Align and Distill: Unifying and Improving Domain Adaptive Object Detection
Abstract: Object detectors often perform poorly on data that differs from their training set. Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) methods have recently demonstrated strong results on addressing this challenge. Unfortunately, we identify systemic benchmarking pitfalls that call past results into question and hamper further progress: (a) Overestimation of performance due to underpowered baselines, (b) Inconsistent implementation practices preventing transparent comparisons of methods, and (c) Lack of generality due to outdated backbones and lack of diversity in benchmarks. We address these problems by introducing: (1) A unified benchmarking and implementation framework, Align and Distill (ALDI), enabling comparison of DAOD methods and supporting future development, (2) A fair and modern training and evaluation protocol for DAOD that addresses benchmarking pitfalls, (3) A new DAOD benchmark dataset, CFC-DAOD, enabling evaluation on diverse real-world data, and (4) A new method, ALDI++, that achieves state-of-the-art results by a large margin. ALDI++ outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by +3.5 AP50 on Cityscapes $\rightarrow$ Foggy Cityscapes, +5.7 AP50 on Sim10k $\rightarrow$ Cityscapes (where ours is the only method to outperform a fair baseline), and +0.6 AP50 on CFC Kenai $\rightarrow$ Channel. Our framework, dataset, and state-of-the-art method offer a critical reset for DAOD and provide a strong foundation for future research.
Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)
Assigned Action Editor: ~Zhiding_Yu1
Submission Number: 3203
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