# Active Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08348 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08348/

## Key facts

- Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 41 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2023.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [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)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Mean teachers are better role models: Weight-averaged consistency targets improve semi-supervised deep learning results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01780/) (2017)
- [ReMixMatch: Semi-Supervised Learning with Distribution Alignment and Augmentation Anchoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09785/) (2019)
- [Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09480/) (2021)
- [A Simple Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04757/) (2020)
- [Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4864/) (2014)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Detection Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02853/) (2015)
- [Multiple Instance Detection Network with Online Instance Classifier Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00138/) (2017)
- [Humble Teachers Teach Better Students for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10456/) (2021)
- [Consistency-based Semi-supervised Active Learning: Towards Minimizing Labeling Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07153/) (2019)
- [Instant-Teaching: An End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11402/) (2021)
- [Multiple instance active learning for object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02324/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [YOLO26: Key Architectural Enhancements and Performance Benchmarking for Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25164/) (2025)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation via Unlabeled Frame Exploitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11074/) (2024)
- [AIDE: An Automatic Data Engine for Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17373/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Supervision and Shuffle Data Augmentation for 3D Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01464/) (2023)
- [Multiview Aerial Visual Recognition (MAVREC): Can Multi-view Improve Aerial Visual Perception?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04548/) (2023)
- [DQS3D: Densely-matched Quantization-aware Semi-supervised 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13031/) (2023)
- [Orthogonal Annotation Benefits Barely-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13090/) (2023)
- [Ambiguity-Resistant Semi-Supervised Learning for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14960/) (2023)
- [Box-Level Active Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13089/) (2023)
- [DATR: Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Detection Transformer with Dataset-Level Adaptation and Prototypical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11765/) (2024)
- [CamoTeacher: Dual-Rotation Consistency Learning for Semi-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08050/) (2024)
- [UCOD-DPL: Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection via Dynamic Pseudo-label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07087/) (2025)
- [BSNet: Box-Supervised Simulation-assisted Mean Teacher for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15019/) (2024)
- [ALWOD: Active Learning for Weakly-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07914/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Teacher-Reference-Student Architecture for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19675/) (2024)
- [ACTRESS: Active Retraining for Semi-supervised Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03251/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty Meets Diversity: A Comprehensive Active Learning Framework for Indoor 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16125/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Recognition of Unknown Objects for Open-World Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16527/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Class Imbalance for End-to-end Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02268/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Object Detection: A Survey on Progress from CNN to Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08460/) (2024)
- [SCOUT: Semi-supervised Camouflaged Object Detection by Utilizing Text and Adaptive Data Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17843/) (2025)
- [Dual Learning with Dynamic Knowledge Distillation and Soft Alignment for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12283/) (2025)
- [Semi-Supervised and Long-Tailed Object Detection with CascadeMatch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14813/) (2023)
- [Credible Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection in Open Scene](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00695/) (2024)
- [Boosting Semi-Supervised Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images With Active Teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18958/) (2024)
- [AdaSemiCD: An Adaptive Semi-Supervised Change Detection Method Based on Pseudo-Label Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07758/) (2024)
- [Reflective Teacher: Semi-Supervised Multimodal 3D Object Detection in Bird's-Eye-View via Uncertainty Measure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04337/) (2024)
- [3DResT: A Strong Baseline for Semi-Supervised 3D Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12599/) (2025)
- [Pseudo-Label Quality Decoupling and Correction for Semi-Supervised Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11075/) (2025)
- [Active-SAOOD: Active Sparsely Annotated Oriented Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10162/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we study teacher-student learning from the perspective of data initialization and propose a novel algorithm called Active Teacher(Source code are available at: urlhttps://github.com/HunterJ-Lin/ActiveTeacher) for semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). Active Teacher extends the teacher-student framework to an iterative version, where the label set is partially initialized and gradually augmented by evaluating three key factors of unlabeled examples, including difficulty, information and diversity. With this design, Active Teacher can maximize the effect of limited label information while improving the quality of pseudo-labels. To validate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on the MS-COCO benchmark and compare Active Teacher with a set of recently proposed SSOD methods. The experimental results not only validate the superior performance gain of Active Teacher over the compared methods, but also show that it enables the baseline network, ie, Faster-RCNN, to achieve 100% supervised performance with much less label expenditure, ie 40% labeled examples on MS-COCO. More importantly, we believe that the experimental analyses in this paper can provide useful empirical knowledge for data annotation in practical applications.