This work improves the performance of a segmentation network by utilizing unlabelled data. They use a discriminator (they call EN) to distinguish between annotated and unannotated examples. They then train the segmentation generator (they call SN) based on what will fool the discriminator. 

https://i.imgur.com/7CfKnh5.png

Three training phases are shown above

This work is really great. They are using the segmentation to condition the discriminator which will learn to point out flaws when applying the segmentation to the unlabelled examples. Then these flaws in the segmentation are corrected by using the gradients from the discriminator to adjust the segmentation.

In contrast with other semi-supervised approaches which learn a latent space for all samples, labelled and unlabelled, and then uses this space to learn a classifier or segmentation; this approach looks for the boundaries of the space only. The unlabelled examples are used to bias the representation learned by the segmentation network to conform to the distribution represented by all observed examples.

Read this paper for more: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.08408

Poster:
https://i.imgur.com/eR5jgwn.png

# Overview

This paper presents a novel way to align frames in videos of similar actions temporally in a self-supervised setting.  To do so, they leverage the concept of cycle-consistency. They introduce two formulations of cycle-consistency which are differentiable and solvable using standard gradient descent approaches. They name their method Temporal Cycle Consistency (TCC). They introduce a dataset that they use to evaluate their approach and show that their learned embeddings allow for few shot classification of actions from videos. 

Figure 1 shows the basic idea of what the paper aims to achieve. Given two video sequences, they wish to map the frames that are closest to each other in both sequences. The beauty here is that this "closeness" measure is defined by nearest neighbors in an embedding space, so the network has to figure out for itself what being close to another frame means. The cycle-consistency is what makes the network converge towards meaningful "closeness".

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/18450628/63888190-68b8a500-c9ac-11e9-9da7-925b72c731c3.png)

# Cycle Consistency

Intuitively, the concept of cycle-consistency can be thought of like this: suppose you have an application that allows you to take the photo of a user X and  increase their apparent age via some transformation F and decrease their age via some transformation G. The process is cycle-consistent if you can age your image, then using the aged image, "de-age" it and obtain something close to the original image you took; i.e. F(G(X))  ~= X.

In this paper, cycle-consistency is defined in the context of nearest-neighbors in the embedding space. Suppose you have two video sequences, U and V. Take a frame embedding from U, u_i, and find its nearest neighbor in V's embedding space, v_j. Now take the frame embedding v_j and find its closest frame embedding in U, u_k, using a nearest-neighbors approach. If k=i, the frames are cycle consistent. Otherwise, they are not. The authors seek to maximize cycle consistency across frames.
 
# Differentiable Cycle Consistency

The authors present two differentiable methods for cycle-consistency; cycle-back classification and cycle-back regression.

In order to make their cycle-consistency formulation differentiable, the authors use the concept of soft nearest neighbor:

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/18450628/63891061-5477a680-c9b2-11e9-9e4f-55e11d81787d.png)

## cycle-back classification

Once the soft nearest neighbor v~ is computed, the euclidean distance between v~ and all u_k  is computed for a total of N frames (assume N frames in U) in a logit vector x_k and softmaxed to a prediction ŷ = softmax(x): 

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/18450628/63891450-38c0d000-c9b3-11e9-89e9-d257be3fd175.png). 

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/18450628/63891746-e92ed400-c9b3-11e9-982c-078ebd1d747e.png)


Note the clever use of the negative, which will ensure the softmax selects for the highest distance. The ground truth label is a one-hot vector of size 1xN where position i is set to 1 and all others are set to 0. Cross-entropy is then used to compute the loss.

## cycle-back regression

The concept is very similar to cycle-back classification up to the soft nearest neighbor calculation. However the similarity metric of v~ back to u_k is not computed using euclidean distance but instead soft nearest neighbor again:

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/18450628/63893231-9bb46600-c9b7-11e9-9145-0c13e8ede5e6.png)

The idea is that they want to penalize the network less for "close enough" guesses. This is done by imposing a gaussian prior on beta centered around the actual closest neighbor i.

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/18450628/63893439-29905100-c9b8-11e9-81fe-fab238021c6d.png)

The following figure summarizes the pipeline:

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/18450628/63896278-9f4beb00-c9bf-11e9-8be1-5f1ad67199c7.png)

# Datasets

All training is done in a self-supervised fashion. To evaluate their methods, they annotate the Pouring dataset, which they introduce and the Penn Action dataset. To annotate the datasets, they limit labels to specific events and phases between phases 

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/18450628/63894846-affa6200-c9bb-11e9-8919-2f2cdf720a88.png)

# Model

The network consists of two parts: an encoder network and an embedder network.

