open-mmlab/mmdetection · error · ValueError

Unrecognized mode, only "area" and "11points" are supported

Error message

Unrecognized mode, only "area" and "11points" are supported

What it means

average_precision supports only two computation modes: 'area' (COCO-style interpolation) and '11points' (VOC-style 11-point interpolation). Any other mode string raises ValueError.

Source

Thrown at mmdet/evaluation/functional/mean_ap.py:53

        zeros = np.zeros((num_scales, 1), dtype=recalls.dtype)
        ones = np.ones((num_scales, 1), dtype=recalls.dtype)
        mrec = np.hstack((zeros, recalls, ones))
        mpre = np.hstack((zeros, precisions, zeros))
        for i in range(mpre.shape[1] - 1, 0, -1):
            mpre[:, i - 1] = np.maximum(mpre[:, i - 1], mpre[:, i])
        for i in range(num_scales):
            ind = np.where(mrec[i, 1:] != mrec[i, :-1])[0]
            ap[i] = np.sum(
                (mrec[i, ind + 1] - mrec[i, ind]) * mpre[i, ind + 1])
    elif mode == '11points':
        for i in range(num_scales):
            for thr in np.arange(0, 1 + 1e-3, 0.1):
                precs = precisions[i, recalls[i, :] >= thr]
                prec = precs.max() if precs.size > 0 else 0
                ap[i] += prec
        ap /= 11
    else:
        raise ValueError(
            'Unrecognized mode, only "area" and "11points" are supported')
    if no_scale:
        ap = ap[0]
    return ap


def tpfp_imagenet(det_bboxes,
                  gt_bboxes,
                  gt_bboxes_ignore=None,
                  default_iou_thr=0.5,
                  area_ranges=None,
                  use_legacy_coordinate=False,
                  **kwargs):
    """Check if detected bboxes are true positive or false positive.

    Args:
        det_bbox (ndarray): Detected bboxes of this image, of shape (m, 5).
        gt_bboxes (ndarray): GT bboxes of this image, of shape (n, 4).

View on GitHub (pinned to cfd5d3a985)

Solutions

1. Use exactly 'area' or '11points'
2. Check config files for misspelled eval mode keys (e.g. '11point' -> '11points')

Example fix

# before
eval_map(det, gt, mode='11point')
# after
eval_map(det, gt, mode='11points')

assert mode in ('area', '11points'), f'bad mode: {mode}'

def is_valid_ap_mode(m: str) -> bool:
    return m in ('area', '11points')

When it happens

Trigger: Calling eval_map/average_precision with mode='11point', mode='max', or a typo like 'Arae'.

Common situations: Porting VOC configs where the flag is written '11point' (single point) instead of '11points'; custom eval scripts passing arbitrary mode strings.

Understand the failure class

Background: "Must be a positive integer", "Invalid value", "Unsupported": the invalid-argument-value error family, when a library rejects the value you pass — this error's family across 35 libraries.

Related errors

• tpfp_fn has to be a function or None, but got {tpfp_fn}
• iouType not supported
• LoadImageFromFile is not found in the test pipeline
• Visualization needs the "visualizer" termdefined in the conf
• Unsupported input type: {type(single_input)}

AI-assisted analysis of open-mmlab/mmdetection@cfd5d3a985 (2026-08-27). Data as JSON: /api/errors/2477fba5f9aab7e1. Report an issue: GitHub.