# QATMA: Quantization-Aware Training with Multimodal Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05964 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05964/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [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)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [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)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [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)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Channel Pruning for Accelerating Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06168/) (2017)
- [Learned Step Size Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08153/) (2019)
- [Up or Down? Adaptive Rounding for Post-Training Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10568/) (2020)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [Improved Knowledge Distillation via Teacher Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03393/) (2019)
- [DoReFa-Net: Training Low Bitwidth Convolutional Neural Networks with Low Bitwidth Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06160/) (2016)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Quantizing open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) models reduces their memory and computational costs, but extremely low-bit quantization severely degrades both cross-modal (region-text) and intra-modal (region-region) alignments. This multimodal degradation is a unique challenge that prior quantization methods for closed-vocabulary detectors fail to resolve. To overcome this, we propose Quantization-Aware Training with Multimodal Alignment (QATMA), the first multimodal-aware and architecture-agnostic QAT framework tailored for OVOD. QATMA integrates two key components: (i) Curriculum QAT, which partitions the detector by functional roles and progressively expands the quantization scope to suppress error accumulation and ensure stable optimization; and (ii) Text-anchored Pairwise Similarity Distillation, which transfers both region-text and region-region alignments from a full-precision teacher model via pairwise cosine similarities in the joint embedding space. Experimental results on LVIS and COCO zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that QATMA significantly outperforms existing QAT baselines under extremely low-bit settings, achieving gains of up to 4.3 and 7.6 AP, respectively.