# Spatial Likelihood Voting with Self-Knowledge Distillation for Weakly Supervised Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06899 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06899/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 37 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2022.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Detection Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02853/) (2015)
- [Learning Lightweight Lane Detection CNNs by Self Attention Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00821/) (2019)
- [Multiple Instance Detection Network with Online Instance Classifier Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00138/) (2017)
- [Snapshot Distillation: Teacher-Student Optimization in One Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00123/) (2018)
- [PCL: Proposal Cluster Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03342/) (2018)
- [Instance-aware, Context-focused, and Memory-efficient Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04725/) (2020)
- [C-MIL: Continuation Multiple Instance Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05647/) (2019)
- [WSOD^2: Learning Bottom-up and Top-down Objectness Distillation for Weakly-supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04972/) (2019)
- [Comprehensive Attention Self-Distillation for Weakly-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12023/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08258/) (2016)
- [Min-Entropy Latent Model for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06057/) (2019)
- [Towards Precise End-to-end Weakly Supervised Object Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12148/) (2019)
- [Weakly Supervised Object Localization with Multi-fold Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00949/) (2015)
- [ContextLocNet: Context-Aware Deep Network Models for Weakly Supervised Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04331/) (2016)
- [SLV: Spatial Likelihood Voting for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12884/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD), which is an effective way to train an object detection model using only image-level annotations, has attracted considerable attention from researchers. However, most of the existing methods, which are based on multiple instance learning (MIL), tend to localize instances to the discriminative parts of salient objects instead of the entire content of all objects. In this paper, we propose a WSOD framework called the Spatial Likelihood Voting with Self-knowledge Distillation Network (SLV-SD Net). In this framework, we introduce a spatial likelihood voting (SLV) module to converge region proposal localization without bounding box annotations. Specifically, in every iteration during training, all the region proposals in a given image act as voters voting for the likelihood of each category in the spatial dimensions. After dilating the alignment on the area with large likelihood values, the voting results are regularized as bounding boxes, which are then used for the final classification and localization. Based on SLV, we further propose a self-knowledge distillation (SD) module to refine the feature representations of the given image. The likelihood maps generated by the SLV module are used to supervise the feature learning of the backbone network, encouraging the network to attend to wider and more diverse areas of the image. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2007/2012 and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate the excellent performance of SLV-SD Net. In addition, SLV-SD Net produces new state-of-the-art results on these benchmarks.