Centerpoints Are All You Need in Overhead Imagery

Labeling data to use for training object detectors is expensive and time consuming. Publicly available overhead datasets for object detection are labeled with image-aligned bounding boxes, object-aligned bounding boxes, or object masks, but it is not clear whether such detailed labeling is necessary. To test the idea, we developed novel single- and two-stage network architectures that use centerpoints for labeling. In this paper we show that these architectures achieve nearly equivalent performance to approaches using more detailed labeling on three overhead object detection datasets.

There is a Singularity in the Loss Landscape

Despite the widespread adoption of neural networks, their training dynamics remain poorly understood. We show experimentally that as the size of the dataset increases, a point forms where the magnitude of the gradient of the loss becomes unbounded. Gradient descent rapidly brings the network close to this singularity in parameter space, and further training takes place near it. This singularity explains a variety of phenomena recently observed in the Hessian of neural network loss functions, such as training on the edge of stability and the concentration of the gradient in a top subspace. Once the network approaches the singularity, the top subspace contributes little to learning, even though it constitutes the majority of the gradient.