# Bridging the Scale Gap: Balanced Tiny and General Object Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01665 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01665/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Vision mixture-of-experts, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 44 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Vision mixture-of-experts](https://mlsanity.com/moe/vision-mixture-of-experts/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Mixture-of-Experts with Expert Choice Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09368/) (2022)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [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)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [Conditional DETR for Fast Training Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06152/) (2021)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [Mask DINO: Towards A Unified Transformer-based Framework for Object Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02777/) (2022)
- [YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12524/) (2025)
- [MoE-LLaVA: Mixture of Experts for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15947/) (2024)
- [DETRs with Collaborative Hybrid Assignments Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12860/) (2022)
- [RepPoints: Point Set Representation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11490/) (2019)
- [DetectoRS: Detecting Objects with Recursive Feature Pyramid and Switchable Atrous Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02334/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Head: Unifying Object Detection Heads with Attentions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08322/) (2021)
- [Scale-Aware Trident Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01892/) (2019)
- [Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14096/) (2022)

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

- [Variable-Granularity Tokenization for High-Resolution Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28706/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tiny object detection in remote sensing imagery has attracted significant research interest in recent years. Despite recent progress, achieving balanced detection performance across diverse object scales remains a formidable challenge, particularly in scenarios where dense tiny objects and large objects coexist. Although large foundation models have revolutionized general vision tasks, their application to tiny object detection remains unexplored due to the extreme scale variation and density distribution inherent to remote sensing imagery. To bridge this scale gap, we propose ScaleBridge-Det, to the best of our knowledge, the first large detection framework designed for tiny objects, which could achieve balanced performance across diverse scales through scale-adaptive expert routing and density-guided query allocation. Specifically, we introduce a Routing-Enhanced Mixture Attention (REM) module that dynamically selects and fuses scale-specific expert features via adaptive routing to address the tendency of standard MoE models to favor dominant scales. REM generates complementary and discriminative multi-scale representations suitable for both tiny and large objects. Furthermore, we present a Density-Guided Dynamic Query (DGQ) module that predicts object density to adaptively adjust query positions and numbers, enabling efficient resource allocation for objects of varying scales. The proposed framework allows ScaleBridge-Det to simultaneously optimize performance for both dense tiny and general objects without trade-offs. Extensive experiments on benchmark and cross-domain datasets demonstrate that ScaleBridge-Det achieves state-of-the-art performance on AI-TOD-V2 and DTOD, while exhibiting superior cross-domain robustness on VisDrone.