FlowDet: Unifying Object Detection and Generative Transport Flows
This work improves object detection performance for computer vision applications, offering a novel generative approach that is incremental over prior diffusion-based methods.
The paper tackles object detection by reformulating it as a generative transport problem using Conditional Flow Matching, outperforming diffusion-based and non-generative methods with gains of up to +3.6% AP on COCO and +4.2% AP_rare on LVIS.
We present FlowDet, the first formulation of object detection using modern Conditional Flow Matching techniques. This work follows from DiffusionDet, which originally framed detection as a generative denoising problem in the bounding box space via diffusion. We revisit and generalise this formulation to a broader class of generative transport problems, while maintaining the ability to vary the number of boxes and inference steps without re-training. In contrast to the curved stochastic transport paths induced by diffusion, FlowDet learns simpler and straighter paths resulting in faster scaling of detection performance as the number of inference steps grows. We find that this reformulation enables us to outperform diffusion based detection systems (as well as non-generative baselines) across a wide range of experiments, including various precision/recall operating points using multiple feature backbones and datasets. In particular, when evaluating under recall-constrained settings, we can highlight the effects of the generative transport without over-compensating with large numbers of proposals. This provides gains of up to +3.6% AP and +4.2% AP$_{rare}$ over DiffusionDet on the COCO and LVIS datasets, respectively.