ADAM: Autonomous Discovery and Annotation Model using LLMs for Context-Aware Annotations

Object detection models typically rely on predefined categories, limiting their ability to identify novel objects in open-world scenarios. To overcome this constraint, we introduce ADAM: Autonomous Discovery and Annotation Model, a training-free, self-refining framework for open-world object labeling. ADAM leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate candidate labels for unknown objects based on contextual information from known entities within a scene. These labels are paired with visual embeddings from CLIP to construct an Embedding-Label Repository (ELR) that enables inference without category supervision. For a newly encountered unknown object, ADAM retrieves visually similar instances from the ELR and applies frequency-based voting and cross-modal re-ranking to assign a robust label. To further enhance consistency, we introduce a self-refinement loop that re-evaluates repository labels using visual cohesion analysis and k-nearest-neighbor-based majority re-labeling. Experimental results on the COCO and PASCAL datasets demonstrate that ADAM effectively annotates novel categories using only visual and contextual signals, without requiring any fine-tuning or retraining.

Amirreza Rouhi, Solmaz Arezoomandan, Knut Peterson, Joseph T. Woods, David K. Han · 2025