While deep learning-based classification is generally addressed using standardized approaches, a wide variety of techniques are employed for regression. In computer vision, one particularly popular such technique is that of confidence-based regression, which entails predicting a confidence value for each input-target pair (x, y). While this approach has demonstrated impressive results, it requires important task-dependent design choices, and the predicted confidences often lack a natural probabilistic meaning. We address these issues by proposing Deep Conditional Target Densities (DCTD), a novel and general regression method with a clear probabilistic interpretation. DCTD models the conditional target density p(y|x) by using a neural network to directly predict the un-normalized density from (x, y). This model of p(y|x) is trained by minimizing the associated negative log-likelihood, approximated using Monte Carlo sampling. We perform comprehensive experiments on four computer vision regression tasks. Our approach outperforms direct regression, as well as other probabilistic and confidence-based methods. Notably, our regression model achieves a 1.9% AP improvement over Faster-RCNN for object detection on the COCO dataset, and sets a new state-of-the-art on visual tracking when applied for bounding box regression.

本文介绍了一种基于能量模型和深度神经网络，通过蒙特卡罗采样方法直接最小化相关负对数似然训练条件目标密度p(y|x)，可用于计算机视觉回归任务的新的概率解释回归方法，并在四个计算机视觉回归任务中表现优于其他概率和自信度方法，同时也具备更广泛的应用性，可用于估计年龄和头部姿势等任务。

基于能量模型的深度概率回归