Detection Transformer

Also known as DETR

Momentum

2 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 53

Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

Multi-Granularity 3D Kidney Lesion Characterization from CT Volumes

Radiology reports describe kidney lesions by type, size, enhancement, and attenuation, yet existing 3D methods predict only at the patient or organ level. We reformulate kidney CT characterization as a per-lesion set-prediction task: one model emits a variable number of lesions per kidney, each with four clinical attributes. We curated 2,619 CT volumes from 788 patients at one academic medical center, with multi-granularity side- and per-lesion labels, and used KiTS23 (489 cases) for zero-shot external validation. We propose \textbf{LesionDETR}, a DETR-style architecture with size-distance Hungarian matching and a hierarchical loss that aggregates per-slot outputs to side-level objectives. Across four input representations and six encoder initializations, two design choices dominate: a segmentation mask as an input channel, and same-domain abdominal pretraining (SuPreM); generic large-corpus pretraining is no better than random initialization. LesionDETR reaches bilateral side-level abnormality AUC 0.799±0.0090.799 \pm 0.009 on UF-Health and 0.817±0.0720.817 \pm 0.072 on KiTS23. A count-conditioned variant reaches per-lesion mAP 0.190±0.0830.190 \pm 0.083 on cystic lesions; rare solid-lesion AP stays at the noise floor, pointing to targeted data collection, not architecture, as the next bottleneck. The framework yields verified per-lesion predictions for downstream structured report generation.
Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

EIVE: End-to-End Instance-Specific Visual Explanations for Detection Transformers

Visual explainability for object detection remains challenging due to the multi-instance nature of detection. Existing approaches predominantly adopt post-hoc paradigms, such as gradient-based or perturbation-based explanation methods, to interpret pretrained detectors. However, these methods require additional gradient computation or repeated model inference, resulting in limited efficiency. To address this issue, we propose an End-to-end Instance-specific Visual Explanation framework (EIVE) that directly generates instance-level saliency maps following the forward pass of Detection Transformer (DETR)-like models. Specifically, we reformulate the cross-attention mechanism in the decoder as an instance-level feature attribution pathway, so that the cross-attention of each object query corresponds to the visual attribution of its predicted instance. Based on this formulation, we design a cross-layer hybrid consensus fusion (CLHCF) module to aggregate cross-attention signals across decoder layers, producing stable and compact explanations. The explanation process of EIVE requires neither gradient computation nor input perturbation, yielding high computational efficiency, and applies to single- and multi-scale DETR-like object detectors. Finally, we present an attention-aware joint training strategy (AAJTS) as a training-oriented application, which imposes spatial constraints on cross-attention patterns to encourage stable and concentrated attribution representations, thereby improving both interpretability and detection performance. Experiments on MS COCO 2017, ExDark, and Cityscapes demonstrate that EIVE produces high-quality instance-level saliency maps and achieves performance comparable to, or better than, state-of-the-art post-hoc methods across standard metrics, while substantially improving explanation efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/xjlDestiny/EIVE.git.
May 30, 2026cs.CV

GIRL-DETR: Gradient-Isolated Reinforcement Learning for Video Moment Retrieval

Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) task requires accurately localizing temporal boundaries aligned with natural language queries, but many models suffer from a misalignment between continuous surrogate losses and non-differentiable metrics, leading to optimization stagnation during the late stages of training and trapping boundary predictions in suboptimal solutions. Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training successfully optimizes localization results for large models, applying it directly to lightweight networks easily disrupts the fragile feature representations established during the supervised phase. To overcome this optimization bottleneck, we propose Gradient-Isolated Reinforcement Learning for DETR (GIRL-DETR), introducing RL post-training into a lightweight temporal localization framework for the first time. The input video and text features first establish early alignment through Cross-Modal Interaction (CMI) before entering the transformer encoder. Subsequently, a Text-Guided Gating (TGG) mechanism dynamically injects semantic priors into the queries before the transformer decoder generates candidate proposals, providing high signal-to-noise ratio inputs for temporal prediction. After the supervised training reaches convergence, the backbone network is frozen to protect the feature manifold, while the detection head directly optimizes the non-differentiable evaluation metric tIoU to enhance localization accuracy through a Three-stage Progressive Reinforcement Learning (TPRL) strategy. This approach achieves an orthogonal decoupling of state representation and metric optimization. Experiments on Charades-STA, QVHighlights, and TACoS demonstrate that GIRL-DETR effectively resolves surrogate loss degradation and achieves substantial accuracy improvements with minimal parameter updates, providing a robust new pathway for RL applications in lightweight VMR models.
May 24, 2026cs.CV

