Frozen High-Resolution Inference for Cross-City Object Detection: An AI City Challenge 2026 Study

Abstract

Cross-city object detection requires a detector trained in one city to generalize to an unlabeled target city. In AI City Challenge 2026 Track 6, we analyze archived configurations of a single RF-DETR-Large detector inside an air-gapped Training-as-a-Service platform whose server returns only an aggregate COCO-style AP over a hidden mixture of source- and target-city images. Frozen 1120 x 1120 inference of a checkpoint trained at 704 x 704 achieved the highest aggregate AP among the evaluated configurations (0.3272 -> 0.3654, +0.0382) without any parameter update, with the largest relative gain on small objects and the largest absolute gain on medium objects, at 2.53x the input pixels. A warm-start 1120px fine-tuning recipe reached 0.3470 while its in-domain validation AP rose (0.767 -> 0.789), a caution that in-domain validation is an unreliable model-selection signal under aggregate-only cross-city feedback. Because that run's evaluation used a higher confidence threshold than the inference-only runs (0.05 vs. 0.01), we treat its score as a descriptive archived outcome rather than a controlled verdict on fine-tuning. Gray-world normalization did not meaningfully change the frozen-1120 result, and a rectangular run was found by audit to have used an unintended portrait orientation. We release verbatim platform commands, configuration snapshots, and an explicit evidence boundary for every claim. Each configuration was submitted once and the best was selected on the hidden server, so these are exploratory, audited findings about the aggregate mixture; they do not establish target-city-specific improvement.