# Order Matters: Competition-Guided Query Ordering for RNN-Based Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05191 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05191/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Learning to (Learn at Test Time): RNNs with Expressive Hidden States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04620/) (2024)
- [xLSTM: Extended Long Short-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04517/) (2024)
- [CrowdHuman: A Benchmark for Detecting Human in a Crowd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00123/) (2018)
- [DETRs with Collaborative Hybrid Assignments Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12860/) (2022)
- [DETRs with Hybrid Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13080/) (2022)
- [Group DETR: Fast DETR Training with Group-Wise One-to-Many Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13085/) (2022)
- [Vision-RWKV: Efficient and Scalable Visual Perception with RWKV-Like Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02308/) (2024)
- [AdaMixer: A Fast-Converging Query-Based Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16507/) (2022)
- [Dense Distinct Query for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12776/) (2023)
- [DEIM: DETR with Improved Matching for Fast Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04234/) (2024)
- [Rank-DETR for High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08854/) (2023)
- [What Makes for End-to-End Object Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05780/) (2020)
- [Detection Transformer with Stable Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04742/) (2023)
- [MS-DETR: Efficient DETR Training with Mixed Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03989/) (2024)
- [Salience DETR: Enhancing Detection Transformer with Hierarchical Salience Filtering Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16131/) (2024)
- [DQ-DETR: DETR with Dynamic Query for Tiny Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03507/) (2024)
- [Relation DETR: Exploring Explicit Position Relation Prior for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11699/) (2024)
- [Mamba YOLO: A Simple Baseline for Object Detection with State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05835/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

DETR-style detectors use one-to-one bipartite matching during training to assign object queries to ground-truth objects, enabling end-to-end set prediction without non-maximum suppression (NMS). However, without an explicit de-duplication procedure, multiple queries can still produce highly similar hypotheses for the same object, making training unstable and predictions less decisive. Inspired by the sequential ordering of NMS, we propose DETRNN, a plug-and-play module that turns unordered object queries into a competition-aware sequence for recurrent refinement. DETRNN builds an explicit confidence-and-similarity based order from prior predictions, then refines queries with an RNN along this order to model competition inside the decoder. This ordered recurrent refinement reduces redundant predictions, stabilizes optimization, and improves final detection accuracy. Experiments on multiple DETR-style detectors show consistent gains with comparable efficiency. Code repository: https://github.com/nigelwoo2008-coder/DETRNN.