Twofold Debiasing Enhances Fine-Grained Learning with Coarse Labels
Xin-yang Zhao, Jian Jin, Yang-yang Li, Yazhou Yao
Abstract
The Coarse-to-Fine Few-Shot (C2FS) task is designed to train models using only coarse labels, then leverages a limited number of subclass samples to achieve fine-grained recognition capabilities. This task presents two main challenges: coarse-grained supervised pre-training suppresses the extraction of critical fine-grained features for subcategory discrimination, and models suffer from overfitting due to biased distributions caused by limited fine-grained samples. In this paper, we propose the Twofold Debiasing (TFB) method, which addresses these challenges through detailed feature enhancement and distribution calibration. Specifically, we introduce a multi-layer feature fusion reconstruction module and an intermediate layer feature alignment module to combat the model's tendency to focus on simple predictive features directly related to coarse-grained supervision, while neglecting complex fine-grained level details. Furthermore, we mitigate the biased distributions learned by the fine-grained classifier using readily available coarse-grained sample embeddings enriched with fine-grained information. Extensive experiments conducted on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art results that surpass competitive methods.
BibTeX
@article{Zhao_Jin_Li_Yao_2025, title={Twofold Debiasing Enhances Fine-Grained Learning with Coarse Labels}, volume={39}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/34444}, DOI={10.1609/aaai.v39i21.34444}, abstractNote={The Coarse-to-Fine Few-Shot (C2FS) task is designed to train models using only coarse labels, then leverages a limited number of subclass samples to achieve fine-grained recognition capabilities. This task presents two main challenges: coarse-grained supervised pre-training suppresses the extraction of critical fine-grained features for subcategory discrimination, and models suffer from overfitting due to biased distributions caused by limited fine-grained samples. In this paper, we propose the Twofold Debiasing (TFB) method, which addresses these challenges through detailed feature enhancement and distribution calibration. Specifically, we introduce a multi-layer feature fusion reconstruction module and an intermediate layer feature alignment module to combat the model’s tendency to focus on simple predictive features directly related to coarse-grained supervision, while neglecting complex fine-grained level details. Furthermore, we mitigate the biased distributions learned by the fine-grained classifier using readily available coarse-grained sample embeddings enriched with fine-grained information. Extensive experiments conducted on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art results that surpass competitive methods.}, number={21}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, author={Zhao, Xin-yang and Jin, Jian and Li, Yang-yang and Yao, Yazhou}, year={2025}, month={Apr.}, pages={22831-22839} }