Papers › Pairwise Confusion for Fine-Grained Visual Classification
Pairwise Confusion for Fine-Grained Visual Classification
Abhimanyu Dubey, Otkrist Gupta, Pei Guo, Ramesh Raskar, Ryan Farrell, Nikhil Naik
Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC) datasets contain small sample sizes, along with significant intra-class variation and inter-class similarity. While prior work has addressed intra-class variation using localization and segmentation techniques, inter-class similarity may also affect feature learning and reduce classification performance. In this work, we address this problem using a novel optimization procedure for the end-to-end neural network training on FGVC tasks. Our procedure, called Pairwise Confusion (PC) reduces overfitting by intentionally {introducing confusion} in the activations. With PC regularization, we obtain state-of-the-art performance on six of the most widely-used FGVC datasets and demonstrate improved localization ability. {PC} is easy to implement, does not need excessive hyperparameter tuning during training, and does not add significant overhead during test time.
Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fine-Grained Image Classification | CUB-200-2011 | PC | Accuracy | 86.9 | #26 of 30 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Fine-Grained Image Classification | NABirds | PC-DenseNet-161 | Accuracy | 82.79% | #28 of 30 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Fine-Grained Image Classification | Oxford 102 Flowers | PC Bilinear CNN | Accuracy | 93.65% | #22 of 25 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Fine-Grained Image Classification | Stanford Cars | PC-DenseNet-161 | Accuracy | 92.86% | #69 of 83 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Fine-Grained Image Classification | Stanford Dogs | PC-DenseNet-161 | Accuracy | 83.75% | #23 of 24 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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