Daily Papers

Progress on object detection is enabled by datasets that focus the research community's attention on open challenges. This process led us from simple images to complex scenes and from bounding boxes to segmentation masks. In this work, we introduce LVIS (pronounced `el-vis'): a new dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation. We plan to collect ~2 million high-quality instance segmentation masks for over 1000 entry-level object categories in 164k images. Due to the Zipfian distribution of categories in natural images, LVIS naturally has a long tail of categories with few training samples. Given that state-of-the-art deep learning methods for object detection perform poorly in the low-sample regime, we believe that our dataset poses an important and exciting new scientific challenge. LVIS is available at http://www.lvisdataset.org.

We present Contrastive Feature Masking Vision Transformer (CFM-ViT) - an image-text pretraining methodology that achieves simultaneous learning of image- and region-level representation for open-vocabulary object detection (OVD). Our approach combines the masked autoencoder (MAE) objective into the contrastive learning objective to improve the representation for localization tasks. Unlike standard MAE, we perform reconstruction in the joint image-text embedding space, rather than the pixel space as is customary with the classical MAE method, which causes the model to better learn region-level semantics. Moreover, we introduce Positional Embedding Dropout (PED) to address scale variation between image-text pretraining and detection finetuning by randomly dropping out the positional embeddings during pretraining. PED improves detection performance and enables the use of a frozen ViT backbone as a region classifier, preventing the forgetting of open-vocabulary knowledge during detection finetuning. On LVIS open-vocabulary detection benchmark, CFM-ViT achieves a state-of-the-art 33.9 APr, surpassing the best approach by 7.6 points and achieves better zero-shot detection transfer. Finally, CFM-ViT acquires strong image-level representation, outperforming the state of the art on 8 out of 12 metrics on zero-shot image-text retrieval benchmarks.

Open-set object detection aims at detecting arbitrary categories beyond those seen during training. Most recent advancements have adopted the open-vocabulary paradigm, utilizing vision-language backbones to represent categories with language. In this paper, we introduce DE-ViT, an open-set object detector that employs vision-only DINOv2 backbones and learns new categories through example images instead of language. To improve general detection ability, we transform multi-classification tasks into binary classification tasks while bypassing per-class inference, and propose a novel region propagation technique for localization. We evaluate DE-ViT on open-vocabulary, few-shot, and one-shot object detection benchmark with COCO and LVIS. For COCO, DE-ViT outperforms the open-vocabulary SoTA by 6.9 AP50 and achieves 50 AP50 in novel classes. DE-ViT surpasses the few-shot SoTA by 15 mAP on 10-shot and 7.2 mAP on 30-shot and one-shot SoTA by 2.8 AP50. For LVIS, DE-ViT outperforms the open-vocabulary SoTA by 2.2 mask AP and reaches 34.3 mask APr. Code is available at https://github.com/mlzxy/devit.