Papers › Regularized Frank-Wolfe for Dense CRFs: Generalizing Mean Field and Beyond

Regularized Frank-Wolfe for Dense CRFs: Generalizing Mean Field and Beyond

27 Oct 2021NeurIPS 2021 12arXiv:2110.14759archive 2025-07-28

Đ. Khuê Lê-Huu, Karteek Alahari

We introduce regularized Frank-Wolfe, a general and effective algorithm for inference and learning of dense conditional random fields (CRFs). The algorithm optimizes a nonconvex continuous relaxation of the CRF inference problem using vanilla Frank-Wolfe with approximate updates, which are equivalent to minimizing a regularized energy function. Our proposed method is a generalization of existing algorithms such as mean field or concave-convex procedure. This perspective not only offers a unified analysis of these algorithms, but also allows an easy way of exploring different variants that potentially yield better performance. We illustrate this in our empirical results on standard semantic segmentation datasets, where several instantiations of our regularized Frank-Wolfe outperform mean field inference, both as a standalone component and as an end-to-end trainable layer in a neural network. We also show that dense CRFs, coupled with our new algorithms, produce significant improvements over strong CNN baselines.

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FrankWolfeParams netw0rkf10w/crf/src/CRF/CRF.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · ffcfed9406f54b9f · report
create_conv_filters netw0rkf10w/crf/src/CRF/convcrf.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · ecd35e38496327fe · report
perform_filtering netw0rkf10w/crf/src/CRF/convcrf.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · cd5649a5faba83c2 · report
unnormalize netw0rkf10w/crf/src/CRF/CRF.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 635254ae1186a96b · report
create_position_feats netw0rkf10w/crf/src/CRF/convcrf.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · f0739a827d3c4acc · report

Tasks

Semantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Semantic Segmentation Cityscapes test Euclidean Frank-Wolfe CRFs (backbone: DeepLabv3+)(coarse) Mean IoU (class) 83.6% #14 of 105 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.

Methods

CRF

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