Recent advances in unsupervised representation learning often rely on knowing the number of classes to improve feature extraction and clustering. However, this assumption raises an important question: is the number of classes always necessary, and do class labels fully capture the fine-grained features within the data? In this paper, we propose Contrastive Disentangling (CD), a framework designed to learn representations without relying on class priors. CD leverages a multi-level contrastive learning strategy, integrating instance-level and feature-level contrastive losses with a normalized entropy loss to capture semantically rich and fine-grained representations. Specifically, (1) the instance-level contrastive loss separates feature representations across samples; (2) the feature-level contrastive loss promotes independence among feature heads; and (3) the normalized entropy loss ensures feature diversity and prevents feature collapse. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, STL-10, and ImageNet-10 demonstrate that CD outperforms existing methods in scenarios where class information is unavailable or ambiguous. The code is available at https://github.com/Hoper-J/Contrastive-Disentangling.
Self-supervised contrastive learning has demonstrated great potential in learning visual representations. Despite their success in various downstream tasks such as image classification and object detection, self-supervised pre-training for fine-grained scenarios is not fully explored. We point out that current contrastive methods are prone to memorizing background/foreground texture and therefore have a limitation in localizing the foreground object. Analysis suggests that learning to extract discriminative texture information and localization are equally crucial for fine-grained self-supervis…
Video-text retrieval has been a crucial and fundamental task in multi-modal research. The development of video-text retrieval has been considerably promoted by large-scale multi-modal contrastive pre-training, which primarily focuses on coarse-grained or fine-grained contrast. However, cross-grained contrast, which is the contrast between coarse-grained representations and fine-grained representations, has rarely been explored in prior research. Compared with fine-grained or coarse-grained contrasts, cross-grained contrast calculate the correlation between coarse-grained features and each fine…
State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and System, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室）
Fine-grained action recognition is attracting increasing attention due to the emerging demand of specific action understanding in real-world applications, whereas the data of rare fine-grained categories is very limited. Therefore, we propose the few-shot fine-grained action recognition problem, aiming to recognize novel fine-grained actions with only few samples given for each class. Although progress has been made in coarse-grained actions, existing few-shot recognition methods encounter two issues handling fine-grained actions: the inability to capture subtle action details and the inadequa…
Existing computer vision research in artwork struggles with artwork's fine-grained attributes recognition and lack of curated annotated datasets due to their costly creation. To the best of our knowledge, we are one of the first methods to use CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) to train a neural network on a variety of artwork images and text descriptions pairs. CLIP is able to learn directly from free-form art descriptions, or, if available, curated fine-grained labels. Model's zero-shot capability allows predicting accurate natural language description for a given image, without …
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University（浙江大学医学院附属第二医院）；Waseda University（早稻田大学）；Communication University of Zhejiang（浙江传媒学院）
Precise and rapid categorization of images in the B-scan ultrasound modality is vital for diagnosing ocular diseases. Nevertheless, distinguishing various diseases in ultrasound still challenges experienced ophthalmologists. Thus a novel contrastive disentangled network (CDNet) is developed in this work, aiming to tackle the fine-grained image categorization (FGIC) challenges of ocular abnormalities in ultrasound images, including intraocular tumor (IOT), retinal detachment (RD), posterior scleral staphyloma (PSS), and vitreous hemorrhage (VH). Three essential components of CDNet are the weakl…
Unsupervised fine-grained class clustering is a practical yet challenging task due to the difficulty of feature representations learning of subtle object details. We introduce C3-GAN, a method that leverages the categorical inference power of InfoGAN with contrastive learning. We aim to learn feature representations that encourage a dataset to form distinct cluster boundaries in the embedding space, while also maximizing the mutual information between the latent code and its image observation. Our approach is to train a discriminator, which is also used for inferring clusters, to optimize the …
Balanced Hierarchical Contrastive Learning with Decoupled Queries for Fine-grained Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University, China（浙江大学计算机学院）
