In this work, we revisit the global average pooling layer proposed in [13], and shed light on how it explicitly enables the convolutional neural network (CNN) to have remarkable localization ability despite being trained on image-level labels. While this technique was previously proposed as a means for regularizing training, we find that it actually builds a generic localizable deep representation that exposes the implicit attention of CNNs on an image. Despite the apparent simplicity of global average pooling, we are able to achieve 37.1% top-5 error for object localization on ILSVRC 2014 without training on any bounding box annotation. We demonstrate in a variety of experiments that our network is able to localize the discriminative image regions despite just being trained for solving classification task.
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