
Roboflow and Carnegie Mellon University are collaborating to release the second iteration of the Foundational Few-Shot Object Detection Challenge at CVPR 2025.
In partnership, we have developed Roboflow-20VL, a challenging new dataset that measures the ability of foundation models to localize objects from a few visual examples and textual descriptions.
Roboflow-20VL includes 20 diverse datasets from novel domains like supermarket product localization, defect detection, and action contextualization and imaging modalities like X-Rays, thermal images, and aerial photography.
Each dataset in Roboflow-20VL has a 10-shot split, as well as annotation instructions for class. We challenge you to define an algorithm that can learn from these multi-modal examples.
While foundation models are capable of identifying common objects, existing models struggle to find rare classes, leading to the ad-hoc process of prompt engineering. Instead, we argue that one can principally address the challenge of aligning foundation models to target concepts through the lens of few-shot recognition, by presenting VLMs with a few examples of the target concept.
We hope that this challenge motivates the community to develop robust algorithms that can adapt to new domains with a few examples. We have pre-populated the leaderboard with state-of-the-art models like Qwen 2.5VL and GroundingDINO. However, these methods achieve less than 1% accuracy on many datasets in Roboflow-20VL. We invite you to submit a method that can beat our baselines.
Top performing teams will be highlighted at the Workshop On Visual Perception and Learning in an Open World. Check out our previous 2024 NeurIPS paper for more details about last year’s competition winners.
The Roboflow20-VL challenge is open from March 11, 2025 to June 8, 2025. Submit your method to our EvalAI leaderboard.
Questions about the challenge? The Foundational FSOD Github issues page is a good place to ask.
Cite this Post
Use the following entry to cite this post in your research:
Peter Robicheaux. (Mar 13, 2025). Foundational Few-Shot Object Detection Challenge @ CVPR 2025. Roboflow Blog: https://blog.roboflow.com/foundational-few-shot-object-detection-challenge-cvpr-2025/
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