# PS-TTL: Prototype-based Soft-labels and Test-Time Learning for Few-shot Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05674 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05674/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [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)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09480/) (2021)
- [Frustratingly Simple Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06957/) (2020)
- [FCOS: A simple and strong anchor-free object detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09214/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Meta Faster R-CNN: Towards Accurate Few-Shot Object Detection with Attentive Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07719/) (2021)
- [Query Adaptive Few-Shot Object Detection with Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09791/) (2021)
- [Hallucination Improves Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01294/) (2021)
- [Rank-DETR for High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08854/) (2023)
- [Meta-DETR: Image-Level Few-Shot Detection with Inter-Class Correlation Exploitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00219/) (2022)
- [Universal-Prototype Enhancing for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01077/) (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)
- [PC-RGNN: Point Cloud Completion and Graph Neural Network for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10412/) (2020)
- [Restoring Negative Information in Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11714/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection via Variational Feature Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13411/) (2023)
- [Towards Scale Balanced 6-DoF Grasp Detection in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05275/) (2022)

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

- [DroneFINE: Domain-Aware Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Detectors for Drone Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00338/) (2026)
- [From Label Error Detection to Correction: A Modular Framework and Benchmark for Object Detection Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06556/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) has gained widespread attention and made significant progress due to its ability to build models with a good generalization power using extremely limited annotated data. The fine-tuning based paradigm is currently dominating this field, where detectors are initially pre-trained on base classes with sufficient samples and then fine-tuned on novel ones with few samples, but the scarcity of labeled samples of novel classes greatly interferes precisely fitting their data distribution, thus hampering the performance. To address this issue, we propose a new framework for FSOD, namely Prototype-based Soft-labels and Test-Time Learning (PS-TTL). Specifically, we design a Test-Time Learning (TTL) module that employs a mean-teacher network for self-training to discover novel instances from test data, allowing detectors to learn better representations and classifiers for novel classes. Furthermore, we notice that even though relatively low-confidence pseudo-labels exhibit classification confusion, they still tend to recall foreground. We thus develop a Prototype-based Soft-labels (PS) strategy through assessing similarities between low-confidence pseudo-labels and category prototypes as soft-labels to unleash their potential, which substantially mitigates the constraints posed by few-shot samples. Extensive experiments on both the VOC and COCO benchmarks show that PS-TTL achieves the state-of-the-art, highlighting its effectiveness. The code and model are available at https://github.com/gaoyingjay/PS-TTL.