Test Time Adaptation with Regularized Loss for Weakly Supervised Salient Object Detection

It is well known that CNNs tend to overfit to the training data. Test-time adaptation is an extreme approach to deal with overfitting: given a test image, the aim is to adapt the trained model to that image. Indeed nothing can be closer to the test data than the test image itself. The main difficulty of test-time adaptation is that the ground truth is not available. Thus test-time adaptation, while intriguing, applies to only a few scenarios where one can design an effective loss function that does not require ground truth. We propose the first approach for test-time Salient Object Detection (SOD) in the context of weak supervision. Our approach is based on a so called regularized loss function, which can be used for training CNN when pixel precise ground truth is unavailable. Regularized loss tends to have lower values for the more likely object segments, and thus it can be used to finetune an already trained CNN to a given test image, adapting to images unseen during training. We develop a regularized loss function particularly suitable for test-time adaptation and show that our approach significantly outperforms prior work for weakly supervised SOD.