# Language Prompt vs. Image Enhancement: Boosting Object Detection With CLIP in Hazy Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10637 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10637/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06826/) (2020)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04143/) (2017)
- [VirTex: Learning Visual Representations from Textual Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06666/) (2020)
- [Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Cooperative Prior Architecture Search for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05609/) (2020)
- [Getting to Know Low-light Images with The Exclusively Dark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11227/) (2018)
- [U-shape Transformer for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11843/) (2021)
- [SED: A Simple Encoder-Decoder for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15537/) (2023)
- [Image-Adaptive YOLO for Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08088/) (2021)
- [Understanding and Mitigating Overfitting in Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02219/) (2022)
- [GDIP: Gated Differentiable Image Processing for Object-Detection in Adverse Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14922/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Prior Information Generation with CLIP for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08458/) (2024)
- [Erasing, Transforming, and Noising Defense Network for Occluded Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07187/) (2023)
- [Visual and Textual Prior Guided Mask Assemble for Few-Shot Segmentation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07539/) (2023)
- [Simple Image-level Classification Improves Open-vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10439/) (2023)
- [Boosting R-CNN: Reweighting R-CNN Samples by RPN's Error for Underwater Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13728/) (2022)
- [TogetherNet: Bridging Image Restoration and Object Detection Together via Dynamic Enhancement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01373/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Prototypes Distillation for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07629/) (2024)
- [Semi-supervised Open-World Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16013/) (2024)
- [CFMW: Cross-modality Fusion Mamba for Robust Object Detection under Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16302/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object detection in hazy environments is challenging because degraded objects are nearly invisible and their semantics are weakened by environmental noise, making it difficult for detectors to identify. Common approaches involve image enhancement to boost weakened semantics, but these methods are limited by the instability of enhanced modules. This paper proposes a novel solution by employing language prompts to enhance weakened semantics without image enhancement. Specifically, we design Approximation of Mutual Exclusion (AME) to provide credible weights for Cross-Entropy Loss, resulting in CLIP-guided Cross-Entropy Loss (CLIP-CE). The provided weights assess the semantic weakening of objects. Through the backpropagation of CLIP-CE, weakened semantics are enhanced, making degraded objects easier to detect. In addition, we present Fine-tuned AME (FAME) which adaptively fine-tunes the weight of AME based on the predicted confidence. The proposed FAME compensates for the imbalanced optimization in AME. Furthermore, we present HazyCOCO, a large-scale synthetic hazy dataset comprising 61258 images. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code and dataset will be released.