TinyFormer: Preserving Tiny Objects in YOLO-DETR Hybrid Real-time Detectors

YOLO-series and DETR-based detectors struggle with tiny-object detection. YOLO-style models benefit from efficient dense prediction, but their large-stride backbones may suppress tiny instances in deep feature maps and make grid assignment ambiguous. DETR-based models remove hand-crafted post-processing through set prediction, yet they reason over coarse token grids, where tiny objects occupy only a few weak tokens and are easily overlooked during matching. To address these limitations, we propose TinyFormer, a unified YOLO--DETR hybrid real-time detector that combines ViT representations, NMS-free set prediction, and a YOLO-style pyramid neck for accurate small-object detection. TinyFormer introduces a Parallel Bi-fusion Module (PBM), which builds high-resolution shortcuts from shallow stages to the feature pyramid, preserving fine spatial details during multi-scale fusion. We further design a Spatial Semantic Adapter (SSA) to compensate for the spatial loss caused by coarse tokenization. SSA extracts high-resolution cues from early stages and injects them into transformer token embeddings, improving tiny-object localization without sacrificing the global modeling ability of DETR. Experiments on MS COCO show that TinyFormer consistently outperforms recent YOLO-series detectors and the strong DEIMv2 baseline. TinyFormer-X achieves 58.4% AP even without PBM, while adding PBM improves the overall AP to 58.5% and brings a 1.6% AP gain on small objects. With Objects365 pre-training, TinyFormer-X-PBM reaches 60.2% AP, surpassing RF-DETR and other Objects365-pretrained detectors with fewer parameters and lower computation. These results demonstrate that TinyFormer bridges dense YOLO-style feature fusion and DETR-style set prediction, providing a strong accuracy-efficiency trade-off for real-time tiny-object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/mmpmmpmmpjosh/TinyFormer.
May 22, 2026cs.CV

MDS-DETR: DETR with Masked Duplicate Suppressor

The DEtection TRansformer (DETR) is a powerful end-to-end object detector, yet its one-to-one matching strategy suffers from slow convergence and low recall. A common approach to address this issue is to use one-to-many label assignment to provide more positive samples. However, existing methods that use one-to-many matching as an auxiliary objective lead to increased training costs, with their auxiliary decoders discarded during inference. To address this limitation, we propose MDS-DETR, which leverages both one-to-one and one-to-many supervision within a single decoder. Specifically, we introduce a Masked Duplicate Suppressor (MDS) that injects asymmetry into self-attention via confidence-based causal masking. MDS filters out the duplicates generated by the one-to-many supervised layer, enables explainable, duplicate-free predictions in a fully end-to-end framework. MDS-DETR outperforms existing one-to-many DETR variants such as MS-DETR, MR.DETR and Relation-DETR, without relying on any additional queries or auxiliary decoders. Under a 12-epoch training schedule on MS COCO with a ResNet-50 backbone, MDS-DETR achieves a +2.8 mAP improvement over Deformable-DETR with only a 5% increase in training time, and outperforms the state-of-the-art MR.DETR by +0.3 mAP while being even 20% faster in training. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/DChoLee/MDS-DETR.
May 21, 2026cs.CV

