Adversarial Reconstruction Feedback for Robust Fine-grained Generalization

Existing fine-grained image retrieval (FGIR) methods predominantly rely on supervision from predefined categories to learn discriminative representations for retrieving fine-grained objects. However, they inadvertently introduce category-specific semantics into the retrieval representation, creating semantic dependencies on predefined classes that critically hinder generalization to unseen categories. To tackle this, we propose AdvRF, a novel adversarial reconstruction feedback framework aimed at learning category-agnostic discrepancy representations. Specifically, AdvRF reformulates FGIR as a visual discrepancy reconstruction task via synergizing category-aware discrepancy localization from retrieval models with category-agnostic feature learning from reconstruction models. The reconstruction model exposes residual discrepancies overlooked by the retrieval model, forcing it to improve localization accuracy, while the refined signals from the retrieval model guide the reconstruction model to improve its reconstruction ability. Consequently, the retrieval model localizes visual differences, while the reconstruction model encodes these differences into category-agnostic representations. This representation is then transferred to the retrieval model through knowledge distillation for efficient deployment. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our AdvRF achieves impressive performance on both widely-used fine-grained and coarse-grained datasets.