Improving Transferability for Domain Adaptive Detection Transformers

DETR-style detectors stand out amongst in-domain scenarios, but their properties in domain shift settings are under-explored. This paper aims to build a simple but effective baseline with a DETR-style detector on domain shift settings based on two findings. For one, mitigating the domain shift on the backbone and the decoder output features excels in getting favorable results. For another, advanced domain alignment methods in both parts further enhance the performance. Thus, we propose the Object-Aware Alignment (OAA) module and the Optimal Transport based Alignment (OTA) module to achieve comprehensive domain alignment on the outputs of the backbone and the detector. The OAA module aligns the foreground regions identified by pseudo-labels in the backbone outputs, leading to domain-invariant base features. The OTA module utilizes sliced Wasserstein distance to maximize the retention of location information while minimizing the domain gap in the decoder outputs. We implement the findings and the alignment modules into our adaptation method, and it benchmarks the DETR-style detector on the domain shift settings. Experiments on various domain adaptive scenarios validate the effectiveness of our method.