DLWL: Improving Detection for Lowshot Classes With Weakly Labelled Data

Large detection datasets have a long tail of lowshot classes with very few bounding box annotations. We wish to improve detection for lowshot classes with weakly labelled web-scale datasets only having image-level labels. This requires a detection framework that can be jointly trained with limited number of bounding box annotated images and large number of weakly labelled images. Towards this end, we propose a modification to the FRCNN model to automatically infer label assignment for objects proposals from weakly labelled images during training. We pose this label assignment as a Linear Program with constraints on the number and overlap of object instances in an image. We show that this can be solved efficiently during training for weakly labelled images. Compared to just training with few annotated examples, augmenting with weakly labelled examples in our framework provides significant gains. We demonstrate this on the LVIS dataset 3.5 gain in AP as well as different lowshot variants of the COCO dataset. We provide a thorough analysis of the effect of amount of weakly labelled and fully labelled data required to train the detection model. Our DLWL framework can also outperform self-supervised baselines like omni-supervision for lowshot classes.