This work explores CNNs for the recognition of novel categories from few examples.

This review provides an in-depth exploration of the field of animal action recognition, focusing on coarse-grained (CG) and fine-grained (FG) techniques. The primary aim is to examine the current state of research in animal behaviour recognition and to elucidate the unique challenges associated with recognising subtle animal actions in outdoor environments. These challenges differ significantly from those encountered in human action recognition due to factors such as non-rigid body structures, frequent occlusions, and the lack of large-scale, annotated datasets. The review begins by discussing the evolution of human action recognition, a more established field, highlighting how it progressed from broad, coarse actions in controlled settings to the demand for fine-grained recognition in dynamic environments. This shift is particularly relevant for animal action recognition, where behavioural variability and environmental complexity present unique challenges that human-centric models cannot fully address. The review then underscores the critical differences between human and animal action recognition, with an emphasis on high intra-species variability, unstructured datasets, and the natural complexity of animal habitats. Techniques like spatio-temporal deep learning frameworks (e.g., SlowFast) are evaluated for their effectiveness in animal behaviour analysis, along with the limitations of existing datasets. By assessing the strengths and weaknesses of current methodologies and introducing a recently-published dataset, the review outlines future directions for advancing fine-grained action recognition, aiming to improve accuracy and generalisability in behaviour analysis across species.

This paper presents a simple and effective approach for fine-grained image recognition. The core idea is to introduce max-entropy into loss function, because regular image classification networks often fail to distinguish semantically close visual classes in the feature space. The formulation is clear and the performance is very good in fine-grained tasks. I like the ablation study on CIFAR10/100 and different subsets of ImageNet, showing that this idea really works in classifying fine-grained concepts. The major drawback of this paper lies in its weak technical contribution.

The attribution of the author of an art piece is typically a laborious manual process, usually relying on subjective evaluations of expert figures. However, there are some situations in which quantitative features of the artwork can support these evaluations. The extraction of these features can sometimes be automated, for instance, with the use of Machine Learning (ML) techniques. An example of these features is represented by repeated, mechanically impressed patterns, called punches, present chiefly in 13th and 14th-century panel paintings from Tuscany. Previous research in art history showcased a strong connection between the shapes of punches and specific artists or workshops, suggesting the possibility of using these quantitative cues to support the attribution. In the present work, we first collect a dataset of large-scale images of these panel paintings. Then, using YOLOv10, a recent and popular object detection model, we train a ML pipeline to perform object detection on the punches contained in the images. Due to the large size of the images, the detection procedure is split across multiple frames by adopting a sliding-window approach with overlaps, after which the predictions are combined for the whole image using a custom non-maximal suppression routine. Our results indicate how art historians working in the field can reliably use our method for the identification and extraction of punches.

This work explores CNNs for the recognition of novel categories from few examples.

Visual explanations are logical arguments based on visual features that justify the predictions made by neural networks. Current modes of visual explanations answer questions of the form $`Why \text{ } P?'$. These $Why$ questions operate under broad contexts thereby providing answers that are irrelevant in some cases. We propose to constrain these $Why$ questions based on some context $Q$ so that our explanations answer contrastive questions of the form $`Why \text{ } P, \text{} rather \text{ } than \text{ } Q?'$. In this paper, we formalize the structure of contrastive visual explanations for neural networks. We define contrast based on neural networks and propose a methodology to extract defined contrasts. We then use the extracted contrasts as a plug-in on top of existing $`Why \text{ } P?'$ techniques, specifically Grad-CAM. We demonstrate their value in analyzing both networks and data in applications of large-scale recognition, fine-grained recognition, subsurface seismic analysis, and image quality assessment.

We present an interpretable deep model for fine-grained visual recognition. At the core of our method lies the integration of region-based part discovery and attribution within a deep neural network. Our model is trained using image-level object labels, and provides an interpretation of its results via the segmentation of object parts and the identification of their contributions towards classification. To facilitate the learning of object parts without direct supervision, we explore a simple prior of the occurrence of object parts. We demonstrate that this prior, when combined with our region-based part discovery and attribution, leads to an interpretable model that remains highly accurate. Our model is evaluated on major fine-grained recognition datasets, including CUB-200, CelebA and iNaturalist. Our results compare favorably to state-of-the-art methods on classification tasks, and our method outperforms previous approaches on the localization of object parts.

A key challenge in fine-grained recognition is how to find and represent discriminative local regions.Recent attention models are capable of learning discriminative region localizers only from category labels with reinforcement learning. However, not utilizing any explicit part information, they are not able to accurately find multiple distinctive regions.In this work, we introduce an attribute-guided attention localization scheme where the local region localizers are learned under the guidance of part attribute descriptions.By designing a novel reward strategy, we are able to learn to locate regions that are spatially and semantically distinctive with reinforcement learning algorithm. The attribute labeling requirement of the scheme is more amenable than the accurate part location annotation required by traditional part-based fine-grained recognition methods.Experimental results on the CUB-200-2011 dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme on both fine-grained recognition and attribute recognition.