Daily Papers

Inverted bottleneck layers, which are built upon depthwise convolutions, have been the predominant building blocks in state-of-the-art object detection models on mobile devices. In this work, we investigate the optimality of this design pattern over a broad range of mobile accelerators by revisiting the usefulness of regular convolutions. We discover that regular convolutions are a potent component to boost the latency-accuracy trade-off for object detection on accelerators, provided that they are placed strategically in the network via neural architecture search. By incorporating regular convolutions in the search space and directly optimizing the network architectures for object detection, we obtain a family of object detection models, MobileDets, that achieve state-of-the-art results across mobile accelerators. On the COCO object detection task, MobileDets outperform MobileNetV3+SSDLite by 1.7 mAP at comparable mobile CPU inference latencies. MobileDets also outperform MobileNetV2+SSDLite by 1.9 mAP on mobile CPUs, 3.7 mAP on Google EdgeTPU, 3.4 mAP on Qualcomm Hexagon DSP and 2.7 mAP on Nvidia Jetson GPU without increasing latency. Moreover, MobileDets are comparable with the state-of-the-art MnasFPN on mobile CPUs even without using the feature pyramid, and achieve better mAP scores on both EdgeTPUs and DSPs with up to 2x speedup. Code and models are available in the TensorFlow Object Detection API: https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/object_detection.

We introduce Constellation, a dataset of 13K images suitable for research on detection of objects in dense urban streetscapes observed from high-elevation cameras, collected for a variety of temporal conditions. The dataset addresses the need for curated data to explore problems in small object detection exemplified by the limited pixel footprint of pedestrians observed tens of meters from above. It enables the testing of object detection models for variations in lighting, building shadows, weather, and scene dynamics. We evaluate contemporary object detection architectures on the dataset, observing that state-of-the-art methods have lower performance in detecting small pedestrians compared to vehicles, corresponding to a 10% difference in average precision (AP). Using structurally similar datasets for pretraining the models results in an increase of 1.8% mean AP (mAP). We further find that incorporating domain-specific data augmentations helps improve model performance. Using pseudo-labeled data, obtained from inference outcomes of the best-performing models, improves the performance of the models. Finally, comparing the models trained using the data collected in two different time intervals, we find a performance drift in models due to the changes in intersection conditions over time. The best-performing model achieves a pedestrian AP of 92.0% with 11.5 ms inference time on NVIDIA A100 GPUs, and an mAP of 95.4%.

Autonomous driving perception systems must maintain reliable object detection under diverse environmental conditions, not only in clear daytime scenes. However, the cross-weather robustness of modern detectors remains insufficiently characterised under source-only evaluation. This study evaluates representative object detection architectures trained exclusively on clear daytime driving scenes and tested without adaptation under unseen fog, rain, snow, and night conditions. The evaluation covers lightweight and medium-scale one-stage, two-stage, and transformer-based detectors within a unified protocol. Robustness is assessed using performance Drop (%), a Weather Robustness Index (WRI), and class-level sensitivity analysis for critical road participants, including cars, buses, trucks, and persons. Prediction confidence reliability under environmental domain shift is measured using Expected Calibration Error (ECE). Results reveal consistent performance degradation in adverse conditions, reaching 62.90% at night. Buses show the highest sensitivity to environmental variability, while cars remain comparatively stable across weather transitions. Comparisons indicate that YOLO-based detectors exhibit the lowest calibration mismatch, reflecting stronger agreement between predicted confidence and empirical detection correctness. In contrast, DETR achieves the lowest robustness score, with a WRI of 0.6859, indicating greater vulnerability to cross-weather domain shift. These findings offer deployment-oriented insights into detector robustness and confidence reliability for safety-critical intelligent vehicle perception systems.

As object detection techniques continue to evolve, understanding their relationships with complementary visual tasks becomes crucial for optimising model architectures and computational resources. This paper investigates the correlations between object detection accuracy and two fundamental visual tasks: depth prediction and visual saliency prediction. Through comprehensive experiments using state-of-the-art models (DeepGaze IIE, Depth Anything, DPT-Large, and Itti's model) on COCO and Pascal VOC datasets, we find that visual saliency shows consistently stronger correlations with object detection accuracy (mArho up to 0.459 on Pascal VOC) compared to depth prediction (mArho up to 0.283). Our analysis reveals significant variations in these correlations across object categories, with larger objects showing correlation values up to three times higher than smaller objects. These findings suggest incorporating visual saliency features into object detection architectures could be more beneficial than depth information, particularly for specific object categories. The observed category-specific variations also provide insights for targeted feature engineering and dataset design improvements, potentially leading to more efficient and accurate object detection systems.

Remote sensing object detection has advanced rapidly with the development of large-scale benchmarks and modern detection architectures. However, existing datasets and detectors remain fragmented. Most benchmarks focus on limited categories, fixed spatial resolutions, or a single sensor, while detectors still struggle to work across different sensors and categorical systems. In this paper, we introduce LEVIRDet-159, the largest and most comprehensive remote sensing object detection dataset to date, with 159 categories, 2.56 million bounding boxes, and 700k fine-grained annotations under a multi-level taxonomy. In each key scale dimension, LEVIRDet-159 exceeds the corresponding largest existing remote sensing object detection dataset, containing approximately (7x) more images, (6x) more object instances, and (4x) more categories. Based on this dataset, we design LEVIRDetNet, a scale-hierarchy-aware detection foundation model for universal remote sensing object detection. LEVIRDetNet couples online visual Ground Sampling Distance (GSD) prediction, GSD-conditioned query modulation and allocation, and a hierarchy-aware detection head for mixed-granularity remote sensing supervision. Under stringent evaluation settings, LEVIRDetNet demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization. Even without target-domain training or fine-tuning, it achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on 9 external benchmarks, improving the strongest fully supervised competing methods by 5.02 mAP on average under each benchmark's primary metric. We hope this study will facilitate the development of strongly generalizable remote sensing object detection across diverse category systems, spatial resolutions, and sensor platforms. The dataset and trained models will be released at https://qinzheyang.github.io/LEVIRDet/, accompanying the final paper.

We propose Cut-and-LEaRn (CutLER), a simple approach for training unsupervised object detection and segmentation models. We leverage the property of self-supervised models to 'discover' objects without supervision and amplify it to train a state-of-the-art localization model without any human labels. CutLER first uses our proposed MaskCut approach to generate coarse masks for multiple objects in an image and then learns a detector on these masks using our robust loss function. We further improve the performance by self-training the model on its predictions. Compared to prior work, CutLER is simpler, compatible with different detection architectures, and detects multiple objects. CutLER is also a zero-shot unsupervised detector and improves detection performance AP50 by over 2.7 times on 11 benchmarks across domains like video frames, paintings, sketches, etc. With finetuning, CutLER serves as a low-shot detector surpassing MoCo-v2 by 7.3% APbox and 6.6% APmask on COCO when training with 5% labels.

Large-scale pre-training holds the promise to advance 3D medical object detection, a crucial component of accurate computer-aided diagnosis. Yet, it remains underexplored compared to segmentation, where pre-training has already demonstrated significant benefits. Existing pre-training approaches for 3D object detection rely on 2D medical data or natural image pre-training, failing to fully leverage 3D volumetric information. In this work, we present the first systematic study of how existing pre-training methods can be integrated into state-of-the-art detection architectures, covering both CNNs and Transformers. Our results show that pre-training consistently improves detection performance across various tasks and datasets. Notably, reconstruction-based self-supervised pre-training outperforms supervised pre-training, while contrastive pre-training provides no clear benefit for 3D medical object detection. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/nnDetection-finetuning.

We present TornadoNet, a comprehensive benchmark for automated street-level building damage assessment evaluating how modern real-time object detection architectures and ordinal-aware supervision strategies perform under realistic post-disaster conditions. TornadoNet provides the first controlled benchmark demonstrating how architectural design and loss formulation jointly influence multi-level damage detection from street-view imagery, delivering methodological insights and deployable tools for disaster response. Using 3,333 high-resolution geotagged images and 8,890 annotated building instances from the 2021 Midwest tornado outbreak, we systematically compare CNN-based detectors from the YOLO family against transformer-based models (RT-DETR) for multi-level damage detection. Models are trained under standardized protocols using a five-level damage classification framework based on IN-CORE damage states, validated through expert cross-annotation. Baseline experiments reveal complementary architectural strengths. CNN-based YOLO models achieve highest detection accuracy and throughput, with larger variants reaching 46.05% mAP@0.5 at 66-276 FPS on A100 GPUs. Transformer-based RT-DETR models exhibit stronger ordinal consistency, achieving 88.13% Ordinal Top-1 Accuracy and MAOE of 0.65, indicating more reliable severity grading despite lower baseline mAP. To align supervision with the ordered nature of damage severity, we introduce soft ordinal classification targets and evaluate explicit ordinal-distance penalties. RT-DETR trained with calibrated ordinal supervision achieves 44.70% mAP@0.5, a 4.8 percentage-point improvement, with gains in ordinal metrics (91.15% Ordinal Top-1 Accuracy, MAOE = 0.56). These findings establish that ordinal-aware supervision improves damage severity estimation when aligned with detector architecture. Model & Data: https://github.com/crumeike/TornadoNet

Robust Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is critical for the automated processing and understanding of historical documents with complex page organizations. This paper benchmarks five state-of-the-art object detection architectures on three annotated datasets representing a spectrum of codicological complexity: The e-NDP, a corpus of Parisian medieval registers (1326-1504); CATMuS, a diverse multiclass dataset derived from various medieval and modern sources (ca.12th-17th centuries) and HORAE, a corpus of decorated books of hours (ca.13th-16th centuries). We evaluate two Transformer-based models (Co-DETR, Grounding DINO) against three YOLO variants (AABB, OBB, and YOLO-World). Our findings reveal significant performance variations dependent on model architecture, data set characteristics, and bounding box representation. In the e-NDP dataset, Co-DETR achieves state-of-the-art results (0.752 mAP@.50:.95), closely followed by YOLOv11X-OBB (0.721). Conversely, on the more complex CATMuS and HORAE datasets, the CNN-based YOLOv11x-OBB significantly outperforms all other models (0.564 and 0.568, respectively). This study unequivocally demonstrates that using Oriented Bounding Boxes (OBB) is not a minor refinement but a fundamental requirement for accurately modeling the non-Cartesian nature of historical manuscripts. We conclude that a key trade-off exists between the global context awareness of Transformers, ideal for structured layouts, and the superior generalization of CNN-OBB models for visually diverse and complex documents.

Many advanced, image-based precision agricultural technologies for plant breeding, field crop research, and site-specific crop management hinge on the reliable detection and phenotyping of plants across highly variable morphological growth stages. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promise for image-based plant phenotyping and weed recognition, but their ability to recognize growth stages, often with stark differences in appearance, is uncertain. Amaranthus palmeri (Palmer amaranth) is a particularly challenging weed plant in cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) production, exhibiting highly variable plant morphology both across growth stages over a growing season, as well as between plants at a given growth stage due to high genetic diversity. In this paper, we investigate eight-class growth stage recognition of A. palmeri in cotton as a challenging model for You Only Look Once (YOLO) architectures. We compare 26 different architecture variants from YOLO v3, v5, v6, v6 3.0, v7, and v8 on an eight-class growth stage dataset of A. palmeri. The highest mAP@[0.5:0.95] for recognition of all growth stage classes was 47.34% achieved by v8-X, with inter-class confusion across visually similar growth stages. With all growth stages grouped as a single class, performance increased, with a maximum mean average precision (mAP@[0.5:0.95]) of 67.05% achieved by v7-Original. Single class recall of up to 81.42% was achieved by v5-X, and precision of up to 89.72% was achieved by v8-X. Class activation maps (CAM) were used to understand model attention on the complex dataset. Fewer classes, grouped by visual or size features improved performance over the ground-truth eight-class dataset. Successful growth stage detection highlights the substantial opportunity for improving plant phenotyping and weed recognition technologies with open-source object detection architectures.

Although state-of-the-art object detection methods have shown compelling performance, models often are not robust to adversarial attacks and out-of-distribution data. We introduce a new dataset, Natural Adversarial Objects (NAO), to evaluate the robustness of object detection models. NAO contains 7,934 images and 9,943 objects that are unmodified and representative of real-world scenarios, but cause state-of-the-art detection models to misclassify with high confidence. The mean average precision (mAP) of EfficientDet-D7 drops 74.5% when evaluated on NAO compared to the standard MSCOCO validation set. Moreover, by comparing a variety of object detection architectures, we find that better performance on MSCOCO validation set does not necessarily translate to better performance on NAO, suggesting that robustness cannot be simply achieved by training a more accurate model. We further investigate why examples in NAO are difficult to detect and classify. Experiments of shuffling image patches reveal that models are overly sensitive to local texture. Additionally, using integrated gradients and background replacement, we find that the detection model is reliant on pixel information within the bounding box, and insensitive to the background context when predicting class labels. NAO can be downloaded at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15P8sOWoJku6SSEiHLEts86ORfytGezi8.

We focus on the utilisation of reactive trajectory imitation controllers for goal-directed mobile robot navigation. We propose a topological navigation graph (TNG) - an imitation-learning-based framework for navigating through environments with intersecting trajectories. The TNG framework represents the environment as a directed graph composed of deep neural networks. Each vertex of the graph corresponds to a trajectory and is represented by a trajectory identification classifier and a trajectory imitation controller. For trajectory following, we propose the novel use of neural object detection architectures. The edges of TNG correspond to intersections between trajectories and are all represented by a classifier. We provide empirical evaluation of the proposed navigation framework and its components in simulated and real-world environments, demonstrating that TNG allows us to utilise non-goal-directed, imitation-learning methods for goal-directed autonomous navigation.

This paper introduces Grounding DINO 1.5, a suite of advanced open-set object detection models developed by IDEA Research, which aims to advance the "Edge" of open-set object detection. The suite encompasses two models: Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro, a high-performance model designed for stronger generalization capability across a wide range of scenarios, and Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge, an efficient model optimized for faster speed demanded in many applications requiring edge deployment. The Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro model advances its predecessor by scaling up the model architecture, integrating an enhanced vision backbone, and expanding the training dataset to over 20 million images with grounding annotations, thereby achieving a richer semantic understanding. The Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge model, while designed for efficiency with reduced feature scales, maintains robust detection capabilities by being trained on the same comprehensive dataset. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of Grounding DINO 1.5, with the Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro model attaining a 54.3 AP on the COCO detection benchmark and a 55.7 AP on the LVIS-minival zero-shot transfer benchmark, setting new records for open-set object detection. Furthermore, the Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge model, when optimized with TensorRT, achieves a speed of 75.2 FPS while attaining a zero-shot performance of 36.2 AP on the LVIS-minival benchmark, making it more suitable for edge computing scenarios. Model examples and demos with API will be released at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Grounding-DINO-1.5-API

Vision-language models are emerging for autonomous driving, yet their robustness to physical adversarial attacks remains unexplored. This paper presents a systematic framework for comparative adversarial evaluation across three VLM architectures: Dolphins, OmniDrive (Omni-L), and LeapVAD. Using black-box optimization with semantic homogenization for fair comparison, we evaluate physically realizable patch attacks in CARLA simulation. Results reveal severe vulnerabilities across all architectures, sustained multi-frame failures, and critical object detection degradation. Our analysis exposes distinct architectural vulnerability patterns, demonstrating that current VLM designs inadequately address adversarial threats in safety-critical autonomous driving applications.

