# AirShot: Efficient Few-Shot Detection for Autonomous Exploration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05069 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05069/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [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)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Semantic Relation Reasoning for Shot-Stable Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01903/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection with Fully Cross-Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15021/) (2022)
- [Query Adaptive Few-Shot Object Detection with Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09791/) (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)
- [HyperNet: Towards Accurate Region Proposal Generation and Joint Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00600/) (2016)
- [FSSD: Feature Fusion Single Shot Multibox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00960/) (2017)
- [Universal-Prototype Enhancing for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01077/) (2021)
- [DSOD: Learning Deeply Supervised Object Detectors from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01241/) (2017)
- [Cooperating RPN's Improve Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10142/) (2020)
- [AirDet: Few-Shot Detection without Fine-tuning for Autonomous Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01740/) (2021)
- [Efficient Few-Shot Object Detection via Knowledge Inheritance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12224/) (2022)
- [Visual Memorability for Robotic Interestingness via Unsupervised Online Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08829/) (2020)

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

- [DrivingRecon: Large 4D Gaussian Reconstruction Model For Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09043/) (2024)
- [MonoFusion: Sparse-View 4D Reconstruction via Monocular Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23782/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Event Stream Slicing for Open-Vocabulary Event-Based Object Detection via Vision-Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00681/) (2025)
- [Journey into Automation: Image-Derived Pavement Texture Extraction and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02414/) (2025)
- [CPDR: Towards Highly-Efficient Salient Object Detection via Crossed Post-decoder Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06441/) (2025)
- [DDUNet: Dual Dynamic U-Net for Highly-Efficient Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15385/) (2025)
- [CP2M: Clustered-Patch-Mixed Mosaic Augmentation for Aerial Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15389/) (2025)
- [Segregation and Context Aggregation Network for Real-time Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14178/) (2025)
- [CRISP: Contact-Guided Real2Sim from Monocular Video with Planar Scene Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14696/) (2025)
- [F2STNet: Fair and Federated Spectral-Temporal Modeling for Graph Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09082/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot object detection has drawn increasing attention in the field of robotic exploration, where robots are required to find unseen objects with a few online provided examples. Despite recent efforts have been made to yield online processing capabilities, slow inference speeds of low-powered robots fail to meet the demands of real-time detection-making them impractical for autonomous exploration. Existing methods still face performance and efficiency challenges, mainly due to unreliable features and exhaustive class loops. In this work, we propose a new paradigm AirShot, and discover that, by fully exploiting the valuable correlation map, AirShot can result in a more robust and faster few-shot object detection system, which is more applicable to robotics community. The core module Top Prediction Filter (TPF) can operate on multi-scale correlation maps in both the training and inference stages. During training, TPF supervises the generation of a more representative correlation map, while during inference, it reduces looping iterations by selecting top-ranked classes, thus cutting down on computational costs with better performance. Surprisingly, this dual functionality exhibits general effectiveness and efficiency on various off-the-shelf models. Exhaustive experiments on COCO2017, VOC2014, and SubT datasets demonstrate that TPF can significantly boost the efficacy and efficiency of most off-the-shelf models, achieving up to 36.4% precision improvements along with 56.3% faster inference speed. Code and Data are at: https://github.com/ImNotPrepared/AirShot.