MS-DETR: Efficient DETR Training with Mixed Supervision

DETR accomplishes end-to-end object detection through iteratively generating multiple object candidates based on image features and promoting one candidate for each ground-truth object. The traditional training procedure using one-to-one supervision in the original DETR lacks di-rect supervision for the object detection candidates. We aim at improving the DETR training efficiency by explicitly supervising the candidate generation procedure through mixing one-to-one supervision and one-to-many su-pervision. Our approach, namely MS-DETR, is simple, and places one-to-many supervision to the object queries of the primary decoder that is used for inference. In comparison to existing DETR variants with one-to-many supervision, such as Group DETR and Hybrid DETR, our approach does not need additional decoder branches or object queries; the object queries of the primary decoder in our approach di-rectly benefit from one-to-many supervision and thus are superior in object candidate prediction. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms related DETR variants, such as DN-DETR, Hybrid DETR, and Group DETR, and the combination with related DETR variants further improves the performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/Atten4Vis/MS-DETR.