* They use an implementation of Q-learning (i.e. reinforcement learning) with CNNs to automatically play Atari games.
  * The algorithm receives the raw pixels as its input and has to choose buttons to press as its output. No hand-engineered features are used. So the model "sees" the game and "uses" the controller, just like a human player would.
  * The model achieves good results on various games, beating all previous techniques and sometimes even surpassing human players.

### How
  * Deep Q Learning
    * *This is yet another explanation of deep Q learning, see also [this blog post](http://www.nervanasys.com/demystifying-deep-reinforcement-learning/) for longer explanation.*
    * While playing, sequences of the form (`state1`, `action1`, `reward`, `state2`) are generated.
      * `state1` is the current game state. The agent only sees the pixels of that state. (Example: Screen shows enemy.)
      * `action1` is an action that the agent chooses. (Example: Shoot!)
      * `reward` is the direct reward received for picking `action1` in `state1`. (Example: +1 for a kill.)
      * `state2` is the next game state, after the action was chosen in `state1`. (Example: Screen shows dead enemy.)
    * One can pick actions at random for some time to generate lots of such tuples. That leads to a replay memory.
    * Direct reward
      * After playing randomly for some time, one can train a model to predict the direct reward given a screen (we don't want to use the whole state, just the pixels) and an action, i.e. `Q(screen, action) -> direct reward`.
      * That function would need a forward pass for each possible action that we could take. So for e.g. 8 buttons that would be 8 forward passes. To make things more efficient, we can let the model directly predict the direct reward for each available action, e.g. for 3 buttons `Q(screen) -> (direct reward of action1, direct reward of action2, direct reward of action3)`.
      * We can then sample examples from our replay memory. The input per example is the screen. The output is the reward as a tuple. E.g. if we picked button 1 of 3 in one example and received a reward of +1 then our output/label for that example would be `(1, 0, 0)`.
      * We can then train the model by playing completely randomly for some time, then sample some batches and train using a mean squared error. Then play a bit less randomly, i.e. start to use the action which the network thinks would generate the highest reward. Then train again, and so on.
    * Indirect reward
      * Doing the previous steps, the model will learn to anticipate the *direct* reward correctly. However, we also want it to predict indirect rewards. Otherwise, the model e.g. would never learn to shoot rockets at enemies, because the reward from killing an enemy would come many frames later.
      * To learn the indirect reward, one simply adds the reward value of highest reward action according to `Q(state2)` to the direct reward.
      * I.e. if we have a tuple (`state1`, `action1`, `reward`, `state2`), we would not add (`state1`, `action1`, `reward`) to the replay memory, but instead (`state1`, `action1`, `reward + highestReward(Q(screen2))`). (Where `highestReward()` returns the reward of the action with the highest reward according to Q().)
      * By training to predict `reward + highestReward(Q(screen2))` the network learns to anticipate the direct reward *and* the indirect reward. It takes a leap of faith to accept that this will ever converge to a good solution, but it does.
      * We then add `gamma` to the equation: `reward + gamma*highestReward(Q(screen2))`. `gamma` may be set to 0.9. It is a discount factor that devalues future states, e.g. because the world is not deterministic and therefore we can't exactly predict what's going to happen. Note that Q will automatically learn to stack it, e.g. `state3` will be discounted to `gamma^2` at `state1`.
  * This paper
    * They use the mentioned Deep Q Learning to train their model Q.
    * They use a k-th frame technique, i.e. they let the model decide upon an action at (here) every 4th frame.
    * Q is implemented via a neural net. It receives 84x84x4 grayscale pixels that show the game and projects that onto the rewards of 4 to 18 actions.
    * The input is HxWx4 because they actually feed the last 4 frames into the network, instead of just 1 frame. So the network knows more about what things are moving how.
    * The network architecture is:
      * 84x84x4 (input)
      * 16 convs, 8x8, stride 4, ReLU
      * 32 convs, 4x4, stride 2, ReLU
      * 256 fully connected neurons, ReLU
      * <N_actions> fully connected neurons, linear
    * They use a replay memory of 1 million frames.

### Results
  * They ran experiments on the Atari games Beam Rider, Breakout, Enduro, Pong, Qbert, Seaquest and Space Invaders.
  * Same architecture and hyperparameters for all games.
  * Rewards were based on score changes in the games, i.e. they used +1 (score increases) and -1 (score decreased).
  * Optimizer: RMSProp, Batch Size: 32.
  * Trained for 10 million examples/frames per game.
  * They had no problems with instability and their average Q value per game increased smoothly.
  * Their method beats all other state of the art methods.
  * They managed to beat a human player in games that required not so much "long" term strategies (the less frames the better).
  * Video: starts at 46:05. 
 https://youtu.be/dV80NAlEins?t=46m05s 


![Algorithm](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aleju/papers/master/neural-nets/images/Playing_Atari_with_Deep_Reinforcement_Learning__algorithm.png?raw=true "Algorithm")

*The original full algorithm, as shown in the paper.*

--------------------

### Rough chapter-wise notes

* (1) Introduction
  * Problems when using neural nets in reinforcement learning (RL):
    * Reward signal is often sparse, noise and delayed.
    * Often assumption that data samples are independent, while they are correlated in RL.
    * Data distribution can change when the algorithm learns new behaviours.
  * They use Q-learning with a CNN and stochastic gradient descent.
  * They use an experience replay mechanism (i.e. memory) from which they can sample previous transitions (for training).
  * They apply their method to Atari 2600 games in the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE).
  * They use only the visible pixels as input to the network, i.e. no manual feature extraction.

