# A Dual Weighting Label Assignment Scheme for Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.09730 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09730/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (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)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [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)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Conditional DETR for Fast Training Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06152/) (2021)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [VarifocalNet: An IoU-aware Dense Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13367/) (2020)
- [TOOD: Task-aligned One-stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07755/) (2021)
- [UnitBox: An Advanced Object Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01471/) (2016)
- [OTA: Optimal Transport Assignment for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14259/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12524/) (2025)
- [YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02976/) (2022)
- [Dense Distinct Query for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12776/) (2023)
- [Dual Memory Networks: A Versatile Adaptation Approach for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17589/) (2024)
- [RaLiBEV: Radar and LiDAR BEV Fusion Learning for Anchor Box Free Object Detection Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06108/) (2022)
- [PIDray: A Large-scale X-ray Benchmark for Real-World Prohibited Item Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10763/) (2022)
- [MixTeacher: Mining Promising Labels with Mixed Scale Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09061/) (2023)
- [UniHead: Unifying Multi-Perception for Detection Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13242/) (2023)
- [One-to-Few Label Assignment for End-to-End Dense Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11567/) (2023)
- [Zone Evaluation: Revealing Spatial Bias in Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13215/) (2023)
- [ASAG: Building Strong One-Decoder-Layer Sparse Detectors via Adaptive Sparse Anchor Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09242/) (2023)
- [DEYO: DETR with YOLO for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16370/) (2024)
- [Align-DETR: Enhancing End-to-end Object Detection with Aligned Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07527/) (2023)
- [Similarity Distance-Based Label Assignment for Tiny Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02394/) (2024)
- [Correlation Loss: Enforcing Correlation between Classification and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01019/) (2023)
- [PETDet: Proposal Enhancement for Two-Stage Fine-Grained Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10515/) (2023)
- [Task-Specific Context Decoupling for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01047/) (2023)
- [Deep Omni-supervised Learning for Rib Fracture Detection from Chest Radiology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13301/) (2023)
- [Polar R-CNN: End-to-End Lane Detection with Fewer Anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01499/) (2024)
- [OD-VIRAT: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Object Detection in Realistic Surveillance Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12396/) (2025)
- [Towards Spatial Equilibrium Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05957/) (2023)
- [Multi-Semantic Interactive Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10411/) (2023)
- [A Cross-direction Task Decoupling Network for Small Logo Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02503/) (2023)
- [RFAssigner: A Generic Label Assignment Strategy for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01240/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Label assignment (LA), which aims to assign each training sample a positive (pos) and a negative (neg) loss weight, plays an important role in object detection. Existing LA methods mostly focus on the design of pos weighting function, while the neg weight is directly derived from the pos weight. Such a mechanism limits the learning capacity of detectors. In this paper, we explore a new weighting paradigm, termed dual weighting (DW), to specify pos and neg weights separately. We first identify the key influential factors of pos/neg weights by analyzing the evaluation metrics in object detection, and then design the pos and neg weighting functions based on them. Specifically, the pos weight of a sample is determined by the consistency degree between its classification and localization scores, while the neg weight is decomposed into two terms: the probability that it is a neg sample and its importance conditioned on being a neg sample. Such a weighting strategy offers greater flexibility to distinguish between important and less important samples, resulting in a more effective object detector. Equipped with the proposed DW method, a single FCOS-ResNet-50 detector can reach 41.5% mAP on COCO under 1x schedule, outperforming other existing LA methods. It consistently improves the baselines on COCO by a large margin under various backbones without bells and whistles. Code is available at https://github.com/strongwolf/DW.