# SMILe: Leveraging Submodular Mutual Information For Robust Few-Shot Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02665 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02665/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2024.

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

- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Few-Shot Visual Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09458/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Generalized Few-Shot Object Detection without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09491/) (2021)
- [RepMet: Representative-based metric learning for classification and one-shot object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04728/) (2018)
- [Beyond Max-Margin: Class Margin Equilibrium for Few-shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04612/) (2021)
- [Semantic Relation Reasoning for Shot-Stable Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01903/) (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)
- [PRISM: A Rich Class of Parameterized Submodular Information Measures for Guided Subset Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00128/) (2021)
- [Label, Verify, Correct: A Simple Few Shot Object Detection Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05749/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection via Association and DIscrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11656/) (2021)
- [TALISMAN: Targeted Active Learning for Object Detection with Rare Classes and Slices using Submodular Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00166/) (2021)
- [DiGeo: Discriminative Geometry-Aware Learning for Generalized Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09674/) (2023)
- [Demystifying Multi-Faceted Video Summarization: Tradeoff Between Diversity,Representation, Coverage and Importance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01153/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Learning for Road Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12543/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Generalized Semantic Contrastive Learning via Embedding Side Information for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07060/) (2025)
- [Looking Beyond the Known: Towards a Data Discovery Guided Open-World Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00303/) (2025)
- [InSQuAD: In-Context Learning for Efficient Retrieval via Submodular Mutual Information to Enforce Quality and Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21003/) (2025)
- [SHaSaM: Submodular Hard Sample Mining for Fair Facial Attribute Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05162/) (2026)
- [SMA: Submodular Modality Aligner For Data Efficient Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12872/) (2026)
- [Prototype Memory-Guided Training-Free Anomaly Classification and Localization in Prenatal Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00744/) (2026)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection via Spatial-Channel State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15308/) (2025)
- [Understanding Submodular Information Measure Based Objectives for Representation Learning: A Variance and Separation Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27660/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Confusion and forgetting of object classes have been challenges of prime interest in Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD). To overcome these pitfalls in metric learning based FSOD techniques, we introduce a novel Submodular Mutual Information Learning (SMILe) framework which adopts combinatorial mutual information functions to enforce the creation of tighter and discriminative feature clusters in FSOD. Our proposed approach generalizes to several existing approaches in FSOD, agnostic of the backbone architecture demonstrating elevated performance gains. A paradigm shift from instance based objective functions to combinatorial objectives in SMILe naturally preserves the diversity within an object class resulting in reduced forgetting when subjected to few training examples. Furthermore, the application of mutual information between the already learnt (base) and newly added (novel) objects ensures sufficient separation between base and novel classes, minimizing the effect of class confusion. Experiments on popular FSOD benchmarks, PASCAL-VOC and MS-COCO show that our approach generalizes to State-of-the-Art (SoTA) approaches improving their novel class performance by up to 5.7% (3.3 mAP points) and 5.4% (2.6 mAP points) on the 10-shot setting of VOC (split 3) and 30-shot setting of COCO datasets respectively. Our experiments also demonstrate better retention of base class performance and up to 2x faster convergence over existing approaches agnostic of the underlying architecture.