Detect in Any Scene: An Agentic Framework for Object Detection with Experience-Aware Reasoning
Authors: Wenlun Zhang, Jun Yin, Kentaro Yoshioka
Organizations: Keio University · Tsinghua University
Abstract
Object detection in real-world scenarios remains challenging due to diverse image degradations and heterogeneous object distributions, which significantly hinder the generalization of existing detectors. Conventional approaches, including scene-specific representation learning and end-to-end pipeline design, are inherently limited by their reliance on predefined conditions and lack adaptability to dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose DetAS, an agentic detection framework that formulates object detection as a dynamic decision process. Instead of relying on static pipelines, DetAS leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as a central agent to adaptively compose detection workflows by selecting from a toolbox of restoration modules and specialized detectors. Specifically, DetAS consists of two key components: Self-Adaptive Image Restoration, which dynamically determines whether and how to enhance images for downstream detection, and Multi-Expertise Detection, which integrates multiple domain-specialized detectors and resolves their predictions through instance-level reasoning. To further improve decision quality under fine-grained conditions, we introduce Self-Evolving Experience Harvesting and extend the framework to DetAS-X, which accumulates node-level decision experience from a small set of annotated data and enables experience-aware reasoning during inference. This mechanism allows the system to progressively refine its decision policy and adapt to diverse real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on six challenging benchmarks demonstrate that DetAS-X significantly outperforms existing MLLM-based detectors, achieving an average improvement of 28.36% in F1 score, with up to 37.01% gain on DarkFace. These results demonstrate the promise of agentic detection and establish a solid foundation for its application in complex and dynamic environments.
Object detection under adverse weather remains challenging due to severe visual degradations and domain shifts. Existing enhancer-based approaches attempt to improve detection by cascading an enhancer with a detector, but they introduce redundant feature extraction and incur high computational cost with limited accuracy gains when paired with SOTA detectors. We propose FR-DETR, a detector-centric framework that refines features rather than images, focusing enhancement on regions of interest and leveraging frequency-domain cues. Specifically, we design (I) a Frequency Refinement Module that dynamically separates and reweights low- and high-frequency components to improve foreground-background discrimination, and (II) a Recurrent Focus Refinement Module (RFRM) that iteratively refines features using coarse predictions as guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FR-DETR achieves superior detection accuracy under adverse weather while being significantly more computationally efficient than enhancer-based methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/ducnt1210/FR-DETR.
Personalized object detection aims to adapt a general-purpose detector to recognize user-specific instances from only a few examples. Lightweight models often struggle in this setting due to their weak semantic priors, while large vision-language models (VLMs) offer strong object-level understanding but are too computationally demanding for real-time or on-device applications. We introduce MOCHA (Multi-modal Objects-aware Cross-arcHitecture Alignment), a distillation framework that transfers multimodal region-level knowledge from a frozen VLM teacher into a lightweight vision-only detector. MOCHA extracts fused visual and textual teacher's embeddings and uses them to guide student training through a dual-objective loss that enforces accurate local alignment and global relational consistency across regions. This process enables efficient transfer of semantics without the need for teacher modifications or textual input at inference. MOCHA consistently outperforms prior baselines across four personalized detection benchmarks under strict few-shot regimes, yielding a +10.1 average improvement, with minimal inference cost.
Annotating bounding boxes is costly and limits the scalability of object detection. This challenge is compounded by the need to preserve high accuracy while minimizing manual effort in real-world applications. Prior active learning methods often depend on model features or modify detector internals and training schedules, increasing integration overhead. Moreover, they rarely jointly exploit the benefits of image-level signals, class-imbalance cues, and instance-level uncertainty for comprehensive selection. We present Portable Active Learning (PAL), a detector-agnostic, easily portable framework that operates solely on inference outputs. PAL combines class-wise instance uncertainty with image-level diversity to guide data selection. At each round, PAL trains lightweight class-specific logistic classifiers to distinguish true from false positives, producing entropy-based uncertainty scores for proposals. Candidate images are then refined using global image entropy, class diversity, and image similarity, yielding batches that are both informative and diverse. PAL requires no changes to model internals or training pipelines, ensuring broad compatibility across detectors. Extensive experiments on COCO, PASCAL VOC, and BDD100K demonstrate that PAL consistently improves label efficiency and detection accuracy compared to existing active learning baselines, making it a practical solution for scalable and cost-effective deployment of object detection in real-world settings.
Rashi Sharma, Justin Timothy C. Bersamin, Karthikk Subramanian