Auxiliary Loss Adaptation for Image Inpainting

Auxiliary losses commonly used in image inpainting lead to better reconstruction performance by incorporating prior knowledge of missing regions. However, it usually requires a lot of effort to fully exploit the potential of auxiliary losses, or otherwise, improperly weighted auxiliary losses would distract the model from the inpainting task, and the effectiveness of an auxiliary loss might vary during the training process. Hence the design of auxiliary losses takes strong domain expertise. To mitigate the problem, in this work, we introduce the Auxiliary Loss Adaptation for Image Inpainting (ALA) algorithm to dynamically adjust the parameters of the auxiliary loss. Our method is based on the principle that the best auxiliary loss is the one that helps increase the performance of the main loss most through several steps of gradient descent. We then examined two commonly used auxiliary losses in inpainting and used ALA to adapt their parameters. Experimental results show that ALA induces more competitive inpainting results than fixed auxiliary losses. In particular, simply combining auxiliary loss with ALA, existing inpainting methods can achieve increased performances without explicitly incorporating delicate network design or structure knowledge prior.