# LED: LLM Enhanced Open-Vocabulary Object Detection without Human Curated Data Generation

Source: [LED: LLM Enhanced Open-Vocabulary Object Detection without Human Curated Data Generation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa7b641e209131cea8825e>)

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

Data updated: 2025-10-27T07:02:34.980Z

Authors: Yang Zhou, Shiyu Zhao, Yuxiao Chen, Zhenting Wang, Can Jin, Dimitris N. Metaxas

Published: 2025-03-18T00:50:40.000Z

## Abstract

Large foundation models trained on large-scale vision-language data can boost Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVD) via synthetic training data, yet the hand-crafted pipelines often introduce bias and overfit to specific prompts. We sidestep this issue by directly fusing hidden states from Large Language Models (LLMs) into detectors-an avenue surprisingly under-explored. This paper presents a systematic method to enhance visual grounding by utilizing decoder layers of the LLM of an MLLM. We introduce a zero-initialized cross-attention adapter to enable efficient knowledge fusion from LLMs to object detectors, a new approach called LED (LLM Enhanced Open-Vocabulary Object Detection). We find that intermediate LLM layers already encode rich spatial semantics; adapting only the early layers yields most of the gain. With Swin-T as the vision encoder, Qwen2-0.5B + LED lifts GroundingDINO by 3.82 % on OmniLabel at just 8.7 % extra GFLOPs, and a larger vision backbone pushes the improvement to 6.22 %. Extensive ablations on adapter variants, LLM scales and fusion depths further corroborate our design.

## Recorded benchmark results

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## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13794>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13794.pdf>)
