Empirical Minimum Bayes Risk Prediction: How to Extract an Extra Few % Performance from Vision Models with Just Three More Parameters

Vittal Premachandran, Daniel Tarlow, Dhruv Batra; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014, pp. 1043-1050

When building vision systems that predict structured objects such as image segmentations or human poses, a crucial concern is performance under task-specific evaluation measures (e.g. Jaccard Index or Average Precision). An ongoing research challenge is to optimize predictions so as to maximize performance on such complex measures. In this work, we present a simple meta-algorithm that is surprisingly effective – Empirical Min Bayes Risk. EMBR takes as input a pre-trained model that would normally be the final product and learns three additional parameters so as to optimize performance on the complex high-order task-specific measure. We demonstrate EMBR in several domains, taking existing state-of-the-art algorithms and improving performance up to ~7%, simply with three extra parameters.