# HMPE:HeatMap Embedding for Efficient Transformer-Based Small Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13469 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13469/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (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)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02034/) (2021)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [Nystr"omformer: A Nystr"om-Based Algorithm for Approximating Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03902/) (2021)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02976/) (2022)
- [Learning non-maximum suppression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02950/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Snake Convolution based on Topological Geometric Constraints for Tubular Structure Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08388/) (2023)
- [YOLO-Z: Improving small object detection in YOLOv5 for autonomous vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11798/) (2021)
- [SparseFormer: Detecting Objects in HRW Shots via Sparse Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07216/) (2025)
- [PCNet: A Structure Similarity Enhancement Method for Multispectral and Multimodal Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05124/) (2021)

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

- [Learning Where to Embed: Noise-Aware Positional Embedding for Query Retrieval in Small-Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15065/) (2026)
- [When Images Look Right and Retrieve Wrong: Coverage-Guided Cross-Scale Re-Indexing for Knowledge-Faithful Generative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20810/) (2026)
- [HGSQ: Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Detector for Real-Time Aerial Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13306/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current Transformer-based methods for small object detection continue emerging, yet they have still exhibited significant shortcomings. This paper introduces HeatMap Position Embedding (HMPE), a novel Transformer Optimization technique that enhances object detection performance by dynamically integrating positional encoding with semantic detection information through heatmap-guided adaptive learning.We also innovatively visualize the HMPE method, offering clear visualization of embedded information for parameter fine-tuning.We then create Multi-Scale ObjectBox-Heatmap Fusion Encoder (MOHFE) and HeatMap Induced High-Quality Queries for Decoder (HIDQ) modules. These are designed for the encoder and decoder, respectively, to generate high-quality queries and reduce background noise queries.Using both heatmap embedding and Linear-Snake Conv(LSConv) feature engineering, we enhance the embedding of massively diverse small object categories and reduced the decoder multihead layers, thereby accelerating both inference and training.In the generalization experiments, our approach outperforme the baseline mAP by 1.9% on the small object dataset (NWPU VHR-10) and by 1.2% on the general dataset (PASCAL VOC). By employing HMPE-enhanced embedding, we are able to reduce the number of decoder layers from eight to a minimum of three, significantly decreasing both inference and training costs.