# Spatial-Temporal Attention Network for Open-Set Fine-Grained Image Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13940 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13940/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Transformer in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00112/) (2021)
- [Stand-Alone Self-Attention in Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05909/) (2019)
- [Towards Open Set Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06233/) (2015)
- [Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06207/) (2021)
- [Cross-Modal Self-Attention Network for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04745/) (2019)
- [Attention Mechanisms in Computer Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07624/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Clustering with Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02648/) (2016)
- [Reducing Network Agnostophobia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04110/) (2018)
- [Generative OpenMax for Multi-Class Open Set Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07418/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Reciprocal Points Learning for Open Set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00953/) (2021)
- [NeW CRFs: Neural Window Fully-connected CRFs for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01502/) (2022)
- [Classification-Reconstruction Learning for Open-Set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04246/) (2018)
- [C2AE: Class Conditioned Auto-Encoder for Open-set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01198/) (2019)
- [OpenGAN: Open-Set Recognition via Open Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02939/) (2021)
- [Attention-based Dropout Layer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10028/) (2019)
- [Robust Classification with Convolutional Prototype Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03438/) (2018)
- [Learning Placeholders for Open-Set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15086/) (2021)
- [Learning Open Set Network with Discriminative Reciprocal Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00178/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Triggered by the success of transformers in various visual tasks, the spatial self-attention mechanism has recently attracted more and more attention in the computer vision community. However, we empirically found that a typical vision transformer with the spatial self-attention mechanism could not learn accurate attention maps for distinguishing different categories of fine-grained images. To address this problem, motivated by the temporal attention mechanism in brains, we propose a spatial-temporal attention network for learning fine-grained feature representations, called STAN, where the features learnt by implementing a sequence of spatial self-attention operations corresponding to multiple moments are aggregated progressively. The proposed STAN consists of four modules: a self-attention backbone module for learning a sequence of features with self-attention operations, a spatial feature self-organizing module for facilitating the model training, a spatial-temporal feature learning module for aggregating the re-organized features via a Long Short-Term Memory network, and a context-aware module that is implemented as the forget block of the spatial-temporal feature learning module for preserving/forgetting the long-term memory by utilizing contextual information. Then, we propose a STAN-based method for open-set fine-grained recognition by integrating the proposed STAN network with a linear classifier, called STAN-OSFGR. Extensive experimental results on 3 fine-grained datasets and 2 coarse-grained datasets demonstrate that the proposed STAN-OSFGR outperforms 9 state-of-the-art open-set recognition methods significantly in most cases.