# COVD: Continual Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Novel Concept Injection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27116 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27116/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2026.

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

- [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)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14940/) (2022)
- [Boosting Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models via Mixture-of-Experts Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11549/) (2024)
- [F-VLM: Open-Vocabulary Object Detection upon Frozen Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15639/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Gap between Object and Image-level Representations for Open-Vocabulary Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03482/) (2022)
- [ELEVATER: A Benchmark and Toolkit for Evaluating Language-Augmented Visual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08790/) (2022)
- [CORA: Adapting CLIP for Open-Vocabulary Detection with Region Prompting and Anchor Pre-Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13076/) (2023)
- [CLIPSelf: Vision Transformer Distills Itself for Open-Vocabulary Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01403/) (2023)
- [Preventing Zero-Shot Transfer Degradation in Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06628/) (2023)
- [Region-Aware Pretraining for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07011/) (2023)
- [Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05892/) (2023)
- [LLMDet: Learning Strong Open-Vocabulary Object Detectors under the Supervision of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18954/) (2025)
- [Mind the Interference: Retaining Pre-trained Knowledge in Parameter Efficient Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05342/) (2024)
- [DeCLIP: Decoupled Learning for Open-Vocabulary Dense Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04410/) (2025)
- [Taming Self-Training for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06412/) (2023)
- [Learning Background Prompts to Discover Implicit Knowledge for Open Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00510/) (2024)
- [OV-DQUO: Open-Vocabulary DETR with Denoising Text Query Training and Open-World Unknown Objects Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17913/) (2024)
- [KeepLoRA: Continual Learning with Residual Gradient Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19659/) (2026)
- [ProxyDet: Synthesizing Proxy Novel Classes via Classwise Mixup for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07266/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Generalizable Incremental Learning for Vision-Language Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01680/) (2024)
- [LADA: Scalable Label-Specific CLIP Adapter for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23271/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) has made significant progress, enabling detectors to generalize from seen to unseen categories. However, real-world category spaces continually evolve, and existing OVD models still struggle with newly emerging concepts, while repeated full retraining is prohibitively expensive. To this end, we introduce a new task setting, termed Continual OVD with Novel Concept Injection (COVD), where models sequentially learn incoming novel concept groups while preserving prior concepts and original open-vocabulary knowledge, along with a new benchmark, Novel-114. Our key observation is that pretrained visual encoders often already perceive and represent many novel concepts, and the main bottleneck lies in the lack of stable semantic alignment between visual representations and textual concepts. Based on this, we propose NoIn-Det, an efficient continual injection framework without additional parameters. NoIn-Det freezes the visual encoder, preserves the text representation space using only texts of common concepts and previously injected concepts, and injects novel concepts by updating only a small subset of text-branch parameters beneficial to novel concept learning. Extensive experiments show that NoIn-Det effectively learns novel concepts, preserves old knowledge, and consistently outperforms existing continual learning methods for VLMs without introducing additional parameters.Novel-114 and the code will be released.