CurricularFace: Adaptive Curriculum Learning Loss for Deep Face Recognition

Yuge Huang, Yuhan Wang, Ying Tai, Xiaoming Liu, Pengcheng Shen, Shaoxin Li, Jilin Li, Feiyue Huang

Keywords: CurricularFace, Adaptive Curriculum Learning, Face Recognition

TL;DR: A novel Adaptive Curriculum Learning loss for deep face recognition

Abstract: As an emerging topic in face recognition, designing margin-based loss functions can increase the feature margin between different classes for enhanced discriminability. More recently, absorbing the idea of mining-based strategies is adopted to emphasize the misclassified samples and achieve promising results. However, during the entire training process, the prior methods either do not explicitly emphasize the sample based on its importance that renders the hard samples not fully exploited or explicitly emphasize the effects of semi-hard/hard samples even at the early training stage that may lead to convergence issues. In this work, we propose a novel Adaptive Curriculum Learning loss (CurricularFace) that embeds the idea of curriculum learning into the loss function to achieve a novel training strategy for deep face recognition, which mainly addresses easy samples in the early training stage and hard ones in the later stage. Specifically, our CurricularFace adaptively adjusts the relative importance of easy and hard samples during different training stages. In each stage, different samples are assigned with different importance according to their corresponding difficultness. Extensive experimental results on popular benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our CurricularFace over the state-of-the-art competitors. Code will be available upon publication.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2004.00288/code)