Calibrating Undisciplined Over-Smoothing in Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cheng, Lechao, Liu, Zerun, He, Jingxuan, Fang, Chaowei, Zhang, Dingwen, Wang, Meng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909626666057728
author Cheng, Lechao
Liu, Zerun
He, Jingxuan
Fang, Chaowei
Zhang, Dingwen
Wang, Meng
author_facet Cheng, Lechao
Liu, Zerun
He, Jingxuan
Fang, Chaowei
Zhang, Dingwen
Wang, Meng
contents Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) has recently attracted considerable attention because it requires fewer annotations than fully supervised approaches, making it especially promising for large-scale image segmentation tasks. Although many vision transformer-based methods leverage self-attention affinity matrices to refine Class Activation Maps (CAMs), they often treat each layer's affinity equally and thus introduce considerable background noise at deeper layers, where attention tends to converge excessively on certain tokens (i.e., over-smoothing). We observe that this deep-level attention naturally converges on a subset of tokens, yet unregulated query-key affinity can generate unpredictable activation patterns (undisciplined over-smoothing), adversely affecting CAM accuracy. To address these limitations, we propose an Adaptive Re-Activation Mechanism (AReAM), which exploits shallow-level affinity to guide deeper-layer convergence in an entropy-aware manner, thereby suppressing background noise and re-activating crucial semantic regions in the CAMs. Experiments on two commonly used datasets demonstrate that AReAM substantially improves segmentation performance compared with existing WSSS methods, reducing noise while sharpening focus on relevant semantic regions. Overall, this work underscores the importance of controlling deep-level attention to mitigate undisciplined over-smoothing, introduces an entropy-aware mechanism that harmonizes shallow and deep-level affinities, and provides a refined approach to enhance transformer-based WSSS accuracy by re-activating CAMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_03112
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Calibrating Undisciplined Over-Smoothing in Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Cheng, Lechao
Liu, Zerun
He, Jingxuan
Fang, Chaowei
Zhang, Dingwen
Wang, Meng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) has recently attracted considerable attention because it requires fewer annotations than fully supervised approaches, making it especially promising for large-scale image segmentation tasks. Although many vision transformer-based methods leverage self-attention affinity matrices to refine Class Activation Maps (CAMs), they often treat each layer's affinity equally and thus introduce considerable background noise at deeper layers, where attention tends to converge excessively on certain tokens (i.e., over-smoothing). We observe that this deep-level attention naturally converges on a subset of tokens, yet unregulated query-key affinity can generate unpredictable activation patterns (undisciplined over-smoothing), adversely affecting CAM accuracy. To address these limitations, we propose an Adaptive Re-Activation Mechanism (AReAM), which exploits shallow-level affinity to guide deeper-layer convergence in an entropy-aware manner, thereby suppressing background noise and re-activating crucial semantic regions in the CAMs. Experiments on two commonly used datasets demonstrate that AReAM substantially improves segmentation performance compared with existing WSSS methods, reducing noise while sharpening focus on relevant semantic regions. Overall, this work underscores the importance of controlling deep-level attention to mitigate undisciplined over-smoothing, introduces an entropy-aware mechanism that harmonizes shallow and deep-level affinities, and provides a refined approach to enhance transformer-based WSSS accuracy by re-activating CAMs.
title Calibrating Undisciplined Over-Smoothing in Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.03112