http://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=Ak2naik&feedformat=atomstatwiki - User contributions [US]2024-03-29T11:48:10ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.41.0http://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=DON%27T_DECAY_THE_LEARNING_RATE_,_INCREASE_THE_BATCH_SIZE&diff=42447DON'T DECAY THE LEARNING RATE , INCREASE THE BATCH SIZE2018-12-14T05:16:43Z<p>Ak2naik: /* INTRODUCTION */</p>
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<div>Summary of the ICLR 2018 paper: '''Don't Decay the learning Rate, Increase the Batch Size ''' <br />
<br />
Link: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.00489.pdf]<br />
<br />
Summarized by: Afify, Ahmed [ID: 20700841]<br />
<br />
==INTUITION==<br />
Nowadays, it is a common practice not to have a singular steady learning rate for the learning phase of neural network models. Instead, we use adaptive learning rates with the standard gradient descent method. The intuition behind this is that when we are far away from the minima, it is beneficial for us to take large steps towards the minima, as it would require a lesser number of steps to converge, but as we approach the minima, our step size should decrease, otherwise we may just keep oscillating around the minima. In practice, this is generally achieved by methods like SGD with momentum, Nesterov momentum, and Adam. However, the core claim of this paper is that the same effect can be achieved by increasing the batch size during the gradient descent process while keeping the learning rate constant throughout. In addition, the paper argues that such an approach also reduces the parameter updates required to reach the minima, thus leading to greater parallelism and shorter training times. The authors present conclusive experimental evidence to prove the empirical benefits of decaying learning rate can be achieved by increasing the batch size instead.<br />
<br />
== INTRODUCTION ==<br />
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the most widely used optimization technique for training deep learning models. The reason for this is that the minima found using this process generalizes well to unseen data (Zhang et al., 2016; Wilson et al., 2017). However, the optimization process is slow and time-consuming as each parameter update corresponds to a small step towards the goal. According to (Goyal et al., 2017; Hoffer et al., 2017; You et al., 2017a), this has motivated researchers to try to speed up this optimization process by taking bigger steps, and hence reduce the number of parameter updates in training a model. This can be achieved by using large batch training, which can be divided across many machines. <br />
<br />
However, increasing the batch size leads to decreasing the test set accuracy (Keskar et al., 2016; Goyal et al., 2017). Smith and Le (2017) believed that SGD has a scale of random fluctuations <math> g = \epsilon (\frac{N}{B}-1) </math>, where <math> \epsilon </math> is the learning rate, <math> N </math> is the number of training samples, and <math> B </math> is the batch size. They concluded that there is an optimal batch size proportional to the learning rate when <math> B \ll N </math>, and optimum fluctuation scale <math>g</math> at constant learning rate which maximizes test set accuracy. This was observed empirically by Goyal et al., 2017 and used to train a ResNet-50 in under an hour with 76.3% validation accuracy on ImageNet dataset.<br />
<br />
In this paper, the authors' main goal is to provide evidence that increasing the batch size is quantitatively equivalent to decreasing the learning rate. They show that this approach achieves almost equivalent model performance on the test set with the same number of training epochs but with a remarkably fewer number of parameter updates. The strategy of increasing the batch size during training is in effect decreasing the scale of random fluctuations. Moreover, an additional reduction in the number of parameter updates can be attained by increasing the learning rate and scaling <math> B \propto \epsilon </math> or even more reduction by increasing the momentum coefficient, <math> m </math>, and scaling <math> B \propto \frac{1}{1-m} </math>. Although the latter decreases the test accuracy. This has been demonstrated by several experiments on the ImageNet and CIFAR-10 datasets using ResNet-50 and Inception-ResNet-V2 architectures respectively. The authors train ResNet-50 on ImageNet to 76.1% validation accuracy in under 30 minutes.<br />
<br />
== STOCHASTIC GRADIENT DESCENT AND CONVEX OPTIMIZATION ==<br />
As mentioned in the previous section, the drawback of SGD when compared to full-batch training is the noise that it introduces that hinders optimization. According to (Robbins & Monro, 1951), there are two equations that govern how to reach the minimum of a convex function: (<math> \epsilon_i </math> denotes the learning rate at the <math> i^{th} </math> gradient update)<br />
<br />
<math> \sum_{i=1}^{\infty} \epsilon_i = \infty </math>. This equation guarantees that we will reach the minimum. <br />
<br />
<math> \sum_{i=1}^{\infty} \epsilon^2_i < \infty </math>. This equation, which is valid only for a fixed batch size, guarantees that learning rate decays fast enough allowing us to reach the minimum rather than bouncing due to noise.<br />
<br />
These equations indicate that the learning rate must decay during training, and second equation is only available when the batch size is constant. To change the batch size, Smith and Le (2017) proposed to interpret SGD as integrating this stochastic differential equation <math> \frac{dw}{dt} = -\frac{dC}{dw} + \eta(t) </math>, where <math>C</math> represents cost function, <math>w</math> represents the parameters, and <math>\eta</math> represents the Gaussian random noise. Furthermore, they proved that noise scale <math>g</math> controls the magnitude of random fluctuations in the training dynamics by this formula: <math> g = \epsilon (\frac{N}{B}-1) </math>, where <math> \epsilon </math> is the learning rate, N is the training set size and <math>B</math> is the batch size. As we usually have <math> B \ll N </math>, we can define <math> g \approx \epsilon \frac{N}{B} </math>. This explains why when the learning rate decreases, noise <math>g</math> decreases, enabling us to converge to the minimum of the cost function. However, increasing the batch size has the same effect and makes <math>g</math> decays with constant learning rate. In this work, the batch size is increased until <math> B \approx \frac{N}{10} </math>, then the conventional way of decaying the learning rate is followed.<br />
<br />
== SIMULATED ANNEALING AND THE GENERALIZATION GAP ==<br />
'''Simulated Annealing:''' Decaying learning rates are empirically successful. To understand this, they note that introducing random fluctuations whose scale falls during training is also a well-established technique in non-convex optimization; simulated annealing. The initial noisy optimization phase allows exploring a larger fraction of the parameter space without becoming trapped in local minima. Once a promising region of parameter space is located, the noise is reduced to fine-tune the parameters.<br />
<br />
Simulated Annealing is a famous technique in non-convex optimization. Starting with the noise in the training process helps us to explore a wide range of parameters. Once we are near the optimum value, noise is reduced to fine tune our final parameters. Nowadays, researchers typically use sharp decay schedules like cosine decay or step-function drops. In physical sciences, slowly annealing (or decaying) the temperature (which is the noise scale in this situation) helps to converge to the global minimum, which is sharp. But decaying the temperature in discrete steps can make the system stuck in a local minimum, which leads to higher cost and lower curvature. The authors think that deep learning has the same intuition. Note that this interpretation may explain why conventional learning rate decay schedules like square roots or exponential decay have become less popular in deep learning in recent years. Increasingly, researchers favor sharper decay schedules like cosine decay or step-function drops. To interpret this shift, we note that it is well known in the physical sciences that slowly annealing the temperature (noise scale) helps<br />
the system to converge to the global minimum, which may be sharp. <br />
<br />
'''Generalization Gap:''' Small batch data generalizes better to the test set than large batch data. Smith and Le (2017) found that there is an optimal batch size which corresponds to optimal noise scale <math> g </math> <math> (g \approx \epsilon \frac{N}{B}) </math>. They found an optimum batch size <math> B_{opt} \propto \epsilon N </math> that maximizes test set accuracies. This means that gradient noise is helpful as it makes SGD escape sharp minima which do not generalize well.<br />
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== THE EFFECTIVE LEARNING RATE AND THE ACCUMULATION VARIABLE ==<br />
'''The Effective Learning Rate''' : <math> \epsilon_{eff} = \frac{\epsilon}{1-m} </math><br />
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Smith and Le (2017) included momentum <math>m</math> to the vanilla SGD noise scale equation, <math> g = \frac{\epsilon}{1-m}(\frac{N}{B}-1)\approx \frac{\epsilon N}{B(1-m)} </math>. They found that by increasing the learning rate and the momentum while proportionally scaling <math> B \propto \frac{\epsilon }{1-m} </math>, further reduces the number of parameter updates needed during training. However, test accuracy decreases when the momentum coefficient is increased. <br />
<br />
To understand the reasons behind this, we need to analyze momentum update equations below:<br />
<br />
<center><math><br />
\Delta A = -(1-m)A + \frac{d\widehat{C}}{dw} <br />
</math><br />
<br />
<math><br />
\Delta w = -A\epsilon<br />
</math><br />
</center><br />
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We can see that the accumulation variable <math> A </math>, starting at 0, increases exponentially until it reaches its steady state value during <math> \frac{B}{N(1-m)} </math> training epochs. If <math> \Delta w </math> is suppressed, it can reduce the rate of convergence. <br />
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Moreover, at high momentum, we have four challenges:<br />
# Additional epochs are needed to catch up with the accumulation.<br />
# Accumulation needs more time <math> \frac{B}{N(1-m)} </math> to forget old gradients. <br />
# After this time, however, the accumulation cannot adapt to changes in the loss landscape.<br />
# In the early stage, a large batch size will lead to the instabilities.<br />
<br />
It is thus recommended to keep a reduced learning rate for the first few epochs of training.<br />
<br />
== EXPERIMENTS ==<br />
=== SIMULATED ANNEALING IN A WIDE RESNET ===<br />
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'''Dataset:''' CIFAR-10 (50,000 training images)<br />
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'''Network Architecture:''' “16-4” wide ResNet<br />
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'''Training Schedules used as in the below figure:''' . These demonstrate the equivalence between decreasing the learning rate and increasing the batch size.<br />
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- Decaying learning rate: learning rate decays by a factor of 5 at a sequence of “steps”, and the batch size is constant<br />
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- Increasing batch size: learning rate is constant, and the batch size is increased by a factor of 5 at every step.<br />
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- Hybrid: At the beginning, the learning rate is constant and batch size is increased by a factor of 5. Then, the learning rate decays by a factor of 5 at each subsequent step, and the batch size is constant. This is the schedule that will be used if there is a hardware limit affecting a maximum batch size limit.<br />
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If the learning rate itself must decay during training, then these schedules should show different learning curves (as a function of the number of training epochs) and reach different final test set accuracies. Meanwhile, if it is the noise scale which should decay, all three schedules should be indistinguishable.<br />
[[File:Paper_40_Fig_1.png | 800px|center]]<br />
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As shown in the below figure: in the left figure (2a), we can observe that for the training set, the three learning curves are exactly the same while in figure 2b, increasing the batch size has a huge advantage of reducing the number of parameter updates.<br />
This concludes that noise scale is the one that needs to be decayed and not the learning rate itself<br />
[[File:Paper_40_Fig_2.png | 800px|center]] <br />
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To make sure that these results are the same for the test set as well, in figure 3, we can see that the three learning curves are exactly the same for SGD with momentum, and Nesterov momentum. In figure 3b, the test set accuracy when training with Nesterov momentum parameter 0.9 is presented. <br />
[[File:Paper_40_Fig_3.png | 800px|center]]<br />
<br />
To check for other optimizers as well. the below figure shows the same experiment as in figure 3, which is the three learning curves for the test set, but for vanilla SGD and Adam, and showing<br />
[[File:Paper_40_Fig_4.png | 800px|center]]<br />
<br />
In figure 4a, the same experiment is repeated with vanilla SGD, again obtaining three similar curves. Finally, in figure 4b, the authors repeat the experiment with Adam. They also use the default parameter settings of TensorFlow, such that the initial base learning rate here is 0.01, β1 = 0.9 and β2 = 0.999.<br />
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'''Conclusion:''' Decreasing the learning rate and increasing the batch size during training are equivalent<br />
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=== INCREASING THE EFFECTIVE LEARNING RATE===<br />
<br />
Here, the focus is on minimizing the number of parameter updates required to train a model. As shown above, the first step is to replace decaying learning rates by increasing batch sizes. Now, the authors show here that we can also increase the effective learning rate <math>\epsilon_{eff} = \epsilon/(1 − m) </math> at the start of training, while scaling the initial batch size <math>B \propto \epsilon_{eff} </math> . All experiments are conducted using SGD with momentum. There are 50000 images in the CIFAR-10 training set, and since the scaling rules only hold when <math>B << N </math> , we decided to set a maximum batch size <math>B_{max} </math>= 5120 .<br />
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'''Dataset:''' CIFAR-10 (50,000 training images)<br />
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'''Network Architecture:''' “16-4” wide ResNet<br />
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'''Training Parameters:''' Optimization Algorithm: SGD with momentum / Maximum batch size = 5120<br />
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'''Training Schedules:''' <br />
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The authors consider four training schedules, all of which decay the noise scale by a factor of five in a series of three steps with the same number of epochs.<br />
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Original training schedule: initial learning rate of 0.1 which decays by a factor of 5 at each step, a momentum coefficient of 0.9, and a batch size of 128. Follows the implementation of Zagoruyko & Komodakis (2016).<br />
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Increasing batch size: learning rate of 0.1, momentum coefficient of 0.9, initial batch size of 128 that increases by a factor of 5 at each step. <br />
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Increased initial learning rate: initial learning rate of 0.5, initial batch size of 640 that increase during training.<br />
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Increased momentum coefficient: increased initial learning rate of 0.5, initial batch size of 3200 that increase during training, and an increased momentum coefficient of 0.98.<br />
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The results of all training schedules, which are presented in the below figure, are documented in the following table:<br />
<br />
[[File:Paper_40_Table_1.png | 800px|center]]<br />
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[[File:Paper_40_Fig_5.png | 800px|center]]<br />
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<br />
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'''Conclusion:''' Increasing the effective learning rate and scaling the batch size results in further reduction in the number of parameter updates<br />
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=== TRAINING IMAGENET IN 2500 PARAMETER UPDATES===<br />
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'''A) Experiment Goal:''' Control Batch Size<br />
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'''Dataset:''' ImageNet (1.28 million training images)<br />
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The paper modified the setup of Goyal et al. (2017), and used the following configuration:<br />
<br />
'''Network Architecture:''' Inception-ResNet-V2 <br />
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'''Training Parameters:''' <br />
<br />
90 epochs / noise decayed at epoch 30, 60, and 80 by a factor of 10 / Initial ghost batch size = 32 / Learning rate = 3 / momentum coefficient = 0.9 / Initial batch size = 8192<br />
<br />
Two training schedules were used:<br />
<br />
“Decaying learning rate”, where batch size is fixed and the learning rate is decayed<br />
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“Increasing batch size”, where batch size is increased to 81920 then the learning rate is decayed at two steps.<br />
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[[File:Paper_40_Table_2.png | 800px|center]]<br />
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[[File:Paper_40_Fig_6.png | 800px|center]]<br />
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'''Conclusion:''' Increasing the batch size resulted in reducing the number of parameter updates from 14,000 to 6,000.<br />
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'''B) Experiment Goal:''' Control Batch Size and Momentum Coefficient<br />
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'''Training Parameters:''' Ghost batch size = 64 / noise decayed at epoch 30, 60, and 80 by a factor of 10. <br />
<br />
The below table shows the number of parameter updates and accuracy for different sets of training parameters:<br />
<br />
[[File:Paper_40_Table_3.png | 800px|center]]<br />
<br />
[[File:Paper_40_Fig_7.png | 800px|center]]<br />
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'''Conclusion:''' Increasing the momentum reduces the number of parameter updates but leads to a drop in the test accuracy.<br />
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=== TRAINING IMAGENET IN 30 MINUTES===<br />
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'''Dataset:''' ImageNet (Already introduced in the previous section)<br />
<br />
'''Network Architecture:''' ResNet-50<br />
<br />
The paper replicated the setup of Goyal et al. (2017) while modifying the number of TPU devices, batch size, learning rate, and then calculating the time to complete 90 epochs, and measuring the accuracy, and performed the following experiments below:<br />
<br />
[[File:Paper_40_Table_4.png | 800px|center]]<br />
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'''Conclusion:''' Model training times can be reduced by increasing the batch size during training.<br />
<br />
== RELATED WORK ==<br />
Main related work mentioned in the paper is as follows:<br />
<br />
- Smith & Le (2017) interpreted Stochastic gradient descent as a stochastic differential equation; the paper built on this idea to include decaying learning rate.<br />
<br />
- Mandt et al. (2017) analyzed how to modify SGD for the task of Bayesian posterior sampling.<br />
<br />
- Keskar et al. (2016) focused on the analysis of noise once the training is started.<br />
<br />
- Moreover, the proportional relationship between batch size and learning rate was first discovered by Goyal et al. (2017) and successfully trained ResNet-50 on ImageNet in one hour after discovering the proportionality relationship between batch size and learning rate.<br />
<br />
- Furthermore, You et al. (2017a) presented Layer-wise Adaptive Rate Scaling (LARS), which is applying different learning rates to train ImageNet in 14 minutes and 74.9% accuracy. <br />
<br />
- Wilson et al. (2017) argued that adaptive optimization methods tend to generalize less well than SGD and SGD with momentum (although<br />
they did not include K-FAC in their study), while the authors' work reduces the gap in convergence speed.<br />
<br />
- Finally, another strategy called Asynchronous-SGD that allowed (Recht et al., 2011; Dean et al., 2012) to use multiple GPUs even with small batch sizes.<br />
<br />
== CONCLUSIONS ==<br />
Increasing the batch size during training has the same benefits of decaying the learning rate in addition to reducing the number of parameter updates, which corresponds to faster training time. Experiments were performed on different image datasets and various optimizers with different training schedules to prove this result. The paper proposed to increase the learning rate and momentum parameter <math>m</math>, while scaling <math> B \propto \frac{\epsilon}{1-m} </math>, which achieves fewer parameter updates, but slightly less test set accuracy as mentioned in detail in the experiments’ section. In summary, on ImageNet dataset, Inception-ResNet-V2 achieved 77% validation accuracy in under 2500 parameter updates, and ResNet-50 achieved 76.1% validation set accuracy on TPU in less than 30 minutes. One of the great findings of this paper is that all the methods use the hyper-parameters directly from previous works in the literature, and no additional hyper-parameter tuning was performed.<br />
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== CRITIQUE ==<br />
'''Pros:'''<br />
<br />
- The paper showed empirically that increasing batch size and decaying learning rate are equivalent.<br />
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- Several experiments were performed on different optimizers such as SGD and Adam.<br />
<br />
- Had several comparisons with previous experimental setups.<br />
<br />
'''Cons:'''<br />
<br />
<br />
- All datasets used are image datasets. Other experiments should have been done on datasets from different domains to ensure generalization. <br />
<br />
- The number of parameter updates was used as a comparison criterion, but wall-clock times could have provided additional measurable judgment although they depend on the hardware used.<br />
<br />
- Special hardware is needed for large batch training, which is not always feasible. As batch-size increases, we generally need more RAM to train the same model. However, if the learning rate is decreased, the RAM use remains constant. As a result, learning rate decay will allow us to train bigger models.<br />
<br />
- In section 5.2 (Increasing the Effective Learning rate), the authors did not test a range of learning rate values and used only (0.1 and 0.5). Additional results from varying the initial learning rate values from 0.1 to 3.2 are provided in the appendix, which indicates that the test accuracy begins to fall for initial learning rates greater than ~0.4. The appended results do not show validation set accuracy curves like in Figure 6, however. It would be beneficial to see if they were similar to the original 0.1 and 0.5 initial learning rate baselines.<br />
<br />
- Although the main idea of the paper is interesting, its results do not seem to be too surprising in comparison with other recent papers in the subject.<br />
<br />
- The paper could benefit from using some other models to demonstrate its claim and generalize its idea by adding some comparisons with other models as well as other recent methods to increase batch size.<br />
<br />
- The paper presents interesting ideas. However, it lacks mathematical and theoretical analysis beyond the idea. Since the experiment is primary on image dataset and it does not provide sufficient theories, the paper itself presents limited applicability to other types. <br />
<br />
- Also, in an experimental setting, only single training runs from one random initialization is used. It would be better to take the best of many runs or to show confidence intervals.<br />
<br />
- It is proposed that we should compare learning rate decay with batch-size increase under the setting that total budget/number of training samples is fixed.<br />
<br />
- While the paper demonstrated the proposed solution can decrease training time, it is not an entirely fair comparison because computations were distributed on a TPU POD. Suppose computing resource remains the same, the purposed method may possibly train slower.<br />
<br />
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#Alex Krizhevsky. One weird trick for parallelizing convolutional neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.5997, 2014.<br />
#Qianxiao Li, Cheng Tai, and E Weinan. Stochastic modified equations and adaptive stochastic gradient algorithms. arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06251, 2017.<br />
#Ilya Loshchilov and Frank Hutter. SGDR: stochastic gradient descent with restarts. arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.03983, 2016.<br />
#Stephan Mandt, Matthew D Hoffman, and DavidMBlei. Stochastic gradient descent as approximate bayesian inference. arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.04289, 2017.<br />
#James Martens and Roger Grosse. Optimizing neural networks with kronecker-factored approximate curvature. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 2408–2417, 2015.<br />
#Yurii Nesterov. A method of solving a convex programming problem with convergence rate o (1/k2). In Soviet Mathematics Doklady, volume 27, pp. 372–376, 1983.<br />
#Lutz Prechelt. Early stopping-but when? Neural Networks: Tricks of the trade, pp. 553–553, 1998.<br />
#Benjamin Recht, Christopher Re, Stephen Wright, and Feng Niu. Hogwild: A lock-free approach to parallelizing stochastic gradient descent. In Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 693–701, 2011.<br />
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#Samuel L. Smith and Quoc V. Le. A bayesian perspective on generalization and stochastic gradient descent. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.06451, 2017.<br />
#Christian Szegedy, Sergey Ioffe, Vincent Vanhoucke, and Alexander A Alemi. Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the impact of residual connections on learning. In AAAI, pp. 4278–4284, 2017.<br />
#Max Welling and Yee W Teh. Bayesian learning via stochastic gradient langevin dynamics. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-11), pp. 681–688, 2011.<br />
#Ashia C Wilson, Rebecca Roelofs, Mitchell Stern, Nathan Srebro, and Benjamin Recht. The marginal value of adaptive gradient methods in machine learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.08292, 2017.<br />
#Yang You, Igor Gitman, and Boris Ginsburg. Scaling SGD batch size to 32k for imagenet training. arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.03888, 2017a.<br />
#Yang You, Zhao Zhang, C Hsieh, James Demmel, and Kurt Keutzer. Imagenet training in minutes. CoRR, abs/1709.05011, 2017b.<br />
#Sergey Zagoruyko and Nikos Komodakis. Wide residual networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.07146, 2016.<br />
#Chiyuan Zhang, Samy Bengio, Moritz Hardt, Benjamin Recht, and Oriol Vinyals. Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.03530, 2016.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=DETECTING_STATISTICAL_INTERACTIONS_FROM_NEURAL_NETWORK_WEIGHTS&diff=42445DETECTING STATISTICAL INTERACTIONS FROM NEURAL NETWORK WEIGHTS2018-12-14T05:08:20Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Experiment */</p>
<hr />
<div>=Introduction=<br />
<br />
It has been commonly believed that one major advantage of neural networks is their capability of modeling complex statistical interactions between features for automatic feature learning. Statistical interactions capture important information on where features often have joint effects with other features on predicting an outcome. The discovery of interactions is especially useful for scientific discoveries and hypothesis validation. For example, physicists may be interested in understanding what joint factors provide evidence for new elementary particles; doctors may want to know what interactions are accounted for in risk prediction models, to compare against known interactions from existing medical literature.<br />
<br />
With the growth in the computational power available Neural Networks have been able to solve many of the complex tasks in a wide variety of fields. This is mainly due to their ability to model complex and non-linear interactions. Neural networks have traditionally been treated as “black box” models, preventing their adoption in many application domains, such as those where explainability is desirable. It has been noted that complex machine learning models can learn unintended patterns from data, raising significant risks to stakeholders [14]. Therefore, in applications where machine learning models are intended for making critical decisions, such as healthcare or finance, it is paramount to understand how they make predictions [9]. Within several areas, like eg: computation social science, interpretability is of utmost importance. Since we do not understand how a neural network comes to its decision, practitioners in these areas tend to prefer simpler models like linear regression, decision trees, etc. which are much more interpretable. In this paper, we are going to present one way of implementing interpretability in a neural network.<br />
<br />
Existing approaches to interpreting neural networks can be summarized into two types. One type is direct interpretation, which focuses on 1) explaining individual feature importance, for example by computing input gradients [13] and decomposing predictions [8], 2) developing attention-based models, which illustrate where neural networks focus during inference [11], and 3) providing model-specific visualizations, such as feature map and gate activation visualizations [15]. The other type is indirect interpretation, for example, post-hoc interpretations of feature importance [12] and knowledge distillation to simpler interpretable models [10].<br />
<br />
