# UniT: Unified Knowledge Transfer for Any-shot Object Detection and Segmentation

Source: [UniT: Unified Knowledge Transfer for Any-shot Object Detection and Segmentation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa696a1e209131cea21e21>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:59:51.007Z

Authors: Siddhesh Khandelwal, Raghav Goyal, Leonid Sigal

Published: 2020-06-12T22:45:47.000Z

## Abstract

Methods for object detection and segmentation rely on large scale instance-level annotations for training, which are difficult and time-consuming to collect. Efforts to alleviate this look at varying degrees and quality of supervision. Weakly-supervised approaches draw on image-level labels to build detectors/segmentors, while zero/few-shot methods assume abundant instance-level data for a set of base classes, and none to a few examples for novel classes. This taxonomy has largely siloed algorithmic designs. In this work, we aim to bridge this divide by proposing an intuitive and unified semi-supervised model that is applicable to a range of supervision: from zero to a few instance-level samples per novel class. For base classes, our model learns a mapping from weakly-supervised to fully-supervised detectors/segmentors. By learning and leveraging visual and lingual similarities between the novel and base classes, we transfer those mappings to obtain detectors/segmentors for novel classes; refining them with a few novel class instance-level annotated samples, if available. The overall model is end-to-end trainable and highly flexible. Through extensive experiments on MS-COCO and Pascal VOC benchmark datasets we show improved performance in a variety of settings.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07502>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.07502.pdf>)
