LEARNING TOWARDS THE LARGEST MARGINS

Xiong Zhou, Xianming Liu*, Deming Zhai, Junjun Jiang, Xin Gao, Xiangyang Ji

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

One of the main challenges for feature representation in deep learning-based classification is the design of appropriate loss functions that exhibit strong discriminative power. The classical softmax loss does not explicitly encourage discriminative learning of features. A popular direction of research is to incorporate margins in well-established losses in order to enforce extra intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, which, however, were developed through heuristic means, as opposed to rigorous mathematical principles. In this work, we attempt to address this limitation by formulating the principled optimization objective as learning towards the largest margins. Specifically, we firstly define the class margin as the measure of inter-class separability, and the sample margin as the measure of intra-class compactness. Accordingly, to encourage discriminative representation of features, the loss function should promote the largest possible margins for both classes and samples. Furthermore, we derive a generalized margin softmax loss to draw general conclusions for the existing margin-based losses. Not only does this principled framework offer new perspectives to understand and interpret existing margin-based losses, but it also provides new insights that can guide the design of new tools, including sample margin regularization and largest margin softmax loss for the class-balanced case, and zero-centroid regularization for the class-imbalanced case. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy on a variety of tasks, including visual classification, imbalanced classification, person re-identification, and face verification.

Original languageEnglish (US)
StatePublished - 2022
Event10th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2022 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Apr 25 2022Apr 29 2022

Conference

Conference10th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2022
CityVirtual, Online
Period04/25/2204/29/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Education
  • Linguistics and Language

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'LEARNING TOWARDS THE LARGEST MARGINS'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this