In this paper, the authors propose Neural Interaction Detection (NID), which can detect any order or form of statistical interaction captured by the feedforward neural network by examining its weight matrix. This approach is efficient because it avoids searching over an exponential solution space of interaction candidates by making an approximation of hidden unit importance at the first hidden layer via all weights above and doing a 2D traversal of the input weight matrix.The authors also provide theoretical justifications as to why, interactions between features are created at hidden units and why the hidden unit approximation satisfies bounds on hidden unit gradients. Top -K interactions are determined from interaction rankings by using a special form of generalized additive model, which accounts for interactions of variable order.<br />
<br />
Note that in this paper, we only consider one specific types of neural network, feedforward neural network. Based on the methodology discussed here, the authors suggest that we can build an interpretation method for other types of networks also.<br />
<br />
=Related Work=<br />
<br />
1. Interaction Detection approaches: <br />
* Conduct individual tests for all features' combination such as ANOVA and Additive Groves. Two-way ANOVA has been a standard method of performing pairwise interaction detection that involves conducting hypothesis tests for each interaction candidate by checking each hypothesis with F-statistics (Wonnacott & Wonnacott, 1972). Additive Groves is another method that conducts individual tests for interactions and hence must face the same computational difficulties; however, it is special because the interactions it detects are not constrained to any functional form.<br />
* Define all interaction forms of interest, then later finds the important ones.<br />
<br />
- The paper's goal is to detect interactions without compromising the functional forms. Our method accomplishes higher-order interaction detection, which has the benefit of avoiding a high false positive or false discovery rate.<br />
<br />
2. Interpretability: A lot of work has also been done in this particular area and it can be divided it the following broad categories:<br />
* Feature Importance through Decomposition: Methods like Input Gradient(Sundararajan et al., 2017) learns the importance of features through a gradient-based approach similar to backpropagation. Works like Li et al(2017), Murdoch(2017) and Murdoch(2018) study interpretability of LSTMs by looking at phrase and word level importance scores. Bach et al. 2015 and Shrikumar et al. 2016 (DeepLift) study pixel importance in CNNs.<br />
* Studying Visualizations in Models - Karpathy et al. (2015) worked with character generating LSTMs and tried to study activation and firing in certain hidden units for meaningful attributes. (Yosinski et al., 2015 studies feature map visualizations, providing a tool for visualizing live activations on each layer of a trained CNN, and another for visualizing "Regularized Optimization".) <br />
* Attention-Based Models: Bahdanau et al. (2014) - These are a different class of models which use attention modules(different architectures) to help focus the neural network to decide the parts of the input that it should look more closely or give more importance to. Looking at the results of these type of model an indirect sense of interpretability can be gauged.<br />
* Sum product networks, Hoifun Poon, Pedro Domingos (2011) It is a new deep architecture that provides clear semantics. In its core, it is a probabilistic model, with two types of nodes: Sum node and Product nodes. The sum nodes are trying to model the mixture of distributions and product node is trying to model joint distributions. It can be trained using gradient descent and other methods as well. The main advantage of the Sum-Product Network is that it has clear semantics, where people can interpret exactly how the network models make decisions. Therefore, it has better interpretability than most of the current deep architectures. <br />
<br />
The approach in this paper is to extract non-additive interactions between variables from the neural network weights.<br />
<br />
=Notations=<br />
Before we dive into methodology, we are going to define a few notations here. Most of them will be trivial.<br />
<br />
1. Vector: Vectors are defined with bold-lowercases, '''v, w'''<br />
<br />
2. Matrix: Matrices are defined with bold-uppercases, '''V, W'''<br />
<br />
3. Interger Set: For some interger p <math>\in</math> Z, we define [p] := {1,2,3,...,p}<br />
<br />
=Interaction=<br />
First of all, in order to explain the model, we need to be able to explain the interactions and their effects to output. Therefore, we define 'interaction' between variables as below. <br />
<br />
[[File:def_interaction.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
From the definition above, for a function like, <math>x_1x_2 + sin(x_3 + x_4 + x_5)</math>, we have <math>{[x_1, x_2]}</math> and <math>{[x_3, x_4, x_5]}</math> interactions. And we say that the latter interaction to be 3-way interaction.<br />
<br />
Note that from the definition above, we can naturally deduce that d-way interaction can exist if and only if all of its (d-1) interactions exist. For example, 3-way interaction above shows that we have 2-way interactions <math>{[3,4], [4,5]}</math> and <math>{[3,5]}</math>.<br />
<br />
One thing that we need to keep in mind is that for models like neural networks, most of the interactions are happening within hidden layers. This means that we need a proper way of measuring interaction strength.<br />
<br />
The key observation is that for any kinds of interaction, at some hidden unit of some hidden layer, two interacting features the ancestors. In graph-theoretical language, interaction map can be viewed as an associated directed graph and for any interaction <math>\Gamma \in [p]</math>, there exists at least one vertex that has all of the features of <math>\Gamma</math> as ancestors. The statement can be rigorized as the following:<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:prop2.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
Now, the above mathematical statement guarantees us to measure interaction strengths at ANY hidden layers. For example, if we want to study interactions at some specific hidden layer, now we now that there exists corresponding vertices between the hidden layer and output layer. Therefore all we need to do is now to find appropriate measure which can summarize the information between those two layers.<br />
<br />
Before doing so, let's think about a single-layered neural network. For any single hidden unit, we can have possibly, <math>2^{||W_i,:||}</math>, number of interactions. This means that our search space might be too huge for multi-layered networks. Therefore, we need some descent way of approximate out search space. Moreover, the authors realized a fast interaction detection by limiting the search complexity of the task by only quantifying interactions created at the first hidden layer. The figure below illustrates an interaction within a fully connected feedforward neural network, where the box contains later layers in the network.<br />
<br />
[[File:network1.PNG|500px|center]]<br />
<br />
==Measuring influence in hidden layers==<br />
As we discussed above, in order to consider the interaction between units in any layers, we need to think about their out-going paths. However, we soon encountered the fact that for some fully-connected multi-layer neural network, the search space might be too huge to compare. Therefore, we use information about out-going paths gradient upper bond. To represent the influence of out-going paths at <math>l</math>-hidden layer, we define cumulative impact of weights between output layer and <math>l+1</math>. We define aggregated weights as, <br />
<br />
[[File:def3.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Note that <math>z^{(l)} \in R^{(p_l)}</math> where <math>p_l</math> is the number of hidden units in <math>l</math>-layer.<br />
Moreover, this is the lipschitz constant of gradients. Gradient has been an import variable of measuring the influence of features, especially when we consider that input layer's derivative computes the direction normal to decision boundaries. Hence an upper bound on the gradient magnitude approximates how important the variable can be.<br />
<br />
==Quantifying influence==<br />
For some <math>i</math> hidden unit at the first hidden layer, which is the closet layer to the input layer, we define the influence strength of some interaction as, <br />
<br />
[[File:measure1.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
The function <math>\mu</math> will be defined later. Essentially, the formula shows that the strength of influence is defined as the product of the aggregated weight on the first hidden layer and some measure of influence between the first hidden layer and the input layer. <br />
<br />
For the function, <math>\mu</math>, any positive-real valued functions such as max, min and average can be candidates. The effects of those candidates will be tested later.<br />
<br />
Now based on the specifications above, the author suggested the algorithm for searching influential interactions between input layer units as follows:<br />
<br />
It was pointed out that restricting to the first hidden layer might miss some important feature interactions, however, the author state that it is not straightforward how to incorporate the idea of hidden units at intermediate layers to get better interaction detection performance.<br />
[[File:algorithm1.PNG|850px|center]]<br />
<br />
=Cut-off Model=<br />
Now using the greedy algorithm defined above, we can rank the interactions by their strength. However, in order to access true interactions, we are building the cut-off model which is a generalized additive model (GAM) as below,<br />
<br />
<center><math><br />
c_K('''x''') = \sum_{i=1}^{p}g_i(x_i) + \sum_{i=1}^{K}{g_i}^\prime(x_\chi)<br />
</math></center><br />
<br />
From the above model, each of <math>g_i</math> and <math>g_i'</math> are Feed-Forward neural networks. <math>g_i(\cdot)</math> captures the main effects, while <math>g_i'(\cdot)</math> captures the interaction. We are keep adding interactions until the performance reaches plateaus.<br />
<br />
=Pairwise Interaction Detection=<br />
A variant to the authors interaction algorithm tests for all pairwise interactions. Modelling pairwise interactions is the de facto objective of many machine learning algorithms such as factorization machines and hierarchical lasso. The authors rank all pairwise features accorind to their strengths denoted by <math>w({i,j})</math> , calculated on the first hidden layer, where again the leveraging function is <math>min(.)</math> and<math>w({i,j})</math> = <math>\sum_{s=1}^{p_1}w_s({i,j})</math>. The higher the rank calculated by above equations, the more likely the interactions exist. <br />
<br />
=Experiment=<br />
For the experiment, the authors have compared three neural network model with traditional statistical interaction detecting algorithms. For the neural network models, first model will be MLP, the second model will be MLP-M, which is MLP with an additional univariate network at the output. The last one is the cut-off model defined above, which is denoted by MLP-cutoff. In the experiments that the authors performed, all the networks which modeled feature interactions consisted of four hidden layers containing 140, 100, 60, and 20 units respectively. Whereas, all the individual univariate networks contained three hidden layers with each layer containing 10 units. All of these networks used ReLU activation and back-propagation for training. The MLP-M model is graphically represented below.<br />
<br />
[[File:output11.PNG|300px|center]]<br />
<br />
For the experiment, the authors study the interaction detection framework on both simulated and real-world experiments. For simulated experiments, the authors are going to test on 10 synthetic functions as shown in Table I.<br />
<br />
[[File:synthetic.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
The authors use four real-world datasets, of which two are regression datasets, and the other two are binary classification datasets. The datasets are a mixture of common prediction tasks in the cal housing<br />
and bike sharing datasets, a scientific discovery task in the higgs boson dataset, and an example of very-high order interaction detection in the letter dataset. Specifically, the cal housing dataset is a regression dataset with 21k data points for predicting California housing prices. The bike sharing dataset contains 17k data points of weather and seasonal information to predict the hourly count of rental bikes in a bike-share system. The Higgs-Boson dataset has 800k data points for classifying whether a particle environment originates from the decay of a Higgs-Boson. <br />
<br />
And the authors also reported the results of comparisons between the models. As you can see, neural network based models are performing better on average. Compared to the traditional methods like ANOVA, MLP and MLP-M, proposed method shows 20% increases in performance.<br />
<br />
[[File:performance_mlpm.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:performance2_mlpm.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
The above result shows that MLP-M almost perfectly capture the most influential pair-wise interactions.<br />
<br />
=Higher-order interaction detection=<br />
The authors use their greedy interaction ranking algorithm to perform higher-order interaction detection without an exponential search of interaction candidates.<br />
[[File:higher-order_interaction_detection.png|700px|center]]<br />
<br />
=Limitations=<br />
Even though for the above synthetic experiment MLP methods showed superior performances, the method still has some limitations. For example, for the function like, <math>x_1x_2 + x_2x_3 + x_1x_3</math>, neural network fails to distinguish between interlinked interactions to single higher order interaction. Moreover, a correlation between features deteriorates the ability of the network to distinguish interactions. However, correlation issues are presented most of interaction detection algorithms. <br />
<br />
In the case of detecting pairwise interactions, the interlinked pairwise interactions are often confused by the algorithm for complex interactions. This means that the higher-order interaction algorithm fails to separate interlinked pairwise interactions encoded in the neural network. Another issue is that it sometimes detects abrupt interactions or misses interactions as a result of correlations between features<br />
<br />
Because this method relies on the neural network fitting the data well, there are some additional concerns. Notably, if the NN is unable to make an appropriate fit (under/overfitting), the resulting interactions will be flawed. This can occur if the datasets that are too small or too noisy, which often occurs in practical settings.<br />
<br />
=Conclusion=<br />
Here we presented the method of detecting interactions using MLP. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods like Additive Groves (AG), the performances are competitive yet computational powers required is far less. Therefore, it is safe to claim that the method will be extremely useful for practitioners with (comparably) less computational powers. Moreover, the NIP algorithm successfully reduced the computation sizes. After all, the most important aspect of this algorithm is that now users of nueral networks can impose interpretability in the model usage, which will change the level of usability to another level for most of the practitioners outside of those working in machine learning and deep learning areas.<br />
<br />
For future work, the authors want to detect feature interactions by using the common units in the intermediate hidden layers of feedforward networks, and also want to use such interaction detection to interpret weights in other deep neural networks. Also, it was pointed out that the neural network weights heavily depend on L-1 regularized neural network training, but a group lasso penalty may work better.<br />
<br />
=Critique=<br />
1. Authors need to do large-scale experiments, instead of just conducting experiments on some synthetic dataset with small feature dimensionality, to make their claim stronger.<br />
<br />
2. Although the method proposed in this paper is interesting, the paper would benefit from providing some more explanations to support its idea and fill the possible gaps in its experimental evaluation. In some parts there are repetitive explanations that could be replaced by other essential clarifications.<br />
<br />
3. Greedy algorithm is implemented but nothing is mentioned about the speed of this algorithm which is definitely not fast. So, this has the potential to be a weak point of the study.<br />
<br />
4. Could have provided more experiments.<br />
<br />
=Reference=<br />
<br />
[1] Jacob Bien, Jonathan Taylor, and Robert Tibshirani. A lasso for hierarchical interactions. Annals of statistics, 41(3):1111, 2013. <br />
<br />
[2] G David Garson. Interpreting neural-network connection weights. AI Expert, 6(4):46–51, 1991.<br />
<br />
[3] Yotam Hechtlinger. Interpretation of prediction models using the input gradient. arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.07634, 2016.<br />
<br />
[4] Shiyu Liang and R Srikant. Why deep neural networks for function approximation? 2016. <br />
<br />
[5] David Rolnick and Max Tegmark. The power of deeper networks for expressing natural functions. International Conference on Learning Representations, 2018. <br />
<br />
[6] Daria Sorokina, Rich Caruana, and Mirek Riedewald. Additive groves of regression trees. Machine Learning: ECML 2007, pp. 323–334, 2007.<br />
<br />
[7] Simon Wood. Generalized additive models: an introduction with R. CRC press, 2006<br />
<br />
[8] Sebastian Bach, Alexander Binder, Gre ́goire Montavon, Frederick Klauschen, Klaus-Robert Mu ̈ller, and Wojciech Samek. On pixel-wise explanations for non-linear classifier decisions by layer-wise relevance propagation. PloS one, 10(7):e0130140, 2015.<br />
<br />
[9] Rich Caruana, Yin Lou, Johannes Gehrke, Paul Koch, Marc Sturm, and Noemie Elhadad. Intel- ligible models for healthcare: Predicting pneumonia risk and hospital 30-day readmission. In Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 1721–1730. ACM, 2015.<br />
<br />
[10] Zhengping Che, Sanjay Purushotham, Robinder Khemani, and Yan Liu. Interpretable deep models for icu outcome prediction. In AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings, volume 2016, pp. 371. American Medical Informatics Association, 2016.<br />
<br />
[11] Laurent Itti, Christof Koch, and Ernst Niebur. A model of saliency-based visual attention for rapid scene analysis. IEEE Transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, 20(11):1254– 1259, 1998.<br />
<br />
[12] Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Sameer Singh, and Carlos Guestrin. Why should i trust you?: Explaining the predictions of any classifier. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 1135–1144. ACM, 2016.<br />
<br />
[13]Karen Simonyan, Andrea Vedaldi, and Andrew Zisserman. Deep inside convolutional networks: Vi- sualising image classification models and saliency maps. arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.6034, 2013.<br />
<br />
[14] Kush R Varshney and Homa Alemzadeh. On the safety of machine learning: Cyber-physical sys- tems, decision sciences, and data products. arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.01256, 2016.<br />
<br />
[15] Jason Yosinski, Jeff Clune, Anh Nguyen, Thomas Fuchs, and Hod Lipson. Understanding neural networks through deep visualization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.06579, 2015.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=DETECTING_STATISTICAL_INTERACTIONS_FROM_NEURAL_NETWORK_WEIGHTS&diff=42444DETECTING STATISTICAL INTERACTIONS FROM NEURAL NETWORK WEIGHTS2018-12-14T05:07:22Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Critique */</p>
<hr />
<div>=Introduction=<br />
<br />
It has been commonly believed that one major advantage of neural networks is their capability of modeling complex statistical interactions between features for automatic feature learning. Statistical interactions capture important information on where features often have joint effects with other features on predicting an outcome. The discovery of interactions is especially useful for scientific discoveries and hypothesis validation. For example, physicists may be interested in understanding what joint factors provide evidence for new elementary particles; doctors may want to know what interactions are accounted for in risk prediction models, to compare against known interactions from existing medical literature.<br />
<br />
With the growth in the computational power available Neural Networks have been able to solve many of the complex tasks in a wide variety of fields. This is mainly due to their ability to model complex and non-linear interactions. Neural networks have traditionally been treated as “black box” models, preventing their adoption in many application domains, such as those where explainability is desirable. It has been noted that complex machine learning models can learn unintended patterns from data, raising significant risks to stakeholders [14]. Therefore, in applications where machine learning models are intended for making critical decisions, such as healthcare or finance, it is paramount to understand how they make predictions [9]. Within several areas, like eg: computation social science, interpretability is of utmost importance. Since we do not understand how a neural network comes to its decision, practitioners in these areas tend to prefer simpler models like linear regression, decision trees, etc. which are much more interpretable. In this paper, we are going to present one way of implementing interpretability in a neural network.<br />
<br />
Existing approaches to interpreting neural networks can be summarized into two types. One type is direct interpretation, which focuses on 1) explaining individual feature importance, for example by computing input gradients [13] and decomposing predictions [8], 2) developing attention-based models, which illustrate where neural networks focus during inference [11], and 3) providing model-specific visualizations, such as feature map and gate activation visualizations [15]. The other type is indirect interpretation, for example, post-hoc interpretations of feature importance [12] and knowledge distillation to simpler interpretable models [10].<br />
<br />
In this paper, the authors propose Neural Interaction Detection (NID), which can detect any order or form of statistical interaction captured by the feedforward neural network by examining its weight matrix. This approach is efficient because it avoids searching over an exponential solution space of interaction candidates by making an approximation of hidden unit importance at the first hidden layer via all weights above and doing a 2D traversal of the input weight matrix.The authors also provide theoretical justifications as to why, interactions between features are created at hidden units and why the hidden unit approximation satisfies bounds on hidden unit gradients. Top -K interactions are determined from interaction rankings by using a special form of generalized additive model, which accounts for interactions of variable order.<br />
<br />
Note that in this paper, we only consider one specific types of neural network, feedforward neural network. Based on the methodology discussed here, the authors suggest that we can build an interpretation method for other types of networks also.<br />
<br />
=Related Work=<br />
<br />
1. Interaction Detection approaches: <br />
* Conduct individual tests for all features' combination such as ANOVA and Additive Groves. Two-way ANOVA has been a standard method of performing pairwise interaction detection that involves conducting hypothesis tests for each interaction candidate by checking each hypothesis with F-statistics (Wonnacott & Wonnacott, 1972). Additive Groves is another method that conducts individual tests for interactions and hence must face the same computational difficulties; however, it is special because the interactions it detects are not constrained to any functional form.<br />
* Define all interaction forms of interest, then later finds the important ones.<br />
<br />
- The paper's goal is to detect interactions without compromising the functional forms. Our method accomplishes higher-order interaction detection, which has the benefit of avoiding a high false positive or false discovery rate.<br />
<br />
2. Interpretability: A lot of work has also been done in this particular area and it can be divided it the following broad categories:<br />
* Feature Importance through Decomposition: Methods like Input Gradient(Sundararajan et al., 2017) learns the importance of features through a gradient-based approach similar to backpropagation. Works like Li et al(2017), Murdoch(2017) and Murdoch(2018) study interpretability of LSTMs by looking at phrase and word level importance scores. Bach et al. 2015 and Shrikumar et al. 2016 (DeepLift) study pixel importance in CNNs.<br />
* Studying Visualizations in Models - Karpathy et al. (2015) worked with character generating LSTMs and tried to study activation and firing in certain hidden units for meaningful attributes. (Yosinski et al., 2015 studies feature map visualizations, providing a tool for visualizing live activations on each layer of a trained CNN, and another for visualizing "Regularized Optimization".) <br />
* Attention-Based Models: Bahdanau et al. (2014) - These are a different class of models which use attention modules(different architectures) to help focus the neural network to decide the parts of the input that it should look more closely or give more importance to. Looking at the results of these type of model an indirect sense of interpretability can be gauged.<br />
* Sum product networks, Hoifun Poon, Pedro Domingos (2011) It is a new deep architecture that provides clear semantics. In its core, it is a probabilistic model, with two types of nodes: Sum node and Product nodes. The sum nodes are trying to model the mixture of distributions and product node is trying to model joint distributions. It can be trained using gradient descent and other methods as well. The main advantage of the Sum-Product Network is that it has clear semantics, where people can interpret exactly how the network models make decisions. Therefore, it has better interpretability than most of the current deep architectures. <br />
<br />
The approach in this paper is to extract non-additive interactions between variables from the neural network weights.<br />
<br />
=Notations=<br />
Before we dive into methodology, we are going to define a few notations here. Most of them will be trivial.<br />
<br />
1. Vector: Vectors are defined with bold-lowercases, '''v, w'''<br />
<br />
2. Matrix: Matrices are defined with bold-uppercases, '''V, W'''<br />
<br />
3. Interger Set: For some interger p <math>\in</math> Z, we define [p] := {1,2,3,...,p}<br />
<br />
=Interaction=<br />
First of all, in order to explain the model, we need to be able to explain the interactions and their effects to output. Therefore, we define 'interaction' between variables as below. <br />
<br />
[[File:def_interaction.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
From the definition above, for a function like, <math>x_1x_2 + sin(x_3 + x_4 + x_5)</math>, we have <math>{[x_1, x_2]}</math> and <math>{[x_3, x_4, x_5]}</math> interactions. And we say that the latter interaction to be 3-way interaction.<br />
<br />
Note that from the definition above, we can naturally deduce that d-way interaction can exist if and only if all of its (d-1) interactions exist. For example, 3-way interaction above shows that we have 2-way interactions <math>{[3,4], [4,5]}</math> and <math>{[3,5]}</math>.<br />
<br />
One thing that we need to keep in mind is that for models like neural networks, most of the interactions are happening within hidden layers. This means that we need a proper way of measuring interaction strength.<br />
<br />
The key observation is that for any kinds of interaction, at some hidden unit of some hidden layer, two interacting features the ancestors. In graph-theoretical language, interaction map can be viewed as an associated directed graph and for any interaction <math>\Gamma \in [p]</math>, there exists at least one vertex that has all of the features of <math>\Gamma</math> as ancestors. The statement can be rigorized as the following:<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:prop2.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
Now, the above mathematical statement guarantees us to measure interaction strengths at ANY hidden layers. For example, if we want to study interactions at some specific hidden layer, now we now that there exists corresponding vertices between the hidden layer and output layer. Therefore all we need to do is now to find appropriate measure which can summarize the information between those two layers.<br />
<br />
Before doing so, let's think about a single-layered neural network. For any single hidden unit, we can have possibly, <math>2^{||W_i,:||}</math>, number of interactions. This means that our search space might be too huge for multi-layered networks. Therefore, we need some descent way of approximate out search space. Moreover, the authors realized a fast interaction detection by limiting the search complexity of the task by only quantifying interactions created at the first hidden layer. The figure below illustrates an interaction within a fully connected feedforward neural network, where the box contains later layers in the network.<br />
<br />
[[File:network1.PNG|500px|center]]<br />
<br />
==Measuring influence in hidden layers==<br />
As we discussed above, in order to consider the interaction between units in any layers, we need to think about their out-going paths. However, we soon encountered the fact that for some fully-connected multi-layer neural network, the search space might be too huge to compare. Therefore, we use information about out-going paths gradient upper bond. To represent the influence of out-going paths at <math>l</math>-hidden layer, we define cumulative impact of weights between output layer and <math>l+1</math>. We define aggregated weights as, <br />
<br />
[[File:def3.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Note that <math>z^{(l)} \in R^{(p_l)}</math> where <math>p_l</math> is the number of hidden units in <math>l</math>-layer.<br />
Moreover, this is the lipschitz constant of gradients. Gradient has been an import variable of measuring the influence of features, especially when we consider that input layer's derivative computes the direction normal to decision boundaries. Hence an upper bound on the gradient magnitude approximates how important the variable can be.<br />
<br />
==Quantifying influence==<br />
For some <math>i</math> hidden unit at the first hidden layer, which is the closet layer to the input layer, we define the influence strength of some interaction as, <br />