* (2) Background
  * blablabla, standard deep q learning explanation

* (3) Related Work
  * TD-Backgammon: "Solved" backgammon. Worked similarly to Q-learning and used a multi-layer perceptron.
  * Attempts to copy TD-Backgammon to other games failed.
  * Research was focused on linear function approximators as there were problems with non-linear ones diverging.
  * Recently again interest in using neural nets for reinforcement learning. Some attempts to fix divergence problems with gradient temporal-difference methods.
  * NFQ is a very similar method (to the one in this paper), but worked on the whole batch instead of minibatches, making it slow. It also first applied dimensionality reduction via autoencoders on the images instead of training on them end-to-end.
  * HyperNEAT was applied to Atari games and evolved a neural net for each game. The networks learned to exploit design flaws.

* (4) Deep Reinforcement Learning
  * They want to connect a reinforcement learning algorithm with a deep neural network, e.g. to get rid of handcrafted features.
  * The network is supposes to run on the raw RGB images.
  * They use experience replay, i.e. store tuples of (pixels, chosen action, received reward) in a memory and use that during training.
  * They use Q-learning.
  * They use an epsilon-greedy policy.
  * Advantages from using experience replay instead of learning "live" during game playing:
    * Experiences can be reused many times (more efficient).
    * Samples are less correlated.
    * Learned parameters from one batch don't determine as much the distributions of the examples in the next batch.
  * They save the last N experiences and sample uniformly from them during training.
  * (4.1) Preprocessing and Model Architecture
    * Raw Atari images are 210x160 pixels with 128 possible colors.
    * They downsample them to 110x84 pixels and then crop the 84x84 playing area out of them.
    * They also convert the images to grayscale.
    * They use the last 4 frames as input and stack them.
    * So their network input has shape 84x84x4.
    * They use one output neuron per possible action. So they can compute the Q-value (expected reward) of each action with one forward pass.
    * Architecture: 84x84x4 (input) => 16 8x8 convs, stride 4, ReLU => 32 4x4 convs stride 2 ReLU => fc 256, ReLU => fc N actions, linear
    * 4 to 18 actions/outputs (depends on the game).
    * Aside from the outputs, the architecture is the same for all games.

* (5) Experiments
  * Games that they played: Beam Rider, Breakout, Enduro, Pong, Qbert, Seaquest, Space Invaders
  * They use the same architecture und hyperparameters for all games.
  * They give a reward of +1 whenever the in-game score increases and -1 whenever it decreases.
  * They use RMSProp.
  * Mini batch size was 32.
  * They train for 10 million frames/examples.
  * They initialize epsilon (in their epsilon greedy strategy) to 1.0 and decrease it linearly to 0.1 at one million frames.
  * They let the agent decide upon an action at every 4th in-game frame (3rd in space invaders).
  * (5.1) Training and stability
    * They plot the average reward und Q-value per N games to evaluate the agent's training progress,
    * The average reward increases in a noisy way.
    * The average Q value increases smoothly.
    * They did not experience any divergence issues during their training.
  * (5.2) Visualizating the Value Function
    * The agent learns to predict the value function accurately, even for rather long sequences (here: ~25 frames).
  * (5.3) Main Evaluation
    * They compare to three other methods that use hand-engineered features and/or use the pixel data combined with significant prior knownledge.
    * They mostly outperform the other methods.
    * They managed to beat a human player in three games. The ones where the human won seemed to require strategies that stretched over longer time frames.

This paper investigates different paradigms for learning how to answer natural language queries through various forms of feedback. Most interestingly, it investigates whether a model can learn to answer correctly questions when the feedback is presented purely in the form of a sentence (e.g. "Yes, that's right", "Yes, that's correct", "No, that's incorrect", etc.). This later form of feedback is particularly hard to leverage, since the model has to somehow learn that the word "Yes" is a sign of a positive feedback, but not the word "No". 

Normally, we'd trained a model to directly predict the correct answer to questions based on feedback provided by an expert that always answers correctly. "Imitating" this expert just corresponds to regular supervised learning.

The paper however explores other variations on this learning scenario. Specifically, they consider 3 dimensions of variations.

The first dimension of variation is who is providing the answers. Instead of an expert (who is always right), the paper considers the case where the model is instead observing a different, "imperfect" expert whose answers come from a fixed policy that answers correctly only a fraction of the time (the paper looked at 0.5, 0.1 and 0.01). Note that the paper refers to these answers as coming from "the learner" (which should be the model), but since the policy is fixed and actually doesn't depend on the model, I think one can also think of it as coming from another agent, which I'll refer to as the imperfect expert (I think this is also known as "off policy learning" in the RL world).

The second dimension of variation on the learning scenario that is explored is in the nature of the "supervision type" (i.e. nature of the labels). There are 10 of them (see Figure 1 for a nice illustration). In addition to the real expert's answers only (Type 1), the paper considers other types that instead involve the imperfect expert and fall in one of the two categories below:

1. Explicit positive / negative rewards based on whether the imperfect expert's answer is correct.
2. Various forms of natural language responses to the imperfect expert's answers, which vary from worded positive/negative feedback, to hints, to mentions of the supporting fact for the correct answer.

Also, mixtures of the above are considered.

Finally, the third dimension of variation is how the model learns from the observed data. In addition to the regular supervised learning approach of imitating the observed answers (whether it's from the real expert or the imperfect expert), two other distinct approaches are considered, each inspired by the two categories of feedback mentioned above:

1. Reward-based imitation: this simply corresponds to ignoring answers from the imperfect expert for which the reward is not positive (as for when the answers come from the regular expert, they are always used I believe). 
2. Forward prediction: this consists in predicting the natural language feedback to the answer of the imperfect expert. This is essentially treated as a classification problem over possible feedback (with negative sampling, since there are many possible feedback responses), that leverages a soft-attention architecture over the answers the expert could have given, which is also informed by the actual answer that was given (see Equation 2).

Also, a mixture of both of these learning approaches is considered.

