# Scalpel-SAM: A Semi-Supervised Paradigm for Adapting SAM to Infrared Small Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22483 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22483/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Vision mixture-of-experts, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 10 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Vision mixture-of-experts](https://mlsanity.com/moe/vision-mixture-of-experts/)
- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Asymmetric Contextual Modulation for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14530/) (2020)
- [Dense Nested Attention Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00487/) (2021)
- [UIU-Net: U-Net in U-Net for Infrared Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00968/) (2022)
- [Attentional Local Contrast Networks for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08573/) (2020)
- [Mapping Degeneration Meets Label Evolution: Learning Infrared Small Target Detection with Single Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01484/) (2023)
- [Multi-Scale Direction-Aware Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02037/) (2024)
- [From Easy to Hard: Progressive Active Learning Framework for Infrared Small Target Detection with Single Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11154/) (2024)
- [Gradient-Guided Learning Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09497/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Infrared small object detection urgently requires semi-supervised paradigms due to the high cost of annotation. However, existing methods like SAM face significant challenges of domain gaps, inability of encoding physical priors, and inherent architectural complexity. To address this, we designed a Hierarchical MoE Adapter consisting of four white-box neural operators. Building upon this core component, we propose a two-stage paradigm for knowledge distillation and transfer: (1) Prior-Guided Knowledge Distillation, where we use our MoE adapter and 10% of available fully supervised data to distill SAM into an expert teacher (Scalpel-SAM); and (2) Deployment-Oriented Knowledge Transfer, where we use Scalpel-SAM to generate pseudo labels for training lightweight and efficient downstream models. Experiments demonstrate that with minimal annotations, our paradigm enables downstream models to achieve performance comparable to, or even surpassing, their fully supervised counterparts. To our knowledge, this is the first semi-supervised paradigm that systematically addresses the data scarcity issue in IR-SOT using SAM as the teacher model.