# Hallucination Improves Few-Shot Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.01294 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01294/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [Frustratingly Simple Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06957/) (2020)
- [Few-shot Object Detection via Feature Reweighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01866/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection with Attention-RPN and Multi-Relation Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01998/) (2019)
- [Meta R-CNN : Towards General Solver for Instance-level Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13032/) (2019)
- [Low-Shot Learning from Imaginary Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05401/) (2018)
- [FSCE: Few-Shot Object Detection via Contrastive Proposal Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05950/) (2021)
- [Bottom-up Object Detection by Grouping Extreme and Center Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08043/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection and Viewpoint Estimation for Objects in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12107/) (2020)
- [Multi-Scale Positive Sample Refinement for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09384/) (2020)
- [Delta-encoder: an effective sample synthesis method for few-shot object recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04734/) (2018)
- [RepMet: Representative-based metric learning for classification and one-shot object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04728/) (2018)
- [Beyond Max-Margin: Class Margin Equilibrium for Few-shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04612/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [SIGMA: Semantic-complete Graph Matching for Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06398/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection with Fully Cross-Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15021/) (2022)
- [Meta-DETR: Image-Level Few-Shot Detection with Inter-Class Correlation Exploitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00219/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection via Association and DIscrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11656/) (2021)
- [Explore the Power of Synthetic Data on Few-shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13221/) (2023)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11699/) (2021)
- [Few-shot Keypoint Detection with Uncertainty Learning for Unseen Species](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06183/) (2021)
- [Where is my Wallet? Modeling Object Proposal Sets for Egocentric Visual Query Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10528/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection via Variational Feature Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13411/) (2023)
- [Generating Features with Increased Crop-related Diversity for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05096/) (2023)
- [FS-DETR: Few-Shot DEtection TRansformer with prompting and without re-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04845/) (2022)
- [Hallucination Improves the Performance of Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12168/) (2023)
- [Semantic-aligned Fusion Transformer for One-shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09093/) (2022)
- [Disentangle and Remerge: Interventional Knowledge Distillation for Few-Shot Object Detection from A Conditional Causal Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12681/) (2022)
- [AirDet: Few-Shot Detection without Fine-tuning for Autonomous Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01740/) (2021)
- [Efficient Few-Shot Object Detection via Knowledge Inheritance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12224/) (2022)
- [Breaking Immutable: Information-Coupled Prototype Elaboration for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14782/) (2022)
- [Reference Twice: A Simple and Unified Baseline for Few-Shot Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01156/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Few-Shot Object Detection with Meta-Learning-Based Cross-Modal Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07841/) (2022)
- [Multi-Faceted Distillation of Base-Novel Commonality for Few-shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11184/) (2022)
- [A Comparative Review of Recent Few-Shot Object Detection Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00201/) (2021)
- [Towards Efficient Use of Multi-Scale Features in Transformer-Based Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11356/) (2022)
- [Mobile Robot Manipulation using Pure Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12437/) (2022)
- [Recent Few-Shot Object Detection Algorithms: A Survey with Performance Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14205/) (2022)
- [From Saliency to DINO: Saliency-guided Vision Transformer for Few-shot Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03140/) (2023)
- [Meta-Point Learning and Refining for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13647/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning for Low-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02814/) (2021)
- [Multi-Perspective Data Augmentation for Few-shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18195/) (2025)
- [The Art of Camouflage: Few-Shot Learning for Animal Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07444/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Object Detection with Refined Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13495/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning to detect novel objects from few annotated examples is of great practical importance. A particularly challenging yet common regime occurs when there are extremely limited examples (less than three). One critical factor in improving few-shot detection is to address the lack of variation in training data. We propose to build a better model of variation for novel classes by transferring the shared within-class variation from base classes. To this end, we introduce a hallucinator network that learns to generate additional, useful training examples in the region of interest (RoI) feature space, and incorporate it into a modern object detection model. Our approach yields significant performance improvements on two state-of-the-art few-shot detectors with different proposal generation procedures. In particular, we achieve new state of the art in the extremely-few-shot regime on the challenging COCO benchmark.