Match One, Learn with Graph: One-to-Graph Query Collaboration with Backward Sharing for Object Detection

Abstract

One-to-one (O2O) matching enables Detection Transformers (DETRs) to perform end-to-end set prediction by assigning each object to a single positive query. However, the strongest classification, center, scale, and overlap evidence for an object is often distributed across multiple queries. This mismatch leaves only the matched owner positively supervised for the object, while other evidence-bearing queries receive no box target for it. We term this query knowledge fragmentation. To exploit such complementary evidence without one-to-many supervision, we propose BS-O2G, a plug-in that builds a sparse prediction-aware graph from decoded features, boxes, and class distributions to organize query collaboration in feature and optimization spaces while preserving the original O2O matcher, positive labels, and objective. One-to-Graph (O2G) calibration propagates relative messages over this graph to consolidate query evidence in the forward pass, whereas Backward Sharing (BS) reuses its transposed detached adjacency to route gradients across persistent query basis vectors without changing the decoder input in the forward pass. Experiments across diverse DETR methods, backbones, COCO, and CrowdHuman show consistent gains and faster convergence with negligible parameter/FLOP growth and modest runtime overhead, supporting graph-based query collaboration as an alternative to expanding positive assignments.