Reading Decoder Trajectories: Training-Free Counterfactual Query-Trajectory Reliability for Small-Object Detection
Small-object detection remains challenging because limited pixels cause information loss and suppress the scale knowledge encoded in pretrained detectors. Existing approaches mainly improve representations through multiscale training, architecture redesign, or parameter adaptation, implicitly assuming that frozen models lack the required capability. We challenge this assumption and hypothesize that small-object knowledge already exists in frozen detectors but remains underactivated and unstable during query evolution. To test this hypothesis, we propose Counterfactual Query-Trajectory Reliability (CQTR), a training-free framework that elicits latent responses through counterfactual scale ...
| Authors | Zhaoning Shi, Bo Ma |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 6 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 September 2026 |
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