Partition, Refine, and Detect: Preserving Novel Category Capacity in Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Wei Zhang, Zhu Teng, Zhixiang Chi, Junnan Zou, Yi Liu +1

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) expects the model trained on base classes to recognize both base and novel classes at inference. Typical methods rely on CLIP-style vision-language embeddings, yet the learned space is often biased toward base categories, with limited effective capacity preserved for novel concepts. Such a base-dominated representation can compress novel semantics, leading to semantic collapse and mis-calibrated confidence at inference. To address this issue, we present PR-OVD, a partition-and-refine framework that explicitly reserves capacity for novel categories and strengthens category separation, while being seamlessly integrated into different detector architectures. Specifically, PR-OVD first performs coarse partitioning to build global divisions for base, novel, and an explicit background partition in both visual and textual modalities, preventing object-irrelevant embeddings from leaking into category-specific representations. It then applies category-level refinement within each partition to sharpen decision boundaries and alleviate the lack of fine-grained region-level pretraining in CLIP. To further provide reliable visual anchors for novel…