Learning to Generate Content-Aware Dynamic Detectors

TL;DR

This paper introduces CADDet, a content-aware dynamic detector that adaptively generates model architectures on the fly, improving efficiency and accuracy in object detection tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents the first dynamic routing mechanism for object detection, combining multi-scale networks with a course-to-fine strategy for adaptive model architecture.

Findings

Achieves 1.8 higher mAP with 10% fewer FLOPs compared to static models.

Reduces FLOPs by 42% while maintaining competitive mAP.

Demonstrates effectiveness on MS-COCO dataset.

Abstract

Model efficiency is crucial for object detection. Mostprevious works rely on either hand-crafted design or auto-search methods to obtain a static architecture, regardless ofthe difference of inputs. In this paper, we introduce a newperspective of designing efficient detectors, which is automatically generating sample-adaptive model architectureon the fly. The proposed method is named content-aware dynamic detectors (CADDet). It first applies a multi-scale densely connected network with dynamic routing as the supernet. Furthermore, we introduce a course-to-fine strat-egy tailored for object detection to guide the learning of dynamic routing, which contains two metrics: 1) dynamic global budget constraint assigns data-dependent expectedbudgets for individual samples; 2) local path similarity regularization aims to generate more diverse routing paths. With these, our method achieves higher computational efficiency while maintaining good performance. To the best of our knowledge, our CADDet is the first work to introduce dynamic routing mechanism in object detection. Experiments on MS-COCO dataset demonstrate that CADDet achieves 1.8 higher mAP with 10% fewer FLOPs compared with vanilla routing strategy. Compared with the models based upon similar building blocks, CADDet achieves a 42% FLOPs reduction with a competitive mAP.