When building a unified vision system or gradually adding new capabilities to a system, the usual assumption is that training data for all tasks is always available. However, as the number of tasks grows, storing and retraining on such data becomes infeasible. A new problem arises where we add new capabilities to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), but the training data for its existing capabilities are unavailable. We propose our Learning without Forgetting method, which uses only new task data to train the network while preserving the original capabilities. Our method performs favorably compared to commonly used feature extraction and fine-tuning adaption techniques and performs similarly to multitask learning that uses original task data we assume unavailable. A more surprising observation is that Learning without Forgetting may be able to replace fine-tuning with similar old and new task datasets for improved new task performance.

Learning without Forgetting

Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: ‘Open World Object Detection’, where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as ‘unknown’, without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call ORE: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyse the efficacy of ORE in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterising unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.1

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Towards Open World Object Detection

Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks

Tree detection and counting have been performed using conventional methods or high costly remote sensing data. In the past few years, deep learning techniques have gained significant progress in th...

Tree extraction from multi-scale UAV images using Mask R-CNN with FPN

In a real-world setting, object instances from new classes can be continuously encountered by object detectors. When existing object detectors are applied to such scenarios, their performance on old classes deteriorates significantly. A few efforts have been reported to address this limitation, all of which apply variants of knowledge distillation to avoid catastrophic forgetting. We note that although distillation helps to retain previous learning, it obstructs fast adaptability to new tasks, which is a critical requirement for incremental learning. In this pursuit, we propose a meta-learning approach that learns to reshape model gradients, such that information across incremental tasks is optimally shared. This ensures a seamless information transfer via a meta-learned gradient preconditioning that minimizes forgetting and maximizes knowledge transfer. In comparison to existing meta-learning methods, our approach is task-agnostic, allows incremental addition of new-classes and scales to high-capacity models for object detection. We evaluate our approach on a variety of incremental learning settings defined on PASCAL-VOC and MS COCO datasets, where our approach performs favourably well against state-of-the-art methods.

Incremental Object Detection via Meta-Learning

Faster ILOD: Incremental learning for object detectors based on faster RCNN

SID: Incremental learning for anchor-free object detection via Selective and Inter-related Distillation

The continual appearance of new objects in the visual world poses considerable challenges for current deep learning methods in real-world deployments. The challenge of new task learning is often exacerbated by the scarcity of data for the new categories due to rarity or cost. Here we explore the important task of Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) and its extreme data scarcity condition of one-shot. An ideal FSCIL model needs to perform well on all classes, regardless of their presentation order or paucity of data. It also needs to be robust to open-set real-world conditions and be easily adapted to the new tasks that always arise in the field. In this paper, we first reevaluate the current task setting and propose a more comprehensive and practical setting for the FSCIL task. Then, inspired by the similarity of the goals for FSCIL and modern face recognition systems, we propose our method -- Augmented Angular Loss Incremental Classification or ALICE. In ALICE, instead of the commonly used cross-entropy loss, we propose to use the angular penalty loss to obtain well-clustered features. As the obtained features not only need to be compactly clustered but also diverse enough to maintain generalization for future incremental classes, we further discuss how class augmentation, data augmentation, and data balancing affect classification performance. Experiments on benchmark datasets, including CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and CUB200, demonstrate the improved performance of ALICE over the state-of-the-art FSCIL methods.

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning from an Open-Set Perspective

The human vision and perception system is inherently incremental where new knowledge is continually learned over time whilst existing knowledge is retained. On the other hand, deep learning networks are ill-equipped for incremental learning. When a well-trained network is adapted to new categories, its performance on the old categories will dramatically degrade. To address this problem, incremental learning methods have been explored which preserve the old knowledge of deep learning models. However, the state-of-the-art incremental object detector employs an external fixed region proposal method that increases overall computation time and reduces accuracy comparing to Region Proposal Network (RPN) based object detectors such as Faster RCNN. The purpose of this paper is to design an efficient end-to-end incremental object detector using knowledge distillation. We first evaluate and analyze the performance of the RPN-based detector with classic distillation on incremental detection tasks. Then, we introduce multi-network adaptive distillation that properly retains knowledge from the old categories when fine-tuning the model for new task. Experiments on the benchmark datasets, PASCAL VOC and COCO, demonstrate that the proposed incremental detector based on Faster RCNN is more accurate as well as being 13 times faster than the baseline detector.

Faster ILOD: Incremental Learning for Object Detectors based on Faster RCNN

The condition of the Glomeruli, or filter sacks, in renal Direct Immunofluorescence (DIF) specimens is a critical indicator for diagnosing kidney diseases. A digital pathology system which digitizes a glass histology slide into a Whole Slide Image (WSI) and then automatically detects and zooms in on the glomeruli with a higher magnification objective will be extremely helpful for pathologists. In this paper, using glomerulus detection as the study case, we provide analysis and observations on several important issues to help with the development of Computer Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems to process WSIs. Large image resolution, large file size, and data scarcity are always challenging to deal with. To this end, we first examine image downsampling rates in terms of their effect on detection accuracy. Second, we examine the impact of image compression. Third, we examine the relationship between the size of the training set and detection accuracy. To understand the above issues, experiments are performed on the state-of-the-art detectors: Faster R-CNN, R-FCN, Mask R-CNN and SSD. Critical findings are observed: (1) The best balance between detection accuracy, detection speed and file size is achieved at 8 times downsampling captured with a $40\times$ objective; (2) compression which reduces the file size dramatically, does not necessarily have an adverse effect on overall accuracy; (3) reducing the amount of training data to some extents causes a drop in precision but has a negligible impact on the recall; (4) in most cases, Faster R-CNN achieves the best accuracy in the glomerulus detection task. We show that the image file size of $40\times$ WSI images can be reduced by a factor of over 6000 with negligible loss of glomerulus detection accuracy.

Can Peng

Papers

Faster ILOD: Incremental learning for object detectors based on faster RCNN

SID: Incremental learning for anchor-free object detection via Selective and Inter-related Distillation

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning from an Open-Set Perspective

Faster ILOD: Incremental Learning for Object Detectors based on Faster RCNN

To What Extent Does Downsampling, Compression, and Data Scarcity Impact Renal Image Analysis?