Improving Deep Regression with Ordinal Entropy

In computer vision, it is often observed that formulating regression problems as a classification task yields better performance. We investigate this curious phenomenon and provide a derivation to show that classification, with the cross-entropy loss, outperforms regression with a mean squared error loss in its ability to learn high-entropy feature representations. Based on the analysis, we propose an ordinal entropy loss to encourage higher-entropy feature spaces while maintaining ordinal relationships to improve the performance of regression tasks. Experiments on synthetic and real-world regression tasks demonstrate the importance and benefits of increasing entropy for regression.

Authors

• Shihao Zhang
• Linlin Yang
• Michael Bi Mi
• Xiaoxu Zheng
• Angela Yao

Keywords

• regression
• classification
• entropy
• depth estimation
• counting
• age estimation