<br />
[[File:measure1.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
The function <math>\mu</math> will be defined later. Essentially, the formula shows that the strength of influence is defined as the product of the aggregated weight on the first hidden layer and some measure of influence between the first hidden layer and the input layer. <br />
<br />
For the function, <math>\mu</math>, any positive-real valued functions such as max, min and average can be candidates. The effects of those candidates will be tested later.<br />
<br />
Now based on the specifications above, the author suggested the algorithm for searching influential interactions between input layer units as follows:<br />
<br />
It was pointed out that restricting to the first hidden layer might miss some important feature interactions, however, the author state that it is not straightforward how to incorporate the idea of hidden units at intermediate layers to get better interaction detection performance.<br />
[[File:algorithm1.PNG|850px|center]]<br />
<br />
=Cut-off Model=<br />
Now using the greedy algorithm defined above, we can rank the interactions by their strength. However, in order to access true interactions, we are building the cut-off model which is a generalized additive model (GAM) as below,<br />
<br />
<center><math><br />
c_K('''x''') = \sum_{i=1}^{p}g_i(x_i) + \sum_{i=1}^{K}{g_i}^\prime(x_\chi)<br />
</math></center><br />
<br />
From the above model, each of <math>g_i</math> and <math>g_i'</math> are Feed-Forward neural networks. <math>g_i(\cdot)</math> captures the main effects, while <math>g_i'(\cdot)</math> captures the interaction. We are keep adding interactions until the performance reaches plateaus.<br />
<br />
=Pairwise Interaction Detection=<br />
A variant to the authors interaction algorithm tests for all pairwise interactions. Modelling pairwise interactions is the de facto objective of many machine learning algorithms such as factorization machines and hierarchical lasso. The authors rank all pairwise features accorind to their strengths denoted by <math>w({i,j})</math> , calculated on the first hidden layer, where again the leveraging function is <math>min(.)</math> and<math>w({i,j})</math> = <math>\sum_{s=1}^{p_1}w_s({i,j})</math>. The higher the rank calculated by above equations, the more likely the interactions exist. <br />
<br />
=Experiment=<br />
For the experiment, the authors have compared three neural network model with traditional statistical interaction detecting algorithms. For the neural network models, first model will be MLP, the second model will be MLP-M, which is MLP with an additional univariate network at the output. The last one is the cut-off model defined above, which is denoted by MLP-cutoff. In the experiments that the authors performed, all the networks which modeled feature interactions consisted of four hidden layers containing 140, 100, 60, and 20 units respectively. Whereas, all the individual univariate networks contained three hidden layers with each layer containing 10 units. All of these networks used ReLU activation and back-propagation for training. The MLP-M model is graphically represented below.<br />
<br />
[[File:output11.PNG|300px|center]]<br />
<br />
For the experiment, the authors study our interaction detection framework on both simulated and real-world experiments. For simulated experiments, the authors are going to test on 10 synthetic functions as shown in Table I.<br />
<br />
[[File:synthetic.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
The authors use four real-world datasets, of which two are regression datasets, and the other two are binary classification datasets. The datasets are a mixture of common prediction tasks in the cal housing<br />
and bike sharing datasets, a scientific discovery task in the higgs boson dataset, and an example of very-high order interaction detection in the letter dataset. Specifically, the cal housing dataset is a regression dataset with 21k data points for predicting California housing prices. The bike sharing dataset contains 17k data points of weather and seasonal information to predict the hourly count of rental bikes in a bike-share system. The Higgs-Boson dataset has 800k data points for classifying whether a particle environment originates from the decay of a Higgs-Boson. <br />
<br />
And the authors also reported the results of comparisons between the models. As you can see, neural network based models are performing better on average. Compared to the traditional methods like ANOVA, MLP and MLP-M, proposed method shows 20% increases in performance.<br />
<br />
[[File:performance_mlpm.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:performance2_mlpm.PNG|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
The above result shows that MLP-M almost perfectly capture the most influential pair-wise interactions.<br />
<br />
=Higher-order interaction detection=<br />
The authors use their greedy interaction ranking algorithm to perform higher-order interaction detection without an exponential search of interaction candidates.<br />
[[File:higher-order_interaction_detection.png|700px|center]]<br />
<br />
=Limitations=<br />
Even though for the above synthetic experiment MLP methods showed superior performances, the method still has some limitations. For example, for the function like, <math>x_1x_2 + x_2x_3 + x_1x_3</math>, neural network fails to distinguish between interlinked interactions to single higher order interaction. Moreover, a correlation between features deteriorates the ability of the network to distinguish interactions. However, correlation issues are presented most of interaction detection algorithms. <br />
<br />
In the case of detecting pairwise interactions, the interlinked pairwise interactions are often confused by the algorithm for complex interactions. This means that the higher-order interaction algorithm fails to separate interlinked pairwise interactions encoded in the neural network. Another issue is that it sometimes detects abrupt interactions or misses interactions as a result of correlations between features<br />
<br />
Because this method relies on the neural network fitting the data well, there are some additional concerns. Notably, if the NN is unable to make an appropriate fit (under/overfitting), the resulting interactions will be flawed. This can occur if the datasets that are too small or too noisy, which often occurs in practical settings.<br />
<br />
=Conclusion=<br />
Here we presented the method of detecting interactions using MLP. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods like Additive Groves (AG), the performances are competitive yet computational powers required is far less. Therefore, it is safe to claim that the method will be extremely useful for practitioners with (comparably) less computational powers. Moreover, the NIP algorithm successfully reduced the computation sizes. After all, the most important aspect of this algorithm is that now users of nueral networks can impose interpretability in the model usage, which will change the level of usability to another level for most of the practitioners outside of those working in machine learning and deep learning areas.<br />
<br />
For future work, the authors want to detect feature interactions by using the common units in the intermediate hidden layers of feedforward networks, and also want to use such interaction detection to interpret weights in other deep neural networks. Also, it was pointed out that the neural network weights heavily depend on L-1 regularized neural network training, but a group lasso penalty may work better.<br />
<br />
=Critique=<br />
1. Authors need to do large-scale experiments, instead of just conducting experiments on some synthetic dataset with small feature dimensionality, to make their claim stronger.<br />
<br />
2. Although the method proposed in this paper is interesting, the paper would benefit from providing some more explanations to support its idea and fill the possible gaps in its experimental evaluation. In some parts there are repetitive explanations that could be replaced by other essential clarifications.<br />
<br />
3. Greedy algorithm is implemented but nothing is mentioned about the speed of this algorithm which is definitely not fast. So, this has the potential to be a weak point of the study.<br />
<br />
4. Could have provided more experiments.<br />
<br />
=Reference=<br />
<br />
[1] Jacob Bien, Jonathan Taylor, and Robert Tibshirani. A lasso for hierarchical interactions. Annals of statistics, 41(3):1111, 2013. <br />
<br />
[2] G David Garson. Interpreting neural-network connection weights. AI Expert, 6(4):46–51, 1991.<br />
<br />
[3] Yotam Hechtlinger. Interpretation of prediction models using the input gradient. arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.07634, 2016.<br />
<br />
[4] Shiyu Liang and R Srikant. Why deep neural networks for function approximation? 2016. <br />
<br />
[5] David Rolnick and Max Tegmark. The power of deeper networks for expressing natural functions. International Conference on Learning Representations, 2018. <br />
<br />
[6] Daria Sorokina, Rich Caruana, and Mirek Riedewald. Additive groves of regression trees. Machine Learning: ECML 2007, pp. 323–334, 2007.<br />
<br />
[7] Simon Wood. Generalized additive models: an introduction with R. CRC press, 2006<br />
<br />
[8] Sebastian Bach, Alexander Binder, Gre ́goire Montavon, Frederick Klauschen, Klaus-Robert Mu ̈ller, and Wojciech Samek. On pixel-wise explanations for non-linear classifier decisions by layer-wise relevance propagation. PloS one, 10(7):e0130140, 2015.<br />
<br />
[9] Rich Caruana, Yin Lou, Johannes Gehrke, Paul Koch, Marc Sturm, and Noemie Elhadad. Intel- ligible models for healthcare: Predicting pneumonia risk and hospital 30-day readmission. In Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 1721–1730. ACM, 2015.<br />
<br />
[10] Zhengping Che, Sanjay Purushotham, Robinder Khemani, and Yan Liu. Interpretable deep models for icu outcome prediction. In AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings, volume 2016, pp. 371. American Medical Informatics Association, 2016.<br />
<br />
[11] Laurent Itti, Christof Koch, and Ernst Niebur. A model of saliency-based visual attention for rapid scene analysis. IEEE Transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, 20(11):1254– 1259, 1998.<br />
<br />
[12] Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Sameer Singh, and Carlos Guestrin. Why should i trust you?: Explaining the predictions of any classifier. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 1135–1144. ACM, 2016.<br />
<br />
[13]Karen Simonyan, Andrea Vedaldi, and Andrew Zisserman. Deep inside convolutional networks: Vi- sualising image classification models and saliency maps. arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.6034, 2013.<br />
<br />
[14] Kush R Varshney and Homa Alemzadeh. On the safety of machine learning: Cyber-physical sys- tems, decision sciences, and data products. arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.01256, 2016.<br />
<br />
[15] Jason Yosinski, Jeff Clune, Anh Nguyen, Thomas Fuchs, and Hod Lipson. Understanding neural networks through deep visualization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.06579, 2015.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=a_neural_representation_of_sketch_drawings&diff=42443a neural representation of sketch drawings2018-12-14T04:59:20Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Related Work */</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== Introduction ==<br />
In this paper, the authors present a recurrent neural network, sketch-rnn, that can be used to construct stroke-based drawings. Besides new robust training methods, they also outline a framework for conditional and unconditional sketch generation.<br />
<br />
Neural networks have been heavily used as image generation tools. For example, Generative Adversarial Networks, Variational Inference, and Autoregressive models have been used. Most of those models are designed to generate pixels to construct images. People, however, learn to draw using sequences of strokes as opposed to the simultaneous generation of pixels. The authors propose a new generative model that creates vector images so that it might generalize abstract concepts in a manner more similar to how humans do. <br />
<br />
The model is trained with hand-drawn sketches as input sequences. The model is able to produce sketches in vector format. In the conditional generation model, they also explore the latent space representation for vector images and discuss a few future applications of this model. The model and dataset are now available as an open source project ([https://magenta.tensorflow.org/sketch_rnn link]).<br />
<br />
=== Terminology ===<br />
Pixel images, also referred to as raster or bitmap images are files that encode image data as a set of pixels. These are the most common image type, with extensions such as .png, .jpg, .bmp. <br />
<br />
Vector images are files that encode image data as paths between points. SVG and EPS file types are used to store vector images. <br />
<br />
For a visual comparison of raster and vector images, see this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fs2t6P5AjY video]. As mentioned, vector images are generally simpler and more abstract, whereas raster images generally are used to store detailed images. <br />
<br />
For this paper, the important distinction between the two is that the encoding of images in the model will be inherently more abstract because of the vector representation. The intuition is that generating abstract representations is more effective using a vector representation.<br />
<br />
== Related Work ==<br />
There are some works in the history that used a similar approach to generate images such as Portrait Drawing by Paul the Robot [26, 28] and some reinforcement learning approaches[28], Reinforcement Learning to discover a set of paint brush strokes that can best represent a given input photograph. They work more like a mimic of digitized photographs, rather than develop generative models of vector images. There are also some Neural networks based approaches, but those are mostly dealing with pixel images. Little work is done on vector images generation. There are models that use Hidden Markov Models [25] or Mixture Density Networks [2] to generate human sketches, continuous data points (modelling Chinese characters as a sequence of pen stroke actions) or vectorized Kanji characters [9,29].<br />
<br />
Neural Network-based approaches are able to generate latent space representation of vector images, which follows a Gaussian distribution. The generated output of these networks is trained to match the Gaussian distribution by minimizing a given loss function. Using this idea, previous works attempted to generate a sequence-to-Sequence model with Variational Auto-encoder to model sentences into latent space and using probabilistic program induction to model Omniglot dataset. Variational Auto-encoders differ from regular encoders in that there is an intermediary “sampling step” between the encoder and decoder. Simply connecting the two would NOT guarantee that encoded parameters can be viewed as parameters of a normal distribution representing a latent space. In VAEs, the output of the encoder is physically put into an intermediary step that uses it as normal parameters and provides a sample. In this way, the encoding is penalized as if it were the parameters of some Normal Distribution.<br />
<br />
One of the limiting factors that the authors mention in the field of generative vector drawings is the lack of availability of publicly available datasets. Previous datasets such as the Sketch data with 20k vector sketches was explored for feature extraction techniques. The Sketchy dataset consisting of 70k vector sketches along with pixel images was used for large-scale exploration of human sketches. The ShadowDraw system that used 30k raster images along with extracted vectorized features is an interactive system<br />
that predicts what a finished drawing looks like based on a set of incomplete brush strokes from the<br />
user while the sketch is being drawn. In all the cases, the datasets are comparatively small. The dataset proposed in this work uses a much larger dataset and has been made publicly available, and is one of the major contributions of this paper.<br />
<br />
== Major Contributions ==<br />
This paper makes the following major contributions: Authors outline a framework for both unconditional and<br />
conditional generation of vector images composed of a sequence of lines. The recurrent neural<br />
network-based generative model is capable of producing sketches of common objects in a vector<br />
format. The paper develops a training procedure unique to vector images to make the training more robust. The paper also made available<br />
a large dataset of hand drawn vector images to encourage further development of generative modeling<br />
for vector images, and also release an implementation of our model as an open source project<br />
<br />
== Methodology ==<br />
=== Dataset ===<br />
QuickDraw is a dataset with 50 million vector drawings collected by an online game [https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/# Quick Draw!], where the players are required to draw objects belonging to a particular object class in less than 20 seconds. It contains hundreds of classes, each class has 70k training samples, 2.5k validation samples, and 2.5k test samples.<br />
<br />
The data format of each sample is a representation of a pen stroke action event. The Origin is the initial coordinate of the drawing. The sketches are points in a list. Each point consists of 5 elements <math> (\Delta x, \Delta y, p_{1}, p_{2}, p_{3})</math> where x and y are the offset distance in x and y directions from the previous point. The parameters <math>p_{1}, p_{2}, p_{3}</math> represent three possible states in binary one-hot representation where <math>p_{1}</math> indicates the pen is touching the paper, <math>p_{2}</math> indicates the pen will be lifted from here, and <math>p_{3}</math> represents the drawing has ended.<br />
<br />
=== Sketch-RNN ===<br />
[[File:sketchfig2.png|700px|center]]<br />
<br />
The model is a Sequence-to-Sequence Variational Autoencoder(VAE). <br />
<br />
==== Encoder ====<br />
The encoder is a bidirectional RNN. The input is a sketch sequence denoted by <math>S =\{S_0, S_1, ... S_{N_{s}}\}</math> and a reversed sketch sequence denoted by <math>S_{reverse} = \{S_{N_{s}},S_{N_{s}-1}, ... S_0\}</math>. The final hidden layer representations of the two encoded sequences <math>(h_{ \rightarrow}, h_{ \leftarrow})</math> are concatenated to form a latent vector, <math>h</math>, of size <math>N_{z}</math>,<br />
<br />
\begin{split}<br />
&h_{ \rightarrow} = encode_{ \rightarrow }(S), \\<br />
&h_{ \leftarrow} = encode_{ \leftarrow }(S_{reverse}), \\<br />
&h = [h_{\rightarrow}; h_{\leftarrow}].<br />
\end{split}<br />
<br />
Then the authors project <math>h</math> into two vectors <math>\mu</math> and <math>\hat{\sigma}</math> of size <math>N_{z}</math>. The projection is performed using a fully connected layer. These two vectors are the parameters of the latent space Gaussian distribution that will estimate the distribution of the input data. Because standard deviations cannot be negative, an exponential function is used to convert it to all positive values. Next, a random variable with mean <math>\mu</math> and standard deviation <math>\sigma</math> is constructed by scaling a normalized IID Gaussian, <math>\mathcal{N}(0,I)</math>, <br />
<br />
\begin{split}<br />
& \mu = W_\mu h + b_\mu, \\<br />
& \hat \sigma = W_\sigma h + b_\sigma, \\<br />
& \sigma = exp( \frac{\hat \sigma}{2}), \\<br />
& z = \mu + \sigma \odot \mathcal{N}(0,I). <br />
\end{split}<br />
<br />
<br />
Note that <math>z</math> is not deterministic but a random vector that can be conditioned on an input sketch sequence.<br />
<br />
==== Decoder ====<br />
The decoder is an autoregressive RNN. The initial hidden and cell states are generated using <math>[h_0;c_0] = \tanh(W_z z + b_z)</math>. Here, <math>c_0</math> is utilized if applicable (eg. if an LSTM decoder is used). <math>S_0</math> is defined as <math>(0,0,1,0,0)</math> (the pen is touching the paper at location 0, 0). <br />
<br />
For each step <math>i</math> in the decoder, the input <math>x_i</math> is the concatenation of the previous point <math>S_{i-1}</math> and the latent vector <math>z</math>. The outputs of the RNN decoder <math>y_i</math> are parameters for a probability distribution that will generate the next point <math>S_i</math>. <br />
<br />
The authors model <math>(\Delta x,\Delta y)</math> as a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with <math>M</math> normal distributions and model the ground truth data <math>(p_1, p_2, p_3)</math> as a categorical distribution <math>(q_1, q_2, q_3)</math> where <math>q_1, q_2\ \text{and}\ q_3</math> sum up to 1,<br />
<br />
\begin{align*}<br />
p(\Delta x, \Delta y) = \sum_{j=1}^{M} \Pi_j \mathcal{N}(\Delta x,\Delta y | \mu_{x,j}, \mu_{y,j}, \sigma_{x,j},\sigma_{y,j}, \rho _{xy,j}), where \sum_{j=1}^{M}\Pi_j = 1<br />
\end{align*}<br />
<br />
Where <math>\mathcal{N}(\Delta x,\Delta y | \mu_{x,j}, \mu_{y,j}, \sigma_{x,j},\sigma_{y,j}, \rho _{xy,j})</math> is a bi-variate Normal Distribution, with parameters means <math>\mu_x, \mu_y</math>, standard deviations <math>\sigma_x, \sigma_y</math> and correlation parameter <math>\rho_{xy}</math>. There are <math>M</math> such distributions. <math>\Pi</math> is a categorical distribution vector of length <math>M</math>. Collectively these form the mixture weights of the Gaussian Mixture model.<br />
<br />
The output vector <math>y_i</math> is generated using a fully-connected forward propagation in the hidden state of the RNN.<br />
<br />
\begin{split}<br />
&x_i = [S_{i-1}; z], \\<br />
&[h_i; c_i] = forward(x_i,[h_{i-1}; c_{i-1}]), \\<br />
&y_i = W_y h_i + b_y, \\<br />
&y_i \in \mathbb{R}^{6M+3}. \\<br />
\end{split}<br />
<br />
The output consists the probability distribution of the next data point.<br />
<br />
\begin{align*}<br />
[(\hat\Pi_1\ \mu_x\ \mu_y\ \hat\sigma_x\ \hat\sigma_y\ \hat\rho_{xy})_1\ (\hat\Pi_1\ \mu_x\ \mu_y\ \hat\sigma_x\ \hat\sigma_y\ \hat\rho_{xy})_2\ ...\ (\hat\Pi_1\ \mu_x\ \mu_y\ \hat\sigma_x\ \hat\sigma_y\ \hat\rho_{xy})_M\ (\hat{q_1}\ \hat{q_2}\ \hat{q_3})] = y_i<br />
\end{align*}<br />
<br />
<math>\exp</math> and <math>\tanh</math> operations are applied to ensure that the standard deviations are non-negative and the correlation value is between -1 and 1.<br />
<br />
\begin{align*}<br />
\sigma_x = \exp (\hat \sigma_x),\ <br />
\sigma_y = \exp (\hat \sigma_y),\ <br />
\rho_{xy} = \tanh(\hat \rho_{xy}). <br />
\end{align*}<br />
<br />
Categorical distribution probabilities for <math>(p_1, p_2, p_3)</math> using <math>(q_1, q_2, q_3)</math> can be obtained as :<br />
<br />
\begin{align*}<br />
q_k = \frac{\exp{(\hat q_k)}}{ \sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^{3} \exp {(\hat q_j)}},<br />
k \in \left\{1,2,3\right\}, <br />
\Pi _k = \frac{\exp{(\hat \Pi_k)}}{ \sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^{M} \exp {(\hat \Pi_j)}},<br />
k \in \left\{1,...,M\right\}.<br />
\end{align*}<br />
<br />
It is hard for the model to decide when to stop drawing because the probabilities of the three events <math>(p_1, p_2, p_3)</math> are very unbalanced. Researchers in the past have used different weights for each pen event probability, but the authors found this approach lacking elegance and inadequate. They define a hyperparameter representing the max length of the longest sketch in the training set denoted by <math>N_{max}</math>, and set the <math>S_i</math> to be <math>(0, 0, 0, 0, 1)</math> for <math>i > N_s</math>.<br />
<br />
The outcome sample <math>S_i^{'}</math> can be generated in each time step during sample process and fed as input for the next time step. The process will stop when <math>p_3 = 1</math> or <math>i = N_{max}</math>. The output is not deterministic but conditioned random sequences. The level of randomness can be controlled using a temperature parameter <math>\tau</math>.<br />
<br />
\begin{align*}<br />
\hat q_k \rightarrow \frac{\hat q_k}{\tau}, <br />
\hat \Pi_k \rightarrow \frac{\hat \Pi_k}{\tau}, <br />
\sigma_x^2 \rightarrow \sigma_x^2\tau, <br />
\sigma_y^2 \rightarrow \sigma_y^2\tau. <br />
\end{align*}<br />
<br />
The <math>\tau</math> ranges from 0 to 1. When <math>\tau = 0</math> the output will be deterministic as the sample will consist of the points on the peak of the probability density function.<br />
<br />
=== Unconditional Generation ===<br />
There is a special case that only the decoder RNN module is trained. The decoder RNN could work as a standalone autoregressive model without latent variables. In this case, initial states are 0, the input <math>x_i</math> is only <math>S_{i-1}</math> or <math>S_{i-1}^{'}</math>. In the Figure 3, generating sketches unconditionally from the temperature parameter <math>\tau = 0.2</math> at the top in blue, to <math>\tau = 0.9</math> at the bottom in red.<br />
<br />
[[File:sketchfig3.png|700px|center]]<br />
<br />
=== Training ===<br />
The training process is the same as a Variational Autoencoder. The loss function is the sum of Reconstruction Loss <math>L_R</math> and the Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss <math>L_{KL}</math>. The reconstruction loss <math>L_R</math> can be obtained with generated parameters of pdf and training data <math>S</math>. It is the sum of the <math>L_s</math> and <math>L_p</math>, which are the log loss of the offset <math>(\Delta x, \Delta y)</math> and the pen state <math>(p_1, p_2, p_3)</math>.<br />
<br />
\begin{align*}<br />
L_s = - \frac{1 }{N_{max}} \sum_{i = 1}^{N_s} \log(\sum_{i = 1}^{M} \Pi_{j,i} \mathcal{N}(\Delta x,\Delta y | \mu_{x,j,i}, \mu_{y,j,i}, \sigma_{x,j,i},\sigma_{y,j,i}, \rho _{xy,j,i})), <br />
\end{align*}<br />
\begin{align*}<br />
L_p = - \frac{1 }{N_{max}} \sum_{i = 1}^{N_{max}} \sum_{k = 1}^{3} p_{k,i} \log (q_{k,i}), <br />
L_R = L_s + L_p.<br />
\end{align*}<br />
<br />
<br />
Both terms are normalized by <math>N_{max}</math>.<br />
<br />
<math>L_{KL}</math> measures the difference between the distribution of the latent vector <math>z</math> and an i.i.d. Gaussian vector with zero mean and unit variance.<br />
<br />
\begin{align*}<br />
L_{KL} = - \frac{1}{2 N_z} (1+\hat \sigma - \mu^2 - \exp(\hat \sigma))<br />
\end{align*}<br />
<br />
The overall loss is weighted as:<br />
<br />
\begin{align*}<br />
Loss = L_R + w_{KL} L_{KL}<br />
\end{align*}<br />
<br />
When <math>w_{KL} = 0</math>, the model becomes a standalone unconditional generator. Specially, there will be no <math>L_{KL} </math> term as we only optimize for <math>L_{R} </math>. By removing the <math>L_{KL} </math> term the model approaches a pure autoencoder, meaning it sacrifices the ability to enforce a prior over the latent space and gains better reconstruction loss metrics.<br />
<br />
While the aforementioned loss function could be used, it was found that annealing the KL term (as shown below) in the loss function produces better results.<br />
<br />
<center><math><br />
\eta_{step} = 1 - (1 - \eta_{min})R^{step}<br />
</math></center><br />
<br />
<center><math><br />
Loss_{train} = L_R + w_{KL} \eta_{step} max(L_{KL}, KL_{min})<br />
</math></center><br />
<br />
As shown in Figure 4, the <math>L_{R} </math> metric for the standalone decoder model is actually an upper bound for different models using a latent vector. The reason is the unconditional model does not access to the entire sketch it needs to generate.<br />
<br />
[[File:s.png|600px|thumb|center|Figure 4. Tradeoff between <math>L_{R} </math> and <math>L_{KL} </math>, for two models trained on single class datasets (left).<br />
Validation Loss Graph for models trained on the Yoga dataset using various <math>w_{KL} </math>. (right)]]<br />
<br />
== Experiments ==<br />
The authors experiment with the sketch-rnn model using different settings and recorded both losses. They used a Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM) model as an encoder and a HyperLSTM as a decoder. HyperLSTM is a type of RNN cell that excels at sequence generation tasks. The ability for HyperLSTM to spontaneously augment its own weights enables it to adapt to many different regimes<br />
in a large diverse dataset. They also conduct multi-class datasets. The result is as follows.<br />
<br />
[[File:sketchtable1.png|700px|center]]<br />
<br />
We could see the trade-off between <math>L_R</math> and <math>L_{KL}</math> in this table clearly. Furthermore, <math>L_R</math> decreases as <math>w_{KL} </math> is halfed. <br />
<br />
=== Conditional Reconstruction ===<br />
The authors assess the reconstructed sketch with a given sketch with different <math>\tau</math> values. We could see that with high <math>\tau</math> value on the right, the reconstructed sketches are more random. The reconstructed sketches have similar properties as the input image , and occasionally add or remove few minor details. <br />
<br />
[[File:sketchfig5.png|700px|center]]<br />
<br />
They also experiment on inputting a sketch from a different class. The output will still keep some features from the class that the model is trained on.<br />
<br />
=== Latent Space Interpolation ===<br />
The authors visualize the reconstruction sketches while interpolating between latent vectors using different <math>w_{KL}</math> values. As Gaussian prior is enforced on the latent space, fewer gaps are expected in the latent space between two encoded vectors. A model trained using higher <math>w_{KL}</math> is expected to produce images that are close to the data manifold. To show this authors trained several models using various values of <math>w_{KL}</math> and showed through experimentation that with high <math>w_{KL}</math> values, the generated images are more coherently interpolated.<br />
<br />
[[File:sketchfig6.png|700px|center]]<br />
<br />
=== Sketch Drawing Analogies ===<br />
Since the latent vector <math>z</math> encode conceptual features of a sketch, those features can also be used to augment other sketches that do not have these features. This is possible when models are trained with low <math>L_{KL}</math> values. Given the smoothness of the latent space, where any interpolated vector between two latent vectors results in a coherent sketch, we can perform vector arithmetic on the latent vectors encoded from different sketches and explore how the model organizes the latent space to represent different concepts in the manifold of generated sketches. For instance, we can subtract the latent vector of an encoded pig head from the latent vector of a full pig, to arrive at a vector that represents a body. Adding this difference to the latent vector of a cat head results in a full cat (i.e. cat head + body = full cat).<br />
<br />
=== Predicting Different Endings of Incomplete Sketches === <br />