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Pengcheng Lab（鹏城实验室）
The goal of few-shot classification is to classify new categories with few labeled examples within each class. Nowadays, the excellent performance in handling few-shot classification problems is shown by metric-based meta-learning methods. However, it is very hard for previous methods to discriminate the fine-grained sub-categories in the embedding space without fine-grained labels. This may lead to unsatisfactory generalization to fine-grained subcategories, and thus affects model interpretation. To tackle this problem, we introduce the contrastive loss into few-shot classification for learni…
This paper presents Contrastive Reconstruction, ConRec - a self-supervised learning algorithm that obtains image representations by jointly optimizing a contrastive and a self-reconstruction loss. We showcase that state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods (e.g. SimCLR) have shortcomings to capture fine-grained visual features in their representations. ConRec extends the SimCLR framework by adding (1) a self-reconstruction task and (2) an attention mechanism within the contrastive learning task. This is accomplished by applying a simple encoder-decoder architecture with two heads. We show t…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS)（中国科学院大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
We target at the task of weakly-supervised action localization (WSAL), where only video-level action labels are available during model training. Despite the recent progress, existing methods mainly embrace a localization-by-classification paradigm and overlook the fruitful fine-grained temporal distinctions between video sequences, thus suffering from severe ambiguity in classification learning and classification-to-localization adaption. This paper argues that learning by contextually comparing sequence-to-sequence distinctions offers an essential inductive bias in WSAL and helps identify coh…
COMICS: End-to-end Bi-grained Contrastive Learning for Multi-face Forgery Detection
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学计算机科学与技术学院）；University at Buffalo, SUNY（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
Extremely Fine-Grained Visual Classification over Resembling Glyphs in the Wild
School of Computer and Information Engineering, Henan University（河南大学计算机与信息工程学院）；UPV/EHU（巴斯克大学）；IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science（巴斯克科学基金会（IKERBASQUE））
Recent self-supervised contrastive methods have been able to produce impressive transferable visual representations by learning to be invariant to different data augmentations. However, these methods implicitly assume a particular set of representational invariances (e.g., invariance to color), and can perform poorly when a downstream task violates this assumption (e.g., distinguishing red vs. yellow cars). We introduce a contrastive learning framework which does not require prior knowledge of specific, task-dependent invariances. Our model learns to capture varying and invariant factors for v…
Wavelet-Decoupling Contrastive Enhancement Network for Fine-Grained Skeleton-Based Action Recognition
Beijing Engineering Research Center of Mixed Reality and Advanced Display（北京混合现实与先进显示工程研究中心）；School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学光电学院）
Despite recent progress in video and language representation learning, the weak or sparse correspondence between the two modalities remains a bottleneck in the area. Most video-language models are trained via pair-level loss to predict whether a pair of video and text is aligned. However, even in paired video-text segments, only a subset of the frames are semantically relevant to the corresponding text, with the remainder representing noise; where the ratio of noisy frames is higher for longer videos. We propose FineCo (Fine-grained Contrastive Loss for Frame Sampling), an approach to better l…
Peking University（北京大学）；China North Vehicle Research Institute（中国北方车辆研究所）
Off-road semantic segmentation with fine-grained labels is necessary for autonomous vehicles to understand driving scenes, as the coarse-grained road detection can not satisfy off-road vehicles with various mechanical properties. Fine-grained semantic segmentation in off-road scenes usually has no unified category definition due to ambiguous nature environments, and the cost of pixel-wise labeling is extremely high. Furthermore, semantic properties of off-road scenes can be very changeable due to various precipitations, temperature, defoliation, etc. To address these challenges, this research …
IBM Research AI（IBM研究院人工智能部门）；Tel-Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Penta-AI（Penta人工智能）；Boston University（波士顿大学）
Few-shot learning methods offer pre-training techniques optimized for easier later adaptation of the model to new classes (unseen during training) using one or a few examples. This adaptivity to unseen classes is especially important for many practical applications where the pre-trained label space cannot remain fixed for effective use and the model needs to be "specialized" to support new categories on the fly. One particularly interesting scenario, essentially overlooked by the few-shot literature, is Coarse-to-Fine Few-Shot (C2FS), where the training classes (e.g. animals) are of much `coar…
