Papers › RelationNet++: Bridging Visual Representations for Object Detection via Transformer Decoder

RelationNet++: Bridging Visual Representations for Object Detection via Transformer Decoder

29 Oct 2020NeurIPS 2020 12arXiv:2010.15831archive 2025-07-28

Cheng Chi, Fangyun Wei, Han Hu

Existing object detection frameworks are usually built on a single format of object/part representation, i.e., anchor/proposal rectangle boxes in RetinaNet and Faster R-CNN, center points in FCOS and RepPoints, and corner points in CornerNet. While these different representations usually drive the frameworks to perform well in different aspects, e.g., better classification or finer localization, it is in general difficult to combine these representations in a single framework to make good use of each strength, due to the heterogeneous or non-grid feature extraction by different representations. This paper presents an attention-based decoder module similar as that in Transformer~\cite{vaswani2017attention} to bridge other representations into a typical object detector built on a single representation format, in an end-to-end fashion. The other representations act as a set of \emph{key} instances to strengthen the main \emph{query} representation features in the vanilla detectors. Novel techniques are proposed towards efficient computation of the decoder module, including a \emph{key sampling} approach and a \emph{shared location embedding} approach. The proposed module is named \emph{bridging visual representations} (BVR). It can perform in-place and we demonstrate its broad effectiveness in bridging other representations into prevalent object detection frameworks, including RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, FCOS and ATSS, where about 1.5∼3.0 AP improvements are achieved. In particular, we improve a state-of-the-art framework with a strong backbone by about $2.0$ AP, reaching $52.7$ AP on COCO test-dev. The resulting network is named RelationNet++. The code will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/RelationNet2.

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anchorfree_forward_feature_single microsoft/RelationNet2/code/models/utils/bvr_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 69d11c2f1a409fff · report
atss_forward_prediction_single microsoft/RelationNet2/code/models/utils/bvr_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 432371ded78e0429 · report
gaussian_radius microsoft/RelationNet2/code/core/bbox/assigners/point_kpt_assigner.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · fd2a3221f3c55b7f · report
multi_head_attention_forward microsoft/RelationNet2/code/models/utils/bvr_transformer/multihead_attention.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 150c213138c1ac1a · report
reduce_mean microsoft/RelationNet2/code/models/dense_heads/keypoint_head.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 57ba5c957e237b5f · report

Tasks

DecoderObjectObject Detectionobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Object Detection COCO test-dev RelationNet++ (ResNeXt-64x4d-101-DCN) box mAP 52.7 #68 of 225 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

1x1 ConvolutionATSSConvolutionCorner PoolingCornerNetFCOSFPNFaster R-CNNFocal LossHourglass ModuleMax PoolingNon Maximum SuppressionRPNReLURepPointsResidual ConnectionRetinaNetRoIPoolSoftmaxStacked Hourglass Network

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