This study conducts a detailed comparison of RF-DETR object detection base model and YOLOv12 object detection model configurations for detecting greenfruits in a complex orchard environment marked by label ambiguity, occlusions, and background blending. A custom dataset was developed featuring both single-class (greenfruit) and multi-class (occluded and non-occluded greenfruits) annotations to assess model performance under dynamic real-world conditions. RF-DETR object detection model, utilizing a DINOv2 backbone and deformable attention, excelled in global context modeling, effectively identifying partially occluded or ambiguous greenfruits. In contrast, YOLOv12 leveraged CNN-based attention for enhanced local feature extraction, optimizing it for computational efficiency and edge deployment. RF-DETR achieved the highest mean Average Precision (mAP50) of 0.9464 in single-class detection, proving its superior ability to localize greenfruits in cluttered scenes. Although YOLOv12N recorded the highest mAP@50:95 of 0.7620, RF-DETR consistently outperformed in complex spatial scenarios. For multi-class detection, RF-DETR led with an mAP@50 of 0.8298, showing its capability to differentiate between occluded and non-occluded fruits, while YOLOv12L scored highest in mAP@50:95 with 0.6622, indicating better classification in detailed occlusion contexts. Training dynamics analysis highlighted RF-DETR's swift convergence, particularly in single-class settings where it plateaued within 10 epochs, demonstrating the efficiency of transformer-based architectures in adapting to dynamic visual data. These findings validate RF-DETR's effectiveness for precision agricultural applications, with YOLOv12 suited for fast-response scenarios. >Index Terms: RF-DETR object detection, YOLOv12, YOLOv13, YOLOv14, YOLOv15, YOLOE, YOLO World, YOLO, You Only Look Once, Roboflow, Detection Transformers, CNNs

While object detection has advanced through improved architectures and open-vocabulary models, we provide strong evidence that benchmark quality is limited by annotation incompleteness. Across four widely used datasets (COCO, Pascal VOC, Cityscapes, KITTI), re-annotation reveals substantial increases in annotated objects (e.g., up to +60% on KITTI and +40% on COCO), driven primarily by previously unlabeled small, occluded, or densely packed instances. While some differences arise from dataset-specific annotation conventions, we consistently find that missing annotations are the main source of label errors across all datasets. To achieve high data quality, we introduce a scalable annotation pipeline that emphasizes high recall and captures ambiguity through soft labels aggregated from at least 11 annotators per object. The resulting annotations improve coverage and align well with human calibration. We show that benchmark performance is highly sensitive to annotation quality, although model rankings remain largely stable. We introduce two large-scale benchmarks: (i) an uncertainty-aware object detection benchmark, and (ii) a label error detection benchmark grounded in real label errors. We show that current detectors are strongly depended on annotation quality and are misaligned with human perception. Current label error detection methods, which have been shown to perform well on synthetic noise, struggle to achieve high recall and precision on real label errors. Our results highlight the need for future object detection benchmarks to move beyond deterministic annotations toward high-recall, uncertainty-aware evaluation that maximizes valid instances and better reflects real-world ambiguity.

Combining simple architectures with large-scale pre-training has led to massive improvements in image classification. For object detection, pre-training and scaling approaches are less well established, especially in the long-tailed and open-vocabulary setting, where training data is relatively scarce. In this paper, we propose a strong recipe for transferring image-text models to open-vocabulary object detection. We use a standard Vision Transformer architecture with minimal modifications, contrastive image-text pre-training, and end-to-end detection fine-tuning. Our analysis of the scaling properties of this setup shows that increasing image-level pre-training and model size yield consistent improvements on the downstream detection task. We provide the adaptation strategies and regularizations needed to attain very strong performance on zero-shot text-conditioned and one-shot image-conditioned object detection. Code and models are available on GitHub.

This review provides a systematic analysis of comprehensive survey of 3D object detection with vision-language models(VLMs) , a rapidly advancing area at the intersection of 3D vision and multimodal AI. By examining over 100 research papers, we provide the first systematic analysis dedicated to 3D object detection with vision-language models. We begin by outlining the unique challenges of 3D object detection with vision-language models, emphasizing differences from 2D detection in spatial reasoning and data complexity. Traditional approaches using point clouds and voxel grids are compared to modern vision-language frameworks like CLIP and 3D LLMs, which enable open-vocabulary detection and zero-shot generalization. We review key architectures, pretraining strategies, and prompt engineering methods that align textual and 3D features for effective 3D object detection with vision-language models. Visualization examples and evaluation benchmarks are discussed to illustrate performance and behavior. Finally, we highlight current challenges, such as limited 3D-language datasets and computational demands, and propose future research directions to advance 3D object detection with vision-language models. >Object Detection, Vision-Language Models, Agents, VLMs, LLMs, AI

An increasing need of running Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models on mobile devices with limited computing power and memory resource encourages studies on efficient model design. A number of efficient architectures have been proposed in recent years, for example, MobileNet, ShuffleNet, and MobileNetV2. However, all these models are heavily dependent on depthwise separable convolution which lacks efficient implementation in most deep learning frameworks. In this study, we propose an efficient architecture named PeleeNet, which is built with conventional convolution instead. On ImageNet ILSVRC 2012 dataset, our proposed PeleeNet achieves a higher accuracy and over 1.8 times faster speed than MobileNet and MobileNetV2 on NVIDIA TX2. Meanwhile, PeleeNet is only 66% of the model size of MobileNet. We then propose a real-time object detection system by combining PeleeNet with Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) method and optimizing the architecture for fast speed. Our proposed detection system2, named Pelee, achieves 76.4% mAP (mean average precision) on PASCAL VOC2007 and 22.4 mAP on MS COCO dataset at the speed of 23.6 FPS on iPhone 8 and 125 FPS on NVIDIA TX2. The result on COCO outperforms YOLOv2 in consideration of a higher precision, 13.6 times lower computational cost and 11.3 times smaller model size.

Compared with model architectures, the training process, which is also crucial to the success of detectors, has received relatively less attention in object detection. In this work, we carefully revisit the standard training practice of detectors, and find that the detection performance is often limited by the imbalance during the training process, which generally consists in three levels - sample level, feature level, and objective level. To mitigate the adverse effects caused thereby, we propose Libra R-CNN, a simple but effective framework towards balanced learning for object detection. It integrates three novel components: IoU-balanced sampling, balanced feature pyramid, and balanced L1 loss, respectively for reducing the imbalance at sample, feature, and objective level. Benefitted from the overall balanced design, Libra R-CNN significantly improves the detection performance. Without bells and whistles, it achieves 2.5 points and 2.0 points higher Average Precision (AP) than FPN Faster R-CNN and RetinaNet respectively on MSCOCO.

Accurate uncertainty estimates are essential for deploying deep object detectors in safety-critical systems. The development and evaluation of probabilistic object detectors have been hindered by shortcomings in existing performance measures, which tend to involve arbitrary thresholds or limit the detector's choice of distributions. In this work, we propose to view object detection as a set prediction task where detectors predict the distribution over the set of objects. Using the negative log-likelihood for random finite sets, we present a proper scoring rule for evaluating and training probabilistic object detectors. The proposed method can be applied to existing probabilistic detectors, is free from thresholds, and enables fair comparison between architectures. Three different types of detectors are evaluated on the COCO dataset. Our results indicate that the training of existing detectors is optimized toward non-probabilistic metrics. We hope to encourage the development of new object detectors that can accurately estimate their own uncertainty. Code available at https://github.com/georghess/pmb-nll.

The fusion of language and vision in large vision-language models (LVLMs) has revolutionized deep learning-based object detection by enhancing adaptability, contextual reasoning, and generalization beyond traditional architectures. This in-depth review presents a structured exploration of the state-of-the-art in LVLMs, systematically organized through a three-step research review process. First, we discuss the functioning of vision language models (VLMs) for object detection, describing how these models harness natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) techniques to revolutionize object detection and localization. We then explain the architectural innovations, training paradigms, and output flexibility of recent LVLMs for object detection, highlighting how they achieve advanced contextual understanding for object detection. The review thoroughly examines the approaches used in integration of visual and textual information, demonstrating the progress made in object detection using VLMs that facilitate more sophisticated object detection and localization strategies. This review presents comprehensive visualizations demonstrating LVLMs' effectiveness in diverse scenarios including localization and segmentation, and then compares their real-time performance, adaptability, and complexity to traditional deep learning systems. Based on the review, its is expected that LVLMs will soon meet or surpass the performance of conventional methods in object detection. The review also identifies a few major limitations of the current LVLM modes, proposes solutions to address those challenges, and presents a clear roadmap for the future advancement in this field. We conclude, based on this study, that the recent advancement in LVLMs have made and will continue to make a transformative impact on object detection and robotic applications in the future.

Object localization has been a crucial task in computer vision field. Methods of localizing objects in an image have been proposed based on the features of the attended pixels. Recently researchers have proposed methods to formulate object localization as a dynamic decision process, which can be solved by a reinforcement learning approach. In this project, we implement a novel active object localization algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning. We compare two different action settings for this MDP: a hierarchical method and a dynamic method. We further perform some ablation studies on the performance of the models by investigating different hyperparameters and various architecture changes.

With the ever-growing variety of object detection approaches, this study explores a series of experiments that combine reinforcement learning (RL)-based visual attention methods with saliency ranking techniques to investigate transparent and sustainable solutions. By integrating saliency ranking for initial bounding box prediction and subsequently applying RL techniques to refine these predictions through a finite set of actions over multiple time steps, this study aims to enhance RL object detection accuracy. Presented as a series of experiments, this research investigates the use of various image feature extraction methods and explores diverse Deep Q-Network (DQN) architectural variations for deep reinforcement learning-based localisation agent training. Additionally, we focus on optimising the detection pipeline at every step by prioritising lightweight and faster models, while also incorporating the capability to classify detected objects, a feature absent in previous RL approaches. We show that by evaluating the performance of these trained agents using the Pascal VOC 2007 dataset, faster and more optimised models were developed. Notably, the best mean Average Precision (mAP) achieved in this study was 51.4, surpassing benchmarks set by RL-based single object detectors in the literature.

The YOLO series models reign supreme in real-time object detection due to their superior accuracy and computational efficiency. However, both the convolutional architectures of YOLO11 and earlier versions and the area-based self-attention mechanism introduced in YOLOv12 are limited to local information aggregation and pairwise correlation modeling, lacking the capability to capture global multi-to-multi high-order correlations, which limits detection performance in complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose YOLOv13, an accurate and lightweight object detector. To address the above-mentioned challenges, we propose a Hypergraph-based Adaptive Correlation Enhancement (HyperACE) mechanism that adaptively exploits latent high-order correlations and overcomes the limitation of previous methods that are restricted to pairwise correlation modeling based on hypergraph computation, achieving efficient global cross-location and cross-scale feature fusion and enhancement. Subsequently, we propose a Full-Pipeline Aggregation-and-Distribution (FullPAD) paradigm based on HyperACE, which effectively achieves fine-grained information flow and representation synergy within the entire network by distributing correlation-enhanced features to the full pipeline. Finally, we propose to leverage depthwise separable convolutions to replace vanilla large-kernel convolutions, and design a series of blocks that significantly reduce parameters and computational complexity without sacrificing performance. We conduct extensive experiments on the widely used MS COCO benchmark, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters and FLOPs. Specifically, our YOLOv13-N improves mAP by 3.0\% over YOLO11-N and by 1.5\% over YOLOv12-N. The code and models of our YOLOv13 model are available at: https://github.com/iMoonLab/yolov13.

Real-time object detection has achieved substantial progress through meticulously designed architectures and optimization strategies. However, the pursuit of high-speed inference via lightweight network designs often leads to degraded feature representation, which hinders further performance improvements and practical on-device deployment. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective and highly adaptable distillation framework that harnesses the rapidly evolving capabilities of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to enhance lightweight object detectors. Given the significant architectural and learning objective disparities between VFMs and resource-constrained detectors, achieving stable and task-aligned semantic transfer is challenging. To address this, on one hand, we introduce a Deep Semantic Injector (DSI) module that facilitates the integration of high-level representations from VFMs into the deep layers of the detector. On the other hand, we devise a Gradient-guided Adaptive Modulation (GAM) strategy, which dynamically adjusts the intensity of semantic transfer based on gradient norm ratios. Without increasing deployment and inference overhead, our approach painlessly delivers striking and consistent performance gains across diverse DETR-based models, underscoring its practical utility for real-time detection. Our new model family, RT-DETRv4, achieves state-of-the-art results on COCO, attaining AP scores of 49.7/53.5/55.4/57.0 at corresponding speeds of 273/169/124/78 FPS.

This paper investigates the integration of the Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI) paradigm in object detection to exploit fine-grained, descriptive information available during training but not at inference. We introduce a general, model-agnostic methodology for injecting privileged information-such as bounding box masks, saliency maps, and depth cues-into deep learning-based object detectors through a teacher-student architecture. Experiments are conducted across five state-of-the-art object detection models and multiple public benchmarks, including UAV-based litter detection datasets and Pascal VOC 2012, to assess the impact on accuracy, generalization, and computational efficiency. Our results demonstrate that LUPI-trained students consistently outperform their baseline counterparts, achieving significant boosts in detection accuracy with no increase in inference complexity or model size. Performance improvements are especially marked for medium and large objects, while ablation studies reveal that intermediate weighting of teacher guidance optimally balances learning from privileged and standard inputs. The findings affirm that the LUPI framework provides an effective and practical strategy for advancing object detection systems in both resource-constrained and real-world settings.

Object detectors often produce over-confident predictions for objects outside their training categories, leading to so-called out-of-distribution (OoD) hallucinations. Existing approaches for detecting or mitigating such hallucinations typically either construct scoring functions directly over learned object detector representations or modify the object detector itself to suppress hallucination emergence. However, the latent priors implicitly encoded in these representations remain largely unexplored and have not been explicitly decoded for OoD detection. To uncover and exploit these latent priors, we propose Structured Prior Knowledge (SPK), a hallucination-oriented framework that explicitly elicits OoD-relevant priors from pretrained object detectors. Specifically, SPK leverages in-distribution data and hallucination-inducing samples as diagnostic supervision to elicit part-level semantic concepts underlying object detector decision-making, rather than using them merely for rejection or object detector adaptation. The elicited semantic priors are further integrated with geometric and contextual priors to form a compact five-dimensional SPK representation for OoD detection. Extensive experiments across diverse object detector architectures and multiple OoD benchmarks demonstrate that SPK achieves state-of-the-art OoD detection. Our findings reveal that pretrained object detectors already encode substantially richer latent knowledge than is typically exploited for OoD detection. More importantly, this knowledge can be explicitly elicited and organized into a compact, structured, and interpretable knowledge space for prediction reliability analysis. This suggests a promising proactive route for improving object detector reliability by explicitly uncovering and leveraging latent priors. Code and data are available at: https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/dnn-safety/spk

Current 3D object detection methods are heavily influenced by 2D detectors. In order to leverage architectures in 2D detectors, they often convert 3D point clouds to regular grids (i.e., to voxel grids or to bird's eye view images), or rely on detection in 2D images to propose 3D boxes. Few works have attempted to directly detect objects in point clouds. In this work, we return to first principles to construct a 3D detection pipeline for point cloud data and as generic as possible. However, due to the sparse nature of the data -- samples from 2D manifolds in 3D space -- we face a major challenge when directly predicting bounding box parameters from scene points: a 3D object centroid can be far from any surface point thus hard to regress accurately in one step. To address the challenge, we propose VoteNet, an end-to-end 3D object detection network based on a synergy of deep point set networks and Hough voting. Our model achieves state-of-the-art 3D detection on two large datasets of real 3D scans, ScanNet and SUN RGB-D with a simple design, compact model size and high efficiency. Remarkably, VoteNet outperforms previous methods by using purely geometric information without relying on color images.

Training heuristics greatly improve various image classification model accuracies~he2018bag. Object detection models, however, have more complex neural network structures and optimization targets. The training strategies and pipelines dramatically vary among different models. In this works, we explore training tweaks that apply to various models including Faster R-CNN and YOLOv3. These tweaks do not change the model architectures, therefore, the inference costs remain the same. Our empirical results demonstrate that, however, these freebies can improve up to 5% absolute precision compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

We present a new 3D point-based detector model, named Shift-SSD, for precise 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Traditional point-based 3D object detectors often employ architectures that rely on a progressive downsampling of points. While this method effectively reduces computational demands and increases receptive fields, it will compromise the preservation of crucial non-local information for accurate 3D object detection, especially in the complex driving scenarios. To address this, we introduce an intriguing Cross-Cluster Shifting operation to unleash the representation capacity of the point-based detector by efficiently modeling longer-range inter-dependency while including only a negligible overhead. Concretely, the Cross-Cluster Shifting operation enhances the conventional design by shifting partial channels from neighboring clusters, which enables richer interaction with non-local regions and thus enlarges the receptive field of clusters. We conduct extensive experiments on the KITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes datasets, and the results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Shift-SSD in both detection accuracy and runtime efficiency.

