# Counterfactual Co-occurring Learning for Bias Mitigation in Weakly-supervised Object Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15354 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15354/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Object Detection with Deep Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05511/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for Generic Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02165/) (2018)
- [Unbiased Scene Graph Generation from Biased Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11949/) (2020)
- [Long-Tailed Classification by Keeping the Good and Removing the Bad Momentum Causal Effect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12991/) (2020)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [Hide-and-Seek: Forcing a Network to be Meticulous for Weakly-supervised Object and Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04232/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Counterfactual Samples Synthesizing for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06576/) (2020)
- [Attention-based Dropout Layer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10028/) (2019)
- [Counterfactual Attention Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization and Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08728/) (2021)
- [Interventional Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13000/) (2020)
- [Evaluating Weakly Supervised Object Localization Methods Right](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07437/) (2020)
- [Self-produced Guidance for Weakly-supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08902/) (2018)
- [A Prototype-Oriented Framework for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12024/) (2021)
- [The Devil is in the Labels: Noisy Label Correction for Robust Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03014/) (2022)
- [Inter-Image Communication for Weakly Supervised Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05096/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08258/) (2016)

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

- [Hypergraph-State Collaborative Reasoning for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12665/) (2026)
- [PROBE: Diagnosing Residual Concept Capacity in Erased Text-to-Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21547/) (2026)
- [Learning from Synthetic Data via Provenance-Based Input Gradient Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02946/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contemporary weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) methods have primarily focused on addressing the challenge of localizing the most discriminative region while largely overlooking the relatively less explored issue of biased activation -- incorrectly spotlighting co-occurring background with the foreground feature. In this paper, we conduct a thorough causal analysis to investigate the origins of biased activation. Based on our analysis, we attribute this phenomenon to the presence of co-occurring background confounders. Building upon this profound insight, we introduce a pioneering paradigm known as Counterfactual Co-occurring Learning (CCL), meticulously engendering counterfactual representations by adeptly disentangling the foreground from the co-occurring background elements. Furthermore, we propose an innovative network architecture known as Counterfactual-CAM. This architecture seamlessly incorporates a perturbation mechanism for counterfactual representations into the vanilla CAM-based model. By training the WSOL model with these perturbed representations, we guide the model to prioritize the consistent foreground content while concurrently reducing the influence of distracting co-occurring backgrounds. To the best of our knowledge, this study represents the initial exploration of this research direction. Our extensive experiments conducted across multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed Counterfactual-CAM in mitigating biased activation.