Improved Vision-to-Chart Buoy Association with Learned World-to-Image Projection

This report presents a lightweight modification to the DETR-based fusion transformer baseline for the MaCVi 2026 Vision-to-Chart data association challenge. The challenge baseline decoder receives per-buoy queries encoding world-space distance and bearing, forcing the transformer to implicitly learn the complex geometric projection from world coordinates to image pixels. Instead, this work trains an additional dedicated MLP, QueryMLP, to explicitly predict the buoy's waterline contact point in the image from chart measurements and IMU orientation data. The predicted pixel coordinates are appended to the baseline decoder query vector, providing a direct spatial prior per buoy and reducing the geometric reasoning burden on the transformer decoder. On the challenge leaderboard, the presented approach achieves an Overall score of 0.7386, with F1 = 0.8055 and mIoU = 0.6718, on the held-out test set, placing second among all submissions.
May 13, 2026cs.CV

Pattern-Enhanced RT-DETR for Multi-Class Battery Detection

Accurate and efficient battery detection is increasingly important for applications in electronic waste recycling, industrial quality control, and automated sorting systems. In this paper, we present both a comprehensive benchmark and a novel method for multi-class battery detection. We systematically compare three CNN-based detectors (YOLOv8n, YOLOv8s, YOLO11n) and two transformer-based detectors (RT-DETR-L, RT-DETR-X) on a publicly available dataset of approximately 8,591 annotated images under identical experimental conditions, and further propose PaQ-RT-DETR, which introduces pattern-based dynamic query generation into RT-DETR to alleviate query activation imbalance with negligible computational overhead. Among baselines, YOLO11n achieves the best CNN-based accuracy (mAP@50: 0.779) at only 2.6M parameters, while YOLOv8n delivers the fastest inference at ~1,667 FPS. PaQ-RT-DETR-X achieves the highest overall mAP@50 of 0.782, surpassing RT-DETR-X by +2.8% with consistent per-class gains across all six battery categories including the data-scarce Bike Battery class. Our findings provide practical guidance for selecting object detection models in battery-related industrial applications.
May 13, 2026cs.CV

WD-FQDet: Multispectral Detection Transformer via Wavelet Decomposition and Frequency-aware Query Learning

Infrared-visible object detection improves detection performance by combining complementary features from multispectral images. Existing backbone-specific and backbone-shared approaches still suffer from the problems of severe bias of modality-shared features and the insufficiency of modality-specific features. To address these issues, we propose a novel detection framework WD-FQDet that explicitly decouples modality-shared and modality-specific information from infrared and visible modalities in the new view of low- and high-frequency domains, allowing fusion strategies tailored to their frequency characteristics. Specifically, a low-frequency homogeneity alignment module is proposed to align modality-shared features across modalities via a cross-modal attention mechanism, and a high-frequency specificity retention module is proposed to preserve modality-specific features through the multi-scale gradient consistency loss. To reinforce the feature representation in the frequency domain, we propose a hybrid feature enhancement module that incorporates spatial cues. Furthermore, considering that the contributions of homogeneous and modality-specific features to object detection vary across scenarios, we propose a frequency-aware query selection module to dynamically regulate their contributions. Experimental results on the FLIR, LLVIP, and M3FD datasets demonstrate that WD-FQDet achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple evaluation metrics.
May 11, 2026cs.CV

Increasing the Efficiency of DETR for Maritime High-Resolution Images

Maritime object detection is critical for the safe navigation of unmanned surface vessels (USVs), requiring accurate recognition of obstacles from small buoys to large vessels. Real-time detection is challenging due to long distances, small object sizes, large-scale variations, edge computing limitations, and the high memory demands of high-resolution imagery. Existing solutions, such as downsampling or image splitting, often reduce accuracy or require additional processing, while memory-efficient models typically handle only limited resolutions. To overcome these limitations, we leverage Vision Mamba (ViM) backbones, which build on State Space Models (SSMs) to capture long-range dependencies while scaling linearly with sequence length. Images are tokenized into sequences for efficient high-resolution processing. For further computational efficiency, we design a tailored Feature Pyramid Network with successive downsampling and SSM layers, as well as token pruning to reduce unnecessary computation on background regions. Compared to state-of-the-art methods like RT-DETR with ResNet50 backbone, our approach achieves a better balance between performance and computational efficiency in maritime object detection.
May 5, 2026cs.SD

