{"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/imagenet-hard-the-hardest-images-remaining","title":"ImageNet-Hard: The Hardest Images Remaining from a Study of the Power of Zoom and Spatial Biases in Image Classification","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2023-09-26","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2023 11","authors":[],"abstract":"Image classifiers are information-discarding machines, by design. Yet, how these models discard information remains mysterious. We hypothesize that one way for image classifiers to reach high accuracy is to first zoom to the most discriminative region in the image and then extract features from there to predict image labels, discarding the rest of the image. Studying six popular networks ranging from AlexNet to CLIP, we find that proper framing of the input image can lead to the correct classification of 98.91% of ImageNet images. Furthermore, we  uncover positional biases in various datasets, especially a strong center bias in two popular datasets: ImageNet-A and ObjectNet. Finally, leveraging our insights into the potential of zooming, we propose a test-time augmentation (TTA) technique that improves classification accuracy by forcing models to explicitly perform zoom-in operations before making predictions.\nOur method is more interpretable, accurate, and faster than MEMO, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) TTA method. We introduce ImageNet-Hard, a new benchmark that challenges SOTA classifiers including large vision-language models even when optimal zooming is allowed.","url_abs":"https://openreview.net/forum?id=Cf2c9Pk9yF","url_pdf":"https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Cf2c9Pk9yF","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":"imagenet-hard-the-hardest-images-remaining","repo_url":"https://github.com/taesiri/ZoomIsAllYouNeed","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"clip","method_name":"CLIP"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}