ConceptHash: Interpretable Fine-Grained Hashing with Concept Discovery

17 Sept 2023 (modified: 25 Mar 2024)ICLR 2024 Conference Withdrawn SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Keywords: fine-grained hashing, deep hashing, learning to hash, fine-grained retrieval, interpretability, concept bottleneck model
TL;DR: ConceptHash proposes a new hashing method that achieves sub-code level interpretability. The method uses concept tokens and language guidance to distinguish fine-grained object classes and outperforms prior art alternatives in image retrieval.
Abstract: Existing fine-grained hashing methods typically lack code interpretability as they compute hash code bits holistically using both global and local features. To address this limitation, we propose ConceptHash, a novel method that achieves sub-code level interpretability. In ConceptHash, each sub-code corresponds to a human-understandable concept, such as an object part, and these concepts are automatically discovered without human annotations. Specifically, we leverage a Vision Transformer architecture and introduce concept tokens as visual prompts, along with image patch tokens as model inputs. Each concept is then mapped to a specific sub-code at the model output, providing natural sub-code interpretability. To capture subtle visual differences among highly similar sub-categories (e.g., bird species), we incorporate language guidance to ensure that the learned hash codes are distinguishable within fine-grained object classes while maintaining semantic alignment. This approach allows us to develop hash codes that exhibit similarity within families of species while remaining distinct from species in other families. Extensive experiments on four fine-grained image retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that ConceptHash outperforms previous methods by a significant margin, offering unique sub-code interpretability as an additional benefit.
Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning
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Submission Number: 939
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