Information Bottleneck Approach to Spatial Attention Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lai, Qiuxia, Li, Yu, Zeng, Ailing, Liu, Minhao, Sun, Hanqiu, Xu, Qiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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author Lai, Qiuxia
Li, Yu
Zeng, Ailing
Liu, Minhao
Sun, Hanqiu
Xu, Qiang
author_facet Lai, Qiuxia
Li, Yu
Zeng, Ailing
Liu, Minhao
Sun, Hanqiu
Xu, Qiang
contents The selective visual attention mechanism in the human visual system (HVS) restricts the amount of information to reach visual awareness for perceiving natural scenes, allowing near real-time information processing with limited computational capacity [Koch and Ullman, 1987]. This kind of selectivity acts as an 'Information Bottleneck (IB)', which seeks a trade-off between information compression and predictive accuracy. However, such information constraints are rarely explored in the attention mechanism for deep neural networks (DNNs). In this paper, we propose an IB-inspired spatial attention module for DNN structures built for visual recognition. The module takes as input an intermediate representation of the input image, and outputs a variational 2D attention map that minimizes the mutual information (MI) between the attention-modulated representation and the input, while maximizing the MI between the attention-modulated representation and the task label. To further restrict the information bypassed by the attention map, we quantize the continuous attention scores to a set of learnable anchor values during training. Extensive experiments show that the proposed IB-inspired spatial attention mechanism can yield attention maps that neatly highlight the regions of interest while suppressing backgrounds, and bootstrap standard DNN structures for visual recognition tasks (e.g., image classification, fine-grained recognition, cross-domain classification). The attention maps are interpretable for the decision making of the DNNs as verified in the experiments. Our code is available at https://github.com/ashleylqx/AIB.git.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2108_03418
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Information Bottleneck Approach to Spatial Attention Learning
Lai, Qiuxia
Li, Yu
Zeng, Ailing
Liu, Minhao
Sun, Hanqiu
Xu, Qiang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The selective visual attention mechanism in the human visual system (HVS) restricts the amount of information to reach visual awareness for perceiving natural scenes, allowing near real-time information processing with limited computational capacity [Koch and Ullman, 1987]. This kind of selectivity acts as an 'Information Bottleneck (IB)', which seeks a trade-off between information compression and predictive accuracy. However, such information constraints are rarely explored in the attention mechanism for deep neural networks (DNNs). In this paper, we propose an IB-inspired spatial attention module for DNN structures built for visual recognition. The module takes as input an intermediate representation of the input image, and outputs a variational 2D attention map that minimizes the mutual information (MI) between the attention-modulated representation and the input, while maximizing the MI between the attention-modulated representation and the task label. To further restrict the information bypassed by the attention map, we quantize the continuous attention scores to a set of learnable anchor values during training. Extensive experiments show that the proposed IB-inspired spatial attention mechanism can yield attention maps that neatly highlight the regions of interest while suppressing backgrounds, and bootstrap standard DNN structures for visual recognition tasks (e.g., image classification, fine-grained recognition, cross-domain classification). The attention maps are interpretable for the decision making of the DNNs as verified in the experiments. Our code is available at https://github.com/ashleylqx/AIB.git.
title Information Bottleneck Approach to Spatial Attention Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03418