Towards Open World Sound Event Detection

Sound Event Detection (SED) plays a vital role in audio understanding, with applications in surveillance, smart cities, healthcare, and multimedia indexing. However, conventional SED systems operate under a closed-world assumption, limiting their effectiveness in real-world environments where novel acoustic events frequently emerge. Inspired by the success of open-world learning in computer vision, we introduce the Open-World Sound Event Detection (OW-SED) paradigm, where models must detect known events, identify unseen ones, and incrementally learn from them. To tackle the unique challenges of OW-SED, such as overlapping and ambiguous events, we propose a 1D Deformable architecture that leverages deformable attention to adaptively focus on salient temporal regions. Furthermore, we design a novel Open-World Deformable Sound Event Detection Transformer (WOOT) framework incorporating feature disentanglement to separate class-specific and class-agnostic representations, together with a one-to-many matching strategy and a diversity loss to enhance representation diversity. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves marginally superior performance compared to existing leading techniques in closed-world settings and significantly improves over existing baselines in open-world scenarios.
May 1, 2026cs.CV

Benchmarking ResNet Backbones in RT-DETR: Impact of Depth and Regularization under environmental conditions

Visual perception plays a central role in competitive robotics, where environmental variations can directly affect real-time detection performance. The related literature on transformer-based detectors lack information regarding the impact of backbone scale and environmental settings on model performance. This work presents a comparative evaluation of RT-DETR for detecting round objects under environmental and hyperparameter variations relevant to competitive robotics. Four ResNet backbones (ResNet18, ResNet34, ResNet50, and ResNet101) were compared using dropout rates, analyzing their effect on confidence and accuracy. All models were trained under the same configuration and evaluated under changes in lighting and background contrast. Environmental conditions primarily impact prediction confidence, while inference latency remains largely unaffected and classification accuracy stays consistently high, approaching or above 1.00 in most cases. Two distinct behaviors were observed. Under illumination variation, ResNet50 achieves the best trade-off, combining near-perfect accuracy, confidence values up to approximately 0.869 and latency around 0.058-0.059 ms. Under background variation, ResNet34 provides the most balanced performance, reaching near-perfect accuracy and higher confidence values up to approximately 0.887. These results indicate that the optimal architecture depends on the type of environmental variation, with intermediate-depth models offering the best balance between performance and efficiency.
Apr 29, 2026cs.CV

ViCrop-Det: Spatial Attention Entropy Guided Cropping for Training-Free Small-Object Detection

Transformer-based architectures have established a dominant paradigm in global semantic perception; however, they remain fundamentally constrained by the profound spatial heterogeneity inherent in natural images. Specifically, the imposition of a uniform global receptive field across regions of varying information density inevitably leads to local feature degradation, particularly in dense conflict zones populated by microscopic targets. To address this mechanistic limitation, we propose ViCrop-Det, a training-free inference framework that introduces adaptive spatial trust region shrinkage. Inspired by the use of attention entropy in anomaly segmentation, ViCrop-Det leverages the detection decoder's cross-attention distribution as an endogenous probe. By utilizing Spatial Attention Entropy (SAE) to heuristically evaluate local spatial ambiguity, the framework executes dynamic spatial routing, allocating a fixed computational budget exclusively to regions exhibiting both high target saliency and high cognitive uncertainty. By shrinking the spatial trust region and injecting high-frequency localized observations, ViCrop-Det actively resolves spatial ambiguity and recovers fine-grained features without requiring architectural modifications. Extensive evaluations on VisDrone and DOTA-v1.5 demonstrate that ViCrop-Det yields competitive performance enhancements, consistently adding +1-3 mAP@50 to RT-DETR-R50 and Deformable DETR with a marginal 20-23% latency overhead. On MS COCO, APSAP_{S} improves while APM/APLAP_{M}/AP_{L} remains stable, indicating precise fine-scale refinement without compromising the global spatial prior. Under compute-matched settings, our adaptive routing strategy comprehensively surpasses uniform slicing baselines, achieving a highly optimized accuracy-speed trade-off.
Apr 29, 2026cs.CV