Modern object detectors achieve strong performance on standard benchmarks, yet their robustness to contextual variation remains insufficiently understood. Prior evaluations largely rely on aggregate metrics such as AP on uncontrolled distribution shifts, which can obscure how performance degrades under context change. We introduce ContextShift, a controlled benchmark that systematically manipulates object--context relationships while preserving object appearance. Built on COCO 2017, it isolates context as an independent variable through geometric transformations and synthetic and natural background substitutions, including a continuous compatibility axis based on normalized pointwise mutual information (NPMI). Across diverse detector architectures, we observe a consistent degradation pattern: false negatives increase by up to 227% and prediction volume decreases by up to 44%, while false positives remain stable or decline. This suppression behavior is not captured by aggregate metrics such as AP, which can mask substantial recall loss and changes in prediction dynamics. Further analysis suggests that degradation is driven less by reduced confidence than by a reduced formation of valid detection candidates. Moreover, performance along the statistical compatibility axis is non-monotonic, peaking at intermediate NPMI and degrading toward both extremes, indicating that statistical co-occurrence does not correlate linearly with effective visual context. Finally, we show that context-aware augmentation improves robustness: every augmented variant outperforms the dataset-only baseline on both original and manipulated test images, partially recovering performance lost to prediction-suppression failures by exposing models to object--context decoupling during training.

An analysis of different techniques for recognizing and detecting objects under extreme scale variation is presented. Scale specific and scale invariant design of detectors are compared by training them with different configurations of input data. By evaluating the performance of different network architectures for classifying small objects on ImageNet, we show that CNNs are not robust to changes in scale. Based on this analysis, we propose to train and test detectors on the same scales of an image-pyramid. Since small and large objects are difficult to recognize at smaller and larger scales respectively, we present a novel training scheme called Scale Normalization for Image Pyramids (SNIP) which selectively back-propagates the gradients of object instances of different sizes as a function of the image scale. On the COCO dataset, our single model performance is 45.7% and an ensemble of 3 networks obtains an mAP of 48.3%. We use off-the-shelf ImageNet-1000 pre-trained models and only train with bounding box supervision. Our submission won the Best Student Entry in the COCO 2017 challenge. Code will be made available at http://bit.ly/2yXVg4c.

There can be numerous electronic components on a given PCB, making the task of visual inspection to detect defects very time-consuming and prone to error, especially at scale. There has thus been significant interest in automatic PCB component detection, particularly leveraging deep learning. However, deep neural networks typically require high computational resources, possibly limiting their feasibility in real-world use cases in manufacturing, which often involve high-volume and high-throughput detection with constrained edge computing resource availability. As a result of an exploration of efficient deep neural network architectures for this use case, we introduce PCBDet, an attention condenser network design that provides state-of-the-art inference throughput while achieving superior PCB component detection performance compared to other state-of-the-art efficient architecture designs. Experimental results show that PCBDet can achieve up to 2times inference speed-up on an ARM Cortex A72 processor when compared to an EfficientNet-based design while achieving sim2-4\% higher mAP on the FICS-PCB benchmark dataset.

In object detection, an intersection over union (IoU) threshold is required to define positives and negatives. An object detector, trained with low IoU threshold, e.g. 0.5, usually produces noisy detections. However, detection performance tends to degrade with increasing the IoU thresholds. Two main factors are responsible for this: 1) overfitting during training, due to exponentially vanishing positive samples, and 2) inference-time mismatch between the IoUs for which the detector is optimal and those of the input hypotheses. A multi-stage object detection architecture, the Cascade R-CNN, is proposed to address these problems. It consists of a sequence of detectors trained with increasing IoU thresholds, to be sequentially more selective against close false positives. The detectors are trained stage by stage, leveraging the observation that the output of a detector is a good distribution for training the next higher quality detector. The resampling of progressively improved hypotheses guarantees that all detectors have a positive set of examples of equivalent size, reducing the overfitting problem. The same cascade procedure is applied at inference, enabling a closer match between the hypotheses and the detector quality of each stage. A simple implementation of the Cascade R-CNN is shown to surpass all single-model object detectors on the challenging COCO dataset. Experiments also show that the Cascade R-CNN is widely applicable across detector architectures, achieving consistent gains independently of the baseline detector strength. The code will be made available at https://github.com/zhaoweicai/cascade-rcnn.

Automated X-ray inspection is crucial for efficient and unobtrusive security screening in various public settings. However, challenges such as object occlusion, variations in the physical properties of items, diversity in X-ray scanning devices, and limited training data hinder accurate and reliable detection of illicit items. Despite the large body of research in the field, reported experimental evaluations are often incomplete, with frequently conflicting outcomes. To shed light on the research landscape and facilitate further research, a systematic, detailed, and thorough comparative evaluation of recent Deep Learning (DL)-based methods for X-ray object detection is conducted. For this, a comprehensive evaluation framework is developed, composed of: a) Six recent, large-scale, and widely used public datasets for X-ray illicit item detection (OPIXray, CLCXray, SIXray, EDS, HiXray, and PIDray), b) Ten different state-of-the-art object detection schemes covering all main categories in the literature, including generic Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), custom CNN, generic transformer, and hybrid CNN-transformer architectures, and c) Various detection (mAP50 and mAP50:95) and time/computational-complexity (inference time (ms), parameter size (M), and computational load (GFLOPS)) metrics. A thorough analysis of the results leads to critical observations and insights, emphasizing key aspects such as: a) Overall behavior of the object detection schemes, b) Object-level detection performance, c) Dataset-specific observations, and d) Time efficiency and computational complexity analysis. To support reproducibility of the reported experimental results, the evaluation code and model weights are made publicly available at https://github.com/jgenc/xray-comparative-evaluation.

Recent advancements in lightweight neural networks have significantly improved the efficiency of deploying deep learning models on edge hardware. However, most existing architectures still trade accuracy for latency, which limits their applicability on microcontroller and neural processing unit based devices. In this work, we introduce two new model families, STResNet for image classification and STYOLO for object detection, jointly optimized for accuracy, efficiency, and memory footprint on resource constrained platforms. The proposed STResNet series, ranging from Nano to Tiny variants, achieves competitive ImageNet 1K accuracy within a four million parameter budget. Specifically, STResNetMilli attains 70.0 percent Top 1 accuracy with only three million parameters, outperforming MobileNetV1 and ShuffleNetV2 at comparable computational complexity. For object detection, STYOLOMicro and STYOLOMilli achieve 30.5 percent and 33.6 percent mean average precision, respectively, on the MS COCO dataset, surpassing YOLOv5n and YOLOX Nano in both accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, when STResNetMilli is used as a backbone with the Ultralytics training environment.

Efficient detectors for edge devices are often optimized for parameters or speed count metrics, which remain in weak correlation with the energy of detectors. However, some vision applications of convolutional neural networks, such as always-on surveillance cameras, are critical for energy constraints. This paper aims to serve as a baseline by designing detectors to reach tradeoffs between energy and performance from two perspectives: 1) We extensively analyze various CNNs to identify low-energy architectures, including selecting activation functions, convolutions operators, and feature fusion structures on necks. These underappreciated details in past work seriously affect the energy consumption of detectors; 2) To break through the dilemmatic energy-performance problem, we propose a balanced detector driven by energy using discovered low-energy components named FemtoDet. In addition to the novel construction, we improve FemtoDet by considering convolutions and training strategy optimizations. Specifically, we develop a new instance boundary enhancement (IBE) module for convolution optimization to overcome the contradiction between the limited capacity of CNNs and detection tasks in diverse spatial representations, and propose a recursive warm-restart (RecWR) for optimizing training strategy to escape the sub-optimization of light-weight detectors by considering the data shift produced in popular augmentations. As a result, FemtoDet with only 68.77k parameters achieves a competitive score of 46.3 AP50 on PASCAL VOC and 1.11 W & 64.47 FPS on Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 CPU platforms. Extensive experiments on COCO and TJU-DHD datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves competitive results in diverse scenes.

Vision-Language Model (VLM) have gained widespread adoption in Open-Vocabulary (OV) object detection and segmentation tasks. Despite they have shown promise on OV-related tasks, their effectiveness in conventional vision tasks has thus far been unevaluated. In this work, we present the systematic review of VLM-based detection and segmentation, view VLM as the foundational model and conduct comprehensive evaluations across multiple downstream tasks for the first time: 1) The evaluation spans eight detection scenarios (closed-set detection, domain adaptation, crowded objects, etc.) and eight segmentation scenarios (few-shot, open-world, small object, etc.), revealing distinct performance advantages and limitations of various VLM architectures across tasks. 2) As for detection tasks, we evaluate VLMs under three finetuning granularities: zero prediction, visual fine-tuning, and text prompt, and further analyze how different finetuning strategies impact performance under varied task. 3) Based on empirical findings, we provide in-depth analysis of the correlations between task characteristics, model architectures, and training methodologies, offering insights for future VLM design. 4) We believe that this work shall be valuable to the pattern recognition experts working in the fields of computer vision, multimodal learning, and vision foundation models by introducing them to the problem, and familiarizing them with the current status of the progress while providing promising directions for future research. A project associated with this review and evaluation has been created at https://github.com/better-chao/perceptual_abilities_evaluation.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in artificial intelli-gence, capable of integrating textual and visual data for a unified understanding of complex scenes. While models such as Florence2, built on transformer architectures, have shown promise across general tasks, their performance in object detection within unstructured or cluttered environments remains underexplored. In this study, we fi-ne-tuned the Florence2 model for object detection tasks in non-constructed, complex environments. A comprehensive experimental framework was established involving multiple hardware configurations (NVIDIA T4, L4, and A100 GPUs), optimizers (AdamW, SGD), and varied hyperparameters including learning rates and LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) setups. Model training and evaluation were conducted on challenging datasets representative of real-world, disordered settings. The optimized Florence2 models exhibited significant improvements in object detection accuracy, with Mean Average Precision (mAP) metrics approaching or matching those of estab-lished models such as YOLOv8, YOLOv9, and YOLOv10. The integration of LoRA and careful fine-tuning of transformer layers contributed notably to these gains. Our find-ings highlight the adaptability of transformer-based VLMs like Florence2 for do-main-specific tasks, particularly in visually complex environments. The study under-scores the potential of fine-tuned VLMs to rival traditional convolution-based detec-tors, offering a flexible and scalable approach for advanced vision applications in re-al-world, unstructured settings.

Hierarchical feature representations play a pivotal role in computer vision, particularly in object detection for autonomous driving. Multi-level semantic understanding is crucial for accurately identifying pedestrians, vehicles, and traffic signs in dynamic environments. However, existing architectures, such as YOLO and DETR, struggle to maintain feature consistency across different scales while balancing detection precision and computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose Butter, a novel object detection framework designed to enhance hierarchical feature representations for improving detection robustness. Specifically, Butter introduces two key innovations: Frequency-Adaptive Feature Consistency Enhancement (FAFCE) Component, which refines multi-scale feature consistency by leveraging adaptive frequency filtering to enhance structural and boundary precision, and Progressive Hierarchical Feature Fusion Network (PHFFNet) Module, which progressively integrates multi-level features to mitigate semantic gaps and strengthen hierarchical feature learning. Through extensive experiments on BDD100K, KITTI, and Cityscapes, Butter demonstrates superior feature representation capabilities, leading to notable improvements in detection accuracy while reducing model complexity. By focusing on hierarchical feature refinement and integration, Butter provides an advanced approach to object detection that achieves a balance between accuracy, deployability, and computational efficiency in real-time autonomous driving scenarios. Our model and implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/Aveiro-Lin/Butter, facilitating further research and validation within the autonomous driving community.

Data augmentation is an essential technique in improving the generalization of deep neural networks. The majority of existing image-domain augmentations either rely on geometric and structural transformations, or apply different kinds of photometric distortions. In this paper, we propose an effective technique for image augmentation by injecting contextually meaningful knowledge into the scenes. Our method of semantically meaningful image augmentation for object detection via language grounding, SemAug, starts by calculating semantically appropriate new objects that can be placed into relevant locations in the image (the what and where problems). Then it embeds these objects into their relevant target locations, thereby promoting diversity of object instance distribution. Our method allows for introducing new object instances and categories that may not even exist in the training set. Furthermore, it does not require the additional overhead of training a context network, so it can be easily added to existing architectures. Our comprehensive set of evaluations showed that the proposed method is very effective in improving the generalization, while the overhead is negligible. In particular, for a wide range of model architectures, our method achieved ~2-4% and ~1-2% mAP improvements for the task of object detection on the Pascal VOC and COCO datasets, respectively.

Object detectors achieve strong performance under nominal imaging conditions but can fail silently when exposed to blur, noise, compression, adverse weather, or resolution changes. In safety-critical settings, it is therefore insufficient to produce predictions without assessing whether the input remains within the detector's nominal operating regime. We refer to this capability as self-aware object detection. We introduce a degradation-aware self-awareness framework based on degradation manifolds, which explicitly structure a detector's feature space according to image degradation rather than semantic content. Our method augments a standard detection backbone with a lightweight embedding head trained via multi-layer contrastive learning. Images sharing the same degradation composition are pulled together, while differing degradation configurations are pushed apart, yielding a geometrically organized representation that captures degradation type and severity without requiring degradation labels or explicit density modeling. To anchor the learned geometry, we estimate a pristine prototype from clean training embeddings, defining a nominal operating point in representation space. Self-awareness emerges as geometric deviation from this reference, providing an intrinsic, image-level signal of degradation-induced shift that is independent of detection confidence. Extensive experiments on synthetic corruption benchmarks, cross-dataset zero-shot transfer, and natural weather-induced distribution shifts demonstrate strong pristine-degraded separability, consistent behavior across multiple detector architectures, and robust generalization under semantic shift. These results suggest that degradation-aware representation geometry provides a practical and detector-agnostic foundation.

Detecting small objects is notoriously challenging due to their low resolution and noisy representation. Existing object detection pipelines usually detect small objects through learning representations of all the objects at multiple scales. However, the performance gain of such ad hoc architectures is usually limited to pay off the computational cost. In this work, we address the small object detection problem by developing a single architecture that internally lifts representations of small objects to "super-resolved" ones, achieving similar characteristics as large objects and thus more discriminative for detection. For this purpose, we propose a new Perceptual Generative Adversarial Network (Perceptual GAN) model that improves small object detection through narrowing representation difference of small objects from the large ones. Specifically, its generator learns to transfer perceived poor representations of the small objects to super-resolved ones that are similar enough to real large objects to fool a competing discriminator. Meanwhile its discriminator competes with the generator to identify the generated representation and imposes an additional perceptual requirement - generated representations of small objects must be beneficial for detection purpose - on the generator. Extensive evaluations on the challenging Tsinghua-Tencent 100K and the Caltech benchmark well demonstrate the superiority of Perceptual GAN in detecting small objects, including traffic signs and pedestrians, over well-established state-of-the-arts.

