# RegionDet: A Benchmark for Region Detection Beyond Object Instances

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06850 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06850/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [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)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08421/) (2017)
- [DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09788/) (2022)
- [Simple Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06230/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Learning to Detect Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05448/) (2017)
- [Visual Semantic Role Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04474/) (2015)
- [ELEVATER: A Benchmark and Toolkit for Evaluating Language-Augmented Visual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08790/) (2022)
- [YOLOv13: Real-Time Object Detection with Hypergraph-Enhanced Adaptive Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17733/) (2025)
- [Real-Time Object Detection Meets DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20787/) (2025)
- [MI-DETR: An Object Detection Model with Multi-time Inquiries Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01463/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object detection is a fundamental task in computer vision and has achieved remarkable progress on standard benchmarks by localizing discrete and well-bounded object instances. However, many visual targets in real-world scenarios are not individual objects, but regions defined by visual states, scene context, object relations, and human activities, such as construction areas, damaged road regions, queues, group conversations, and vendor regions. Existing detection benchmarks are mainly built around object instances, providing limited support for systematically evaluating such region targets. To address this gap, we introduce Region Detection, a task that extends conventional object detection beyond object instances, and construct RegionDet, a benchmark for region target localization. RegionDet contains eight region categories, including Construction, Crossing, Damage, Queuing, Talking, Vendor, Waiting, and Walking, with COCO-style bounding-box annotations and evaluation protocols. We systematically evaluate representative closed-set and zero-shot/open-vocabulary detectors on RegionDet. Results show that closed-set detectors can partially learn region-level patterns under supervision, while zero-shot/open-vocabulary detectors struggle severely, revealing the strong object-centric bias of current vision-language detectors. Further analyses highlight key challenges in Region Detection, including weak boundary cues, strong context dependency, and insufficient relation-level region understanding. The RegionDet will be released.