# Cross-DINO: Cross the Deep MLP and Transformer for Small Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21868 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21868/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (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)
- [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)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05055/) (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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [UHR-DETR: Efficient End-to-End Small Object Detection for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21435/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Small Object Detection (SOD) poses significant challenges due to limited information and the model's low class prediction score. While Transformer-based detectors have shown promising performance, their potential for SOD remains largely unexplored. In typical DETR-like frameworks, the CNN backbone network, specialized in aggregating local information, struggles to capture the necessary contextual information for SOD. The multiple attention layers in the Transformer Encoder face difficulties in effectively attending to small objects and can also lead to blurring of features. Furthermore, the model's lower class prediction score of small objects compared to large objects further increases the difficulty of SOD. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach called Cross-DINO. This approach incorporates the deep MLP network to aggregate initial feature representations with both short and long range information for SOD. Then, a new Cross Coding Twice Module (CCTM) is applied to integrate these initial representations to the Transformer Encoder feature, enhancing the details of small objects. Additionally, we introduce a new kind of soft label named Category-Size (CS), integrating the Category and Size of objects. By treating CS as new ground truth, we propose a new loss function called Boost Loss to improve the class prediction score of the model. Extensive experimental results on COCO, WiderPerson, VisDrone, AI-TOD, and SODA-D datasets demonstrate that Cross-DINO efficiently improves the performance of DETR-like models on SOD. Specifically, our model achieves 36.4% APs on COCO for SOD with only 45M parameters, outperforming the DINO by +4.4% APS (36.4% vs. 32.0%) with fewer parameters and FLOPs, under 12 epochs training setting. The source codes will be available at https://github.com/Med-Process/Cross-DINO.