Papers › Knowledge Transfer Based Fine-grained Visual Classification

Knowledge Transfer Based Fine-grained Visual Classification

21 Dec 2020arXiv:2012.11389archive 2025-07-28

Siqing Zhang, Ruoyi Du, Dongliang Chang, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Guo

Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) aims to distinguish the sub-classes of the same category and its essential solution is to mine the subtle and discriminative regions. Convolution neural networks (CNNs), which employ the cross entropy loss (CE-loss) as the loss function, show poor performance since the model can only learn the most discriminative part and ignore other meaningful regions. Some existing works try to solve this problem by mining more discriminative regions by some detection techniques or attention mechanisms. However, most of them will meet the background noise problem when trying to find more discriminative regions. In this paper, we address it in a knowledge transfer learning manner. Multiple models are trained one by one, and all previously trained models are regarded as teacher models to supervise the training of the current one. Specifically, a orthogonal loss (OR-loss) is proposed to encourage the network to find diverse and meaningful regions. In addition, the first model is trained with only CE-Loss. Finally, all models' outputs with complementary knowledge are combined together for the final prediction result. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method and obtain state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances on three popular FGVC datasets.

PaperPDFCode

Code

PRIS-CV/knowledge-transfer-based-FGVC mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

ClassificationFine-Grained Image ClassificationGeneral ClassificationTransfer Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Convolution

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections