Papers › Switchable Whitening for Deep Representation Learning

Switchable Whitening for Deep Representation Learning

22 Apr 2019ICCV 2019 10arXiv:1904.09739archive 2025-07-28

Xingang Pan, Xiaohang Zhan, Jianping Shi, Xiaoou Tang, Ping Luo

Normalization methods are essential components in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). They either standardize or whiten data using statistics estimated in predefined sets of pixels. Unlike existing works that design normalization techniques for specific tasks, we propose Switchable Whitening (SW), which provides a general form unifying different whitening methods as well as standardization methods. SW learns to switch among these operations in an end-to-end manner. It has several advantages. First, SW adaptively selects appropriate whitening or standardization statistics for different tasks (see Fig.1), making it well suited for a wide range of tasks without manual design. Second, by integrating benefits of different normalizers, SW shows consistent improvements over its counterparts in various challenging benchmarks. Third, SW serves as a useful tool for understanding the characteristics of whitening and standardization techniques. We show that SW outperforms other alternatives on image classification (CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet), semantic segmentation (ADE20K, Cityscapes), domain adaptation (GTA5, Cityscapes), and image style transfer (COCO). For example, without bells and whistles, we achieve state-of-the-art performance with 45.33% mIoU on the ADE20K dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/XingangPan/Switchable-Whitening.

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conv3x3 XingangPan/Switchable-Whitening/models/backbones/resnet.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · fac5364e2f53c6db · report
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Tasks

Domain AdaptationImage ClassificationRepresentation LearningRobust Object DetectionSemantic SegmentationStyle Transferimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Robust Object Detection DWD SW mPC [AP50] 26.1 #10 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Synthetic-to-Real Translation GTAV-to-Cityscapes Labels AdaptSetNet-SWa mIoU 35.7 #69 of 73 Archive leaderboard report

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