# Integrally Migrating Pre-trained Transformer Encoder-decoders for Visual Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.09613 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09613/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [MViTv2: Improved Multiscale Vision Transformers for Classification and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01526/) (2021)
- [Few-shot Object Detection via Feature Reweighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01866/) (2018)
- [Conformer: Local Features Coupling Global Representations for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03889/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Detection Transfer Learning with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11429/) (2021)
- [DeFRCN: Decoupled Faster R-CNN for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09017/) (2021)
- [Beyond Max-Margin: Class Margin Equilibrium for Few-shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04612/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Generic-to-Specific Distillation of Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14771/) (2023)
- [MaeFuse: Transferring Omni Features with Pretrained Masked Autoencoders for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion via Guided Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11016/) (2024)
- [Masked Modeling for Self-supervised Representation Learning on Vision and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00897/) (2023)
- [Spatial Transform Decoupling for Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10561/) (2023)
- [SMILe: Leveraging Submodular Mutual Information For Robust Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02665/) (2024)
- [Aerial Image Object Detection With Vision Transformer Detector (ViTDet)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12058/) (2023)
- [Proposal Distribution Calibration for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07618/) (2022)
- [Few-shot Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12466/) (2024)
- [LV-OSD: Language-Vision-Complementary Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28271/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern object detectors have taken the advantages of backbone networks pre-trained on large scale datasets. Except for the backbone networks, however, other components such as the detector head and the feature pyramid network (FPN) remain trained from scratch, which hinders fully tapping the potential of representation models. In this study, we propose to integrally migrate pre-trained transformer encoder-decoders (imTED) to a detector, constructing a feature extraction path which is ``fully pre-trained" so that detectors' generalization capacity is maximized. The essential differences between imTED with the baseline detector are twofold: (1) migrating the pre-trained transformer decoder to the detector head while removing the randomly initialized FPN from the feature extraction path; and (2) defining a multi-scale feature modulator (MFM) to enhance scale adaptability. Such designs not only reduce randomly initialized parameters significantly but also unify detector training with representation learning intendedly. Experiments on the MS COCO object detection dataset show that imTED consistently outperforms its counterparts by ~2.4 AP. Without bells and whistles, imTED improves the state-of-the-art of few-shot object detection by up to 7.6 AP. Code is available at https://github.com/LiewFeng/imTED.