Weakly Supervised Knowledge Transfer with Probabilistic Logical Reasoning for Object Detection

Abstract: Training object detection models usually requires instance-level annotations, such as the positions and labels of all objects present in each image. Such supervision is unfortunately not always available and, more often, only image-level information is provided, also known as weak supervision. Recent works have addressed this limitation by leveraging knowledge from a richly annotated domain. However, the scope of weak supervision supported by these approaches has been very restrictive, preventing them to use all available information. In this work, we propose ProbKT, a framework based on probabilistic logical reasoning that allows to train object detection models with arbitrary types of weak supervision. We empirically show on different datasets that using all available information is beneficial as our ProbKT leads to significant improvement on target domain and better generalization compared to existing baselines. We also showcase the ability of our approach to handle complex logic statements as supervision signal.