This model is able to predict an incomplete sketch by encoding the sketch into hidden state <math>h</math> using the decoder and then using <math>h</math> as an initial hidden state to generate the remaining sketch. The authors train on individual classes by using decoder-only models and set <math>τ = 0.8</math> to complete samples. Figure 7 shows the results.<br />
<br />
[[File:sketchfig7.png|700px|center]]<br />
<br />
== Limitations ==<br />
<br />
Although sketch-rnn can model a large variety of sketch drawings, there are several limitations in the current approach. For most single-class datasets, sketch-rnn is capable of modeling around 300 data points. The model becomes increasingly difficult to train beyond this length. For the author's dataset, the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker algorithm is used to simplify the strokes of sketch data to less than 200 data points.<br />
<br />
For more complicated classes of images, such as mermaids or lobsters, the reconstruction loss metrics are not as good compared to simpler classes such as ants, faces or firetrucks. The models trained on these more challenging image classes tend to draw smoother, more circular line segments that do not resemble individual sketches, but rather resemble an averaging of many sketches in the training set. This smoothness may be analogous to the blurriness effect produced by a Variational Autoencoder that is trained on pixel images. Depending on the use case of the model, smooth circular lines can be viewed as aesthetically pleasing and a desirable property.<br />
<br />
While both conditional and unconditional models are capable of training on datasets of several classes, sketch-rnn is ineffective at modeling a large number of classes simultaneously. The samples generated will be incoherent, with different classes are shown in the same sketch.<br />
<br />
== Applications and Future Work ==<br />
The authors believe this model can assist artists by suggesting how to finish a sketch, helping them to find interesting intersections between different drawings or objects, or generating a lot of similar but different designs. In the simplest use, pattern designers can apply sketch-rnn to generate a large number of similar, but unique designs for textile or wallpaper prints. The creative designers can also come up with abstract designs which enables them to resonate more with their target audience<br />
<br />
This model may also find its place on teaching students how to draw. Even with the simple sketches in QuickDraw, the authors of this work have become much more proficient at drawing animals, insects, and various sea creatures after conducting these experiments. <br />
When the model is trained with a high <math>w_{KL}</math> and sampled with a low <math>\tau</math>, it may help to turn a poor sketch into a more aesthetical one. Latent vector augmentation could also help to create a better drawing by inputting user-rating data during training processes.<br />
<br />
The authors conclude by providing the following future directions to this work:<br />
# Investigate using user-rating data to augmenting the latent vector in the direction that maximizes the aesthetics of the drawing.<br />
# Look into combining variations of sequence-generation models with unsupervised, cross-domain pixel image generation models.<br />
<br />
It's exciting that they manage to combine this model with other unsupervised, cross-domain pixel image generation models to create photorealistic images from sketches.<br />
<br />
The authors have also mentioned the opposite direction of converting a photograph of an object into an unrealistic, but similar looking<br />
sketch of the object composed of a minimal number of lines to be a more interesting problem.<br />
<br />
Moreover, it would be interesting to see how varying loss will be represented as a drawing. Some exotic form of loss function may change the way that the network behaves, which can lead to various applications.<br />
<br />
== Conclusion ==<br />
The paper presents a methodology to model sketch drawings using recurrent neural networks. The sketch-rnn model that can encode and decode sketches, generate and complete unfinished sketches is introduced in this paper. In addition, Authors demonstrated how to both interpolate between latent spaces from a different class, and use it to augment sketches or generate similar looking sketches. Furthermore, the importance of enforcing a prior distribution on latent vector while interpolating coherent sketch generations is shown. Finally, a large sketch drawings dataset for future research work is created.<br />
<br />
== Critique ==<br />
This paper presents both a novel large dataset of sketches and a new RNN architecture to generate new sketches. Although its exciting to read about, many improvements can be done.<br />
<br />
* The performance of the decoder model can hardly be evaluated. The authors present the performance of the decoder by showing the generated sketches, it is clear and straightforward, however, not very efficient. It would be great if the authors could present a way, or a metric to evaluate how well the sketches are generated rather than printing them out and evaluate with human judgment. The authors didn't present an evaluation of the algorithms either. They provided <math>L_R</math> and <math>L_{KL}</math> for reference, however, a lower loss doesn't represent a better performance. Training loss alone likely does not capture the quality of a sketch.<br />
<br />
* The authors have not mentioned details on training details such as learning rate, training time, parameter size, and so on. <br />
<br />
* Algorithm lacks comparison to the prior state of the art on standard metrics, which made the novelty unclear. Using strokes as inputs is a novel and innovative move, however, the paper does not provide a baseline or any comparison with other methods or algorithms. Some other researches were mentioned in the paper, using similar and smaller datasets. It would be great if the authors could use some basic or existing methods a baseline and compare with the new algorithm.<br />
<br />
* Besides the comparison with other algorithms, it would also be great if the authors could remove or replace some component of the algorithm in the model to show if one part is necessary, or what made them decide to include a specific component in the algorithm.<br />
<br />
* The authors did not present better complexity and deeper mathematical analysis on the algorithms in the paper. It also does not include comparison using some more standard metrics compare to previous results. Therefore, it lacks some algorithmic contribution. It would be better to include some more formal analysis on the algorithmic side. <br />
<br />
* The authors proposed a few future applications for the model, however, the current output seems somehow not very close to their descriptions. But I do believe that this is a very good beginning, with the release of the sketch dataset, it must attract more scholars to research and improve with it!<br />
<br />
* As they said their model can become increasingly difficult to train on with increased size.<br />
<br />
== References == <br />
# Jimmy L. Ba, Jamie R. Kiros, and Geoffrey E. Hinton. Layer normalization. NIPS, 2016.<br />
# Christopher M. Bishop. Mixture density networks. Technical Report, 1994. URL http://publications.aston.ac.uk/373/.<br />
# Samuel R. Bowman, Luke Vilnis, Oriol Vinyals, Andrew M. Dai, Rafal Józefowicz, and Samy Bengio. Generating Sentences from a Continuous Space. CoRR, abs/1511.06349, 2015. URL http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06349.<br />
# H. Dong, P. Neekhara, C. Wu, and Y. Guo. Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation with Generative Adversarial Networks. ArXiv e-prints, January 2017.<br />
# David H. Douglas and Thomas K. Peucker. Algorithms for the reduction of the number of points required to represent a digitized line or its caricature. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 10(2):112–122, October 1973. doi: 10.3138/fm57-6770-u75u-7727. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/fm57-6770-u75u-7727.<br />
# Mathias Eitz, James Hays, and Marc Alexa. How Do Humans Sketch Objects? ACM Trans. Graph.(Proc. SIGGRAPH), 31(4):44:1–44:10, 2012.<br />
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# Alex Graves. Generating sequences with recurrent neural networks. arXiv:1308.0850, 2013.<br />
# David Ha. Recurrent Net Dreams Up Fake Chinese Characters in Vector Format with TensorFlow, 2015.<br />
# David Ha, Andrew M. Dai, and Quoc V. Le. HyperNetworks. In ICLR, 2017.<br />
# Sepp Hochreiter and Juergen Schmidhuber. Long short-term memory. Neural Computation, 1997.<br />
# P. Isola, J.-Y. Zhu, T. Zhou, and A. A. Efros. Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks. ArXiv e-prints, November 2016.<br />
# Jonas Jongejan, Henry Rowley, Takashi Kawashima, Jongmin Kim, and Nick Fox-Gieg. The Quick, Draw! - A.I. Experiment. https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/, 2016. URL https: //quickdraw.withgoogle.com/.<br />
# C. Kaae Sønderby, T. Raiko, L. Maaløe, S. Kaae Sønderby, and O. Winther. Ladder Variational Autoencoders. ArXiv e-prints, February 2016.<br />
# T. Kim, M. Cha, H. Kim, J. Lee, and J. Kim. Learning to Discover cross-domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networks. ArXiv e-prints, March 2017.<br />
# D. P Kingma and M. Welling. Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes. ArXiv e-prints, December 2013.<br />
# Diederik Kingma and Jimmy Ba. Adam: A method for stochastic optimization. In ICLR, 2015.<br />
# Diederik P. Kingma, Tim Salimans, and Max Welling. Improving variational inference with inverse autoregressive flow. CoRR, abs/1606.04934, 2016. URL http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04934.<br />
# Brenden M. Lake, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. Human level concept learning through probabilistic program induction. Science, 350(6266):1332–1338, December 2015. ISSN 1095-9203. doi: 10.1126/science.aab3050. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aab3050.<br />
# Yong Jae Lee, C. Lawrence Zitnick, and Michael F. Cohen. Shadowdraw: Real-time user guidance for freehand drawing. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 Papers, SIGGRAPH ’11, pp. 27:1–27:10, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-0943-1. doi: 10.1145/1964921.1964922. URL http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1964921.1964922.<br />
# M.-Y. Liu, T. Breuel, and J. Kautz. Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks. ArXiv e-prints, March 2017.<br />
# S. Reed, A. van den Oord, N. Kalchbrenner, S. Gómez Colmenarejo, Z. Wang, D. Belov, and N. de Freitas. Parallel Multiscale Autoregressive Density Estimation. ArXiv e-prints, March 2017.<br />
# Patsorn Sangkloy, Nathan Burnell, Cusuh Ham, and James Hays. The Sketchy Database: Learning to Retrieve Badly Drawn Bunnies. ACM Trans. Graph., 35(4):119:1–119:12, July 2016. ISSN 0730-0301. doi: 10.1145/2897824.2925954. URL http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2897824.2925954.<br />
# Mike Schuster, Kuldip K. Paliwal, and A. General. Bidirectional recurrent neural networks. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 1997.<br />
# Saul Simhon and Gregory Dudek. Sketch interpretation and refinement using statistical models. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Eurographics Conference on Rendering Techniques, EGSR’04, pp. 23–32, Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland, Switzerland, 2004. Eurographics Association. ISBN 3-905673-12-6. doi: 10.2312/EGWR/EGSR04/023-032. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.2312/EGWR/EGSR04/023-032.<br />
# Patrick Tresset and Frederic Fol Leymarie. Portrait drawing by paul the robot. Comput. Graph.,37(5):348–363, August 2013. ISSN 0097-8493. doi: 10.1016/j.cag.2013.01.012. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2013.01.012.<br />
# T. White. Sampling Generative Networks. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.04468 ArXiv e-prints], September 2016.<br />
#Ning Xie, Hirotaka Hachiya, and Masashi Sugiyama. Artist agent: A reinforcement learning approach to automatic stroke generation in oriental ink painting. In ICML. icml.cc / Omnipress, 2012. URL http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/icml/icml2012.html#XieHS12.<br />
# Xu-Yao Zhang, Fei Yin, Yan-Ming Zhang, Cheng-Lin Liu, and Yoshua Bengio. Drawing and Recognizing Chinese Characters with Recurrent Neural Network. CoRR, abs/1606.06539, 2016. URL http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06539.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=CapsuleNets&diff=42441CapsuleNets2018-12-14T04:50:38Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div>The paper "Dynamic Routing Between Capsules" was written by three researchers at Google Brain: Sara Sabour, Nicholas Frosst, and Geoffrey E. Hinton. This paper was published and presented at the 31st Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2017) in Long Beach, California. The same three researchers recently published a highly related paper "[https://openreview.net/pdf?id=HJWLfGWRb Matrix Capsules with EM Routing]" for ICLR 2018. Source code in tensorflow can be found here [https://github.com/naturomics/CapsNet-Tensorflow]<br />
<br />
=Motivation=<br />
<br />
Ever since AlexNet eclipsed the performance of competing architectures in the 2012 ImageNet challenge, convolutional neural networks have maintained their dominance in computer vision applications. Despite the recent successes and innovations brought about by convolutional neural networks, some assumptions made in these networks are perhaps unwarranted and deficient. Using a novel neural network architecture, the authors create CapsuleNets, a network that they claim is able to learn image representations in a more robust, human-like manner. With only a 3 layer capsule network, they achieved near state-of-the-art results on MNIST.<br />
<br />
The activities of the neurons within an active capsule represent the various properties of a particular entity that is present in the image. These properties can include many different types of instantiation parameter such as pose (position, size, orientation), deformation, velocity, albedo, hue, texture, etc. One very special property is the existence of the instantiated entity in the image. An obvious way to represent existence is by using a separate logistic unit whose output is the probability that the entity exists. This paper explores an interesting alternative which is to use the overall length of the vector of instantiation parameters to represent the existence of the entity and to force the orientation of the vector to represent the properties of the entity. The length of the vector output of a capsule cannot exceed 1 because of an application of a non-linearity that leaves the orientation of the vector unchanged but scales down its magnitude.<br />
<br />
The fact that the output of a capsule is a vector makes it possible to use a powerful dynamic routing mechanism to ensure that the output of the capsule gets sent to an appropriate parent in the layer above. Initially, the output is routed to all possible parents but is scaled down by coupling coefficients that sum to 1. For each possible parent, the capsule computes a “prediction vector” by multiplying its own output by a weight matrix. If this prediction vector has a large scalar product with the output of a possible parent, there is top-down feedback which increases the coupling coefficient for that parent and decreasing it for other parents. This increases the contribution that the capsule makes to that parent thus further increasing the scalar product of the capsule’s prediction with the parent’s output. This type of “routing-by-agreement” should be far more effective than the very primitive form of routing implemented by max-pooling, which allows neurons in one layer to ignore all but the most active feature detector in a local pool in the layer below. The authors demonstrate that their dynamic routing mechanism is an effective way to implement the “explaining away” that is needed for segmenting highly overlapping objects<br />
<br />
==Adversarial Examples==<br />
<br />
First discussed by Christian Szegedy et. al. in late 2013, adversarial examples have been heavily discussed by the deep learning community as a potential security threat to AI learning. Adversarial examples are defined as inputs that an attacker creates intentionally to fool a machine learning model. An example of an adversarial example is shown below: <br />
<br />
[[File:adversarial_img_1.png |center]]<br />
<br />
To human eyes, the image appears to be a panda both before and after noise is injected into the image, whereas the trained ConvNet model discerns the noisy image as a Gibbon with almost 100% certainty. The fact that the network is unable to classify the above image as a panda after the epsilon perturbation leads to many potential security risks in AI dependent systems such as self-driving vehicles. Although various methods have been suggested to combat adversarial examples, robust defenses are hard to construct due to the inherent difficulties in constructing theoretical models for the adversarial example crafting process. However, beyond the fact that these examples may serve as a security threat, it emphasizes that these convolutional neural networks do not learn image classification/object detection patterns the same way that a human would. Rather than identifying the core features of a panda such as its eyes, mouth, nose, and the gradient changes in its black/white fur, the convolutional neural network seems to be learning image representations in a completely different manner. Deep learning researchers often attempt to model neural networks after human learning, and it is clear that further steps must be taken to robustify ConvNets against targeted noise perturbations.<br />
<br />
==Drawbacks of CNNs==<br />
Hinton claims that the key fault with traditional CNNs lies within the pooling function. Although pooling builds translational invariance into the network, it fails to preserve spatial relationships between objects. When we pool, we effectively reduce a <math>k \cdot k</math> kernel of convolved cells into a scalar input. This results in a desired local invariance without inhibiting the network's ability to detect features but causes valuable spatial information to be lost.<br />
<br />
Also, in CNNs, higher-level features combine lower-level features as a weighted sum: activations of a previous layer multiplied by the current layer's weight, then passed to another activation function. In this process, pose relationship between simpler features is not part of the higher-level feature.<br />
<br />
In the example below, the network is able to detect the similar features (eyes, mouth, nose, etc) within both images, but fails to recognize that one image is a human face, while the other is a Picasso-esque due to the CNN's inability to encode spatial relationships after multiple pooling layers.<br />
In deep learning, the activation level of a neuron is often interpreted as the likelihood of detecting a specific feature. CNNs are good at detecting features but less effective at exploring the spatial relationships among features (perspective, size, orientation). <br />
<br />
[[File:Equivariance Face.png |center]]<br />
<br />
Here, the CNN could wrongly activate the neuron for the face detection. Without realizing the mismatch in spatial orientation and size, the activation for the face detection will be too high.<br />
<br />
Conversely, we hope that a CNN can recognize that both of the following pictures contain a kitten. Unfortunately, when we feed the two images into a ResNet50 architecture, only the first image is correctly classified, while the second image is predicted to be a guinea pig.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:kitten.jpeg |center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:kitten-rotated-180.jpg |center]]<br />
<br />
For a more in-depth discussion on the problems with ConvNets, please listen to Geoffrey Hinton's talk "What is wrong with convolutional neural nets?" given at MIT during the Brain & Cognitive Sciences - Fall Colloquium Series (December 4, 2014).<br />
<br />
==Intuition for Capsules==<br />
Human vision ignores irrelevant details by using a carefully determined sequence of fixation points to ensure that only a tiny fraction of the optic array is ever processed at the highest resolution. Hinton argues that our brains reason visual information by deconstructing it into a hierarchical representation which we then match to familiar patterns and relationships from memory. The key difference between this understanding and the functionality of CNNs is that recognition of an object should not depend on the angle from which it is viewed. <br />
<br />
To enforce rotational and translational equivariance, Capsule Networks store and preserve hierarchical pose relationships between objects. The core idea behind capsule theory is the explicit numerical representations of relative relationships between different objects within an image. Building these relationships into the Capsule Networks model, the network is able to recognize newly seen objects as a rotated view of a previously seen object. For example, the below image shows the Statue of Liberty under five different angles. If a person had only seen the Statue of Liberty from one angle, they would be able to ascertain that all five pictures below contain the same object (just from a different angle).<br />
<br />
[[File:Rotational Invariance.jpeg |center]]<br />
<br />
Building on this idea of hierarchical representation of spatial relationships between key entities within an image, the authors introduce Capsule Networks. Unlike traditional CNNs, Capsule Networks are better equipped to classify correctly under rotational invariance. Furthermore, the authors managed to achieve state of the art results on MNIST using a fraction of the training samples that alternative state of the art networks requires.<br />
<br />
=Background, Notation, and Definitions=<br />
<br />
==What is a Capsule==<br />
"Each capsule learns to recognize an implicitly defined visual entity over a limited domain of viewing conditions and deformations and it outputs both the probability that the entity is present within its limited domain and a set of “instantiation parameters” that may include the precise pose, lighting, and deformation of the visual entity relative to an implicitly defined canonical version of that entity. When the capsule is working properly, the probability of the visual entity being present is locally invariant — it does not change as the entity moves over the manifold of possible appearances within the limited domain covered by the capsule. The instantiation parameters, however, are “equivariant” — as the viewing conditions change and the entity moves over the appearance manifold, the instantiation parameters change by a corresponding amount because they are representing the intrinsic coordinates of the entity on the appearance manifold."<br />
<br />
In essence, capsules store object properties in a vector form; probability of detection is encoded as the vector's length, while spatial properties are encoded as the individual vector components. Thus, when a feature is present but the image captures it under a different angle, the probability of detection remains unchanged.<br />
<br />
A brief overview/understanding of capsules can be found in other papers from the author. To quote from [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=HJWLfGWRb this paper]:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
A capsule network consists of several layers of capsules. The set of capsules in layer <math>L</math> is denoted<br />
as <math>\Omega_L</math>. Each capsule has a 4x4 pose matrix, <math>M</math>, and an activation probability, <math>a</math>. These are like the<br />
activities in a standard neural net: they depend on the current input and are not stored. In between<br />
each capsule <math>i</math> in layer <math>L</math> and each capsule <math>j</math> in layer <math>L + 1</math> is a 4x4 trainable transformation matrix,<br />
<math>W_{ij}</math> . These <math>W_{ij}</math>'s (and two learned biases per capsule) are the only stored parameters and they<br />
are learned discriminatively. The pose matrix of capsule <math>i</math> is transformed by <math>W_{ij}</math> to cast a vote<br />
<math>V_{ij} = M_iW_{ij}</math> for the pose matrix of capsule <math>j</math>. The poses and activations of all the capsules in layer<br />
<math>L + 1</math> are calculated by using a non-linear routing procedure which gets as input <math>V_{ij}</math> and <math>a_i</math> for all<br />
<math>i \in \Omega_L, j \in \Omega_{L+1}</math><br />
</blockquote><br />
<math></math><br />
<br />
==Notation==<br />
<br />
We want the length of the output vector of a capsule to represent the probability that the entity represented by the capsule is present in the current input. The paper performs a non-linear squashing operation to ensure that vector length falls between 0 and 1, with shorter vectors (less likely to exist entities) being shrunk towards 0. <br />
<br />
\begin{align} \mathbf{v}_j &= \frac{||\mathbf{s}_j||^2}{1+ ||\mathbf{s}_j||^2} \frac{\mathbf{s}_j}{||\mathbf{s}_j||} \end{align}<br />
<br />
where <math>\mathbf{v}_j</math> is the vector output of capsule <math>j</math> and <math>s_j</math> is its total input.<br />
<br />
For all but the first layer of capsules, the total input to a capsule <math>s_j</math> is a weighted sum over all “prediction vectors” <math>\hat{\mathbf{u}}_{j|i}</math> from the capsules in the layer below and is produced by multiplying the output <math>\mathbf{u}_i</math> of a capsule in the layer below by a weight matrix <math>\mathbf{W}ij</math><br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\mathbf{s}_j = \sum_i c_{ij}\hat{\mathbf{u}}_{j|i}, ~\hspace{0.5em} \hat{\mathbf{u}}_{j|i}= \mathbf{W}_{ij}\mathbf{u}_i<br />
\end{align}<br />
where the <math>c_{ij}</math> are coupling coefficients that are determined by the iterative dynamic routing process.<br />
<br />
The coupling coefficients between capsule <math>i</math> and all the capsules in the layer above sum to 1 and are determined by a “routing softmax” whose initial logits <math>b_{ij}</math> are the log prior probabilities that capsule <math>i</math> should be coupled to capsule <math>j</math>.<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
c_{ij} = \frac{\exp(b_{ij})}{\sum_k \exp(b_{ik})}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
=Network Training and Dynamic Routing=<br />
<br />
==Understanding Capsules==<br />
The notation can get somewhat confusing, so I will provide intuition behind the computational steps within a capsule. The following image is taken from naturomic's talk on Capsule Networks.<br />
<br />
[[File:CapsuleNets.jpeg|center|800px]]<br />
<br />
The above image illustrates the key mathematical operations happening within a capsule (and compares them to the structure of a neuron). Although the operations are rather straightforward, it's crucial to note that the capsule computes an affine transformation onto each input vector. The length of the input vectors <math>\mathbf{u}_{i}</math> represent the probability of entity <math>i</math> existing in a lower level. This vector is then reoriented with an affine transform using <math>\mathbf{W}_{ij}</math> matrices that encode spatial relationships between entity <math>\mathbf{u}_{i}</math> and other lower level features.<br />
<br />
We illustrate the intuition behind vector-to-vector matrix multiplication within capsules using the following example: if vectors <math>\mathbf{u}_{1}</math>, <math>\mathbf{u}_{2}</math>, and <math>\mathbf{u}_{3}</math> represent detection of eyes, nose, and mouth respectively, then after multiplication with trained weight matrices <math>\mathbf{W}_{ij}</math> (where j denotes existence of a face), we should get a general idea of the general location of the higher level feature (face), similar to the image below.<br />
<br />
[[File:Predictions.jpeg |center]]<br />
<br />
==Dynamic Routing==<br />
A capsule <math>i</math> in a lower-level layer needs to decide how to send its output vector to higher-level capsules <math>j</math>. This decision is made with probability proportional to <math>c_{ij}</math>. If there are <math>K</math> capsules in the level that capsule <math>i</math> routes to, then we know the following properties about <math>c_{ij}</math>: <math>\sum_{j=1}^M c_{ij} = 1, c_{ij} \geq 0</math><br />
<br />
In essence, the <math>\{c_{ij}\}_{j=1}^M</math> denotes a discrete probability distribution with respect to capsule <math>i</math>'s output location. Lower level capsules decide which higher level capsules to send vectors into by adjusting the corresponding routing weights <math>\{c_{ij}\}_{j=1}^M</math>. After a few iterations in training, numerous vectors will have already been sent to all higher level capsules. Based on the similarity between the current vector being routed and all vectors already sent into the higher level capsules, we decide which capsule to send the current vector into.<br />
[[File:Dynamic Routing.png|center|900px]]<br />
<br />
From the image above, we notice that a cluster of points similar to the current vector has already been routed into capsule K, while most points in capsule J are highly dissimilar. It thus makes more sense to route the current observations into capsule K; we adjust the corresponding weights upward during training.<br />
<br />
These weights are determined through the dynamic routing procedure:<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:Routing Algo.png|900px]]<br />
<br />
Note that the convergence of this routing procedure has been questioned. Although it is empirically shown that this procedure converges, the convergence has not been proven.<br />
<br />
Although dynamic routing is not the only manner in which we can encode relationships between capsules, the premise of the paper is to demonstrate the capabilities of capsules under a simple implementation. Since the paper was released in 2017, numerous alternative routing implementations have been released including an EM matrix routing algorithm by the same authors (ICLR 2018).<br />
<br />
=Architecture=<br />
The capsule network architecture given by the authors has 11.36 million trainable parameters. The paper itself is not very detailed on exact implementation of each architectural layer, and hence it leaves some degree of ambiguity on coding various aspects of the original network. The capsule network has 6 overall layers, with the first three layers denoting components of the encoder, and the last 3 denoting components of the decoder.<br />
<br />
==Loss Function==<br />
[[File:Loss Function.png|900px]]<br />
<br />
