# Spatial Reasoning for Few-Shot Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.01080 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01080/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [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)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Relation Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11575/) (2017)
- [Graph R-CNN for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00191/) (2018)
- [Frustratingly Simple Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06957/) (2020)
- [Few-shot Object Detection via Feature Reweighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01866/) (2018)
- [Learning Deep Representations of Fine-grained Visual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05395/) (2016)
- [Meta R-CNN : Towards General Solver for Instance-level Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13032/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection and Viewpoint Estimation for Objects in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12107/) (2020)
- [Multi-Scale Positive Sample Refinement for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09384/) (2020)
- [Structure Inference Net: Object Detection Using Scene-Level Context and Instance-Level Relationships](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00119/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Learning with Geometric Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09151/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Few-Shot Object Detection: Research Advances and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04799/) (2024)
- [Faster OreFSDet : A Lightweight and Effective Few-shot Object Detector for Ore Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01183/) (2023)
- [PS-TTL: Prototype-based Soft-labels and Test-Time Learning for Few-shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05674/) (2024)
- [Few-Shot Learning in Video and 3D Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17079/) (2025)
- [DiCE-CIR: Direct Composition Learning for Efficient Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04665/) (2026)
- [Tree-of-Thoughts Reasoning for Text-to-Image In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07117/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although modern object detectors rely heavily on a significant amount of training data, humans can easily detect novel objects using a few training examples. The mechanism of the human visual system is to interpret spatial relationships among various objects and this process enables us to exploit contextual information by considering the co-occurrence of objects. Thus, we propose a spatial reasoning framework that detects novel objects with only a few training examples in a context. We infer geometric relatedness between novel and base RoIs (Region-of-Interests) to enhance the feature representation of novel categories using an object detector well trained on base categories. We employ a graph convolutional network as the RoIs and their relatedness are defined as nodes and edges, respectively. Furthermore, we present spatial data augmentation to overcome the few-shot environment where all objects and bounding boxes in an image are resized randomly. Using the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and verify its efficacy through extensive ablation studies.