# Weakly Supervised Virus Capsid Detection with Image-Level Annotations in Electron Microscopy Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00563 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00563/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [HoVer-Net: Simultaneous Segmentation and Classification of Nuclei in Multi-Tissue Histology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06499/) (2018)
- [Cut, Paste and Learn: Surprisingly Easy Synthesis for Instance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01642/) (2017)
- [Hide-and-Seek: Forcing a Network to be Meticulous for Weakly-supervised Object and Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04232/) (2017)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Detection Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02853/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Complementary Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06962/) (2018)
- [Attention-based Dropout Layer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10028/) (2019)
- [TS-CAM: Token Semantic Coupled Attention Map for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14862/) (2021)
- [Multiple Instance Detection Network with Online Instance Classifier Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00138/) (2017)
- [Modeling Visual Context is Key to Augmenting Object Detection Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07428/) (2018)
- [Instance-aware, Context-focused, and Memory-efficient Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04725/) (2020)
- [WSOD^2: Learning Bottom-up and Top-down Objectness Distillation for Weakly-supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04972/) (2019)
- [Comprehensive Attention Self-Distillation for Weakly-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12023/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08258/) (2016)
- [ContextLocNet: Context-Aware Deep Network Models for Weakly Supervised Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04331/) (2016)
- [Geometry Constrained Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09727/) (2020)
- [CREAM: Weakly Supervised Object Localization via Class RE-Activation Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13922/) (2022)
- [Boosting Weakly Supervised Object Detection via Learning Bounding Box Adjusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01499/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Object Detection with 2D and 3D Regression Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01891/) (2019)
- [Object Discovery via Contrastive Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07576/) (2022)
- [Self-taught Object Localization with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3964/) (2014)
- [Re-Attention Transformer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01838/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current state-of-the-art methods for object detection rely on annotated bounding boxes of large data sets for training. However, obtaining such annotations is expensive and can require up to hundreds of hours of manual labor. This poses a challenge, especially since such annotations can only be provided by experts, as they require knowledge about the scientific domain. To tackle this challenge, we propose a domain-specific weakly supervised object detection algorithm that only relies on image-level annotations, which are significantly easier to acquire. Our method distills the knowledge of a pre-trained model, on the task of predicting the presence or absence of a virus in an image, to obtain a set of pseudo-labels that can be used to later train a state-of-the-art object detection model. To do so, we use an optimization approach with a shrinking receptive field to extract virus particles directly without specific network architectures. Through a set of extensive studies, we show how the proposed pseudo-labels are easier to obtain, and, more importantly, are able to outperform other existing weak labeling methods, and even ground truth labels, in cases where the time to obtain the annotation is limited.