4.7 Article

Top-Down Neural Attention by Excitation Backprop

Journal

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMPUTER VISION
Volume 126, Issue 10, Pages 1084-1102

Publisher

SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s11263-017-1059-x

Keywords

Convolutional neural network; Top-down attention; Selective tuning

Funding

  1. US NSF [0910908, 1029430]
  2. Adobe Research

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We aim to model the top-down attention of a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier for generating task-specific attention maps. Inspired by a top-down human visual attention model, we propose a new backpropagation scheme, called Excitation Backprop, to pass along top-down signals downwards in the network hierarchy via a probabilistic Winner-Take-All process. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of contrastive attention to make the top-down attention maps more discriminative. We show a theoretic connection between the proposed contrastive attention formulation and the Class Activation Map computation. Efficient implementation of Excitation Backprop for common neural network layers is also presented. In experiments, we visualize the evidence of a model's classification decision by computing the proposed top-down attention maps. For quantitative evaluation, we report the accuracy of our method in weakly supervised localization tasks on the MS COCO, PASCAL VOC07 and ImageNet datasets. The usefulness of our method is further validated in the text-to-region association task. On the Flicicr30k Entities dataset, we achieve promising performance in phrase localization by leveraging the top-down attention of a CNN model that has been trained on weakly labeled web images. Finally, we demonstrate applications of our method in model interpretation and data annotation assistance for facial expression analysis and medical imaging tasks.

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