速さか強さか：重み付き集約とトークンプルーニングによる柔軟な視覚場所認識
Faster or Stronger: Towards Flexible Visual Place Recognition via Weighted Aggregation and Token Pruning
視覚場所認識の性能と推論速度を両立するため、クラスタへの重み付き集約で識別性を高め、トークンプルーニングで特徴抽出コストを削減する手法を提案した。
詳しい要約
1. どんなもの？
2. 先行研究と比べてどこがすごい？
3. 技術・手法の肝は？
4. どうやって有効だと検証した？
5. 議論はある？
6. 次に読むべき論文は？
※ AIが要旨から生成した要約です。正確性は原文をご確認ください。
著者: Zichao Zeng, June Moh Goo, Junwei Zheng, Weijia Fan, Jiaming Zhang, Rainer Stiefelhagen, Jan Boehm
分類: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO
原文アブストラクト
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) aims to match a query image to reference images of the same place in a large-scale database. Recent state-of-the-art methods employ Vision Transformers (ViTs) as backbone foundation models to extract patch-level features that are robust to viewpoint, illumination, and seasonal variations, which are then aggregated into a compact global descriptor for retrieval. Most existing aggregation methods uniformly pool patch tokens into learned clusters, despite the fact that different clusters often encode distinct spatial or semantic patterns and contribute unequally to VPR performance. To address this limitation, we propose Weighted Aggregated Descriptor (WeiAD), which assigns weights to clusters during aggregation, producing more discriminative global representations. Beyond accuracy, retrieval latency is a critical concern for large-scale deployments and resource-constrained edge devices. Prior work mainly reduces latency by compressing global descriptors, while overlooking the cost of feature extraction, an issue exacerbated by ViT-based backbones. We therefore introduce WeiToP, a VPR-oriented token pruning framework that reduces feature extraction cost via self-distillation, where aggregation-induced token importance supervises a lightweight pruning module attached to an early transformer layer, enabling inference-time token pruning. After a single joint training phase, WeiToP enables plug-and-play token pruning at inference time, allowing flexible and on-demand control over the accuracy-efficiency trade-off without additional training. Moreover, WeiToP outperforms existing token pruning methods adapted from general vision tasks.