The paper thoroughly explores experimentally all these dimensions, on two question-answering datasets (single supporting fact bAbI dataset and MovieQA). The neural net model architectures used are all based on memory networks. Without much surprise, imitating the true expert performs best. But quite surprisingly, forward prediction leveraging only natural language feedback to an imperfect expert often performs competitively compared to reward-based imitation.

#### My two cents
This is a very thought provoking paper! I very much like the idea of exploring how a model could learn a task based on instructions in natural language. This makes me think of this work \cite{conf/iccv/BaSFS15} on using zero-shot learning to learn a model that can produce a visual classifier based on a description of what must be recognized.

Another component that is interesting here is studying how a model can learn without knowing a priori whether a feedback is positive or negative. This sort of makes me think of [this work](http://www.thespermwhale.com/jaseweston/ram/papers/paper_16.pdf) (which is also close to this work \cite{conf/icann/HochreiterYC01}) where a recurrent network is trained to process a training set (inputs and targets) to later produce another model that's applied on a test set, without the RNN explicitly knowing what the training gradients are on this other model's parameters. In other words, it has to effectively learn to execute (presumably a form of) gradient descent on the other model's parameters.

I find all such forms of "learning to learn" incredibly interesting.

Coming back to this paper, unfortunately I've yet to really understand why forward prediction actually works. An explanation is given, that is that "this is because there is a natural coherence to predicting true answers that leads to greater accuracy in forward prediction" (see paragraph before conclusion). I can sort of understand what is meant by that, but it would be nice to somehow dig deeper into this hypothesis. Or I might be misunderstanding something here, since the paper mentions that changing how wrong answers are sampled yields a "worse" accuracy of 80% on Task 2 for the bAbI dataset and a policy accuracy of 0.1, but Table 1 reports an accuracy 54% for this case (which is not better, but worse).

Similarly, I'd like to better understand Equation 2, specifically the β* term, and why exactly this is an appropriate form of incorporating which answer was given and why it works. I really was unable to form an intuition around Equation 2.

In any case, I really like that there's work investigating this theme and hope there can be more in the future!

This paper describes a learning algorithm for deep neural networks that can be understood as an extension of stacked denoising autoencoders. In short, instead of reconstructing one layer at a time and greedily stacking, a unique unsupervised objective involving the reconstruction of all layers is optimized jointly by all parameters (with the relative importance of each layer cost controlled by hyper-parameters). 

In more details:

* The encoding (forward propagation) adds noise (Gaussian) at all layers, while decoding is noise-free.
* The target at each layer is the result of noise-less forward propagation.
* Direct connections (also known as skip-connections) between a layer and its decoded reconstruction are used. The resulting encoder/decoder architecture thus ressembles a ladder (hence the name Ladder Networks).
* Miniature neural networks with a single hidden unit and skip-connections are used to decode the left and top layers into a reconstruction. Each network is applied element-wise (without parameter sharing across reconstructed units).
* The unsupervised objective is combined with a supervised objective, corresponding to the regular negative class log-likelihood objective (using an output softmax layer). Two losses are used for each input/target pair: one based on the noise-free forward propagation (which also provides the target of the denoising objective) and one with the noise added (which also corresponds to the encoding stage of the unsupervised autoencoder objective).
Batch normalization is used to train the network.
Since the model combines unsupervised and supervised learning, it can be used for semi-supervised learning, where unlabeled examples can be used to update the network using the unsupervised objective only. State of the art results in the semi-supervised setting are presented, for both the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets.

#### My two cents

What I find most exciting about this paper is its performance. On MNIST, with only 100 labeled examples, it achieves 1.13% error! That is essentially the performance of stacked denoising autoencoders, trained on the entire training set (though that was before ReLUs and batch normalization, which this paper uses)! This confirms a current line of thought in Deep Learning (DL) that, while recent progress in DL applied on large labeled datasets does not rely on any unsupervised learning (unlike at the "beginning" of DL in the mid 2000s), unsupervised learning might instead be crucial for success in low-labeled data regime, in the semi-supervised setting.

Unfortunately, there is one little issue in the experiments, disclosed by the authors: while they used few labeled examples for training, model selection did use all 10k labels in the validation set. This is of course unrealistic. But model selection in the low data regime is arguably, in itself, an open problem. So I like to think that this doesn't invalidate the progress made in this paper, and only suggests that some research needs to be done on doing effective hyper-parameter search with a small validation set.

Generally, I really hope this paper will stimulate more research on DL methods to the specific case of small labeled dataset / large unlabeled dataset. While this isn't a problem that is as "flashy" as tasks such as the ImageNet Challenge which comes with lots of labeled data, I think this is a crucial research direction for AI in general. Indeed, it seems naive to me to expect that we will be able to collect large labeled dataset for each and every task, on our way to real AI.

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)

An attention mechanism and a separate encoder/decoder are two properties of almost every single neural translation model. The question asked in this paper is- how far can we go without attention and without a separate encoder and decoder? And the answer is- pretty far! The model presented preforms just as well as the attention model of Bahdanau on the four language directions that are studied in the paper.

The translation model presented in the paper is basically a simple recurrent language model. A recurrent language model receives at every timestep the current input word and has to predict the next word in the dataset. To translate with such a model, simply give it the current word from the source sentence and have it try to predict the next word from the target sentence.

Obviously, in many cases such a simple model wouldn't work. For example, if your sentence was "The white dog" and you wanted to translate to Spanish ("El perro blanco"), at the 2nd timestep, the input would be "white" and the expected output would be "perro" (dog). But how could the model predict "perro" when it hasn't seen "dog" yet?

To solve this issue, we preprocess the data before training and insert "empty" padding tokens into the target sentence. When the model outputs such a token, it means that the model would like to read more of the input sentence before emitting the next output word.

