Online Data Curation for Object Detection via Marginal Contributions to Dataset-level Average Precision

TL;DR

DetGain is an online data curation method for object detection that estimates the impact of each image on dataset-level Average Precision to select informative samples, improving accuracy and robustness.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, architecture-agnostic online data curation approach for object detection based on marginal AP contributions, addressing structural complexities and domain gaps.

Findings

Consistent accuracy improvements on COCO dataset

Robust performance with low-quality data

Effective integration with knowledge distillation techniques

Abstract

High-quality data has become a primary driver of progress under scale laws, with curated datasets often outperforming much larger unfiltered ones at lower cost. Online data curation extends this idea by dynamically selecting training samples based on the model's evolving state. While effective in classification and multimodal learning, existing online sampling strategies rarely extend to object detection because of its structural complexity and domain gaps. We introduce DetGain, an online data curation method specifically for object detection that estimates the marginal perturbation of each image to dataset-level Average Precision (AP) based on its prediction quality. By modeling global score distributions, DetGain efficiently estimates the global AP change and computes teacher-student contribution gaps to select informative samples at each iteration. The method is architecture-agnostic and minimally intrusive, enabling straightforward integration into diverse object detection architectures. Experiments on the COCO dataset with multiple representative detectors show consistent improvements in accuracy. DetGain also demonstrates strong robustness under low-quality data and can be effectively combined with knowledge distillation techniques to further enhance performance, highlighting its potential as a general and complementary strategy for data-efficient object detection.