Nadav Zamir

Emanuel Ben-Baruch, Tal Ridnik, Nadav Zamir et al.

In a typical multi-label setting, a picture contains on average few positive labels, and many negative ones. This positive-negative imbalance dominates the optimization process, and can lead to under-emphasizing gradients from positive labels during training, resulting in poor accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a novel asymmetric loss ("ASL"), which operates differently on positive and negative samples. The loss enables to dynamically down-weights and hard-thresholds easy negative samples, while also discarding possibly mislabeled samples. We demonstrate how ASL can balance the probabilities of different samples, and how this balancing is translated to better mAP scores. With ASL, we reach state-of-the-art results on multiple popular multi-label datasets: MS-COCO, Pascal-VOC, NUS-WIDE and Open Images. We also demonstrate ASL applicability for other tasks, such as single-label classification and object detection. ASL is effective, easy to implement, and does not increase the training time or complexity. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/Alibaba-MIIL/ASL.

Avi Ben-Cohen, Nadav Zamir, Emanuel Ben Baruch et al.

Training a neural network model for recognizing multiple labels associated with an image, including identifying unseen labels, is challenging, especially for images that portray numerous semantically diverse labels. As challenging as this task is, it is an essential task to tackle since it represents many real-world cases, such as image retrieval of natural images. We argue that using a single embedding vector to represent an image, as commonly practiced, is not sufficient to rank both relevant seen and unseen labels accurately. This study introduces an end-to-end model training for multi-label zero-shot learning that supports semantic diversity of the images and labels. We propose to use an embedding matrix having principal embedding vectors trained using a tailored loss function. In addition, during training, we suggest up-weighting in the loss function image samples presenting higher semantic diversity to encourage the diversity of the embedding matrix. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method improves the zero-shot model's quality in tag-based image retrieval achieving SoTA results on several common datasets (NUS-Wide, COCO, Open Images).

Asaf Noy, Niv Nayman, Tal Ridnik et al.

Automatic methods for Neural Architecture Search (NAS) have been shown to produce state-of-the-art network models. Yet, their main drawback is the computational complexity of the search process. As some primal methods optimized over a discrete search space, thousands of days of GPU were required for convergence. A recent approach is based on constructing a differentiable search space that enables gradient-based optimization, which reduces the search time to a few days. While successful, it still includes some noncontinuous steps, e.g., the pruning of many weak connections at once. In this paper, we propose a differentiable search space that allows the annealing of architecture weights, while gradually pruning inferior operations. In this way, the search converges to a single output network in a continuous manner. Experiments on several vision datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with respect to the search cost and accuracy of the achieved model. Specifically, with $0.2$ GPU search days we achieve an error rate of $1.68\%$ on CIFAR-10.