Regularization Through Simultaneous Learning: A Case Study on Plant Classification

In response to the prevalent challenge of overfitting in deep neural networks, this paper introduces Simultaneous Learning, a regularization approach drawing on principles of Transfer Learning and Multi-task Learning. We leverage auxiliary datasets with the target dataset, the UFOP-HVD, to facilitate simultaneous classification guided by a customized loss function featuring an inter-group penalty. This experimental configuration allows for a detailed examination of model performance across similar (PlantNet) and dissimilar (ImageNet) domains, thereby enriching the generalizability of Convolutional Neural Network models. Remarkably, our approach demonstrates superior performance over models without regularization and those applying dropout regularization exclusively, enhancing accuracy by 5 to 22 percentage points. Moreover, when combined with dropout, the proposed approach improves generalization, securing state-of-the-art results for the UFOP-HVD challenge. The method also showcases efficiency with significantly smaller sample sizes, suggesting its broad applicability across a spectrum of related tasks. In addition, an interpretability approach is deployed to evaluate feature quality by analyzing class feature correlations within the network's convolutional layers. The findings of this study provide deeper insights into the efficacy of Simultaneous Learning, particularly concerning its interaction with the auxiliary and target datasets

Zero-Annotation Object Detection with Web Knowledge Transfer

Object detection is one of the major problems in computer vision, and has been extensively studied. Most of the existing detection works rely on labor-intensive supervision, such as ground truth bounding boxes of objects or at least image-level annotations. On the contrary, we propose an object detection method that does not require any form of human annotation on target tasks, by exploiting freely available web images. In order to facilitate effective knowledge transfer from web images, we introduce a multi-instance multi-label domain adaption learning framework with two key innovations. First of all, we propose an instance-level adversarial domain adaptation network with attention on foreground objects to transfer the object appearances from web domain to target domain. Second, to preserve the class-specific semantic structure of transferred object features, we propose a simultaneous transfer mechanism to transfer the supervision across domains through pseudo strong label generation. With our end-to-end framework that simultaneously learns a weakly supervised detector and transfers knowledge across domains, we achieved significant improvements over baseline methods on the benchmark datasets.Comment: Accepted in ECCV 201

Partial Transfer Learning with Selective Adversarial Networks

Adversarial learning has been successfully embedded into deep networks to learn transferable features, which reduce distribution discrepancy between the source and target domains. Existing domain adversarial networks assume fully shared label space across domains. In the presence of big data, there is strong motivation of transferring both classification and representation models from existing big domains to unknown small domains. This paper introduces partial transfer learning, which relaxes the shared label space assumption to that the target label space is only a subspace of the source label space. Previous methods typically match the whole source domain to the target domain, which are prone to negative transfer for the partial transfer problem. We present Selective Adversarial Network (SAN), which simultaneously circumvents negative transfer by selecting out the outlier source classes and promotes positive transfer by maximally matching the data distributions in the shared label space. Experiments demonstrate that our models exceed state-of-the-art results for partial transfer learning tasks on several benchmark datasets