# DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12329 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/

## Key facts

- Cited by 573 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [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)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Conditional DETR for Fast Training Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06152/) (2021)
- [Fast Convergence of DETR with Spatially Modulated Co-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07448/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Transformer-based Set Prediction for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10881/) (2020)
- [Efficient DETR: Improving End-to-End Object Detector with Dense Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01318/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 573)

- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [PETR: Position Embedding Transformation for Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05625/) (2022)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09788/) (2022)
- [PETRv2: A Unified Framework for 3D Perception from Multi-Camera Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01256/) (2022)
- [Mask DINO: Towards A Unified Transformer-based Framework for Object Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02777/) (2022)
- [OneFormer: One Transformer to Rule Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06220/) (2022)
- [YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12524/) (2025)
- [DETRs with Collaborative Hybrid Assignments Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12860/) (2022)
- [Motion Transformer with Global Intention Localization and Local Movement Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13508/) (2022)
- [Visual Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09741/) (2022)
- [A Simple Framework for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08131/) (2023)
- [MapTRv2: An End-to-End Framework for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05736/) (2023)
- [Query-Dependent Video Representation for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13874/) (2023)
- [DETRs with Hybrid Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13080/) (2022)
- [SparseBEV: High-Performance Sparse 3D Object Detection from Multi-Camera Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09244/) (2023)
- [MOTRv2: Bootstrapping End-to-End Multi-Object Tracking by Pretrained Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09791/) (2022)
- [MTR++: Multi-Agent Motion Prediction with Symmetric Scene Modeling and Guided Intention Querying](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17770/) (2023)
- [CORA: Adapting CLIP for Open-Vocabulary Detection with Region Prompting and Anchor Pre-Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13076/) (2023)
- [DriveTransformer: Unified Transformer for Scalable End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07656/) (2025)
- [Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09854/) (2023)
- [Delving into the Devils of Bird's-eye-view Perception: A Review, Evaluation and Recipe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05324/) (2022)
- [GaussCtrl: Multi-View Consistent Text-Driven 3D Gaussian Splatting Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08733/) (2024)
- [ConvMAE: Masked Convolution Meets Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03892/) (2022)
- [CenterFormer: Center-based Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05588/) (2022)
- [Group DETR: Fast DETR Training with Group-Wise One-to-Many Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13085/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present in this paper a novel query formulation using dynamic anchor boxes for DETR (DEtection TRansformer) and offer a deeper understanding of the role of queries in DETR. This new formulation directly uses box coordinates as queries in Transformer decoders and dynamically updates them layer-by-layer. Using box coordinates not only helps using explicit positional priors to improve the query-to-feature similarity and eliminate the slow training convergence issue in DETR, but also allows us to modulate the positional attention map using the box width and height information. Such a design makes it clear that queries in DETR can be implemented as performing soft ROI pooling layer-by-layer in a cascade manner. As a result, it leads to the best performance on MS-COCO benchmark among the DETR-like detection models under the same setting, e.g., AP 45.7% using ResNet50-DC5 as backbone trained in 50 epochs. We also conducted extensive experiments to confirm our analysis and verify the effectiveness of our methods. Code is available at urlhttps://github.com/SlongLiu/DAB-DETR.