Title: Mind the Gap: Transferring Labels Across Datasets with Divergent Annotation Protocols
Primary area: transfer learning, meta learning, and lifelong learning
Keywords: label transfer, dataset alignment, object detection

Abstract: Combining multiple object detection datasets offers a path to improved model generalisation but is hindered by inconsistencies in class semantics and bounding box annotations.cSome methods to address this assume shared label taxonomies and address only spatial inconsistencies; others require manual relabelling, or produce a unified label space, which may be unsuitable when a fixed target label space is required. We propose Label-Aligned Transfer (LAT), a label transfer framework that systematically projects annotations from diverse source datasets into the label space of a target dataset. LAT begins by training dataset-specific detectors to generate pseudo-labels, which are then combined with ground-truth annotations via a Privileged Proposal Generator (PPG) that replaces the region proposal network in two-stage detectors. To further refine region features and address pseudo-label noise, a Semantic Feature Fusion (SFF) module injects class-aware context and features from overlapping proposals using a confidence-weighted attention mechanism. This pipeline preserves dataset-specific annotation granularity while enabling many-to-one label space transfer across heterogeneous datasets, resulting in a semantically and spatially aligned representation suitable for training a downstream detector. LAT thus jointly addresses both class-level misalignments and bounding box inconsistencies without relying on shared label spaces or manual re-annotation. Across multiple benchmarks, LAT demonstrates consistent improvements in detection performance, achieving gains of up to +8.4 AP over baseline methods.