AsyFOD: An Asymmetric Adaptation Paradigm for Few-Shot Domain Adaptive Object Detection

In this work, we study few-shot domain adaptive object detection (FSDAOD), where only a few target labeled images are available for training in addition to sufficient source labeled images. Critically, in FSDAOD, the data scarcity in the target domain leads to an extreme data imbalance between the source and target domains, which potentially causes over-adaptation in traditional feature alignment. To address the data imbalance problem, we propose an asymmetric adaptation paradigm, namely AsyFOD, which leverages the source and target instances from different perspectives. Specifically, by using target distribution estimation, the AsyFOD first identifies the target-similar source instances, which serves to augment the limited target instances. Then, we conduct asynchronous alignment between target-dissimilar source instances and augmented target instances, which is simple yet effective for alleviating the over-adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed AsyFOD outperforms all state-ofthe-art methods on four FSDAOD benchmarks with various environmental variances, e.g., 3.1% mAP improvement on Cityscapes-to-FoggyCityscapes and 2.9% mAP increase on Sim10k-to-Cityscapes. The code is available at https://github.com/Hlings/AsyFOD.