Paper ID: 2301.08915

Improving Deep Regression with Ordinal Entropy

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

In computer vision, it is often observed that formulating regression problems as a classification task often 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.

Submitted: Jan 21, 2023