# DroneFINE: Domain-Aware Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Detectors for Drone Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00338 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00338/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (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)
- [HyperNetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09106/) (2016)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00518/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Bypasses Are Better Vision Transformer Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07039/) (2022)
- [AerialVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06735/) (2023)
- [Towards Realistic UAV Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark, and Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07087/) (2024)
- [DINO-X: A Unified Vision Model for Open-World Object Detection and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14347/) (2024)
- [Clustered Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08008/) (2019)
- [V3Det: Vast Vocabulary Visual Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03752/) (2023)
- [QueryDet: Cascaded Sparse Query for Accelerating High-Resolution Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09136/) (2021)
- [An Open and Comprehensive Pipeline for Unified Object Grounding and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02361/) (2024)
- [Locate Anything on Earth: Advancing Open-Vocabulary Object Detection for Remote Sensing Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09110/) (2024)
- [UAVs Meet LLMs: Overviews and Perspectives Toward Agentic Low-Altitude Mobility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02341/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Sparse Convolutional Networks with Global Context Enhancement for Faster Object Detection on Drone Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14488/) (2023)
- [UFPMP-Det: Toward Accurate and Efficient Object Detection on Drone Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10415/) (2021)
- [5%>100%: Breaking Performance Shackles of Full Fine-Tuning on Visual Recognition Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08345/) (2024)
- [CityNavAgent: Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Semantic Planning and Global Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05622/) (2025)
- [GRIT: General Robust Image Task Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13653/) (2022)
- [ESOD: Efficient Small Object Detection on High-Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16424/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [From Semantic Grounding to Decision Optimization: A Unified Framework for Long-Horizon UAV Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09564/) (2026)
- [YOLO-PEFT: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning on YOLO Family](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07051/) (2026)
- [Variable-Granularity Tokenization for High-Resolution Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28706/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object detection for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) working in open and dynamic environments is a highly challenging task. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have offered a powerful solution for universal object detection, adapting them to UAV scenarios remains non-trivial due to a substantial domain gap between VLM pre-training data and aerial imagery. The prevailing Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods prove ineffective in bridging this gap, as VLMs' "natural-scene, foreground-dominant" visual priors misalign with the "bird's-eye-view, background-dominant, small-object" characteristics of UAV data. To address this issue, we propose DroneFINE, a novel PEFT paradigm comprising two domain-aware complementary modules tailored for VLM-based drone image detectors. Specifically, a data-dependent, foreground-aware, and multi-path adaptation mechanism named HyperAdapter is designed, which overcomes the static structural constraints of PEFT. In addition, a background suppression algorithm named SemanticGate is developed. It is a text-conditioned guidance strategy that employs background vocabulary to actively guide the model in suppressing responses from irrelevant regions. Extensive experiments on VisDrone and UAVDT demonstrate that DroneFINE significantly outperforms existing PEFT methods and achieves performance comparable to full fine-tuning while substantially reducing the number of trainable parameters.