# DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09788 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09788/

## Key facts

- Cited by 354 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 99 of its 118 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 99)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (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)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 354)

- [VideoCrafter1: Open Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19512/) (2023)
- [UniPC: A Unified Predictor-Corrector Framework for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04867/) (2023)
- [A Tale of Two Features: Stable Diffusion Complements DINO for Zero-Shot Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15347/) (2023)
- [Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02153/) (2023)
- [MagicDrive: Street View Generation with Diverse 3D Geometry Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02601/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10647/) (2023)
- [Structural Pruning for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10924/) (2023)
- [DDP: Diffusion Model for Dense Visual Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17559/) (2023)
- [The All-Seeing Project: Towards Panoptic Visual Recognition and Understanding of the Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01907/) (2023)
- [How to Backdoor Diffusion Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05400/) (2022)
- [BeLFusion: Latent Diffusion for Behavior-Driven Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14304/) (2022)
- [DiffusionDepth: Diffusion Denoising Approach for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05021/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation with Multi-Hypothesis Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11579/) (2023)
- [HumanMAC: Masked Motion Completion for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03665/) (2023)
- [Dense Distinct Query for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12776/) (2023)
- [Dream the Impossible: Outlier Imagination with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13415/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17959/) (2023)
- [Selective Hourglass Mapping for Universal Image Restoration Based on Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11157/) (2024)
- [VillanDiffusion: A Unified Backdoor Attack Framework for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06874/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Diffusion Models for Time Series and Spatio-Temporal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18886/) (2024)
- [MomentDiff: Generative Video Moment Retrieval from Random to Real](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02869/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08702/) (2023)
- [Dif-Fusion: Towards High Color Fidelity in Infrared and Visible Image Fusion with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08072/) (2023)
- [GeoDiffusion: Text-Prompted Geometric Control for Object Detection Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04607/) (2023)
- [No Other Representation Component Is Needed: Diffusion Transformers Can Provide Representation Guidance by Themselves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02831/) (2025)
- [DiffusionRet: Generative Text-Video Retrieval with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09867/) (2023)
- [DiffusionInst: Diffusion Model for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02773/) (2022)
- [Learning to Localize Objects Improves Spatial Reasoning in Visual-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07449/) (2024)
- [Lexicon3D: Probing Visual Foundation Models for Complex 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03757/) (2024)
- [Point Cloud Pre-training with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14960/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose DiffusionDet, a new framework that formulates object detection as a denoising diffusion process from noisy boxes to object boxes. During the training stage, object boxes diffuse from ground-truth boxes to random distribution, and the model learns to reverse this noising process. In inference, the model refines a set of randomly generated boxes to the output results in a progressive way. Our work possesses an appealing property of flexibility, which enables the dynamic number of boxes and iterative evaluation. The extensive experiments on the standard benchmarks show that DiffusionDet achieves favorable performance compared to previous well-established detectors. For example, DiffusionDet achieves 5.3 AP and 4.8 AP gains when evaluated with more boxes and iteration steps, under a zero-shot transfer setting from COCO to CrowdHuman. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShoufaChen/DiffusionDet.