# Mutual Supervision for Dense Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05986 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05986/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [RepPoints: Point Set Representation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11490/) (2019)
- [VarifocalNet: An IoU-aware Dense Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13367/) (2020)
- [Acquisition of Localization Confidence for Accurate Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11590/) (2018)
- [Scale-Aware Trident Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01892/) (2019)
- [Probabilistic Anchor Assignment with IoU Prediction for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08103/) (2020)
- [AutoAssign: Differentiable Label Assignment for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03496/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Classification and Localization for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06493/) (2019)
- [Revisiting the Sibling Head in Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07540/) (2020)
- [Prime Sample Attention in Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04821/) (2019)
- [What Makes for End-to-End Object Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05780/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [AdaMixer: A Fast-Converging Query-Based Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16507/) (2022)
- [A Dual Weighting Label Assignment Scheme for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09730/) (2022)
- [MixTeacher: Mining Promising Labels with Mixed Scale Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09061/) (2023)
- [Logit Normalization for Long-tail Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17020/) (2022)
- [StageInteractor: Query-based Object Detector with Cross-stage Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04978/) (2023)
- [Decoupled DETR: Spatially Disentangling Localization and Classification for Improved End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15955/) (2023)
- [Efficient Decoder-free Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06829/) (2022)
- [Align-DETR: Enhancing End-to-end Object Detection with Aligned Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07527/) (2023)
- [Towards Spatial Equilibrium Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05957/) (2023)
- [Refined Response Distillation for Class-Incremental Player Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00620/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The classification and regression head are both indispensable components to build up a dense object detector, which are usually supervised by the same training samples and thus expected to have consistency with each other for detecting objects accurately in the detection pipeline. In this paper, we break the convention of the same training samples for these two heads in dense detectors and explore a novel supervisory paradigm, termed as Mutual Supervision (MuSu), to respectively and mutually assign training samples for the classification and regression head to ensure this consistency. MuSu defines training samples for the regression head mainly based on classification predicting scores and in turn, defines samples for the classification head based on localization scores from the regression head. Experimental results show that the convergence of detectors trained by this mutual supervision is guaranteed and the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on the challenging MS COCO benchmark. We also find that tiling more anchors at the same location benefits detectors and leads to further improvements under this training scheme. We hope this work can inspire further researches on the interaction of the classification and regression task in detection and the supervision paradigm for detectors, especially separately for these two heads.