# Calibrated Teacher for Sparsely Annotated Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07582 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07582/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09480/) (2021)
- [UnitBox: An Advanced Object Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01471/) (2016)
- [Multivariate Confidence Calibration for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13546/) (2020)
- [Co-mining: Self-Supervised Learning for Sparsely Annotated Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01950/) (2020)
- [Solving Missing-Annotation Object Detection with Background Recalibration Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05274/) (2020)
- [Soft Sampling for Robust Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06986/) (2018)
- [Object Detection as a Positive-Unlabeled Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04672/) (2020)
- [Sampling Techniques for Large-Scale Object Detection from Sparsely Annotated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10862/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Multispectral Pedestrian Detection with Sparsely Annotated Label](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02640/) (2025)
- [h-calibration: Rethinking Classifier Recalibration with Probabilistic Error-Bounded Objective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17968/) (2025)
- [LLM-Assisted Semantic Guidance for Sparsely Annotated Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16970/) (2025)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Contextual Curriculum Learning for Online Grasp Learning in Robotic Bin Picking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02495/) (2024)
- [MonoSAOD: Monocular 3D Object Detection with Sparsely Annotated Label](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01646/) (2026)
- [Generalized Small Object Detection:A Point-Prompted Paradigm and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02773/) (2026)
- [Semi-supervised Source Detection in Astronomical Images: New Benchmark and Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09219/) (2026)
- [S2Teacher: Step-by-step Teacher for Sparsely Annotated Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11111/) (2025)
- [SPWOOD: Sparse Partial Weakly-Supervised Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03634/) (2026)
- [Towards Sparsely Annotated Open-World Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12714/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fully supervised object detection requires training images in which all instances are annotated. This is actually impractical due to the high labor and time costs and the unavoidable missing annotations. As a result, the incomplete annotation in each image could provide misleading supervision and harm the training. Recent works on sparsely annotated object detection alleviate this problem by generating pseudo labels for the missing annotations. Such a mechanism is sensitive to the threshold of the pseudo label score. However, the effective threshold is different in different training stages and among different object detectors. Therefore, the current methods with fixed thresholds have sub-optimal performance, and are difficult to be applied to other detectors. In order to resolve this obstacle, we propose a Calibrated Teacher, of which the confidence estimation of the prediction is well calibrated to match its real precision. In this way, different detectors in different training stages would share a similar distribution of the output confidence, so that multiple detectors could share the same fixed threshold and achieve better performance. Furthermore, we present a simple but effective Focal IoU Weight (FIoU) for the classification loss. FIoU aims at reducing the loss weight of false negative samples caused by the missing annotation, and thus works as the complement of the teacher-student paradigm. Extensive experiments show that our methods set new state-of-the-art under all different sparse settings in COCO. Code will be available at https://github.com/Whileherham/CalibratedTeacher.