Localization with Sampling-Argmax

Jiefeng Li, Tong Chen, Ruiqi Shi, Yujing Lou, Yong-Lu Li, Cewu Lu


Shanghai Jiao Tong University

In NeurIPS 2021

[Paper]
[arXiv]
[Code]



Abstract

Soft-argmax operation is commonly adopted in the detection-based method to localize the target position in a differentiable manner. However, training the neural network with soft-argmax makes the shape of the probability map unconstrained. Consequently, the model lacks pixel-wise supervision through the map during training, leading to performance degradation. In this work, we propose sampling-argmax, a differentiable training method that imposes implicit constraints to the shape of the probability map by minimizing the expectation of the error. To approximate the expectation, we introduce a continuous formulation of the output distribution and develop a differentiable sampling process. The expectation can be approximated by calculating the average error of all samples drawn from the output distribution. We show that sampling-argmax can seamlessly replace the conventional soft-argmax operation on various localization tasks. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed method.


Code


 [GitHub]


Paper and Supplementary Material

Jiefeng Li, Tong Chen, Ruiqi Shi, Yujing Lou, Yong-Lu Li, Cewu Lu
Localization with Sampling-Argmax
In NeurIPS, 2021.


[Bibtex]


Acknowledgements

This template was originally made by Phillip Isola and Richard Zhang for a colorful ECCV project; the code can be found here.