Improving Weakly Supervised Object Localization via Causal Intervention

The recently emerged weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) methods can learn to localize an object in the image only using image-level labels. Previous works endeavor to perceive the interval objects from the small and sparse discriminative attention map, yet ignoring the co-occurrence confounder (e.g., duck and water), which makes the model inspection (e.g., CAM) hard to distinguish between the object and context. In this paper, we make an early attempt to tackle this challenge via causal intervention (CI). Our proposed method, dubbed CI-CAM, explores the causalities among image features, contexts, and categories to eliminate the biased object-context entanglement in the class activation maps thus improving the accuracy of object localization. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CI-CAM in learning the clear object boundary from confounding contexts. Particularly, on the CUB-200-2011 which severely suffers from the co-occurrence confounder, CI-CAM significantly outperforms the traditional CAM-based baseline (58.39% vs 52.4% in Top-1 localization accuracy). While in more general scenarios such as ILSVRC 2016, CI-CAM can also perform on par with the state of the arts.