Detecting rare objects from a few examples is an emerging problem. Prior works show meta-learning is a promising approach. But, fine-tuning techniques have drawn scant attention. We find that fine-tuning only the last layer of existing detectors on rare classes is crucial to the few-shot object detection task. Such a simple approach outperforms the meta-learning methods by roughly 2~20 points on current benchmarks and sometimes even doubles the accuracy of the prior methods. However, the high variance in the few samples often leads to the unreliability of existing benchmarks. We revise the evaluation protocols by sampling multiple groups of training examples to obtain stable comparisons and build new benchmarks based on three datasets: PASCAL VOC, COCO and LVIS. Again, our fine-tuning approach establishes a new state of the art on the revised benchmarks. The code as well as the pretrained models are available at //github.com/ucbdrive/few-shot-object-detection.
Conventional methods for object detection typically require a substantial amount of training data and preparing such high-quality training data is very labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot object detection network that aims at detecting objects of unseen categories with only a few annotated examples. Central to our method are our Attention-RPN, Multi-Relation Detector and Contrastive Training strategy, which exploit the similarity between the few shot support set and query set to detect novel objects while suppressing false detection in the background. To train our network, we contribute a new dataset that contains 1000 categories of various objects with high-quality annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first datasets specifically designed for few-shot object detection. Once our few-shot network is trained, it can detect objects of unseen categories without further training or fine-tuning. Our method is general and has a wide range of potential applications. We produce a new state-of-the-art performance on different datasets in the few-shot setting. The dataset link is //github.com/fanq15/Few-Shot-Object-Detection-Dataset.
Applying artificial intelligence techniques in medical imaging is one of the most promising areas in medicine. However, most of the recent success in this area highly relies on large amounts of carefully annotated data, whereas annotating medical images is a costly process. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called FocalMix, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to leverage recent advances in semi-supervised learning (SSL) for 3D medical image detection. We conducted extensive experiments on two widely used datasets for lung nodule detection, LUNA16 and NLST. Results show that our proposed SSL methods can achieve a substantial improvement of up to 17.3% over state-of-the-art supervised learning approaches with 400 unlabeled CT scans.
Fine-tuning a deep network trained with the standard cross-entropy loss is a strong baseline for few-shot learning. When fine-tuned transductively, this outperforms the current state-of-the-art on standard datasets such as Mini-ImageNet, Tiered-ImageNet, CIFAR-FS and FC-100 with the same hyper-parameters. The simplicity of this approach enables us to demonstrate the first few-shot learning results on the ImageNet-21k dataset. We find that using a large number of meta-training classes results in high few-shot accuracies even for a large number of few-shot classes. We do not advocate our approach as the solution for few-shot learning, but simply use the results to highlight limitations of current benchmarks and few-shot protocols. We perform extensive studies on benchmark datasets to propose a metric that quantifies the "hardness" of a few-shot episode. This metric can be used to report the performance of few-shot algorithms in a more systematic way.
We study few-shot acoustic event detection (AED) in this paper. Few-shot learning enables detection of new events with very limited labeled data. Compared to other research areas like computer vision, few-shot learning for audio recognition has been under-studied. We formulate few-shot AED problem and explore different ways of utilizing traditional supervised methods for this setting as well as a variety of meta-learning approaches, which are conventionally used to solve few-shot classification problem. Compared to supervised baselines, meta-learning models achieve superior performance, thus showing its effectiveness on generalization to new audio events. Our analysis including impact of initialization and domain discrepancy further validate the advantage of meta-learning approaches in few-shot AED.
It is a common paradigm in object detection frameworks to treat all samples equally and target at maximizing the performance on average. In this work, we revisit this paradigm through a careful study on how different samples contribute to the overall performance measured in terms of mAP. Our study suggests that the samples in each mini-batch are neither independent nor equally important, and therefore a better classifier on average does not necessarily mean higher mAP. Motivated by this study, we propose the notion of Prime Samples, those that play a key role in driving the detection performance. We further develop a simple yet effective sampling and learning strategy called PrIme Sample Attention (PISA) that directs the focus of the training process towards such samples. Our experiments demonstrate that it is often more effective to focus on prime samples than hard samples when training a detector. Particularly, On the MSCOCO dataset, PISA outperforms the random sampling baseline and hard mining schemes, e.g. OHEM and Focal Loss, consistently by more than 1% on both single-stage and two-stage detectors, with a strong backbone ResNeXt-101.
