DeCo-DETR: Decoupled Cognition DETR for efficient Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

siheng wang, Yanshu Li, Bohan Hu, Zhengdao Li, HaiboZhan, Linshan Li, Weiming Liu, Ruizhi Qian, Guangxin Wu, Hao Zhang, Jifeng Shen, Piotr Koniusz, Zhengtao Yao, Junhao Dong, Qiang Sun

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) plays a critical role in autonomous driving and human-computer interaction by enabling perception beyond closed-set categories. However, current approaches predominantly rely on multimodal fusion, facing dual limitations: multimodal fusion methods incur heavy computational overhead from text encoders, while task-coupled designs compromise between detection precision and open-world generalization. To address these challenges, we propose Decoupled Cognition DETR, a vision framework featuring a three-stage cognitive distillation mechanism: Dynamic Hierarchical Concept Pool constructs self-evolving concept prototypes using LLaVA-generated region descriptions filtered by CLIP alignment, aiming to replace costly text encoders and reduce computational overhead; Hierarchical Knowledge Distillation decouples visual-semantic space mapping via prototype-centric projection, avoiding task coupling to enhance open-world generalization; Parametric Decoupling Training coordinates localization and cognition through dual-stream gradient isolation, further optimizing detection precision. Extensive experiments on the common OVOD evaluation protocol demonstrated that DeCo-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing OVOD methods. It provides a new paradigm for extending OVOD to more real-world applications.