Improving Pseudo Labels for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Recent studies show promising performance in open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) using pseudo labels (PLs) from pretrained vision and language models (VLMs). However, PLs generated by VLMs are extremely noisy due to the gap between the pretraining objective of VLMs and OVD, which blocks further advances on PLs. In this paper, we aim to reduce the noise in PLs and propose a method called online Self-training And a Split-and-fusion head for OVD (SAS-Det). First, the self-training finetunes VLMs to generate high quality PLs while prevents forgetting the knowledge learned in the pretraining. Second, a split-and-fusion (SAF) head is designed to remove the noise in localization of PLs, which is usually ignored in existing methods. It also fuses complementary knowledge learned from both precise ground truth and noisy pseudo labels to boost the performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate SAS-Det is both efficient and effective. Our pseudo labeling is 3 times faster than prior methods. SAS-Det outperforms prior state-of-the-art models of the same scale by a clear margin and achieves 37.4 AP$_{50}$ and 27.3 AP$_r$ on novel categories of the COCO and LVIS benchmarks, respectively.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure

Improved Visual-Semantic Alignment for Zero-Shot Object Detection

Zero-shot object detection is an emerging research topic that aims to recognize and localize previously ‘unseen’ objects. This setting gives rise to several unique challenges, e.g., highly imbalanced positive vs. negative instance ratio, proper alignment between visual and semantic concepts and the ambiguity between background and unseen classes. Here, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework underpinned by a novel loss function that handles class-imbalance and seeks to properly align the visual and semantic cues for improved zero-shot learning. We call our objective the ‘Polarity loss’ because it explicitly maximizes the gap between positive and negative predictions. Such a margin maximizing formulation is not only important for visual-semantic alignment but it also resolves the ambiguity between background and unseen objects. Further, the semantic representations of objects are noisy, thus complicating the alignment between visual and semantic domains. To this end, we perform metric learning using a ‘Semantic vocabulary’ of related concepts that refines the noisy semantic embeddings and establishes a better synergy between visual and semantic domains. Our approach is inspired by the embodiment theories in cognitive science, that claim human semantic understanding to be grounded in past experiences (seen objects), related linguistic concepts (word vocabulary) and the visual perception (seen/unseen object images). Our extensive results on MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets show significant improvements over state of the art.