Evaluation of Convolutional and Transformer-Based Detectors for Weed Detection in Tomato Plantations

This paper presents a comparative evaluation of convolutional and transformer-based object detection architectures for early weed detection in tomato plantations. Representative models from each paradigm are considered, including YOLOv26-nano, a recent variant of the YOLO family, and RT-DETR Large and RF-DETR Medium as transformer-based architectures. The evaluation was conducted on the GROUNDBASED_WEED dataset, considering six weed classes and an additional category corresponding to unidentified plants, which allowed for the assessment of performance in terms of detection accuracy and computational efficiency using metrics such as precision, recall, average precision, and inference speed, as well as non-parametric statistical tests. The results highlight a clear trade-off between efficiency and contextual modeling: CNN-based detectors achieve high performance at a lower computational cost, while transformer-based approaches offer better global context capture at the expense of higher resource demands. These results provide practical criteria for model selection in precision agriculture applications.
Apr 26, 2026cs.CV

Caries DETR: Tooth Structure-aware Prior and Lesion-aware Dynamic Loss Refinement for DETR Based Caries Detection

As dental caries appear as subtle, low-contrast lesions in intraoral imaging, existing deep learning models face significant challenges in the early detection of caries. While recent Transformer-based detectors have shown promising results in natural images, they often fail to capture the domain-specific anatomical priors crucial for dental caries detection. In this paper, we propose Caries-DETR, a specialized Transformer framework for caries detection in intraoral images. A Tooth Structure-aware Query Initialization (TSQI) is designed, leveraging large-scale intraoral photograph pre-training and a structure perception branch (SPB) to integrate high-frequency structural priors, guiding the model to focus on anatomically significant lesion areas. Furthermore, we design a Lesion-aware Dynamic Loss Refinement (LDLR) to implement quality-driven hard mining through adaptive loss reweighting based on lesion size, anatomical relevance, and prediction quality, optimizing detection for subtle lesions. Extensive experiments on two public datasets (i.e., AlphaDent and DentalAI) demonstrate that Caries-DETR achieves a state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods and exhibits good generalization and robustness. Code and data at https://github.com/XuefenLiu-SZU/Caries-DETR}{https://github.com/XuefenLiu-SZU/Caries-DETR.
Apr 23, 2026cs.CV

VFM4^{4}SDG: Unveiling the Power of VFMs for Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection

Real-world weather, illumination, and imaging variations often induce severe domain shifts, degrading single-source detectors in unseen environments. Existing single-domain generalized object detection (SDGOD) methods mainly rely on data augmentation or domain-invariant learning, while largely overlooking how domain shift disrupts detector prediction stability. Through analytical experiments, we find that performance degradation is mainly dominated by increasing missed detections. Further analysis shows that this phenomenon stems from reduced cross-domain stability in DETR-style detectors: domain shift disrupts encoder-side object-background and inter-instance relations, and further weakens the semantic-spatial binding between decoder queries and real objects. Motivated by this, we find that vision foundation models (VFMs) still preserve stable relational structures and object responses under severe shifts, making them suitable cross-domain stability priors to compensate for detector degradation. To this end, we propose VFM4^{4}SDG, a dual-prior learning framework for SDGOD, which introduces a frozen VFM into encoder representation learning and decoder query modeling. Specifically, we propose Cross-domain Stable Relational Prior Distillation to distill stable object-background and inter-instance relations from the VFM into the encoder, compensating for relational degradation. Meanwhile, we propose Semantic-Contextual Prior-based Query Enhancement, which injects category semantic prototypes and global object context into queries before they enter the decoder layer, enhancing semantic-spatial query-object binding stability. Extensive experiments show that VFM4^{4}SDG significantly outperforms existing advanced methods on standard SDGOD benchmarks and two mainstream DETR-based detection frameworks, demonstrating its effectiveness, robustness, and generality.
Apr 23, 2026cs.CV

