# On learning to localize objects with minimal supervision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.1024 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.1024/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2014.

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07918/) (2021)
- [Online Refinement of Low-level Feature Based Activation Map for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05741/) (2021)
- [Active Learning Strategies for Weakly-supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12112/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Relative Spatial Reasoning for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01934/) (2021)
- [Regularized Frank-Wolfe for Dense CRFs: Generalizing Mean Field and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14759/) (2021)
- [WSSOD: A New Pipeline for Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11293/) (2021)
- [Multi-patch Feature Pyramid Network for Weakly Supervised Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08063/) (2021)
- [Atom-Level Optical Chemical Structure Recognition with Limited Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01743/) (2024)
- [Weakly-Supervised 3D Scene Graph Generation via Visual-Linguistic Assisted Pseudo-labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02527/) (2024)
- [Assessing Domain Gap for Continual Domain Adaptation in Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10396/) (2023)
- [Weakly Supervised Knowledge Transfer with Probabilistic Logical Reasoning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05148/) (2023)
- [Distributed Attention for Grounded Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01056/) (2021)
- [Online Nonsubmodular Optimization with Delayed Feedback in the Bandit Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00523/) (2025)
- [P2P-Loc: Point to Point Tiny Person Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15344/) (2021)
- [Learning Transferable Reward for Query Object Localization with Policy Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12403/) (2022)
- [HUWSOD: Holistic Self-training for Unified Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19394/) (2024)
- [LMPNet for Weakly-supervised Keypoint Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02308/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning to localize objects with minimal supervision is an important problem in computer vision, since large fully annotated datasets are extremely costly to obtain. In this paper, we propose a new method that achieves this goal with only image-level labels of whether the objects are present or not. Our approach combines a discriminative submodular cover problem for automatically discovering a set of positive object windows with a smoothed latent SVM formulation. The latter allows us to leverage efficient quasi-Newton optimization techniques. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach provides a 50% relative improvement in mean average precision over the current state-of-the-art on PASCAL VOC 2007 detection.