# DS-Det: Single-Query Paradigm and Attention Disentangled Learning for Flexible Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19807 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19807/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [Efficient Attention: Attention with Linear Complexities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01243/) (2018)
- [CrowdHuman: A Benchmark for Detecting Human in a Crowd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00123/) (2018)
- [DETRs with Collaborative Hybrid Assignments Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12860/) (2022)
- [MambaOut: Do We Really Need Mamba for Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07992/) (2024)
- [Efficient DETR: Improving End-to-End Object Detector with Dense Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01318/) (2021)
- [Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14096/) (2022)
- [Sparse DETR: Efficient End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14330/) (2021)
- [Group DETR: Fast DETR Training with Group-Wise One-to-Many Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13085/) (2022)
- [Dense Distinct Query for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12776/) (2023)
- [Accelerating DETR Convergence via Semantic-Aligned Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06883/) (2022)
- [Rank-DETR for High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08854/) (2023)
- [WiderPerson: A Diverse Dataset for Dense Pedestrian Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12118/) (2019)

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

- [Order Matters: Competition-Guided Query Ordering for RNN-Based Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05191/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Popular transformer detectors have achieved promising performance through query-based learning using attention mechanisms. However, the roles of existing decoder query types (e.g., content query and positional query) are still underexplored. These queries are generally predefined with a fixed number (fixed-query), which limits their flexibility. We find that the learning of these fixed-query is impaired by Recurrent Opposing inTeractions (ROT) between two attention operations: Self-Attention (query-to-query) and Cross-Attention (query-to-encoder), thereby degrading decoder efficiency. Furthermore, "query ambiguity" arises when shared-weight decoder layers are processed with both one-to-one and one-to-many label assignments during training, violating DETR's one-to-one matching principle. To address these challenges, we propose DS-Det, a more efficient detector capable of detecting a flexible number of objects in images. Specifically, we reformulate and introduce a new unified Single-Query paradigm for decoder modeling, transforming the fixed-query into flexible. Furthermore, we propose a simplified decoder framework through attention disentangled learning: locating boxes with Cross-Attention (one-to-many process), deduplicating predictions with Self-Attention (one-to-one process), addressing "query ambiguity" and "ROT" issues directly, and enhancing decoder efficiency. We further introduce a unified PoCoo loss that leverages box size priors to prioritize query learning on hard samples such as small objects. Extensive experiments across five different backbone models on COCO2017 and WiderPerson datasets demonstrate the general effectiveness and superiority of DS-Det. The source codes are available at https://github.com/Med-Process/DS-Det/.