UHR-DETR: Efficient End-to-End Small Object Detection for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Ultra-High-Resolution (UHR) imagery has become essential for modern remote sensing, offering unprecedented spatial coverage. However, detecting small objects in such vast scenes presents a critical dilemma: retaining the original resolution for small objects causes prohibitive memory bottlenecks. Conversely, conventional compromises like image downsampling or patch cropping either erase small objects or destroy context. To break this dilemma, we propose UHR-DETR, an efficient end-to-end transformer-based detector designed for UHR imagery. First, we introduce a Coverage-Maximizing Sparse Encoder that dynamically allocates finite computational resources to informative high-resolution regions, ensuring maximum object coverage with minimal spatial redundancy. Second, we design a Global-Local Decoupled Decoder. By integrating macroscopic scene awareness with microscopic object details, this module resolves semantic ambiguities and prevents scene fragmentation. Extensive experiments on the UHR imagery datasets (e.g., STAR and SODA-A) demonstrate the superiority of UHR-DETR under strict hardware constraints (e.g., a single 24GB RTX 3090). It achieves a 2.8% mAP improvement while delivering a 10×\times inference speedup compared to standard sliding-window baselines on the STAR dataset. Our codes and models will be available at https://github.com/Li-JingFang/UHR-DETR.
Apr 16, 2026cs.CV

Learning Where to Embed: Noise-Aware Positional Embedding for Query Retrieval in Small-Object Detection

Transformer-based detectors have advanced small-object detection, but they often remain inefficient and vulnerable to background-induced query noise, which motivates deep decoders to refine low-quality queries. We present HELP (Heatmap-guided Embedding Learning Paradigm), a noise-aware positional-semantic fusion framework that studies where to embed positional information by selectively preserving positional encodings in foreground-salient regions while suppressing background clutter. Within HELP, we introduce Heatmap-guided Positional Embedding (HPE) as the core embedding mechanism and visualize it with a heatbar for interpretable diagnosis and fine-tuning. HPE is integrated into both the encoder and decoder: it guides noise-suppressed feature encoding by injecting heatmap-aware positional encoding, and it enables high-quality query retrieval by filtering background-dominant embeddings via a gradient-based mask filter before decoding. To address feature sparsity in complex small targets, we integrate Linear-Snake Convolution to enrich retrieval-relevant representations. The gradient-based heatmap supervision is used during training only, incurring no additional gradient computation at inference. As a result, our design reduces decoder layers from eight to three and achieves a 59.4% parameter reduction (66.3M vs. 163M) while maintaining consistent accuracy gains under a reduced compute budget across benchmarks. Code Repository: https://github.com/yidimopozhibai/Noise-Suppressed-Query-Retrieval
Apr 16, 2026cs.CV

FSDETR: Frequency-Spatial Feature Enhancement for Small Object Detection

Small object detection remains a significant challenge due to feature degradation from downsampling, mutual occlusion in dense clusters, and complex background interference. To address these issues, this paper proposes FSDETR, a frequency-spatial feature enhancement framework built upon the RT-DETR baseline. By establishing a collaborative modeling mechanism, the method effectively leverages complementary structural information. Specifically, a Spatial Hierarchical Attention Block (SHAB) captures both local details and global dependencies to strengthen semantic representation. Furthermore, to mitigate occlusion in dense scenes, the Deformable Attention-based Intra-scale Feature Interaction (DA-AIFI) focuses on informative regions via dynamic sampling. Finally, the Frequency-Spatial Feature Pyramid Network (FSFPN) integrates frequency filtering with spatial edge extraction via the Cross-domain Frequency-Spatial Block (CFSB) to preserve fine-grained details. Experimental results show that with only 14.7M parameters, FSDETR achieves 13.9% APS on VisDrone 2019 and 48.95% AP50 tiny on TinyPerson, showing strong performance on small-object benchmarks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/YT3DVision/FSDETR.
Apr 16, 2026cs.CV

