# Augmenting Anchors by the Detector Itself

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.14086 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14086/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Mixed Precision Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03740/) (2017)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [RepPoints: Point Set Representation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11490/) (2019)
- [Acquisition of Localization Confidence for Accurate Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11590/) (2018)
- [Probabilistic Anchor Assignment with IoU Prediction for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08103/) (2020)
- [Region Proposal by Guided Anchoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03278/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Fully Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03544/) (2020)
- [Siamese Cascaded Region Proposal Networks for Real-Time Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06148/) (2018)
- [Cascade RPN: Delving into High-Quality Region Proposal Network with Adaptive Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06720/) (2019)
- [RepPoints V2: Verification Meets Regression for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08508/) (2020)
- [Attend Refine Repeat: Active Box Proposal Generation via In-Out Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04446/) (2016)
- [Zoom Out-and-In Network with Map Attention Decision for Region Proposal and Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04347/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Usually, it is difficult to determine the scale and aspect ratio of anchors for anchor-based object detection methods. Current state-of-the-art object detectors either determine anchor parameters according to objects' shape and scale in a dataset, or avoid this problem by utilizing anchor-free methods, however, the former scheme is dataset-specific and the latter methods could not get better performance than the former ones. In this paper, we propose a novel anchor augmentation method named AADI, which means Augmenting Anchors by the Detector Itself. AADI is not an anchor-free method, instead, it can convert the scale and aspect ratio of anchors from a continuous space to a discrete space, which greatly alleviates the problem of anchors' designation. Furthermore, AADI is a learning-based anchor augmentation method, but it does not add any parameters or hyper-parameters, which is beneficial for research and downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on COCO dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of AADI, specifically, AADI achieves significant performance boosts on many state-of-the-art object detectors (eg. at least +2.4 box AP on Faster R-CNN, +2.2 box AP on Mask R-CNN, and +0.9 box AP on Cascade Mask R-CNN). We hope that this simple and cost-efficient method can be widely used in object detection. Code and models are available at https://github.com/WanXiaopei/aadi.