Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) is a technique which allows Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to use input images of any size, not only $224\text{px} \times 224\text{px}$ as most architectures do. (However, there is a lower bound for the size of the input image).

## Idea

* Convolutional layers operate on any size, but fully connected layers need fixed-size inputs
* Solution:
  * Add a new SPP layer on top of the last convolutional layer, before the fully connected layer
  * Use an approach similar to bag of words (BoW), but maintain the spatial information. The BoW approach is used for text classification, where the order of the words is discarded and only the number of occurences is kept.
  * The SPP layer operates on each feature map independently.
  * The output of the SPP layer is of dimension $k \cdot M$, where $k$ is the number of feature maps the SPP layer got as input and $M$ is the number of bins.

Example: We could use spatial pyramid pooling with 21 bins:

* 1 bin which is the max of the complete feature map
* 4 bins which divide the image into 4 regions of equal size (depending on the input size) and rectangular shape. Each bin gets the max of its region.
* 16 bins which divide the image into 4 regions of equal size (depending on the input size) and rectangular shape. Each bin gets the max of its region.

## Evaluation

* Pascal VOC 2007, Caltech101: state-of-the-art, without finetuning
* ImageNet 2012: Boosts accuracy for various CNN architectures
* ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) 2014: Rank #2


## Code

The paper claims that the code is [here](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kahe/), but this seems not to be the case any more.

People have tried to implement it with Tensorflow ([1](http://stackoverflow.com/q/40913794/562769), [2](https://github.com/fchollet/keras/issues/2080), [3](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/6011)), but by now no public working implementation is available.


## Related papers

* [Atrous Convolution](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00915)

This paper presents a method to train a neural network to make predictions for *counterfactual* questions. In short, such questions are questions about what the result of an intervention would have been, had a different choice for the intervention been made (e.g. *Would this patient have lower blood sugar had she received a different medication?*).

One approach to tackle this problem is to collect data of the form $(x_i, t_i, y_i^F)$ where $x_i$ describes a situation (e.g. a patient), $t_i$ describes the intervention made (in this paper $t_i$ is binary, e.g. $t_i = 1$ if a new treatment is used while $t_i = 0$ would correspond to using the current treatment) and $y_i^F$ is the factual outcome of the intervention $t_i$ for $x_i$. From this training data, a predictor $h(x,t)$ taking the pair $(x_i, t_i)$ as input and outputting a prediction for $y_i^F$ could be trained. 

From this predictor, one could imagine answering counterfactual questions by feeding $(x_i, 1-t_i)$ (i.e. a description of the same situation $x_i$ but with the opposite intervention $1-t_i$) to our predictor and comparing the prediction $h(x_i, 1-t_i)$ with $y_i^F$. This would give us an estimate of the change in the outcome, had a different intervention been made, thus providing an answer to our counterfactual question.

The authors point out that this scenario is related to that of domain adaptation (more specifically to the special case of covariate shift) in which the input training distribution (here represented by inputs $(x_i,t_i)$) is different from the distribution of inputs that will be fed at test time to our predictor (corresponding to the inputs $(x_i, 1-t_i)$). If the choice of intervention $t_i$ is evenly spread and chosen independently from $x_i$, the distributions become the same. However, in observational studies, the choice of $t_i$ for some given $x_i$ is often not independent of $x_i$ and made according to some unknown policy. This is the situation of interest in this paper.

Thus, the authors propose an approach inspired by the domain adaptation literature. Specifically, they propose to have the predictor $h(x,t)$ learn a representation of $x$ that is indiscriminate of the intervention $t$ (see Figure 2 for the proposed neural network architecture). Indeed, this is a notion that is [well established][1] in the domain adaptation literature and has been exploited previously using regularization terms based on [adversarial learning][2] and [maximum mean discrepancy][3]. In this paper, the authors used instead a regularization (noted in the paper as $disc(\Phi_{t=0},\Phi_ {t=1})$) based on the so-called discrepancy distance of [Mansour et al.][4], adapting its use to the case of a neural network. 

As an example, imagine that in our dataset, a new treatment ($t=1$) was much more frequently used than not ($t=0$) for men. Thus, for men, relatively insufficient evidence for counterfactual inference is expected to be found in our training dataset. Intuitively, we would thus want our predictor to not rely as much on that "feature" of patients when inferring the impact of the treatment. 