So in the example from above, we would change the target sentence to "El PAD perro blanco". Now, at timestep 2 the model emits the PAD symbol. At timestep 3, when the input is "dog", the model can emit the token "perro". These padding symbols are deleted in post-processing, before the output is returned to the user. You can see a visualization of the decoding process below:

https://i.imgur.com/znI6xoN.png

To enable us to use beam search, our model actually receives the previous outputted target token in addition to receiving the current source token at every timestep.

PyTorch code for the model is available at https://github.com/ofirpress/YouMayNotNeedAttention 

## Very Short Summary
The authors introduce a number of modifications to traditional hessian-free optimisation that makes the method work better for neural networks. The modifications are:
* Use the Generalised Gauss Newton Matrix (GGN) rather than the Hessian.
* Damp the GGN so that $G' = G + \lambda I$ and adjust $\lambda$ using levenberg-marquardt heuristic.
* Use an efficient recursion to calculate the GGN.
* Initialise each round of conjugated gradients with the final vector of the previous iteration.
* A new simpler termination criterion for CG. Terminate CG when the relative decrease in the objective falls below some threshold.
* Back-tracking of the CG solution. ie you store intermediate solutions to CG and only update if the new CG solution actually decreases the over all problem objective.

## Less Short Summary

### Hessian Free Optimisation in General
Hessian free optimisation is used when one wishes to optimise some objective $f(\theta)$ using second order methods but inversion or even computation of the Hessian is intractable or infeasible. The method is an iterative method and at each iteration, we take a second order approximation to the objective. i.e at iterantion n, we take a second order taylor expansion of $f$ to get:

$M^n(\theta) = f(\theta^n) + \nabla_{\theta}^Tf(\theta^n)(\theta - \theta^n) + (\theta - \theta^n)^TH(\theta - \theta^n) $

Where $H$ is the hessian matrix. If we minimise this second order approximation with respect to $\theta$ we would find that that $\theta^{n+1} = H^{-1}(-\nabla_{\theta}^Tf(\theta^n))$. However, inverting $H$ is usually not possible for even moderately sized neural networks.

There does however exist an efficient algorithm for calculating hessian vector products $Hv$ for any $v$. The insight of hessian-free optimisation is that one can solve linear problems of the form $Hx = v$ using only hessian vector products via the linear conjugated gradients algorithm. You therefore avoid the need to ever actually compute either the Hessian or its inverse.

To run vanilla hessian free all you need to do at each iteration is:

1) Calculate the gradient vector using standard backprop.

2) Calculate $H\theta$ product using an efficient recursion.

3) calculate the next update $\theta^{n+1} = ConjugatedGradients(H, -\nabla_{\theta}^Tf(\theta^n))$

The main contribution of this paper is to take the above algorithm and make the changes outlined in the very short summary.

## Take aways
Hessian-Free optimisation was perhaps the best method at the time of publication. Recently it seems that first order methods using per-parameter learning rates like ADAM or even learning-to-learn can outperform Hessian-Free. This is primarily because of the increased cost per iteration of Hessian Free. However it still seems that using curvature information if its available is beneficial though expensive.

More resent second order curvature appoximations like Kroeniker Factored Approximate Curvature (KFAC) and Kroeniker Factored Recursive Approximation (KFRA) are cheaper ways to achieve the same benefit.

This paper proposes a variant of Neural Turing Machine (NTM) for meta-learning or "learning to learn", in the specific context of few-shot learning (i.e. learning from few examples). Specifically, the proposed model is trained to ingest as input a training set of examples and improve its output predictions as examples are processed, in a purely feed-forward way. This is a form of meta-learning because the model is trained so that its forward pass effectively executes a form of "learning" from the examples it is fed as input.

During training, the model is fed multiples sequences (referred to as episodes) of labeled examples $({\bf x}_1, {\rm null}), ({\bf x}_2, y_1), \dots, ({\bf x}_T, y_{T-1})$, where $T$ is the size of the episode. For instance, if the model is trained to learn how to do 5-class classification from 10 examples per class, $T$ would be $5 \times 10 = 50$. Mainly, the paper presents experiments on the Omniglot dataset, which has 1623 classes. In these experiments, classes are separated into 1200 "training classes" and 423 "test classes", and each episode is generated by randomly selecting 5 classes (each assigned some arbitrary vector representation, e.g. a  one-hot vector that is consistent within the episode, but not across episodes) and constructing a randomly ordered sequence of 50 examples from within the chosen 5 classes. Moreover, the correct label $y_t$ of a given input ${\bf x}_t$ is always provided only at the next time step, but the model is trained to be good at its prediction of the label of ${\bf x}_t$ at the current time step. This is akin to the scenario of online learning on a stream of examples, where the label of an example is revealed only once the model has made a prediction.

The proposed NTM is different from the original NTM of Alex Graves, mostly in how it writes into its memory. The authors propose to focus writing to either the least recently used memory location or the most recently used memory location. Moreover, the least recently used memory location is reset to zero before every write (an operation that seems to be ignored when backpropagating gradients).

Intuitively, the proposed NTM should learn a strategy by which, given a new input, it looks into its memory for information from other examples earlier in the episode (perhaps similarly to what a nearest neighbor classifier would do) to predict the class of the new input.

The paper presents experiments in learning to do multiclass classification on the Omniglot dataset and regression based on functions synthetically generated by a GP. The highlights are that:

1. The proposed model performs much better than an LSTM and better than an NTM with the original write mechanism of Alex Graves (for classification).
2. The proposed model even performs better than a 1st nearest neighbor classifier.
3. The proposed model is even shown to outperform human performance, for the 5-class scenario.
4. The proposed model has decent performance on the regression task, compared to GP predictions using the groundtruth kernel.

**My two cents**

This is probably one of my favorite ICML 2016 papers. I really think meta-learning is a problem that deserves more attention, and this paper presents both an interesting proposal for how to do it and an interesting empirical investigation of it. 

