ByeongMoon Ji

Jae-Hun Lee, Doyoung Yoon, ByeongMoon Ji et al.

Linear probing (LP) (and $k$-NN) on the upstream dataset with labels (e.g., ImageNet) and transfer learning (TL) to various downstream datasets are commonly employed to evaluate the quality of visual representations learned via self-supervised learning (SSL). Although existing SSL methods have shown good performances under those evaluation protocols, we observe that the performances are very sensitive to the hyperparameters involved in LP and TL. We argue that this is an undesirable behavior since truly generic representations should be easily adapted to any other visual recognition task, i.e., the learned representations should be robust to the settings of LP and TL hyperparameters. In this work, we try to figure out the cause of performance sensitivity by conducting extensive experiments with state-of-the-art SSL methods. First, we find that input normalization for LP is crucial to eliminate performance variations according to the hyperparameters. Specifically, batch normalization before feeding inputs to a linear classifier considerably improves the stability of evaluation, and also resolves inconsistency of $k$-NN and LP metrics. Second, for TL, we demonstrate that a weight decay parameter in SSL significantly affects the transferability of learned representations, which cannot be identified by LP or $k$-NN evaluations on the upstream dataset. We believe that the findings of this study will be beneficial for the community by drawing attention to the shortcomings in the current SSL evaluation schemes and underscoring the need to reconsider them.

Kyungyul Kim, ByeongMoon Ji, Doyoung Yoon et al.

The generalization capability of deep neural networks has been substantially improved by applying a wide spectrum of regularization methods, e.g., restricting function space, injecting randomness during training, augmenting data, etc. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective regularization method named progressive self-knowledge distillation (PS-KD), which progressively distills a model's own knowledge to soften hard targets (i.e., one-hot vectors) during training. Hence, it can be interpreted within a framework of knowledge distillation as a student becomes a teacher itself. Specifically, targets are adjusted adaptively by combining the ground-truth and past predictions from the model itself. We show that PS-KD provides an effect of hard example mining by rescaling gradients according to difficulty in classifying examples. The proposed method is applicable to any supervised learning tasks with hard targets and can be easily combined with existing regularization methods to further enhance the generalization performance. Furthermore, it is confirmed that PS-KD achieves not only better accuracy, but also provides high quality of confidence estimates in terms of calibration as well as ordinal ranking. Extensive experimental results on three different tasks, image classification, object detection, and machine translation, demonstrate that our method consistently improves the performance of the state-of-the-art baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/lgcnsai/PS-KD-Pytorch.

Byeongmoon Ji, Hyemin Jung, Jihyeun Yoon et al.

The prediction reliability of neural networks is important in many applications. Specifically, in safety-critical domains, such as cancer prediction or autonomous driving, a reliable confidence of model's prediction is critical for the interpretation of the results. Modern deep neural networks have achieved a significant improvement in performance for many different image classification tasks. However, these networks tend to be poorly calibrated in terms of output confidence. Temperature scaling is an efficient post-processing-based calibration scheme and obtains well calibrated results. In this study, we leverage the concept of temperature scaling to build a sophisticated bin-wise scaling. Furthermore, we adopt augmentation of validation samples for elaborated scaling. The proposed methods consistently improve calibration performance with various datasets and deep convolutional neural network models.