  Many real-world visual recognition use-cases can not directly benefit from
state-of-the-art CNN-based approaches because of the lack of many annotated
data. The usual approach to deal with this is to transfer a representation
pre-learned on a large annotated source-task onto a target-task of interest.
This raises the question of how well the original representation is
"universal", that is to say directly adapted to many different target-tasks. To
improve such universality, the state-of-the-art consists in training networks
on a diversified source problem, that is modified either by adding generic or
specific categories to the initial set of categories. In this vein, we proposed
a method that exploits finer-classes than the most specific ones existing, for
which no annotation is available. We rely on unsupervised learning and a
bottom-up split and merge strategy. We show that our method learns more
universal representations than state-of-the-art, leading to significantly
better results on 10 target-tasks from multiple domains, using several network
architectures, either alone or combined with networks learned at a coarser
semantic level.
