Cross entropy loss has served as the main objective function for classification-based tasks. Widely deployed for learning neural network classifiers, it shows both effectiveness and a probabilistic interpretation. Recently, after the success of self supervised contrastive representation learning methods, supervised contrastive methods have been proposed to learn representations and have shown superior and more robust performance, compared to solely training with cross entropy loss. However, cross entropy loss is still needed to train the final classification layer. In this work, we investigate the possibility of learning both the representation and the classifier using one objective function that combines the robustness of contrastive learning and the probabilistic interpretation of cross entropy loss. First, we revisit a previously proposed contrastive-based objective function that approximates cross entropy loss and present a simple extension to learn the classifier jointly. Second, we propose a new version of the supervised contrastive training that learns jointly the parameters of the classifier and the backbone of the network. We empirically show that these proposed objective functions demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and show a significant improvement over the standard cross entropy loss with more training stability and robustness in various challenging settings.

We introduce a novel fine-grained dataset and bench-mark, the Danish Fungi 2020 (DF20). The dataset, constructed from observations submitted to the Atlas of Danish Fungi, is unique in its taxonomy-accurate class labels, small number of errors, highly unbalanced long-tailed class distribution, rich observation metadata, and well-defined class hierarchy. DF20 has zero overlap with ImageNet, al-lowing unbiased comparison of models fine-tuned from publicly available ImageNet checkpoints. The proposed evaluation protocol enables testing the ability to improve classification using metadata – e.g. precise geographic location, habitat, and substrate, facilitates classifier calibration testing, and finally allows to study the impact of the device settings on the classification performance. Experiments using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and the recent Vision Transformers (ViT) show that DF20 presents a challenging task. Interestingly, ViT achieves results su-perior to CNN baselines with 80.45% accuracy and 0.743 macro F1 score, reducing the CNN error by 9% and 12% respectively. A simple procedure for including metadata into the decision process improves the classification accuracy by more than 2.95 percentage points, reducing the error rate by 15%. The source code for all methods and experiments is available at https://sites.google.com/view/danish-fungi-dataset.

In many computer vision classification tasks, class priors at test time often differ from priors on the training set. In the case of such prior shift, classifiers must be adapted correspondingly to maintain close to optimal performance. This paper analyzes methods for adaptation of probabilistic classifiers to new priors and for estimating new priors on an unlabeled test set. We propose a novel method to address a known issue of prior estimation methods based on confusion matrices, where inconsistent estimates of decision probabilities and confusion matrices lead to negative values in the estimated priors. Experiments on fine-grained image classification datasets provide insight into the best practice of prior shift estimation and classifier adaptation, and show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in prior adaptation. Applying the best practice to two tasks with naturally imbalanced priors, learning from web-crawled images and plant species classification, increased the recognition accuracy by 1.1% and 3.4% respectively.

The paper presents a system for visual recognition of 1394 fungi species based on deep convolutional neural networks and its deployment in a citizen-science project. The system allows users to automatically identify observed specimens, while providing valuable data to biologists and computer vision researchers. The underlying classification method scored first in the FGVCx Fungi Classification Kaggle competition organized in connection with the Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC) workshop at CVPR 2018. We describe our winning submission and evaluate all technicalities that increased the recognition scores, and discuss the issues related to deployment of the system via the web- and mobile- interfaces.