Event cameras provide sequential visual data with spatial sparsity and high temporal resolution, making them attractive for low-latency object detection. Existing asynchronous event-based neural networks exploit this low-latency advantage by updating predictions event by event, but still suffer from two bottlenecks: recurrent architectures are difficult to train efficiently on long sequences, and improving accuracy often increases per-event computation and latency. Linear attention is appealing because it enables parallel training and recurrent inference. However, its dense state updates make per-event computation scale with the state size, yielding a poor accuracy-efficiency trade-off for object detection, where accurate localization requires fine-grained spatial states. The key challenge is therefore to introduce sparse state activation that exploits the spatial sparsity of events while preserving efficient parallel training. We propose Spatially-Sparse Linear Attention (SSLA), which introduces a mixture-of-spaces state decomposition and a scatter-compute-gather training procedure, enabling state-level sparsity as well as training parallelism. Building on SSLA, we develop an end-to-end asynchronous linear attention model, SSLA-Det, for low-latency event-based object detection. On Gen1 and N-Caltech101, SSLA-Det achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among asynchronous methods, reaching 0.375 mAP and 0.515 mAP, respectively, while reducing per-event computation by over 20 times compared with the strongest prior asynchronous baseline, demonstrating the potential of linear attention for low-latency event-based vision.

This paper addresses the critical challenges of sparsity and occlusion in LiDAR-based 3D object detection. Current methods often rely on supplementary modules or specific architectural designs, potentially limiting their applicability to new and evolving architectures. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a versatile technique that seamlessly integrates into any existing framework for 3D Object Detection, marking the first instance of Weak-to-Strong generalization in 3D computer vision. We introduce a novel framework, X-Ray Distillation with Object-Complete Frames, suitable for both supervised and semi-supervised settings, that leverages the temporal aspect of point cloud sequences. This method extracts crucial information from both previous and subsequent LiDAR frames, creating Object-Complete frames that represent objects from multiple viewpoints, thus addressing occlusion and sparsity. Given the limitation of not being able to generate Object-Complete frames during online inference, we utilize Knowledge Distillation within a Teacher-Student framework. This technique encourages the strong Student model to emulate the behavior of the weaker Teacher, which processes simple and informative Object-Complete frames, effectively offering a comprehensive view of objects as if seen through X-ray vision. Our proposed methods surpass state-of-the-art in semi-supervised learning by 1-1.5 mAP and enhance the performance of five established supervised models by 1-2 mAP on standard autonomous driving datasets, even with default hyperparameters. Code for Object-Complete frames is available here: https://github.com/sakharok13/X-Ray-Teacher-Patching-Tools.

Transformer-based real-time object detectors achieve strong accuracy-latency trade-offs, and D-FINE is among the top-performing recent architectures. However, real-time instance segmentation with transformers is still less common. We present D-FINE-seg, an instance segmentation extension of D-FINE that adds: a lightweight mask head, segmentation-aware training, including box cropped BCE and dice mask losses, auxiliary and denoising mask supervision, and adapted Hungarian matching cost. On the TACO dataset, D-FINE-seg improves F1-score over Ultralytics YOLO26 under a unified TensorRT FP16 end-to-end benchmarking protocol, while maintaining competitive latency. Second contribution is an end-to-end pipeline for training, exporting, and optimized inference across ONNX, TensorRT, OpenVINO for both object detection and instance segmentation tasks. This framework is released as open-source under the Apache-2.0 license. GitHub repository - https://github.com/ArgoHA/D-FINE-seg.

One-stage object detectors are trained by optimizing classification-loss and localization-loss simultaneously, with the former suffering much from extreme foreground-background class imbalance issue due to the large number of anchors. This paper alleviates this issue by proposing a novel framework to replace the classification task in one-stage detectors with a ranking task, and adopting the Average-Precision loss (AP-loss) for the ranking problem. Due to its non-differentiability and non-convexity, the AP-loss cannot be optimized directly. For this purpose, we develop a novel optimization algorithm, which seamlessly combines the error-driven update scheme in perceptron learning and backpropagation algorithm in deep networks. We verify good convergence property of the proposed algorithm theoretically and empirically. Experimental results demonstrate notable performance improvement in state-of-the-art one-stage detectors based on AP-loss over different kinds of classification-losses on various benchmarks, without changing the network architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/cccorn/AP-loss.

3D object detection from LiDAR point clouds faces a fundamental dilemma: voxel-based methods achieve efficiency at the cost of geometric quantization, while point-based methods preserve fidelity but suffer from prohibitive computational bottlenecks. Specifically, point-based architectures are crippled by slow downsampling strategies (e.g., FPS) and expensive dynamic neighbor queries (e.g., k-NN) coupled with costly continuous interactions. To tackle these systemic inefficiencies, we propose PointLAM, a highly efficient and powerful point-based architecture driven by two synergistic innovations. First, to resolve the downsampling bottleneck, we develop the Laplacian Point Sampler (LPS). LPS employs an implicit discrete Laplacian high-pass filter and Doubly Sorted Sampling to achieve fast, structure-aware foreground preservation. Second, to overcome local modeling latency, we design the Local Hadamard Aggregator (LHA). LHA decouples spatial indexing from feature representation using transient grids, and replaces complex continuous interactions with a Hadamard Gating mechanism for topology-aware, attentive modulation. By coupling this local gating with Bi-Directional Mamba (BDM) layers for global sequence modeling, we formulate the Local Attentive Mamba (LAM) block. Powered by this architecture, PointLAM achieves competitive performance on nuScenes and Waymo for point-based detectors. It rivals highly optimized voxel competitors while requiring a fraction of the computational footprint, demonstrating marked superiority in detecting small instances and handling extreme sparsity. Project page: https://pointlam.github.io/.

Object detection in adverse weather is critical for the safety of autonomous vehicles; however, the scarcity of labelled, real-world foggy data remains a significant bottleneck. In this paper, we propose Clear2Fog (C2F), an end-to-end, physics-based pipeline that simulates fog for clear-weather datasets under a unified camera and LiDAR framework. C2F combines monocular depth estimation with a novel atmospheric light estimation method to improve the physical consistency of synthetic fog generation while reducing structural artefacts and chromatic biases observed in existing frameworks. Utilising a training set of 270,000 images from the Waymo Open Dataset, we conduct an extensive data efficiency study to investigate whether environmental diversity can reduce dataset scale requirements and improve model generalisation under varying fog conditions. Our findings reveal that models trained on mixed-density fog datasets at 75% scale achieve performance that is not statistically different from those trained on fixed-density datasets at 100% scale, reducing synthetic training data requirements by 25%. We observe that this efficiency trend is consistent across two representative detector architectures. Furthermore, we investigate the sim-to-real transfer by using C2F-generated data as a pre-training foundation before fine-tuning on real-world fog data. We demonstrate that, within the evaluated settings, a relative 10x increase in the default fine-tuning learning rate reduces the negative transfer caused by standard fine-tuning, resulting in an absolute increase of up to 0.0117 mAP beyond the real-only baseline. Overall, this work demonstrates the value of diverse synthetic fog as a pre-training tool for real-world adaptation.

Recent remote sensing tech advancements drive imagery growth, making oriented object detection rapid development, yet hindered by labor-intensive annotation for high-density scenes. Oriented object detection with point supervision offers a cost-effective solution for densely packed scenes in remote sensing, yet existing methods suffer from inadequate sample assignment and instance confusion due to rigid rule-based designs. To address this, we propose SSP (Semantic-decoupled Spatial Partition), a unified framework that synergizes rule-driven prior injection and data-driven label purification. Specifically, SSP introduces two core innovations: 1) Pixel-level Spatial Partition-based Sample Assignment, which compactly estimates the upper and lower bounds of object scales and mines high-quality positive samples and hard negative samples through spatial partitioning of pixel maps. 2) Semantic Spatial Partition-based Box Extraction, which derives instances from spatial partitions modulated by semantic maps and reliably converts them into bounding boxes to form pseudo-labels for supervising the learning of downstream detectors. Experiments on DOTA-v1.0 and others demonstrate SSP\' s superiority: it achieves 45.78% mAP under point supervision, outperforming SOTA method PointOBB-v2 by 4.10%. Furthermore, when integrated with ORCNN and ReDet architectures, the SSP framework achieves mAP values of 47.86% and 48.50%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/antxinyuan/ssp.

We propose an embarrassingly simple method -- instance-aware repeat factor sampling (IRFS) to address the problem of imbalanced data in long-tailed object detection. Imbalanced datasets in real-world object detection often suffer from a large disparity in the number of instances for each class. To improve the generalization performance of object detection models on rare classes, various data sampling techniques have been proposed. Repeat factor sampling (RFS) has shown promise due to its simplicity and effectiveness. Despite its efficiency, RFS completely neglects the instance counts and solely relies on the image count during re-sampling process. However, instance count may immensely vary for different classes with similar image counts. Such variation highlights the importance of both image and instance for addressing the long-tail distributions. Thus, we propose IRFS which unifies instance and image counts for the re-sampling process to be aware of different perspectives of the imbalance in long-tailed datasets. Our method shows promising results on the challenging LVIS v1.0 benchmark dataset over various architectures and backbones, demonstrating their effectiveness in improving the performance of object detection models on rare classes with a relative +50% average precision (AP) improvement over counterpart RFS. IRFS can serve as a strong baseline and be easily incorporated into existing long-tailed frameworks.

Manual peripheral blood smear (PBS) analysis is labor intensive and subjective. While deep learning offers a promising alternative, a systematic evaluation of state of the art models such as YOLOv11 for fine grained PBS detection is still lacking. In this work, we make two key contributions. First, we curate a large scale annotated dataset for blood cell detection and classification, comprising 16,891 images across 12 peripheral blood cell (PBC) classes, along with the red blood cell class, all carefully re annotated for object detection tasks. In total, the dataset contains 298,850 annotated cells. Second, we leverage this dataset to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of five YOLOv11 variants (ranging from Nano to XLarge). These models are rigorously benchmarked under two data splitting strategies (70:20:10 and 80:10:10) and systematically assessed using multiple performance criteria, including mean Average Precision (mAP), precision, recall, F1 score, and computational efficiency. Our experiments show that the YOLOv11 Medium variant achieves the best trade off, reaching a mAP@0.5 of 0.934 under the 8:1:1 split. Larger models (Large and XLarge) provide only marginal accuracy gains at substantially higher computational cost. Moreover, the 8:1:1 split consistently outperforms the 7:2:1 split across all models. These findings highlight YOLOv11, particularly the Medium variant, as a highly effective framework for automated, fine grained PBS detection. Beyond benchmarking, our publicly released dataset (github.com/Mohamad-AbouAli/OI-PBC-Dataset) offers a valuable resource to advance research on blood cell detection and classification in hematology.

Combining the strengths of many existing predictors to obtain a Mixture of Experts which is superior to its individual components is an effective way to improve the performance without having to develop new architectures or train a model from scratch. However, surprisingly, we find that naïvely combining expert object detectors in a similar way to Deep Ensembles, can often lead to degraded performance. We identify that the primary cause of this issue is that the predictions of the experts do not match their performance, a term referred to as miscalibration. Consequently, the most confident detector dominates the final predictions, preventing the mixture from leveraging all the predictions from the experts appropriately. To address this, when constructing the Mixture of Experts, we propose to combine their predictions in a manner which reflects the individual performance of the experts; an objective we achieve by first calibrating the predictions before filtering and refining them. We term this approach the Mixture of Calibrated Experts and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on 5 different detection tasks using a variety of detectors, showing that it: (i) improves object detectors on COCO and instance segmentation methods on LVIS by up to sim 2.5 AP; (ii) reaches state-of-the-art on COCO test-dev with 65.1 AP and on DOTA with 82.62 AP_{50}; (iii) outperforms single models consistently on recent detection tasks such as Open Vocabulary Object Detection.

We propose 3DETR, an end-to-end Transformer based object detection model for 3D point clouds. Compared to existing detection methods that employ a number of 3D-specific inductive biases, 3DETR requires minimal modifications to the vanilla Transformer block. Specifically, we find that a standard Transformer with non-parametric queries and Fourier positional embeddings is competitive with specialized architectures that employ libraries of 3D-specific operators with hand-tuned hyperparameters. Nevertheless, 3DETR is conceptually simple and easy to implement, enabling further improvements by incorporating 3D domain knowledge. Through extensive experiments, we show 3DETR outperforms the well-established and highly optimized VoteNet baselines on the challenging ScanNetV2 dataset by 9.5%. Furthermore, we show 3DETR is applicable to 3D tasks beyond detection, and can serve as a building block for future research.

Having precise perception of the environment is crucial for ensuring the secure and reliable functioning of autonomous driving systems. Radar object detection networks are one fundamental part of such systems. CNN-based object detectors showed good performance in this context, but they require large compute resources. This paper investigates sparse convolutional object detection networks, which combine powerful grid-based detection with low compute resources. We investigate radar specific challenges and propose sparse kernel point pillars (SKPP) and dual voxel point convolutions (DVPC) as remedies for the grid rendering and sparse backbone architectures. We evaluate our SKPP-DPVCN architecture on nuScenes, which outperforms the baseline by 5.89% and the previous state of the art by 4.19% in Car AP4.0. Moreover, SKPP-DPVCN reduces the average scale error (ASE) by 21.41% over the baseline.

Detecting small and distant objects remains challenging for object detectors due to scale variation, low resolution, and background clutter. Safety-critical applications require reliable detection of these objects for safe planning. Depth information can improve detection, but existing approaches require complex, model-specific architectural modifications. We provide a theoretical analysis followed by an empirical investigation of the depth-detection relationship. Together, they explain how depth causes systematic performance degradation and why depth-informed supervision mitigates it. We introduce DepthPrior, a framework that uses depth as prior knowledge rather than as a fused feature, providing comparable benefits without modifying detector architectures. DepthPrior consists of Depth-Based Loss Weighting (DLW) and Depth-Based Loss Stratification (DLS) during training, and Depth-Aware Confidence Thresholding (DCT) during inference. The only overhead is the initial cost of depth estimation. Experiments across four benchmarks (KITTI, MS COCO, VisDrone, SUN RGB-D) and two detectors (YOLOv11, EfficientDet) demonstrate the effectiveness of DepthPrior, achieving up to +9% mAP_S and +7% mAR_S for small objects, with inference recovery rates as high as 95:1 (true vs. false detections). DepthPrior offers these benefits without additional sensors, architectural changes, or performance costs. Code is available at https://github.com/mos-ks/DepthPrior.

Point-cloud based 3D object detectors recently have achieved remarkable progress. However, most studies are limited to the development of network architectures for improving only their accuracy without consideration of the computational efficiency. In this paper, we first propose an autoencoder-style framework comprising channel-wise compression and decompression via interchange transfer-based knowledge distillation. To learn the map-view feature of a teacher network, the features from teacher and student networks are independently passed through the shared autoencoder; here, we use a compressed representation loss that binds the channel-wised compression knowledge from both student and teacher networks as a kind of regularization. The decompressed features are transferred in opposite directions to reduce the gap in the interchange reconstructions. Lastly, we present an head attention loss to match the 3D object detection information drawn by the multi-head self-attention mechanism. Through extensive experiments, we verify that our method can train the lightweight model that is well-aligned with the 3D point cloud detection task and we demonstrate its superiority using the well-known public datasets; e.g., Waymo and nuScenes.

Occlusion is a major challenge for LiDAR-based object detection methods. This challenge becomes safety-critical in urban traffic where the ego vehicle must have reliable object detection to avoid collision while its field of view is severely reduced due to the obstruction posed by a large number of road users. Collaborative perception via Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, which leverages the diverse perspective thanks to the presence at multiple locations of connected agents to form a complete scene representation, is an appealing solution. State-of-the-art V2X methods resolve the performance-bandwidth tradeoff using a mid-collaboration approach where the Bird-Eye View images of point clouds are exchanged so that the bandwidth consumption is lower than communicating point clouds as in early collaboration, and the detection performance is higher than late collaboration, which fuses agents' output, thanks to a deeper interaction among connected agents. While achieving strong performance, the real-world deployment of most mid-collaboration approaches is hindered by their overly complicated architectures, involving learnable collaboration graphs and autoencoder-based compressor/ decompressor, and unrealistic assumptions about inter-agent synchronization. In this work, we devise a simple yet effective collaboration method that achieves a better bandwidth-performance tradeoff than prior state-of-the-art methods while minimizing changes made to the single-vehicle detection models and relaxing unrealistic assumptions on inter-agent synchronization. Experiments on the V2X-Sim dataset show that our collaboration method achieves 98\% of the performance of an early-collaboration method, while only consuming the equivalent bandwidth of a late-collaboration method.

