# SSRT-DETR: Domain-Adaptive Semi-Supervised Detector

## TL;DR

SSRT-DETR is a new framework for domain-adaptive object detection that improves performance in challenging conditions like adverse weather.

## Contribution

SSRT-DETR introduces Domain-Aware Matching and Class-/Scene-Adaptive Pseudo-Labeling to stabilize and enhance cross-domain object detection.

## Key findings

- SSRT-DETR improves mAP@0.5 from 51.0 to 54.3 on Cityscapes→Foggy Cityscapes.
- It achieves 67.3 AP on KITTI→Cityscapes and 64.9 AP on Sim10K→Cityscapes for car detection.
- The framework shows consistent gains in rare categories and adverse weather scenarios.

## Abstract

Domain-adaptive object detection under set-prediction paradigms remains challenging, as Hungarian matching is sensitive to domain shift and fixed pseudo-label thresholds cannot simultaneously handle class imbalance and scene variability. This paper presents SSRT-DETR, a semi-supervised, domain-adaptive framework built on the real-time detector RT-DETR. We adopt a mean teacher–student architecture with style-transferred images to jointly model source and target domains. To stabilize the assignment process during the early stages of cross-domain training, Domain-Aware Matching (DAM) is formulated to augment the Hungarian matching cost with a teacher-guided decoder-query consistency term. Leveraging the more stable EMA teacher representations, DAM guides early matching toward domain-consistent assignments and is gradually annealed to recover standard matching as training converges. In parallel, we introduce Class-/Scene-Adaptive Pseudo-Labeling (CAP) to address a key limitation of existing DAOD methods that rely on fixed or globally tuned pseudo-label thresholds, which struggle with class imbalance and scene-dependent difficulty under domain shift. CAP leverages per-class confidence statistics and multi-view consistency to adapt classification and IoU thresholds across classes and scenes, while temperature scaling and quality-weighted losses provide soft control over pseudo-label reliability. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate the robustness of SSRT-DETR. On Cityscapes→Foggy Cityscapes, SSRT-DETR improves mAP@0.5 from 51.0 to 54.3. On KITTI→Cityscapes and Sim10K→Cityscapes, it achieves 67.3 AP and 64.9 AP on the car category, respectively, clearly outperforming the RT-DETR baseline while maintaining real-time efficiency. Notably, consistent gains are observed in rare categories and adverse weather scenarios, validating the effectiveness of the proposed DAM and CAP modules.