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PMG-DETR: fast convergence of DETR with position-sensitive multi-scale attention and grouped queries

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Abstract

The recently proposed DETR successfully applied the Transformer to object detection and achieved impressive results. However, the learned object queries often explore the entire image to match the corresponding regions, resulting in slow convergence of DETR. Additionally, DETR only uses single-scale features from the final stage of the backbone network, leading to poor performance in small object detection. To address these issues, we propose an effective training strategy for improving the DETR framework, named PMG-DETR. We achieve this by using Position-sensitive Multi-scale attention and Grouped queries. First, to better fuse the multi-scale features, we propose a Position-sensitive Multi-scale attention. By incorporating a spatial sampling strategy into deformable attention, we can further improve the performance of small object detection. Second, we extend the attention mechanism by introducing a novel positional encoding scheme. Finally, we propose a grouping strategy for object queries, where queries are grouped at the decoder side for a more precise inclusion of regions of interest and to accelerate DETR convergence. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset show that PMG-DETR can achieve better performance compared to DETR, e.g., AP 47.8\(\%\) using ResNet50 as backbone trained in 50 epochs. We perform ablation studies on the COCO dataset to validate the effectiveness of the proposed PMG-DETR.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are available in COCO (https://cocodataset.org) and Cityscapes (https://www.cityscapes-dataset.com) repositories.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (2023JJ50096, 2022JJ50016), the Science and Technology Plan Project of Hunan Province (2016TP1020), the “14th Five-Year Plan” Key Disciplines and Application-oriented Special Disciplines of Hunan Province (Xiangjiaotong [2022] 351).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Technology, Hengyang Normal University, Hengyang, 421002, China

    Shuming Cui & Hongwei Deng

  2. Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing and Application, Hengyang, 421002, China

    Hongwei Deng

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  1. Shuming Cui
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Shuming Cui and Hongwei Deng were responsible for material preparation, data collection, and analysis. Shuming Cui wrote the main manuscript text, and all authors provided comments on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. All authors reviewed the manuscript. Data availability statement. The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are available in COCO (https://cocodataset.org) and Cityscapes (https://www.cityscapes-dataset.com) repositories.

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Correspondence to Hongwei Deng.

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Cui, S., Deng, H. PMG-DETR: fast convergence of DETR with position-sensitive multi-scale attention and grouped queries. Pattern Anal Applic 27, 58 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-024-01281-0

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