# Plug and Play Active Learning for Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11612 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11612/

## Key facts

- Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [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)
- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Deep Bayesian Active Learning with Image Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02910/) (2017)
- [Deep Batch Active Learning by Diverse, Uncertain Gradient Lower Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03671/) (2019)
- [The Open Images Dataset V4: Unified image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00982/) (2018)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [Learning Loss for Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03677/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Soft Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09018/) (2021)
- [Cost-Effective Active Learning for Deep Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.03551/) (2017)
- [Contextual Diversity for Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05723/) (2020)
- [Batch Active Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14263/) (2021)
- [Diverse mini-batch Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05954/) (2019)
- [Active Learning for Deep Object Detection via Probabilistic Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16130/) (2021)
- [Multiple instance active learning for object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02324/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [A Unified Approach Towards Active Learning and Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11337/) (2024)
- [Joint Out-of-Distribution Filtering and Data Discovery Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02491/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty Meets Diversity: A Comprehensive Active Learning Framework for Indoor 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16125/) (2025)
- [Neptune-X: Active X-to-Maritime Generation for Universal Maritime Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20745/) (2025)
- [Active Learning Inspired ControlNet Guidance for Augmenting Semantic Segmentation Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09221/) (2025)
- [IDEAL-M3D: Instance Diversity-Enriched Active Learning for Monocular 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19301/) (2025)
- [Performance-guided Reinforced Active Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15688/) (2026)
- [Labeled TrustSet Guided: Batch Active Learning with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12303/) (2026)
- [Active-SAOOD: Active Sparsely Annotated Oriented Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10162/) (2026)
- [Portable Active Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10349/) (2026)
- [Distribution Discrepancy and Feature Heterogeneity for Active 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05425/) (2024)
- [A model-agnostic active learning approach for animal detection from camera traps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06537/) (2025)
- [Clip-level Uncertainty and Temporal-aware Active Learning for End-to-End Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09858/) (2026)
- [HiLLIE: Human-in-the-Loop Training for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02134/) (2025)
- [Data-Efficient Stream-Based Active Distillation for Scalable Edge Model Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20484/) (2025)
- [Online Data Curation for Object Detection via Marginal Contributions to Dataset-level Average Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14197/) (2025)
- [Learnability-Driven Submodular Optimization for Active Roadside 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01695/) (2026)
- [Human-in-the-loop Adaptation in Group Activity Feature Learning for Team Sports Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03157/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Class-Aware Active Learning for Unbiased Satellite Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08965/) (2026)
- [Hard to See, Hard to Label: Generative and Symbolic Acquisition for Subtle Visual Phenomena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22990/) (2026)
- [From Model Uncertainty to Human Attention: Localization-Aware Visual Cues for Scalable Annotation Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12303/) (2026)
- [Are Candidate Models Really Needed for Active Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14689/) (2026)
- [Embodied Active Learning under Limited Annotation and Navigation Budget for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15974/) (2026)
- [Foundation-Assisted Active Learning for Object Detection Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16671/) (2026)
- [Probing Association Instability with Track-State Perturbations for Clip-Level Active Learning in Query-Propagation Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17224/) (2026)
- [FuDU: A Fuzzy Dual-dimensional Uncertainty Framework for Streaming Active Learning in Industrial Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02212/) (2026)
- [Distance to Class Prototypes: Active Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20248/) (2026)
- [From internal representations to model improvement through prediction errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35449/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Annotating datasets for object detection is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. To minimize this burden, active learning (AL) techniques are employed to select the most informative samples for annotation within a constrained "annotation budget". Traditional AL strategies typically rely on model uncertainty or sample diversity for query sampling, while more advanced methods have focused on developing AL-specific object detector architectures to enhance performance. However, these specialized approaches are not readily adaptable to different object detectors due to the significant engineering effort required for integration. To overcome this challenge, we introduce Plug and Play Active Learning (PPAL), a simple and effective AL strategy for object detection. PPAL is a two-stage method comprising uncertainty-based and diversity-based sampling phases. In the first stage, our Difficulty Calibrated Uncertainty Sampling leverage a category-wise difficulty coefficient that combines both classification and localisation difficulties to re-weight instance uncertainties, from which we sample a candidate pool for the subsequent diversity-based sampling. In the second stage, we propose Category Conditioned Matching Similarity to better compute the similarities of multi-instance images as ensembles of their instance similarities, which is used by the k-Means++ algorithm to sample the final AL queries. PPAL makes no change to model architectures or detector training pipelines; hence it can be easily generalized to different object detectors. We benchmark PPAL on the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets using different detector architectures and show that our method outperforms prior work by a large margin. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenhongyiYang/PPAL