Papers › NAS-FCOS: Fast Neural Architecture Search for Object Detection
NAS-FCOS: Fast Neural Architecture Search for Object Detection
Ning Wang, Yang Gao, Hao Chen, Peng Wang, Zhi Tian, Chunhua Shen, Yanning Zhang
The success of deep neural networks relies on significant architecture engineering. Recently neural architecture search (NAS) has emerged as a promise to greatly reduce manual effort in network design by automatically searching for optimal architectures, although typically such algorithms need an excessive amount of computational resources, e.g., a few thousand GPU-days. To date, on challenging vision tasks such as object detection, NAS, especially fast versions of NAS, is less studied. Here we propose to search for the decoder structure of object detectors with search efficiency being taken into consideration. To be more specific, we aim to efficiently search for the feature pyramid network (FPN) as well as the prediction head of a simple anchor-free object detector, namely FCOS, using a tailored reinforcement learning paradigm. With carefully designed search space, search algorithms and strategies for evaluating network quality, we are able to efficiently search a top-performing detection architecture within 4 days using 8 V100 GPUs. The discovered architecture surpasses state-of-the-art object detection models (such as Faster R-CNN, RetinaNet and FCOS) by 1.5 to 3.5 points in AP on the COCO dataset, with comparable computation complexity and memory footprint, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed NAS for object detection.
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Tasks
1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Object Detection | COCO test-dev | ResNeXt-64x4d-101 NAS-FCOS @128-256 w/improvements | box mAP | 46.1 | #131 of 225 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Object Detection | COCO test-dev | ResNet-50 NAS-FCOS @256 | box mAP | 39.8 | #201 of 225 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
Introduced by this paper: NAS-FCOS
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