Annotator-Free Object Detection via Foundation Model Collaboration

Abstract

Object detection research remains constrained by high annotation costs and the closed-set assumptions of supervised models, limiting scalability to novel categories. We present a target-dataset annotation-free object detection framework that eliminates the need for human labeling on the target dataset by leveraging the complementary strengths of pretrained foundation models, including segmentation and vision-language systems, combined with a self-refining training loop. To further reduce reliance on expensive LVLM queries, we introduce a landmark-based clustering mechanism that amortizes labeling across image clusters, improving label consistency while lowering computational cost. Our method autonomously generates segmentation proposals, assigns semantic labels through multimodal reasoning, and iteratively improves both localization and classification using a lightweight open-set detector. This modular pipeline enables adaptation to completely unseen object classes and domains without any human-provided target-dataset annotations, while maintaining compatibility with existing detection architectures. Evaluations on COCO, LVIS, ODinW-35, and Roboflow-100 demonstrate substantial performance gains over state-of-the-art open-vocabulary and long-tail detection methods, achieving 60.8 AP on COCO and 47.4 AP on LVIS under zero-shot settings. Beyond strong benchmark results, our approach provides a scalable foundation for real-world detection systems in unknown environments, where annotation is infeasible.