# Absolute Wrong Makes Better: Boosting Weakly Supervised Object Detection via Negative Deterministic Information

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10068 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10068/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [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)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Detection Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02853/) (2015)
- [NLNL: Negative Learning for Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07387/) (2019)
- [Multiple Instance Detection Network with Online Instance Classifier Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00138/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Towards Precise End-to-end Weakly Supervised Object Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12148/) (2019)
- [Object Instance Mining for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01087/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [DiffUCD:Unsupervised Hyperspectral Image Change Detection with Semantic Correlation Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12410/) (2023)
- [Complete Instances Mining for Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07633/) (2024)
- [Negative Prototypes Guided Contrastive Learning for WSOD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18576/) (2024)
- [Dual-Thresholded Heatmap-Guided Proposal Clustering and Negative Certainty Supervision with Enhanced Base Network for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08289/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) is a challenging task, in which image-level labels (e.g., categories of the instances in the whole image) are used to train an object detector. Many existing methods follow the standard multiple instance learning (MIL) paradigm and have achieved promising performance. However, the lack of deterministic information leads to part domination and missing instances. To address these issues, this paper focuses on identifying and fully exploiting the deterministic information in WSOD. We discover that negative instances (i.e. absolutely wrong instances), ignored in most of the previous studies, normally contain valuable deterministic information. Based on this observation, we here propose a negative deterministic information (NDI) based method for improving WSOD, namely NDI-WSOD. Specifically, our method consists of two stages: NDI collecting and exploiting. In the collecting stage, we design several processes to identify and distill the NDI from negative instances online. In the exploiting stage, we utilize the extracted NDI to construct a novel negative contrastive learning mechanism and a negative guided instance selection strategy for dealing with the issues of part domination and missing instances, respectively. Experimental results on several public benchmarks including VOC 2007, VOC 2012 and MS COCO show that our method achieves satisfactory performance.