In addition to this term, the authors also propose incorporating an additional regularizer where the prediction $h(x_i,1-t_i)$ on counterfactual inputs is pushed to be as close as possible to the target $y_{j}^F$ of the observation $x_j$ that is closest to $x_i$ **and** actually had the counterfactual intervention $t_j = 1-t_i$. 

The paper first shows a bound relating the counterfactual generalization error to the discrepancy distance. Moreover, experiments simulating counterfactual inference tasks are presented, in which performance is measured by comparing the predicted treatment effects (as estimated by the difference between the observed effect $y_i^F$ for the observed treatment and the predicted effect $h(x_i, 1-t_i)$ for the opposite treatment) with the real effect (known here because the data is simulated). The paper shows that the proposed approach using neural networks outperforms several baselines on this task.

**My two cents**

The connection with domain adaptation presented here is really clever and enlightening. This sounds like a very compelling approach to counterfactual inference, which can exploit a lot of previous work on domain adaptation.

The paper mentions that selecting the hyper-parameters (such as the regularization terms weights) in this scenario is not a trivial task. Indeed, measuring performance here requires knowing the true difference in intervention outcomes, which in practice usually cannot be known (e.g. two treatments usually cannot be given to the same patient once). In the paper, they somewhat "cheat" by using the ground truth difference in outcomes to measure out-of-sample performance, which the authors admit is unrealistic. Thus, an interesting avenue for future work would be to design practical hyper-parameter selection procedures for this scenario. I wonder whether the *reverse cross-validation* approach we used in our work on our adversarial approach to domain adaptation (see [Section 5.1.2][5]) could successfully be used here.

Finally, I command the authors for presenting such a nicely written description of counterfactual inference problem setup in general, I really enjoyed it!

[1]: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2983-analysis-of-representations-for-domain-adaptation.pdf
[2]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07818
[3]: http://ijcai.org/Proceedings/09/Papers/200.pdf
[4]: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~mohri/pub/nadap.pdf
[5]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.07818v4.pdf#page=16

This paper starts by introducing a trick to reduce the variance of stochastic gradient variational Bayes (SGVB) estimators. In neural networks, SGVB consists in learning a variational (e.g. diagonal Gaussian) posterior over the weights and biases of neural networks, through a procedure that (for the most part) alternates between adding (Gaussian) noise to the model's parameters and then performing a model update with backprop. 

The authors present a local reparameterization trick, which exploits the fact that the Gaussian noise added into the weights could instead be added directly into the pre-activation (i.e. before the activation fonction) vectors during forward propagation. This is due to the fact that computing the pre-activation is a linear operation, thus noise at that level is also Gaussian. The advantage of doing so is that, in the context of minibatch training, one can efficiently then add independent noise to the pre-activation vectors for each example of the minibatch. The nature of the local reparameterization trick implies that this is equivalent to using one corrupted version of the weights for each example in the minibatch, something that wouldn't be practical computationally otherwise. This is in fact why, in normal SGVB, previous work would normally use a single corrupted version of the weights for all the minibatch. 

The authors demonstrate that using the local reparameterization trick yields stochastic gradients with lower variance, which should improve the speed of convergence.

Then, the authors demonstrate that the Gaussian version of dropout (one that uses multiplicative Gaussian noise, instead of 0-1 masking noise) can be seen as the local reparameterization trick version of a SGVB objective, with some specific prior and variational posterior. In this SGVB view of Gaussian dropout, the dropout rate is an hyper-parameter of this prior, which can now be tuned by optimizing the variational lower bound of SGVB. In other words, we now have a method to also train the dropout rate! Moreover, it becomes possible to tune an individual dropout rate parameter for each layer, or even each parameter of the model.

Experiments on MNIST confirm that tuning that parameter works and allows to reach good performance of various network sizes, compared to using a default dropout rate. 


##### My two cents

This is another thought provoking connection between Bayesian learning and dropout. Indeed, while Deep GPs have allowed to make a Bayesian connection with regular (binary) dropout learning \cite{journals/corr/GalG15}, this paper sheds light on a neat Bayesian connection for the Gaussian version of dropout. This is great, because it suggests that Gaussian dropout training is another legit way of modeling uncertainty in the parameters of neural networks. It's also nice that that connection also yielded a method for tuning the dropout rate automatically.

