Taming Self-Training for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Recent studies have shown promising performance in open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) by utilizing pseudo labels (PLs) from pre-trained vision and language models (VLMs). However, teacher-student self-training, a powerful and widely used paradigm to leverage PLs, is rarely explored for OVD. This work identifies two challenges of using self-training in OVD: noisy PLs from VLMs and frequent distribution changes of PLs. To address these challenges, we propose SAS-Det that tames self-training for OVD from two key perspectives. First, we present a split-and-fusion (SAF) head that splits a standard detection into an open-branch and a closed-branch. This design can reduce noisy supervision from pseudo boxes. More-over, the two branches learn complementary knowledge from different training data, significantly enhancing performance when fused together. Second, in our view, un-like in closed-set tasks, the PL distributions in OVD are solely determined by the teacher model. We introduce a periodic update strategy to decrease the number of up-dates to the teacher, thereby decreasing the frequency of changes in PL distributions, which stabilizes the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate SAS-Det is both efficient and effective. SAS-Det outperforms recent models of the same scale by a clear margin and achieves 37.4 AP<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">50</inf> and 29.1 AP<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">r</inf> on novel categories of the COCO and LVIS benchmarks, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaofeng94/SAS-Det.