## Encoder

They experiment with two encoders: 

* ResNet-50 pretrained on imagenet. They use conv_4 layer's output which is 14x14x1024 as the encoder scheme.

* A Vgg-like model from scratch whose encoder output is 14x14x512.

## Embedder

They then fuse the k following frame encodings along the time dimension, and feed it to an embedder network which uses 3D Convolutions and 3D pooling to reduce it to a 1x128 feature vector. They find that k=2 works pretty well.

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)

**Object detection** is the task of drawing one bounding box around each instance of the type of object one wants to detect. Typically, image classification is done before object detection. With neural networks, the usual procedure for object detection is to train a classification network, replace the last layer with a regression layer which essentially predicts pixel-wise if the object is there or not. An bounding box inference algorithm is added at last to make a consistent prediction (see [Deep Neural Networks for Object Detection](http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5207-deep-neural-networks-for-object-detection.pdf)).

The paper introduces RPNs (Region Proposal Networks). They are end-to-end trained to generate region proposals.They simoultaneously regress region bounds and bjectness scores at each location on a regular grid.

RPNs are one type of fully convolutional networks. They take an image of any size as input and output a set of rectangular object proposals, each with an objectness score.

## See also
* [R-CNN](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=conf/iccv/Girshick15#joecohen)
* [Fast R-CNN](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=conf/iccv/Girshick15#joecohen)
* [Faster R-CNN](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=conf/nips/RenHGS15#martinthoma)
* [Mask R-CNN](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=journals/corr/HeGDG17)

The method is a multi-task learning model performing person detection, keypoint detection, person segmentation, and pose estimation. It is a bottom-up approach as it first localizes identity-free semantics and then group them into instances.
https://i.imgur.com/kRs9687.png

Model structure:
 - **Backbone**. A feature extractor is presented by ResNet-(50 or 101) with one [Feature Pyramid Network](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.03144.pdf) (FPN) for keypoint branch and one for person detection branch. FPN enhances extracted features through multi-level representation.
 -  **Keypoint detection** detects keypoints as well as produces a pixel-level segmentation mask.
https://i.imgur.com/XFAi3ga.png
FPN features $K_i$ are processed with multiple $3\times3$ convolutions followed by concatenation and final $1\times1$  convolution to obtain predictions for each keypoint, as well as segmentation mask (see Figure for details). This results in #keypoints_in_dataset_per_person + 1 output layers. Additionally, intermediate supervision (i.e. loss) is applied at the FPN outputs. $L_2$ loss between predictions and Gaussian peaks at the keypoint locations is used. Similarly, $L_2$ loss is applied for segmentation predictions and corresponding ground truth masks.
 - **Person detection** is essentially a [RetinaNet](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.02002.pdf), a one-stage object detector, modified to only handle *person* class.
 - **Pose estimation**. Given initial keypoint predictions, Pose Estimation Network (PRN) selects a single keypoint for each class. 
https://i.imgur.com/k8wNP5p.png
During inference, PRN takes cropped outputs from keypoint detection branch defined by the predicted bounding boxes from the person detection branch, resizes it to a fixed size, and forwards it through a multilayer perceptron with residual connection. During the training, the same process is performed, except the cropped keypoints come from the ground truth annotation defined by a labeled bounding box.

This model is not an end-to-end trainable model. While keypoint and person detection branches can, in theory, be trained simultaneously, PRN network requires separate training.

**Personal note**. Interestingly, PRN training with ground truth inputs (i.e. "perfect" inputs) only reaches 89.4 mAP validation score which is surprisingly quite far from the max possible score. This presumably means that even if preceding networks or branches perform god-like, the PRN might become a bottleneck in the performance. Therefore, more efforts should be directed to PRN itself. Moreover, modifying the network to support end-to-end training might help in boosting the performance.

Open-source implementations used to make sure the paper apprehension is correct: [link1](https://github.com/LiMeng95/MultiPoseNet.pytorch), [link2](https://github.com/IcewineChen/pytorch-MultiPoseNet).

TLDR; The authors use an attention mechanism in image caption generation, allowing the decoder RNN focus on specific parts of the image. In order find the correspondence between words and image patches, the RNN uses a lower convolutional layer as its input (before pooling). The authors propose both a "hard" attention (trained using sampling methods) and "soft" attention (trained end-to-end) mechanism, and show qualitatively that the decoder focuses on sensible regions while generating text, adding an additional layer of interpretability to the model. The attention-based models achieve state-of-the art on Flickr8k, Flickr30 and MS Coco.

