GANORCON: Are Generative Models Useful for Few-shot Segmentation?
Oindrila Saha, Zezhou Cheng, Subhransu Maji
Abstract
Advances in generative modeling based on GANs has motivated the community to find their use beyond image generation and editing tasks. In particular, several re-cent works have shown that GAN representations can be re-purposed for discriminative tasks such as part segmen-tation, especially when training data is limited. But how do these improvements stack-up against recent advances in self-supervised learning? Motivated by this we present an alternative approach based on contrastive learning and compare their performance on standard few-shot part seg-mentation benchmarks. Our experiments reveal that not only do the GAN-based approach offer no significant per-formance advantage, their multi-step training is complex, nearly an order-of-magnitude slower, and can introduce ad-ditional bias. These experiments suggest that the inductive biases of generative models, such as their ability to dis-entangle shape and texture, are well captured by standard feed-forward networks trained using contrastive learning.