# Fine-Grained Prototypes Distillation for Few-Shot Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.07629 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07629/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (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)
- [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)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [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)
- [LSTD: A Low-Shot Transfer Detector for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01529/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection with Fully Cross-Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15021/) (2022)
- [Meta Faster R-CNN: Towards Accurate Few-Shot Object Detection with Attentive Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07719/) (2021)
- [Dense Relation Distillation with Context-aware Aggregation for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17115/) (2021)
- [Meta-DETR: Image-Level Few-Shot Detection with Inter-Class Correlation Exploitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00219/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection via Variational Feature Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13411/) (2023)

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

- [Generalized Semantic Contrastive Learning via Embedding Side Information for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07060/) (2025)
- [AnySynth: Harnessing the Power of Image Synthetic Data Generation for Generalized Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16749/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Beyond Few-shot Object Detection: A Detailed Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14249/) (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)
- [Language Prompt vs. Image Enhancement: Boosting Object Detection With CLIP in Hazy Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10637/) (2026)
- [LV-OSD: Language-Vision-Complementary Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28271/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims at extending a generic detector for novel object detection with only a few training examples. It attracts great concerns recently due to the practical meanings. Meta-learning has been demonstrated to be an effective paradigm for this task. In general, methods based on meta-learning employ an additional support branch to encode novel examples (a.k.a. support images) into class prototypes, which are then fused with query branch to facilitate the model prediction. However, the class-level prototypes are difficult to precisely generate, and they also lack detailed information, leading to instability in performance.New methods are required to capture the distinctive local context for more robust novel object detection. To this end, we propose to distill the most representative support features into fine-grained prototypes. These prototypes are then assigned into query feature maps based on the matching results, modeling the detailed feature relations between two branches. This process is realized by our Fine-Grained Feature Aggregation (FFA) module. Moreover, in terms of high-level feature fusion, we propose Balanced Class-Agnostic Sampling (B-CAS) strategy and Non-Linear Fusion (NLF) module from differenct perspectives. They are complementary to each other and depict the high-level feature relations more effectively. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO benchmarks show that our method sets a new state-of-the-art performance in most settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/wangchen1801/FPD.