# NL-FCOS: Improving FCOS through Non-Local Modules for Object Detection Source: [NL-FCOS: Improving FCOS through Non-Local Modules for Object Detection]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T01:42:00.795Z Authors: Lukas Pavez, Jose M. Saavedra Rondo Published: 2022-03-29T15:00:14.000Z ## Abstract During the last years, we have seen significant advances in the object detection task, mainly due to the outperforming results of convolutional neural networks. In this vein, anchor-based models have achieved the best results. However, these models require prior information about the aspect and scales of target objects, needing more hyperparameters to fit. In addition, using anchors to fit bounding boxes seems far from how our visual system does the same visual task. Instead, our visual system uses the interactions of different scene parts to semantically identify objects, called perceptual grouping. An object detection methodology closer to the natural model is anchor-free detection, where models like FCOS or Centernet have shown competitive results, but these have not yet exploited the concept of perceptual grouping. Therefore, to increase the effectiveness of anchor-free models keeping the inference time low, we propose to add non-local attention (NL modules) modules to boost the feature map of the underlying backbone. NL modules implement the perceptual grouping mechanism, allowing receptive fields to cooperate in visual representation learning. We show that non-local modules combined with an FCOS head (NL-FCOS) are practical and efficient. Thus, we establish state-of-the-art performance in clothing detection and handwritten amount recognition problems. ## 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]() [PDF]()