Hyperspherical Classification with Dynamic Label-to-Prototype Assignment

Aiming to enhance the utilization of metric space by the parametric softmax classifier, recent studies suggest replacing it with a non-parametric alternative. Although a nonparametric classifier may provide better metric space utilization, it introduces the challenge of capturing inter-class relationships. A shared characteristic among prior nonparametric classifiers is the static assignment of labels to prototypes during the training, i.e., each prototype consistently represents a class throughout the training course. Orthogonal to previous works, we present a simple yet effective method to optimize the category assigned to each prototype (label-to-prototype assignment) during the training. To this aim, we formalize the problem as a two-step optimization objective over network parameters and label-to-prototype assignment mapping. We solve this optimization using a sequential combination of gradient descent and Bi-partide matching. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach by conducting experiments on balanced and long-tail classification problems using different backbone network architectures. In particular, our method outperforms its competitors by 1.22% accuracy on CIFAR-100, and 2.15% on ImageNet-200 using a metric space dimension half of the size of its competitors. Code