I hope future work (by the authors or by others) can evaluate the quality of the corresponding variational posterior in terms of estimating uncertainty in the network and, in particular, in obtaining calibrated output probabilities.

Little detail: I couldn't figure out whether the authors tuned a single dropout rate for the whole network, or used many rates, for instance one per parameter, as they suggest can be done.

This paper presents a novel neural network approach (though see [here](https://www.facebook.com/hugo.larochelle.35/posts/172841743130126?pnref=story) for a discussion on prior work) to density estimation, with a focus on image modeling. At its core, it exploits the following property on the densities of random variables. Let $x$ and $z$ be two random variables of equal dimensionality such that $x = g(z)$, where $g$ is some bijective and deterministic function (we'll note its inverse as $f = g^{-1}$). Then the change of variable formula gives us this relationship between the densities of $x$ and $z$:

$p_X(x) = p_Z(z) \left|{\rm det}\left(\frac{\partial g(z)}{\partial z}\right)\right|^{-1}$

Moreover, since the determinant of the Jacobian matrix of the inverse $f$ of a function $g$ is simply the inverse of the Jacobian of the function $g$, we can also write:

$p_X(x) = p_Z(f(x)) \left|{\rm det}\left(\frac{\partial f(x)}{\partial x}\right)\right|$

where we've replaced $z$ by its deterministically inferred value $f(x)$ from $x$.

So, the core of the proposed model is in proposing a design for bijective functions $g$ (actually, they design its inverse $f$, from which $g$ can be derived by inversion), that have the properties of being easily invertible and having an easy-to-compute determinant of Jacobian. Specifically, the authors propose to construct $f$ from various modules that all preserve these properties and allows to construct highly non-linear $f$ functions. Then, assuming a simple choice for the density $p_Z$ (they use a multidimensional Gaussian), it becomes possible to both compute $p_X(x)$ tractably and to sample from that density, by first samples $z\sim p_Z$ and then computing $x=g(z)$.

The building blocks for constructing $f$ are the following:

**Coupling layers**: This is perhaps the most important piece. It simply computes as its output $b\odot x + (1-b) \odot (x \odot \exp(l(b\odot x)) + m(b\odot x))$, where $b$ is a binary mask (with half of its values set to 0 and the others to 1) over the input of the layer $x$, while $l$ and $m$ are arbitrarily complex neural networks with input and output layers of equal dimensionality. 

In brief, for dimensions for which $b_i = 1$ it simply copies the input value into the output. As for the other dimensions (for which $b_i = 0$) it linearly transforms them as $x_i * \exp(l(b\odot x)_i) + m(b\odot x)_i$. Crucially, the bias ($m(b\odot x)_i$) and coefficient ($\exp(l(b\odot x)_i)$) of the linear transformation are non-linear transformations (i.e. the output of neural networks) that only have access to the masked input (i.e. the non-transformed dimensions). While this layer might seem odd, it has the important property that it is invertible and the determinant of its Jacobian is simply $\exp(\sum_i (1-b_i) l(b\odot x)_i)$. See Section 3.3 for more details on that.

**Alternating masks**: One important property of coupling layers is that they can be stacked (i.e. composed), and the resulting composition is still a bijection and is invertible (since each layer is individually a bijection) and has a tractable determinant for its Jacobian (since the Jacobian of the composition of functions is simply the multiplication of each function's Jacobian matrix, and the determinant of the product of square matrices is the product of the determinant of each matrix). This is also true, even if the mask $b$ of each layer is different. Thus, the authors propose using masks that alternate across layer, by masking a different subset of (half of) the dimensions. For images, they propose using masks with a checkerboard pattern (see Figure 3). Intuitively, alternating masks are better because then after at least 2 layers, all dimensions have been transformed at least once.

**Squeezing operations**: Squeezing operations corresponds to a reorganization of a 2D spatial layout of dimensions into 4 sets of features maps with spatial resolutions reduced by half (see Figure 3). This allows to expose multiple scales of resolutions to the model. Moreover, after a squeezing operation, instead of using a checkerboard pattern for masking, the authors propose to use a per channel masking pattern, so that "the resulting partitioning is not redundant with the previous checkerboard masking". See Figure 3 for an illustration.