The cost function looks very complicated, but can be broken down into intuitive components. Before diving into the equation, remember that the length of the vector denotes the probability of object existence. The left side of the equation denotes loss when the network classifies an observation correctly; the term becomes zero when the classification is incorrect. To compute loss when the network correctly classifies the label, we subtract the vector norm from a fixed quantity <math>m^+ := 0.9</math>. On the other hand, when the network classifies a label incorrectly, we penalize the loss based on the network's confidence in the incorrect label; we compute the loss by subtracting <math>m^- := 0.1</math> from the vector norm.<br />
<br />
A graphical representation of loss function values under varying vector norms is given below.<br />
[[File:Loss function chart.png|900px]]<br />
<br />
==Encoder Layers==<br />
All experiments within this paper were conducted on the MNIST dataset, and thus the architecture is built to classify the corresponding dataset. For more complex datasets, the experiments were less promising. <br />
<br />
[[File:Architecture.png|center|900px]]<br />
<br />
The encoder layer takes in a 28x28 MNIST image and learns a 16 dimensional representation of instantiation parameters.<br />
<br />
'''Layer 1: Convolution''': <br />
This layer is a standard convolution layer. Using kernels with size 9x9x1, a stride of 1, and a ReLU activation function, we detect the 2D features within the network.<br />
<br />
'''Layer 2: PrimaryCaps''': <br />
We represent the low level features detected during convolution as 32 primary capsules. Each capsule applies eight convolutional kernels with stride 2 to the output of the convolution layer and feeds the corresponding transformed tensors into the DigiCaps layer.<br />
<br />
'''Layer 3: DigiCaps''': <br />
This layer contains 10 digit capsules, one for each digit. As explained in the dynamic routing procedure, each input vector from the PrimaryCaps layer has its own corresponding weight matrix <math>W_{ij}</math>. Using the routing coefficients <math>c_{ij}</math> and temporary coefficients <math>b_{ij}</math>, we train the DigiCaps layer to output ten 16 dimensional vectors. The length of the <math>i^{th}</math> vector in this layer corresponds to the probability of detection of digit <math>i</math>.<br />
<br />
==Decoder Layers==<br />
The decoder layer aims to train the capsules to extract meaningful features for image detection/classification. During training, it takes the 16 layer instantiation vector of the correct (not predicted) DigiCaps layer, and attempts to recreate the 28x28 MNIST image as best as possible. Setting the loss function as reconstruction error (Euclidean distance between the reconstructed image and original image), we tune the capsules to encode features that are meaningful within the actual image.<br />
<br />
[[File:Decoder.png|center|900px]]<br />
<br />
The layer consists of three fully connected layers, and transforms a 16x1 vector from the encoder layer into a 28x28 image.<br />
<br />
In addition to the digicaps loss function, we add reconstruction error as a form of regularization. During training, everything but the activity vector of the correct digit capsule is masked, and then this activity vector is used to reconstruct the input image. We minimize the Euclidean distance between the outputs of the logistic units and the pixel intensities of the original and reconstructed images. We scale down this reconstruction loss by 0.0005 so that it does not dominate the margin loss during training. As illustrated below, reconstructions from the 16D output of the CapsNet are robust while keeping only important details.<br />
<br />
[[File:Reconstruction.png|center|900px]]<br />
<br />
=MNIST Experimental Results=<br />
<br />
==Accuracy==<br />
The paper tests on the MNIST dataset with 60K training examples, and 10K testing. Wan et al. [2013] achieves 0.21% test error with ensembling and augmenting the data with rotation and scaling. They achieve 0.39% without them. As shown in Table 1, the authors manage to achieve 0.25% test error with only a 3 layer network; the previous state of the art only beat this number with very deep networks. This example shows the importance of routing and reconstruction regularizer, which boosts the performance. On the other hand, while the accuracies are very high, the number of parameters is much smaller compared to the baseline model.<br />
<br />
[[File:Accuracies.png|center|900px]]<br />
<br />
==What Capsules Represent for MNIST==<br />
The following figure shows the digit representation under capsules. Each row shows the reconstruction when one of the 16 dimensions in the DigitCaps representation is tweaked by intervals of 0.05 in the range [−0.25, 0.25]. By tweaking the values, we notice how the reconstruction changes, and thus get a sense for what each dimension is representing. The authors found that some dimensions represent global properties of the digits, while other represent localized properties. <br />
[[File:CapsuleReps.png|center|900px]]<br />
<br />
One example the authors provide is: different dimensions are used for the length of the ascender of a 6 and the size of the loop. The variations include stroke thickness, skew and width, as well as digit-specific variations. The authors are able to show dimension representations using a decoder network by feeding a perturbed vector.<br />
<br />
==Robustness of CapsNet==<br />
The authors conclude that DigitCaps capsules learn more robust representations for each digit class than traditional CNNs. The trained CapsNet becomes moderately robust to small affine transformations in the test data.<br />
<br />
To compare the robustness of CapsNet to affine transformations against traditional CNNs, both models (CapsNet and a traditional CNN with MaxPooling and DropOut) were trained on a padded and translated MNIST training set, in which each example is an MNIST digit placed randomly on a black background of 40 × 40 pixels. The networks were then tested on the [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~tijmen/affNIST/ affNIST] dataset (MNIST digits with random affine transformation). An under-trained CapsNet which achieved 99.23% accuracy on the MNIST test set achieved a corresponding 79% accuracy on the affnist test set. A traditional CNN achieved similar accuracy (99.22%) on the mnist test set, but only 66% on the affnist test set.<br />
<br />
=MultiMNIST & Other Experiments=<br />
<br />
==MultiMNIST==<br />
To evaluate the performance of the model on highly overlapping digits, the authors generate a 'MultiMNIST' dataset. In MultiMNIST, images are two overlaid MNIST digits of the same set(train or test) but different classes. The results indicate a classification error rate of 5%. Additionally, CapsNet can be used to segment the image into the two digits that compose it. Moreover, the model is able to deal with the overlaps and reconstruct digits correctly since each digit capsule can learn the style from the votes of PrimaryCapsules layer (Figure 5).<br />
<br />
There are some additional steps to generating the MultiMNIST dataset.<br />
<br />
1. Both images are shifted by up to 4 pixels in each direction resulting in a 36 × 36 image. Bounding boxes of digits in MNIST overlap by approximately 80%, so this is used to make both digits identifiable (since there is no RGB difference learnable by the network to separate the digits)<br />
<br />
2. The label becomes a vector of two numbers, representing the original digit and the randomly generated (and overlaid) digit.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:CapsuleNets MultiMNIST.PNG|600px|thumb|center|Figure 5: Sample reconstructions of a CapsNet with 3 routing iterations on MultiMNIST test dataset.<br />
The two reconstructed digits are overlayed in green and red as the lower image. The upper image<br />
shows the input image. L:(l1; l2) represents the label for the two digits in the image and R:(r1; r2)<br />
represents the two digits used for reconstruction. The two right most columns show two examples<br />
with wrong classification reconstructed from the label and from the prediction (P). In the (2; 8)<br />
example the model confuses 8 with a 7 and in (4; 9) it confuses 9 with 0. The other columns have<br />
correct classifications and show that the model accounts for all the pixels while being able to assign<br />
one pixel to two digits in extremely difficult scenarios (column 1 − 4). Note that in dataset generation<br />
the pixel values are clipped at 1. The two columns with the (*) mark show reconstructions from a<br />
digit that is neither the label nor the prediction. These columns suggest that the model is not just<br />
finding the best fit for all the digits in the image including the ones that do not exist. Therefore in case<br />
of (5; 0) it cannot reconstruct a 7 because it knows that there is a 5 and 0 that fit best and account for<br />
all the pixels. Also, in the case of (8; 1) the loop of 8 has not triggered 0 because it is already accounted<br />
for by 8. Therefore it will not assign one pixel to two digits if one of them does not have any other<br />
support.]]<br />
<br />
==Other datasets==<br />
The authors also tested the proposed capsule model on CIFAR10 dataset and achieved an error rate of 10.6%. The model tested was an ensemble of 7 models. Each of the models in the ensemble had the same architecture as the model used for MNIST (apart from 3 additional channels and 64 different types of primary capsules being used). These 7 models were trained on 24x24 patches of the training images for 3 iterations. During experimentation, the authors also found out that adding an additional none-of-the-above category helped improved the overall performance. The error rate achieved is comparable to the error rate achieved by a standard CNN model. According to the authors, one of the reasons for low performance is the fact that background in CIFAR-10 images are too varied for it to be adequately modeled by reasonably sized capsule net.<br />
<br />
The proposed model was also evaluated using a small subset of SVHN dataset. The network trained was much smaller and trained using only 73257 training images. The network still managed to achieve an error rate of 4.3% on the test set.<br />
<br />
=Critique=<br />
Although the network performs incredibly favourable in the author's experiments, it has a long way to go on more complex datasets. On CIFAR-10, the network achieved subpar results, and the experimental results seem to be worse when the problem becomes more complex. This is anticipated, since these networks are still in their early stage; later innovations might come in the upcoming decades/years. It could also be wise to apply the model to other datasets with larger sizes to make the functionality more acceptable. MNIST dataset has simple patterns and even if the model wanted to be presented with only one dataset, it was better not to be MNIST dataset especially in this case that the focus is on human-eye detection and numbers are not that regular in real-life experiences.<br />
<br />
Hinton talks about CapsuleNets revolutionizing areas such as self-driving, but such groundbreaking innovations are far away from CIFAR-10, and even further from MNIST. Only time can tell if CapsNets will live up to their hype.<br />
<br />
Moreover, there is no underlying intuition provided on the main point of the paper which is that capsule nets preserve relations between extracted features from the proposed architecture. An explanation on the intuition behind this idea will go a long way in arguing against CNN networks.<br />
<br />
Capsules inherently segment images and learn a lower dimensional embedding in a new manner, which makes them likely to perform well on segmentation and computer vision tasks once further research is done. <br />
<br />
Additionally, these networks are more interpretable than CNNs, and have strong theoretical reasoning for why they could work. Naturally, it would be hard for a new architecture to beat the heavily researched/modified CNNs.<br />
<br />
* ([https://openreview.net/forum?id=HJWLfGWRb]) it's not fully clear how effective it can be performed / how scalable it is. Evaluation is performed on a small dataset for shape recognition. The approach will need to be tested on larger, more challenging datasets.<br />
<br />
=Future Work=<br />
The same authors [N. F. Geoffrey E Hinton, Sara Sabour] presented another paper "MATRIX CAPSULES WITH EM ROUTING" in ICLR 2018, which achieved better results than the work presented in this paper. They presented a new multi-layered capsule network architecture, implemented an EM routing procedure, and introduced "Coordinate Addition". While dynamic routing involves capsules voting on the pose matrix of many different capsules in the layer above, EM-routing iteratively updates coefficients for each image using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm such that the output of each capsule is routed to a capsule in the layer above that receives a cluster of similar votes. This new type reduced number of errors by 45%, and performed better than standard CNN on white box adversarial attacks. Capsule architectures are gaining interest because of their ability to achieve equivariance of parts, and employ a new form of pooling called "routing" (as opposed to max pooling) which groups parts that make similar predictions of the whole to which they belong, rather than relying on spatial co-locality.<br />
Moreover, the authors hint towards trying to change the curvature and sensitivities to various factors by introducing new form of loss function. It may improve the performance of the model for more complicated data set which is one of the model's drawback.<br />
<br />
Moreover, as mentioned in critiques, a good future work for this group would be making the model more robust to the dataset and achieve acceptable performance on datasets with more regularly seen images in real life experiences.<br />
<br />
=References=<br />
#N. F. Geoffrey E Hinton, Sara Sabour. Matrix capsules with em routing. In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2018.<br />
#S. Sabour, N. Frosst, and G. E. Hinton, “Dynamic routing between capsules,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.09829v2, 2017<br />
# Hinton, G. E., Krizhevsky, A. and Wang, S. D. (2011), Transforming Auto-encoders <br />
#Geoffrey Hinton's talk: What is wrong with convolutional neural nets? - Talk given at MIT. Brain & Cognitive Sciences - Fall Colloquium Series. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTawFwUvnLE ]<br />
#Understanding Hinton’s Capsule Networks - Max Pechyonkin's series [https://medium.com/ai%C2%B3-theory-practice-business/understanding-hintons-capsule-networks-part-i-intuition-b4b559d1159b]<br />
#Martín Abadi, Ashish Agarwal, Paul Barham, Eugene Brevdo, Zhifeng Chen, Craig Citro, Greg SCorrado, Andy Davis, Jeffrey Dean, Matthieu Devin, et al. Tensorflow: Large-scale machinelearning on heterogeneous distributed systems.arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.04467, 2016.<br />
#Jimmy Ba, Volodymyr Mnih, and Koray Kavukcuoglu. Multiple object recognition with visualattention.arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.7755, 2014.<br />
#Jia-Ren Chang and Yong-Sheng Chen. Batch-normalized maxout network in network.arXiv preprintarXiv:1511.02583, 2015.<br />
#Dan C Cire ̧san, Ueli Meier, Jonathan Masci, Luca M Gambardella, and Jürgen Schmidhuber. High-performance neural networks for visual object classification.arXiv preprint arXiv:1102.0183,2011.<br />
#Ian J Goodfellow, Yaroslav Bulatov, Julian Ibarz, Sacha Arnoud, and Vinay Shet. Multi-digit numberrecognition from street view imagery using deep convolutional neural networks.arXiv preprintarXiv:1312.6082, 2013.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=learn_what_not_to_learn&diff=42439learn what not to learn2018-12-14T04:45:17Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Related Work */</p>
<hr />
<div>=Introduction=<br />
<br />
In reinforcement learning, it is often difficult for an agent to learn when the action space is large, especially the difficulties from function approximation and exploration. Some previous work has been trying to use Monte Carlo Tree Search to help address this problem. Monte Carlo Tree Search is a heuristic search algorithm that helps provides some indication of how good is an action, it works relatively well in a problem where the action space is large(like the one in this paper). One of the famous examples would be Google's Alphago that defeated the world champion in 2016, which uses MCTS in their reinforcement learning algorithm for the board game Go. When the action space is large, one com In some cases many actions are irrelevant and it is sometimes easier for the algorithm to learn which action not to take. The paper proposes a new reinforcement learning approach for dealing with large action spaces based on action elimination by restricting the available actions in each state to a subset of the most likely ones. There is a core assumption being made in the proposed method that it is easier to predict which actions in each state are invalid or inferior and use that information for control. More specifically, it proposes a system that learns the approximation of a Q-function and concurrently learns to eliminate actions. The method utilizes an external elimination signal which incorporates domain-specific prior knowledge. For example, in parser-based text games, the parser gives feedback regarding irrelevant actions after the action is played (e.g., Player: "Climb the tree." Parser: "There are no trees to climb"). Then a machine learning model can be trained to generalize to unseen states. <br />
<br />
The paper focuses on tasks where both states and the actions are natural language. It introduces a novel deep reinforcement learning approach which has a Deep Q-Network (DQN) and an Action Elimination Network (AEN), both using the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The AEN is trained to predict invalid actions, supervised by the elimination signal from the environment. The proposed method uses the final layer activations of AEN to build a linear contextual bandit model which allows the elimination of sub-optimal actions with high probability. '''Note that the core assumption is that it is easy to predict which actions are invalid or inferior in each state and leverage that information for control.'''<br />
<br />
The text-based game called "Zork", which lets players to interact with a virtual world through a text-based interface is tested by using the elimination framework. <br />
In this game, the player explores an environment using imagination of the text he/she reads. For more info, you can watch this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzUagi41Wo0 Zork].<br />
<br />
The AEN algorithm has achieved a faster learning rate than the baseline agents by eliminating irrelevant actions.<br />
<br />
Below shows an example for the Zork interface:<br />
<br />
[[File:lnottol_fig1.png|500px|center]]<br />
<br />
All states and actions are given in natural language. Input for the game contains more than a thousand possible actions in each state since the player can type anything.<br />
<br />
=Related Work=<br />
<br />
'''Text-Based Games(TBG):''' The state of the environment in TBG is described by simple language. Players interact with the environment through text commands that<br />
respect a predefined grammar, which must be discovered in each game. A popular example is Zork which has been tested in the paper. TBG is a good research intersection of RL and NLP, it requires language understanding, long-term memory, planning, exploration, affordability extraction, and common sense. It also often introduce stochastic dynamics to increase randomness. They highlight several open problems for RL, mainly the combinatorial and compositional properties of the action space, and game states that are only partially observable. <br />
<br />
'''Representations for TBG:''' Good word representation is necessary in order to learn control policies from high-dimensional complex data such as text. Previous work on TBG used pre-trained embeddings directly for control, other works combined pre-trained embedding with neural networks. For example, He<br />
et al. (2015) proposed to consider an input as Bag Of Words features for a neural network, learned separately<br />
embeddings for states and actions, and then computed the Q function from autocorrelations between<br />
these embeddings.<br />
<br />
'''DRL with linear function approximation:''' DRL methods such as the DQN have achieved state-of-the-art results in a variety of challenging, high-dimensional domains. This success is mainly because neural networks can learn rich domain representations for value function and policy. On the other hand, linear representation batch reinforcement learning methods are more stable and accurate, while feature engineering is necessary.A natural attempt at getting the best of both worlds is to learn a linear control policy on top of the representation of the last layer of a DNN. This approach was shown to refine the performance of DQNs and improve exploration. Similarly, for contextual linear bandits, Riquelme et al. showed that a neuro-linear Thompson sampling approach outperformed deep<br />
and linear bandit algorithms in practice.<br />
<br />
'''RL in Large Action Spaces:''' Prior work concentrated on factorizing the action space into binary subspace(Pazis and Parr, 2011; Dulac-Arnold et al., 2012; Lagoudakis and Parr, 2003), other works proposed to embed the discrete actions into a continuous space, then choose the nearest discrete action according to the optimal actions in the continuous space(Dulac-Arnold et al., 2015; Van Hasselt and Wiering, 2009). He et. al. (2015)extended DQN to unbounded(natural language) action spaces.<br />
Learning to eliminate actions was first mentioned by (Even-Dar, Mannor, and Mansour, 2003). They proposed to learn confidence intervals around the value function in each state. Lipton et al.(2016a) proposed to learn a classifier that detects hazardous state and then use it to shape the reward. Fulda et al.(2017) presented a method for affordability extraction via inner products of pre-trained word embedding.<br />
<br />
=Action Elimination=<br />
<br />
The approach in the paper builds on the standard Reinforcement Learning formulation. At each time step <math>t</math>, the agent observes state <math display="inline">s_t </math> and chooses a discrete action <math display="inline">a_t\in\{1,...,|A|\} </math>. Then, after action execution, the agent obtains a reward <math display="inline">r_t(s_t,a_t) </math> and observes next state <math display="inline">s_{t+1} </math> according to a transition kernel <math>P(s_{t+1}|s_t,a_t)</math>. The goal of the algorithm is to learn a policy <math display="inline">\pi(a|s) </math> which maximizes the expected future discounted cumulative return <math display="inline">V^\pi(s)=E^\pi[\sum_{t=0}^{\infty}\gamma^tr(s_t,a_t)|s_0=s]</math>, where <math> 0< \gamma <1 </math>. The Q-function is <math display="inline">Q^\pi(s,a)=E^\pi[\sum_{t=0}^{\infty}\gamma^tr(s_t,a_t)|s_0=s,a_0=a]</math>, and it can be optimized by Q-learning algorithm.<br />
<br />
After executing an action, the agent observes a binary elimination signal <math>e(s, a)</math> to determine which actions not to take. It equals 1 if action <math>a</math> may be eliminated in state <math>s</math> (and 0 otherwise). The signal helps mitigating the problem of large discrete action spaces. We start with the following definitions:<br />
<br />
'''Definition 1:''' <br />
<br />
Valid state-action pairs with respect to an elimination signal are state action pairs which the elimination process should not eliminate. <br />
<br />
The set of valid state-action pairs contains all of the state-action pairs that are a part of some optimal policy, i.e., only strictly suboptimal state-actions can be invalid.<br />
<br />
'''Definition 2:'''<br />
<br />
Admissible state-action pairs with respect to an elimination algorithm are state action pairs which the elimination algorithm does not eliminate.<br />
<br />
'''Definition 3:'''<br />
<br />
Action Elimination Q-learning is a Q-learning algorithm which updates only admissible state-action pairs and chooses the best action in the next state from its admissible actions. We allow the base Q-learning algorithm to be any algorithm that converges to <math display="inline">Q^*</math> with probability 1 after observing each state-action infinitely often.<br />
<br />
==Advantages of Action Elimination==<br />
<br />
The main advantage of action elimination is that it allows the agent to overcome some of the main difficulties in large action spaces which are Function Approximation and Sample Complexity. <br />
<br />
Function approximation: Errors in the Q-function estimates may cause the learning algorithm to converge to a suboptimal policy, this phenomenon becomes more noticeable when the action space is large. Action elimination mitigates this effect by taking the max operator only on valid actions, thus, reducing potential overestimation errors. Besides, by ignoring the invalid actions, the function approximation can also learn a simpler mapping (i.e., only the Q-values of the valid state-action pairs) leading to faster convergence and better solution.<br />
<br />
Sample complexity: The sample complexity measures the number of steps during learning, in which the policy is not <math display="inline">\epsilon</math>-optimal. Assume that there are <math>A'</math> actions that should be eliminated and are <math>\epsilon</math>-optimal, i.e. their value is at least <math>V^*(s)-\epsilon</math>. The invalid action often returns no reward and doesn't change the state, (Lattimore and Hutter, 2012)resulting in an action gap of <math display="inline">\epsilon=(1-\gamma)V^*(s)</math>, and this translates to <math display="inline">V^*(s)^{-2}(1-\gamma)^{-5}log(1/\delta)</math> wasted samples for learning each invalid state-action pair. Practically, elimination algorithm can eliminate these invalid actions and therefore speed up the learning process approximately by <math display="inline">A/A'</math>.<br />
<br />
Because it is difficult to embed the elimination signal into the MDP, the authors use contextual multi-armed bandits to decouple the elimination signal from the MDP, which can correctly eliminate actions when applying standard Q learning into learning process.<br />
<br />
To embed the elimination signal, we can add an elimination penalty to shape rewards (e.g. decreasing the rewards when selecting the wrong actions). Due to the exploration of irrelevant actions during reward training/shaping, this becomes hard to tune, and slows down convergence/reduces efficiency. Another alternative is to design a policy using two interleaving signals (which are iteratively updated during policy gradient descent), maximizing the reward and minimizing the elimination signal error. This result unfortunately leads to high dependence and correlation between the two models, and each model affects the observations of the other model, which may make convergence difficult.<br />
<br />
==Action elimination with contextual bandits==<br />
<br />
Contextual bandit problem is a famous probability problem and is a natural extension from the multi-arm bandit problem.<br />
<br />
Let <math display="inline">x(s_t)\in R^d </math> be the feature representation of <math display="inline">s_t </math>. We assume that under this representation there exists a set of parameters <math display="inline">\theta_a^*\in \mathbb{R}^d </math> such that the elimination signal in state <math display="inline">s_t </math> is <math display="inline">e_t(s_t,a) = \theta_a^{*T}x(s_t)+\eta_t </math>, where <math display="inline"> \Vert\theta_a^*\Vert_2\leq S</math>. <math display="inline">\eta_t</math> is an R-subgaussian random variable with zero mean that models additive noise to the elimination signal. When there is no noise in the elimination signal, R=0. Otherwise, <math display="inline">R\leq 1</math> since the elimination signal is bounded in [0,1]. Assume the elimination signal satisfies: <math display="inline">0\leq E[e_t(s_t,a)]\leq l </math> for any valid action and <math display="inline"> u\leq E[e_t(s_t, a)]\leq 1</math> for any invalid action. And <math display="inline"> l\leq u</math>. Denote by <math display="inline">X_{t,a}</math> as the matrix whose rows are the observed state representation vectors in which action a was chosen, up to time t. <math display="inline">E_{t,a}</math> as the vector whose elements are the observed state representation elimination signals in which action a was chosen, up to time t. Denote the solution to the regularized linear regression <math display="inline">\Vert X_{t,a}\theta_{t,a}-E_{t,a}\Vert_2^2+\lambda\Vert \theta_{t,a}\Vert_2^2 </math> (for some <math display="inline">\lambda>0</math>) by <math display="inline">\hat{\theta}_{t,a}=\bar{V}_{t,a}^{-1}X_{t,a}^TE_{t,a} </math>, where <math display="inline">\bar{V}_{t,a}=\lambda I + X_{t,a}^TX_{t,a}</math>.<br />
<br />
<br />
According to Theorem 2 in (Abbasi-Yadkori, Pal, and Szepesvari, 2011), <math display="inline">|\hat{\theta}_{t,a}^{T}x(s_t)-\theta_a^{*T}x(s_t)|\leq\sqrt{\beta_t(\delta)x(s_t)^T\bar{V}_{t,a}^{-1}x(s_t)}\ \forall t>0</math>, where <math display="inline">\sqrt{\beta_t(\delta)}=R\sqrt{2\ \text{log}(\text{det}(\bar{V}_{t,a})^{1/2}\text{det}(\lambda I)^{-1/2}/\delta)}+\lambda^{1/2}S</math>, with probability of at least <math display="inline">1-\delta</math>. If <math display="inline">\forall s\ ,\Vert x(s)\Vert_2 \leq L</math>, then <math display="inline">\beta_t</math> can be bounded by <math display="inline">\sqrt{\beta_t(\delta)} \leq R \sqrt{d\ \text{log}(1+tL^2/\lambda/\delta)}+\lambda^{1/2}S</math>. Next, define <math display="inline">\tilde{\delta}=\delta/k</math> and bound this probability for all the actions. i.e., <math display="inline">\forall a,t>0</math><br />
<br />
<math display="inline">Pr(|\hat{\theta}_{t-1,a}^{T}x(s_t)-\theta_{t-1, a}^{*T}x(s_t)|\leq\sqrt{\beta_t(\tilde\delta)x(s_t)^T\bar{V}_{t - 1,a}^{-1}x(s_t)}) \leq 1-\delta</math><br />
<br />
Recall that <math display="inline">E[e_t(s,a)]=\theta_a^{*T}x(s_t)\leq l</math> if a is a valid action. Then we can eliminate action a at state <math display="inline">s_t</math> if it satisfies:<br />
<br />
<math display="inline">\hat{\theta}_{t-1,a}^{T}x(s_t)-\sqrt{\beta_{t-1}(\tilde\delta)x(s_t)^T\bar{V}_{t-1,a}^{-1}x(s_t)})>l</math><br />
<br />
with probability <math display="inline">1-\delta</math> that we never eliminate any valid action. Note that <math display="inline">l, u</math> are not known. In practice, choosing <math display="inline">l</math> to be 0.5 should suffice.<br />
<br />
==Concurrent Learning==<br />
In fact, Q-learning and contextual bandit algorithms can learn simultaneously, resulting in the convergence of both algorithms, i.e., finding an optimal policy and a minimal valid action space. <br />
<br />
If the elimination is done based on the concentration bounds of the linear contextual bandits, it can be ensured that Action Elimination Q-learning converges, as shown in Proposition 1.<br />
<br />
