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Leveraging human perception into training of convo- lutional neural networks (CNN) has boosted generalization capabilities of such models in open-set recognition tasks. One of the active research questions is where (in the model architecture or training pipeline) and how to efficiently incorporate always-limited human perceptual data into training strategies of models. In this paper, we introduce MENTOR (huMan pErceptioN-guided preTraining fOr increased geneRalization), which addresses this ques- tion through two unique rounds of training CNNs tasked with open-set anomaly detection. First, we train an au- toencoder to learn human saliency maps given an input image, without any class labels. The autoencoder is thus tasked with discovering domain-specific salient features which mimic human perception. Second, we remove the decoder part, add a classification layer on top of the encoder, and train this new model conventionally, now using class labels. We show that MENTOR successfully raises the generalization performance across three different CNN backbones in a variety of anomaly detection tasks (demonstrated for detection of unknown iris presentation attacks, synthetically-generated faces, and anomalies in chest X-ray images) compared to traditional pretraining methods (e.g., sourcing the weights from ImageNet), and as well as state- of-the-art methods that incorporate human perception guidance into training. In addition, we demonstrate that MENTOR can be flexibly applied to existing human perception- guided methods and subsequently increasing their generalization with no architectural modifications. 

Incorporating human-perceptual intelligence into model training has shown to increase the generalization capability of models in several difficult biometric tasks, such as presentation attack detection (PAD) and detection of synthetic samples. After the initial collection phase, human visual saliency (e.g., eye-tracking data, or handwritten annotations) can be integrated into model training through attention mechanisms, augmented training samples, or through human perception-related components of loss functions. Despite their successes, a vital, but seemingly neglected, aspect of any saliency-based training is the level of salience granularity (e.g., bounding boxes, single saliency maps, or saliency aggregated from multiple subjects) necessary to find a balance between reaping the full benefits of human saliency and the cost of its collection. In this paper, we explore several different levels of salience granularity and demonstrate that increased generalization capabilities of PAD and synthetic face detection can be achieved by using simple yet effective saliency post-processing techniques across several different CNNs.