Though much work has been done in the domain of improving the adversarial robustness of facial recognition systems, a surprisingly small percentage of it has focused on self-supervised approaches. In this work, we present an approach that combines Ad-versarial Pre-Training with Triplet Loss AdversarialFine-Tuning. We compare our methods with the pre-trained ResNet50 model that forms the backbone of FaceNet, finetuned on our CelebA dataset. Through comparing adversarial robustness achieved without adversarial training, with triplet loss adversarial training, and our contrastive pre-training com…
Learning with noisy labels (LNL) aims to ensure model generalization given a label-corrupted training set. In this work, we investigate a rarely studied scenario of LNL on fine-grained datasets (LNL-FG), which is more practical and challenging as large inter-class ambiguities among fine-grained classes cause more noisy labels. We empirically show that existing methods that work well for LNL fail to achieve satisfying performance for LNL-FG, arising the practical need of effective solutions for LNL-FG. To this end, we propose a novel framework called stochastic noise-tolerated supervised contra…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Guangdong University of Education（广东第二师范学院）
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved remarkable performance in pretraining the models that can be further used in downstream tasks via fine-tuning. However, these self-supervised models may not capture meaningful semantic information since the images belonging to the same class are always regarded as negative pairs in the contrastive loss. Consequently, the images of the same class are often located far away from each other in learned feature space, which would inevitably hamper the fine-tuning process. To address this issue, we seek to provide a better initialization for the self-super…
Peking University（北京大学）；China North Vehicle Research Institute（中国北方车辆研究所）
Road detection or traversability analysis has been a key technique for a mobile robot to traverse complex off-road scenes. The problem has been mainly formulated in early works as a binary classification one, e.g. associating pixels with road or non-road labels. Whereas understanding scenes with fine-grained labels are needed for off-road robots, as scenes are very diverse, and the various mechanical performance of off-road robots may lead to different definitions of safe regions to traverse. How to define and annotate fine-grained labels to achieve meaningful scene understanding for a robot t…
Tongji University（同济大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；LunarAI
We address the problem of generalized category discovery (GCD) in this paper, i.e. clustering the unlabeled images leveraging the information from a set of seen classes, where the unlabeled images could contain both seen classes and unseen classes. The seen classes can be seen as an implicit criterion of classes, which makes this setting different from unsupervised clustering where the cluster criteria may be ambiguous. We mainly concern the problem of discovering categories within a fine-grained dataset since it is one of the most direct applications of category discovery, i.e. helping expert…
Image denoising has achieved unprecedented progress as great efforts have been made to exploit effective deep denoisers. To improve the denoising performance in realworld, two typical solutions are used in recent trends: devising better noise models for the synthesis of more realistic training data, and estimating noise level function to guide non-blind denoisers. In this work, we combine both noise modeling and estimation, and propose an innovative noise model estimation and noise synthesis pipeline for realistic noisy image generation. Specifically, our model learns a noise estimation model …
Modern self-supervised learning algorithms typically enforce persistency of instance representations across views. While being very effective on learning holistic image and video representations, such an objective becomes sub-optimal for learning spatio-temporally fine-grained features in videos, where scenes and instances evolve through space and time. In this paper, we present Contextualized Spatio-Temporal Contrastive Learning (ConST-CL) to effectively learn spatio-temporally fine-grained video representations via self-supervision. We first design a region-based pretext task which requires …
H3Former: Hypergraph-based Semantic-Aware Aggregation via Hyperbolic Hierarchical Contrastive Loss for Fine-Grained Visual Classification
College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University（吉林大学计算机科学与技术学院）；College of Software, Jilin University（吉林大学软件学院）；School of Software, Tsinghua University（清华大学软件学院）
A Multihead Continual Learning Framework for Fine-Grained Fashion Image Retrieval with Contrastive Learning and Exponential Moving Average Distillation
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University（信息科学与技术研究生院，北海道大学）；Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo（信息科学与技术研究生院，东京大学）
