Papers › Pairwise Confusion for Fine-Grained Visual Classification

Pairwise Confusion for Fine-Grained Visual Classification

22 May 2017ECCV 2018 9arXiv:1705.08016archive 2025-07-28

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.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

Code

abhimanyudubey/confusion officialmentioned in papermentioned 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 Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
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.

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