arXiv:2606.14555cs.CVcs.AI2026-06

普通分类器其实暗藏多实例学习能力,能找回错误预测中的关键区域。

Rethinking Global Average Pooling: Your Classifier Is Secretly a Multi-Instance Learner

论文配图:Rethinking Global Average Pooling: Your Classifier Is Secretly a Multi-Instance Learner
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 把平均池化看作多实例学习,用空间特征推断类别
  • 模型在错误预测时仍能还原真实类别的空间位置
  • 无需修改模型,事后即可定位关键视觉区域

现代图像分类器普遍采用全局平均池化(GAP)加线性分类头的结构。由于线性特性,图像级逻辑值等于分类头对特征网格逐点作用后取平均的结果。因此,标准分类器可能隐式保留空间类别证据,即使整体预测错误也能恢复。该结构天然支持多实例学习(MIL)解释:图像被视为一组空间实例的集合。我们证明,仅用单标签训练的分类器在多物体场景中仍能完成正确分类任务。进一步利用这一性质,可将图像级逻辑值分解为预测网格,实现事后诊断,提取被GAP掩盖的空间类别证据。系统评估显示,现成模型在前景区域始终能准确恢复真实类别。MIL视角也表明,常见分类失败源于均值聚合的固有局限。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Modern image classifiers widely adopt global average pooling (GAP) followed by a linear classification head. This linearity ensures that the image-level logits equal the average of logits obtained by applying the classification head pointwise to the feature grid prior to GAP. Consequently, standard classifiers may inherently retain spatial class evidence that remains recoverable even when the image-level prediction is incorrect. This structure naturally suggests a multiple-instance learning (MIL) interpretation, where an image is viewed as a bag of spatial instances. Within this formulation, we demonstrate that standard classifiers trained with a single label per image can still learn the intended classification task in multi-object scenes. We further exploit this property to decompose image-level logits into a prediction grid, providing a post-hoc diagnostic to extract spatial class evidence that GAP otherwise obscures. Our systematic evaluation reveals that off-the-shelf models consistently recover the ground-truth class within foreground regions. The MIL interpretation further suggests that common classifier failures reflect known limitations of mean aggregation.

图像分类多实例学习可解释性特征可视化

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