Dynamic DETR: End-to-End Object Detection with Dynamic Attention

In this paper, we present a novel Dynamic DETR (Detection with Transformers) approach by introducing dynamic attentions into both the encoder and decoder stages of DETR to break its two limitations on small feature resolution and slow training convergence. To address the first limitation, which is due to the quadratic computational complexity of the self-attention module in Transformer encoders, we propose a dynamic encoder to approximate the Transformer encoder’s attention mechanism using a convolution-based dynamic encoder with various attention types. Such an encoder can dynamically adjust attentions based on multiple factors such as scale importance, spatial importance, and representation (i.e., feature dimension) importance. To mitigate the second limitation of learning difficulty, we introduce a dynamic decoder by replacing the cross-attention module with a ROI-based dynamic attention in the Transformer decoder. Such a decoder effectively assists Transformers to focus on region of interests from a coarse-to-fine manner and dramatically lowers the learning difficulty, leading to a much faster convergence with fewer training epochs. We conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate our advantages. Our Dynamic DETR significantly reduces the training epochs (by 14×), yet results in a much better performance (by 3.6 on mAP). Meanwhile, in the standard 1× setup with ResNet-50 backbone, we archive a new state-of-the-art performance that further proves the learning effectiveness of the proposed approach.