# MambaRefine-YOLO: A Dual-Modality Small Object Detector for UAV Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19134 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19134/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [CARAFE: Content-Aware ReAssembly of FEatures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02188/) (2019)
- [Cross-Modality Fusion Transformer for Multispectral Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00273/) (2021)
- [QueryDet: Cascaded Sparse Query for Accelerating High-Resolution Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09136/) (2021)
- [DEIM: DETR with Improved Matching for Fast Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04234/) (2024)
- [Fusion-Mamba for Cross-modality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09146/) (2024)
- [Fusion of Multispectral Data Through Illumination-aware Deep Neural Networks for Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09972/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Coarse-to-Fine Learning for Oriented Tiny Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08876/) (2023)
- [Removal then Selection: A Coarse-to-Fine Fusion Perspective for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10731/) (2024)
- [Small Object Detection: A Comprehensive Survey on Challenges, Techniques and Real-World Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20516/) (2025)
- [UAVD-Mamba: Deformable Token Fusion Vision Mamba for Multimodal UAV Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00849/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Small object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery is a persistent challenge, hindered by low resolution and background clutter. While fusing RGB and infrared (IR) data offers a promising solution, existing methods often struggle with the trade-off between effective cross-modal interaction and computational efficiency. In this letter, we introduce MambaRefine-YOLO. Its core contributions are a Dual-Gated Complementary Mamba fusion module (DGC-MFM) that adaptively balances RGB and IR modalities through illumination-aware and difference-aware gating mechanisms, and a Hierarchical Feature Aggregation Neck (HFAN) that uses a ``refine-then-fuse'' strategy to enhance multi-scale features. Our comprehensive experiments validate this dual-pronged approach. On the dual-modality DroneVehicle dataset, the full model achieves a state-of-the-art mAP of 83.2%, an improvement of 7.9% over the baseline. On the single-modality VisDrone dataset, a variant using only the HFAN also shows significant gains, demonstrating its general applicability. Our work presents a superior balance between accuracy and speed, making it highly suitable for real-world UAV applications.