Overall, the models used in the experiments usually stack a few of the following "chunks" of layers: 1) a few coupling layers with alternating checkboard masks, 2) followed by squeezing, 3) followed by a few coupling layers with alternating channel-wise masks. Since the output of each layers-chunk must technically be of the same size as the input image, this could become expensive in terms of computations and space when using a lot of layers. Thus, the authors propose to explicitly pass on (copy) to the very last layer ($z$) half of the dimensions after each layers-chunk, adding another chunk of layers only on the other half. This is illustrated in Figure 4b.

Experiments on CIFAR-10, and 32x32 and 64x64 versions of ImageNet show that the proposed model (coined the real-valued non-volume preserving or Real NVP) has competitive performance (in bits per dimension), though slightly worse than the Pixel RNN.

**My Two Cents**

The proposed approach is quite unique and thought provoking. Most interestingly, it is the only powerful generative model I know that combines A) a tractable likelihood, B) an efficient / one-pass sampling procedure and C) the explicit learning of a latent representation. While achieving this required a model definition that is somewhat unintuitive, it is nonetheless mathematically really beautiful!

I wonder to what extent Real NVP is penalized in its results by the fact that it models pixels as real-valued observations. First, it implies that its estimate of bits/dimensions is an upper bound on what it could be if the uniform sub-pixel noise was integrated out (see Equations 3-4-5 of [this paper](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.01844v3.pdf)). Moreover, the authors had to apply a non-linear transformation (${\rm logit}(\alpha + (1-\alpha)\odot x)$) to the pixels, to spread the $[0,255]$ interval further over the reals. Since the Pixel RNN models pixels as discrete observations directly, the Real NVP might be at a disadvantage.

I'm also curious to know how easy it would be to do conditional inference with the Real NVP. One could imagine doing approximate MAP conditional inference, by clamping the observed dimensions and doing gradient descent on the log-likelihood with respect to the value of remaining dimensions. This could be interesting for image completion, or for structured output prediction with real-valued outputs in general. I also wonder how expensive that would be.

In all cases, I'm looking forward to saying interesting applications and variations of this model in the future!

This paper describes how to apply the idea of batch normalization (BN) successfully to recurrent neural networks, specifically to LSTM networks. The technique involves the 3 following ideas:

**1) Careful initialization of the BN scaling parameter.** While standard practice is to initialize it to 1 (to have unit variance), they show that this situation creates problems with the gradient flow through time, which vanishes quickly. A value around 0.1 (used in the experiments) preserves gradient flow much better.

**2) Separate BN for the "hiddens to hiddens pre-activation and for the "inputs to hiddens" pre-activation.** In other words, 2 separate BN operators are applied on each contributions to the pre-activation, before summing and passing through the tanh and sigmoid non-linearities.

**3) Use of largest time-step BN statistics for longer test-time sequences.** Indeed, one issue with applying BN to RNNs is that if the input sequences have varying length, and if one uses per-time-step mean/variance statistics in the BN transformation (which is the natural thing to do), it hasn't been clear how do deal with the last time steps of longer sequences seen at test time, for which BN has no statistics from the training set. The paper shows evidence that the pre-activation statistics tend to gradually converge to stationary values over time steps, which supports the idea of simply using the training set's last time step statistics.

Among these ideas, I believe the most impactful idea is 1). The papers mentions towards the end that improper initialization of the BN scaling parameter probably explains previous failed attempts to apply BN to recurrent networks.

Experiments on 4 datasets confirms the method's success.

**My two cents**

This is an excellent development for LSTMs. BN has had an important impact on our success in training deep neural networks, and this approach might very well have a similar impact on the success of LSTMs in practice.

Mask RCNN takes off from where Faster RCNN left, with some augmentations aimed at bettering instance segmentation (which was out of scope for FRCNN). Instance segmentation was achieved remarkably well in *DeepMask* , *SharpMask* and later *Feature Pyramid Networks* (FPN).

Faster RCNN was not designed for pixel-to-pixel alignment between network inputs and outputs. This is most evident in how RoIPool , the de facto core operation for attending to instances, performs coarse spatial quantization for feature extraction. Mask RCNN fixes that by introducing RoIAlign in place of RoIPool.

#### Methodology

Mask RCNN retains most of the architecture of Faster RCNN. It adds the a third branch for segmentation. The third branch takes the output from RoIAlign layer and predicts binary class masks for each class.

