# Dynamic Multi-Scale Loss Optimization for Object Detection

Source: [Dynamic Multi-Scale Loss Optimization for Object Detection](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6a7a1e209131cea28729>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T23:26:28.956Z

Authors: Yihao Luo, Xiang Cao, Juntao Zhang, Peng Cheng, Tianjiang Wang, Qi Feng

Published: 2021-08-09T13:12:41.000Z

## Abstract

With the continuous improvement of the performance of object detectors via advanced model architectures, imbalance problems in the training process have received more attention. It is a common paradigm in object detection frameworks to perform multi-scale detection. However, each scale is treated equally during training. In this paper, we carefully study the objective imbalance of multi-scale detector training. We argue that the loss in each scale level is neither equally important nor independent. Different from the existing solutions of setting multi-task weights, we dynamically optimize the loss weight of each scale level in the training process. Specifically, we propose an Adaptive Variance Weighting (AVW) to balance multi-scale loss according to the statistical variance. Then we develop a novel Reinforcement Learning Optimization (RLO) to decide the weighting scheme probabilistically during training. The proposed dynamic methods make better utilization of multi-scale training loss without extra computational complexity and learnable parameters for backpropagation. Experiments show that our approaches can consistently boost the performance over various baseline detectors on Pascal VOC and MS COCO benchmark.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.04014>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.04014.pdf>)
