# Aligned Consensus Teaching for Label-Efficient Oriented Object Detection in Weakly-Aligned Visible-Infrared Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18124 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18124/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Soft Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09018/) (2021)
- [Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09480/) (2021)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [ReDet: A Rotation-equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07733/) (2021)
- [R3Det: Refined Single-Stage Detector with Feature Refinement for Rotating Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05612/) (2019)
- [Align Deep Features for Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09397/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Rotated Object Detection with Gaussian Wasserstein Distance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11952/) (2021)
- [Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02437/) (2020)
- [Humble Teachers Teach Better Students for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10456/) (2021)
- [MMRotate: A Rotated Object Detection Benchmark using PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13317/) (2022)
- [Equalization Loss v2: A New Gradient Balance Approach for Long-tailed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08548/) (2020)
- [Unbiased Teacher v2: Semi-supervised Object Detection for Anchor-free and Anchor-based Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09500/) (2022)
- [Fusion-Mamba for Cross-modality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09146/) (2024)
- [C2Former: Calibrated and Complementary Transformer for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16175/) (2023)
- [PseCo: Pseudo Labeling and Consistency Training for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16317/) (2022)
- [Translation, Scale and Rotation: Cross-Modal Alignment Meets RGB-Infrared Vehicle Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13801/) (2022)
- [Dense Teacher: Dense Pseudo-Labels for Semi-supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02541/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Pseudo Labels for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00168/) (2021)
- [Consistent-Teacher: Towards Reducing Inconsistent Pseudo-targets in Semi-supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01589/) (2022)
- [Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Adaptive Class-Rebalancing Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05031/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visible-infrared object detection (VIOD) detects objects with oriented bounding boxes from paired visible and infrared images. Existing methods depend on costly dual-modality annotations. Semi-supervised learning can reduce this burden, but extending it from single-modal detection to VIOD is challenging. In the practical image-pair-level setting considered here, only a few pairs are labeled in both modalities, while the rest are completely unlabeled. This limited supervision creates three challenges: (i) too few labeled boxes for robust cross-modal alignment; (ii) pseudo-label errors caused by branch-wise misses accumulate during self-training; and (iii) tail-class annotations become critically scarce as the labeling budget decreases. We propose Aligned Consensus Teacher (ACT) for label-efficient VIOD in this setting. Its Cycle-Consistent Region Alignment (CRA) combines cycle consistency and sparse anchors with reliability-weighted regional matching. Cross-Modal Consensus Mean-Teacher (CMC-MT) forms consensus pseudo labels under pair-preserving views to recover branch-wise misses and supervise unlabeled pairs. Text-Guided Cross-Modal Instance Augmentation (TG-CMIA) uses a vision-language scene prior to compose tail-class instance pairs while preserving RGB--IR offsets. To the best of our knowledge, ACT is the first framework to study semi-supervised VIOD under this image-pair-level setting. Experiments on DroneVehicle and VEDAI show consistent gains across annotation ratios. With 10% labeled pairs on DroneVehicle, ACT reaches 94.3% of the mAP obtained by the same detector under full supervision. Code and models will be available on GitHub to facilitate future work.