# Investigating Long-term Training for Remote Sensing Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15143 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15143/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Learning multiple visual domains with residual adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08045/) (2017)
- [Why gradient clipping accelerates training: A theoretical justification for adaptivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11881/) (2019)
- [Scale-MAE: A Scale-Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multiscale Geospatial Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14532/) (2022)
- [Knowledge distillation: A good teacher is patient and consistent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05237/) (2021)
- [Oriented R-CNN for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05699/) (2021)
- [ReDet: A Rotation-equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07733/) (2021)
- [RSPrompter: Learning to Prompt for Remote Sensing Instance Segmentation based on Visual Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16269/) (2023)
- [FCOS: A simple and strong anchor-free object detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09214/) (2020)
- [CROMA: Remote Sensing Representations with Contrastive Radar-Optical Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00566/) (2023)
- [Efficient parametrization of multi-domain deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10082/) (2018)
- [Gliding vertex on the horizontal bounding box for multi-oriented object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09358/) (2019)
- [MMRotate: A Rotated Object Detection Benchmark using PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13317/) (2022)
- [Anchor-free Oriented Proposal Generator for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01931/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Remote Sensing Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02825/) (2022)
- [Oriented RepPoints for Aerial Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11111/) (2021)
- [The Step Decay Schedule: A Near Optimal, Geometrically Decaying Learning Rate Procedure For Least Squares](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12838/) (2019)
- [MTP: Advancing Remote Sensing Foundation Model via Multi-Task Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13430/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, numerous methods have achieved impressive performance in remote sensing object detection, relying on convolution or transformer architectures. Such detectors typically have a feature backbone to extract useful features from raw input images. A common practice in current detectors is initializing the backbone with pre-trained weights available online. Fine-tuning the backbone is typically required to generate features suitable for remote-sensing images. While the prolonged training could lead to over-fitting, hindering the extraction of basic visual features, it can enable models to gradually extract deeper insights and richer representations from remote sensing data. Striking a balance between these competing factors is critical for achieving optimal performance. In this study, we aim to investigate the performance and characteristics of remote sensing object detection models under very long training schedules, and propose a novel method named Dynamic Backbone Freezing (DBF) for feature backbone fine-tuning on remote sensing object detection under long-term training. Our method addresses the dilemma of whether the backbone should extract low-level generic features or possess specific knowledge of the remote sensing domain, by introducing a module called 'Freezing Scheduler' to manage the update of backbone features during long-term training dynamically. Extensive experiments on DOTA and DIOR-R show that our approach enables more accurate model learning while substantially reducing computational costs in long-term training. Besides, it can be seamlessly adopted without additional effort due to its straightforward design. The code is available at https://github.com/unique-chan/dbf.