Vladan Stojnić

Vladan Stojnić, Zakaria Laskar, Giorgos Tolias

Deep active learning in the presence of outlier examples poses a realistic yet challenging scenario. Acquiring unlabeled data for annotation requires a delicate balance between avoiding outliers to conserve the annotation budget and prioritizing useful inlier examples for effective training. In this work, we present an approach that leverages three highly synergistic components, which are identified as key ingredients: joint classifier training with inliers and outliers, semi-supervised learning through pseudo-labeling, and model ensembling. Our work demonstrates that ensembling significantly enhances the accuracy of pseudo-labeling and improves the quality of data acquisition. By enabling semi-supervision through the joint training process, where outliers are properly handled, we observe a substantial boost in classifier accuracy through the use of all available unlabeled examples. Notably, we reveal that the integration of joint training renders explicit outlier detection unnecessary; a conventional component for acquisition in prior work. The three key components align seamlessly with numerous existing approaches. Through empirical evaluations, we showcase that their combined use leads to a performance increase. Remarkably, despite its simplicity, our proposed approach outperforms all other methods in terms of performance. Code: https://github.com/vladan-stojnic/active-outliers

Tilemachos Aravanis, Vladan Stojnić, Bill Psomas et al.

Open-vocabulary segmentation (OVS) extends the zero-shot recognition capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) to pixel-level prediction, enabling segmentation of arbitrary categories specified by text prompts. Despite recent progress, OVS lags behind fully supervised approaches due to two challenges: the coarse image-level supervision used to train VLMs and the semantic ambiguity of natural language. We address these limitations by introducing a few-shot setting that augments textual prompts with a support set of pixel-annotated images. Building on this, we propose a retrieval-augmented test-time adapter that learns a lightweight, per-image classifier by fusing textual and visual support features. Unlike prior methods relying on late, hand-crafted fusion, our approach performs learned, per-query fusion, achieving stronger synergy between modalities. The method supports continually expanding support sets, and applies to fine-grained tasks such as personalized segmentation. Experiments show that we significantly narrow the gap between zero-shot and supervised segmentation while preserving open-vocabulary ability.

Vladan Stojnić, Yannis Kalantidis, Giorgos Tolias

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on zero-shot classification, i.e. classification when provided merely with a list of class names. In this paper, we tackle the case of zero-shot classification in the presence of unlabeled data. We leverage the graph structure of the unlabeled data and introduce ZLaP, a method based on label propagation (LP) that utilizes geodesic distances for classification. We tailor LP to graphs containing both text and image features and further propose an efficient method for performing inductive inference based on a dual solution and a sparsification step. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our method on 14 common datasets and show that ZLaP outperforms the latest related works. Code: https://github.com/vladan-stojnic/ZLaP

Vladimir Risojević, Vladan Stojnić

Due to the scarcity of labeled data, using supervised models pre-trained on ImageNet is a de facto standard in remote sensing scene classification. Recently, the availability of larger high resolution remote sensing (HRRS) image datasets and progress in self-supervised learning have brought up the questions of whether supervised ImageNet pre-training is still necessary for remote sensing scene classification and would supervised pre-training on HRRS image datasets or self-supervised pre-training on ImageNet achieve better results on target remote sensing scene classification tasks. To answer these questions, in this paper we both train models from scratch and fine-tune supervised and self-supervised ImageNet models on several HRRS image datasets. We also evaluate the transferability of learned representations to HRRS scene classification tasks and show that self-supervised pre-training outperforms the supervised one, while the performance of HRRS pre-training is similar to self-supervised pre-training or slightly lower. Finally, we propose using an ImageNet pre-trained model combined with a second round of pre-training using in-domain HRRS images, i.e. domain-adaptive pre-training. The experimental results show that domain-adaptive pre-training results in models that achieve state-of-the-art results on HRRS scene classification benchmarks. The source code and pre-trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/risojevicv/RSSC-transfer}.

Giorgos Kordopatis-Zilos, Vladan Stojnić, Anna Manko et al.

This work introduces ILIAS, a new test dataset for Instance-Level Image retrieval At Scale. It is designed to evaluate the ability of current and future foundation models and retrieval techniques to recognize particular objects. The key benefits over existing datasets include large scale, domain diversity, accurate ground truth, and a performance that is far from saturated. ILIAS includes query and positive images for 1,000 object instances, manually collected to capture challenging conditions and diverse domains. Large-scale retrieval is conducted against 100 million distractor images from YFCC100M. To avoid false negatives without extra annotation effort, we include only query objects confirmed to have emerged after 2014, i.e. the compilation date of YFCC100M. An extensive benchmarking is performed with the following observations: i) models fine-tuned on specific domains, such as landmarks or products, excel in that domain but fail on ILIAS ii) learning a linear adaptation layer using multi-domain class supervision results in performance improvements, especially for vision-language models iii) local descriptors in retrieval re-ranking are still a key ingredient, especially in the presence of severe background clutter iv) the text-to-image performance of the vision-language foundation models is surprisingly close to the corresponding image-to-image case. website: https://vrg.fel.cvut.cz/ilias/

Vladan Stojnić, Vladimir Risojević

In recent years self-supervised learning has emerged as a promising candidate for unsupervised representation learning. In the visual domain its applications are mostly studied in the context of images of natural scenes. However, its applicability is especially interesting in specific areas, like remote sensing and medicine, where it is hard to obtain huge amounts of labeled data. In this work, we conduct an extensive analysis of the applicability of self-supervised learning in remote sensing image classification. We analyze the influence of the number and domain of images used for self-supervised pre-training on the performance on downstream tasks. We show that, for the downstream task of remote sensing image classification, using self-supervised pre-training on remote sensing images can give better results than using supervised pre-training on images of natural scenes. Besides, we also show that self-supervised pre-training can be easily extended to multispectral images producing even better results on our downstream tasks.