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Cited by 680

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 17 of the 17 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Top-Down Neural Attention by Excitation Backprop

Zhang, Jianming, Bargal, Sarah Adel, Lin, Zhe, Brandt, Jonathan, Shen, Xiaohui, Sclaroff, Stan·2018·International Journal of Computer Vision

Abstract

We aim to model the top-down attention of a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier for generating task-specific attention maps. Inspired by a top-down human visual attention model, we propose a new backpropagation scheme, called Excitation Backprop, to pass along top-down signals downwards in the network hierarchy via a probabilistic Winner-Take-All process. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of contrastive attention to make the top-down attention maps more discriminative. We show a theoretic connection between the proposed contrastive attention formulation and the Class Activation Map computation. Efficient implementation of Excitation Backprop for common neural network layers is also presented. In experiments, we visualize the evidence of a model’s classification decision by computing the proposed top-down attention maps. For quantitative evaluation, we report the accuracy of our method in weakly supervised localization tasks on the MS COCO, PASCAL VOC07 and ImageNet datasets. The usefulness of our method is further validated in the text-to-region association task. On the Flickr30k Entities dataset, we achieve promising performance in phrase localization by leveraging the top-down attention of a CNN model that has been trained on weakly labeled web images. Finally, we demonstrate applications of our method in model interpretation and data annotation assistance for facial expression analysis and medical imaging tasks.

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Metadata

Authors
Zhang, J., Bargal, S. A., Lin, Z., Brandt, J., Shen, X., & Sclaroff, S.
Venue
International Journal of Computer Vision
Published
2017-12-23
Volume
126
Issue
10
Pages
1084-1102
ISSN
  • 0920-5691 (ISSN-L)
  • 1573-1405
OpenAlex
W2776207810
Cited by
680
References
17
FWCI
18.31
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Top-Down Neural Attention by Excitation Backprop. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1007/s11263-017-1059-x
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Zhang, J., Bargal, S. A., Lin, Z., Brandt, J., Shen, X., & Sclaroff, S. (2018). Top-Down Neural Attention by Excitation Backprop. International Journal of Computer Vision. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-017-1059-x

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

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