# Bridging the Gap Between Object Detection and User Intent via Query-Modulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10258 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10258/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06409/) (2016)
- [Connecting Vision and Language with Localized Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03098/) (2019)
- [Speed/accuracy trade-offs for modern convolutional object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.10012/) (2016)
- [A Fast and Accurate One-Stage Approach to Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06354/) (2019)
- [Improving One-stage Visual Grounding by Recursive Sub-query Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01059/) (2020)
- [Single-Shot Refinement Neural Network for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06897/) (2017)
- [Natural Language Object Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04164/) (2015)
- [Learning Two-Branch Neural Networks for Image-Text Matching Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03470/) (2017)
- [Grounding Referring Expressions in Images by Variational Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01892/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Grounding of Objects from Natural Language Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07129/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When interacting with objects through cameras, or pictures, users often have a specific intent. For example, they may want to perform a visual search. With most object detection models relying on image pixels as their sole input, undesired results are not uncommon. Most typically: lack of a high-confidence detection on the object of interest, or detection with a wrong class label. The issue is especially severe when operating capacity-constrained mobile object detectors on-device. In this paper we investigate techniques to modulate mobile detectors to explicitly account for the user intent, expressed as an embedding of a simple query. Compared to standard detectors, query-modulated detectors show superior performance at detecting objects for a given user query. Thanks to large-scale training data synthesized from standard object detection annotations, query-modulated detectors also outperform a specialized referring expression recognition system. Query-modulated detectors can also be trained to simultaneously solve for both localizing a user query and standard detection, even outperforming standard mobile detectors at the canonical COCO task.