Continual Adaptation: Environment-Conditional Parameter Generation for Object Detection in Dynamic Scenarios
This work addresses the challenge of adapting object detectors to changing environments for applications like autonomous driving or surveillance, representing an incremental advance in continual adaptation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of object detectors failing in dynamic environments due to distribution shifts by proposing a method that generates adapter parameters based on the current environment, achieving improved generalization in continual test-time adaptation tasks.
In practice, environments constantly change over time and space, posing significant challenges for object detectors trained based on a closed-set assumption, i.e., training and test data share the same distribution. To this end, continual test-time adaptation has attracted much attention, aiming to improve detectors' generalization by fine-tuning a few specific parameters, e.g., BatchNorm layers. However, based on a small number of test images, fine-tuning certain parameters may affect the representation ability of other fixed parameters, leading to performance degradation. Instead, we explore a new mechanism, i.e., converting the fine-tuning process to a specific-parameter generation. Particularly, we first design a dual-path LoRA-based domain-aware adapter that disentangles features into domain-invariant and domain-specific components, enabling efficient adaptation. Additionally, a conditional diffusion-based parameter generation mechanism is presented to synthesize the adapter's parameters based on the current environment, preventing the optimization from getting stuck in local optima. Finally, we propose a class-centered optimal transport alignment method to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments conducted on various continuous domain adaptive object detection tasks demonstrate the effectiveness. Meanwhile, visualization results show that the representation extracted by the generated parameters can capture more object-related information and strengthen the generalization ability.