ClonalNet: Classifying Better by Focusing on Confusing Categories

Existing neural classification networks predominately adopt one-hot encoding due to its simplicity in representing categorical data. However, the one-hot representation neglects inter-category correlations, which may result in poor generalization. Herein, we observe that a pre-trained baseline network has paid attention to the target image region even though it incorrectly predicts the image, revealing which categories confuse the baseline. This observation motivates us to consider inter-category correlations. Therefore, we propose a clonal network, named ClonalNet, which learns to discriminate between confusing categories derived from the pre-trained baseline. The ClonalNet architecture can be identical or smaller than the baseline architecture. When identical, ClonalNet is a clonal version of the baseline but does not share weights. When smaller, the training process of ClonalNet resembles that of the standard knowledge distillation. The difference from knowledge distillation is that we design a focusing-picking loss to optimize ClonalNet. This novel loss enforces ClonalNet to concentrate on confusing categories and make more confident predictions on ground-truth labels with the baseline reference. Experiments show that ClonalNet significantly outperforms baseline networks and knowledge distillation.