Multispectral fusion object detection is a critical task for edge-based maritime surveillance and remote sensing, demanding both high inference efficiency and robust feature representation for high-resolution inputs. However, current State Space Models (SSMs) like Mamba suffer from significant parameter redundancy in their standard 2D Selective Scan (SS2D) blocks, which hinders deployment on resource-constrained hardware and leads to the loss of fine-grained structural information during conventional compression. To address these challenges, we propose the Low-Rank Two-Dimensional Selective Structured State Space Model (Low-Rank SS2D), which reformulates state transitions via matrix factorization to exploit intrinsic feature sparsity. Furthermore, we introduce a Structure-Aware Distillation strategy that aligns the internal latent state dynamics of the student with a full-rank teacher model to compensate for potential representation degradation. This approach substantially reduces computational complexity and memory footprint while preserving the high-fidelity spatial modeling required for object recognition. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets and real-world edge platforms, such as Raspberry Pi 5, demonstrate that our method achieves a superior efficiency-accuracy trade-off, significantly outperforming existing lightweight architectures in practical deployment scenarios.

In autonomous driving, multi-modal perception tasks like 3D object detection typically rely on well-synchronized sensors, both at training and inference. However, despite the use of hardware- or software-based synchronization algorithms, perfect synchrony is rarely guaranteed: Sensors may operate at different frequencies, and real-world factors such as network latency, hardware failures, or processing bottlenecks often introduce time offsets between sensors. Such asynchrony degrades perception performance, especially for dynamic objects. To address this challenge, we propose AsyncBEV, a trainable lightweight and generic module to improve the robustness of 3D Birds' Eye View (BEV) object detection models against sensor asynchrony. Inspired by scene flow estimation, AsyncBEV first estimates the 2D flow from the BEV features of two different sensor modalities, taking into account the known time offset between these sensor measurements. The predicted feature flow is then used to warp and spatially align the feature maps, which we show can easily be integrated into different current BEV detector architectures (e.g., BEV grid-based and token-based). Extensive experiments demonstrate AsyncBEV improves robustness against both small and large asynchrony between LiDAR or camera sensors in both the token-based CMT and grid-based UniBEV, especially for dynamic objects. We significantly outperform the ego motion compensated CMT and UniBEV baselines, notably by 16.6 % and 11.9 % NDS on dynamic objects in the worst-case scenario of a 0.5 s time offset. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Computational efficiency in deep neural networks is critical for object detection, especially as newer models prioritize speed over efficient computation (FLOP). This evolution has somewhat left behind embedded and mobile-oriented AI object detection applications. In this paper, we focus on design choices of neural network architectures for efficient object detection computation based on FLOP and propose several optimizations to enhance the efficiency of YOLO-based models. Firstly, we introduce an efficient backbone scaling inspired by inverted bottlenecks and theoretical insights from the Information Bottleneck principle. Secondly, we present the Fast Pyramidal Architecture Network (FPAN), designed to facilitate fast multiscale feature sharing while reducing computational resources. Lastly, we propose a Decoupled Network-in-Network (DNiN) detection head engineered to deliver rapid yet lightweight computations for classification and regression tasks. Building upon these optimizations and leveraging more efficient backbones, this paper contributes to a new scaling paradigm for object detection and YOLO-centric models called LeYOLO. Our contribution consistently outperforms existing models in various resource constraints, achieving unprecedented accuracy and flop ratio. Notably, LeYOLO-Small achieves a competitive mAP score of 38.2% on the COCOval with just 4.5 FLOP(G), representing a 42% reduction in computational load compared to the latest state-of-the-art YOLOv9-Tiny model while achieving similar accuracy. Our novel model family achieves a FLOP-to-accuracy ratio previously unattained, offering scalability that spans from ultra-low neural network configurations (< 1 GFLOP) to efficient yet demanding object detection setups (> 4 GFLOPs) with 25.2, 31.3, 35.2, 38.2, 39.3 and 41 mAP for 0.66, 1.47, 2.53, 4.51, 5.8 and 8.4 FLOP(G).

The ``You Only Look Once'' (YOLO) framework has long served as a standard for real-time object detection, though traditional iterations have utilized Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) post-processing, which introduces specific latency and hyperparameter variables. This paper presents a comprehensive architectural analysis of YOLO26, a model that shifts toward a native end-to-end learning strategy by eliminating NMS. This study examines the core mechanisms driving this framework: the MuSGD optimizer for backbone stabilization, Small-Target-Aware Label Assignment (STAL), and ProgLoss for dynamic supervision. To contextualize its performance, this article reviews exhaustive benchmark data from the COCO val2017 leaderboard. This evaluation provides an objective comparison of YOLO26 across various model scales (Nano to Extra-Large) against both prior CNN lineages and contemporary Transformer-based architectures (e.g., RT-DETR, DEIM, RF-DETR), detailing the observed speed-accuracy trade-offs and parameter requirements without asserting a singular optimal model. Additionally, the analysis covers the framework's unified multi-task capabilities, including the YOLOE-26 open-vocabulary module for promptable detection. Ultimately, this paper serves to document how decoupling representation learning from heuristic post-processing impacts the "Export Gap" and deterministic latency in modern edge-based computer vision deployments.

Object detection is a central downstream task used to test if pre-trained network parameters confer benefits, such as improved accuracy or training speed. The complexity of object detection methods can make this benchmarking non-trivial when new architectures, such as Vision Transformer (ViT) models, arrive. These difficulties (e.g., architectural incompatibility, slow training, high memory consumption, unknown training formulae, etc.) have prevented recent studies from benchmarking detection transfer learning with standard ViT models. In this paper, we present training techniques that overcome these challenges, enabling the use of standard ViT models as the backbone of Mask R-CNN. These tools facilitate the primary goal of our study: we compare five ViT initializations, including recent state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods, supervised initialization, and a strong random initialization baseline. Our results show that recent masking-based unsupervised learning methods may, for the first time, provide convincing transfer learning improvements on COCO, increasing box AP up to 4% (absolute) over supervised and prior self-supervised pre-training methods. Moreover, these masking-based initializations scale better, with the improvement growing as model size increases.

Existing Real-Time Object Detection (RTOD) methods commonly adopt YOLO-like architectures for their favorable trade-off between accuracy and speed. However, these models rely on static dense computation that applies uniform processing to all inputs, misallocating representational capacity and computational resources such as over-allocating on trivial scenes while under-serving complex ones. This mismatch results in both computational redundancy and suboptimal detection performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose YOLO-Master, a novel YOLO-like framework that introduces instance-conditional adaptive computation for RTOD. This is achieved through a Efficient Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (ES-MoE) block that dynamically allocates computational resources to each input according to its scene complexity. At its core, a lightweight dynamic routing network guides expert specialization during training through a diversity enhancing objective, encouraging complementary expertise among experts. Additionally, the routing network adaptively learns to activate only the most relevant experts, thereby improving detection performance while minimizing computational overhead during inference. Comprehensive experiments on five large-scale benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of YOLO-Master. On MS COCO, our model achieves 42.4% AP with 1.62ms latency, outperforming YOLOv13-N by +0.8% mAP and 17.8% faster inference. Notably, the gains are most pronounced on challenging dense scenes, while the model preserves efficiency on typical inputs and maintains real-time inference speed. Code will be available.

YOLO has become a central real-time object detection system for robotics, driverless cars, and video monitoring applications. We present a comprehensive analysis of YOLO's evolution, examining the innovations and contributions in each iteration from the original YOLO up to YOLOv8, YOLO-NAS, and YOLO with Transformers. We start by describing the standard metrics and postprocessing; then, we discuss the major changes in network architecture and training tricks for each model. Finally, we summarize the essential lessons from YOLO's development and provide a perspective on its future, highlighting potential research directions to enhance real-time object detection systems.

Self-driving cars need to understand 3D scenes efficiently and accurately in order to drive safely. Given the limited hardware resources, existing 3D perception models are not able to recognize small instances (e.g., pedestrians, cyclists) very well due to the low-resolution voxelization and aggressive downsampling. To this end, we propose Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution (SPVConv), a lightweight 3D module that equips the vanilla Sparse Convolution with the high-resolution point-based branch. With negligible overhead, this point-based branch is able to preserve the fine details even from large outdoor scenes. To explore the spectrum of efficient 3D models, we first define a flexible architecture design space based on SPVConv, and we then present 3D Neural Architecture Search (3D-NAS) to search the optimal network architecture over this diverse design space efficiently and effectively. Experimental results validate that the resulting SPVNAS model is fast and accurate: it outperforms the state-of-the-art MinkowskiNet by 3.3%, ranking 1st on the competitive SemanticKITTI leaderboard. It also achieves 8x computation reduction and 3x measured speedup over MinkowskiNet with higher accuracy. Finally, we transfer our method to 3D object detection, and it achieves consistent improvements over the one-stage detection baseline on KITTI.

This work presents a simple vision transformer design as a strong baseline for object localization and instance segmentation tasks. Transformers recently demonstrate competitive performance in image classification tasks. To adopt ViT to object detection and dense prediction tasks, many works inherit the multistage design from convolutional networks and highly customized ViT architectures. Behind this design, the goal is to pursue a better trade-off between computational cost and effective aggregation of multiscale global contexts. However, existing works adopt the multistage architectural design as a black-box solution without a clear understanding of its true benefits. In this paper, we comprehensively study three architecture design choices on ViT -- spatial reduction, doubled channels, and multiscale features -- and demonstrate that a vanilla ViT architecture can fulfill this goal without handcrafting multiscale features, maintaining the original ViT design philosophy. We further complete a scaling rule to optimize our model's trade-off on accuracy and computation cost / model size. By leveraging a constant feature resolution and hidden size throughout the encoder blocks, we propose a simple and compact ViT architecture called Universal Vision Transformer (UViT) that achieves strong performance on COCO object detection and instance segmentation tasks.

Separating and labeling each instance of a nucleus (instance-aware segmentation) is the key challenge in segmenting single cell nuclei on fluorescence microscopy images. Deep Neural Networks can learn the implicit transformation of a nuclear image into a probability map indicating the class membership of each pixel (nucleus or background), but the use of post-processing steps to turn the probability map into a labeled object mask is error-prone. This especially accounts for nuclear images of tissue sections and nuclear images across varying tissue preparations. In this work, we aim to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning architectures to segment nuclei in fluorescence images of various tissue origins and sample preparation types without post-processing. We compare architectures that operate on pixel to pixel translation and an architecture that operates on object detection and subsequent locally applied segmentation. In addition, we propose a novel strategy to create artificial images to extend the training set. We evaluate the influence of ground truth annotation quality, image scale and segmentation complexity on segmentation performance. Results show that three out of four deep learning architectures (U-Net, U-Net with ResNet34 backbone, Mask R-CNN) can segment fluorescent nuclear images on most of the sample preparation types and tissue origins with satisfactory segmentation performance. Mask R-CNN, an architecture designed to address instance aware segmentation tasks, outperforms other architectures. Equal nuclear mean size, consistent nuclear annotations and the use of artificially generated images result in overall acceptable precision and recall across different tissues and sample preparation types.

In this paper, we present a novel model to detect lane regions and extract lane departure events (changes and incursions) from challenging, lower-resolution videos recorded with mobile cameras. Our algorithm used a Mask-RCNN based lane detection model as pre-processor. Recently, deep learning-based models provide state-of-the-art technology for object detection combined with segmentation. Among the several deep learning architectures, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) outperformed other machine learning models, especially for region proposal and object detection tasks. Recent development in object detection has been driven by the success of region proposal methods and region-based CNNs (R-CNNs). Our algorithm utilizes lane segmentation mask for detection and Fix-lag Kalman filter for tracking, rather than the usual approach of detecting lane lines from single video frames. The algorithm permits detection of driver lane departures into left or right lanes from continuous lane detections. Preliminary results show promise for robust detection of lane departure events. The overall sensitivity for lane departure events on our custom test dataset is 81.81%.

X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) based 3D imaging is widely used in airports for aviation security screening whilst prior work on prohibited item detection focuses primarily on 2D X-ray imagery. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the possibility of extending the automatic prohibited item detection from 2D X-ray imagery to volumetric 3D CT baggage security screening imagery. To these ends, we take advantage of 3D Convolutional Neural Neworks (CNN) and popular object detection frameworks such as RetinaNet and Faster R-CNN in our work. As the first attempt to use 3D CNN for volumetric 3D CT baggage security screening, we first evaluate different CNN architectures on the classification of isolated prohibited item volumes and compare against traditional methods which use hand-crafted features. Subsequently, we evaluate object detection performance of different architectures on volumetric 3D CT baggage images. The results of our experiments on Bottle and Handgun datasets demonstrate that 3D CNN models can achieve comparable performance (98% true positive rate and 1.5% false positive rate) to traditional methods but require significantly less time for inference (0.014s per volume). Furthermore, the extended 3D object detection models achieve promising performance in detecting prohibited items within volumetric 3D CT baggage imagery with 76% mAP for bottles and 88% mAP for handguns, which shows both the challenge and promise of such threat detection within 3D CT X-ray security imagery.

Outlier detection is an important data mining task with numerous practical applications such as intrusion detection, credit card fraud detection, and video surveillance. However, given a specific complicated task with big data, the process of building a powerful deep learning based system for outlier detection still highly relies on human expertise and laboring trials. Although Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has shown its promise in discovering effective deep architectures in various domains, such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, contemporary NAS methods are not suitable for outlier detection due to the lack of intrinsic search space, unstable search process, and low sample efficiency. To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose AutoOD, an automated outlier detection framework, which aims to search for an optimal neural network model within a predefined search space. Specifically, we firstly design a curiosity-guided search strategy to overcome the curse of local optimality. A controller, which acts as a search agent, is encouraged to take actions to maximize the information gain about the controller's internal belief. We further introduce an experience replay mechanism based on self-imitation learning to improve the sample efficiency. Experimental results on various real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the deep model identified by AutoOD achieves the best performance, comparing with existing handcrafted models and traditional search methods.

The Annotated Germs for Automated Recognition (AGAR) dataset is an image database of microbial colonies cultured on agar plates. It contains 18000 photos of five different microorganisms as single or mixed cultures, taken under diverse lighting conditions with two different cameras. All the images are classified into "countable", "uncountable", and "empty", with the "countable" class labeled by microbiologists with colony location and species identification (336442 colonies in total). This study describes the dataset itself and the process of its development. In the second part, the performance of selected deep neural network architectures for object detection, namely Faster R-CNN and Cascade R-CNN, was evaluated on the AGAR dataset. The results confirmed the great potential of deep learning methods to automate the process of microbe localization and classification based on Petri dish photos. Moreover, AGAR is the first publicly available dataset of this kind and size and will facilitate the future development of machine learning models. The data used in these studies can be found at https://agar.neurosys.com/.

