Yash Patel presents Smooth-AP: Smoothing the Path Towards Large-Scale Image Retrieval

On 2020-11-26 11:00:00 at https://meet.google.com/yzt-yyeb-ohc
Online reading group on the work "Smooth-AP: Smoothing the Path Towards
Large-Scale Image Retrieval", Andrew Brown, Weidi Xie, Vicky Kalogeiton,
Andrew Zisserman. ECCV 2020, Presented by Yash Patel

Video conference link: https://meet.google.com/yzt-yyeb-ohc
Instructions: http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/~toliageo/rg/instructions.html

Abstract: Optimising a ranking-based metric, such as Average Precision (AP), is
notoriously challenging due to the fact that it is non-differentiable, and
hence cannot be optimised directly using gradient-descent methods. To this end,
we
introduce an objective that optimises instead a smoothed approximation of AP,
coined Smooth-AP. Smooth-AP is a plug-and-play objective function that allows
for end-to-end training of deep networks with a simple and elegant
implementation. We also present an analysis for why directly optimising the
ranking based metric of AP offers benefits over other deep metric learning
losses. We apply Smooth-AP to standard retrieval benchmarks: Stanford Online
products and VehicleID, and also evaluate on larger-scale datasets: INaturalist
for fine-grained category retrieval, and VGGFace2 and IJB-C for face retrieval.
In all cases, we improve the performance over the state-of-the-art, especially
for larger-scale datasets, thus demonstrating the effectiveness and scalability
of Smooth-AP to real-world scenarios.

Paper URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.12163

Instructions for participants: The reading group studies the literature in the
field of pattern recognition and computer vision. At each meeting one or more
papers are prepared for presentation by a single person, the presenter. The
meetings are open to anyone, disregarding their background. It is assumed that
everyone attending the reading group has, at least briefly, read the paper –
not necessarily understanding everything. Attendants should preferably send
questions about the unclear parts to the speaker at least one day in advance.
During the presentation we aim to have a fruitful discussion, a critical
analysis of the paper, as well as brainstorming for creative extensions.

See the page of reading groups
http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/~toliageo/rg/index.html
Responsible person: Petr Pošík