Learning to Explore Sample Relationships

Despite the great success achieved, deep learning technologies usually suffer from data scarcity issues in real-world applications, where existing methods mainly explore sample relationships in a vanilla way from the perspectives of either the input or the loss function. In this paper, we propose a batch transformer module, BatchFormerV1, to equip deep neural networks themselves with the abilities to explore sample relationships in a learnable way. Basically, the proposed method enables data collaboration, e.g., head-class samples will also contribute to the learning of tail classes. Considering that exploring instance-level relationships has very limited impacts on dense prediction, we generalize and refer to the proposed module as BatchFormerV2, which further enables exploring sample relationships for pixel-/patch-level dense representations. In addition, to address the train-test inconsistency where a mini-batch of data samples are neither necessary nor desirable during inference, we also devise a two-stream training pipeline, i.e., a shared model is first jointly optimized with and without BatchFormerV2 which is then removed during testing. The proposed module is plug-and-play without requiring any extra inference cost. Lastly, we evaluate the proposed method on over ten popular datasets, including 1) different data scarcity settings such as long-tailed recognition, zero-shot learning, domain generalization, and contrastive learning; and 2) different visual recognition tasks ranging from image classification to object detection and panoptic segmentation.