RTGen: Real-Time Generative Detection Transformer

Abstract: While open-vocabulary object detectors require predefined categories during inference, generative object detectors overcome this limitation by endowing the model with text generation capabilities. However, existing generative object detection methods directly append an autoregressive LLM to an object detector to generate texts for each detected object. This straightforward design leads to structural redundancy and increased processing time. In this paper, we propose a Real-Time GENerative Detection Transformer (RTGen), a real-time generative object detector with a succinct encoder-decoder architecture. Specifically, we introduce a novel Region-Language Decoder (RL-Decoder), which innovatively integrates a non-autoregressive LLM into the detection decoder, enabling concurrent processing of object and text information. With these efficient designs, RTGen achieves a remarkable inference speed of 60.41 FPS. Moreover, RTGen obtains 18.6 mAP on the LVIS dataset, outperforming the previous SOTA method by 3.5 mAP.