Improved Zero-Shot Classification by Adapting VLMs with Text Descriptions

The zero-shot performance of existing vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP is limited by the availability of large-scale, aligned image and text datasets in specific domains. In this work, we leverage two complementary sources of information -- descriptions of categories generated by large language models (LLMs) and abundant, fine-grained image classification datasets -- to improve the zero-shot classification performance of VLMs across fine-grained domains. On the technical side, we develop methods to train VLMs with this "bag-level" image-text supervision. We find that simply using these attributes at test-time does not improve performance, but our training strategy, for example, on the iNaturalist dataset, leads to an average improvement of 4-5% in zero-shot classification accuracy for novel categories of birds and flowers. Similar improvements are observed in domains where a subset of the categories was used to fine-tune the model. By prompting LLMs in various ways, we generate descriptions that capture visual appearance, habitat, and geographic regions and pair them with existing attributes such as the taxonomic structure of the categories. We systematically evaluate their ability to improve zero-shot categorization in natural domains. Our findings suggest that geographic priors can be just as effective and are complementary to visual appearance. Our method also outperforms prior work on prompt-based tuning of VLMs. We plan to release the benchmark, consisting of 7 datasets, which will contribute to future research in zero-shot recognition.

PARTICLE: Part Discovery and Contrastive Learning for Fine-grained Recognition

We develop techniques for refining representations for fine-grained classification and segmentation tasks in a self-supervised manner. We find that fine-tuning methods based on instance-discriminative contrastive learning are not as effective, and posit that recognizing part-specific variations is crucial for fine-grained categorization. We present an iterative learning approach that incorporates part-centric equivariance and invariance objectives. First, pixel representations are clustered to discover parts. We analyze the representations from convolutional and vision transformer networks that are best suited for this task. Then, a part-centric learning step aggregates and contrasts representations of parts within an image. We show that this improves the performance on image classification and part segmentation tasks across datasets. For example, under a linear-evaluation scheme, the classification accuracy of a ResNet50 trained on ImageNet using DetCon, a self-supervised learning approach, improves from 35.4% to 42.0% on the Caltech-UCSD Birds, from 35.5% to 44.1% on the FGVC Aircraft, and from 29.7% to 37.4% on the Stanford Cars. We also observe significant gains in few-shot part segmentation tasks using the proposed technique, while instance-discriminative learning was not as effective. Smaller, yet consistent, improvements are also observed for stronger networks based on transformers.

Improving Few-Shot Part Segmentation using Coarse Supervision

A significant bottleneck in training deep networks for part segmentation is the cost of obtaining detailed annotations. We propose a framework to exploit coarse labels such as figure-ground masks and keypoint locations that are readily available for some categories to improve part segmentation models. A key challenge is that these annotations were collected for different tasks and with different labeling styles and cannot be readily mapped to the part labels. To this end, we propose to jointly learn the dependencies between labeling styles and the part segmentation model, allowing us to utilize supervision from diverse labels. To evaluate our approach we develop a benchmark on the Caltech-UCSD birds and OID Aircraft dataset. Our approach outperforms baselines based on multi-task learning, semi-supervised learning, and competitive methods relying on loss functions manually designed to exploit sparse-supervision.

GANORCON: Are Generative Models Useful for Few-shot Segmentation?

Advances in generative modeling based on GANs has motivated the community to find their use beyond image generation and editing tasks. In particular, several recent works have shown that GAN representations can be re-purposed for discriminative tasks such as part segmentation, especially when training data is limited. But how do these improvements stack-up against recent advances in self-supervised learning? Motivated by this we present an alternative approach based on contrastive learning and compare their performance on standard few-shot part segmentation benchmarks. Our experiments reveal that not only do the GAN-based approach offer no significant performance advantage, their multi-step training is complex, nearly an order-of-magnitude slower, and can introduce additional bias. These experiments suggest that the inductive biases of generative models, such as their ability to disentangle shape and texture, are well captured by standard feed-forward networks trained using contrastive learning. These experiments suggest that the inductive biases present in current generative models, such as their ability to disentangle shape and texture, are well captured by standard feed-forward networks trained using contrastive learning.

RecSal : Deep Recursive Supervision for Visual Saliency Prediction

State-of-the-art saliency prediction methods develop upon model architectures or loss functions; while training to generate one target saliency map. However, publicly available saliency prediction datasets can be utilized to create more information for each stimulus than just a final aggregate saliency map. This information when utilized in a biologically inspired fashion can contribute in better prediction performance without the use of models with huge number of parameters. In this light, we propose to extract and use the statistics of (a) region specific saliency and (b) temporal order of fixations, to provide additional context to our network. We show that extra supervision using spatially or temporally sequenced fixations results in achieving better performance in saliency prediction. Further, we also design novel architectures for utilizing this extra information and show that it achieves superior performance over a base model which is devoid of extra supervision. We show that our best method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods with 50-80% fewer parameters. We also show that our models perform consistently well across all evaluation metrics unlike prior methods.

RNNPool: Efficient Non-linear Pooling for RAM Constrained Inference

Pooling operators are key components in most Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as they serve to downsample images, aggregate feature information, and increase receptive field. However, standard pooling operators reduce the feature size gradually to avoid significant loss in information via gross aggregation. Consequently, CNN architectures tend to be deep, computationally expensive and challenging to deploy on RAM constrained devices. We introduce RNNPool, a novel pooling operator based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), that efficiently aggregate features over large patches of an image and rapidly downsamples its size. Our empirical evaluation indicates that an RNNPool layer(s) can effectively replace multiple blocks in a variety of architectures such as MobileNets (Sandler et al., 2018), DenseNet (Huang et al., 2017) and can be used for several vision tasks like image classification and face detection. That is, RNNPool can significantly decrease computational complexity and peak RAM usage for inference, while retaining comparable accuracy. Further, we use RNNPool to construct a novel real-time face detection method that achieves state-of-the-art MAP within computational budget afforded by a tiny Cortex M4 microcontroller with ~256 KB RAM.

Fully Convolutional Neural Network for Semantic Segmentation of Anatomical Structure and Pathologies in Colour Fundus Images Associated with Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the most common form of diabetic eye disease. Retinopathy can affect all diabetic patients and becomes particularly dangerous, increasing the risk of blindness, if it is left untreated. The success rate of its curability solemnly depends on diagnosis at an early stage. The development of automated computer aided disease diagnosis tools could help in faster detection of symptoms with a wider reach and reasonable cost. This paper proposes a method for the automated segmentation of retinal lesions and optic disk in fundus images using a deep fully convolutional neural network for semantic segmentation. This trainable segmentation pipeline consists of an encoder network, a corresponding decoder network followed by pixel-wise classification to segment microaneurysms, hemorrhages, hard exudates, soft exudates, optic disk from background. The network was trained using Binary cross entropy criterion with Sigmoid as the last layer, while during an additional SoftMax layer was used for boosting response of single class. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using sensitivity, positive prediction value (PPV) and accuracy as the metrices. Further, the position of the Optic disk is localised using the segmented output map.