'''Proposition 1:'''<br />
<br />
Assume that all state action pairs (s,a) are visited infinitely often, unless eliminated according to <math display="inline">\hat{\theta}_{t-1,a}^Tx(s)-\sqrt{\beta_{t-1}(\tilde{\delta})x(s)^T\bar{V}_{t-1,a}^{-1}x(s))}>l</math>. Then, with a probability of at least <math display="inline">1-\delta</math>, action elimination Q-learning converges to the optimal Q-function for any valid state-action pairs. In addition, actions which should be eliminated are visited at most <math display="inline">T_{s,a}(t)\leq 4\beta_t/(u-l)^2<br />
+1</math> times.<br />
<br />
Notice that when there is no noise in the elimination signal(R=0), we correctly eliminate actions with probability 1. so invalid actions will be sampled a finite number of times.<br />
<br />
=Method=<br />
<br />
The assumption that <math display="inline">e_t(s_t,a)=\theta_a^{*T}x(s_t)+\eta_t </math> generally does not hold when using raw features like word2vec. So the paper proposes to use the neural network's last layer as feature representation of states. A practical challenge here is that the features must be fixed over time when used by the contextual bandit. So batch-updates framework(Levine et al., 2017;Riquelme, Tucker, and Snoek, 2018) is used, where a new contextual bandit model is learned for every few steps that uses the last layer activation of the AEN as features.<br />
<br />
==Architecture of action elimination framework==<br />
<br />
[[File:lnottol_fig1b.png|300px|center]]<br />
<br />
After taking action <math display="inline">a_t</math>, the agent observes <math display="inline">(r_t,s_{t+1},e_t)</math>. The agent uses it to learn two function approximation deep neural networks: A DQN and an AEN. AEN provides an admissible actions set <math display="inline">A'</math> to the DQN, which uses this set to decide how to act and learn. The architecture for both the AEN and DQN is an NLP CNN(100 convolutional filters for AEN and 500 for DQN, with three different 1D kernels of length (1,2,3)), based on(Kim, 2014). The state is represented as a sequence of words, composed of the game descriptor and the player's inventory. These are truncated or zero padded to a length of 50 descriptor + 15 inventory words and each word is embedded into continuous vectors using word2vec in <math display="inline">R^{300}</math>. The features of the last four states are then concatenated together such that the final state representations s are in <math display="inline">R^{78000}</math>. The AEN is trained to minimize the MSE loss, using the elimination signal as a label. The code, the Zork domain, and the implementation of the elimination signal can be found [https://github.com/TomZahavy/CB_AE_DQN here.]<br />
<br />
==Psuedocode of the Algorithm==<br />
<br />
[[File:lnottol_fig2.png|750px|center]]<br />
<br />
AE-DQN trains two networks: a DQN denoted by Q and an AEN denoted by E. The algorithm creates a linear contextual bandit model from it every L iterations with procedure AENUpdate(). This procedure uses the activations of the last hidden layer of E as features, which are then used to create a contextual linear bandit model.AENUpdate() then solved this model and plugin it into the target AEN. The contextual linear bandit model <math display="inline">(E^-,V)</math> is then used to eliminate actions via the ACT() and Target() functions. ACT() follows an <math display="inline">\epsilon</math>-greedy mechanism on the admissible actions set. For exploitation, it selects the action with highest Q-value by taking an argmax on Q-values among <math display="inline">A'</math>. For exploration, it selects an action uniformly from <math display="inline">A'</math>. The targets() procedure is estimating the value function by taking max over Q-values only among admissible actions, hence, reducing function approximation errors.<br />
<br />
=Experiments=<br />
==Grid Domain==<br />
The authors start by evaluating our algorithm on a small grid world domain with 9 rooms, where they ca analyze the effect of the action elimination (visualization can be found in the appendix). In this domain, the agent starts at the center of the grid and needs to navigate to its upper-left corner. On every step, the agent suffers a penalty of (−1), with a terminal reward of 0. Prior to the game, the states are randomly divided into K categories. The environment has 4K navigation actions, 4 for each category, each with a probability to move in a random direction. If the chosen action belongs to the same category as the state, the action is performed correctly in probability pTc = 0.75. Otherwise, it will be performed correctly in probability pFc = 0.5. If the action does not fit the state category, the elimination signal equals 1, and if the action and state belong to the same category, then e = 0. The optimal policy will only use the navigation actions from the same type as the state, and all of the other actions are strictly suboptimal. A basic comparison between vanilla Q-learning without action elimination (green) and a tabular version of the action elimination Q-learning (blue) can be found in the figure below. In all of the figures, the results are compared to the case with one category (red), i.e., only 4 basic navigation actions, which forms an upper bound on performance with multiple categories. In Figure (a),(c), the episode length is T = 150, and in Figure (b) it is T = 300, to allow sufficient exploration for the vanilla Q-Learning. It is clear from the simulations that the action elimination dramatically improves the results in large action spaces. Also, note that the gain from action elimination increases with the grid size since the elimination allows the agent to reach the goal earlier.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:griddomain.png|1200px|thumb|center|Performance of agents in grid world]]<br />
==Zork domain==<br />
<br />
The world of Zork presents a rich environment with a large state and action space. <br />
Zork players describe their actions using natural language instructions. For example, "open the mailbox". Then their actions were processed by a sophisticated natural language parser. Based on the results, the game presents the outcome of the action. The goal of Zork is to collect the Twenty Treasures of Zork and install them in the trophy case. Points that are generated from the game's scoring system are given to the agent as the reward. For example, the player gets the points when solving the puzzles. Placing all treasures in the trophy will get 350 points. The elimination signal is given in two forms, "wrong parse" flag, and text feedback "you cannot take that". These two signals are grouped together into a single binary signal which then provided to the algorithm. <br />
<br />
[[File:zork_domain.png|1200px|thumb|center|Left:the world of Zork.Right:subdomains of Zork.]]<br />
<br />
Experiments begin with the two subdomains of Zork domains: Egg Quest and the Troll Quest. For these subdomains, an additional reward signal is provided to guide the agent towards solving specific tasks and make the results more visible. A reward of -1 is applied at every time step to encourage the agent to favor short paths. Each trajectory terminates is upon completing the quest or after T steps are taken. The discounted factor for training is <math display="inline">\gamma=0.8</math> and <math display="inline">\gamma=1</math> during evaluation. Also <math display="inline">\beta=0.5, l=0.6</math> in all experiments. <br />
<br />
===Egg Quest===<br />
<br />
The goal for this quest is to find and open the jewel-encrusted egg hidden on a tree in the forest. An egg-splorer goes on an adventure to find a mystical ancient relic with his furry companion. You can have a look at the game at [https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/212838126/ EggQuest]<br />
<br />
The agent will get 100 points upon completing this task. For action space, there are 9 fixed actions for navigation, and a second subset which consisting <math display="inline">N_{Take}</math> actions for taking possible objects in the game. <math display="inline">N_{Take}=200 (set A_1), N_{Take}=300 (set A_2)</math> has been tested separately.<br />
AE-DQN (blue) and a vanilla DQN agent (green) has been tested in this quest.<br />
<br />
[[File:AEF_zork_comparison.png|1200px|thumb|center|Performance of agents in the egg quest.]]<br />
<br />
Figure a) corresponds to the set <math display="inline">A_1</math>, with T=100, b) corresponds to the set <math display="inline">A_2</math>, with T=100, and c) corresponds to the set <math display="inline">A_2</math>, with T=200. Both agents have performed well on sets a and c. However, the AE-DQN agent has learned much faster than the DQN on set b, which implies that action elimination is more robust to hyperparameter optimization when the action space is large. One important observation to note is that the three figures have different scales for the cumulative reward. While the AE-DQN outperformed the standard DQN in figure b, both models performed significantly better with the hyperparameter configuration in figure c.<br />
<br />
===Troll Quest===<br />
<br />
The goal of this quest is to find the troll. To do it the agent needs to find the way to the house, use a lantern to expose the hidden entrance to the underworld. It will get 100 points upon achieving the goal. This quest is a larger problem than Egg Quest. The action set <math display="inline">A_1</math> is 200 take actions and 15 necessary actions, 215 in total.<br />
<br />
[[File:AEF_troll_comparison.png|400px|thumb|center|Results in the Troll Quest.]]<br />
<br />
The red line above is an "optimal elimination" baseline which consists of only 35 actions(15 essential and 20 relevant take actions). We can see that AE-DQN still outperforms DQN and its improvement over DQN is more significant in the Troll Quest than the Egg quest. Also, it achieves compatible performance to the "optimal elimination" baseline.<br />
<br />
===Open Zork===<br />
<br />
Lastly, the "Open Zork" domain has been tested which only the environment reward has been used. 1M steps have been trained. Each trajectory terminates after T=200 steps. Two action sets have been used:<math display="inline">A_3</math>, the "Minimal Zork" action set, which is the minimal set of actions (131) that is required to solve the game. <math display="inline">A_4</math>, the "Open Zork" action set (1227) which composed of {Verb, Object} tuples for all the verbs and objects in the game.<br />
<br />
[[]]<br />
<br />
[[File:AEF_open_zork_comparison.png|600px|thumb|center|Results in "Open Zork".]]<br />
<br />
<br />
The above Figure shows the learning curve for both AE-DQN and DQN. We can see that AE-DQN (blue) still outperform the DQN (blue) in terms of speed and cumulative reward.<br />
<br />
=Conclusion=<br />
In this paper, the authors proposed a Deep Reinforcement Learning model for sub-optimal actions while performing Q-learning. Moreover, they showed that by eliminating actions, using linear contextual bandits with theoretical guarantees of convergence, the size of the action space is reduced, exploration is more effective, and learning is improved when tested on Zork, a text-based game.<br />
<br />
For future work the authors aim to investigate more sophisticated architectures and tackle learning shared representations for elimination and control which may boost performance on both tasks.<br />
<br />
They also hope to to investigate other mechanisms for action elimination, such as eliminating actions that result from low Q-values as in Even-Dar, Mannor, and Mansour, 2003.<br />
<br />
The authors aim to generate elimination signals in real-world domains and achieve the purpose of eliminating the signal implicitly.<br />
<br />
=Critique=<br />
The paper is not a significant algorithmic contribution and it merely adds an extra layer of complexity to the very famous DQN algorithm. All the experimental domains considered in the paper are discrete action problems that have so many actions that it could have been easily extended to a continuous action problem. In continuous action space there are several policy gradient based RL algorithms that have provided stronger performances. The authors should have ideally compared their methods to such algorithms like PPO or DRPO.<br />
<br />
Even with the critique above, the paper presents mathematical/theoretical justifications of the methodology. Moreover, since the methodology is built on the standard RL framework, this means that other variant RL algorithms can apply the idea to decrease the complexity and increase the performance. Moreover, the there are some rooms for applying technical variations for the algorithm.<br />
<br />
Also, since we are utilizing the system's response to irrelevant actions, an intuitive approach to eliminate such irrelevant actions is to add a huge negative reward for such actions, which will be much easier than the approach suggested by this paper. However, the in experiments, the author only compares AE-DQN to traditional DQN, not traditional DQN with negative rewards assigned to irrelevant actions.<br />
<br />
After all, the name that the authors have chosen is a good and attractive choice and matches our brain's structure which in so many real-world scenarios detects what not to learn.<br />
<br />
=Reference=<br />
1. Chu, W.; Li, L.; Reyzin, L.; and Schapire, R. 2011. Contextual bandits with linear payoff functions. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics.<br />
<br />
2. Côté,M.-A.;Kádár,Á.;Yuan,X.;Kybartas,B.;Barnes,T.;Fine,E.;Moore,J.;Hausknecht,M.;Asri, L. E.; Adada, M.; et al. 2018. Textworld: A learning environment for text-based games. arXiv.<br />
<br />
3. Dulac-Arnold, G.; Evans, R.; van Hasselt, H.; Sunehag, P.; Lillicrap, T.; Hunt, J.; Mann, T.; Weber, T.; Degris, T.; and Coppin, B. 2015. Deep reinforcement learning in large discrete action spaces. arXiv.<br />
<br />
4. He, J.; Chen, J.; He, X.; Gao, J.; Li, L.; Deng, L.; and Ostendorf, M. 2015. Deep reinforcement learning with an unbounded action space. CoRR abs/1511.04636.<br />
<br />
5. Kim, Y. 2014. Convolutional neural networks for sentence classification. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.5882 arXiv preprint].<br />
<br />
6. VanHasselt,H.,andWiering,M.A. 2009. Usingcontinuousactionspacestosolvediscreteproblems. In Neural Networks, 2009. IJCNN 2009. International Joint Conference on, 1149–1156. IEEE.<br />
<br />
7. Watkins, C. J., and Dayan, P. 1992. Q-learning. Machine learning 8(3-4):279–292.<br />
<br />
8. Su, P.-H.; Gasic, M.; Mrksic, N.; Rojas-Barahona, L.; Ultes, S.; Vandyke, D.; Wen, T.-H.; and Young, S. 2016. Continuously learning neural dialogue management. arXiv preprint.<br />
<br />
9. Wu, Y.; Schuster, M.; Chen, Z.; Le, Q. V.; Norouzi, M.; Macherey, W.; Krikun, M.; Cao, Y.; Gao, Q.; Macherey, K.; et al. 2016. Google’s neural machine translation system: Bridging the gap between human and machine translation. arXiv preprint.<br />
<br />
10. Yuan, X.; Côté, M.-A.; Sordoni, A.; Laroche, R.; Combes, R. T. d.; Hausknecht, M.; and Trischler, A. 2018. Counting to explore and generalize in text-based games. arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.1152<br />
<br />
11. Zahavy, T.; Haroush, M.; Merlis, N.; Mankowitz, D. J.; 2018. Learn What Not to Learn: Action Elimination with Deep Reinforcement Learning.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Fix_your_classifier:_the_marginal_value_of_training_the_last_weight_layer&diff=42438Fix your classifier: the marginal value of training the last weight layer2018-12-14T04:38:51Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Previous Work */</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
The code for the proposed model is available at https://github.com/eladhoffer/fix_your_classifier.<br />
<br />
=Introduction=<br />
<br />
Deep neural networks have become widely used for machine learning, achieving state-of-the-art results on many tasks. One of the most common tasks they are used for is classification. For example, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used to classify images to a semantic category. Typically, a learned affine transformation is placed at the end of such models, yielding a per-class prediction for each class. This classifier can have a vast number of parameters, which grows linearly with the number of possible classes. As the number of classes in the data set increases, more and more computational resources are consumed by this layer.<br />
<br />
=Brief Overview=<br />
<br />
In order to alleviate the aforementioned problem, the authors propose that the final layer of the classifier be fixed (up to a global scale constant). They argue that with little or no loss of accuracy for most classification tasks, the method provides significant memory and computational benefits. In addition, they show that by initializing the classifier with a Hadamard matrix the inference could be made faster as well.<br />
<br />
=Previous Work=<br />
<br />
Training neural networks (NNs) and using them for inference requires large amounts of memory and computational resources; thus, extensive research has focused on reducing the size of these networks, including:<br />
<br />
* Weight sharing and specification (Han et al., 2015). Weight sharing has to do with the filters used in the convolution layers. Normally, we would train different filters for each depth dimension. For example, in a particular convolution step, if our input was XxYx3, we would have 3 different filters applied to each 2D slice. Weight sharing forces the network to use identical filters for each of these layers. That is, the trained-for AxB convolution will have the same values, and the “stamp” will be identical; no matter which of the 3 dimensions is dealt with. <br />
<br />
* Mixed precision to reduce the size of the neural networks by half (Micikevicius et al., 2017)<br />
<br />
* Low-rank approximations to speed up CNN (Tai et al., 2015)<br />
<br />
* Quantization of weights, activations, and gradients to further reduce computation during training (Hubara et al., 2016b; Li et al., 2016 and Zhou et al., 2016). Although aggressive quantization benefits from smaller model size, the extreme compression rate comes with a loss of accuracy.<br />
<br />
Some of the past works have also put forward the fact that predefined (Park & Sandberg, 1991) and random (Huang et al., 2006) projections can be used together with a learned affine transformation to achieve competitive results on many of the classification tasks. However, the authors' proposal in the current paper suggests the reverse proposal - common NN models can learn useful representations even without modifying the final output layer, which often holds a large number of parameters that grows linearly with number of classes.<br />
<br />
The use of a fixed transform can, in many cases, allow a huge decrease in model parameters, and<br />
a possible computational benefit. Authors suggest that existing models can, with no other modification,<br />
devoid their classifier weights, which can help the deployment of those models in devices with low<br />
computation ability and smaller memory capacity.<br />
<br />
=Background=<br />
<br />
A CNN is comprised of one or more convolutional layers (often with a subsampling step) and then followed by one or more fully connected layers as in a standard multilayer neural network. The architecture of a CNN is designed to take advantage of the 2D structure of an input image (or other 2D input such as a speech signal). This is achieved with local connections and tied weights followed by some form of pooling which results in translation invariant features. Another benefit of CNNs is that they are easier to train and have many fewer parameters than fully connected networks with the same number of hidden units. <br />
<br />
A CNN consists of a number of convolutional and subsampling layers optionally followed by fully connected layers. The input to a convolutional layer is a <math>m \times m \times r</math> image where <math>m</math> is the height and width of the image and <math>r</math> is the number of channels, e.g. an RGB image has <math>r=3</math>. The convolutional layer can have a specifiable number of <math>k</math> filters (or kernels) of size <math>n \times n \times q</math> where <math>n</math> is the height and width of the kernel and is smaller than the dimension of the image, and <math>q</math> can either be the same or smaller that the number of channels in the previous layer. Each kernel is convolved with the image to produce <math>k</math> feature maps of size <math>m−n+1</math>. Each map is then subsampled typically with mean or max pooling over <math>p \times p</math> contiguous regions where <math>p</math> ranges between 2 for small images (e.g. MNIST) and is usually not more than 5 for larger inputs. Either before or after the subsampling layer an additive bias and sigmoidal nonlinearity is applied to each feature map. <br />
<br />
CNNs are commonly used to solve a variety of spatial and temporal tasks. Earlier architectures of CNNs (LeCun et al., 1998; Krizhevsky et al., 2012) used a set of fully-connected layers at later stages of the network, presumably to allow classification based on global features of an image.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Shortcomings of the Final Classification Layer ==<br />
<br />
Zeiler & Fergus, 2014 showed that despite the enormous number of trainable parameters fully connected layers add to the model, they have a rather marginal impact on the performance. Furthermore, it has been shown that these layers could be easily compressed and reduced after a model is trained by simple means such as matrix decomposition and sparsification (Han et al., 2015). Modern NNs are characterized with the removal of most fully connected layers (Lin et al., 2013; Szegedy et al., 2015; He et al., 2016). This was shown to lead to better generalization and overall accuracy, together with a huge decrease in the number of trainable parameters. Additionally, numerous works showed that CNNs can be trained in a metric learning regime (Bromley et al., 1994; Schroff et al., 2015; Hoffer & Ailon, 2015), where no explicit classification layer is used and the objective regarded only distance measures between intermediate representations. Hardt & Ma (2017) suggested an all-convolutional network variant, where they kept the original initialization of the classification layer fixed and found no negative impact on performance on the CIFAR-10 dataset.<br />
<br />
=Proposed Method=<br />
<br />
The aforementioned works provide evidence that fully-connected layers are in fact redundant and play a small role in learning and generalization. In this work, the authors have suggested that the parameters used for the final classification transform are completely redundant, and can be replaced with a predetermined linear transform. This holds for even in large-scale models and classification tasks, such as recent architectures trained on the ImageNet benchmark (Deng et al., 2009).<br />
<br />
==Using a Fixed Classifier==<br />
<br />
Suppose the final representation obtained by the network (the last hidden layer) is represented as <math>x = F(z;\theta)</math> where <math>F</math> is assumed to be a deep neural network with input <math>z</math> and parameters <math>θ</math>, e.g., a convolutional network, trained by backpropagation. In common NN models, this representation is followed by an additional affine transformation, <math>y = W^T x + b</math>, where <math>W</math> and <math>b</math> are also trained by back-propagation.<br />
<br />
For input <math>x</math> of length <math>N</math>, and <math>C</math> different possible outputs, <math>W</math> is required to be a matrix of <math>N × C</math>. <br />
<br />
Training is done using cross-entropy loss, by feeding the network outputs through a softmax activation<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
v_i = \frac{e^{y_i}}{\sum_{j}^{C}{e^{y_j}}}, \qquad i \in {1, . . . , C}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
and reducing the expected negative log likelihood with respect to ground-truth target class <math> t </math>, by minimizing the loss function:<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
L(x, t) = −\text{log}\ {v_t} = −{w_t}·{x} − b_t + \text{log} ({\sum_{j}^{C}e^{w_j . x + b_j}})<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
where <math>w_i</math> is the <math>i</math>-th column of <math>W</math>.<br />
<br />
==Choosing the Projection Matrix==<br />
<br />
To evaluate the conjecture regarding the importance of the final classification transformation, the trainable parameter matrix <math>W</math> is replaced with a fixed orthonormal projection <math> Q &isin; R^{N×C} </math>, such that <math> &forall; i &ne; j : q_i · q_j = 0 </math> and <math> || q_i ||_{2} = 1 </math>, where <math>q_i</math> is the <math>i</math>th column of <math>Q</math>. This is ensured by a simple random sampling and singular-value decomposition<br />
<br />
As the rows of classifier weight matrix are fixed with an equally valued <math>L_{2}</math> norm, we find it beneficial<br />
to also restrict the representation of <math>x</math> by normalizing it to reside on the <math>n</math>-dimensional sphere:<br />
<br />
<center><math><br />
\hat{x} = \frac{x}{||x||_{2}}<br />
</math></center><br />
<br />
This allows faster training and convergence, as the network does not need to account for changes in the scale of its weights. However, it has now an issue that <math>q_i · \hat{x} </math> is bounded between −1 and 1. This causes convergence issues, as the softmax function is scale sensitive, and the network is affected by the inability to re-scale its input. This issue is amended with a fixed scale <math>T</math> applied to softmax inputs <math>f(y) = softmax(\frac{1}{T}y)</math>, also known as the ''softmax temperature''. However, this introduces an additional hyper-parameter which may differ between networks and datasets. So, the authors propose to introduce a single scalar parameter <math>\alpha</math> to learn the softmax scale, effectively functioning as an inverse of the softmax temperature <math>\frac{1}{T}</math>. The normalized weights and an additional scale coefficient are also used, specially using a single scale for all entries in the weight matrix. The additional vector of bias parameters <math>b &isin; \mathbb{R}^{C}</math> is kept the same and the model is trained using the traditional negative-log-likelihood criterion. Explicitly, the classifier output is now:<br />
<br />
<center><br />
<math><br />
v_i=\frac{e^{\alpha q_i &middot; \hat{x} + b_i}}{\sum_{j}^{C} e^{\alpha q_j &middot; \hat{x} + b_j}}, i &isin; </math> { <math> {1,...,C} </math>}<br />
</center><br />
<br />
and the loss to be minimized is:<br />
<br />
<center><math><br />
L(x, t) = -\alpha q_t &middot; \frac{x}{||x||_{2}} + b_t + \text{log} (\sum_{i=1}^{C} \text{exp}((\alpha q_i &middot; \frac{x}{||x||_{2}} + b_i)))<br />
</math></center><br />
<br />
where <math>x</math> is the final representation obtained by the network for a specific sample, and <math> t &isin; </math> { <math> {1, . . . , C} </math> } is the ground-truth label for that sample. The behaviour of the parameter <math> \alpha </math> over time, which is logarithmic in nature and has the same behavior exhibited by the norm of a learned classifier, is shown in<br />
[[Media: figure1_log_behave.png| Figure 1]].<br />
<br />
<center>[[File:figure1_log_behave.png]]</center><br />
<br />
When <math> -1 \le q_i · \hat{x} \le 1 </math>, a possible cosine angle loss is <br />
<br />
<center>[[File:caloss.png]]</center><br />
<br />
But its final validation accuracy has a slight decrease, compared to original models.<br />
<br />
==Using a Hadamard Matrix==<br />
<br />
To recall, Hadamard matrix (Hedayat et al., 1978) <math> H </math> is an <math> n × n </math> matrix, where all of its entries are either +1 or −1. <br />
Example:<br />
<br />
<math>\displaystyle H_{4}={\begin{bmatrix}1&1&1&1\\1&-1&1&-1\\1&1&-1&-1\\1&-1&-1&1\end{bmatrix}}</math><br />
<br />
Furthermore, <math> H </math> is orthogonal, such that <math> HH^{T} = nI_n </math> where <math>I_n</math> is the identity matrix. Instead of using the entire Hadamard matrix <math>H</math>, a truncated version, <math> \hat{H} &isin; </math> {<math> {-1, 1}</math>}<math>^{C \times N}</math> where all <math>C</math> rows are orthogonal as the final classification layer is such that:<br />
<br />
<center><math><br />
y = \hat{H} \hat{x} + b<br />
</math></center><br />
<br />
This usage allows two main benefits:<br />
* A deterministic, low-memory and easily generated matrix that can be used for classification.<br />
* Removal of the need to perform a full matrix-matrix multiplication - as multiplying by a Hadamard matrix can be done by simple sign manipulation and addition.<br />
<br />
Here, <math>n</math> must be a multiple of 4, but it can be easily truncated to fit normally defined networks. Also, as the classifier weights are fixed to need only 1-bit precision, it is now possible to focus our attention on the features preceding it.<br />
<br />
=Experimental Results=<br />
<br />
The authors have evaluated their proposed model on the following datasets:<br />
<br />
==CIFAR-10/100==<br />
<br />
===About the Dataset===<br />
<br />
CIFAR-10 is an image classification benchmark dataset containing 50,000 training images and 10,000 test images. The images are in color and contain 32×32 pixels. There are 10 possible classes of various animals and vehicles. CIFAR-100 holds the same number of images of the same size, but contains 100 different classes.<br />
<br />
===Training Details===<br />
<br />
The authors trained a residual network ( He et al., 2016) on the CIFAR-10 dataset. The network depth was 56 and the same hyper-parameters as in the original work were used. A comparison of the two variants, i.e., the learned classifier and the proposed classifier with a fixed transformation is shown in [[Media: figure1_resnet_cifar10.png | Figure 2]].<br />
<br />
<center>[[File: figure1_resnet_cifar10.png]]</center><br />
<br />
These results demonstrate that although the training error is considerably lower for the network with learned classifier, both models achieve the same classification accuracy on the validation set. The authors' conjecture is that with the new fixed parameterization, the network can no longer increase the norm of a given sample’s representation - thus learning its label requires more effort. As this may happen for specific seen samples - it affects only training error.<br />
<br />
The authors also compared using a fixed scale variable <math>\alpha </math> at different values vs. the learned parameter. Results for <math> \alpha = </math> {0.1, 1, 10} are depicted in [[Media: figure3_alpha_resnet_cifar.png| Figure 3]] for both training and validation error and as can be seen, similar validation accuracy can be obtained using a fixed scale value (in this case <math>\alpha </math>= 1 or 10 will suffice) at the expense of another hyper-parameter to seek. In all the further experiments the scaling parameter <math> \alpha </math> was regularized with the same weight decay coefficient used on original classifier. Although learning the scale is not necessary, but it will help convergence during training.<br />
