EAGLE: Entropy-Aware Geometric Learning Enhancer for Partially Polygon-Supervised Object Localization

Object detection is a critical application of computer vision, yet models trained uniformly on bounding boxes lack the geometric precision to be fully effective in inference settings, especially at high IoU thresholds. One common approach is the introduction of polygon-supervised localization, where a model is trained explicitly for localization but with access to polygon masks during training. Among such methods, partial polygon-supervision is viable due to the higher annotation costs of developing fully supervised training datasets. However, this introduces a further challenge: in object classes of relatively low shape complexity, the addition of training masks and subsequent segmentation loss may obscure box localization, often worsening model performance despite access to deeper geometric information. To address the practical limitations of both full and partial polygon supervision, we introduce a mathematical framework for quantifying per-class geometric complexity by combining information theory and statistical shape analysis. With this framework, we develop Entropy-Aware Geometric Learning Enhancer (EAGLE), a lightweight, post-training model head that learns geometric information for the localization model, improving accuracy via edge refinement and localization rescoring using entropy-informed updates. Empirical analysis across MS COCO and Pascal SBD demonstrates the entropy framework meaningfully predicts shape reconstruction error and accuracy differences among mask-derived and standard box predictions, while the implemented EAGLE framework achieves consistent improvement on already SOTA detection frameworks (+0.9 mAP50-95 points on MS COCO) at minimal observed inference overhead.