##### Major Changes and intutions

**Mask prediction**

Mask prediction segmentation predicts a binary mask for each RoI using fully convolution - and the stark difference being usage of *sigmoid* activation for predicting final mask instead of *softmax*, implies masks don't compete with each other. This *decouples* segmentation from classification. The class prediction branch is used for class prediction and for calculating loss, the mask of predicted loss is used calculating Lmask.

Also, they show that a single class agnostic mask prediction works almost as effective as separate mask for each class, thereby supporting their method of decoupling classification from segmentation

**RoIAlign**

RoIPool first quantizes a floating-number RoI to the discrete granularity of the feature map, this quantized RoI is then subdivided into spatial bins which are themselves quantized, and finally feature values covered by each bin are aggregated (usually by max pooling). Instead of  quantization of the RoI boundaries
or bin bilinear interpolation is used to compute the exact values of the input features at four regularly sampled locations in each RoI bin, and aggregate the result (using max or average).

**Backbone architecture**

Faster RCNN uses a VGG like structure for extracting features from image, weights of which were shared among RPN and region detection layers. Herein, authors experiment with 2 backbone architectures - ResNet based VGG like in FRCNN and ResNet based [FPN](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=journals/corr/LinDGHHB16) based. FPN uses convolution feature maps from previous layers and recombining them to produce pyramid of feature maps to be used for prediction instead of single-scale feature layer (final output of conv layer before connecting to fc layers was used in Faster RCNN) 

**Training Objective**

The training objective looks like this 
![](https://i.imgur.com/snUq73Q.png)

Lmask is the addition from Faster RCNN. The method to calculate was mentioned above

#### Observation

Mask RCNN performs significantly better than COCO instance segmentation winners *without any bells and whiskers*. Detailed results are available in the paper

Deeper networks should never have a higher **training** error than smaller ones. In the worst case, the layers should "simply" learn identities. It seems as this is not so easy with conventional networks, as they get much worse with more layers. So the idea is to add identity functions which skip some layers. The network only has to learn the **residuals**. 

Advantages:

* Learning the identity becomes learning 0 which is simpler
* Loss in information flow in the forward pass is not a problem anymore
    * No vanishing / exploding gradient
* Identities don't have parameters to be learned

## Evaluation

The learning rate starts at 0.1 and is divided by 10 when the error plateaus. Weight decay of 0.0001 ($10^{-4}$), momentum of 0.9. They use mini-batches of size 128.

* ImageNet ILSVRC 2015: 3.57% (ensemble)
* CIFAR-10: 6.43%
* MS COCO: 59.0% mAp@0.5 (ensemble)
* PASCAL VOC 2007: 85.6% mAp@0.5
* PASCAL VOC 2012: 83.8% mAp@0.5

## See also

* [DenseNets](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=journals/corr/1608.06993)

The main contribution of [Understanding the difficulty of training deep feedforward neural networks](http://jmlr.org/proceedings/papers/v9/glorot10a/glorot10a.pdf) by Glorot et al. is a **normalized weight initialization**

$$W \sim U \left [  - \frac{\sqrt{6}}{\sqrt{n_j + n_{j+1}}}, \frac{\sqrt{6}}{\sqrt{n_j + n_{j+1}}} \right ]$$

where $n_j \in \mathbb{N}^+$ is the number of neurons in the layer $j$.

Showing some ways **how to debug neural networks** might be another reason to read the paper.

The paper analyzed standard multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) on a artificial dataset of $32 \text{px} \times 32 \text{px}$ images with either one or two of the 3 shapes: triangle, parallelogram and ellipse. The MLPs varied in the activation function which was used (either sigmoid, tanh or softsign).

However, no regularization was used and many mini-batch epochs were learned. It might be that batch normalization / dropout might change the influence of initialization very much.

Questions that remain open for me:

* [How is weight initialization done today?](https://www.reddit.com/r/MLQuestions/comments/4jsge9)
* Figure 4: Why is this plot not simply completely dependent on the data?
* Is softsign still used? Why not?
* If the only advantage of softsign is that is has the plateau later, why doesn't anybody use $\frac{1}{1+e^{-0.1 \cdot x}}$ or something similar instead of the standard sigmoid activation function?

