# NPID¶

## Abstract¶

Neural net classifiers trained on data with annotated class labels can also capture apparent visual similarity among categories without being directed to do so. We study whether this observation can be extended beyond the conventional domain of supervised learning: Can we learn a good feature representation that captures apparent similar- ity among instances, instead of classes, by merely asking the feature to be discriminative of individual instances?

We formulate this intuition as a non-parametric classification problem at the instance-level, and use noise-contrastive estimation to tackle the computational challenges imposed by the large number of instance classes. Our experimental results demonstrate that, under unsupervised learning settings, our method surpasses the state-of-the-art on ImageNet classification by a large margin.

Our method is also remarkable for consistently improving test performance with more training data and better network architectures. By fine-tuning the learned feature, we further obtain competitive results for semi-supervised learning and object detection tasks. Our non-parametric model is highly compact: With 128 features per image, our method requires only 600MB storage for a million images, enabling fast nearest neighbour retrieval at the run time.

## Results and Models¶

In this page, we provide benchmarks as much as possible to evaluate our pre-trained models. If not mentioned, all models are pre-trained on ImageNet-1k dataset.

### Classification¶

The classification benchmarks includes 4 downstream task datasets, VOC, ImageNet, iNaturalist2018 and Places205. If not specified, the results are Top-1 (%).

#### VOC SVM / Low-shot SVM¶

The Best Layer indicates that the best results are obtained from which layers feature map. For example, if the Best Layer is feature3, its best result is obtained from the second stage of ResNet (1 for stem layer, 2-5 for 4 stage layers).

Besides, k=1 to 96 indicates the hyper-parameter of Low-shot SVM.

Self-Supervised Config Best Layer SVM k=1 k=2 k=4 k=8 k=16 k=32 k=64 k=96
resnet50_8xb32-steplr-200e feature5 76.75 26.96 35.37 44.48 53.89 60.39 66.41 71.48 73.39

#### ImageNet Linear Evaluation¶

The Feature1 - Feature5 don’t have the GlobalAveragePooling, the feature map is pooled to the specific dimensions and then follows a Linear layer to do the classification. Please refer to resnet50_mhead_linear-8xb32-steplr-90e_in1k for details of config.

The AvgPool result is obtained from Linear Evaluation with GlobalAveragePooling. Please refer to resnet50_linear-8xb32-steplr-100e_in1k for details of config.

Self-Supervised Config Feature1 Feature2 Feature3 Feature4 Feature5 AvgPool
resnet50_8xb32-steplr-200e 14.68 31.98 42.85 56.95 58.41 57.97

#### Places205 Linear Evaluation¶

The Feature1 - Feature5 don’t have the GlobalAveragePooling, the feature map is pooled to the specific dimensions and then follows a Linear layer to do the classification. Please refer to resnet50_mhead_8xb32-steplr-28e_places205.py for details of config.

Self-Supervised Config Feature1 Feature2 Feature3 Feature4 Feature5
resnet50_8xb32-steplr-200e 19.98 34.86 41.59 48.43 48.71

#### ImageNet Nearest-Neighbor Classification¶

The results are obtained from the features after GlobalAveragePooling. Here, k=10 to 200 indicates different number of nearest neighbors.

Self-Supervised Config k=10 k=20 k=100 k=200
resnet50_8xb32-steplr-200e 42.9 44.0 43.2 42.2

### Detection¶

The detection benchmarks includes 2 downstream task datasets, Pascal VOC 2007 + 2012 and COCO2017. This benchmark follows the evluation protocols set up by MoCo.

#### Pascal VOC 2007 + 2012¶

Please refer to faster_rcnn_r50_c4_mstrain_24k_voc0712.py for details of config.

Self-Supervised Config AP50
resnet50_8xb32-steplr-200e 79.52

#### COCO2017¶

resnet50_8xb32-steplr-200e 38.5 57.7 42.0 34.6 54.8 37.1

### Segmentation¶

The segmentation benchmarks includes 2 downstream task datasets, Cityscapes and Pascal VOC 2012 + Aug. It follows the evluation protocols set up by MMSegmentation.

#### Pascal VOC 2012 + Aug¶

Please refer to fcn_r50-d8_512x512_20k_voc12aug.py for details of config.

Self-Supervised Config mIOU
resnet50_8xb32-steplr-200e 65.45

## Citation¶

@inproceedings{wu2018unsupervised,
title={Unsupervised feature learning via non-parametric instance discrimination},
author={Wu, Zhirong and Xiong, Yuanjun and Yu, Stella X and Lin, Dahua},
booktitle={CVPR},
year={2018}
}