Much like previous work [\[1\]][1] [\[2\]][2], learning is based on automatically generating a meta-learning training set. This is clever I think, since a very large number of such "meta-learning" examples (the episodes) can be constructed, thus transforming what is normally a "small data problem" (few shot learning) into a "big data problem", for which deep learning is more effective.

I'm particularly impressed by how the proposed model outperforms a 1-nearest neighbor classifier. That said, the proposed NTM actually performs 4 reads at each time step, which suggests that a fairer comparison might be with a 4-nearest neighbor classifier. I do wonder how this baseline would compare.

I'm also impressed with the observation that the proposed model surpassed humans.

The paper also proposes to use 5-letter words to describe classes, instead of one-hot vectors. The motivation is that this should make it easier for the model to scale to much more than 5 classes. However, I don't entirely follow the logic as to why one-hot vectors are problematic. In fact, I would think that arbitrarily assigning 5-letter words to classes would instead imply some similarity between classes that share letters that is arbitrary and doesn't reflect true class similarity. 

Also, while I find it encouraging that the performance for regression of the proposed model is decent, I'm curious about how it would compare with a GP approach that incrementally learns the kernel's hyper-parameter (instead of using the groundtruth values, which makes this baseline unrealistically strong).

Finally, I'm still not 100% sure how exactly the NTM is able to implement the type of feed-forward inference I'd expect to be required. I would expect it to learn a memory representation of examples that combines information from the input vector ${\bf x}_t$ *and* its label $y_t$. However, since the label of an input is presented at the following time step in an episode, it is not intuitive to me then how the read/write mechanisms are able to deal with this misalignment. My only guess is that since the controller is an LSTM, then it can somehow remember ${\bf x}_t$ until it gets $y_t$ and appropriately include the combined information into the memory. This could be supported by the fact that using a non-recurrent feed-forward controller is much worse than using an LSTM controller. But I'm not 100% sure of this either.

All the above being said, this is still a really great paper, which I hope will help stimulate more research on meta-learning. Hopefully code for this paper can eventually be released, which would help in popularizing the topic.

[1]: http://snowedin.net/tmp/Hochreiter2001.pdf
[2]: http://www.thespermwhale.com/jaseweston/ram/papers/paper_16.pdf

I really enjoyed this paper - in addition to being a clean, fundamentally empirical work, it was also clearly written, and had some pretty delightful moments of quotable zen, which I’ll reference at the end. The paper’s goal is to figure out how far curiosity-driven learning alone can take reinforcement learning systems, without the presence of an external reward signal. “Intrinsic” reward learning is when you construct a reward out of internal, inherent features of the environment, rather than using an explicit reward function. In some ways, intrinsic learning in RL can be thought of as analogous to unsupervised learning in classification problems, since reward functions are not inherent to most useful environments, and (when outside of game environments that inherently provide rewards), frequently need to be hand-designed. Curiosity-driven learning is a subset of intrinsic learning, which uses as a reward signal the difference between a prediction made by the dynamics model (predicting next state, given action) and the true observed next state. Situations where the this prediction area are high generate high reward for the agent, which incentivizes it to reach those states, which allows the dynamics model to then make ever-better predictions about them. 

Two key questions this paper raises are: 


1) Does this approach even work when used on it’s own? Curiosity had previously most often been used as a supplement to extrinsic rewards, and the authors wanted to know how far it could go separately. 


2) What is the best feature to do this “surprisal difference” calculation in? Predicting raw pixels is a high-dimensional and noisy process, so naively we might want something with fewer, more informationally-dense dimensions, but it’s not obvious which methods that satisfy these criteria will work the best, so the paper empirically tried them. 

The answer to (1) seems to be: yes, at least in the video games tested. Impressively, when you track against extrinsic reward (which, again, these games have, but we’re just ignoring in a curiosity-only setting), the agents manage to increase it despite not optimizing against it directly. There were some Atari games where this effect was stronger than others, but overall performance was stronger than might have been naively expected. One note the authors made, worth keeping in mind, is that it’s unclear how much of this is an artifact of the constraints and incentives surrounding game design, which might reflect back a preference for gradually-increasing novelty because humans find it pleasant. 

https://i.imgur.com/zhl39vo.png

As for (2), another interesting result of this paper is that random features performed consistently well as a feature space to do these prediction/reality comparisons in. Random features here is really just as simple as “design a convolutional net that compresses down to some dimension, randomly initialize it, and then use those randomly initialized weights to run forward passes of the network to get your lower-dimensional state”. This has the strong disadvantage of (presumably) not capturing any meaningful information about the state, but also has the advantage of being stable: the other techniques tried, like pulling out the center of a VAE bottleneck, changed over time as they were being trained on new states, so they were informative, but non-stationary. 

My two favorite quotable moments from this paper were: 
1) When the authors noted that they had removed the “done” signal associated with an agent “dying,” because it is itself a sort of intrinsic reward. However, “in practice, we do find that the agent avoids dying in the games since that brings it back to the beginning of the game, an area it has already seen many times and where it can predict the dynamics well.”. Short and sweet: “Avoiding death, because it’s really boring” 

https://i.imgur.com/SOfML8d.png

2) When they noted that an easy way to hack the motivation structure of a curiosity-driven agent was through a “noisy tv”, which, every time you pressed the button, jumped to a random channel. As expected, when they put this distraction inside a maze, the agent spent more time jacking up reward through that avenue, rather than exploring. Any resemblance to one’s Facebook feed is entirely coincidental. 

Main purpose:
* This work proposes a software-based resolution augmentation method which is more agile and simpler to implement than hardware engineering solutions.
* The paper examines three deep learning single image super resolution techniques on pCLE images 
* A video-registration based method is proposed to estimate ground truth HR pCLE images (this can be assumed as the main objective of the paper)

Highlights:
* The papers emphasise that this is the first work to address the image resolution problem in pCLE image acquisitions
* The paper introduces useful information on how pCLE devices work
* Strong related work 
* Clear story
* Comprehensive evaluation

Main Idea:
* Use video-registration based techniques to estimate the HR images (real ground truth HR image is not available)
* Simulate LR images from estimate HR images with help of Voronoi diagram and Delaunay-based linear interpolation.
* Train an Exemplar-based SR model (EBSR -- DL-based approach) to learn the mapping between simulated LR and estimate HR images. 

