DefMamba: Deformable Visual State Space Model

Recently, state space models (SSM), particularly Mamba, have attracted significant attention from scholars due to their ability to effectively balance computational efficiency and performance. However, most existing visual Mamba methods flatten images into 1D sequences using predefined scan orders, which results the model being less capable of utilizing the spatial structural information of the image during the feature extraction process. To address this issue, we proposed a novel visual foundation model called DefMamba. This model includes a multi-scale backbone structure and deformable mamba (DM) blocks, which dynamically adjust the scanning path to prioritize important information, thus enhancing the capture and processing of relevant input features. By combining a deformable scanning(DS) strategy, this model significantly improves its ability to learn image structures and detects changes in object details. Numerous experiments have shown that DefMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance in various visual tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. The code is open source on DefMamba.

@article{liu2025_2504.05794,
  title={ DefMamba: Deformable Visual State Space Model },
  author={ Leiye Liu and Miao Zhang and Jihao Yin and Tingwei Liu and Wei Ji and Yongri Piao and Huchuan Lu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05794},
  year={ 2025 }
}