# Unveiling the Potential of Structure Preserving for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.04523 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04523/

## Key facts

- Cited by 46 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [Hide-and-Seek: Forcing a Network to be Meticulous for Weakly-supervised Object and Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04232/) (2017)
- [Object Region Mining with Adversarial Erasing: A Simple Classification to Semantic Segmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08448/) (2017)
- [Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/) (2016)
- [Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Learning of a DCNN for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02734/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Complementary Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06962/) (2018)
- [Interpretable Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.00935/) (2017)
- [FickleNet: Weakly and Semi-supervised Semantic Image Segmentation using Stochastic Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10421/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Dilated Convolution: A Simple Approach for Weakly- and Semi- Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04574/) (2018)
- [Mining Cross-Image Semantics for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01947/) (2020)
- [Disentangled Non-Local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06668/) (2020)
- [Attention-based Dropout Layer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10028/) (2019)
- [Constrained Convolutional Neural Networks for Weakly Supervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03648/) (2015)
- [Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Iteratively Mining Common Object Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04659/) (2018)
- [Self-produced Guidance for Weakly-supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08902/) (2018)
- [C-MIL: Continuation Multiple Instance Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05647/) (2019)
- [Robust Object Detection under Occlusion with Context-Aware CompositionalNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11643/) (2020)
- [Inter-Image Communication for Weakly Supervised Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05096/) (2020)
- [Min-Entropy Latent Model for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06057/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [TS-CAM: Token Semantic Coupled Attention Map for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14862/) (2021)
- [Learning Affordance Grounding from Exocentric Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09905/) (2022)
- [LOCATE: Localize and Transfer Object Parts for Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09665/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Object Affordance Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03658/) (2021)
- [Bridging the Gap between Classification and Localization for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00220/) (2022)
- [LCTR: On Awakening the Local Continuity of Transformer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05291/) (2021)
- [Background Activation Suppression for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00580/) (2021)
- [Grounded Affordance from Exocentric View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13196/) (2022)
- [CREAM: Weakly Supervised Object Localization via Class RE-Activation Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13922/) (2022)
- [Background Activation Suppression for Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12943/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Convolutions in Deep Learning: Applications, Challenges, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15490/) (2024)
- [ViTOL: Vision Transformer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06772/) (2022)
- [Discriminative Sampling of Proposals in Self-Supervised Transformers for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09209/) (2022)
- [INTRA: Interaction Relationship-aware Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06210/) (2024)
- [What is Where by Looking: Weakly-Supervised Open-World Phrase-Grounding without Text Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09358/) (2022)
- [SIOD: Single Instance Annotated Per Category Per Image for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15353/) (2022)
- [Bagging Regional Classification Activation Maps for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07818/) (2022)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation of Weakly-Supervised Object Localization Models for Histology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19113/) (2024)
- [DiPS: Discriminative Pseudo-Label Sampling with Self-Supervised Transformers for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06196/) (2023)
- [Contrastive learning of Class-agnostic Activation Map for Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13505/) (2022)
- [Scaling Novel Object Detection with Weakly Supervised Detection Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05205/) (2022)
- [Spatial-Aware Token for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10438/) (2023)
- [Background-aware Classification Activation Map for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14379/) (2021)
- [EPSD: Early Pruning with Self-Distillation for Efficient Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00084/) (2024)
- [A Weakly Supervised and Globally Explainable Learning Framework for Brain Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01191/) (2024)
- [AffordanceSAM: Segment Anything Once More in Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15650/) (2025)
- [Selective Contrastive Learning for Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07877/) (2025)
- [Weakly Supervised Lesion Detection and Diagnosis for Breast Cancers with Partially Annotated Ultrasound Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06982/) (2023)
- [SSA: Semantic Structure Aware Inference for Weakly Pixel-Wise Dense Predictions without Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03392/) (2021)
- [Knowledge-guided Causal Intervention for Weakly-supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01060/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly supervised object localization(WSOL) remains an open problem given the deficiency of finding object extent information using a classification network. Although prior works struggled to localize objects through various spatial regularization strategies, we argue that how to extract object structural information from the trained classification network is neglected. In this paper, we propose a two-stage approach, termed structure-preserving activation (SPA), toward fully leveraging the structure information incorporated in convolutional features for WSOL. First, a restricted activation module (RAM) is designed to alleviate the structure-missing issue caused by the classification network on the basis of the observation that the unbounded classification map and global average pooling layer drive the network to focus only on object parts. Second, we designed a post-process approach, termed self-correlation map generating (SCG) module to obtain structure-preserving localization maps on the basis of the activation maps acquired from the first stage. Specifically, we utilize the high-order self-correlation (HSC) to extract the inherent structural information retained in the learned model and then aggregate HSC of multiple points for precise object localization. Extensive experiments on two publicly available benchmarks including CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC show that the proposed SPA achieves substantial and consistent performance gains compared with baseline approaches.Code and models are available at https://github.com/Panxjia/SPA_CVPR2021