# An Energy-Based Prior for Generative Saliency

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08803 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08803/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 120 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17154/) (2021)
- [A Probabilistic U-Net for Segmentation of Ambiguous Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05034/) (2018)
- [EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08297/) (2019)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (2019)
- [A Simple Pooling-Based Design for Real-Time Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09569/) (2019)
- [Multi-scale Interactive Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09062/) (2020)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)
- [Visual Saliency Based on Multiscale Deep Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08663/) (2015)
- [F3Net: Fusion, Feedback and Focus for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11445/) (2019)
- [Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12099/) (2021)
- [A Theory of Generative ConvNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03264/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Learning for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07934/) (2018)
- [Learning Non-Convergent Non-Persistent Short-Run MCMC Toward Energy-Based Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09770/) (2019)
- [Rethinking RGB-D Salient Object Detection: Models, Data Sets, and Large-Scale Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06781/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Learning Energy-Based Models by Cooperative Diffusion Recovery Likelihood](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05153/) (2023)
- [Latent Space Energy-based Neural ODEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03845/) (2024)
- [STANLEY: Stochastic Gradient Anisotropic Langevin Dynamics for Learning Energy-Based Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12667/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel generative saliency prediction framework that adopts an informative energy-based model as a prior distribution. The energy-based prior model is defined on the latent space of a saliency generator network that generates the saliency map based on a continuous latent variables and an observed image. Both the parameters of saliency generator and the energy-based prior are jointly trained via Markov chain Monte Carlo-based maximum likelihood estimation, in which the sampling from the intractable posterior and prior distributions of the latent variables are performed by Langevin dynamics. With the generative saliency model, we can obtain a pixel-wise uncertainty map from an image, indicating model confidence in the saliency prediction. Different from existing generative models, which define the prior distribution of the latent variables as a simple isotropic Gaussian distribution, our model uses an energy-based informative prior which can be more expressive in capturing the latent space of the data. With the informative energy-based prior, we extend the Gaussian distribution assumption of generative models to achieve a more representative distribution of the latent space, leading to more reliable uncertainty estimation. We apply the proposed frameworks to both RGB and RGB-D salient object detection tasks with both transformer and convolutional neural network backbones. We further propose an adversarial learning algorithm and a variational inference algorithm as alternatives to train the proposed generative framework. Experimental results show that our generative saliency model with an energy-based prior can achieve not only accurate saliency predictions but also reliable uncertainty maps that are consistent with human perception. Results and code are available at urlhttps://github.com/JingZhang617/EBMGSOD.