Addressing Source Scale Bias via Image Warping for Domain Adaptation

In visual recognition, scale bias is a key challenge due to the imbalance of object and image size distribution inherent in real scene datasets. Conventional solutions involve injecting scale invariance priors, oversampling the dataset at different scales during training, or adjusting scale at inference. While these strategies mitigate scale bias to some extent, their ability to adapt across diverse datasets is limited. Besides, they increase computational load during training and latency during inference. In this work, we use adaptive attentional processing – oversampling salient object regions by warping images in-place during training. Discovering that shifting the source scale distribution improves backbone features, we developed a instance-level warping guidance aimed at object region sampling to mitigate source scale bias in domain adaptation. Our approach improves adaptation across geographies, lighting and weather conditions, is agnostic to the task, domain adaptation algorithm, saliency guidance, and underlying model architecture. Highlights include +6.1 mAP50 for BDD100K Clear → DENSE Foggy, +3.7 mAP50 for BDD100K Day → Night, +3.0 mAP50 for BDD100K Clear → Rainy, and +6.3 mIoU for Cityscapes → ACDC. Our approach adds minimal memory during training and has no additional latency at inference time. Please see Appendix for more results and analysis.