In this paper, we apply the attention mechanism to autonomous driving for steering angle prediction. We propose the first model, applying the recently introduced sparse attention mechanism to visual domain, as well as the aggregated extension for this model. We show the improvement of the proposed method, comparing to no attention as well as to different types of attention.
One limitation of soft attention is that it only reweighs the convolutional features and therefore everything is always attended to, although not with the same relative importance (hence attention). In contrast, models only process part of the input, which is assumed to be the most important region. Because hard attention is not differentiable, it is more challenging to optimise. @cite_4 proposes to learn hard attention from reinforcement learning. There are two crucial component in their network: The first one is a glimpse sensor, which can be used to extract a retina-like representation centred at a given location in the input; The second component is a glimpse network, it is used to process the retina-like representation extracted from the glimpse sensor, and the processed information is then fed into a recurrent neural network (RNN) which estimates the attention focus for the glimpse sensor at the next iteration.
@cite_4
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This paper presents experiments extending the work of (2014) on recurrent neural models for attention into less constrained visual environments, specifically fine-grained categorization on the Stanford Dogs data set. In this work we use an RNN of the same structure but substitute a more powerful visual network and perform large-scale pre-training of the visual network outside of the attention RNN. Most work in attention models to date focuses on tasks with toy or more constrained visual environments, whereas we present results for fine-grained categorization better than the state-of-the-art GoogLeNet classification model. We show that our model learns to direct high resolution attention to the most discriminative regions without any spatial supervision such as bounding boxes, and it is able to discriminate fine-grained dog breeds moderately well even when given only an initial low-resolution context image and narrow, inexpensive glimpses at faces and fur patterns. This and similar attention models have the major advantage of being trained end-to-end, as opposed to other current detection and recognition pipelines with hand-engineered components where information is lost. While our model is state-of-the-art, further work is needed to fully leverage the sequential input. Abstract Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been widely used in natural language processing and computer vision. Amongst them, the Hierarchical Multi-scale RNN (HM-RNN), a recently proposed multi-scale hierarchical RNN, can automatically learn the hierarchical temporal structure from data. In this paper, we extend the work to solve the computer vision task of action recognition. However, in sequence-to-sequence models like RNN, it is normally very hard to discover the relationships between inputs and outputs given static inputs. As a solution, the attention mechanism can be applied to extract the relevant information from the inputs thus facilitating the modeling of the input–output relationships. Based on these considerations, we propose a novel attention network, namely Hierarchical Multi-scale Attention Network (HM-AN), by incorporating the attention mechanism into the HM-RNN and applying it to action recognition. A newly proposed gradient estimation method for stochastic neurons, namely Gumbel-softmax, is exploited to implement the temporal boundary detectors and the stochastic hard attention mechanism. To reduce the negative effect of the temperature sensitivity of the Gumbel-softmax, an adaptive temperature training method is applied to improve the system performance. The experimental results demonstrate the improved effect of HM-AN over LSTM with attention on the vision task. Through visualization of what has been learnt by the network, it can be observed that both the attention regions of the images and the hierarchical temporal structure can be captured by a HM-AN. We aim to model the top-down attention of a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier for generating task-specific attention maps. Inspired by a top-down human visual attention model, we propose a new backpropagation scheme, called Excitation Backprop, to pass along top-down signals downwards in the network hierarchy via a probabilistic Winner-Take-All process. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of contrastive attention to make the top-down attention maps more discriminative. We show a theoretic connection between the proposed contrastive attention formulation and the Class Activation Map computation. Efficient implementation of Excitation Backprop for common neural network layers is also presented. In experiments, we visualize the evidence of a model’s classification decision by computing the proposed top-down attention maps. For quantitative evaluation, we report the accuracy of our method in weakly supervised localization tasks on the MS COCO, PASCAL VOC07 and ImageNet datasets. The usefulness of our method is further validated in the text-to-region association task. On the Flickr30k Entities dataset, we achieve promising performance in phrase localization by leveraging the top-down attention of a CNN model that has been trained on weakly labeled web images. Finally, we demonstrate applications of our method in model interpretation and data annotation assistance for facial expression analysis and medical imaging tasks. We aim to model the top-down attention of a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier for generating task-specific attention maps. Inspired by a top-down human visual attention model, we propose a new backpropagation scheme, called Excitation Backprop, to pass along top-down signals downwards in the network hierarchy via a probabilistic Winner-Take-All process. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of contrastive attention to make the top-down attention maps more discriminative. We show a theoretic connection between the proposed contrastive attention formulation and the Class Activation Map computation. Efficient implementation of Excitation Backprop for common neural network layers is also presented. In experiments, we visualize the evidence of a model’s classification decision by computing the proposed top-down attention maps. For quantitative evaluation, we report the accuracy of our method in weakly supervised localization tasks on the MS COCO, PASCAL VOC07 and ImageNet datasets. The usefulness of our method is further validated in the text-to-region association task. On the Flickr30k Entities dataset, we achieve promising performance in phrase localization by leveraging the top-down attention of a CNN model that has been trained on weakly labeled web images. Finally, we demonstrate applications of our method in model interpretation and data annotation assistance for facial expression analysis and medical imaging tasks.