Methodology Details
* To estimate the HR images, a video-registration based mosaicking techniques (by the same authors in MIA 2006) is used which fuses a collection of input images by averaging the temporal information. 
* Since mosaicking generates  single large filed-of-view mosaic image from LR images, the mosaic-to-image diffeomorphic spatial transformation is used which results from the mosaicking process to propagate and crop the fused information from the mosaic back into each input LR image space. 
* At this point, the authors observe that the misalignment between input LR images (used in the video-registration based mosaicking technique) and estimate HR cause training problem for the EBSR model. So, they treat the HR images as realistic and chose to simulate LR images from them!!!!
* Simulated LR images by obtained using the Voronoi diagram (averaging the Voronoi cell on HR image) + additive noise on estimate HR images. 
* Finally, they build to experimental datasets 1) LR_org and HR and 2) LR_synth and HR and train three CNN SR models on these twor datasets. 
* They train FSRCNN, EDSR, SRGAN
* The networks are trained using L1+SSIM loss functions

Experiment Notes:
* SSIM and GCF are used to quantitatively assess the performance of the models.
* A composite score is also used to take SSIM and GCF into account jointly
* In the ideal case, when the models are trained and etsted on simulated LR and HR images, the quantitative results are convincing.  
* "From this experiment, it is possible to conclude that the proposed solution is capable of performing SR reconstruction when the models are trained on synthetic data with no domain gap at test time"
* When models are trained and tested on original LR and estimate HR images, the performance is not reasonable
* When the models are trained on simulated LR images and tested on original LR images, the results become better compared to the previous case, 
* For a solid conclusion, and MOS study was carried out. The models are trained on simulated LR images. 

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 proposes a framework where an agent learns to navigate a 2D maze-like
environment (XWORLD) from (templated) natural language commands, in the process
simultaneously learning visual representations, syntax and semantics of language and
performing navigation actions. The task is essentially VQA + navigation; at every step
the agent either gets a question about the environment or navigation command,
and the output is either a navigation action or answer. Key contributions:

- Grounding and recognition are tied together to be two versions of the same problem.
In grounding, given an image feature map and label (word), the problem is to find
regions of the image corresponding to word semantics (attention map); and in
recognition, given an image feature map and attention, the problem is to assign
a word label. And thus word embeddings (for grounding) and softmax layer weights
(for recognition) are tied together. This enables transferring concepts
learnt during recognition to navigation.
	- Further, recognition is modulated by question intent. For e.g. given an
	attention map that highlights an agent's west, should it be recognized as
	'west', 'apple' or 'red' (location, object or attribute)? It depends on what
	the question asks. Thus, GRU encoding of question produces an embedding mask
	that modulates recognition. The equivalent when grounding is that word embeddings
	are passed through fully-connected layers.

- Compositionality in language is exploited by performing grounding and
recognition by sequentially (softly) attending to parts of a sentence and
grounding in image. The resulting attention map is selectively combined
with attention from previous timesteps for final decision.

## Weaknesses / Notes

Although the environment is super simple, it's a neat framework and it is useful
that the target is specified in natural language (unlike prior/concurrent work
e.g. Zhu et al., ICRA17). The model gets to see a top-down centred view of the
entire environment at all times, which is a little weird.

This paper talks about how to compare National Land Cover Database data which can be represented as histograms. The challenge is scaling the computations. The question this paper asks is if a semantically aware histogram comparison is worth the extra computation. It turns out that is does not appear worth it but interesting findings are discussed. 

![](http://i.imgur.com/5mKnkQw.png)

This paper combines two ideas. The first is stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD), which is an efficient Bayesian learning method for larger datasets, allowing to efficiently sample from the posterior over the parameters of a model (e.g. a deep neural network). In short, SGLD is stochastic (minibatch) gradient descent, but where Gaussian noise is added to the gradients before each update. Each update thus results in a sample from the SGLD sampler. To make a prediction for a new data point, a number of previous parameter values are combined into an ensemble, which effectively corresponds to Monte Carlo estimate of the posterior predictive distribution of the model.

The second idea is distillation or dark knowledge, which in short is the idea of training a smaller model (student) in replicating the behavior and performance of a much larger model (teacher), by essentially training the student to match the outputs of the teacher. 

The observation made in this paper is that the step of creating an ensemble of several models (e.g. deep networks) can be expensive, especially if many samples are used and/or if each model is large. Thus, they propose to approximate the output of that ensemble by training a single network to predict to output of ensemble. Ultimately, this is done by having the student predict the output of a teacher corresponding to the model with the last parameter value sampled by SGLD.

Interestingly, this process can be operated in an online fashion, where one alternates between sampling from SGLD (i.e. performing a noisy SGD step on the teacher model) and performing a distillation update (i.e. updating the student model, given the current teacher model). The end result is a student model, whose outputs should be calibrated to the bayesian predictive distribution.

- Presents a simple visualization method based on “filter normalization.”
- Observed that __the deeper networks become, neural loss landscapes become more chaotic__; causes a dramatic drop in generalization error, and ultimately to a lack of trainability.
- Observed that __skip connections promote flat minimizers and prevent the transition to chaotic behavior__; helps explain why skip connections are necessary for training extremely deep networks.
- Quantitatively measures non-convexity.
- Studies the visualization of SGD optimization trajectories.