Recent advancements in large-scale foundational models have sparked widespread interest in training highly proficient large vision models. A common consensus revolves around the necessity of aggregating extensive, high-quality annotated data. However, given the inherent challenges in annotating dense tasks in computer vision, such as object detection and segmentation, a practical strategy is to combine and leverage all available data for training purposes. In this work, we propose Plain-Det, which offers flexibility to accommodate new datasets, robustness in performance across diverse datasets, training efficiency, and compatibility with various detection architectures. We utilize Def-DETR, with the assistance of Plain-Det, to achieve a mAP of 51.9 on COCO, matching the current state-of-the-art detectors. We conduct extensive experiments on 13 downstream datasets and Plain-Det demonstrates strong generalization capability. Code is release at https://github.com/ChengShiest/Plain-Det

Accurate object detection and prediction are critical to ensure the safety and efficiency of self-driving architectures. Predicting object trajectories and occupancy enables autonomous vehicles to anticipate movements and make decisions with future information, increasing their adaptability and reducing the risk of accidents. Current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) approaches often isolate the detection, tracking, and prediction stages, which can lead to significant prediction errors due to accumulated inaccuracies between stages. Recent advances have improved the feature representation of multi-camera perception systems through Bird's-Eye View (BEV) transformations, boosting the development of end-to-end systems capable of predicting environmental elements directly from vehicle sensor data. These systems, however, often suffer from high processing times and number of parameters, creating challenges for real-world deployment. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel BEV instance prediction architecture based on a simplified paradigm that relies only on instance segmentation and flow prediction. The proposed system prioritizes speed, aiming at reduced parameter counts and inference times compared to existing SOTA architectures, thanks to the incorporation of an efficient transformer-based architecture. Furthermore, the implementation of the proposed architecture is optimized for performance improvements in PyTorch version 2.1. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/miguelag99/Efficient-Instance-Prediction

Quantized neural networks typically require smaller memory footprints and lower computation complexity, which is crucial for efficient deployment. However, quantization inevitably leads to a distribution divergence from the original network, which generally degrades the performance. To tackle this issue, massive efforts have been made, but most existing approaches lack statistical considerations and depend on several manual configurations. In this paper, we present an adaptive-mapping quantization method to learn an optimal latent sub-distribution that is inherent within models and smoothly approximated with a concrete Gaussian Mixture (GM). In particular, the network weights are projected in compliance with the GM-approximated sub-distribution. This sub-distribution evolves along with the weight update in a co-tuning schema guided by the direct task-objective optimization. Sufficient experiments on image classification and object detection over various modern architectures demonstrate the effectiveness, generalization property, and transferability of the proposed method. Besides, an efficient deployment flow for the mobile CPU is developed, achieving up to 7.46times inference acceleration on an octa-core ARM CPU. Our codes have been publicly released at https://github.com/RunpeiDong/DGMS.

Convolution-BatchNorm (ConvBN) blocks are integral components in various computer vision tasks and other domains. A ConvBN block can operate in three modes: Train, Eval, and Deploy. While the Train mode is indispensable for training models from scratch, the Eval mode is suitable for transfer learning and beyond, and the Deploy mode is designed for the deployment of models. This paper focuses on the trade-off between stability and efficiency in ConvBN blocks: Deploy mode is efficient but suffers from training instability; Eval mode is widely used in transfer learning but lacks efficiency. To solve the dilemma, we theoretically reveal the reason behind the diminished training stability observed in the Deploy mode. Subsequently, we propose a novel Tune mode to bridge the gap between Eval mode and Deploy mode. The proposed Tune mode is as stable as Eval mode for transfer learning, and its computational efficiency closely matches that of the Deploy mode. Through extensive experiments in object detection, classification, and adversarial example generation across 5 datasets and 12 model architectures, we demonstrate that the proposed Tune mode retains the performance while significantly reducing GPU memory footprint and training time, thereby contributing efficient ConvBN blocks for transfer learning and beyond. Our method has been integrated into both PyTorch (general machine learning framework) and MMCV/MMEngine (computer vision framework). Practitioners just need one line of code to enjoy our efficient ConvBN blocks thanks to PyTorch's builtin machine learning compilers.

Event-based cameras (EBCs) have emerged as a bio-inspired alternative to traditional cameras, offering advantages in power efficiency, temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. However, the development of image analysis methods for EBCs is challenging due to the sparse and asynchronous nature of the data. This work addresses the problem of object detection for EBC cameras. The current approaches to EBC object detection focus on constructing complex data representations and rely on specialized architectures. We introduce I2EvDet (Image-to-Event Detection), a novel adaptation framework that bridges mainstream object detection with temporal event data processing. First, we demonstrate that a Real-Time DEtection TRansformer, or RT-DETR, a state-of-the-art natural image detector, trained on a simple image-like representation of the EBC data achieves performance comparable to specialized EBC methods. Next, as part of our framework, we develop an efficient adaptation technique that transforms image-based detectors into event-based detection models by modifying their frozen latent representation space through minimal architectural additions. The resulting EvRT-DETR model reaches state-of-the-art performance on the standard benchmark datasets Gen1 (mAP +2.3) and 1Mpx/Gen4 (mAP +1.4). These results demonstrate a fundamentally new approach to EBC object detection through principled adaptation of mainstream architectures, offering an efficient alternative with potential applications to other temporal visual domains. The code is available at: https://github.com/realtime-intelligence/evrt-detr

Labeling data to use for training object detectors is expensive and time consuming. Publicly available overhead datasets for object detection are labeled with image-aligned bounding boxes, object-aligned bounding boxes, or object masks, but it is not clear whether such detailed labeling is necessary. To test the idea, we developed novel single- and two-stage network architectures that use centerpoints for labeling. In this paper we show that these architectures achieve nearly equivalent performance to approaches using more detailed labeling on three overhead object detection datasets.

We study the challenging task of neural network quantization without end-to-end retraining, called Post-training Quantization (PTQ). PTQ usually requires a small subset of training data but produces less powerful quantized models than Quantization-Aware Training (QAT). In this work, we propose a novel PTQ framework, dubbed BRECQ, which pushes the limits of bitwidth in PTQ down to INT2 for the first time. BRECQ leverages the basic building blocks in neural networks and reconstructs them one-by-one. In a comprehensive theoretical study of the second-order error, we show that BRECQ achieves a good balance between cross-layer dependency and generalization error. To further employ the power of quantization, the mixed precision technique is incorporated in our framework by approximating the inter-layer and intra-layer sensitivity. Extensive experiments on various handcrafted and searched neural architectures are conducted for both image classification and object detection tasks. And for the first time we prove that, without bells and whistles, PTQ can attain 4-bit ResNet and MobileNetV2 comparable with QAT and enjoy 240 times faster production of quantized models. Codes are available at https://github.com/yhhhli/BRECQ.

We present lambda layers -- an alternative framework to self-attention -- for capturing long-range interactions between an input and structured contextual information (e.g. a pixel surrounded by other pixels). Lambda layers capture such interactions by transforming available contexts into linear functions, termed lambdas, and applying these linear functions to each input separately. Similar to linear attention, lambda layers bypass expensive attention maps, but in contrast, they model both content and position-based interactions which enables their application to large structured inputs such as images. The resulting neural network architectures, LambdaNetworks, significantly outperform their convolutional and attentional counterparts on ImageNet classification, COCO object detection and COCO instance segmentation, while being more computationally efficient. Additionally, we design LambdaResNets, a family of hybrid architectures across different scales, that considerably improves the speed-accuracy tradeoff of image classification models. LambdaResNets reach excellent accuracies on ImageNet while being 3.2 - 4.4x faster than the popular EfficientNets on modern machine learning accelerators. When training with an additional 130M pseudo-labeled images, LambdaResNets achieve up to a 9.5x speed-up over the corresponding EfficientNet checkpoints.

Deploying high-performance dense prediction models on resource-constrained edge devices remains challenging due to strict limits on computation and memory. In practice, lightweight systems for object detection, instance segmentation, and pose estimation are still dominated by CNN-based architectures such as YOLO, while compact Vision Transformers (ViTs) often struggle to achieve similarly strong accuracy efficiency tradeoff, even with large scale pretraining. We argue that this gap is largely due to insufficient task specific representation learning in small scale ViTs, rather than an inherent mismatch between ViTs and edge dense prediction. To address this issue, we introduce EdgeCrafter, a unified compact ViT framework for edge dense prediction centered on ECDet, a detection model built from a distilled compact backbone and an edge-friendly encoder decoder design. On the COCO dataset, ECDet-S achieves 51.7 AP with fewer than 10M parameters using only COCO annotations. For instance segmentation, ECInsSeg achieves performance comparable to RF-DETR while using substantially fewer parameters. For pose estimation, ECPose-X reaches 74.8 AP, significantly outperforming YOLO26Pose-X (71.6 AP) despite the latter's reliance on extensive Objects365 pretraining. These results show that compact ViTs, when paired with task-specialized distillation and edge-aware design, can be a practical and competitive option for edge dense prediction. Code is available at: https://intellindust-ai-lab.github.io/projects/EdgeCrafter/

Self-supervised learning has gained popularity because of its ability to avoid the cost of annotating large-scale datasets. It is capable of adopting self-defined pseudo labels as supervision and use the learned representations for several downstream tasks. Specifically, contrastive learning has recently become a dominant component in self-supervised learning methods for computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), and other domains. It aims at embedding augmented versions of the same sample close to each other while trying to push away embeddings from different samples. This paper provides an extensive review of self-supervised methods that follow the contrastive approach. The work explains commonly used pretext tasks in a contrastive learning setup, followed by different architectures that have been proposed so far. Next, we have a performance comparison of different methods for multiple downstream tasks such as image classification, object detection, and action recognition. Finally, we conclude with the limitations of the current methods and the need for further techniques and future directions to make substantial progress.

Network quantization generally converts full-precision weights and/or activations into low-bit fixed-point values in order to accelerate an inference process. Recent approaches to network quantization further discretize the gradients into low-bit fixed-point values, enabling an efficient training. They typically set a quantization interval using a min-max range of the gradients or adjust the interval such that the quantization error for entire gradients is minimized. In this paper, we analyze the quantization error of gradients for the low-bit fixed-point training, and show that lowering the error for large-magnitude gradients boosts the quantization performance significantly. Based on this, we derive an upper bound of quantization error for the large gradients in terms of the quantization interval, and obtain an optimal condition for the interval minimizing the quantization error for large gradients. We also introduce an interval update algorithm that adjusts the quantization interval adaptively to maintain a small quantization error for large gradients. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our quantization method for various combinations of network architectures and bit-widths on various tasks, including image classification, object detection, and super-resolution.

Traditionally, convolutional neural networks (CNN) and vision transformers (ViT) have dominated computer vision. However, recently proposed vision graph neural networks (ViG) provide a new avenue for exploration. Unfortunately, for mobile applications, ViGs are computationally expensive due to the overhead of representing images as graph structures. In this work, we propose a new graph-based sparse attention mechanism, Sparse Vision Graph Attention (SVGA), that is designed for ViGs running on mobile devices. Additionally, we propose the first hybrid CNN-GNN architecture for vision tasks on mobile devices, MobileViG, which uses SVGA. Extensive experiments show that MobileViG beats existing ViG models and existing mobile CNN and ViT architectures in terms of accuracy and/or speed on image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks. Our fastest model, MobileViG-Ti, achieves 75.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with 0.78 ms inference latency on iPhone 13 Mini NPU (compiled with CoreML), which is faster than MobileNetV2x1.4 (1.02 ms, 74.7% top-1) and MobileNetV2x1.0 (0.81 ms, 71.8% top-1). Our largest model, MobileViG-B obtains 82.6% top-1 accuracy with only 2.30 ms latency, which is faster and more accurate than the similarly sized EfficientFormer-L3 model (2.77 ms, 82.4%). Our work proves that well designed hybrid CNN-GNN architectures can be a new avenue of exploration for designing models that are extremely fast and accurate on mobile devices. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/SLDGroup/MobileViG.

Training a large-scale deep neural network in a large-scale dataset is challenging and time-consuming. The recent breakthrough of large-batch optimization is a promising way to tackle this challenge. However, although the current advanced algorithms such as LARS and LAMB succeed in classification models, the complicated pipelines of dense visual predictions such as object detection and segmentation still suffer from the heavy performance drop in the large-batch training regime. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective algorithm, named Adaptive Gradient Variance Modulator (AGVM), which can train dense visual predictors with very large batch size, enabling several benefits more appealing than prior arts. Firstly, AGVM can align the gradient variances between different modules in the dense visual predictors, such as backbone, feature pyramid network (FPN), detection, and segmentation heads. We show that training with a large batch size can fail with the gradient variances misaligned among them, which is a phenomenon primarily overlooked in previous work. Secondly, AGVM is a plug-and-play module that generalizes well to many different architectures (e.g., CNNs and Transformers) and different tasks (e.g., object detection, instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, and panoptic segmentation). It is also compatible with different optimizers (e.g., SGD and AdamW). Thirdly, a theoretical analysis of AGVM is provided. Extensive experiments on the COCO and ADE20K datasets demonstrate the superiority of AGVM. For example, it can train Faster R-CNN+ResNet50 in 4 minutes without losing performance. AGVM enables training an object detector with one billion parameters in just 3.5 hours, reducing the training time by 20.9x, whilst achieving 62.2 mAP on COCO. The deliverables are released at https://github.com/Sense-X/AGVM.

Vision Transformer (ViT) has become one of the most prevailing fundamental backbone networks in the computer vision community. Despite the high accuracy, deploying it in real applications raises critical challenges including the high computational cost and inference latency. Recently, the post-training quantization (PTQ) technique has emerged as a promising way to enhance ViT's efficiency. Nevertheless, existing PTQ approaches for ViT suffer from the inflexible quantization on the post-Softmax and post-GELU activations that obey the power-law-like distributions. To address these issues, we propose a novel non-uniform quantizer, dubbed the Adaptive Logarithm AdaLog (AdaLog) quantizer. It optimizes the logarithmic base to accommodate the power-law-like distribution of activations, while simultaneously allowing for hardware-friendly quantization and de-quantization. By employing the bias reparameterization, the AdaLog quantizer is applicable to both the post-Softmax and post-GELU activations. Moreover, we develop an efficient Fast Progressive Combining Search (FPCS) strategy to determine the optimal logarithm base for AdaLog, as well as the scaling factors and zero points for the uniform quantizers. Extensive experimental results on public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for various ViT-based architectures and vision tasks including classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/GoatWu/AdaLog.

We introduce DEIM, an innovative and efficient training framework designed to accelerate convergence in real-time object detection with Transformer-based architectures (DETR). To mitigate the sparse supervision inherent in one-to-one (O2O) matching in DETR models, DEIM employs a Dense O2O matching strategy. This approach increases the number of positive samples per image by incorporating additional targets, using standard data augmentation techniques. While Dense O2O matching speeds up convergence, it also introduces numerous low-quality matches that could affect performance. To address this, we propose the Matchability-Aware Loss (MAL), a novel loss function that optimizes matches across various quality levels, enhancing the effectiveness of Dense O2O. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset validate the efficacy of DEIM. When integrated with RT-DETR and D-FINE, it consistently boosts performance while reducing training time by 50%. Notably, paired with RT-DETRv2, DEIM achieves 53.2% AP in a single day of training on an NVIDIA 4090 GPU. Additionally, DEIM-trained real-time models outperform leading real-time object detectors, with DEIM-D-FINE-L and DEIM-D-FINE-X achieving 54.7% and 56.5% AP at 124 and 78 FPS on an NVIDIA T4 GPU, respectively, without the need for additional data. We believe DEIM sets a new baseline for advancements in real-time object detection. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/ShihuaHuang95/DEIM.

Efficient neural network backbones for mobile devices are often optimized for metrics such as FLOPs or parameter count. However, these metrics may not correlate well with latency of the network when deployed on a mobile device. Therefore, we perform extensive analysis of different metrics by deploying several mobile-friendly networks on a mobile device. We identify and analyze architectural and optimization bottlenecks in recent efficient neural networks and provide ways to mitigate these bottlenecks. To this end, we design an efficient backbone MobileOne, with variants achieving an inference time under 1 ms on an iPhone12 with 75.9% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. We show that MobileOne achieves state-of-the-art performance within the efficient architectures while being many times faster on mobile. Our best model obtains similar performance on ImageNet as MobileFormer while being 38x faster. Our model obtains 2.3% better top-1 accuracy on ImageNet than EfficientNet at similar latency. Furthermore, we show that our model generalizes to multiple tasks - image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation with significant improvements in latency and accuracy as compared to existing efficient architectures when deployed on a mobile device. Code and models are available at https://github.com/apple/ml-mobileone

Vision transformers (ViTs) have dominated computer vision in recent years. However, ViTs are computationally expensive and not well suited for mobile devices; this led to the prevalence of convolutional neural network (CNN) and ViT-based hybrid models for mobile vision applications. Recently, Vision GNN (ViG) and CNN hybrid models have also been proposed for mobile vision tasks. However, all of these methods remain slower compared to pure CNN-based models. In this work, we propose Multi-Level Dilated Convolutions to devise a purely CNN-based mobile backbone. Using Multi-Level Dilated Convolutions allows for a larger theoretical receptive field than standard convolutions. Different levels of dilation also allow for interactions between the short-range and long-range features in an image. Experiments show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) mobile CNN, ViT, ViG, and hybrid architectures in terms of accuracy and/or speed on image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Our fastest model, RapidNet-Ti, achieves 76.3\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with 0.9 ms inference latency on an iPhone 13 mini NPU, which is faster and more accurate than MobileNetV2x1.4 (74.7\% top-1 with 1.0 ms latency). Our work shows that pure CNN architectures can beat SOTA hybrid and ViT models in terms of accuracy and speed when designed properly.

