ForAug/ForNet

This is the ForNet dataset from the paper ForAug: Recombining Foregrounds and Backgrounds to Improve Vision Transformer Training with Bias Mitigation.

Updates

• [19.03.2025] We release the code to download and use ForNet on GitHub :computer:
• [19.03.2025] We release the patch files of ForNet on Huggingface :hugs:
• [12.03.2025] We release the preprint of ForAug on arXiv :spiral_notepad:

Using ForAug/ForNet

Preliminaries

To be able to download ForNet, you will need the ImageNet dataset in the usual format at <in_path>:

<in_path>
|--- train
|    |--- n01440764
|    |    |--- n01440764_10026.JPEG
|    |    |--- n01440764_10027.JPEG
|    |    |--- n01440764_10029.JPEG
|    |    `-  ...
|    |--- n01693334
|    `-  ...
`-- val
     |--- n01440764
     |    |--- ILSVRC2012_val_00000293.JPEG
     |    |--- ILSVRC2012_val_00002138.JPEG
     |    |--- ILSVRC2012_val_00003014.JPEG
     |    `-  ...
     |--- n01693334
     `-  ...

Downloading ForNet

To download and prepare the already-segmented ForNet dataset at <data_path>, follow these steps:

1. Clone the git repository and install the requirements

git clone https://github.com/tobna/ForAug
cd ForAug
pip install -r prep-requirements.txt

2. Download the diff files

./download_diff_files.sh <data_path>

This script will download all dataset files to <data_path>

3. Apply the diffs to ImageNet

python apply_patch.py -p <data_path> -in <in_path> -o <data_path>

This will apply the diffs to ImageNet and store the results in the <data_path> folder. It will also delete the already-processes patch files (the ones downloaded in step 2). In order to keep the patch files, add the --keep flag.

Optional: Zip the files without compression

When dealing with a large cluster and dataset files that have to be sent over the network (i.e. the dataset is on another server than the one used for processing) it's sometimes useful to not deal with many small files and have fewer large ones instead. If you want this, you can zip up the files (without compression) by using

./zip_up.sh <data_path>

Creating ForNet from Scratch

Coming soon

Using ForNet

To use ForAug/ForNet you need to have it available in folder or zip form (see Downloading ForNet) at data_path. Additionally, you need to install the (standard) requirements from 'requirements.txt':

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then, just do

from fornet import ForNet

data_path = ...

dataset = ForNet(
            data_path,
            train=True,
            transform=None,
            background_combination="all",
          )

For information on all possible parameters, run

from fornet import ForNet

help(ForNet.__init__)

Citation

@misc{nauen2025foraug,
      title={ForAug: Recombining Foregrounds and Backgrounds to Improve Vision Transformer Training with Bias Mitigation},
      author={Tobias Christian Nauen and Brian Moser and Federico Raue and Stanislav Frolov and Andreas Dengel},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2503.09399},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
}

Dataset Sources

• Repository: GitHub
• Paper: arXiv
• Project Page: coming soon

ToDos

• release code to download and create ForNet
• release code to use ForNet for training and evaluation
• integrate ForNet into Huggingface Datasets