# Object detection system overview.

https://i.imgur.com/vd2YUy3.png
 
1.	takes an input image,
2.	extracts around 2000 bottom-up region proposals, 
3.	computes features for each proposal using a large convolutional neural network (CNN), and then
4.	classifies each region using class-specific linear SVMs.
* R-CNN achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 53.7% on PASCAL VOC 2010.
* On the 200-class ILSVRC2013 detection dataset, R-CNN’s mAP is 31.4%, a large improvement over OverFeat , which had the previous best result at 24.3%.

## There is a 2 challenges faced in object detection 
1.	localization problem
2.	labeling the data

1 localization problem :
*  One approach frames localization as a regression problem.  they report a mAP of 30.5% on VOC 2007 compared to the 58.5% achieved by our method.
* An alternative is to build a sliding-window detector.  considered adopting a sliding-window approach increases the number of convolutional layers to 5, have very large receptive fields (195 x 195 pixels) and strides (32x32 pixels) in the input image, which makes precise localization within the sliding-window paradigm.

2 labeling the data:
* The conventional solution to this problem is to use unsupervised pre-training, followed by supervise fine-tuning 
* supervised pre-training on a large auxiliary dataset (ILSVRC), followed by domain specific fine-tuning on a small dataset (PASCAL),
* fine-tuning for detection improves mAP performance by 8 percentage points. 
* Stochastic gradient descent via back propagation was used to  effective for training convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
 
##  Object detection with R-CNN
This  system consists of three modules
* The first generates category-independent region proposals. These proposals define the set of candidate detections available to our detector.
*  The second module is a large convolutional neural network that extracts a fixed-length feature vector from each region.
* The third module is a set of class specific linear SVMs.

Module design

1 Region proposals 
* which detect mitotic cells by applying a CNN to regularly-spaced square crops.
* use selective search method in fast mode (Capture All Scales, Diversification, Fast to Compute).
* the time spent computing region proposals and features (13s/image on a GPU or 53s/image on a CPU)

2 Feature extraction.
* extract a 4096-dimensional feature vector from each region proposal using the Caffe  implementation of the CNN 
* Features are computed by forward propagating a mean-subtracted 227x227 RGB image through five convolutional layers and two fully connected layers.
* warp all pixels in a tight bounding box around it to the required size
* The feature matrix is typically 2000x4096 

3 Test time detection
* At test time, run selective search on the test image to extract around 2000 region proposals (we use selective search’s “fast mode” in all experiments).
*  warp each proposal and forward propagate it through the CNN in order to compute features. Then, for each class, we score each extracted feature vector using the SVM trained for that class.
* Given all scored regions in an image, we apply a greedy non-maximum suppression (for each class independently) that rejects a region if it has an intersection-over union (IoU) overlap with a higher scoring selected region larger than a learned threshold.
## Training

1 Supervised pre-training:
 * pre-trained the CNN on a large auxiliary dataset (ILSVRC2012 classification)  using image-level annotations only (bounding box labels are not available for this data)

2  Domain-specific fine-tuning.
* use the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) training of the CNN parameters using only warped region proposals with  learning rate of 0.001.

3  Object category classifiers.
*   use intersection-over union (IoU) overlap threshold method  to label a region with The overlap threshold of 0.3.
* Once features are extracted and training labels are applied, we optimize one linear SVM per class.
* adopt the standard hard negative mining method to fit large training data in memory.

### Results on PASCAL VOC 201012

1  VOC 2010
* compared against four strong baselines including SegDPM, DPM, UVA, Regionlets. 
* Achieve a large improvement in mAP, from 35.1% to 53.7% mAP,  while also being much faster
 https://i.imgur.com/0dGX9b7.png
2 ILSVRC2013 detection.
* ran R-CNN on the 200-class ILSVRC2013 detection dataset
* R-CNN achieves a mAP of 31.4%
https://i.imgur.com/GFbULx3.png
#### Performance layer-by-layer, without fine-tuning
1 pool5 layer 
* which is the max pooled output of the network’s fifth and final convolutional layer.
*The pool5 feature map is 6 x6 x 256 = 9216 dimensional
* each pool5 unit has a receptive field of 195x195 pixels in the original 227x227 pixel input

2 Layer fc6
* fully connected to pool5
*  it multiplies a 4096x9216 weight matrix by the pool5 feature map (reshaped as a 9216-dimensional vector) and then adds a vector of biases

3 Layer fc7
* It is implemented by multiplying the features computed by fc6 by a 4096 x 4096 weight matrix, and similarly adding a vector of biases and applying half-wave rectification
#### Performance layer-by-layer, with fine-tuning
* CNN’s parameters  fine-tuned on PASCAL.
* fine-tuning increases mAP by 8.0 % points to 54.2%

### Network architectures
* 16-layer deep network, consisting of 13 layers of 3 _ 3 convolution kernels, with five max pooling layers interspersed, and topped with three fully-connected layers. We refer to this network as “O-Net” for OxfordNet and the baseline as “T-Net” for TorontoNet.
* RCNN with O-Net substantially outperforms R-CNN with TNet, increasing mAP from 58.5% to 66.0%
* drawback in terms of compute time, with in terms of compute time, with than T-Net.

