# Disentangle Object and Non-object Infrared Features via Language Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09228 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09228/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2026.

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (2021)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14940/) (2022)
- [Target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning and a Multi-scenario Multi-Modality Benchmark to Fuse Infrared and Visible for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16220/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic two-stage detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07461/) (2021)
- [CyCLIP: Cyclic Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14459/) (2022)
- [DINO-X: A Unified Vision Model for Open-World Object Detection and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14347/) (2024)
- [Cross-Modality Fusion Transformer for Multispectral Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00273/) (2021)
- [Multispectral Fusion for Object Detection with Cyclic Fuse-and-Refine Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12664/) (2020)
- [Rank-DETR for High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08854/) (2023)
- [RemoteSAM: Towards Segment Anything for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18022/) (2025)
- [RemoteReasoner: Towards Unifying Geospatial Reasoning Workflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19280/) (2025)
- [Unifying Vision-Language Representation Space with Single-tower Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11153/) (2022)
- [FD2-Net: Frequency-Driven Feature Decomposition Network for Infrared-Visible Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09258/) (2024)
- [Infrared Adversarial Car Stickers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09924/) (2024)
- [DEYOLO: Dual-Feature-Enhancement YOLO for Cross-Modality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04931/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Infrared object detection focuses on identifying and locating objects in complex environments (eg, dark, snow, and rain) where visible imaging cameras are disabled by poor illumination. However, due to low contrast and weak edge information in infrared images, it is challenging to extract discriminative object features for robust detection. To deal with this issue, we propose a novel vision-language representation learning paradigm for infrared object detection. An additional textual supervision with rich semantic information is explored to guide the disentanglement of object and non-object features. Specifically, we propose a Semantic Feature Alignment (SFA) module to align the object features with the corresponding text features. Furthermore, we develop an Object Feature Disentanglement (OFD) module that disentangles text-aligned object features and non-object features by minimizing their correlation. Finally, the disentangled object features are entered into the detection head. In this manner, the detection performance can be remarkably enhanced via more discriminative and less noisy features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance on two benchmarks: Mtextsuperscript3FD (83.7% mAP), FLIR (86.1% mAP). Our code will be publicly available once the paper is accepted.