Superclass Learning with Representation Enhancement

Abstract

In many real scenarios, data are often divided into a handful of artificial super categories in terms of expert knowledge rather than the representations of images. Concretely, a superclass may contain massive and various raw categories, such as refuse sorting. Due to the lack of common semantic features, the existing classification techniques are intractable to recognize superclass without raw class labels, thus they suffer severe performance damage or require huge annotation costs. To narrow this gap, this paper proposes a superclass learning framework, called SuperClass Learning with Representation Enhancement(SCLRE), to recognize super categories by leveraging enhanced representation. Specifically, by exploiting the self-attention technique across the batch, SCLRE collapses the boundaries of those raw categories and enhances the representation of each superclass. On the enhanced representation space, a superclassaware decision boundary is then reconstructed. Theoretically, we prove that by leveraging attention techniques the generalization error of SCLRE can be bounded under superclass scenarios. Experimentally, extensive results demonstrate that SCLRE outperforms the baseline and other contrastive-based methods on CIFAR-100 datasets and four high-resolution datasets.