Neural networks are fundamental in artificial intelligence, driving progress in computer vision and natural language processing. High-quality datasets are crucial for their development, and there is growing interest in datasets composed of neural networks themselves to support benchmarking, automated machine learning (AutoML), and model analysis. We introduce LEMUR, an open source dataset of neural network models with well-structured code for diverse architectures across tasks such as object detection, image classification, segmentation, and natural language processing. LEMUR is primarily designed to provide a rich source of structured model representations and associated performance data, enabling the fine-tuning of large language models for AutoML applications. Leveraging Python and PyTorch, LEMUR enables seamless extension to new datasets and models while maintaining consistency. It integrates an Optuna-powered framework for evaluation, hyperparameter optimization, statistical analysis, and graphical insights. LEMUR VR extension enables the seamless deployment of models in virtual reality, optimizing their performance on resource-constrained devices. Providing tools for model evaluation, preprocessing, and database management, LEMUR supports researchers and practitioners in developing, testing, and analyzing neural networks. It offers an API that delivers comprehensive information about neural network models and their complete performance statistics with a single request, which can be used in experiments with code-generating large language models. The LEMUR and its plugins are accessible as open source projects under the MIT license at https://github.com/ABrain-One/nn-dataset, https://github.com/ABrain-One/nn-plots and https://github.com/ABrain-One/nn-vr.

Vision graph neural networks (ViG) offer a new avenue for exploration in computer vision. A major bottleneck in ViGs is the inefficient k-nearest neighbor (KNN) operation used for graph construction. To solve this issue, we propose a new method for designing ViGs, Dynamic Axial Graph Construction (DAGC), which is more efficient than KNN as it limits the number of considered graph connections made within an image. Additionally, we propose a novel CNN-GNN architecture, GreedyViG, which uses DAGC. Extensive experiments show that GreedyViG beats existing ViG, CNN, and ViT architectures in terms of accuracy, GMACs, and parameters on image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation tasks. Our smallest model, GreedyViG-S, achieves 81.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, 2.9% higher than Vision GNN and 2.2% higher than Vision HyperGraph Neural Network (ViHGNN), with less GMACs and a similar number of parameters. Our largest model, GreedyViG-B obtains 83.9% top-1 accuracy, 0.2% higher than Vision GNN, with a 66.6% decrease in parameters and a 69% decrease in GMACs. GreedyViG-B also obtains the same accuracy as ViHGNN with a 67.3% decrease in parameters and a 71.3% decrease in GMACs. Our work shows that hybrid CNN-GNN architectures not only provide a new avenue for designing efficient models, but that they can also exceed the performance of current state-of-the-art models.

Transformers and Mamba, initially invented for natural language processing, have inspired backbone architectures for visual recognition. Recent studies integrated Local Attention Transformers with Mamba to capture both local details and global contexts. Despite competitive performance, these methods are limited to simple stacking of Transformer and Mamba layers without any interaction mechanism between them. Thus, deep integration between Transformer and Mamba layers remains an open problem. We address this problem by proposing A2Mamba, a powerful Transformer-Mamba hybrid network architecture, featuring a new token mixer termed Multi-scale Attention-augmented State Space Model (MASS), where multi-scale attention maps are integrated into an attention-augmented SSM (A2SSM). A key step of A2SSM performs a variant of cross-attention by spatially aggregating the SSM's hidden states using the multi-scale attention maps, which enhances spatial dependencies pertaining to a two-dimensional space while improving the dynamic modeling capabilities of SSMs. Our A2Mamba outperforms all previous ConvNet-, Transformer-, and Mamba-based architectures in visual recognition tasks. For instance, A2Mamba-L achieves an impressive 86.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K. In semantic segmentation, A2Mamba-B exceeds CAFormer-S36 by 2.5% in mIoU, while exhibiting higher efficiency. In object detection and instance segmentation with Cascade Mask R-CNN, A2Mamba-S surpasses MambaVision-B by 1.2%/0.9% in AP^b/AP^m, while having 40% less parameters. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/LMMMEng/A2Mamba.

Recently, the advancement of deep learning in discriminative feature learning from 3D LiDAR data has led to rapid development in the field of autonomous driving. However, automated processing uneven, unstructured, noisy, and massive 3D point clouds is a challenging and tedious task. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of existing compelling deep learning architectures applied in LiDAR point clouds, detailing for specific tasks in autonomous driving such as segmentation, detection, and classification. Although several published research papers focus on specific topics in computer vision for autonomous vehicles, to date, no general survey on deep learning applied in LiDAR point clouds for autonomous vehicles exists. Thus, the goal of this paper is to narrow the gap in this topic. More than 140 key contributions in the recent five years are summarized in this survey, including the milestone 3D deep architectures, the remarkable deep learning applications in 3D semantic segmentation, object detection, and classification; specific datasets, evaluation metrics, and the state of the art performance. Finally, we conclude the remaining challenges and future researches.

Robustness and compactness are two essential attributes of deep learning models that are deployed in the real world. The goals of robustness and compactness may seem to be at odds, since robustness requires generalization across domains, while the process of compression exploits specificity in one domain. We introduce Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Pruning (AdaSAP), which unifies these goals through the lens of network sharpness. The AdaSAP method produces sparse networks that are robust to input variations which are unseen at training time. We achieve this by strategically incorporating weight perturbations in order to optimize the loss landscape. This allows the model to be both primed for pruning and regularized for improved robustness. AdaSAP improves the robust accuracy of pruned models on image classification by up to +6% on ImageNet C and +4% on ImageNet V2, and on object detection by +4% on a corrupted Pascal VOC dataset, over a wide range of compression ratios, pruning criteria, and network architectures, outperforming recent pruning art by large margins.

This thesis presents and evaluates the Dilated Convolution with Learnable Spacings (DCLS) method. Through various supervised learning experiments in the fields of computer vision, audio, and speech processing, the DCLS method proves to outperform both standard and advanced convolution techniques. The research is organized into several steps, starting with an analysis of the literature and existing convolution techniques that preceded the development of the DCLS method. We were particularly interested in the methods that are closely related to our own and that remain essential to capture the nuances and uniqueness of our approach. The cornerstone of our study is the introduction and application of the DCLS method to convolutional neural networks (CNNs), as well as to hybrid architectures that rely on both convolutional and visual attention approaches. DCLS is shown to be particularly effective in tasks such as classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Initially using bilinear interpolation, the study also explores other interpolation methods, finding that Gaussian interpolation slightly improves performance. The DCLS method is further applied to spiking neural networks (SNNs) to enable synaptic delay learning within a neural network that could eventually be transferred to so-called neuromorphic chips. The results show that the DCLS method stands out as a new state-of-the-art technique in SNN audio classification for certain benchmark tasks in this field. These tasks involve datasets with a high temporal component. In addition, we show that DCLS can significantly improve the accuracy of artificial neural networks for the multi-label audio classification task. We conclude with a discussion of the chosen experimental setup, its limitations, the limitations of our method, and our results.

This book presents a code-first introduction to computer vision, spanning classical 2D image processing, classical 3D vision, and deep learning. Organized as 44 short chapters across three parts, the book builds each topic from first principles: image arithmetic and morphology; convolution, pyramids, and frequency-domain filtering; feature detection, optical flow, and stereo; projective geometry, camera calibration, and structure from motion; and the full arc of modern deep learning, from a single neuron through convolutional networks, backpropagation, classic architectures, transfer learning, object detection, and semantic and instance segmentation, concluding with engineering considerations like mixed-precision and parallel training. Every technique is implemented directly in Python and NumPy or PyTorch and checked numerically against the corresponding OpenCV or PyTorch library function, so readers see not just the mathematics but its concrete behavior on real and synthetic data. The material was distilled with AI assistance from freely available online course notes, condensing extensive working code into concise mathematical exposition while preserving verified, reproducible results throughout. It is intended as a self-contained reference for students and practitioners who want to understand computer vision algorithms and their Python implementations.

Recent Human-object interaction detection (HOID) methods highly require prior knowledge from VLMs to enhance the interaction recognition capabilities. The training strategies and model architectures for connecting the knowledge from VLMs to the HOI instance representations from the object detector are challenging, and the whole framework is complex for further development or application. On the other hand, the inherent reasoning abilities of MLLMs on human-object interaction detection are under-explored. Inspired by the recent success of training MLLMs with reinforcement learning (RL) methods, we propose HOI-R1 and first explore the potential of the language model on the HOID task without any additional detection modules. We introduce an HOI reasoning process and HOID reward functions to solve the HOID task by pure text. The results on the HICO-DET dataset show that HOI-R1 achieves 2x the accuracy of the baseline with great generalization ability. The source code is available at https://github.com/cjw2021/HOI-R1.

End-to-end multi-object tracking (MOT) methods have recently achieved remarkable progress by unifying detection and association within a single framework. Despite their strong detection performance, these methods suffer from relatively low association accuracy. Through detailed analysis, we observe that object embeddings produced by the shared DETR architecture display excessively high inter-object similarity, as it emphasizes only category-level discrimination within single frames. In contrast, tracking requires instance-level distinction across frames with spatial and temporal continuity, for which current end-to-end approaches insufficiently optimize object embeddings. To address this, we introduce FDTA (From Detection to Association), an explicit feature refinement framework that enhances object discriminativeness across three complementary perspectives. Specifically, we introduce a Spatial Adapter (SA) to integrate depth-aware cues for spatial continuity, a Temporal Adapter (TA) to aggregate historical information for temporal dependencies, and an Identity Adapter (IA) to leverage quality-aware contrastive learning for instance-level separability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FDTA achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple challenging MOT benchmarks, including DanceTrack, SportsMOT, and BFT, highlighting the effectiveness of our proposed discriminative embedding enhancement strategy. The code is available at https://github.com/Spongebobbbbbbbb/FDTA.

Rapid climate change and other disturbances in alpine ecosystems demand frequent habitat monitoring, yet manual mapping remains prohibitively expensive for the required temporal resolution. We employ deep learning for change detection using long-term alpine habitat data from Gesaeuse National Park, Austria, addressing a major gap in applying geospatial foundation models (GFMs) to complex natural environments with fuzzy class boundaries and highly imbalanced classes. We compare two paradigms: post-classification change detection (CD) versus direct CD. For post-classification CD, we evaluate GFMs Prithvi-EO-2.0 and Clay v1.0 against U-Net CNNs; for direct CD, we test the transformer ChangeViT against U-Net baselines. Using high-resolution multimodal data (RGB, NIR, LiDAR, terrain attributes) covering 4,480 documented changes over 15.3 km2, results show Clay v1.0 achieves 51% overall accuracy versus U-Net's 41% for multi-class habitat change, while both reach 67% for binary change detection. Direct CD yields superior IoU (0.53 vs 0.35) for binary but only 28% accuracy for multi-class detection. Cross-temporal evaluation reveals GFM robustness, with Clay maintaining 33% accuracy on 2020 data versus U-Net's 23%. Integrating LiDAR improves semantic segmentation from 30% to 50% accuracy. Although overall accuracies are lower than in more homogeneous landscapes, they reflect realistic performance for complex alpine habitats. Future work will integrate object-based post-processing and physical constraints to enhance applicability.

Pest and disease control plays a key role in agriculture since the damage caused by these agents are responsible for a huge economic loss every year. Based on this assumption, we create an algorithm capable of detecting rust (Hemileia vastatrix) and leaf miner (Leucoptera coffeella) in coffee leaves (Coffea arabica) and quantify disease severity using a mobile application as a high-level interface for the model inferences. We used different convolutional neural network architectures to create the object detector, besides the OpenCV library, k-means, and three treatments: the RGB and value to quantification, and the AFSoft software, in addition to the analysis of variance, where we compare the three methods. The results show an average precision of 81,5% in the detection and that there was no significant statistical difference between treatments to quantify the severity of coffee leaves, proposing a computationally less costly method. The application, together with the trained model, can detect the pest and disease over different image conditions and infection stages and also estimate the disease infection stage.

The goal of this paper is to serve as a guide for selecting a detection architecture that achieves the right speed/memory/accuracy balance for a given application and platform. To this end, we investigate various ways to trade accuracy for speed and memory usage in modern convolutional object detection systems. A number of successful systems have been proposed in recent years, but apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult due to different base feature extractors (e.g., VGG, Residual Networks), different default image resolutions, as well as different hardware and software platforms. We present a unified implementation of the Faster R-CNN [Ren et al., 2015], R-FCN [Dai et al., 2016] and SSD [Liu et al., 2015] systems, which we view as "meta-architectures" and trace out the speed/accuracy trade-off curve created by using alternative feature extractors and varying other critical parameters such as image size within each of these meta-architectures. On one extreme end of this spectrum where speed and memory are critical, we present a detector that achieves real time speeds and can be deployed on a mobile device. On the opposite end in which accuracy is critical, we present a detector that achieves state-of-the-art performance measured on the COCO detection task.

We introduce MCUBench, a benchmark featuring over 100 YOLO-based object detection models evaluated on the VOC dataset across seven different MCUs. This benchmark provides detailed data on average precision, latency, RAM, and Flash usage for various input resolutions and YOLO-based one-stage detectors. By conducting a controlled comparison with a fixed training pipeline, we collect comprehensive performance metrics. Our Pareto-optimal analysis shows that integrating modern detection heads and training techniques allows various YOLO architectures, including legacy models like YOLOv3, to achieve a highly efficient tradeoff between mean Average Precision (mAP) and latency. MCUBench serves as a valuable tool for benchmarking the MCU performance of contemporary object detectors and aids in model selection based on specific constraints.

We present YOLOBench, a benchmark comprised of 550+ YOLO-based object detection models on 4 different datasets and 4 different embedded hardware platforms (x86 CPU, ARM CPU, Nvidia GPU, NPU). We collect accuracy and latency numbers for a variety of YOLO-based one-stage detectors at different model scales by performing a fair, controlled comparison of these detectors with a fixed training environment (code and training hyperparameters). Pareto-optimality analysis of the collected data reveals that, if modern detection heads and training techniques are incorporated into the learning process, multiple architectures of the YOLO series achieve a good accuracy-latency trade-off, including older models like YOLOv3 and YOLOv4. We also evaluate training-free accuracy estimators used in neural architecture search on YOLOBench and demonstrate that, while most state-of-the-art zero-cost accuracy estimators are outperformed by a simple baseline like MAC count, some of them can be effectively used to predict Pareto-optimal detection models. We showcase that by using a zero-cost proxy to identify a YOLO architecture competitive against a state-of-the-art YOLOv8 model on a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Deeplite/deeplite-torch-zoo

The unsupervised pretraining of object detectors has recently become a key component of object detector training, as it leads to improved performance and faster convergence during the supervised fine-tuning stage. Existing unsupervised pretraining methods, however, typically rely on low-level information to define proposals that are used to train the detector. Furthermore, in the absence of class labels for these proposals, an auxiliary loss is used to add high-level semantics. This results in complex pipelines and a task gap between the pretraining and the downstream task. We propose a framework that mitigates this issue and consists of three simple yet key ingredients: (i) richer initial proposals that do encode high-level semantics, (ii) class pseudo-labeling through clustering, that enables pretraining using a standard object detection training pipeline, (iii) self-training to iteratively improve and enrich the object proposals. Once the pretraining and downstream tasks are aligned, a simple detection pipeline without further bells and whistles can be directly used for pretraining and, in fact, results in state-of-the-art performance on both the full and low data regimes, across detector architectures and datasets, by significant margins. We further show that our pretraining strategy is also capable of pretraining from scratch (including the backbone) and works on complex images like COCO, paving the path for unsupervised representation learning using object detection directly as a pretext task.

