# Dual-Stream Attention with Multi-Modal Queries for Object Detection in Transportation Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04868 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04868/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (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)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [Dense Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09157/) (2020)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [Conditional DETR for Fast Training Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06152/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14940/) (2022)
- [Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06303/) (2020)
- [Open-Vocabulary DETR with Conditional Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11876/) (2022)
- [The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00518/) (2018)
- [PolarMask: Single Shot Instance Segmentation with Polar Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13226/) (2019)
- [UA-DETRAC: A New Benchmark and Protocol for Multi-Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04136/) (2015)
- [Clustered Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08008/) (2019)
- [QueryDet: Cascaded Sparse Query for Accelerating High-Resolution Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09136/) (2021)
- [Align Anything: Training All-Modality Models to Follow Instructions with Language Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15838/) (2024)
- [Poly-YOLO: higher speed, more precise detection and instance segmentation for YOLOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13243/) (2020)
- [Cascaded Zoom-in Detector for High Resolution Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08747/) (2023)
- [UAV-DETR: Efficient End-to-End Object Detection for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01855/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer-based object detectors often struggle with occlusions, fine-grained localization, and computational inefficiency caused by fixed queries and dense attention. We propose DAMM, Dual-stream Attention with Multi-Modal queries, a novel framework introducing both query adaptation and structured cross-attention for improved accuracy and efficiency. DAMM capitalizes on three types of queries: appearance-based queries from vision-language models, positional queries using polygonal embeddings, and random learned queries for general scene coverage. Furthermore, a dual-stream cross-attention module separately refines semantic and spatial features, boosting localization precision in cluttered scenes. We evaluated DAMM on four challenging benchmarks, and it achieved state-of-the-art performance in average precision (AP) and recall, demonstrating the effectiveness of multi-modal query adaptation and dual-stream attention. Source code is at: hrefhttps://github.com/DET-LIP/DAMMGitHub.