#### Key Points

- To find image correspondence use lower convolutional layers to attend to.
- Two attention mechanisms: Soft and hard. Depending on evaluation metric (BLEU vs. METERO) one or the other performs better.
- Largest data set (MS COCO) takes 3 days to train on Titan Black GPU. Oxford VGG.
- Soft attention is same as for seq2seq models.
- Attention weights are visualized by upsampling and applying a Gaussian

#### Notes/Questions

- Would've liked to see an explanation of when/how soft vs. hard attention does better.
- What is the computational overhead of using the attention mechanism? Is it significant?

The paper designs some basic tests to compare saliency methods. It founds that some of the most popular methods are independent of model parameters and the data, meaning they are effectively useless.

## Methods compared

The paper compare the following methods: gradient explanation, gradient x input, integrated gradients, guided backprop, guided GradCam and SmoothGrad. They provide a refresher on those methods in the appendix.

All those methods can be put in the same framework. They require a classification model and an input (typically an image). The output of the method is an *explanation map* of the shape of the input where a higher value for a feature implies greater relevance in the decision of the model. 

## Metrics of comparison

The authors argue that visual inspection of the saliency maps can be misleading. They propose to compute the Spearman rank correlation, the structural similarity index (SSMI) and the Pearson correlation of the histogram of gradients. The authors point out that those metrics capture various notions of similarity, but it is an active area of research and those metrics are imperfect.

## First test: model parameters randomization

A saliency method must be dependent of model parameters, otherwise it cannot help us understand a model. In this test, the authors randomize the model parameters, layer per layer, starting from the top.

Surprisingly, methods such as guided backprop and guided gradcam are completely insensitive to model parameters, as illustrated on this Inception v3 trained on ImageNet:

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/8659132/61403152-b10b8000-a8a2-11e9-9f6a-cf1ed6a876cc.png)

Integrated gradients looks also dubious as the bird is still visible with a mostly fully randomized model, but the quantitative metrics reveal the difference is actually big between the two models.

## Second test: data randomization

It is well-known that randomly shuffling the labels of a dataset does not prevent a neural network from getting a high accuracy on the training set, though it does prevent generalization. The model is able to learn by either memorizing the data or finding spurious patterns. As a result, saliency maps obtained from such a network should have no clearly interpretable signal.

Here is the result for a ConvNet trained on MNIST and a shuffled MNIST:

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/8659132/61406757-7efe1c00-a8aa-11e9-9826-a859a373cb4f.png)

The results are very damning for most methods. Only gradients and GradCam are very different between both models, as confirmed by the low correlation.

## Discussion

- Even though some methods do no depend on model parameters and data, they might still depend on the architecture of the models, which could be of some use in some contexts.
- Methods that multiply the input with the gradient are dominated by the input.
- Complex saliency methods are just fancy edge detectors.
- Only gradient, smooth gradient and GradCam survives the sanity checks.

# Comments

- Why is their GradCam maps so ugly? They don't look like usual GradCam maps at all.
- Their tests are simple enough that it's hard to defend a method that doesn't pass them.
- The methods that are left are not very good either. They give fuzzy maps that are difficult to interpret.
- In the case of integrated gradients (IG), I'm not convinced this is sufficient to discard the method. IG requires a "baseline input" that represents the absence of features. In the case of images, people usually just set the image to 0, which is not at all the absence of a feature. The authors also use the "set the image to 0" strategy, and I'd say their tests are damning for this strategy, not for IG in general. I'd expect an estimation of the baseline such as done in [this paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.04595) would be a fairer evaluation of IG.

Code: [GitHub](https://github.com/adebayoj/sanity_checks_saliency) (not available as of 17/07/19)

# Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Nets

## Introduction

* The paper presents Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Nets (DCGAN) - a topologically constrained variant of conditional GAN.
* [Link to the paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06434)

## Benefits

* Stable to train
* Very useful to learn unsupervised image representations.

## Model

* GANs difficult to scale using CNNs.
* Paper proposes following changes to GANs:
    * Replace any pooling layers with strided convolutions (for discriminator) and fractional strided convolutions (for generators).
    * Remove fully connected hidden layers.
    * Use batch normalisation in both generator (all layers except output layer) and discriminator (all layers except input layer).
    * Use LeakyReLU in all layers of the discriminator.
    * Use ReLU activation in all layers of the generator (except output layer which uses Tanh).

