In this paper, we for the first time explore helpful multi-modal contextual knowledge to understand novel categories for open-vocabulary object detection (OVD). The multi-modal contextual knowledge stands for the joint relationship across regions and words. However, it is challenging to incorporate such multi-modal contextual knowledge into OVD. The reason is that previous detection frameworks fail to jointly model multi-modal contextual knowledge, as object detectors only support vision inputs and no caption description is provided at test time. To this end, we propose a multi-modal contextual knowledge distillation framework, MMC-Det, to transfer the learned contextual knowledge from a teacher fusion transformer with diverse multi-modal masked language modeling (D-MLM) to a student detector. The diverse multi-modal masked language modeling is realized by an object divergence constraint upon traditional multi-modal masked language modeling (MLM), in order to extract fine-grained region-level visual contexts, which are vital to object detection. Extensive experiments performed upon various detection datasets show the effectiveness of our multi-modal context learning strategy, where our approach well outperforms the recent state-of-the-art methods.

该研究论文探索了多模态背景知识在开放词汇目标检测中的作用，并提出了一种多模态背景知识蒸馏框架，通过从多模态融合转换器中学习上下文知识并应用于学生检测器，取得了显著的提升。

开探多模态上下文知识的开放词汇物体检测