<br />
<center>[[File: figure3_alpha_resnet_cifar.png]]</center><br />
<br />
The authors then train the model on CIFAR-100 dataset. They used the DenseNet-BC model from Huang et al. (2017) with a depth of 100 layers and k = 12. The higher number of classes caused the number of parameters to grow and encompassed about 4% of the whole model. However, validation accuracy for the fixed-classifier model remained equally good as the original model, and the same training curve was observed as earlier.<br />
<br />
==IMAGENET==<br />
<br />
===About the Dataset===<br />
<br />
The Imagenet dataset introduced by Deng et al. (2009) spans over 1000 visual classes, and over 1.2 million samples. This is supposedly a more challenging dataset to work on as compared to CIFAR-10/100.<br />
<br />
===Experiment Details===<br />
<br />
The authors evaluated their fixed classifier method on Imagenet using Resnet50 by He et al. (2016) and Densenet169 model (Huang et al., 2017) as described in the original work. Using a fixed classifier removed approximately 2-million parameters were from the model, accounting for about 8% and 12 % of the model parameters respectively. The experiments revealed similar trends as observed on CIFAR-10.<br />
<br />
For a more stricter evaluation, the authors also trained a Shufflenet architecture (Zhang et al., 2017b), which was designed to be used in low memory and limited computing platforms and has parameters making up the majority of the model. They were able to reduce the parameters to 0.86 million as compared to 0.96 million parameters in the final layer of the original model. Again, the proposed modification in the original model gave similar convergence results on validation accuracy. Interestingly, this method allowed Imagenet training in an under-specified regime, where there are<br />
more training samples than the number of parameters. This is an unconventional regime for modern deep networks, which are usually over-specified to have many more parameters than training samples (Zhang et al., 2017a).<br />
<br />
The overall results of the fixed-classifier are summarized in [[Media: table1_fixed_results.png | Table 1]].<br />
<br />
<center>[[File: table1_fixed_results.png]]</center><br />
<br />
==Language Modelling==<br />
<br />
Recent works have empirically found that using the same weights for both word embedding and classifier can yield equal or better results than using a separate pair of weights. So the authors experimented with fix-classifiers on language modeling as it also requires classification of all possible tokens available in the task vocabulary. They trained a recurrent model with 2-layers of LSTM (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997) and embedding + hidden size of 512 on the WikiText2 dataset (Merity et al., 2016), using same settings as in Merity et al. (2017). WikiText2 dataset contains about 33K different words, so the number of parameters expected in the embedding and classifier layer was about 34-million. This number is about 89% of the total number of parameters used for the whole model which is 38-million. However, using a random orthogonal transform yielded poor results compared to learned embedding. This was suspected to be due to semantic relationships captured in the embedding layer of language models, which is not the case in image classification task. The intuition was further confirmed by the much better results when pre-trained embeddings using word2vec algorithm by Mikolov et al. (2013) or PMI factorization as suggested by Levy & Goldberg (2014), were used. The final result used 89% fewer parameters than a fully learned model, with only marginally worse perplexity. The authors posit that this implies a required structure in word embedding that originates from the semantic relatedness between words, and unbalanced classes. They further suggest that with more efficient ways to train word embeddings, it may be possible to mitigate the issues arising from this structure and class imbalance. <br />
<br />
<center>[[File: language.png]]</center><br />
<br />
=Discussion=<br />
<br />
==Implications and Use Cases==<br />
<br />
With the increasing number of classes in the benchmark datasets, computational demands for the final classifier will increase as well. In order to understand the problem better, the authors observe the work by Sun et al. (2017), which introduced JFT-300M - an internal Google dataset with over 18K different classes. Using a Resnet50 (He et al., 2016), with a 2048 sized representation led to a model with over 36M parameters meaning that over 60% of the model parameters resided in the final classification layer. Sun et al. (2017) also describe the difficulty in distributing so many parameters over the training servers involving a non-trivial overhead during synchronization of the model for update. The authors claim that the fixed-classifier would help considerably in this kind of scenario - where using a fixed classifier removes the need to do any gradient synchronization for the final layer. Furthermore, introduction of Hadamard matrix removes the need to save the transformation altogether, thereby, making it more efficient and allowing considerable memory and computational savings.<br />
<br />
==Possible Caveats==<br />
<br />
The good performance of fixed-classifiers relies on the ability of the preceding layers to learn separable representations. This could be affected when the ratio between learned features and number of classes is small – that is, when <math> C > N</math>. However, they tested their method in such cases and their model performed well and provided good results. <br />
<br />
Some experiments were conducted by the authors with such cases, for example Imagenet classification (C = 1000) using mobilenet-0.5 with N = 512 or using ResNet with N = 256. In both scenarios, this method converged similarly to a fully learned classifier reaching the same final validation accuracy. Although, there is no presentation of this information within the paper itself, if true, it may strengthen the finding that even in cases in which C > N, fixed classifier can provide equally good results.<br />
<br />
Another factor that can affect the performance of their model using a fixed classifier is when the classes are highly correlated. In that case, the fixed classifier actually cannot support correlated classes and thus, the network could have some difficulty to learn. For a language model, word classes tend to have highly correlated instances, which also lead to difficult learning process.<br />
<br />
Also, this proposed approach will only eliminate the computation of the classifier weights, so when the classes are fewer, the computation saving effect will not be readily apparent.<br />
<br />
==Future Work==<br />
<br />
<br />
The use of fixed classifiers might be further simplified in Binarized Neural Networks (Hubara et al., 2016a), where the activations and weights are restricted to ±1 during propagations. In that case, the norm of the last hidden layer would be constant for all samples (equal to the square root of the hidden layer width). The constant could then be absorbed into the scale constant <math>\alpha</math>, and there is no need in a per-sample normalization.<br />
<br />
Additionally, more efficient ways to learn a word embedding should also be explored where similar redundancy in classifier weights may suggest simpler forms of token representations - such as low-rank or sparse versions.<br />
<br />
A related paper was published that claims that fixing most of the parameters of the neural network achieves comparable results with learning all of them [A. Rosenfeld and J. K. Tsotsos]<br />
<br />
=Conclusion=<br />
<br />
In this work, the authors argue that the final classification layer in deep neural networks is redundant and suggest removing the parameters from the classification layer. The empirical results from experiments on the CIFAR and IMAGENET datasets suggest that such a change lead to little or almost no decline in the performance of the architecture. Furthermore, using a Hadmard matrix as classifier might lead to some computational benefits when properly implemented, and save memory otherwise spent on large amount of transformation coefficients.<br />
<br />
Another possible scope of research that could be pointed out for future could be to find new efficient methods to create pre-defined word embeddings, which require huge amount of parameters that can possibly be avoided when learning a new task. Therefore, more emphasis should be given to the representations learned by the non-linear parts of the neural networks - up to the final classifier, as it seems highly redundant.<br />
<br />
=Critique=<br />
<br />
The paper proposes an interesting idea that has a potential use case when designing memory-efficient neural networks. The experiments shown in the paper are quite rigorous and provide support to the authors' claim. However, it would have been more helpful if the authors had described a bit more about efficient implementation of the Hadamard matrix and how to scale this method for larger datasets (cases with <math> C >N</math>).<br />
<br />
Moreover, one of the main intuitions of the paper has introduced to be computational cost but it has left out to compare a fixed and learned classifier based on the computational cost and then investigate whether it worth the drop in performance or not considering the fact that not always the output can be degraded because of need for speed! At least a discussion on this issue is expected.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, the computational cost and performance change after fixation of classifier could be related to dataset and the nature and complexity of it. Mostly, having 1000 classes makes the classification more crucial than 2 classes. An evaluation of this topic is also needed.<br />
<br />
Another interesting experiment to do would be to look this technique interacts with distillation when used in the teacher or student network or both. For instance, Does fixing the features make it more difficult to place dog than on boat when classifying a cat? Do networks with fixed classifier weights make worse teachers for distillation?<br />
<br />
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A. Rosenfeld and J. K. Tsotsos, “Intriguing properties of randomly weighted networks: Generalizing while learning next to nothing,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.00844, 2018.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=ShakeDrop_Regularization&diff=41888ShakeDrop Regularization2018-11-29T17:33:41Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Critique */</p>
<hr />
<div>=Introduction=<br />
Current state of the art techniques for object classification are deep neural networks based on the residual block, first published by (He et al., 2016). This technique has been the foundation of several improved networks, including Wide ResNet (Zagoruyko & Komodakis, 2016), PyramdNet (Han et al., 2017) and ResNeXt (Xie et al., 2017). They have been further improved by regularization, such as Stochastic Depth (ResDrop) (Huang et al., 2016) and Shake-Shake (Gastaldi, 2017), which can avoid some problem like vanishing gradients. Shake-Shake applied to ResNeXt has achieved one of the lowest error rates on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets. However, it is only applicable to multi-branch architectures and is not memory efficient since it requires two branches of residual blocks to apply. To address this problem, ShakeDrop regularization that can realize a similar disturbance to Shake-Shake on a single residual block is proposed. Moreover, they use ResDrop to stabilize the learning process. This paper seeks to formulate a general expansion of Shake-Shake that can be applied to any residual block based network.<br />
<br />
=Existing Methods=<br />
<br />
'''Deep Approaches'''<br />
<br />
'''ResNet''', was the first use of residual blocks, a foundational feature in many modern state of the art convolution neural networks. They can be formulated as <math>G(x) = x + F(x)</math> where <math>x</math> and <math>G(x)</math> are the input and output of the residual block, and <math>F(x)</math> is the output of the residual branch on the residual block. A residual block typically performs a convolution operation and then passes the result plus its input onto the next block.<br />
<br />
Intuition behind Residual blocks:<br />
If the identity mapping is optimal, We can easily push the residuals to zero (F(x) = 0) than to fit an identity mapping (x, input=output) by a stack of non-linear layers. In simple language it is very easy to come up with a solution like F(x) =0 rather than F(x)=x using stack of non-linear cnn layers as function (Think about it). So, this function F(x) is what the authors called Residual function ([https://medium.com/@14prakash/understanding-and-implementing-architectures-of-resnet-and-resnext-for-state-of-the-art-image-cf51669e1624 Reference]).<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:ResidualBlock.png|580px|centre|thumb|An example of a simple residual block from Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition by He et al., 2016]]<br />
<br />
ResNet is constructed out of a large number of these residual blocks sequentially stacked. It is interesting to note that having too many layers can cause overfitting, as pointed out by He et al. (2016) with the high error rates for the 1,202-layer ResNet on CIFAR datasets. Another paper (Veit et al., 2016) empirically showed that the cause of the high error rates can be mostly attributed to specific residual blocks whose channels increase greatly.<br />
<br />
'''PyramidNet''' is an important iteration that built on ResNet and WideResNet by gradually increasing channels on each residual block. The residual block is similar to those used in ResNet. It has been used to generate some of the first successful convolution neural networks with very large depth, at 272 layers. Amongst unmodified residual network architectures, it performs the best on the CIFAR datasets.<br />
<br />
[[File:ResidualBlockComparison.png|980px|centre|thumb|A simple illustration of different residual blocks from Deep Pyramidal Residual Networks by Han et al., 2017. The width of a block reflects the number of channels used in that layer.]]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Non-Deep Approaches'''<br />
<br />
'''Wide ResNet''' modified ResNet by increasing channels in each layer, having a wider and shallower structure. Similarly to PyramidNet, this architecture avoids some of the pitfalls in the original formulation of ResNet.<br />
<br />
'''ResNeXt''' achieved performance beyond that of Wide ResNet with only a small increase in the number of parameters. It can be formulated as <math>G(x) = x + F_1(x)+F_2(x)</math>. In this case, <math>F_1(x)</math> and <math>F_2(x)</math> are the outputs of two paired convolution operations in a single residual block. The number of branches is not limited to 2, and will control the result of this network.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:SimplifiedResNeXt.png|600px|centre|thumb|Simplified ResNeXt Convolution Block. Yamada et al., 2018]]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Regularization Methods'''<br />
<br />
'''Stochastic Depth''' helped address the issue of vanishing gradients in ResNet. It works by randomly dropping residual blocks. On the <math>l^{th}</math> residual block the Stochastic Depth process is given as <math>G(x)=x+b_lF(x)</math> where <math>b_l \in \{0,1\}</math> is a Bernoulli random variable with probability <math>p_l</math>. Using a constant value for <math>p_l</math> didn't work well, so instead a linear decay rule <math>p_l = 1 - \frac{l}{L}(1-p_L)</math> was used. In this equation, <math>L</math> is the number of layers, and <math>p_L</math> is the initial parameter. <br />
<br />
'''Shake-Shake''' is a regularization method that specifically improves the ResNeXt architecture. It can be given as <math>G(x)=x+\alpha F_1(x)+(1-\alpha)F_2(x)</math>, where <math>\alpha \in [0,1]</math> is a random coefficient. <math>\alpha</math> is used during the forward pass, and another identically distributed random parameter <math>\beta</math> is used in the backward pass. This caused one of the two paired convolution operations to be dropped, and further improved ResNeXt.<br />
<br />
[[File:Paper 32.jpg|600px|centre|thumb| Shake-Shake (ResNeXt + Shake-Shake) (Gastaldi, 2017), in which some processing layers omitted for conciseness.]]<br />
<br />
=Proposed Method=<br />
We give an intuitive interpretation of the forward pass of Shake-Shake regularization. To the best of our knowledge, it has not been given yet, while the phenomenon in the backward pass is experimentally investigated by Gastaldi (2017). In the forward pass, Shake-Shake interpolates the outputs of two residual branches with a random variable α that controls the degree of interpolation. As DeVries & Taylor (2017a) demonstrated that interpolation of two data in the feature space can synthesize reasonable augmented data, the interpolation of two residual blocks of Shake-Shake in the forward pass can be interpreted as synthesizing data. Use of a random variable α generates many different augmented data. On the other hand, in the backward pass, a different random variable β is used to disturb learning to make the network learnable long time. Gastaldi (2017) demonstrated how the difference between <math>\alpha</math> and <math>\beta</math> affects.<br />
<br />
The regularization mechanism of Shake-Shake relies on two or more residual branches, so that it can be applied only to 2-branch networks architectures. In addition, 2-branch network architectures consume more memory than 1-branch network architectures. One may think the number of learnable parameters of ResNeXt can be kept in 1-branch and 2-branch network architectures by controlling its cardinality and the number of channels (filters). For example, a 1-branch network (e.g., ResNeXt 1-64d) and its corresponding 2-branch network (e.g., ResNeXt 2-40d) have almost same number of learnable parameters. However, even so, it increases memory consumption due to the overhead to keep the inputs of residual blocks and so on. By comparing ResNeXt 1-64d and 2-40d, the latter requires more memory than the former by 8% in theory (for one layer) and by 11% in measured values (for 152 layers).<br />
<br />
This paper seeks to generalize the method proposed in Shake-Shake to be applied to any residual structure network. Shake-Shake. The initial formulation of 1-branch shake is <math>G(x) = x + \alpha F(x)</math>. In this case, <math>\alpha</math> is a coefficient that disturbs the forward pass, but is not necessarily constrained to be [0,1]. Another corresponding coefficient <math>\beta</math> is used in the backwards pass. Applying this simple adaptation of Shake-Shake on a 110-layer version of PyramidNet with <math>\alpha \in [0,1]</math> and <math>\beta \in [0,1]</math> performs abysmally, with an error rate of 77.99%.<br />
<br />
This failure is a result of the setup causing too much perturbation. A trick is needed to promote learning with large perturbations, to preserve the regularization effect. The idea of the authors is to borrow from ResDrop and combine that with Shake-Shake. This works by randomly deciding whether to apply 1-branch shake. This creates in effect two networks, the original network without a regularization component, and a regularized network. When mixing up two networks, we expected the following effects: When the non regularized network is selected, learning is promoted; when the perturbed network is selected, learning is disturbed. Achieving good performance requires a balance between the two. <br />
<br />
'''ShakeDrop''' is given as <br />
<br />
<div align="center"><br />
<math>G(x) = x + (b_l + \alpha - b_l \alpha)F(x)</math>,<br />
</div><br />
<br />
where <math>b_l</math> is a Bernoulli random variable following the linear decay rule used in Stochastic Depth. An alternative presentation is <br />
<br />
<div align="center"><br />
<math><br />
G(x) = \begin{cases}<br />
x + F(x) ~~ \text{if } b_l = 1 \\<br />
x + \alpha F(x) ~~ \text{otherwise}<br />
\end{cases}<br />
</math><br />
</div><br />
<br />
If <math>b_l = 1</math> then ShakeDrop is equivalent to the original network, otherwise it is the network + 1-branch Shake. The authors also found that the linear decay rule of ResDrop works well, compared with the uniform rule. Regardless of the value of <math>\beta</math> on the backwards pass, network weights will be updated.<br />
<br />
=Experiments=<br />
<br />
'''Parameter Search'''<br />
<br />
The authors experiments began with a hyperparameter search utilizing ShakeDrop on pyramidal networks. The PyramidNet used was made up of a total of 110 layers which included a convolutional layer and a final fully connected layer. It had 54 additive pyramidal residual blocks and the final residual block had 286 channels. The results of this search are presented below. <br />
<br />
[[File:ShakeDropHyperParameterSearch.png|600px|centre|thumb|Average Top-1 errors (%) of “PyramidNet + ShakeDrop” with several ranges of parameters of 4 runs at the final (300th) epoch on CIFAR-100 dataset in the “Batch” level. In some settings, it is equivalent to PyramidNet and PyramidDrop. Borrowed from ShakeDrop Regularization by Yamada et al., 2018.]]<br />
<br />
The setting that are used throughout the rest of the experiments are then <math>\alpha \in [-1,1]</math> and <math>\beta \in [0,1]</math>. Cases H and F outperform PyramidNet, suggesting that the strong perturbations imposed by ShakeDrop are functioning as intended. However, fully applying the perturbations in the backwards pass appears to destabilize the network, resulting in performance that is worse than standard PyramidNet.<br />
<br />
[[File:ParameterUpdateShakeDrop.png|400px|centre]]<br />
<br />
Following this initial parameter decision, the authors tested 4 different strategies for parameter update among "Batch" (same coefficients for all images in minibatch for each residual block), "Image" (same scaling coefficients for each image for each residual block), "Channel" (same scaling coefficients for each element for each residual block), and "Pixel" (same scaling coefficients for each element for each residual block). While Pixel was the best in terms of error rate, it is not very memory efficient, so Image was selected as it had the second best performance without the memory drawback.<br />
<br />
'''Comparison with Regularization Methods'''<br />
<br />
For these experiments, there are a few modifications that were made to assist with training. For ResNeXt, the EraseRelu formulation has each residual block ends in batch normalization. The Wide ResNet also is compared between vanilla with batch normalization and without. Batch normalization keeps the outputs of residual blocks in a certain range, as otherwise <math>\alpha</math> and <math>\beta</math> could cause perturbations that are too large, causing divergent learning. There is also a comparison of ResDrop/ShakeDrop Type A (where the regularization unit is inserted before the add unit for a residual branch) and after (where the regularization unit is inserted after the add unit for a residual branch). <br />
<br />
These experiments are performed on the CIFAR-100 dataset.<br />
<br />
[[File:ShakeDropArchitectureComparison1.png|800px|centre|thumb|]]<br />
<br />
[[File:ShakeDropArchitectureComparison2.png|800px|centre|thumb|]]<br />
<br />
[[File:ShakeDropArchitectureComparison3.png|800px|centre|thumb|]]<br />
<br />
For a final round of testing, the training setup was modified to incorporate other techniques used in state of the art methods. For most of the tests, the learning rate for the 300 epoch version started at 0.1 and decayed by a factor of 0.1 1/2 & 3/4 of the way through training. The alternative was cosine annealing, based on the presentation by Loshchilov and Hutter in their paper SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts. This is indicated in the Cos column, with a check indicating cosine annealing. <br />
<br />
[[File:CosineAnnealing.png|400px|centre|thumb|]]<br />
<br />
The Reg column indicates the regularization method used, either none, ResDrop (RD), Shake-Shake (SS), or ShakeDrop (SD). Fianlly, the Fil Column determines the type of data augmentation used, either none, cutout (CO) (DeVries & Taylor, 2017b), or Random Erasing (RE) (Zhong et al., 2017). <br />
<br />
[[File:ShakeDropComparison.png|800px|centre|thumb|Top-1 Errors (%) at final epoch on CIFAR-10/100 datasets]]<br />
<br />
'''State-of-the-Art Comparisons'''<br />
<br />
A direct comparison with state of the art methods is favorable for this new method. <br />
<br />
# Fair comparison of ResNeXt + Shake-Shake with PyramidNet + ShakeDrop gives an improvement of 0.19% on CIFAR-10 and 1.86% on CIFAR-100. Under these conditions, the final error rate is then 2.67% for CIFAR-10 and 13.99% for CIFAR-100.<br />
# Fair comparison of ResNeXt + Shake-Shake + Cutout with PyramidNet + ShakeDrop + Random Erasing gives an improvement of 0.25% on CIFAR-10 and 3.01% on CIFAR 100. Under these conditions, the final error rate is then 2.31% for CIFAR-10 and 12.19% for CIFAR-100.<br />
# Comparison with the state-of-the-arts, PyramidNet + ShakeDrop gives an improvement of 0.25% on CIFAR-10 than ResNeXt + Shake-Shake + Cutout, PyramidNet + ShakeDrop gives an improvement of 2.85% on CIFAR-100 than Coupled Ensemble.<br />
<br />
=Implementation details=<br />
<br />
'''CIFAR-10/100 datasets'''<br />
<br />
All the images in these datasets were color normalized and then horizontally flipped with a probability of 50%. All of then then were zero padded to have a dimentionality of 40 by 40 pixels.<br />
<br />
<br />
=Conclusion=<br />
<br />
This paper proposed a new stochastic regularization method, ShakeDrop, which outperforms previous state of the art methods while maintaining similar memory efficiency. It demonstrates that heavily perturbing a network can help to overcome issues with overfitting. It is also an effective way to regularize residual networks for image classification. The method was tested by CIFAR-10/100 and Tiny ImageNet datasets and showed great performance.<br />
<br />
=Critique=<br />
<br />
The novelty of this paper is low as pointed out by the reviewers. Also, there is a confusion whether or not the results could be replicated as <math>\alpha</math> and <math>\beta</math> are choosen randomly. The proposed ShakeDrop regularization is essentially a combination of the PyramidDrop and Shake-Shake regularization. The most surprising part is that the forward weight can be negative thus inverting the output of a convolution. The mathematical justification for ShakeDrop regularization is limited, relying on intuition and empirical evidence instead.<br />
As pointed out from the above, the method basically relies heavily on the intuition. This means that the performance of the algorithm can not been extended beyond the CIFAR dataset and can vary a lot depending on the characteristics of data sets that users are performing, with some exaggeration. However, the performance is still impressive since it performs better than known algorithms. It is not clear as to how the proposed technique would work with a non-residual architecture.<br />
<br />
=References=<br />
[Yamada et al., 2018] Yamada Y, Iwamura M, Kise K. ShakeDrop regularization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.02375. 2018 Feb 7.<br />
<br />
[He et al., 2016] Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, and Jian Sun. Deep residual learning for image recognition. In Proc. CVPR, 2016.<br />
<br />
[Zagoruyko & Komodakis, 2016] Sergey Zagoruyko and Nikos Komodakis. Wide residual networks. In Proc. BMVC, 2016.<br />
<br />
[Han et al., 2017] Dongyoon Han, Jiwhan Kim, and Junmo Kim. Deep pyramidal residual networks. In Proc. CVPR, 2017a.<br />
<br />
[Xie et al., 2017] Saining Xie, Ross Girshick, Piotr Dollar, Zhuowen Tu, and Kaiming He. Aggregated residual transformations for deep neural networks. In Proc. CVPR, 2017.<br />
<br />
[Huang et al., 2016] Gao Huang, Yu Sun, Zhuang Liu, Daniel Sedra, and Kilian Weinberger. Deep networks with stochastic depth. arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.09382v3, 2016.<br />
<br />
[Gastaldi, 2017] Xavier Gastaldi. Shake-shake regularization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.07485v2, 2017.<br />
<br />
[Loshilov & Hutter, 2016] Ilya Loshchilov and Frank Hutter. Sgdr: Stochastic gradient descent with warm restarts. arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.03983, 2016.<br />
<br />
[DeVries & Taylor, 2017b] Terrance DeVries and Graham W. Taylor. Improved regularization of convolutional neural networks with cutout. arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.04552, 2017b.<br />
<br />
[Zhong et al., 2017] Zhun Zhong, Liang Zheng, Guoliang Kang, Shaozi Li, and Yi Yang. Random erasing data augmentation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.04896, 2017.<br />
<br />
[Dutt et al., 2017] Anuvabh Dutt, Denis Pellerin, and Georges Qunot. Coupled ensembles of neural networks. arXiv preprint 1709.06053v1, 2017.<br />
<br />
[Veit et al., 2016] Andreas Veit, Michael J Wilber, and Serge Belongie. Residual networks behave like ensembles of relatively shallow networks. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29, 2016.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946F18/Autoregressive_Convolutional_Neural_Networks_for_Asynchronous_Time_Series&diff=41884stat946F18/Autoregressive Convolutional Neural Networks for Asynchronous Time Series2018-11-29T17:30:53Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Gating and weighting mechanisms */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page is a summary of the paper "[http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/binkowski18a/binkowski18a.pdf Autoregressive Convolutional Neural Networks for Asynchronous Time Series]" by Mikołaj Binkowski, Gautier Marti, Philippe Donnat. It was published at ICML in 2018. The code for this paper is provided [https://github.com/mbinkowski/nntimeseries here].<br />
<br />
=Introduction=<br />
In this paper, the authors propose a deep convolutional network architecture called Significance-Offset Convolutional Neural Network for regression of multivariate asynchronous time series. The model is inspired by standard autoregressive (AR) models and gating systems used in recurrent neural networks. The model is evaluated on various time series data including:<br />
# Hedge fund proprietary dataset of over 2 million quotes for a credit derivative index, <br />
# An artificially generated noisy auto-regressive series, <br />
# A UCI household electricity consumption dataset. <br />
<br />