## Datasets
    
* Large-Scale Scene Understanding.
* Imagenet-1K.
* Faces dataset.

## Hyperparameters

* Minibatch SGD with minibatch size of 128.
* Weights initialized with 0 centered Normal distribution with standard deviation = 0.02
* Adam    Optimizer
* Slope of leak = 0.2 for LeakyReLU.
* Learning rate = 0.0002, β1 = 0.5

## Observations

* Large-Scale Scene Understanding data
    * Demonstrates that model scales with more data and higher resolution generation.
    * Even though it is unlikely that model would have memorized images (due to low learning rate of minibatch SGD).
* Classifying CIFAR-10 dataset
    * Features
        * Train in Imagenet-1K and test on CIFAR-10.
        * Max pool discriminator's convolutional features (from all layers) to get 4x4 spatial grids.
        * Flatten and concatenate to get a 28672-dimensional vector.
        * Linear L2-SVM classifier trained over the feature vector.
    * 82.8% accuracy, outperforms K-means (80.6%)
* Street View House Number Classifier
    * Similar pipeline as CIFAR-10
    * 22.48% test error.
* The paper contains many examples of images generated by final and intermediate layers of the network.
* Images in the latent space do not show sharp transitions indicating that network did not memorize images.
* DCGAN can learn an interesting hierarchy of features.
* Networks seems to have some success in disentangling image representation from object representation.
* Vector arithmetic can be performed on the Z vectors corresponding to the face samples to get results like `smiling woman - normal woman + normal man = smiling man` visually.

This paper describes how to find local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) why a black-box model $m_B$ came to a classification decision for one sample $x$. The key idea is to evaluate many more samples around $x$ (local) and fit an interpretable model $m_I$ to it. The way of sampling and the kind of interpretable model depends on the problem domain.

For computer vision / image classification, the image $x$ is divided into superpixels. Single super-pixels are made black, the new image $x'$ is evaluated $p' = m_B(x')$. This is done multiple times. 

The paper is also explained in [this YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP7-JtFMLo4) by Marco Tulio Ribeiro.

A very similar idea is already in the [Zeiler & Fergus paper](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=journals/corr/ZeilerF13#martinthoma).

## Follow-up Paper

* June 2016: [Model-Agnostic Interpretability of Machine Learning](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05386)
* November 2016:
  * [Nothing Else Matters: Model-Agnostic Explanations By Identifying Prediction Invariance](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05817)
  * [An unexpected unity among methods for interpreting
model predictions](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07478)

In the paper, authors  Bengio et al. , use the DenseNet for semantic segmentation. DenseNets iteratively concatenates input feature maps to output feature maps. The biggest contribution was the use of a novel upsampling path - given conventional upsampling would've caused severe memory cruch.

#### Background

All fully convolutional semantic segmentation nets generally follow a conventional path - a downsampling path which acts as feature extractor, an upsampling path that restores the locational information of every feature extracted in the downsampling path. 

As opposed to Residual Nets (where input feature maps are added to the output) , in DenseNets,the output is concatenated to input which has some interesting implications:  
- DenseNets  are efficient in the parameter usage, since all the feature maps are reused
- DenseNets perform deep supervision thanks to short path to all feature maps in the architecture 

Using DenseNets for segmentation though had an issue with upsampling in the conventional way of concatenating feature maps through skip connections as feature maps could easily go beyond 1-1.5 K. So Bengio et al. suggests a novel way - wherein only feature maps produced in the last Dense layer are only upsampled and not the entire feature maps. Post upsampling, the output is concatenated with feature maps of same resolution from downsampling path through skip connection. That way, the information lost during pooling in the downsampling path can be recovered.

#### Methodology & Architecture

In the downsampling path, the input is concatenated with the output of a dense block, whereas for upsampling the output of dense block is upsampled (without concatenating it with the input) and then concatenated with the same resolution output of downsampling path. 

Here's the overall architecture 
![](https://i.imgur.com/tqsPj72.png)

Here's how a Dense Block looks like 
![](https://i.imgur.com/MMqosoj.png)

#### Results
The 103 Conv layer based DenseNet (FC-DenseNet103) performed better than shallower networks when compared on CamVid dataset. Though the FC-DenseNets were not pre-trained or used any post-processing like CRF or temporal smoothening etc.  When comparing to other nets FC-DenseNet architectures achieve state-of-the-art, improving upon models with 10 times more parameters. It is also worth mentioning that  small model FC-DenseNet56 already outperforms  popular  architectures  with  at  least 100 times more parameters.