# Exploiting Unlabeled Data with Vision and Language Models for Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.08954 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08954/

## Key facts

- Cited by 97 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 97)

- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [Towards Open Vocabulary Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15880/) (2023)
- [Alpha-CLIP: A CLIP Model Focusing on Wherever You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03818/) (2023)
- [F-VLM: Open-Vocabulary Object Detection upon Frozen Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15639/) (2022)
- [CORA: Adapting CLIP for Open-Vocabulary Detection with Region Prompting and Anchor Pre-Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13076/) (2023)
- [Learning Object-Language Alignments for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14843/) (2022)
- [Region-Aware Pretraining for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07011/) (2023)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04356/) (2023)
- [V3Det: Vast Vocabulary Visual Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03752/) (2023)
- [A Foundation Language-Image Model of the Retina (FLAIR): Encoding Expert Knowledge in Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07898/) (2023)
- [Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05892/) (2023)
- [HOICLIP: Efficient Knowledge Transfer for HOI Detection with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15786/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Open-Vocabulary Detection and Segmentation: Past, Present, and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09220/) (2023)
- [DetCLIPv3: Towards Versatile Generative Open-vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09216/) (2024)
- [EdaDet: Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Early Dense Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01151/) (2023)
- [Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection via Enhanced Open-Set Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03094/) (2024)
- [CLIP-VG: Self-paced Curriculum Adapting of CLIP for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08685/) (2023)
- [R-TPT: Improving Adversarial Robustness of Vision-Language Models through Test-Time Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11195/) (2025)
- [Contrastive Feature Masking Open-Vocabulary Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00775/) (2023)
- [Open-vocabulary Attribute Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12914/) (2022)
- [LP-OVOD: Open-Vocabulary Object Detection by Linear Probing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17109/) (2023)
- [Accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models by Searching Optimal Vision Token Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00556/) (2024)
- [InstaGen: Enhancing Object Detection by Training on Synthetic Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05937/) (2024)
- [AIDE: An Automatic Data Engine for Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17373/) (2024)
- [Taming Self-Training for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06412/) (2023)
- [MaMMUT: A Simple Architecture for Joint Learning for MultiModal Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16839/) (2023)
- [Learning Background Prompts to Discover Implicit Knowledge for Open Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00510/) (2024)
- [Toward Open Vocabulary Aerial Object Detection with CLIP-Activated Student-Teacher Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11646/) (2023)
- [OV-DQUO: Open-Vocabulary DETR with Denoising Text Query Training and Open-World Unknown Objects Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17913/) (2024)
- [Unified Adversarial Patch for Visible-Infrared Cross-modal Attacks in the Physical World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14682/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Building robust and generic object detection frameworks requires scaling to larger label spaces and bigger training datasets. However, it is prohibitively costly to acquire annotations for thousands of categories at a large scale. We propose a novel method that leverages the rich semantics available in recent vision and language models to localize and classify objects in unlabeled images, effectively generating pseudo labels for object detection. Starting with a generic and class-agnostic region proposal mechanism, we use vision and language models to categorize each region of an image into any object category that is required for downstream tasks. We demonstrate the value of the generated pseudo labels in two specific tasks, open-vocabulary detection, where a model needs to generalize to unseen object categories, and semi-supervised object detection, where additional unlabeled images can be used to improve the model. Our empirical evaluation shows the effectiveness of the pseudo labels in both tasks, where we outperform competitive baselines and achieve a novel state-of-the-art for open-vocabulary object detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaofeng94/VL-PLM.