{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/distance-based-image-classification-a","title":"Distance Based Image Classification: A solution to generative classification's conundrum?","arxiv_id":"2210.01349","date":"2022-10-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Wen-Yan Lin","Siying Liu","Bing Tian Dai","Hongdong Li"],"abstract":"Most classifiers rely on discriminative boundaries that separate instances of each class from everything else. We argue that discriminative boundaries are counter-intuitive as they define semantics by what-they-are-not; and should be replaced by generative classifiers which define semantics by what-they-are. Unfortunately, generative classifiers are significantly less accurate. This may be caused by the tendency of generative models to focus on easy to model semantic generative factors and ignore non-semantic factors that are important but difficult to model. We propose a new generative model in which semantic factors are accommodated by shell theory's hierarchical generative process and non-semantic factors by an instance specific noise term. We use the model to develop a classification scheme which suppresses the impact of noise while preserving semantic cues. The result is a surprisingly accurate generative classifier, that takes the form of a modified nearest-neighbor algorithm; we term it distance classification. Unlike discriminative classifiers, a distance classifier: defines semantics by what-they-are; is amenable to incremental updates; and scales well with the number of classes.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.01349v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.01349v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"distance-based-image-classification-a","repo_url":"https://github.com/wen-yan-lin/Image-Distance-Classification","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2210.01349","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}