Beyond Softmax: Dual-Branch Sigmoid Architecture for Accurate Class Activation Maps

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Oh, Yoojin, Noh, Junhyug
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Oh, Yoojin
Noh, Junhyug
author_facet Oh, Yoojin
Noh, Junhyug
contents Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and its extensions have become indispensable tools for visualizing the evidence behind deep network predictions. However, by relying on a final softmax classifier, these methods suffer from two fundamental distortions: additive logit shifts that arbitrarily bias importance scores, and sign collapse that conflates excitatory and inhibitory features. We propose a simple, architecture-agnostic dual-branch sigmoid head that decouples localization from classification. Given any pretrained model, we clone its classification head into a parallel branch ending in per-class sigmoid outputs, freeze the original softmax head, and fine-tune only the sigmoid branch with class-balanced binary supervision. At inference, softmax retains recognition accuracy, while class evidence maps are generated from the sigmoid branch -- preserving both magnitude and sign of feature contributions. Our method integrates seamlessly with most CAM variants and incurs negligible overhead. Extensive evaluations on fine-grained tasks (CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars) and WSOL benchmarks (ImageNet-1K, OpenImages30K) show improved explanation fidelity and consistent Top-1 Localization gains -- without any drop in classification accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/finallyupper/beyond-softmax.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_05590
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Softmax: Dual-Branch Sigmoid Architecture for Accurate Class Activation Maps
Oh, Yoojin
Noh, Junhyug
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and its extensions have become indispensable tools for visualizing the evidence behind deep network predictions. However, by relying on a final softmax classifier, these methods suffer from two fundamental distortions: additive logit shifts that arbitrarily bias importance scores, and sign collapse that conflates excitatory and inhibitory features. We propose a simple, architecture-agnostic dual-branch sigmoid head that decouples localization from classification. Given any pretrained model, we clone its classification head into a parallel branch ending in per-class sigmoid outputs, freeze the original softmax head, and fine-tune only the sigmoid branch with class-balanced binary supervision. At inference, softmax retains recognition accuracy, while class evidence maps are generated from the sigmoid branch -- preserving both magnitude and sign of feature contributions. Our method integrates seamlessly with most CAM variants and incurs negligible overhead. Extensive evaluations on fine-grained tasks (CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars) and WSOL benchmarks (ImageNet-1K, OpenImages30K) show improved explanation fidelity and consistent Top-1 Localization gains -- without any drop in classification accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/finallyupper/beyond-softmax.
title Beyond Softmax: Dual-Branch Sigmoid Architecture for Accurate Class Activation Maps
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05590