Object detection in point clouds is an important aspect of many robotics applications such as autonomous driving. In this paper we consider the problem of encoding a point cloud into a format appropriate for a downstream detection pipeline. Recent literature suggests two types of encoders; fixed encoders tend to be fast but sacrifice accuracy, while encoders that are learned from data are more accurate, but slower. In this work we propose PointPillars, a novel encoder which utilizes PointNets to learn a representation of point clouds organized in vertical columns (pillars). While the encoded features can be used with any standard 2D convolutional detection architecture, we further propose a lean downstream network. Extensive experimentation shows that PointPillars outperforms previous encoders with respect to both speed and accuracy by a large margin. Despite only using lidar, our full detection pipeline significantly outperforms the state of the art, even among fusion methods, with respect to both the 3D and bird's eye view KITTI benchmarks. This detection performance is achieved while running at 62 Hz: a 2 - 4 fold runtime improvement. A faster version of our method matches the state of the art at 105 Hz. These benchmarks suggest that PointPillars is an appropriate encoding for object detection in point clouds.

We present a novel architecture for 3D object detection, M3DeTR, which combines different point cloud representations (raw, voxels, bird-eye view) with different feature scales based on multi-scale feature pyramids. M3DeTR is the first approach that unifies multiple point cloud representations, feature scales, as well as models mutual relationships between point clouds simultaneously using transformers. We perform extensive ablation experiments that highlight the benefits of fusing representation and scale, and modeling the relationships. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI 3D object detection dataset and Waymo Open Dataset. Results show that M3DeTR improves the baseline significantly by 1.48% mAP for all classes on Waymo Open Dataset. In particular, our approach ranks 1st on the well-known KITTI 3D Detection Benchmark for both car and cyclist classes, and ranks 1st on Waymo Open Dataset with single frame point cloud input. Our code is available at: https://github.com/rayguan97/M3DETR.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is an important problem in computer vision which has a wide range of applications. Formulating MOT as multi-task learning of object detection and re-ID in a single network is appealing since it allows joint optimization of the two tasks and enjoys high computation efficiency. However, we find that the two tasks tend to compete with each other which need to be carefully addressed. In particular, previous works usually treat re-ID as a secondary task whose accuracy is heavily affected by the primary detection task. As a result, the network is biased to the primary detection task which is not fair to the re-ID task. To solve the problem, we present a simple yet effective approach termed as FairMOT based on the anchor-free object detection architecture CenterNet. Note that it is not a naive combination of CenterNet and re-ID. Instead, we present a bunch of detailed designs which are critical to achieve good tracking results by thorough empirical studies. The resulting approach achieves high accuracy for both detection and tracking. The approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on several public datasets. The source code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/ifzhang/FairMOT.

The advancement of object detection (OD) in open-vocabulary and open-world scenarios is a critical challenge in computer vision. This work introduces OmDet, a novel language-aware object detection architecture, and an innovative training mechanism that harnesses continual learning and multi-dataset vision-language pre-training. Leveraging natural language as a universal knowledge representation, OmDet accumulates a "visual vocabulary" from diverse datasets, unifying the task as a language-conditioned detection framework. Our multimodal detection network (MDN) overcomes the challenges of multi-dataset joint training and generalizes to numerous training datasets without manual label taxonomy merging. We demonstrate superior performance of OmDet over strong baselines in object detection in the wild, open-vocabulary detection, and phrase grounding, achieving state-of-the-art results. Ablation studies reveal the impact of scaling the pre-training visual vocabulary, indicating a promising direction for further expansion to larger datasets. The effectiveness of our deep fusion approach is underscored by its ability to learn jointly from multiple datasets, enhancing performance through knowledge sharing.

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) has attracted significant attention in recent years, as it does not require box-level annotations. State-of-the-art methods generally adopt a multi-module network, which employs WSDDN as the multiple instance detection network module and uses multiple instance refinement modules to refine performance. However, these approaches suffer from three key limitations. First, existing methods tend to generate pseudo GT boxes that either focus only on discriminative parts, failing to capture the whole object, or cover the entire object but fail to distinguish between adjacent intra-class instances. Second, the foundational WSDDN architecture lacks a crucial background class representation for each proposal and exhibits a large semantic gap between its branches. Third, prior methods discard ignored proposals during optimization, leading to slow convergence. To address these challenges, we propose the Dual-thresholded heAtmap-guided proposal clustering and Negative Certainty supervision with Enhanced base network (DANCE) method for WSOD. Specifically, we first devise a heatmap-guided proposal selector (HGPS) algorithm, which utilizes dual thresholds on heatmaps to pre-select proposals, enabling pseudo GT boxes to both capture the full object extent and distinguish between adjacent intra-class instances. We then construct a weakly supervised basic detection network (WSBDN), which augments each proposal with a background class representation and uses heatmaps for pre-supervision to bridge the semantic gap between matrices. At last, we introduce a negative certainty supervision (NCS) loss on ignored proposals to accelerate convergence. Extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/gyl2565309278/DANCE.

This paper proposes novel methods to enhance the performance of monocular 3D object detection models by leveraging the generalized feature extraction capabilities of a vision foundation model. Unlike traditional CNN-based approaches, which often suffer from inaccurate depth estimation and rely on multi-stage object detection pipelines, this study employs a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based foundation model as the backbone, which excels at capturing global features for depth estimation. It integrates a detection transformer (DETR) architecture to improve both depth estimation and object detection performance in a one-stage manner. Specifically, a hierarchical feature fusion block is introduced to extract richer visual features from the foundation model, further enhancing feature extraction capabilities. Depth estimation accuracy is further improved by incorporating a relative depth estimation model trained on large-scale data and fine-tuning it through transfer learning. Additionally, the use of queries in the transformer's decoder, which consider reference points and the dimensions of 2D bounding boxes, enhances recognition performance. The proposed model outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, as demonstrated through quantitative and qualitative evaluations on the KITTI 3D benchmark and a custom dataset collected from high-elevation racing environments. Code is available at https://github.com/JihyeokKim/MonoDINO-DETR.

Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have bio-plausibility and low-power advantages over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Applications of SNNs are currently limited to simple classification tasks because of their poor performance. In this work, we focus on bridging the performance gap between ANNs and SNNs on object detection. Our design revolves around network architecture and spiking neuron. First, the overly complex module design causes spike degradation when the YOLO series is converted to the corresponding spiking version. We design a SpikeYOLO architecture to solve this problem by simplifying the vanilla YOLO and incorporating meta SNN blocks. Second, object detection is more sensitive to quantization errors in the conversion of membrane potentials into binary spikes by spiking neurons. To address this challenge, we design a new spiking neuron that activates Integer values during training while maintaining spike-driven by extending virtual timesteps during inference. The proposed method is validated on both static and neuromorphic object detection datasets. On the static COCO dataset, we obtain 66.2% mAP@50 and 48.9% mAP@50:95, which is +15.0% and +18.7% higher than the prior state-of-the-art SNN, respectively. On the neuromorphic Gen1 dataset, we achieve 67.2% mAP@50, which is +2.5% greater than the ANN with equivalent architecture, and the energy efficiency is improved by 5.7*. Code: https://github.com/BICLab/SpikeYOLO

Modern top-performing object detectors depend heavily on backbone networks, whose advances bring consistent performance gains through exploring more effective network structures. In this paper, we propose a novel and flexible backbone framework, namely CBNetV2, to construct high-performance detectors using existing open-sourced pre-trained backbones under the pre-training fine-tuning paradigm. In particular, CBNetV2 architecture groups multiple identical backbones, which are connected through composite connections. Specifically, it integrates the high- and low-level features of multiple backbone networks and gradually expands the receptive field to more efficiently perform object detection. We also propose a better training strategy with assistant supervision for CBNet-based detectors. Without additional pre-training of the composite backbone, CBNetV2 can be adapted to various backbones (CNN-based vs. Transformer-based) and head designs of most mainstream detectors (one-stage vs. two-stage, anchor-based vs. anchor-free-based). Experiments provide strong evidence that, compared with simply increasing the depth and width of the network, CBNetV2 introduces a more efficient, effective, and resource-friendly way to build high-performance backbone networks. Particularly, our Dual-Swin-L achieves 59.4% box AP and 51.6% mask AP on COCO test-dev under the single-model and single-scale testing protocol, which is significantly better than the state-of-the-art result (57.7% box AP and 50.2% mask AP) achieved by Swin-L, while the training schedule is reduced by 6times. With multi-scale testing, we push the current best single model result to a new record of 60.1% box AP and 52.3% mask AP without using extra training data. Code is available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/CBNetV2.

Feature pyramids are a basic component in recognition systems for detecting objects at different scales. But recent deep learning object detectors have avoided pyramid representations, in part because they are compute and memory intensive. In this paper, we exploit the inherent multi-scale, pyramidal hierarchy of deep convolutional networks to construct feature pyramids with marginal extra cost. A top-down architecture with lateral connections is developed for building high-level semantic feature maps at all scales. This architecture, called a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), shows significant improvement as a generic feature extractor in several applications. Using FPN in a basic Faster R-CNN system, our method achieves state-of-the-art single-model results on the COCO detection benchmark without bells and whistles, surpassing all existing single-model entries including those from the COCO 2016 challenge winners. In addition, our method can run at 5 FPS on a GPU and thus is a practical and accurate solution to multi-scale object detection. Code will be made publicly available.

We introduce a framework for multi-camera 3D object detection. In contrast to existing works, which estimate 3D bounding boxes directly from monocular images or use depth prediction networks to generate input for 3D object detection from 2D information, our method manipulates predictions directly in 3D space. Our architecture extracts 2D features from multiple camera images and then uses a sparse set of 3D object queries to index into these 2D features, linking 3D positions to multi-view images using camera transformation matrices. Finally, our model makes a bounding box prediction per object query, using a set-to-set loss to measure the discrepancy between the ground-truth and the prediction. This top-down approach outperforms its bottom-up counterpart in which object bounding box prediction follows per-pixel depth estimation, since it does not suffer from the compounding error introduced by a depth prediction model. Moreover, our method does not require post-processing such as non-maximum suppression, dramatically improving inference speed. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes autonomous driving benchmark.

Recent advances in multi-modal detection have significantly improved detection accuracy in challenging environments (e.g., low light, overexposure). By integrating RGB with modalities such as thermal and depth, multi-modal fusion increases data redundancy and system robustness. However, significant challenges remain in effectively extracting task-relevant information both within and across modalities, as well as in achieving precise cross-modal alignment. While CNNs excel at feature extraction, they are limited by constrained receptive fields, strong inductive biases, and difficulty in capturing long-range dependencies. Transformer-based models offer global context but suffer from quadratic computational complexity and are confined to pairwise correlation modeling. Mamba and other State Space Models (SSMs), on the other hand, are hindered by their sequential scanning mechanism, which flattens 2D spatial structures into 1D sequences, disrupting topological relationships and limiting the modeling of complex higher-order dependencies. To address these issues, we propose a multi-modal perception network based on hypergraph theory called M2I2HA. Our architecture includes an Intra-Hypergraph Enhancement module to capture global many-to-many high-order relationships within each modality, and an Inter-Hypergraph Fusion module to align, enhance, and fuse cross-modal features by bridging configuration and spatial gaps between data sources. We further introduce a M2-FullPAD module to enable adaptive multi-level fusion of multi-modal enhanced features within the network, meanwhile enhancing data distribution and flow across the architecture. Extensive object detection experiments on multiple public datasets against baselines demonstrate that M2I2HA achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-modal object detection tasks.

Real-time object detection is a crucial problem to solve when in comes to computer vision systems that needs to make appropriate decision based on detection in a timely manner. I have chosen the YOLO v1 architecture to implement it using PyTorch framework, with goal to familiarize with entire object detection pipeline I attempted different techniques to modify the original architecture to improve the results. Finally, I compare the metrics of my implementation to the original.

Existing open-vocabulary object detectors typically require a predefined set of categories from users, significantly confining their application scenarios. In this paper, we introduce DetCLIPv3, a high-performing detector that excels not only at both open-vocabulary object detection, but also generating hierarchical labels for detected objects. DetCLIPv3 is characterized by three core designs: 1. Versatile model architecture: we derive a robust open-set detection framework which is further empowered with generation ability via the integration of a caption head. 2. High information density data: we develop an auto-annotation pipeline leveraging visual large language model to refine captions for large-scale image-text pairs, providing rich, multi-granular object labels to enhance the training. 3. Efficient training strategy: we employ a pre-training stage with low-resolution inputs that enables the object captioner to efficiently learn a broad spectrum of visual concepts from extensive image-text paired data. This is followed by a fine-tuning stage that leverages a small number of high-resolution samples to further enhance detection performance. With these effective designs, DetCLIPv3 demonstrates superior open-vocabulary detection performance, \eg, our Swin-T backbone model achieves a notable 47.0 zero-shot fixed AP on the LVIS minival benchmark, outperforming GLIPv2, GroundingDINO, and DetCLIPv2 by 18.0/19.6/6.6 AP, respectively. DetCLIPv3 also achieves a state-of-the-art 19.7 AP in dense captioning task on VG dataset, showcasing its strong generative capability.

We introduce MQ-Det, an efficient architecture and pre-training strategy design to utilize both textual description with open-set generalization and visual exemplars with rich description granularity as category queries, namely, Multi-modal Queried object Detection, for real-world detection with both open-vocabulary categories and various granularity. MQ-Det incorporates vision queries into existing well-established language-queried-only detectors. A plug-and-play gated class-scalable perceiver module upon the frozen detector is proposed to augment category text with class-wise visual information. To address the learning inertia problem brought by the frozen detector, a vision conditioned masked language prediction strategy is proposed. MQ-Det's simple yet effective architecture and training strategy design is compatible with most language-queried object detectors, thus yielding versatile applications. Experimental results demonstrate that multi-modal queries largely boost open-world detection. For instance, MQ-Det significantly improves the state-of-the-art open-set detector GLIP by +7.8% AP on the LVIS benchmark via multi-modal queries without any downstream finetuning, and averagely +6.3% AP on 13 few-shot downstream tasks, with merely additional 3% modulating time required by GLIP. Code is available at https://github.com/YifanXu74/MQ-Det.

Visible-infrared image pairs provide complementary information, enhancing the reliability and robustness of object detection applications in real-world scenarios. However, most existing methods face challenges in maintaining robustness under complex weather conditions, which limits their applicability. Meanwhile, the reliance on attention mechanisms in modality fusion introduces significant computational complexity and storage overhead, particularly when dealing with high-resolution images. To address these challenges, we propose the Cross-modality Fusion Mamba with Weather-removal (CFMW) to augment stability and cost-effectiveness under adverse weather conditions. Leveraging the proposed Perturbation-Adaptive Diffusion Model (PADM) and Cross-modality Fusion Mamba (CFM) modules, CFMW is able to reconstruct visual features affected by adverse weather, enriching the representation of image details. With efficient architecture design, CFMW is 3 times faster than Transformer-style fusion (e.g., CFT). To bridge the gap in relevant datasets, we construct a new Severe Weather Visible-Infrared (SWVI) dataset, encompassing diverse adverse weather scenarios such as rain, haze, and snow. The dataset contains 64,281 paired visible-infrared images, providing a valuable resource for future research. Extensive experiments on public datasets (i.e., M3FD and LLVIP) and the newly constructed SWVI dataset conclusively demonstrate that CFMW achieves state-of-the-art detection performance. Both the dataset and source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lhy-zjut/CFMW.