As Pseudo-Label Free as Possible: Leveraging Adaptive Feature Generation for Sparsely Annotated Object Detection

Compared to fully supervised object detection, training with sparse annotations typically leads to a decline in performance due to insufficient feature diversity. Existing sparsely annotated object detection (SAOD) methods often rely on pseudo-labeling strategies, but these pseudo-labels tend to introduce noise under extreme sparsity. To simultaneously avoid the impact of pseudo-label noise and enhance feature diversity, we propose a novel Adaptive Feature Generation (AdaptFG) model that generates features based on class names. This model integrates a pre-trained CLIP into a VAE-based feature generator, with its core innovation being an Adaptor that adaptively maps CLIP’s semantic embeddings to the object detector domain. Additionally, we introduce inter-class relationship reasoning in detector, which effectively mitigates misclassifications stemming from similar features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AdaptFG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SAOD methods on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO benchmarks.