RT-DETRv3: Real-time End-to-End Object Detection with Hierarchical Dense Positive Supervision

RT-DETR is the first real-time end-to-end transformer-based object detector. Its efficiency comes from the framework design and the Hungarian matching. However, compared to dense supervision detectors like the YOLO series, the Hungarian matching provides much sparser supervision, leading to insufficient model training and difficult to achieve optimal results. To address these issues, we proposed a hierarchical dense positive supervision method based on RT-DETR, named RT-DETRv3. Firstly, we introduce a CNN-based auxiliary branch that provides dense supervision that collaborates with the original decoder to enhance the encoder feature representation. Secondly, to address insufficient decoder training, we propose a novel learning strategy involving self-attention perturbation. This strategy diversifies label assignment for positive samples across multiple query groups, thereby enriching positive supervisions. Additionally, we introduce a shared-weight decoder branch for dense positive supervision to ensure more high-quality queries matching each ground truth. Notably, all aforementioned modules are training-only. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on COCO val2017. RT-DETRv3 significantly outperforms existing real-time detectors, including the RT-DETR series and the YOLO series. For example, RT-DETRv3-R18 achieves 48.1% AP (+1.6%/+1.4%) compared to RT-DETR-R18/RT-DETRv2-R18 while maintaining the same latency. Meanwhile, it requires only half of epochs to attain a comparable performance. Furthermore, RT-DETRv3-R101 can attain an impressive 54.6% AP outperforming YOLOv10-X. Code will be released soon.

ViT-CoMer: Vision Transformer with Convolutional Multi-scale Feature Interaction for Dense Predictions

Although Vision Transformer (ViT) has achieved significant success in computer vision, it does not perform well in dense prediction tasks due to the lack of inner-patch information interaction and the limited diversity of feature scale. Most existing studies are devoted to designing vision-specific transformers to solve the above problems, which introduce additional pre-training costs. Therefore, we present a plain, pre-training-free, and feature-enhanced ViT backbone with Convolutional Multi-scale feature interaction, named ViT-CoMer, which facilitates bidirectional interaction between CNN and transformer. Compared to the state-of-the-art, ViT-CoMer has the following advantages: (1) We inject spatial pyramid multi-receptive field convolutional features into the ViT architecture, which effectively alleviates the problems of limited local information interaction and single-feature representation in ViT. (2) We propose a simple and efficient CNN-Transformer bidirectional fusion interaction module that performs multi-scale fusion across hierarchical features, which is beneficial for handling dense prediction tasks. (3) We evaluate the performance of ViT-CoMer across various dense prediction tasks, different frameworks, and multiple advanced pre-training. Notably, our ViT-CoMer-L achieves 64.3% AP on COCO val2017 without extra training data, and 62.1% mIoU on ADE20K val, both of which are comparable to state-of-the-art methods. We hope ViT-CoMer can serve as a new backbone for dense prediction tasks to facilitate future research. The code will be released at https://github.com/Traffic-X/ViT-CoMer.

Open-TransMind: A New Baseline and Benchmark for 1st Foundation Model Challenge of Intelligent Transportation

With the continuous improvement of computing power and deep learning algorithms in recent years, the foundation model has grown in popularity. Because of its powerful capabilities and excellent performance, this technology is being adopted and applied by an increasing number of industries. In the intelligent transportation industry, artificial intelligence faces the following typical challenges: few shots, poor generalization, and a lack of multi-modal techniques. Foundation model technology can significantly alleviate the aforementioned issues. To address these, we designed the 1st Foundation Model Challenge, with the goal of increasing the popularity of foundation model technology in traffic scenarios and promoting the rapid development of the intelligent transportation industry. The challenge is divided into two tracks: all-in-one and cross-modal image retrieval. Furthermore, we provide a new baseline and benchmark for the two tracks, called Open-TransMind. According to our knowledge, Open-TransMind is the first open-source transportation foundation model with multi-task and multi-modal capabilities. Simultaneously, Open-TransMind can achieve state-of-the-art performance on detection, classification, and segmentation datasets of traffic scenarios. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Traffic-X/Open-TransMind.