In plain words: A network sorts unlabeled object crops into categories on its own, storing each category as a memory unit while learning what visual features matter. Without hand labels, it found groups matching cars, people, and bicycles in street scenes, and clustered objects in a simpler image set.
Abstract · Object category learning and retrieval with weak supervision
We consider the problem of retrieving objects from image data and learning to classify them into meaningful semantic categories with minimal supervision. To that end, we propose a fully differentiable unsupervised deep clustering approach to learn semantic classes in an end-to-end fashion without individual class labeling using only unlabeled object proposals. The key contributions of our work are 1) a kmeans clustering objective where the clusters are learned as parameters of the network and are represented as memory units, and 2) simultaneously building a feature representation, or embedding, while learning to cluster it. This approach shows promising results on two popular computer vision datasets: on CIFAR10 for clustering objects, and on the more complex and challenging Cityscapes dataset for semantically discovering classes which visually correspond to cars, people, and bicycles. Currently, the only supervision provided is segmentation objectness masks, but this method can be extended to use an unsupervised objectness-based object generation mechanism which will make the approach completely unsupervised.
Steven Hickson, Anelia Angelova, Irfan Essa, Rahul Sukthankar
arXiv:1801.08985 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Jan 26, 2018 · updated Jul 23, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · Camera-ready version for NIPS 2017 workshop Learning with Limited Labeled Data