# Foreground Guidance and Multi-Layer Feature Fusion for Unsupervised Object Discovery with Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13053 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13053/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [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)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Localizing Objects with Self-Supervised Transformers and no Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14279/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Detection Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02853/) (2015)
- [Self-Supervised Transformers for Unsupervised Object Discovery using Normalized Cut](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11539/) (2022)
- [Efficient Self-supervised Vision Transformers for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09785/) (2021)
- [Hypercolumns for Object Segmentation and Fine-grained Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5752/) (2014)

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

- [UNION: Unsupervised 3D Object Detection using Object Appearance-based Pseudo-Classes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15688/) (2024)
- [Recasting Generic Pretrained Vision Transformers As Object-Centric Scene Encoders For Manipulation Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15916/) (2024)
- [MUFASA: A Multi-Layer Framework for Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07544/) (2026)
- [PCaM: A Progressive Focus Attention-Based Information Fusion Method for Improving Vision Transformer Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17232/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised object discovery (UOD) has recently shown encouraging progress with the adoption of pre-trained Transformer features. However, current methods based on Transformers mainly focus on designing the localization head (e.g., seed selection-expansion and normalized cut) and overlook the importance of improving Transformer features. In this work, we handle UOD task from the perspective of feature enhancement and propose FOReground guidance and MUlti-LAyer feature fusion for unsupervised object discovery, dubbed FORMULA. Firstly, we present a foreground guidance strategy with an off-the-shelf UOD detector to highlight the foreground regions on the feature maps and then refine object locations in an iterative fashion. Moreover, to solve the scale variation issues in object detection, we design a multi-layer feature fusion module that aggregates features responding to objects at different scales. The experiments on VOC07, VOC12, and COCO 20k show that the proposed FORMULA achieves new state-of-the-art results on unsupervised object discovery. The code will be released at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/FORMULA.