Feature-Level Frankenstein: Eliminating Variations for Discriminative Recognition

Abstract

Recent successes of deep learning-based recognition rely on maintaining the content related to the main-task label. However, how to explicitly dispel the noisy signals for better generalization remains an open issue. We systematically summarize the detrimental factors as task-relevant/irrelevant semantic variations and unspecified latent variation. In this paper, we cast these problems as an adversarial minimax game in the latent space. Specifically, we propose equipping an end-to-end conditional adversarial network with the ability to decompose an input sample into three complementary parts. The discriminative representation inherits the desired invariance property guided by prior knowledge of the task, which is marginally independent to the task-relevant/irrelevant semantic and latent variations. Our proposed framework achieves top performance on a serial of tasks, including digits recognition, lighting, makeup, disguise-tolerant face recognition, and facial attributes recognition.