arXiv · 2509.12871
Cumulative Consensus Score: Label-Free and Model-Agnostic Evaluation of Object Detectors in Deployment
Abstract
Evaluating object detection models in deployment is challenging because ground-truth annotations are rarely available. We introduce the Cumulative Consensus Score (CCS), a label-free monitoring signal for continuous evaluation and comparison of detectors in real-world settings. CCS applies test-time data augmentation to each image and measures the spatial consistency of predicted bounding boxes across augmented views using Intersection over Union. The resulting consensus score serves as a proxy for reliability without requiring bounding box annotations. In controlled experiments on Open Images and KITTI, CCS achieved over 90% congruence with F1-score, Probabilistic Detection Quality, and Optimal Correction Cost, with qualitative consistency further confirmed on COCO and BDD100K across model pairs. The method is model-agnostic, working across single-stage and two-stage detectors, and operates at the case level to highlight under-performing scenarios. We also provide a simplified theoretical link between expected CCS and detection correctness. Altogether, CCS provides a robust foundation for DevOps-style monitoring of object detectors.
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Avinaash Manoharan, Xiangyu Yin, Domenik Helm, Chih-Hong Cheng. 2025-09-16. Cumulative Consensus Score: Label-Free and Model-Agnostic Evaluation of Object Detectors in Deployment. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12871
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