AFiRe: Anatomy-Driven Self-Supervised Learning for Fine-Grained Representation in Radiographic Images
School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University（同济大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Shanghai Eye Diseases Prevention and Treatment Center, Shanghai Eye Hospital（上海市眼病防治中心、上海眼科医院）；School of Communication and Electronic Engineering, East China Normal University（华东师范大学通信与电子工程学院）
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Previous feature alignment methods in Unsupervised domain adaptation(UDA) mostly only align global features without considering the mismatch between class-wise features. In this work, we propose a new coarse-to-fine feature alignment method using contrastive learning called CFContra. It draws class-wise features closer than coarse feature alignment or class-wise feature alignment only, therefore improves the model's performance to a great extent. We build it upon one of the most effective methods of UDA called entropy minimization to further improve performance. In particular, to prevent exces…
In this paper, we address the extraction of the fine-grained attributes of an instance as a `multi-attribute classification' problem. To this end, we propose an end-to-end architecture by adopting the bi-linear Convolutional Neural Network with the pairwise ranking loss. This is the first time such architecture is applied for the fine-grained attributes classification problem. We compared the proposed method with a competitive deep Convolutional Neural Network baseline. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method attains/outperforms the performance of compared baseline with significant…
Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；University of Texas at San Antonio（德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校）
Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC) has achieved significant progress recently. However, the number of fine-grained species could be huge and dynamically increasing in real scenarios, making it difficult to recognize unseen objects under the current FGVC framework. This raises an open issue to perform large-scale fine-grained identification without a complete training set. Aiming to conquer this issue, we propose a retrieval task named One-Shot Fine-Grained Instance Retrieval (OSFGIR). "One-Shot" denotes the ability of identifying unseen objects through a fine-grained retrieval task assi…
RealRAG: Retrieval-augmented Realistic Image Generation via Self-reflective Contrastive Learning
The Hong Kong University of Science（香港科学与技术大学）；Guangxi Key Laboratory of Digital Infrastructure, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Information Center（广西数字基础设施重点实验室，广西壮族自治区信息中心）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University（广东技术师范大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
With the explosive growth in the number of fine-grained images in the Internet era, it has become a challenging problem to perform fast and efficient retrieval from large-scale fine-grained images. Among the many retrieval methods, hashing methods are widely used due to their high efficiency and small storage space occupation. Fine-grained hashing is more challenging than traditional hashing problems due to the difficulties such as low inter-class variances and high intra-class variances caused by the characteristics of fine-grained images. To improve the retrieval accuracy of fine-grained has…
Large-scale fine-grained image retrieval has two main problems. First, low dimensional feature embedding can fasten the retrieval process but bring accuracy reduce due to overlooking the feature of significant attention regions of images in fine-grained datasets. Second, fine-grained images lead to the same category query hash codes mapping into the different cluster in database hash latent space. To handle these two issues, we propose a feature consistency driven attention erasing network (FCAENet) for fine-grained image retrieval. For the first issue, we propose an adaptive augmentation modu…
Language-guided Medical Image Segmentation with Target-informed Multi-level Contrastive Alignments
School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；Institute of Translational Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学转化医学研究院）；Zhongguancun Academy & Zhongguancun Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing, China（北京中关村学院及中关村人工智能研究院）；Department of Molecular Imaging, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital（皇家珀斯阿尔弗雷德医院分子成像部）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Fine-grained visual recognition is challenging because it highly relies on the modeling of various semantic parts and fine-grained feature learning. Bilinear pooling based models have been shown to be effective at fine-grained recognition, while most previous approaches neglect the fact that inter-layer part feature interaction and fine-grained feature learning are mutually correlated and can reinforce each other. In this paper, we present a novel model to address these issues. First, a cross-layer bilinear pooling approach is proposed to capture the inter-layer part feature relations, which r…
