Reviews: Virtual Class Enhanced Discriminative Embedding Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems 

The paper proposes a simple technique for improved feature learning in convolutional neural networks. The technique consists of adding a "negative" virtual class to CNN training on classification tasks with the softmax loss function. The authors evaluate their approach on a range of computer vision datasets, (CIFAR10/100/100, LFW, SLLFW, CUB200, ImageNet32) and find that it outperforms simple baselines on all of them, and outperforms more complicated state-of-the-art techniques on most of them. The authors also present an analysis from a few different standpoints as to why their method is effective. Strengths: - The technique proposed by the authors is extremely simple to implement (just a one line change in existing code would suffice, as far as I can tell).