Boosting Standard Classification Architectures Through a Ranking Regularizer

We employ triplet loss as a feature embedding regularizer to boost classification performance. Standard architectures, like ResNet and Inception, are extended to support both losses with minimal hyper-parameter tuning. This promotes generality while fine-tuning pretrained networks. Triplet loss is a powerful surrogate for recently proposed embedding regularizers. Yet, it is avoided due to large batch-size requirement and high computational cost. Through our experiments, we re-assess these assumptions. During inference, our network supports both classification and embedding tasks without any computational overhead. Quantitative evaluation highlights a steady improvement on five fine-grained recognition datasets. Further evaluation on an imbalanced video dataset achieves significant improvement. Triplet loss brings feature embedding characteristics like nearest neighbor to classification models. Code available at \url{http://bit.ly/2LNYEqL}.Comment: WACV 2020 Camera ready + supplementary materia

Semi-Supervised and Unsupervised Deep Visual Learning: A Survey

State-of-the-art deep learning models are often trained with a large amountof costly labeled training data. However, requiring exhaustive manualannotations may degrade the model's generalizability in the limited-labelregime. Semi-supervised learning and unsupervised learning offer promisingparadigms to learn from an abundance of unlabeled visual data. Recent progressin these paradigms has indicated the strong benefits of leveraging unlabeleddata to improve model generalization and provide better model initialization.In this survey, we review the recent advanced deep learning algorithms onsemi-supervised learning (SSL) and unsupervised learning (UL) for visualrecognition from a unified perspective. To offer a holistic understanding ofthe state-of-the-art in these areas, we propose a unified taxonomy. Wecategorize existing representative SSL and UL with comprehensive and insightfulanalysis to highlight their design rationales in different learning scenariosand applications in different computer vision tasks. Lastly, we discuss theemerging trends and open challenges in SSL and UL to shed light on futurecritical research directions.<br

Socializing the Semantic Gap: A Comparative Survey on Image Tag Assignment, Refinement and Retrieval

Where previous reviews on content-based image retrieval emphasize on what can be seen in an image to bridge the semantic gap, this survey considers what people tag about an image. A comprehensive treatise of three closely linked problems, i.e., image tag assignment, refinement, and tag-based image retrieval is presented. While existing works vary in terms of their targeted tasks and methodology, they rely on the key functionality of tag relevance, i.e. estimating the relevance of a specific tag with respect to the visual content of a given image and its social context. By analyzing what information a specific method exploits to construct its tag relevance function and how such information is exploited, this paper introduces a taxonomy to structure the growing literature, understand the ingredients of the main works, clarify their connections and difference, and recognize their merits and limitations. For a head-to-head comparison between the state-of-the-art, a new experimental protocol is presented, with training sets containing 10k, 100k and 1m images and an evaluation on three test sets, contributed by various research groups. Eleven representative works are implemented and evaluated. Putting all this together, the survey aims to provide an overview of the past and foster progress for the near future.Comment: to appear in ACM Computing Survey