Dynamic Query as Budgeting for Tiny Object Detection

Overview & Synopsis

Recent DETR-based tiny object detectors adopt dynamic query mechanisms to handle severe density imbalance. However, existing designs entangle two effects: how many and which queries are decoded. This entanglement obscures what drives the gains and complicates dynamic-query design; additional learned predictors and heuristic filtering also introduce overhead and potential selection errors. We disentangle these effects and show that dynamic query primarily acts as \emph{budgeting}---allocating decoder query capacity according to object density---rather than intricate query selection.Motivated by this view, we formulate a monotonic and conservative budgeting principle and propose a budgeting-based DETR (BUTR), a streamlined framework that uses a lightweight, non-learned budgeter to estimate an input-dependent query budget $K(x)$ from encoder confidences. BUTR retains standard Top-$K(x)$ query initialization without additional learned modules or heuristic filtering in the budgeter.At $800\times800$ resolution, BUTR-L achieves 35.7 AP at 47.8 FPS on AI-TOD-v2 and 29.8 AP at 42.1 FPS on VisDrone on an NVIDIA T4 GPU. Inference-time integration on COCO further demonstrates its applicability to general scenario detection. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangyi-magic/BUTR.