Learning Triangular Distribution in Visual World

Ping Chen, Xingpeng Zhang, Chengtao Zhou, Dichao Fan, Peng Tu, Le Zhang, Yanlin Qian; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 11019-11029

Convolution neural network is successful in pervasive vision tasks including label distribution learning which usually takes the form of learning an injection from the non-linear visual features to the well-defined labels. However how the discrepancy between features is mapped to the label discrepancy is ambient and its correctness is not guaranteed.To address these problems we study the mathematical connection between feature and its label presenting a general and simple framework for label distribution learning. We propose a so-called Triangular Distribution Transform (TDT) to build an injective function between feature and label guaranteeing that any symmetric feature discrepancy linearly reflects the difference between labels. The proposed TDT can be used as a plug-in in mainstream backbone networks to address different label distribution learning tasks. Experiments on Facial Age Recognition Illumination Chromaticity Estimation and Aesthetics assessment show that TDT achieves on-par or better results than the prior arts.