# BoxTeacher: Exploring High-Quality Pseudo Labels for Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05174 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05174/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [Mean teachers are better role models: Weight-averaged consistency targets improve semi-supervised deep learning results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01780/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02689/) (2019)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: High Quality Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09756/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03458/) (2019)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Soft Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09018/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [The Devil is in the Points: Weakly Semi-Supervised Instance Segmentation via Point-Guided Mask Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15062/) (2023)
- [Vision Transformers Are Good Mask Auto-Labelers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03992/) (2023)
- [WeakSAM: Segment Anything Meets Weakly-supervised Instance-level Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14812/) (2024)
- [Weakly-supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Gaze Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07406/) (2024)
- [DAWN: Domain-Adaptive Weakly Supervised Nuclei Segmentation via Cross-Task Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14956/) (2024)
- [Label-efficient Segmentation via Affinity Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10533/) (2023)
- [Industrial Anomaly Detection and Localization Using Weakly-Supervised Residual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03492/) (2023)
- [GaPro: Box-Supervised 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation Using Gaussian Processes as Pseudo Labelers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13251/) (2023)
- [MonoBox: Tightness-free Box-supervised Polyp Segmentation using Monotonicity Constraint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01188/) (2024)
- [Detecting Wildfires on UAVs with Real-time Segmentation Trained by Larger Teacher Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10843/) (2024)
- [From Gaze to Insight: Bridging Human Visual Attention and Vision Language Model Explanation for Weakly-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11368/) (2025)
- [ProCNS: Progressive Prototype Calibration and Noise Suppression for Weakly-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14074/) (2024)
- [Extreme Point Supervised Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20729/) (2024)
- [IBoxCLA: Towards Robust Box-supervised Segmentation of Polyp via Improved Box-dice and Contrastive Latent-anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07248/) (2023)
- [DiDA: Video Object Segmentation with Distillation Learning of Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13937/) (2024)
- [Boosting Box-supervised Instance Segmentation with Pseudo Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01214/) (2024)
- [PM-VIS: High-Performance Box-Supervised Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13863/) (2024)
- [A Point-Neighborhood Learning Framework for Nasal Endoscope Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20044/) (2024)
- [Enjoying Information Dividend: Gaze Track-based Medical Weakly Supervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22230/) (2025)
- [Selective Synergistic Learning for Video Object-Centric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15527/) (2026)
- [BoxCell: Leveraging SAM for Cell Segmentation with Box Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17960/) (2023)
- [Beyond Boxes: Mask-Guided Spatio-Temporal Feature Aggregation for Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04915/) (2024)
- [Towards Optimal Heterogeneous Client Sampling in Multi-Model Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05138/) (2025)
- [BoxVIS: Video Instance Segmentation with Box Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14618/) (2023)
- [Improving Weakly-supervised Video Instance Segmentation by Leveraging Spatio-temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16661/) (2024)
- [SurgPIS: Surgical-instrument-level Instances and Part-level Semantics for Weakly-supervised Part-aware Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19592/) (2025)
- [CPS4: Class Prompt driven Semi-Supervised Spine Segmentation with Class-specific Consistency Constraint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15802/) (2026)
- [OBBSeg: Irregular Lesion Segmentation under Oriented Bounding Box Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06007/) (2026)
- [From Spatial Semantics to Temporal Context: Leveraging Gaze Trajectory for Weakly Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26542/) (2026)
- [GazeRefine: Expert Gaze as a Test-Time Prompt for Training-Free Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01310/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Labeling objects with pixel-wise segmentation requires a huge amount of human labor compared to bounding boxes. Most existing methods for weakly supervised instance segmentation focus on designing heuristic losses with priors from bounding boxes. While, we find that box-supervised methods can produce some fine segmentation masks and we wonder whether the detectors could learn from these fine masks while ignoring low-quality masks. To answer this question, we present BoxTeacher, an efficient and end-to-end training framework for high-performance weakly supervised instance segmentation, which leverages a sophisticated teacher to generate high-quality masks as pseudo labels. Considering the massive noisy masks hurt the training, we present a mask-aware confidence score to estimate the quality of pseudo masks and propose the noise-aware pixel loss and noise-reduced affinity loss to adaptively optimize the student with pseudo masks. Extensive experiments can demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed BoxTeacher. Without bells and whistles, BoxTeacher remarkably achieves 35.0 mask AP and 36.5 mask AP with ResNet-50 and ResNet-101 respectively on the challenging COCO dataset, which outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin and bridges the gap between box-supervised and mask-supervised methods. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/hustvl/BoxTeacher.