# Dense Learning based Semi-Supervised Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07300 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07300/

## Key facts

- Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [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)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Mean teachers are better role models: Weight-averaged consistency targets improve semi-supervised deep learning results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01780/) (2017)
- [Deep Layer Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06484/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Pre-training and Self-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06882/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Soft Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09018/) (2021)
- [Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09480/) (2021)
- [A Simple Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04757/) (2020)
- [Scale-Aware Trident Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01892/) (2019)
- [Probabilistic Anchor Assignment with IoU Prediction for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08103/) (2020)
- [Data Distillation: Towards Omni-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04440/) (2017)
- [Humble Teachers Teach Better Students for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10456/) (2021)
- [Instant-Teaching: An End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11402/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Consistent-Teacher: Towards Reducing Inconsistent Pseudo-targets in Semi-supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01589/) (2022)
- [Semi-DETR: Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Detection Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08095/) (2023)
- [SOOD: Towards Semi-Supervised Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04515/) (2023)
- [Multiview Aerial Visual Recognition (MAVREC): Can Multi-view Improve Aerial Visual Perception?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04548/) (2023)
- [Efficient Teacher: Semi-Supervised Object Detection for YOLOv5](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07577/) (2023)
- [Ambiguity-Resistant Semi-Supervised Learning for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14960/) (2023)
- [Sparse Semi-DETR: Sparse Learnable Queries for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01819/) (2024)
- [SOOD++: Leveraging Unlabeled Data to Boost Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01016/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Great Ape Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00275/) (2022)
- [Mixed Pseudo Labels for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07006/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Object-wise Contrastive Learning and Regression Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02747/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Class Imbalance for End-to-end Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02268/) (2023)
- [Semi-supervised Object Detection: A Survey on Recent Research and Progress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14106/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Uncurated Unlabeled Data for Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05498/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Object Detection: A Survey on Progress from CNN to Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08460/) (2024)
- [Gradient-based Sampling for Class Imbalanced Semi-supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15127/) (2024)
- [Partial Weakly-Supervised Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02751/) (2025)
- [Semi-Supervised and Long-Tailed Object Detection with CascadeMatch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14813/) (2023)
- [Towards End-to-end Semi-supervised Learning for One-stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11299/) (2023)
- [IMWA: Iterative Model Weight Averaging Benefits Class-Imbalanced Learning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16331/) (2024)
- [Towards Adaptive Pseudo-label Learning for Semi-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07673/) (2024)
- [VFM-Guided Semi-Supervised Detection Transformer under Source-Free Constraints for Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11167/) (2025)
- [Semi-supervised Source Detection in Astronomical Images: New Benchmark and Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09219/) (2026)
- [Low-Confidence Samples Mining for Semi-supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16201/) (2023)
- [Density Crop-guided Semi-supervised Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05032/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Scale Imbalance in Semi-supervised Object Detection for Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14718/) (2023)
- [Cooperative Students: Navigating Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Nighttime Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01988/) (2024)
- [Collaboration of Teachers for Semi-supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13374/) (2024)
- [CrowdTransfer: Enabling Crowd Knowledge Transfer in AIoT Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06485/) (2024)
- [Class-balanced Open-set Semi-supervised Object Detection for Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12355/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) aims to facilitate the training and deployment of object detectors with the help of a large amount of unlabeled data. Though various self-training based and consistency-regularization based SSOD methods have been proposed, most of them are anchor-based detectors, ignoring the fact that in many real-world applications anchor-free detectors are more demanded. In this paper, we intend to bridge this gap and propose a DenSe Learning (DSL) based anchor-free SSOD algorithm. Specifically, we achieve this goal by introducing several novel techniques, including an Adaptive Filtering strategy for assigning multi-level and accurate dense pixel-wise pseudo-labels, an Aggregated Teacher for producing stable and precise pseudo-labels, and an uncertainty-consistency-regularization term among scales and shuffled patches for improving the generalization capability of the detector. Extensive experiments are conducted on MS-COCO and PASCAL-VOC, and the results show that our proposed DSL method records new state-of-the-art SSOD performance, surpassing existing methods by a large margin. Codes can be found at textcolorbluehttps://github.com/chenbinghui1/DSL.