# Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09480 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09480/

## Key facts

- Cited by 306 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [ReMixMatch: Semi-Supervised Learning with Distribution Alignment and Augmentation Anchoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09785/) (2019)
- [A Simple Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04757/) (2020)
- [Acquisition of Localization Confidence for Accurate Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11590/) (2018)
- [MixUp as Locally Linear Out-Of-Manifold Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02499/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 306)

- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [Localizing Objects with Self-Supervised Transformers and no Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14279/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Weak-to-Strong Consistency in Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09910/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Transformers for Unsupervised Object Discovery using Normalized Cut](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11539/) (2022)
- [Open-Vocabulary Universal Image Segmentation with MaskCLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08984/) (2022)
- [Cross-Domain Adaptive Teacher for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13216/) (2021)
- [TokenCut: Segmenting Objects in Images and Videos with Self-supervised Transformer and Normalized Cut](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00383/) (2022)
- [CODA: A Real-World Road Corner Case Dataset for Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07724/) (2022)
- [USB: A Unified Semi-supervised Learning Benchmark for Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07204/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Object Detectors: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13502/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation via Robust Cross-Modal Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12698/) (2021)
- [Memory Replay with Data Compression for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06592/) (2022)
- [DETReg: Unsupervised Pretraining with Region Priors for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04550/) (2021)
- [Scribble-Supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08537/) (2022)
- [Unbiased Teacher v2: Semi-supervised Object Detection for Anchor-free and Anchor-based Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09500/) (2022)
- [SVFormer: Semi-supervised Video Transformer for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13222/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Object Localization: Observing the Background to Discover Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07834/) (2022)
- [Class-Aware Contrastive Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02261/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Open-Vocabulary Detection and Segmentation: Past, Present, and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09220/) (2023)
- [Learning Domain Adaptive Object Detection with Probabilistic Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06293/) (2022)
- [Instance Relation Graph Guided Source-Free Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15793/) (2022)
- [SoftPatch: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Noisy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14233/) (2024)
- [UniMatch V2: Pushing the Limit of Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10777/) (2024)
- [Entropy-based Active Learning for Object Detection with Progressive Diversity Constraint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07965/) (2022)
- [Semi-Supervised and Unsupervised Deep Visual Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11296/) (2022)
- [PseCo: Pseudo Labeling and Consistency Training for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16317/) (2022)
- [Semi-supervised Vision Transformers at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05688/) (2022)
- [Dense Teacher: Dense Pseudo-Labels for Semi-supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02541/) (2022)
- [Cross Domain Object Detection by Target-Perceived Dual Branch Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01291/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Pseudo Labels for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00168/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semi-supervised learning, i.e., training networks with both labeled and unlabeled data, has made significant progress recently. However, existing works have primarily focused on image classification tasks and neglected object detection which requires more annotation effort. In this work, we revisit the Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SS-OD) and identify the pseudo-labeling bias issue in SS-OD. To address this, we introduce Unbiased Teacher, a simple yet effective approach that jointly trains a student and a gradually progressing teacher in a mutually-beneficial manner. Together with a class-balance loss to downweight overly confident pseudo-labels, Unbiased Teacher consistently improved state-of-the-art methods by significant margins on COCO-standard, COCO-additional, and VOC datasets. Specifically, Unbiased Teacher achieves 6.8 absolute mAP improvements against state-of-the-art method when using 1% of labeled data on MS-COCO, achieves around 10 mAP improvements against the supervised baseline when using only 0.5, 1, 2% of labeled data on MS-COCO.