# Unleashing the Power of Chain-of-Prediction for Monocular 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04594 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04594/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06525/) (2024)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07179/) (2018)
- [Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13848/) (2024)
- [Categorical Depth Distribution Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01100/) (2021)
- [SMOKE: Single-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection via Keypoint Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10111/) (2020)
- [Probabilistic and Geometric Depth: Detecting Objects in Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14160/) (2021)
- [Autoregressive Video Generation without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14169/) (2024)
- [Objects are Different: Flexible Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02323/) (2021)
- [Learning Depth-Guided Convolutions for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04799/) (2019)
- [Stereo R-CNN based 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09738/) (2019)
- [Omni3D: A Large Benchmark and Model for 3D Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10660/) (2022)
- [Geometry Uncertainty Projection Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13774/) (2021)
- [Delving into Localization Errors for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16237/) (2021)
- [Accurate Monocular Object Detection via Color-Embedded 3D Reconstruction for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11444/) (2019)
- [Kinematic 3D Object Detection in Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09548/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Pseudo-LiDAR Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04582/) (2020)
- [MonoDTR: Monocular 3D Object Detection with Depth-Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10981/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Unlearning Isn't Invisible: Detecting Unlearning Traces in LLMs from Model Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14003/) (2025)
- [FusionAgent: A Multimodal Agent with Dynamic Model Selection for Human Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26908/) (2026)
- [Towards Intrinsic-Aware Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27059/) (2026)
- [EmoTaG: Emotion-Aware Talking Head Synthesis on Gaussian Splatting with Few-Shot Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21332/) (2026)
- [DepthAgent: Towards Better Universal Depth Estimation via Sample-wise Expert Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23281/) (2026)
- [MonoPRIO: Adaptive Prior Conditioning for Unified Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14781/) (2026)
- [Who Built This Model? Tracing LLM Lineage via Spectral Fingerprints in Weight Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07786/) (2026)
- [RefineAny3D: Depth Refinement as Semantic Alignment for Monocular 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09147/) (2026)
- [OmniAct3D: Leveraging Foundation Geometry and Evidence-Grounded Reasoning for Panoramic 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03015/) (2026)
- [MonoMIP: Multi-Height Inverse Perspective Mapping for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19071/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular 3D detection (Mono3D) aims to infer 3D bounding boxes from a single RGB image. Without auxiliary sensors such as LiDAR, this task is inherently ill-posed since the 3D-to-2D projection introduces depth ambiguity. Previous works often predict 3D attributes (e.g., depth, size, and orientation) in parallel, overlooking that these attributes are inherently correlated through the 3D-to-2D projection. However, simply enforcing such correlations through sequential prediction can propagate errors across attributes, especially when objects are occluded or truncated, where inaccurate size or orientation predictions can further amplify depth errors. Therefore, neither parallel nor sequential prediction is optimal. In this paper, we propose MonoCoP, an adaptive framework that learns when and how to leverage inter-attribute correlations with two complementary designs. A Chain-of-Prediction (CoP) explores inter-attribute correlations through feature-level learning, propagation, and aggregation, while an Uncertainty-Guided Selector (GS) dynamically switches between CoP and parallel paradigms for each object based on the predicted uncertainty. By combining their strengths, MonoCoP achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on KITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo, significantly improving depth accuracy, particularly for distant objects.