# Bucketed Ranking-based Losses for Efficient Training of Object Detectors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14204 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14204/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [DETRs with Collaborative Hybrid Assignments Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12860/) (2022)
- [Libra R-CNN: Towards Balanced Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02701/) (2019)
- [Probabilistic Anchor Assignment with IoU Prediction for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08103/) (2020)
- [Imbalance Problems in Object Detection: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00169/) (2019)
- [Smooth-AP: Smoothing the Path Towards Large-Scale Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12163/) (2020)
- [FreeAnchor: Learning to Match Anchors for Visual Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02466/) (2019)
- [Towards Accurate One-Stage Object Detection with AP-Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06373/) (2019)
- [A Ranking-based, Balanced Loss Function Unifying Classification and Localisation in Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13592/) (2020)
- [DR Loss: Improving Object Detection by Distributional Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10156/) (2019)
- [AP-Loss for Accurate One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07294/) (2020)
- [Rank & Sort Loss for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11669/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [QAMRO: Quality-aware Adaptive Margin Ranking Optimization for Human-aligned Assessment of Audio Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08957/) (2025)
- [Foundation Models for Trajectory Planning in Autonomous Driving: A Review of Progress and Open Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00021/) (2025)
- [Improving Transformer Based Line Segment Detection with Matched Predicting and Re-ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17766/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ranking-based loss functions, such as Average Precision Loss and Rank&Sort Loss, outperform widely used score-based losses in object detection. These loss functions better align with the evaluation criteria, have fewer hyperparameters, and offer robustness against the imbalance between positive and negative classes. However, they require pairwise comparisons among P positive and N negative predictions, introducing a time complexity of O(PN), which is prohibitive since N is often large (e.g., 108 in ATSS). Despite their advantages, the widespread adoption of ranking-based losses has been hindered by their high time and space complexities. In this paper, we focus on improving the efficiency of ranking-based loss functions. To this end, we propose Bucketed Ranking-based Losses which group negative predictions into B buckets (B ll N) in order to reduce the number of pairwise comparisons so that time complexity can be reduced. Our method enhances the time complexity, reducing it to O(max (N log(N), P2)). To validate our method and show its generality, we conducted experiments on 2 different tasks, 3 different datasets, 7 different detectors. We show that Bucketed Ranking-based (BR) Losses yield the same accuracy with the unbucketed versions and provide 2× faster training on average. We also train, for the first time, transformer-based object detectors using ranking-based losses, thanks to the efficiency of our BR. When we train CoDETR, a state-of-the-art transformer-based object detector, using our BR Loss, we consistently outperform its original results over several different backbones. Code is available at https://github.com/blisgard/BucketedRankingBasedLosses