Publications

Label hierarchies widely exist in many vision-related problems, ranging from explicit label hierarchies existed in image classification to latent label hierarchies existed in semantic segmentation. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art methods often deploy cross-entropy loss that implicitly assumes class labels to be exclusive and thus independence from each other. Motivated by the fact that classes from the same parental category usually share certain similarity, we design a new training diagram called Hierarchical Complement Objective Training (HCOT) that leverages the information from label hierarchy. HCOT maximizes the probability of the ground truth class, and at the same time, neutralizes the probabilities of rest of the classes in a hierarchical fashion, making the model take advantage of the label hierarchy explicitly. The proposed HCOT is evaluated on both image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. Experimental results confirm that HCOT outperforms state-of-the-art models in CIFAR-100, ImageNet-2012, and PASCAL-Context. The study further demonstrates that HCOT can be applied on tasks with latent label hierarchies, which is a common characteristic in many machine learning tasks.

Learning with a primary objective, such as softmax cross entropy for classification and sequence generation, has been the norm for training deep neural networks for years. Although being a widely-adopted approach, using cross entropy as the primary objective exploits mostly the information from the ground-truth class for maximizing data likelihood, and largely ignores information from the complement (incorrect) classes. We argue that, in addition to the primary objective, training also using a complement objective that leverages information from the complement classes can be effective in improving model performance. This motivates us to study a new training paradigm that maximizes the likelihood of the ground-truth class while neutralizing the probabilities of the complement classes. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple tasks ranging from computer vision to natural language understanding. The experimental results confirm that, compared to the conventional training with just one primary objective, training also with the complement objective further improves the performance of the state-of-the-art models across all tasks. In addition to the accuracy improvement, we also show that models trained with both primary and complement objectives are more robust to adversarial attacks.

Learning with a primary objective, such as softmax cross entropy for classification and sequence generation, has been the norm for training deep neural networks for years. Although being a widely-adopted approach, using cross entropy as the primary objective exploits mostly the information from the ground-truth class for maximizing data likelihood, and largely ignores information from the complement (incorrect) classes. We argue that, in addition to the primary objective, training also using a complement objective that leverages information from the complement classes can be effective in improving model performance. This motivates us to study a new training paradigm that maximizes the likelihood of the ground-truth class while neutralizing the probabilities of the complement classes. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple tasks ranging from computer vision to natural language understanding. The experimental results confirm that, compared to the conventional training with just one primary objective, training also with the complement objective further improves the performance of the state-of-the-art models across all tasks. In addition to the accuracy improvement, we also show that models trained with both primary and complement objectives are more robust to adversarial attacks.