DETR-ViP: Detection Transformer with Robust Discriminative Visual Prompts

Visual prompted object detection enables interactive and flexible definition of target categories, thereby facilitating open-vocabulary detection. Since visual prompts are derived directly from image features, they often outperform text prompts in recognizing rare categories. Nevertheless, research on visual prompted detection has been largely overlooked, and it is typically treated as a byproduct of training text prompted detectors, which hinders its development. To fully unlock the potential of visual-prompted detection, we investigate the reasons why its performance is suboptimal and reveal that the underlying issue lies in the absence of global discriminability in visual prompts. Motivated by these observations, we propose DETR-ViP, a robust object detection framework that yields class-distinguishable visual prompts. On top of basic image-text contrastive learning, DETR-ViP incorporates global prompt integration and visual-textual prompt relation distillation to learn more discriminative prompt representations. In addition, DETR-ViP employs a selective fusion strategy that ensures stable and robust detection. Extensive experiments on COCO, LVIS, ODinW, and Roboflow100 demonstrate that DETR-ViP achieves substantially higher performance in visual prompt detection compared to other state-of-the-art counterparts. A series of ablation studies and analyses further validate the effectiveness of the proposed improvements and shed light on the underlying reasons for the enhanced detection capability of visual prompts.
Jan 6, 2026cs.CV

LSP-DETR: Efficient and Scalable Nuclei Segmentation in Whole-Slide Images

Background and Objective: Precise and scalable instance segmentation of cell nuclei is a fundamental prerequisite for computational pathology, yet gigapixel whole-slide images (WSIs) pose significant computational challenges. While patch-based processing is standard during training, existing methods are often limited to small tile sizes during inference due to architectural bottlenecks or reliance on computationally expensive post-processing for instance separation. We introduce a faster, scalable, and end-to-end framework capable of processing large-scale image tiles while accurately modeling biologically realistic overlapping nuclei. Methods: We propose LSP-DETR (Local Star Polygon DEtection TRansformer). The model represents nuclei as star-convex polygons and employs a lightweight transformer with linear complexity, enabling the processing of high-resolution images in a single forward pass. A novel radial distance loss accommodates annotation uncertainty, allowing the segmentation of overlapping nuclei to emerge naturally without explicit overlap labels. Results: LSP-DETR achieves state-of-the-art efficiency, with an inference time of 0.45 s/mm^2, a 3.2x speedup over StarDist, the next-fastest method. On PanNuke, the model achieves competitive accuracy (67.5 bPQ), while yielding an F1_1-score of 0.964 in polygon overlap when evaluated against consensus annotations from two expert pathologists. Furthermore, it outperforms larger models such as LKCell in generalization robustness, reaching an F1-score of 85.0 on MoNuSeg. Conclusions: LSP-DETR bridges the gap between high-fidelity segmentation and practical clinical requirements by eliminating heuristic post-processing. By providing a scalable, linear-complexity solution that naturally handles overlaps between nuclei, this framework sets a new direction for efficient high-throughput WSI analysis in digital pathology.
Jun 16, 2025cs.CV

DETRPose: Real-Time End-to-End Multi-Person Pose Estimation via Modified Transformer Decoder and Novel Denoising Keypoints