The last two years have seen a number of improvements in the field of language model pretraining, and BERT - Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers - is the most recent entry into this canon. The general problem posed by language model pretraining is: can we leverage huge amounts of raw text, which aren’t labeled for any specific classification task, to help us train better models for supervised language tasks (like translation, question answering, logical entailment, etc)? Mechanically, this works by either 1) training word embeddings and then using those embeddings as input feature representations for supervised models, or 2) treating the problem as a transfer learning problem, and fine-tune to a supervised task - similar to how you’d fine-tune a model trained on ImageNet by carrying over parameters, and then training on your new task. Even though the text we’re learning on is strictly speaking unsupervised (lacking a supervised label), we need to design a task on which we calculate gradients in order to train our representations. For unsupervised language modeling, that task is typically structured as predicting a word in a sequence given prior words in that sequence. Intuitively, in order for a model to do a good job at predicting the word that comes next in a sentence, it needs to have learned patterns about language, both on grammatical and semantic levels. A notable change recently has been the shift from learning unconditional word vectors (where the word’s representation is the same globally) to contextualized ones, where the representation of the word is dependent on the sentence context it’s found in. All the baselines discussed here are of this second type. 

The two main baselines that the BERT model compares itself to are OpenAI’s GPT, and Peters et al’s ELMo. The GPT model uses a self-attention-based Transformer architecture, going through each word in the sequence, and predicting the next word by calculating an attention-weighted representation of all prior words. (For those who aren’t familiar, attention works by multiplying a “query” vector with every word in a variable-length sequence, and then putting the outputs of those multiplications into a softmax operator, which inherently gets you a weighting scheme that adds to one). ELMo uses models that gather context in both directions, but in a fairly simple way: it learns one deep LSTM that goes from left to right,  predicting word k using words 0-k-1, and a second LSTM that goes from right to left, predicting word k using words k+1 onward. These two predictions are combined (literally: just summed together) to get a representation for the word at position k. 

https://i.imgur.com/2329e3L.png

BERT differs from prior work in this area in several small ways, but one primary one: instead of representing a word using only information from words before it, or a simple sum of prior information and subsequent information, it uses the full context from before and after the word in each of its multiple layers. It also uses an attention-based Transformer structure, but instead of incorporating just prior context, it pulls in information from the full sentence. To allow for a model that actually uses both directions of context at a time in its unsupervised prediction task, the authors of BERT slightly changed the nature of that task: it replaces the word being predicted with the “mask” token, so that even with multiple layers of context aggregation on both sides, the model doesn’t have any way of knowing what the token is. By contrast, if it weren’t masked, after the first layer of context aggregation, the representations of other words in the sequence would incorporate information about the predicted word k, making it trivial, if another layer were applied on top of that first one, for the model to directly have access to the value it’s trying to predict. This problem can either be solved by using multiple layers, each of which can only see prior context (like GPT), by learning fully separate L-R and R-L models, and combining them at the final layer (like ELMo) or by masking tokens, and predicting the value of the masked tokens using the full remainder of the context. 

This task design crucially allows for a multi-layered bidirectional architecture, and consequently a much richer representation of context in each word’s pre-trained representation. BERT demonstrates dramatic improvements over prior work when fine tuned on a small amount of supervised data, suggesting that this change added substantial value.

I should say from the outset: I have a lot of fondness for this paper. It goes upstream of a lot of research-community incentives: It’s not methodologically flashy, it’s not about beating the State of the Art with a bigger, better model (though, those papers certainly also have their place). The goal of this paper was, instead, to dive into a test set used to evaluate performance of models, and try to understand to what extent it’s really providing a rigorous test of what we want out of model behavior. Test sets are the often-invisible foundation upon which ML research is based, but like real-world foundations, if there are weaknesses, the research edifice built on top can suffer. 

Specifically, this paper discusses the Winograd Schema, a clever test set used to test what the NLP community calls “common sense reasoning”. An example Winograd Schema sentence is: 
The delivery truck zoomed by the school bus because it was going so fast.
A model is given this task, and asked to predict which token the underlined “it” refers to. These cases are specifically chosen because of their syntactic ambiguity - nothing structural about the order of the sentence requires “it” to refer to the delivery truck here. However, the underlying meaning of the sentence is only coherent under that parsing. This is what is meant by “common-sense” reasoning: the ability to understand meaning of a sentence in a way deeper than that allowed by simple syntactic parsing and word co-occurrence statistics.

Taking the existing Winograd examples (and, when I said tiny, there are literally 273 of them) the authors of this paper surface some concerns about ways these examples might not be as difficult or representative of “common sense” abilities as we might like. 

- First off, there is the basic, previously mentioned fact that there are so few examples that it’s possible to perform well simply by random chance, especially over combinatorially large hyperparameter optimization spaces. This isn’t so much an indictment of the set itself as it is indicative of the work involved in creating it. 
- One of the two distinct problems the paper raises is that of “associativity”. This refers to situations where simple co-occurance counts between the description and the correct entity can lead the model to the correct term, without actually having to parse the sentence. An example here is:
“I’m sure that my map will show this building; it is very famous.” 
Treasure maps aside, “famous buildings” are much more generally common than “famous maps”, and so being able to associate “it” with a building in this case doesn’t actually require the model to understand what’s going on in this specific sentence. The authors test this by creating a threshold for co-occurance, and, using that threshold, call about 40% of the examples “associative”
- The second problem is that of predictable structure - the fact that the “hinge” adjective is so often the last word in the sentence, making it possible that the model is brittle, and just attending to that, rather than the sentence as a whole 

The authors perform a few tests - examining results on associative vs non-associative examples, and examining results if you switch the ordering (in cases like “Emma did not pass the ball to Janie although she saw that she was open,” where it’s syntactically possible), to ensure the model is not just anchoring on the identity of the correct entity, regardless of its place in the sentence. Overall, they found evidence that some of the state of the art language models perform well on the Winograd Schema as a whole, but do less well (and in some cases even less well than the baselines they otherwise outperform) on these more rigorous examples. Unfortunately, these tests don’t lead us automatically to a better solution - design of examples like this is still tricky and hard to scale - but does provide valuable caution and food for thought. 