Compared with model architectures, the training process, which is also crucial to the success of detectors, has received relatively less attention in object detection. In this work, we carefully revisit the standard training practice of detectors, and find that the detection performance is often limited by the imbalance during the training process, which generally consists in three levels - sample level, feature level, and objective level. To mitigate the adverse effects caused thereby, we propose Libra R-CNN, a simple but effective framework towards balanced learning for object detection. It integrates three novel components: IoU-balanced sampling, balanced feature pyramid, and balanced L1 loss, respectively for reducing the imbalance at sample, feature, and objective level. Benefitted from the overall balanced design, Libra R-CNN significantly improves the detection performance. Without bells and whistles, it achieves 2.5 points and 2.0 points higher Average Precision (AP) than FPN Faster R-CNN and RetinaNet respectively on MSCOCO.
This work aims to solve the challenging few-shot object detection problem where only a few annotated examples are available for each object category to train a detection model. Such an ability of learning to detect an object from just a few examples is common for human vision systems, but remains absent for computer vision systems. Though few-shot meta learning offers a promising solution technique, previous works mostly target the task of image classification and are not directly applicable for the much more complicated object detection task. In this work, we propose a novel meta-learning based model with carefully designed architecture, which consists of a meta-model and a base detection model. The base detection model is trained on several base classes with sufficient samples to offer basis features. The meta-model is trained to reweight importance of features from the base detection model over the input image and adapt these features to assist novel object detection from a few examples. The meta-model is light-weight, end-to-end trainable and able to entail the base model with detection ability for novel objects fast. Through experiments we demonstrated our model can outperform baselines by a large margin for few-shot object detection, on multiple datasets and settings. Our model also exhibits fast adaptation speed to novel few-shot classes.
We introduce and tackle the problem of zero-shot object detection (ZSD), which aims to detect object classes which are not observed during training. We work with a challenging set of object classes, not restricting ourselves to similar and/or fine-grained categories cf. prior works on zero-shot classification. We follow a principled approach by first adapting visual-semantic embeddings for ZSD. We then discuss the problems associated with selecting a background class and motivate two background-aware approaches for learning robust detectors. One of these models uses a fixed background class and the other is based on iterative latent assignments. We also outline the challenge associated with using a limited number of training classes and propose a solution based on dense sampling of the semantic label space using auxiliary data with a large number of categories. We propose novel splits of two standard detection datasets - MSCOCO and VisualGenome and discuss extensive empirical results to highlight the benefits of the proposed methods. We provide useful insights into the algorithm and conclude by posing some open questions to encourage further research.
As we move towards large-scale object detection, it is unrealistic to expect annotated training data for all object classes at sufficient scale, and so methods capable of unseen object detection are required. We propose a novel zero-shot method based on training an end-to-end model that fuses semantic attribute prediction with visual features to propose object bounding boxes for seen and unseen classes. While we utilize semantic features during training, our method is agnostic to semantic information for unseen classes at test-time. Our method retains the efficiency and effectiveness of YOLO for objects seen during training, while improving its performance for novel and unseen objects. The ability of state-of-art detection methods to learn discriminative object features to reject background proposals also limits their performance for unseen objects. We posit that, to detect unseen objects, we must incorporate semantic information into the visual domain so that the learned visual features reflect this information and leads to improved recall rates for unseen objects. We test our method on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO dataset and observed significant improvements on the average precision of unseen classes.
Weakly supervised object detection has recently received much attention, since it only requires image-level labels instead of the bounding-box labels consumed in strongly supervised learning. Nevertheless, the save in labeling expense is usually at the cost of model accuracy. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective weakly supervised collaborative learning framework to resolve this problem, which trains a weakly supervised learner and a strongly supervised learner jointly by enforcing partial feature sharing and prediction consistency. For object detection, taking WSDDN-like architecture as weakly supervised detector sub-network and Faster-RCNN-like architecture as strongly supervised detector sub-network, we propose an end-to-end Weakly Supervised Collaborative Detection Network. As there is no strong supervision available to train the Faster-RCNN-like sub-network, a new prediction consistency loss is defined to enforce consistency of predictions between the two sub-networks as well as within the Faster-RCNN-like sub-networks. At the same time, the two detectors are designed to partially share features to further guarantee the model consistency at perceptual level. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 data sets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework.