We propose a way to learn visual features that are compatible with previously computed ones even when they have different dimensions and are learned via different neural network architectures and loss functions. Compatible means that, if such features are used to compare images, then "new" features can be compared directly to "old" features, so they can be used interchangeably. This enables visual search systems to bypass computing new features for all previously seen images when updating the embedding models, a process known as backfilling. Backward compatibility is critical to quickly deploy new embedding models that leverage ever-growing large-scale training datasets and improvements in deep learning architectures and training methods. We propose a framework to train embedding models, called backward-compatible training (BCT), as a first step towards backward compatible representation learning. In experiments on learning embeddings for face recognition, models trained with BCT successfully achieve backward compatibility without sacrificing accuracy, thus enabling backfill-free model updates of visual embeddings.

提出了一种名为“backward-compatible training (BCT)”的框架来训练嵌入模型，它可使不同维度和架构、通过不同损失函数学习的视觉特征具有兼容性，从而实现新计算机制与旧计算机制之间的互换，使视觉搜索系统能够跳过计算所有以前看到的图像的新功能。

朝向向后兼容的表示学习