Multi-person pose estimation (MPPE), which involves detecting body joint positions (keypoints) for every person in an image, is a fundamental task in computer vision. Despite recent advances, no transformer-based model currently achieves real-time performance. This work addresses the latency challenge by introducing DETRPose, the first family of real-time, end-to-end transformer models for multi-person 2D pose estimation. DETRPose significantly enhances the GroupPose decoder, enabling real-time inference. For training, a novel denoising keypoint technique is proposed to accelerate convergence. The varifocal loss is also extended for keypoints, termed Keypoint Similarity VariFocal loss, to improve query quality. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that DETRPose models achieve accuracy comparable to or exceeding that of leading alternatives while requiring five to ten times fewer training epochs. DETRPose-S matches the accuracy of YOLOv8-Pose-X and YOLO11-Pose-X on the COCO dataset (67.0 vs 67.3 and 67.2 in AP) with 81% fewer parameters (11.5M vs 69.4M and 58.8M) and 52% faster inference speed (2.39ms vs 5.23ms and 4.93ms). On the CrowdPose dataset, DETRPose-X has 13.1×13.1\times fewer FLOPs (232.3G vs 3048.1G) and only 22% fewer precision (75.1 vs 76.6 in AP) than ED-Pose-SwinL-5S. On the OCHuman dataset, DETRPose-S surpasses all previous models, showing the robustness of DETRPose on out-of-distribution datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/SebastianJanampa/DETRPose
Apr 14, 2025cs.CV

Exploiting Stability-Plasticity Asymmetry in Pretrained Detectors for Incremental Object Detection

Pretrained model-based incremental object detection (PTMIOD) leverages the rich detection priors of pretrained detectors to learn new categories incrementally while preserving detection ability on previously learned ones. Existing methods mainly exploit pretrained detectors as a whole, without explicitly distinguishing which components should remain stable and which require plastic adaptation. In this paper, we revisit PTMIOD from a component-wise stability-plasticity perspective. Our analysis of pretrained DETR-based detectors reveals a clear asymmetry: localization heads preserve transferable geometric priors across tasks, whereas classification-related representations require greater plasticity to handle new categories, especially in cross-domain scenarios where downstream data deviate from the pretraining domain. Based on this finding, we propose a selective adaptation and retention framework that freezes explicit localization heads to preserve localization stability, while adapting transformer representations with parameter-efficient fine-tuning and updating classification heads for classification-oriented plasticity. To alleviate classification-side forgetting, we pioneer the use of pseudo-feature replay in PTMIOD and design Quality-aware Gaussian Feature Replay, which estimates reliable class-wise feature distributions from high-quality matched object features and replays sampled pseudo features to maintain old-class decision boundaries. Since continual adaptation can shift the feature space and undermine replayed distributions, we further develop Two-stage Consistent Distillation to align teacher and student representations at both proposal generation and refinement stages.Extensive experiments on COCO, VOC, and TT100K show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating a favorable balance between old-class retention and new-class adaptation.
Sep 29, 2024cs.CV

OrientedFormer: An End-to-End Transformer-Based Oriented Object Detector in Remote Sensing Images

Oriented object detection in remote sensing images is a challenging task due to objects being distributed in multi-orientation. Recently, end-to-end transformer-based methods have achieved success by eliminating the need for post-processing operators compared to traditional CNN-based methods. However, directly extending transformers to oriented object detection presents three main issues: 1) objects rotate arbitrarily, necessitating the encoding of angles along with position and size; 2) the geometric relations of oriented objects are lacking in self-attention, due to the absence of interaction between content and positional queries; and 3) oriented objects cause misalignment, mainly between values and positional queries in cross-attention, making accurate classification and localization difficult. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end transformer-based oriented object detector, consisting of three dedicated modules to address these issues. First, Gaussian positional encoding is proposed to encode the angle, position, and size of oriented boxes using Gaussian distributions. Second, Wasserstein self-attention is proposed to introduce geometric relations and facilitate interaction between content and positional queries by utilizing Gaussian Wasserstein distance scores. Third, oriented cross-attention is proposed to align values and positional queries by rotating sampling points around the positional query according to their angles. Experiments on six datasets DIOR-R, a series of DOTA, HRSC2016 and ICDAR2015 show the effectiveness of our approach. Compared with previous end-to-end detectors, the OrientedFormer gains 1.16 and 1.21 AP50_{50} on DIOR-R and DOTA-v1.0 respectively, while reducing training epochs from 3×\times to 1×\times. The codes are available at https://github.com/wokaikaixinxin/ai4rs and https://github.com/wokaikaixinxin/OrientedFormer.