1 The ILSVRC2013 detection dataset
* dataset is split into three sets: train (395,918), val (20,121), and test (40,152) 

#### CNN features for segmentation.
* full R-CNN: The first strategy (full) ignores the re region’s shape and computes CNN features directly on the warped window. Two regions might have very similar bounding boxes while having very little overlap. 
* fg R-CNN: the second strategy (fg) computes CNN features only on a region’s foreground mask. We replace the background with the mean input so that background regions are zero after mean subtraction.
* full+fg R-CNN: The third strategy (full+fg) simply concatenates the full and fg features
 https://i.imgur.com/n1bhmKo.png

## General stuff about face recognition

Face recognition has 4 main tasks:

* **Face detection**: Given an image, draw a rectangle around every face
* **Face alignment**: Transform a face to be in a canonical pose
* **Face representation**: Find a representation of a face which is suitable for follow-up tasks (small size, computationally cheap to compare, invariant to irrelevant changes)
* **Face verification**: Images of two faces are given. Decide if it is the same person or not.

The face verification task is sometimes (more simply) a face classification task (given a face, decide which of a fixed set of people it is).

Datasets being used are:

* **LFW** (Labeled Faces in the Wild): 97.35% accuracy; 13 323 web photos of 5 749 celebrities
* **YTF** (YouTube Faces): 3425 YouTube videos of 1 595 subjects
* **SFC** (Social Face Classification): 4.4 million labeled faces from 4030 people, each 800 to 1200 faces
* **USF** (Human-ID database): 3D scans of faces

## Ideas in this paper

This paper deals with face alignment and face representation.

**Face Alignment**

They made an average face with the USF dataset. Then, for each new face, they apply the following procedure:

* Find 6 points in a face (2 eyes, 1 nose tip, 2 corners of the lip, 1 middle point of the bottom lip)
* Crop according to those
* Find 67 points in the face / apply them to a normalized 3D model of a face
* Transform (=align) face to a normalized position

**Representation**

Train a neural network on 152x152 images of faces to classify 4030 celebrities. Remove the softmax output layer and use the output of the second-last layer as the transformed representation.

The network is:

* C1 (convolution): 32 filters of size $11 \times 11 \times 3$ (RGB-channels) (returns $142\times 142$ "images")
* M2 (max pooling): $3 \times 3$, stride of 2  (returns $71\times 71$ "images")
* C3 (convolution): 16 filters of size $9 \times 9 \times 16$ (returns $63\times 63$ "images")
* L4 (locally connected): $16\times9\times9\times16$ (returns $55\times 55$ "images")
* L5 (locally connected): $16\times7\times7\times16$ (returns $25\times 25$ "images")
* L6 (locally connected): $16\times5\times5\times16$ (returns $21\times 21$ "images")
* F7 (fully connected): ReLU, 4096 units
* F8 (fully connected): softmax layer with 4030 output neurons

The training was done with:

* Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD)
* Momentum of 0.9
* Performance scheduling (LR starting at 0.01, ending at 0.0001)
* Weight initialization: $w \sim \mathcal{N}(\mu=0, \sigma=0.01)$, $b = 0.5$
* ~15 epochs ($\approx$ 3 days) of training


## Evaluation results

* **Quality**:
  * 97.35% accuracy (or mean accuracy?) with an Ensemble of DNNs for LFW
  * 91.4% accuracy with a single network on YTF
* **Speed**: DeepFace runs in 0.33 seconds per image (I'm not sure which size). This includes image decoding, face detection and alignment, **the** feed forward network (why only one? wasn't this the best performing Ensemble?) and final classification output

## See also

* Andrew Ng: [C4W4L03 Siamese Network](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jfw8MuKwpI)