# Open-World Weakly-Supervised Object Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.08271 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08271/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [Towards Open World Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02603/) (2021)
- [Learning to Discover Novel Visual Categories via Deep Transfer Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09884/) (2019)
- [Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02609/) (2022)
- [Hide-and-Seek: Forcing a Network to be Meticulous for Weakly-supervised Object and Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04232/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Complementary Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06962/) (2018)
- [Unidentified Video Objects: A Benchmark for Dense, Open-World Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04691/) (2021)
- [Attention-based Dropout Layer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10028/) (2019)
- [TS-CAM: Token Semantic Coupled Attention Map for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14862/) (2021)
- [Neighborhood Contrastive Learning for Novel Class Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10731/) (2021)
- [Large-scale interactive object segmentation with human annotators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10830/) (2019)
- [Aligning Pretraining for Detection via Object-Level Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02637/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Weakly Supervised Object Localization Methods Right](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07437/) (2020)
- [Self-produced Guidance for Weakly-supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08902/) (2018)
- [Unveiling the Potential of Structure Preserving for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04523/) (2021)
- [Shallow Feature Matters for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00873/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Open World Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00471/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Gap between Classification and Localization for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00220/) (2022)
- [LCTR: On Awakening the Local Continuity of Transformer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05291/) (2021)
- [Background Activation Suppression for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00580/) (2021)
- [CREAM: Weakly Supervised Object Localization via Class RE-Activation Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13922/) (2022)
- [Normalization Matters in Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13221/) (2021)
- [Open-Set Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13722/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Goal-Driven Explainable Clustering via Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13749/) (2023)
- [TeD-Loc: Text Distillation for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12632/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While remarkable success has been achieved in weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL), current frameworks are not capable of locating objects of novel categories in open-world settings. To address this issue, we are the first to introduce a new weakly-supervised object localization task called OWSOL (Open-World Weakly-Supervised Object Localization). During training, all labeled data comes from known categories and, both known and novel categories exist in the unlabeled data. To handle such data, we propose a novel paradigm of contrastive representation co-learning using both labeled and unlabeled data to generate a complete G-CAM (Generalized Class Activation Map) for object localization, without the requirement of bounding box annotation. As no class label is available for the unlabelled data, we conduct clustering over the full training set and design a novel multiple semantic centroids-driven contrastive loss for representation learning. We re-organize two widely used datasets, i.e., ImageNet-1K and iNatLoc500, and propose OpenImages150 to serve as evaluation benchmarks for OWSOL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can surpass all baselines by a large margin. We believe that this work can shift the close-set localization towards the open-world setting and serve as a foundation for subsequent works. Code will be released at https://github.com/ryylcc/OWSOL.