Papers › Semi-supervised Object Detection via Virtual Category Learning

Semi-supervised Object Detection via Virtual Category Learning

7 Jul 2022arXiv:2207.03433archive 2025-07-28

Changrui Chen, Kurt Debattista, Jungong Han

Due to the costliness of labelled data in real-world applications, semi-supervised object detectors, underpinned by pseudo labelling, are appealing. However, handling confusing samples is nontrivial: discarding valuable confusing samples would compromise the model generalisation while using them for training would exacerbate the confirmation bias issue caused by inevitable mislabelling. To solve this problem, this paper proposes to use confusing samples proactively without label correction. Specifically, a virtual category (VC) is assigned to each confusing sample such that they can safely contribute to the model optimisation even without a concrete label. It is attributed to specifying the embedding distance between the training sample and the virtual category as the lower bound of the inter-class distance. Moreover, we also modify the localisation loss to allow high-quality boundaries for location regression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed VC learning significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art, especially with small amounts of available labels.

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Tasks

ObjectObject DetectionSemi-Supervised Object Detectionobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Semi-Supervised Object Detection COCO 0.5% labeled data VC mAP 19.46 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Object Detection COCO 1% labeled data VC mAP 23.86 #8 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Object Detection COCO 10% labeled data VC detector FasterRCNN-Res50 #14 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Object Detection COCO 10% labeled data VC mAP 34.82 #14 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Object Detection COCO 2% labeled data VC mAP 27.70 #10 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Object Detection COCO 5% labeled data VC mAP 32.05 #11 of 23 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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