We present an approach to learn a dense pixel-wise labeling from image-level tags. Each image-level tag imposes constraints on the output labeling of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier. We propose Constrained CNN (CCNN), a method which uses a novel loss function to optimize for any set of linear constraints on the output space (i.e. predicted label distribution) of a CNN. Our loss formulation is easy to optimize and can be incorporated directly into standard stochastic gradient descent optimization. The key idea is to phrase the training objective as a biconvex optimization for linear models, which we then relax to nonlinear deep networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generality of our new learning framework. The constrained loss yields state-of-the-art results on weakly supervised semantic image segmentation. We further demonstrate that adding slightly more supervision can greatly improve the performance of the learning algorithm.
Weakly supervised learning seeks to capture the signal that is common to all the positives but absent from all the negatives. This is challenging due to nuisance variables such as pose, occlusion, and intra-class variation. Learning with weak labels is often phrased as Multiple Instance Learning @cite_35 . It is most frequently formulated as a maximum margin problem, although boosting @cite_16 @cite_11 and Noisy-OR models @cite_20 have been explored as well. The multiple instance max-margin classification problem is non-convex and solved as an alternating minimization of a biconvex objective @cite_24 . MI-SVM @cite_24 or LSVM @cite_7 are two classic methods in this paradigm. This setting naturally applies to weakly-labeled detection @cite_5 @cite_30 . However, most of these approaches are sensitive to the initialization of the detector @cite_13 . Several heuristics have been proposed to address these issues @cite_18 @cite_30 , however they are usually specific to detection.
@cite_30 @cite_35 @cite_18 @cite_7 @cite_24 @cite_5 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_20 @cite_11
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In this paper, we study the problem of learning from weakly labeled data, where labels of the training examples are incomplete. This includes, for example, (i) semi-supervised learning where labels are partially known; (ii) multi-instance learning where labels are implicitly known; and (iii) clustering where labels are completely unknown. Unlike supervised learning, learning with weak labels involves a difficult Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) problem. Therefore, it can suffer from poor scalability and may also get stuck in local minimum. In this paper, we focus on SVMs and propose the WELLSVM via a novel label generation strategy. This leads to a convex relaxation of the original MIP, which is at least as tight as existing convex Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) relaxations. Moreover, the WELLSVM can be solved via a sequence of SVM subproblems that are much more scalable than previous convex SDP relaxations. Experiments on three weakly labeled learning tasks, namely, (i) semi-supervised learning; (ii) multi-instance learning for locating regions of interest in content-based information retrieval; and (iii) clustering, clearly demonstrate improved performance, and WELLSVM is also readily applicable on large data sets. Weakly supervised object detection, is a challenging task, where the training procedure involves learning at the same time both, the model appearance and the object location in each image. The classical approach to solve this problem is to consider the location of the object of interest in each image as a latent variable and minimize the loss generated by such latent variable during learning. However, as learning appearance and localization are two interconnected tasks, the optimization is not convex and the procedure can easily get stuck in a poor local minimum, i.e. the algorithm “misses” the object in some images. In this paper, we help the optimization to get close to the global minimum by enforcing a “soft” similarity between each possible location in the image and a reduced set of “exemplars”, or clusters, learned with a convex formulation in the training images. The help is effective because it comes from a different and smooth source of information that is not directly connected with the main task. Results show that our method improves a strong baseline based on convolutional neural network features by more than 4 points without any additional features or extra computation at testing time but only adding a small increment of the training time due to the convex clustering. The prominence of weakly labeled data gives rise to a growing demand for object detection methods that can cope with minimal supervision. We propose an approach that automatically identifies discriminative configurations of visual patterns that are characteristic of a given object class. We formulate the problem as a constrained submodular optimization problem and demonstrate the benefits of the discovered configurations in remedying mislocalizations and finding informative positive and negative training examples. Together, these lead to state-of-the-art weakly-supervised detection results on the challenging PASCAL VOC dataset. Weakly-supervised object detection has attracted much attention lately, since it does not require bounding box annotations for training. Although significant progress has also been made, there is still a large gap in performance between weakly-supervised and fully-supervised object detection. Recently, some works use pseudo ground-truths which are generated by a weakly-supervised detector to train a supervised detector. Such approaches incline to find the most representative parts of objects, and only seek one ground-truth box per class even though many same-class instances exist. To overcome these issues, we propose a weakly-supervised to fully-supervised framework, where a weakly-supervised detector is implemented using multiple instance learning. Then, we propose a pseudo ground-truth excavation (PGE) algorithm to find the pseudo ground-truth of each instance in the image. Moreover, the pseudo ground-truth adaptation (PGA) algorithm is designed to further refine the pseudo ground-truths from PGE. Finally, we use these pseudo ground-truths to train a fully-supervised detector. Extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 benchmarks strongly demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. We obtain 52.4 and 47.8 mAP on VOC2007 and VOC2012 respectively, a significant improvement over previous state-of-the-art methods.