Open-World Objectness Modeling Unifies Novel Object Detection

Shan Zhang, Yao Ni, Jinhao Du, Yuan Xue, Philip Torr, Piotr Koniusz, Anton van den Hengel

Abstract: The challenge in open-world object detection, similarly to few- and zero-shot learning, is to generalize beyond the class distribution of the training data. In this paper, we propose a general class-agnostic objectness measure to limit bias toward labeled samples. One issue in open-world detection is that previously unseen objects are often misclassified as known categories or filtered as background by classifiers. To prevent this, we explicitly model the joint distribution of objectness and category labels using variational approximation. However, without sufficient labeled data, minimizing the KL divergence between the estimated posterior and a static normal prior fails to converge. Our theoretical analysis identifies the root cause of this failure and motivates adopting a Gaussian prior with variance dynamically adapted to the estimated posterior as a surrogate. To further reduce misclassification, we introduce an energy-based margin loss that encourages unknown objects to move toward high-density regions of the distribution, thus reducing the uncertainty of unknown detections. Our Open-World OBJectness modeling (OWOBJ) boosts novel object detection, especially in low-data regimes. OWOBJ is a flexible plugin that outperforms baselines in Open-World, Few-Shot, and zero-shot Open-Vocabulary Object Detection.