## **Keywords**

Progressive GAN , High resolution generator

---

## **Summary**

1.  **Introduction**
    1.  **Goal of the paper**
        1.  Generation of very high quality images using progressively increasing size of the generator and discriminator.
        1.  Improved training and stability of GANs.
        1.  New metric for evaluating GAN results.
        1.  A high quality version of CELEBA-HQ dataset.
    1. **Previous Research**
        1.  Generative methods help to produce new samples from higher-dimensional data distributions such as images .
        1.  The common approaches for generative methods are :
            1.  Autoregressive models : Produce sharp images and are slow to evaluate. eg PixelCNN
            1.  Variational Autoencoders : Easy to train but produces blurry images.
            1.  Generative Adversarial Neural Network : Produces sharp images at small resolutions but are highly unstable.
1.  **Method**
    1.  **Basic GAN architecture**
        1.  Gan consists of two major parts :
            1.  _Generator_ : Creates a sample image from latent code which look very close to the training images.
            1.  _Discriminator_: Discriminator is trained to assess how close the sample image looks to the training image.
        1.  To measure the overlap between the training and the generated distributions many methods are used like Jensen-Shannon divergence , least-squares divergence and Wasserstein Distance.
        1.  Larger resolution generations cause problems because it becomes difficult for both the training and the generated networks amplifying the gradient problem. Larger resolutions also require large memory and can cause problems.
        1.  A mechanism is also proposed to stop the generator from participating in escalation that causes mode collapse problem.

    1.  **Progressive growing of GANs**
        1.  The primary method for the GAN training is to start off from a low resolution image and add extra layers in each step of the training process.
        1.  Lower resolution images are more stable as they have very less class information and as the resolution of the image increases further smaller details and features are added to the image.
        1.  This leads to a smooth increase in the quality of image instead of the network learning lot of details in one single step.
    1.  **Mini-batch separation**
        1.  GANs tend to capture only a very small set of features from the image.
        1.  "Minibatch discrimination" is used to generate feature vector for each individual image along with one for the the mini batch of images also.
        
          ![alt_text](https://i.imgur.com/dHFl5OV.png "image_tooltip")
1.  **Conclusion**
    1.  Higher resolution images are able to be generated which are robust and efficient.
    1.  Improved quality of the generated images is given.
    1.  Reduced training time for a comparable result and output quality and resolution.



---



## **Notes**



*   Gradient Problem : At higher resolutions it becomes easier to tell the differences between the training and the testing images [1]. This is referred to as the gradient problem.
*   Mode Collapse : The generator is incapable of creating a large variety of samples and get stuck.


## **Open research questions**



1.  Improved methods for a true photorealism generation of images.
1.  Improved semantic sensibility and improved understanding of the dataset.

## **References**



1.  [https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/05/10/progressive-growing-of-gans-for-improved-quality-stability-and-variation/](https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/05/10/progressive-growing-of-gans-for-improved-quality-stability-and-variation/) 
1.  [https://medium.com/@jonathan_hui/gan-why-it-is-so-hard-to-train-generative-advisory-networks-819a86b3750b](https://medium.com/@jonathan_hui/gan-why-it-is-so-hard-to-train-generative-advisory-networks-819a86b3750b)

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.

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)

Feature Pyramid Networks (FPNs) build on top of the state-of-the-art implementation for object detection net - Faster RCNN. Faster RCNN faces a major problem in training for scale-invariance as the computations  can be memory-intensive and extremely slow. So FRCNN only applies multi-scale approach while testing. 

On the other hand, feature pyramids were mainstream when hand-generated features were used -primarily to counter scale-invariance. Feature pyramids are collections of features computed at multi-scale versions of the same image. Improving on a similar idea presented in *DeepMask*, FPN brings back feature pyramids using different feature maps of conv layers with differing spatial resolutions with predictiosn happening on all levels of pyramid. Using feature maps directly as it is, would be tough as initial layers tend to contain lower level representations and poor semantics but good localisation whereas deeper layers tend to constitute higher level representations with rich semantics but suffer poor localisation due to multiple subsampling.

##### Methodology

FPN can be used with any normal conv architecture, that's used for classification. In such an architecture all layers have progressively decreasing spatial resolutions (say C1, C2,..C5). FPN would now take C5 and convolve with 1x1 kernel to reduce filters to give P5. Next, P5 is upsampled and merged it to C4 (C4 is convolved with 1x1 kernel to decrease filter size in order to match that of upsampled P5) by adding element wise to produce P4. Similarly P4 is upsampled and merged with C3(in a similar way) to give P3 and so on. The final set of feature maps, in this case {P2 .. P5} are used as feature pyramids. 

This is how pyramids would look like 
![](https://i.imgur.com/oHFmpww.png)

*Usage of combination of {P2,..P5} as compared to only P2* : P2 produces highest resolution, most semantic features and could as well be the default choice but because of shared weights across rest of feature layers and the learned scale invariance makes the pyramidal variant more robust to generating false ROIs

For next steps, it could be RPN or RCNN, the regression and classifier would share weights across for all *anchors* (of varying aspect ratios) at each level of the feature pyramids. This step is similar to [Single Shot Detector (SSD) Networks ](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=conf/eccv/LiuAESRFB16)

##### Observation
The FPN was used in FRCNN in both parts of RPN and RCNN separately and then combined FPN in both parts and produced state-of-the-art result in MS COCO challenges bettering results of COCO '15 & '16 winner models ( Faster RCNN +++ & GMRI) for mAP. FPN also can be used for instance segmentation by using fully convolutional layers on top of the image pyramids. FPN outperforms results from *DeepMask*, *SharpMask*, *InstanceFCN*