Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers—8× deeper than VGG nets [40] but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions1, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

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Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition

In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition

There is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding-window convolutional network) on the ISBI challenge for segmentation of neuronal structures in electron microscopic stacks. Using the same network trained on transmitted light microscopy images (phase contrast and DIC) we won the ISBI cell tracking challenge 2015 in these categories by a large margin. Moreover, the network is fast. Segmentation of a 512x512 image takes less than a second on a recent GPU. The full implementation (based on Caffe) and the trained networks are available at http://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/people/ronneber/u-net .

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U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation

Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers---8x deeper than VGG nets but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. 
The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

One major challenge in training Deep Neural Networks is preventing overfitting. Many techniques such as data augmentation and novel regularizers such as Dropout have been proposed to prevent overfitting without requiring a massive amount of training data. In this work, we propose a new regularizer called DeCov which leads to significantly reduced overfitting (as indicated by the difference between train and val performance), and better generalization. Our regularizer encourages diverse or non-redundant representations in Deep Neural Networks by minimizing the cross-covariance of hidden activations. This simple intuition has been explored in a number of past works but surprisingly has never been applied as a regularizer in supervised learning. Experiments across a range of datasets and network architectures show that this loss always reduces overfitting while almost always maintaining or increasing generalization performance and often improving performance over Dropout.

Reducing Overfitting in Deep Networks by Decorrelating Representations

In this paper, we show how to train a deformable part model (DPM) fast-typically in less than 20 minutes, or four times faster than the current fastest method-while maintaining high average precision on the PASCAL VOC datasets. At the core of our approach is "latent LDA," a novel generalization of linear discriminant analysis for learning latent variable models. Unlike latent SVM, latent LDA uses efficient closed-form updates and does not require an expensive search for hard negative examples. Our approach also acts as a springboard for a detailed experimental study of DPM training. We isolate and quantify the impact of key training factors for the first time (e.g., How important are discriminative SVM filters? How important is joint parameter estimation? How many negative images are needed for training?). Our findings yield useful insights for researchers working with Markov random fields and part-based models, and have practical implications for speeding up tasks such as model selection.

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Training Deformable Part Models with Decorrelated Features

Learning to localize objects with minimal supervision is an important problem
in computer vision, since large fully annotated datasets are extremely costly
to obtain. In this paper, we propose a new method that achieves this goal with
only image-level labels of whether the objects are present or not. Our approach
combines a discriminative submodular cover problem for automatically
discovering a set of positive object windows with a smoothed latent SVM
formulation. The latter allows us to leverage efficient Quasi-Newton
optimization techniques. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach
provides approximately 70% relative improvement in average precision over the
current state of the art on standard benchmark datasets.

One-Bit Object Detection: On learning to localize objects with minimal supervision.

Shared representations are highly appealing due to their potential for gains in computational and statistical efficiency. Compressing a shared representation leads to greater computational savings, but can also severely decrease performance on a target task. Recently, sparselets (Song et al., 2012) were introduced as a new shared intermediate representation for multiclass object detection with deformable part models (Felzenszwalb et al., 2010a), showing significant speedup factors, but with a large decrease in task performance. In this paper we describe a new training framework that learns which sparselets to activate in order to optimize a discriminative objective, leading to larger speedup factors with no decrease in task performance. We first reformulate sparselets in a general structured output prediction framework, then analyze when sparselets lead to computational efficiency gains, and lastly show experimental results on object detection and image classification tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate that discriminative activation substantially outperforms the previous reconstructive approach which, together with our structured output prediction formulation, make sparselets broadly applicable and significantly more effective.

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Discriminatively Activated Sparselets

We introduce PyTorchVideo, an open-source deep-learning library that provides a rich set of modular, efficient, and reproducible components for a variety of video understanding tasks, including classification, detection, self-supervised learning, and low-level processing. The library covers a full stack of video understanding tools including multimodal data loading, transformations, and models that reproduce state-of-the-art performance. PyTorchVideo further supports hardware acceleration that enables real-time inference on mobile devices. The library is based on PyTorch and can be used by any training framework; for example, PyTorchLightning, PySlowFast, or Classy Vision. PyTorchVideo is available at https://pytorchvideo.org/.

Ross Girshick

Papers

Reducing Overfitting in Deep Networks by Decorrelating Representations

Training Deformable Part Models with Decorrelated Features

One-Bit Object Detection: On learning to localize objects with minimal supervision.

Discriminatively Activated Sparselets

PyTorchVideo: A Deep Learning Library for Video Understanding