# Few-Shot Object Detection via Variational Feature Aggregation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13411 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13411/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Few-Shot Visual Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09458/) (2018)
- [Pix2seq: A Language Modeling Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10852/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection with Attention-RPN and Multi-Relation Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01998/) (2019)
- [Meta R-CNN : Towards General Solver for Instance-level Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13032/) (2019)
- [FSCE: Few-Shot Object Detection via Contrastive Proposal Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05950/) (2021)
- [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)
- [DeFRCN: Decoupled Faster R-CNN for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09017/) (2021)
- [Generalized Few-Shot Object Detection without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09491/) (2021)
- [Beyond Max-Margin: Class Margin Equilibrium for Few-shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04612/) (2021)
- [Semantic Relation Reasoning for Shot-Stable Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01903/) (2021)
- [Guided Variational Autoencoder for Disentanglement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01255/) (2020)
- [Meta Faster R-CNN: Towards Accurate Few-Shot Object Detection with Attentive Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07719/) (2021)
- [Query Adaptive Few-Shot Object Detection with Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09791/) (2021)
- [Dense Relation Distillation with Context-aware Aggregation for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17115/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Domain-RAG: Retrieval-Guided Compositional Image Generation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05872/) (2025)
- [Fine-Grained Prototypes Distillation for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07629/) (2024)
- [ARD-VAE: A Statistical Formulation to Find the Relevant Latent Dimensions of Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10901/) (2025)
- [Multi-Perspective Data Augmentation for Few-shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18195/) (2025)
- [Generalized Semantic Contrastive Learning via Embedding Side Information for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07060/) (2025)
- [Visual Textualization for Image Prompted Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23785/) (2025)
- [Transformation-Invariant Network for Few-Shot Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06817/) (2023)
- [BIV-Priv-Seg: Locating Private Content in Images Taken by People With Visual Impairments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18243/) (2024)
- [ECEA: Extensible Co-Existing Attention for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08196/) (2023)
- [CLIP-Guided Source-Free Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05168/) (2024)
- [Generalization-Enhanced Few-Shot Object Detection in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02474/) (2025)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection via Synthetic Features with Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15005/) (2023)
- [Learning Multi-Modal Prototypes for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18811/) (2026)
- [Few-Shot Domain Adaptive Object Detection for Microscopic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07633/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Detect an Object At Once without Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02181/) (2024)
- [Towards Human-Like Machine Comprehension: Few-Shot Relational Learning in Visually-Rich Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15765/) (2024)
- [Semantic Enhanced Few-shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13498/) (2024)
- [AdaptiveCDM: Source-Free Few-Shot Domain Adaptation for Cell Detection in Microscopic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03370/) (2025)
- [Attention-disentangled Uniform Orthogonal Feature Space Optimization for Few-shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22161/) (2025)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection via Spatial-Channel State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15308/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As few-shot object detectors are often trained with abundant base samples and fine-tuned on few-shot novel examples,the learned models are usually biased to base classes and sensitive to the variance of novel examples. To address this issue, we propose a meta-learning framework with two novel feature aggregation schemes. More precisely, we first present a Class-Agnostic Aggregation (CAA) method, where the query and support features can be aggregated regardless of their categories. The interactions between different classes encourage class-agnostic representations and reduce confusion between base and novel classes. Based on the CAA, we then propose a Variational Feature Aggregation (VFA) method, which encodes support examples into class-level support features for robust feature aggregation. We use a variational autoencoder to estimate class distributions and sample variational features from distributions that are more robust to the variance of support examples. Besides, we decouple classification and regression tasks so that VFA is performed on the classification branch without affecting object localization. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and COCO demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms a strong baseline (up to 16%) and previous state-of-the-art methods (4% in average). Code will be available at: urlhttps://github.com/csuhan/VFA