# REAL-OW: Rehearsal-free Open World Object Detection with Low-Rank Adaptation and Dual-Stage Objectness Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03004 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03004/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09536/) (2018)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [AdaLoRA: Adaptive Budget Allocation for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10512/) (2023)
- [Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14152/) (2023)
- [Towards Open World Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02603/) (2021)
- [DyLoRA: Parameter Efficient Tuning of Pre-trained Models using Dynamic Search-Free Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07558/) (2022)
- [Incremental Learning of Object Detectors without Catastrophic Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06977/) (2017)
- [Concept Sliders: LoRA Adaptors for Precise Control in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12092/) (2023)
- [KronA: Parameter Efficient Tuning with Kronecker Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10650/) (2022)
- [OW-DETR: Open-world Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01513/) (2021)
- [Asymmetry in Low-Rank Adapters of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16842/) (2024)
- [Class-agnostic Object Detection with Multi-modal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11430/) (2021)
- [Tracking Meets LoRA: Faster Training, Larger Model, Stronger Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05231/) (2024)
- [Incremental Object Detection via Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08798/) (2020)
- [PROB: Probabilistic Objectness for Open World Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01424/) (2022)
- [MTLoRA: A Low-Rank Adaptation Approach for Efficient Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20320/) (2024)
- [Memory Efficient Continual Learning with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04640/) (2022)
- [UC-OWOD: Unknown-Classified Open World Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11455/) (2022)
- [Novel Class Discovery without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10659/) (2022)
- [CAT: LoCalization and IdentificAtion Cascade Detection Transformer for Open-World Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01970/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [YOLO-PEFT: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning on YOLO Family](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07051/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-World Object Detection (OWOD) requires detectors to identify previously unseen objects as unknown and incrementally incorporate them into the set of known categories, while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Existing frameworks rely heavily on exemplar replay to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, but in some real applications, storing raw data conflicts with data access restrictions and leads to data exposure risks, while incurring significant memory overhead. In this paper, we propose REAL-OW, a novel rehearsal-free framework that decouples incremental knowledge through a collaborative adapter architecture based on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Specifically, we deploy General Adapters (GAs) in the backbone to enable the significance-aware refinement of cross-task universal representations, while Specific Adapters (SAs) in the decoder provide orthogonal storage for task-specific expertise. To resolve representation drift in objectness modeling under rehearsal-free constraints, we introduce Dual-Stage Objectness Modeling (DSOM), which alternates between feature aggregation and boundary consolidation to stabilize objectness distributions while maintaining the separation between known and unknown categories. Furthermore, DSOM is supported by a Calibrated Gaussian Negative Log-Likelihood (CG-NLL) distance tailored for the dispersed feature distributions inherent in rehearsal-free settings. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that REAL-OW achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing existing exemplar replay methods in both detection precision and unknown discovery. Our approach establishes a new baseline for rehearsal-free OWOD.