Killing Two Birds With One Stone: Efficient and Robust Training of Face Recognition CNNs by Partial FC

Xiang An, Jiankang Deng, Jia Guo, Ziyong Feng, XuHan Zhu, Jing Yang, Tongliang Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 4042-4051

Learning discriminative deep feature embeddings by using million-scale in-the-wild datasets and margin-based softmax loss is the current state-of-the-art approach for face recognition. However, the memory and computing cost of the Fully Connected (FC) layer linearly scales up to the number of identities in the training set. Besides, the large-scale training data inevitably suffers from inter-class conflict and long-tailed distribution. In this paper, we propose a sparsely updating variant of the FC layer, named Partial FC (PFC). In each iteration, positive class centers and a random subset of negative class centers are selected to compute the margin-based softmax loss. All class centers are still maintained throughout the whole training process, but only a subset is selected and updated in each iteration. Therefore, the computing requirement, the probability of inter-class conflict, and the frequency of passive update on tail class centers, are dramatically reduced. Extensive experiments across different training data and backbones (e.g. CNN and ViT) confirm the effectiveness, robustness and efficiency of the proposed PFC.