SoftLoc: Robust Temporal Localization under Label Misalignment

Julien Schroeter, Kirill Sidorov, Dave Marshall

Abstract: This work addresses the long-standing problem of robust event localization in the presence of temporally of misaligned labels in the training data. We propose a novel versatile loss function that generalizes a number of training regimes from standard fully-supervised cross-entropy to count-based weakly-supervised learning. Unlike classical models which are constrained to strictly fit the annotations during training, our soft localization learning approach relaxes the reliance on the exact position of labels instead. Training with this new loss function exhibits strong robustness to temporal misalignment of labels, thus alleviating the burden of precise annotation of temporal sequences. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance against standard benchmarks in a number of challenging experiments and further show that robustness to label noise is not achieved at the expense of raw performance.

Code: https://github.com/SoftLocICLR/submission

Keywords: deep learning, temporal localization, robustness, label misalignment, music, time series

TL;DR: This work introduces a novel loss function for the robust training of temporal localization DNN in the presence of misaligned labels.