Attend in groups: a weakly-supervised deep learning framework for learning from web data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a weakly-supervised deep learning framework that effectively learns from noisy web data by using random grouping and attention mechanisms, improving visual recognition performance.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel end-to-end framework combining random grouping and attention to mitigate label noise in web images for deep learning.

Findings

Outperforms baseline methods on challenging datasets

Effective noise reduction through random grouping and attention

Demonstrates robustness on a new fine-grained car dataset

Abstract

Large-scale datasets have driven the rapid development of deep neural networks for visual recognition. However, annotating a massive dataset is expensive and time-consuming. Web images and their labels are, in comparison, much easier to obtain, but direct training on such automatically harvested images can lead to unsatisfactory performance, because the noisy labels of Web images adversely affect the learned recognition models. To address this drawback we propose an end-to-end weakly-supervised deep learning framework which is robust to the label noise in Web images. The proposed framework relies on two unified strategies -- random grouping and attention -- to effectively reduce the negative impact of noisy web image annotations. Specifically, random grouping stacks multiple images into a single training instance and thus increases the labeling accuracy at the instance level. Attention, on the other hand, suppresses the noisy signals from both incorrectly labeled images and less discriminative image regions. By conducting intensive experiments on two challenging datasets, including a newly collected fine-grained dataset with Web images of different car models, the superior performance of the proposed methods over competitive baselines is clearly demonstrated.