In this work, we present BasisNet which combines recent advancements in efficient neural network architectures, conditional computation, and early termination in a simple new form. Our approach incorporates a lightweight model to preview the input an
d generate input-dependent combination coefficients, which later controls the synthesis of a more accurate specialist model to make final prediction. The two-stage model synthesis strategy can be applied to any network architectures and both stages are jointly trained. We also show that proper training recipes are critical for increasing generalizability for such high capacity neural networks. On ImageNet classification benchmark, our BasisNet with MobileNets as backbone demonstrated clear advantage on accuracy-efficiency trade-off over several strong baselines. Specifically, BasisNet-MobileNetV3 obtained 80.3% top-1 accuracy with only 290M Multiply-Add operations, halving the computational cost of previous state-of-the-art without sacrificing accuracy. With early termination, the average cost can be further reduced to 198M MAdds while maintaining accuracy of 80.0% on ImageNet.
Learning to localize and name object instances is a fundamental problem in vision, but state-of-the-art approaches rely on expensive bounding box supervision. While weakly supervised detection (WSOD) methods relax the need for boxes to that of image-
level annotations, even cheaper supervision is naturally available in the form of unstructured textual descriptions that users may freely provide when uploading image content. However, straightforward approaches to using such data for WSOD wastefully discard captions that do not exactly match object names. Instead, we show how to squeeze the most information out of these captions by training a text-only classifier that generalizes beyond dataset boundaries. Our discovery provides an opportunity for learning detection models from noisy but more abundant and freely-available caption data. We also validate our model on three classic object detection benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art WSOD performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/yekeren/Cap2Det.
To alleviate the cost of obtaining accurate bounding boxes for training todays state-of-the-art object detection models, recent weakly supervised detection work has proposed techniques to learn from image-level labels. However, requiring discrete ima
ge-level labels is both restrictive and suboptimal. Real-world supervision usually consists of more unstructured text, such as captions. In this work we learn association maps between images and captions. We then use a novel objectness criterion to rank the resulting candidate boxes, such that high-ranking boxes have strong gradients along all edges. Thus, we can detect objects beyond a fixed object category vocabulary, if those objects are frequent and distinctive enough. We show that our objectness criterion improves the proposed bounding boxes in relation to prior weakly supervised detection methods. Further, we show encouraging results on object detection from image-level captions only.
There is more to images than their objective physical content: for example, advertisements are created to persuade a viewer to take a certain action. We propose the novel problem of automatic advertisement understanding. To enable research on this pr
oblem, we create two datasets: an image dataset of 64,832 image ads, and a video dataset of 3,477 ads. Our data contains rich annotations encompassing the topic and sentiment of the ads, questions and answers describing what actions the viewer is prompted to take and the reasoning that the ad presents to persuade the viewer (What should I do according to this ad, and why should I do it?), and symbolic references ads make (e.g. a dove symbolizes peace). We also analyze the most common persuasive strategies ads use, and the capabilities that computer vision systems should have to understand these strategies. We present baseline classification results for several prediction tasks, including automatically answering questions about the messages of the ads.
