# Multi-Modal Classifiers for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05493 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05493/

## Key facts

- Cited by 53 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 111 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10972/) (2021)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Towards Open Vocabulary Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15880/) (2023)
- [Open3DIS: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation with 2D Mask Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10671/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Open-Vocabulary Detection and Segmentation: Past, Present, and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09220/) (2023)
- [MaskClustering: View Consensus based Mask Graph Clustering for Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07745/) (2024)
- [Do LLMs Understand Visual Anomalies? Uncovering LLM's Capabilities in Zero-shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09654/) (2024)
- [Open-YOLO 3D: Towards Fast and Accurate Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02548/) (2024)
- [Generative Region-Language Pretraining for Open-Ended Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10191/) (2024)
- [Democratizing Fine-grained Visual Recognition with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13837/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Potential of Large Foundation Models for Open-Vocabulary HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06194/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05687/) (2024)
- [OST: Refining Text Knowledge with Optimal Spatio-Temporal Descriptor for General Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00096/) (2023)
- [Detect Everything with Few Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12969/) (2023)
- [Open World Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11301/) (2024)
- [Multi-modal Attribute Prompting for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00219/) (2024)
- [SHiNe: Semantic Hierarchy Nexus for Open-vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10053/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Model for Object Detection and Segmentation: A Review and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09480/) (2025)
- [CapeX: Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation from Textual Point Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00384/) (2024)
- [OpenAD: Open-World Autonomous Driving Benchmark for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17761/) (2024)
- [Decoupled Global-Local Alignment for Improving Compositional Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16801/) (2025)
- [Region-centric Image-Language Pretraining for Open-Vocabulary Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00161/) (2023)
- [Details Matter for Indoor Open-vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23134/) (2025)
- [Open-Vocabulary HOI Detection with Interaction-aware Prompt and Concept Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03207/) (2025)
- [OV-VG: A Benchmark for Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14374/) (2023)
- [Exploring Robust Features for Few-Shot Object Detection in Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05381/) (2024)
- [Renovating Names in Open-Vocabulary Segmentation Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09593/) (2024)
- [An Information Compensation Framework for Zero-Shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00639/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Temporal Action Localization using Multimodal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15556/) (2024)
- [Descriptor and Word Soups: Overcoming the Parameter Efficiency Accuracy Tradeoff for Out-of-Distribution Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13612/) (2023)
- [Interpretable Zero-Shot Learning with Locally-Aligned Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23822/) (2025)
- [Open Vocabulary Multi-Label Video Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09073/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The goal of this paper is open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) unicodex2013 building a model that can detect objects beyond the set of categories seen at training, thus enabling the user to specify categories of interest at inference without the need for model retraining. We adopt a standard two-stage object detector architecture, and explore three ways for specifying novel categories: via language descriptions, via image exemplars, or via a combination of the two. We make three contributions: first, we prompt a large language model (LLM) to generate informative language descriptions for object classes, and construct powerful text-based classifiers; second, we employ a visual aggregator on image exemplars that can ingest any number of images as input, forming vision-based classifiers; and third, we provide a simple method to fuse information from language descriptions and image exemplars, yielding a multi-modal classifier. When evaluating on the challenging LVIS open-vocabulary benchmark we demonstrate that: (i) our text-based classifiers outperform all previous OVOD works; (ii) our vision-based classifiers perform as well as text-based classifiers in prior work; (iii) using multi-modal classifiers perform better than either modality alone; and finally, (iv) our text-based and multi-modal classifiers yield better performance than a fully-supervised detector.