# Interpretable Attention Guided Network for Fine-grained Visual Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.04701 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04701/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Object Detectors Emerge in Deep Scene CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6856/) (2014)
- [Part-based R-CNNs for Fine-grained Category Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.3867/) (2014)
- [Learning to Navigate for Fine-grained Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00287/) (2018)
- [The Devil is in the Channels: Mutual-Channel Loss for Fine-Grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04264/) (2020)
- [Part-Stacked CNN for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.08086/) (2015)
- [Object-Part Attention Model for Fine-grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01740/) (2017)
- [Iterative Reorganization with Weak Spatial Constraints: Solving Arbitrary Jigsaw Puzzles for Unsupervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00329/) (2018)
- [Diversified Visual Attention Networks for Fine-Grained Object Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08572/) (2016)
- [Attend and Rectify: a Gated Attention Mechanism for Fine-Grained Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07320/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) is challenging but more critical than traditional classification tasks. It requires distinguishing different subcategories with the inherently subtle intra-class object variations. Previous works focus on enhancing the feature representation ability using multiple granularities and discriminative regions based on the attention strategy or bounding boxes. However, these methods highly rely on deep neural networks which lack interpretability. We propose an Interpretable Attention Guided Network (IAGN) for fine-grained visual classification. The contributions of our method include: i) an attention guided framework which can guide the network to extract discriminitive regions in an interpretable way; ii) a progressive training mechanism obtained to distill knowledge stage by stage to fuse features of various granularities; iii) the first interpretable FGVC method with a competitive performance on several standard FGVC benchmark datasets.