We propose a novel and flexible anchor mechanism named MetaAnchor for object detection frameworks. Unlike many previous detectors model anchors via a predefined manner, in MetaAnchor anchor functions could be dynamically generated from the arbitrary customized prior boxes. Taking advantage of weight prediction, MetaAnchor is able to work with most of the anchor-based object detection systems such as RetinaNet. Compared with the predefined anchor scheme, we empirically find that MetaAnchor is more robust to anchor settings and bounding box distributions; in addition, it also shows the potential on transfer tasks. Our experiment on COCO detection task shows that MetaAnchor consistently outperforms the counterparts in various scenarios.
@cite_22: The move from hand-designed features to learned features in machine learning has been wildly successful. In spite of this, optimization algorithms are still designed by hand. In this paper we show how the design of an optimization algorithm can be cast as a learning problem, allowing the algorithm to learn to exploit structure in the problems of interest in an automatic way. Our learned algorithms, implemented by LSTMs, outperform generic, hand-designed competitors on the tasks for which they are trained, and also generalize well to new tasks with similar structure. We demonstrate this on a number of tasks, including simple convex problems, training neural networks, and styling images with neural art.
@cite_15: 
@cite_23: We develop a conceptually simple but powerful approach that can learn novel categories from few annotated examples. In this approach, the experience with already learned categories is used to facilitate the learning of novel classes. Our insight is two-fold: (1) there exists a generic, category agnostic transformation from models learned from few samples to models learned from large enough sample sets, and (2) such a transformation could be effectively learned by high-capacity regressors. In particular, we automatically learn the transformation with a deep model regression network on a large collection of model pairs. Experiments demonstrate that encoding this transformation as prior knowledge greatly facilitates the recognition in the small sample size regime on a broad range of tasks, including domain adaptation, fine-grained recognition, action recognition, and scene classification.
@cite_31: 
@cite_16: Compositionality and contextuality are key building blocks of intelligence. They allow us to compose known concepts to generate new and complex ones. However, traditional learning methods do not model both these properties and require copious amounts of labeled data to learn new concepts. A large fraction of existing techniques, e.g., using late fusion, compose concepts but fail to model contextuality. For example, red in red wine is different from red in red tomatoes. In this paper, we present a simple method that respects contextuality in order to compose classifiers of known visual concepts. Our method builds upon the intuition that classifiers lie in a smooth space where compositional transforms can be modeled. We show how it can generalize to unseen combinations of concepts. Our results on composing attributes, objects as well as composing subject, predicate, and objects demonstrate its strong generalization performance compared to baselines. Finally, we present detailed analysis of our method and highlight its properties.
@cite_13: Most methods for object instance segmentation require all training examples to be labeled with segmentation masks. This requirement makes it expensive to annotate new categories and has restricted instance segmentation models to 100 well-annotated classes. The goal of this paper is to propose a new partially supervised training paradigm, together with a novel weight transfer function, that enables training instance segmentation models on a large set of categories all of which have box annotations, but only a small fraction of which have mask annotations. These contributions allow us to train Mask R-CNN to detect and segment 3000 visual concepts using box annotations from the Visual Genome dataset and mask annotations from the 80 classes in the COCO dataset. We evaluate our approach in a controlled study on the COCO dataset. This work is a first step towards instance segmentation models that have broad comprehension of the visual world.
Weight prediction means a mechanism in neural networks where weights are predicted by another structure rather than directly learned, which is mainly used in the fields of @cite_31 @cite_22 @cite_23 , few zero-shot learning @cite_15 @cite_23 and transfer learning @cite_16 . For object detection there are a few related works, for example, @cite_13 proposes to predict mask weights from box weights. There are mainly two differences from ours: first, in our MetaAnchor the purpose of weight prediction is to generate anchor functions, while in @cite_13 it is used for domain adaption (from object box to segmentation mask); second, in our work weights are generated almost from scratch'', while in @cite_13 the source is the learned box weights.