This paper focused on time series that have multivariate and noisy signals, especially financial data. Financial time series is challenging to predict due to their low signal-to-noise ratio and heavy-tailed distributions. For example, the same signal (e.g. price of a stock) is obtained from different sources (e.g. financial news, an investment bank, financial analyst etc.) asynchronously. Each source may have a different bias or noise. ([[Media: Junyi1.png|Figure 1]]) The investment bank with more clients can update their information more precisely than the investment bank with fewer clients, which means the significance of each past observations may depend on other factors that change in time. Therefore, the traditional econometric models such as AR, VAR (Vector Autoregressive Model), VARMA (Vector Autoregressive Moving Average Model) [1] might not be sufficient. However, their relatively good performance could allow us to combine such linear econometric models with deep neural networks that can learn highly nonlinear relationships. This model is inspired by the gating mechanism which is successful in RNNs and Highway Networks.<br />
<br />
Time series forecasting is focused on modeling the predictors of future values of time series given their past. As in many cases the relationship between past and future observations is not deterministic, this amounts to expressing the conditional probability distribution as a function of the past observations: The time series forecasting problem can be expressed as a conditional probability distribution below,<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>p(X_{t+d}|X_t,X_{t-1},...) = f(X_t,X_{t-1},...)</math></div><br />
This forecasting problem has been approached almost independently by econometrics and machine learning communities. In this paper, the authors focus on modeling the predictors of future values of time series given their past values. <br />
<br />
The reasons that financial time series are particularly challenging:<br />
* Low signal-to-noise ratio and heavy-tailed distributions.<br />
* Being observed different sources (e.g. financial news, analysts, portfolio managers in hedge funds, market-makers in investment banks) in asynchronous moments of time. Each of these sources may have a different bias and noise with respect to the original signal that needs to be recovered.<br />
* Data sources are usually strongly correlated and lead-lag relationships are possible (e.g. a market-maker with more clients can update its view more frequently and precisely than one with fewer clients). <br />
* The significance of each of the available past observations might be dependent on some other factors that can change in time. Hence, the traditional econometric models such as AR, VAR, VARMA might not be sufficient.<br />
<br />
The predictability of financial dataset still remains an open problem and is discussed in various publications [2].<br />
<br />
[[File:Junyi1.png | 500px|thumb|center|Figure 1: Quotes from four different market participants (sources) for the same credit default swaps (CDS) throughout one day. Each trader displays from time to time the prices for which he offers to buy (bid) and sell (ask) the underlying CDS. The filled area marks the difference between the best sell and buy offers (spread) at each time.]]<br />
<br />
The paper also provides empirical evidence that their model which combines linear models with deep learning models could perform better than just DL models like CNN, LSTMs and Phased LSTMs.<br />
<br />
=Related Work=<br />
===Time series forecasting===<br />
From recent proceedings in main machine learning venues i.e. ICML, NIPS, AISTATS, UAI, we can notice that time series are often forecast using Gaussian processes[3,4], especially for irregularly sampled time series[5]. Though still largely independent, combined models have started to appear, for example, the Gaussian Copula Process Volatility model[6]. For this paper, the authors use coupling AR models and neural networks to achieve such combined models.<br />
<br />
Although deep neural networks have been applied into many fields and produced satisfactory results, there still is little literature on deep learning for time series forecasting. More recently, the papers include Sirignano (2016)[7] that used 4-layer perceptrons in modeling price change distributions in Limit Order Books, and Borovykh et al. (2017)[8] who applied more recent WaveNet architecture to several short univariate and bivariate time-series (including financial ones). Heaton et al. (2016)[9] claimed to use autoencoders with a single hidden layer to compress multivariate financial data. Neil et al. (2016)[10] presented augmentation of LSTM architecture suitable for asynchronous series, which stimulates learning dependencies of different frequencies through time gate. <br />
<br />
In this paper, the authors examine the capabilities of several architectures (CNN, residual network, multi-layer LSTM, and phase LSTM) on AR-like artificial asynchronous and noisy time series, household electricity consumption dataset, and on real financial data from the credit default swap market with some inefficiencies.<br />
<br />
====AR Model====<br />
<br />
An autoregressive (AR) model describes the next value in a time-series as a combination of previous values, scaling factors, a bias, and noise [https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat501/node/358/ (source)]. For a p-th order (relating the current state to the p last states), the equation of the model is:<br />
<br />
<math> X_t = c + \sum_{i=1}^p \varphi_i X_{t-i}+ \varepsilon_t \,</math> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregressive_model#Definition (equation source)]<br />
<br />
With parameters/coefficients <math>\varphi_i</math>, constant <math>c</math>, and noise <math>\varepsilon_t</math> This can be extended to vector form to create the VAR model mentioned in the paper.<br />
<br />
===Gating and weighting mechanisms===<br />
Gating mechanism for neural networks has ability to overcome the problem of vanishing gradients, and can be expressed as <math display="inline">f(x)=c(x) \otimes \sigma(x)</math>, where <math>f</math> is the output function, <math>c</math> is a "candidate output" (a nonlinear function of <math>x</math>), <math>\otimes</math> is an element-wise matrix product, and <math>\sigma : \mathbb{R} \rightarrow [0,1] </math> is a sigmoid non-linearity that controls the amount of output passed to the next layer. Different composition of functions of the same type as described above have proven to be an essential ingredient in popular recurrent architecture such as LSTM and GRU[11].<br />
<br />
The main purpose of the proposed gating system is to weight the outputs of the intermediate layers within neural networks, and is most closely related to softmax gating used in MuFuRu(Multi-Function Recurrent Unit)[12], i.e.<br />
<math display="inline"> f(x) = \sum_{l=1}^L p^l(x) \otimes f^l(x)\text{,}\ p(x)=\text{softmax}(\widehat{p}(x)), </math>, where <math>(f^l)_{l=1}^L </math>are candidate outputs (composition operators in MuFuRu), <math>(\widehat{p}^l)_{l=1}^L </math>are linear functions of inputs. <br />
<br />
This idea is also successfully used in attention networks[13] such as image captioning and machine translation. In this paper, the proposed method is similar as, the separate inputs (time series steps in this case) are weighted in accordance with learned functions of these inputs. The difference is that the functions are modelled using multi-layer CNNs. Another difference is that the proposed method is not using recurrent layers, which enables the network to remember parts of the sentence/image already translated/described.<br />
<br />
=Motivation=<br />
There are mainly five motivations that are stated in the paper by the authors:<br />
#The forecasting problem in this paper has been done almost independently by econometrics and machine learning communities. Unlike in machine learning, research in econometrics is more likely to explain variables rather than improving out-of-sample prediction power. These models tend to 'over-fit' on financial time series, their parameters are unstable and have poor performance on out-of-sample prediction.<br />
#It is difficult for the learning algorithms to deal with time series data where the observations have been made irregularly. Although Gaussian processes provide a useful theoretical framework that is able to handle asynchronous data, they are not suitable for financial datasets, which often follow heavy-tailed distribution .<br />
#Predictions of autoregressive time series may involve highly nonlinear functions if sampled irregularly. For AR time series with higher order and have more past observations, the expectation of it <math display="inline">\mathbb{E}[X(t)|{X(t-m), m=1,...,M}]</math> may involve more complicated functions that in general may not allow closed-form expression.<br />
#In practice, the dimensions of multivariate time series are often observed separately and asynchronously, such series at fixed frequency may lead to lose information or enlarge the dataset, which is shown in Figure 2(a). Therefore, the core of the proposed architecture SOCNN represents separate dimensions as a single one with dimension and duration indicators as additional features(Figure 2(b)).<br />
#Given a series of pairs of consecutive input values and corresponding durations, <math display="inline"> x_n = (X(t_n),t_n-t_{n-1}) </math>. One may expect that LSTM may memorize the input values in each step and weight them at the output according to the duration, but this approach may lead to an imbalance between the needs for memory and for linearity. The weights that are assigned to the memorized observations potentially require several layers of nonlinearity to be computed properly, while past observations might just need to be memorized as they are.<br />
<br />
[[File:Junyi2.png | 550px|thumb|center|Figure 2: (a) Fixed sampling frequency and its drawbacks; keep- ing all available information leads to much more datapoints. (b) Proposed data representation for the asynchronous series. Consecutive observations are stored together as a single value series, regardless of which series they belong to; this information, however, is stored in indicator features, alongside durations between observations.]]<br />
<br />
=Model Architecture=<br />
Suppose there exists a multivariate time series <math display="inline">(x_n)_{n=0}^{\infty} \subset \mathbb{R}^d </math>, we want to predict the conditional future values of a subset of elements of <math>x_n</math><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>y_n = \mathbb{E} [x_n^I | \{x_{n-m}, m=1,2,...\}], </math></div><br />
where <math> I=\{i_1,i_2,...i_{d_I}\} \subset \{1,2,...,d\} </math> is a subset of features of <math>x_n</math>.<br />
<br />
Let <math> \textbf{x}_n^{-M} = (x_{n-m})_{m=1}^M </math>. <br />
<br />
The estimator of <math>y_n</math> can be expressed as:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>\tilde{y}_n = \sum_{m=1}^M [F(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}) \otimes \sigma(S(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}))].,_m ,</math></div><br />
The estimate is the summation of the columns of the matrix in bracket. Here<br />
#<math>F,S : \mathbb{R}^{d \times M} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{d_I \times M}</math> are neural networks. <br />
#* <math>S</math> is a fully convolutional network which is composed of convolutional layers only. <br />
#* <math display="inline">F(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}) = W \otimes [\text{off}(x_{n-m}) + x_{n-m}^I)]_{m=1}^M </math> <br />
#** <math> W \in \mathbb{R}^{d_I \times M}</math> <br />
#** <math> \text{off}: \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{d_I} </math> is a multilayer perceptron.<br />
<br />
#<math>\sigma</math> is a normalized activation function independent at each row, i.e. <math display="inline"> \sigma ((a_1^T, ..., a_{d_I}^T)^T)=(\sigma(a_1)^T,..., \sigma(a_{d_I})^T)^T </math><br />
#* for any <math>a_{i} \in \mathbb{R}^{M}</math><br />
#* and <math>\sigma </math> is defined such that <math>\sigma(a)^{T} \mathbf{1}_{M}=1</math> for any <math>a \in \mathbb{R}^M</math>.<br />
# <math>\otimes</math> is element-wise matrix multiplication (also known as Hadamard matrix multiplication).<br />
#<math>A.,_m</math> denotes the m-th column of a matrix A.<br />
<br />
Since <math>\sum_{m=1}^M W.,_m=W\cdot(1,1,...,1)^T</math> and <math>\sum_{m=1}^M S.,_m=S\cdot(1,1,...,1)^T</math>, we can express <math>\hat{y}_n</math> as:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>\hat{y}_n = \sum_{m=1}^M W.,_m \otimes (off(x_{n-m}) + x_{n-m}^I) \otimes \sigma(S.,_m(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}))</math></div><br />
This is the proposed network, Significance-Offset Convolutional Neural Network, <math>\text{off}</math> and <math>S</math> in the equation are corresponding to Offset and Significance in the name respectively.<br />
Figure 3 shows the scheme of network.<br />
<br />
[[File:Junyi3.png | 600px|thumb|center|Figure 3: A scheme of the proposed SOCNN architecture. The network preserves the time-dimension up to the top layer, while the number of features per timestep (filters) in the hidden layers is custom. The last convolutional layer, however, has the number of filters equal to dimension of the output. The Weighting frame shows how outputs from offset and significance networks are combined in accordance with Eq. of <math>\hat{y}_n</math>.]]<br />
<br />
The form of <math>\tilde{y}_n</math> ensures the separation of the temporal dependence (obtained in weights <math>W_m</math>). <math>S</math>, which represents the local significance of observations, is determined by its filters which capture local dependencies and are independent of the relative position in time, and the predictors <math>\text{off}(x_{n-m})</math> are completely independent of position in time. An adjusted single regressor for the target variable is provided by each past observation through the offset network. Since in asynchronous sampling procedure, consecutive values of x come from different signals and might be heterogeneous, therefore adjustment of offset network is important. In addition, significance network provides data-dependent weight for each regressor and sums them up in an autoregressive manner.<br />
<br />
===Relation to asynchronous data===<br />
One common problem of time series is that durations are varying between consecutive observations, the paper states two ways to solve this problem<br />
#Data preprocessing: aligning the observations at some fixed frequency e.g. duplicating and interpolating observations as shown in Figure 2(a). However, as mentioned in the figure, this approach will tend to loss of information and enlarge the size of the dataset and model complexity.<br />
#Add additional features: Treating the duration or time of the observations as additional features, it is the core of SOCNN, which is shown in Figure 2(b).<br />
<br />
===Loss function===<br />
The L2 error is a natural loss function for the estimators of expected value: <math>L^2(y,y')=||y-y'||^2</math><br />
<br />
The output of the offset network is series of separate predictors of changes between corresponding observations <math>x_{n-m}^I</math> and the target value<math>y_n</math>, this is the reason why we use auxiliary loss function, which equals to mean squared error of such intermediate predictions:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>L^{aux}(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}, y_n)=\frac{1}{M} \sum_{m=1}^M ||off(x_{n-m}) + x_{n-m}^I -y_n||^2 </math></div><br />
The total loss for the sample <math> \textbf{x}_n^{-M},y_n) </math> is then given by:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>L^{tot}(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}, y_n)=L^2(\widehat{y}_n, y_n)+\alpha L^{aux}(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}, y_n)</math></div><br />
where <math>\widehat{y}_n</math> was mentioned before, <math>\alpha \geq 0</math> is a constant.<br />
<br />
=Experiments=<br />
The paper evaluated SOCNN architecture on three datasets: artificially generated datasets, [https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Individual+household+electric+power+consumption household electric power consumption dataset], and the financial dataset of bid/ask quotes provided by several market participants active in the credit derivatives market. Comparing its performance with simple CNN, single and multiplayer LSTM and 25-layer ResNet. Apart from the evaluation of the SOCNN architecture, the paper also discussed the impact of network components such as auxiliary<br />
loss and the depth of the offset sub-network. The code and datasets are available at [https://github.com/mbinkowski/nntimeseries here]<br />
<br />
==Datasets==<br />
Artificial data: They generated 4 artificial series, <math> X_{K \times N}</math>, where <math>K \in \{16,64\} </math>. Therefore there is a synchronous and an asynchronous series for each K value. Note that a series with K sources is K + 1-dimensional in synchronous case and K + 2-dimensional in asynchronous case. The base series in all processes was a stationary AR(10) series. Although that series has the true order of 10, in the experimental setting the input data included past 60 observations. The rationale behind that is twofold: not only is the data observed in irregular random times but also in real–life problems the order of the model is unknown.<br />
<br />
Electricity data: This UCI dataset contains 7 different features excluding date and time. The features include global active power, global reactive power, voltage, global intensity, sub-metering 1, sub-metering 2 and sub-metering 3, recorded every minute for 47 months. The data has been altered so that one observation contains only one value of 7 features, while durations between consecutive observations are ranged from 1 to 7 minutes. The goal is to predict all 7 features for the next time step.<br />
<br />
Non-anonymous quotes: The dataset contains 2.1 million quotes from 28 different sources from different market participants such as analysts, banks etc. Each quote is characterized by 31 features: the offered price, 28 indicators of the quoting source, the direction indicator (the quote refers to either a buy or a sell offer) and duration from the previous quote. For each source and direction, we want to predict the next quoted price from this given source and direction considering the last 60 quotes.<br />
<br />
[[File:async.png | 520px|center|]]<br />
<br />
==Training details==<br />
They applied grid search on some hyperparameters in order to get the significance of its components. The hyperparameters include the offset sub-network's depth and the auxiliary weight <math>\alpha</math>. For offset sub-network's depth, they use 1, 10,1 for artificial, electricity and quotes dataset respectively; and they compared the values of <math>\alpha</math> in {0,0.1,0.01}.<br />
<br />
They chose LeakyReLU as activation function for all networks:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>\sigma^{LeakyReLU}(x) = x</math> if <math>x\geq 0</math>, and <math>0.1x</math> otherwise </div><br />
They use the same number of layers, same stride and similar kernel size structure in CNN. In each trained CNN, they applied max pooling with the pool size of 2 every 2 convolutional layers.<br />
<br />
Table 1 presents the configuration of network hyperparameters used in comparison<br />
<br />
[[File:Junyi4.png | 520px|center|]]<br />
<br />
===Network Training===<br />
The training and validation data were sampled randomly from the first 80% of timesteps in each series, with ratio of 3 to 1. The remaining 20% of data was used as a test set.<br />
<br />
All models were trained using Adam optimizer because the authors found that its rate of convergence was much faster than standard Stochastic Gradient Descent in early tests.<br />
<br />
They used a batch size of 128 for artificial and electricity data, and 256 for quotes dataset, and applied batch normalization between each convolution and the following activation. <br />
<br />
At the beginning of each epoch, the training samples were randomly sampled. To prevent overfitting, they applied dropout and early stopping.<br />
<br />
Weights were initialized using the normalized uniform procedure proposed by Glorot & Bengio (2010).[14]<br />
<br />
The authors carried out the experiments on Tensorflow and Keras and used different GPU to optimize the model for different datasets.<br />
<br />
==Results==<br />
Table 2 shows all results performed from all datasets.<br />
[[File:Junyi5.png | 800px|center|]]<br />
We can see that SOCNN outperforms in all asynchronous artificial, electricity and quotes datasets. For synchronous data, LSTM might be slightly better, but SOCNN almost has the same results with LSTM. Phased LSTM and ResNet have performed really bad on artificial asynchronous dataset and quotes dataset respectively. Notice that having more than one layer of offset network would have negative impact on results. Also, the higher weights of auxiliary loss(<math>\alpha</math>considerably improved the test error on asynchronous dataset, see Table 3. However, for other datasets, its impact was negligible.<br />
[[File:Junyi6.png | 480px|center|]]<br />
In general, SOCNN has significantly lower variance of the test and validation errors, especially in the early stage of the training process and for quotes dataset. This effect can be seen in the learning curves for Asynchronous 64 artificial dataset presented in Figure 5.<br />
[[File:Junyi7.png | 500px|thumb|center|Figure 5: Learning curves with different auxiliary weights for SOCNN model trained on Asynchronous 64 dataset. The solid lines indicate the test error while the dashed lines indicate the training error.]]<br />
<br />
Finally, we want to test the robustness of the proposed model SOCNN, adding noise terms to asynchronous 16 dataset and check how these networks perform. The result is shown in Figure 6.<br />
[[File:Junyi8.png | 600px|thumb|center|Figure 6: Experiment comparing robustness of the considered networks for Asynchronous 16 dataset. The plots show how the error would change if an additional noise term was added to the input series. The dotted curves show the total significance and average absolute offset (not to scale) outputs for the noisy observations. Interestingly, the significance of the noisy observations increases with the magnitude of noise; i.e. noisy observations are far from being discarded by SOCNN.]]<br />
From Figure 6, the purple lines and green lines seem to stay at the same position in training and testing process. SOCNN and single-layer LSTM are most robust and least prone to overfitting comparing to other networks.<br />
<br />
=Conclusion and Discussion=<br />
In this paper, the authors have proposed a new architecture called Significance-Offset Convolutional Neural Network, which combines AR-like weighting mechanism and convolutional neural network. This new architecture is designed for high-noise asynchronous time series and achieves outperformance in forecasting several asynchronous time series compared to popular convolutional and recurrent networks. <br />
<br />
The SOCNN can be extended further by adding intermediate weighting layers of the same type in the network structure. Another possible extension but needs further empirical studies is that we consider not just <math>1 \times 1</math> convolutional kernels on the offset sub-network. Also, this new architecture might be tested on other real-life datasets with relevant characteristics in the future, especially on econometric datasets and more generally for time series (stochastic processes) regression.<br />
<br />
=Critiques=<br />
#The paper is most likely an application paper, and the proposed new architecture shows improved performance over baselines in the asynchronous time series.<br />
#The quote data cannot be reached as they are proprietary. Also, only two datasets available.<br />
#The 'Significance' network was described as critical to the model in paper, but they did not show how the performance of SOCNN with respect to the significance network.<br />
#The transform of the original data to asynchronous data is not clear.<br />
#The experiments on the main application are not reproducible because the data is proprietary.<br />
#The way that train and test data were split is unclear. This could be important in the case of the financial data set.<br />
#Although the auxiliary loss function was mentioned as an important part, the advantages of it was not too clear in the paper. Maybe it is better that the paper describes a little more about its effectiveness.<br />
#It was not mentioned clearly in the paper whether the model training was done on a rolling basis for time series forecasting.<br />
#The noise term used in section 5's model robustness analysis uses evenly distributed noise (see Appendix B). While the analysis is a good start, analysis with different noise distributions would make the findings more generalizable.<br />
#The paper uses financial/economic data as one of its testing data set. Instead of comparing neural network models such as CNN which is known to work badly on time series data, it would be much better if the author compared to well-known econometric time series models such as GARCH and VAR.<br />
<br />
=References=<br />
[1] Hamilton, J. D. Time series analysis, volume 2. Princeton university press Princeton, 1994. <br />
<br />
[2] Fama, E. F. Efficient capital markets: A review of theory and empirical work. The journal of Finance, 25(2):383–417, 1970.<br />
<br />
[3] Petelin, D., Sˇindela ́ˇr, J., Pˇrikryl, J., and Kocijan, J. Financial modeling using gaussian process models. In Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems (IDAACS), 2011 IEEE 6th International Conference on, volume 2, pp. 672–677. IEEE, 2011.<br />
<br />
[4] Tobar, F., Bui, T. D., and Turner, R. E. Learning stationary time series using Gaussian processes with nonparametric kernels. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 3501–3509, 2015.<br />
<br />
[5] Hwang, Y., Tong, A., and Choi, J. Automatic construction of nonparametric relational regression models for multiple time series. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning, 2016.<br />
<br />
[6] Wilson, A. and Ghahramani, Z. Copula processes. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 2460–2468, 2010.<br />
<br />
[7] Sirignano, J. Extended abstract: Neural networks for limit order books, February 2016.<br />
<br />
[8] Borovykh, A., Bohte, S., and Oosterlee, C. W. Conditional time series forecasting with convolutional neural networks, March 2017.<br />
<br />
[9] Heaton, J. B., Polson, N. G., and Witte, J. H. Deep learning in finance, February 2016.<br />
<br />
[10] Neil, D., Pfeiffer, M., and Liu, S.-C. Phased lstm: Accelerating recurrent network training for long or event-based sequences. In Advances In Neural Information Process- ing Systems, pp. 3882–3890, 2016.<br />
<br />
[11] Chung, J., Gulcehre, C., Cho, K., and Bengio, Y. Empirical evaluation of gated recurrent neural networks on sequence modeling, December 2014.<br />
<br />
[12] Weissenborn, D. and Rockta ̈schel, T. MuFuRU: The Multi-Function recurrent unit, June 2016.<br />
<br />
[13] Cho, K., Courville, A., and Bengio, Y. Describing multi- media content using attention-based Encoder–Decoder networks. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 17(11): 1875–1886, July 2015. ISSN 1520-9210.<br />
<br />
[14] Glorot, X. and Bengio, Y. Understanding the difficulty of training deep feedforward neural net- works. In In Proceedings of the International Con- ference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AIS- TATSaˆ10). Society for Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2010.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946F18/Autoregressive_Convolutional_Neural_Networks_for_Asynchronous_Time_Series&diff=41878stat946F18/Autoregressive Convolutional Neural Networks for Asynchronous Time Series2018-11-29T17:12:22Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div>This page is a summary of the paper "[http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/binkowski18a/binkowski18a.pdf Autoregressive Convolutional Neural Networks for Asynchronous Time Series]" by Mikołaj Binkowski, Gautier Marti, Philippe Donnat. It was published at ICML in 2018. The code for this paper is provided [https://github.com/mbinkowski/nntimeseries here].<br />
<br />
=Introduction=<br />
In this paper, the authors propose a deep convolutional network architecture called Significance-Offset Convolutional Neural Network for regression of multivariate asynchronous time series. The model is inspired by standard autoregressive (AR) models and gating systems used in recurrent neural networks. The model is evaluated on various time series data including:<br />
# Hedge fund proprietary dataset of over 2 million quotes for a credit derivative index, <br />
# An artificially generated noisy auto-regressive series, <br />
# A UCI household electricity consumption dataset. <br />
<br />
This paper focused on time series that have multivariate and noisy signals, especially financial data. Financial time series is challenging to predict due to their low signal-to-noise ratio and heavy-tailed distributions. For example, the same signal (e.g. price of a stock) is obtained from different sources (e.g. financial news, an investment bank, financial analyst etc.) asynchronously. Each source may have a different bias or noise. ([[Media: Junyi1.png|Figure 1]]) The investment bank with more clients can update their information more precisely than the investment bank with fewer clients, which means the significance of each past observations may depend on other factors that change in time. Therefore, the traditional econometric models such as AR, VAR (Vector Autoregressive Model), VARMA (Vector Autoregressive Moving Average Model) [1] might not be sufficient. However, their relatively good performance could allow us to combine such linear econometric models with deep neural networks that can learn highly nonlinear relationships. This model is inspired by the gating mechanism which is successful in RNNs and Highway Networks.<br />
<br />
The time series forecasting problem can be expressed as a conditional probability distribution below,<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>p(X_{t+d}|X_t,X_{t-1},...) = f(X_t,X_{t-1},...)</math></div><br />
Thus, we focus on modeling the predictors of future values of time series given their past values. <br />
<br />
The reasons that financial time series are particularly challenging:<br />
* Low signal-to-noise ratio and heavy-tailed distributions.<br />
* Being observed different sources (e.g. financial news, analysts, portfolio managers in hedge funds, market-makers in investment banks) in asynchronous moments of time. Each of these sources may have a different bias and noise with respect to the original signal that needs to be recovered.<br />
* Data sources are usually strongly correlated and lead-lag relationships are possible (e.g. a market-maker with more clients can update its view more frequently and precisely than one with fewer clients). <br />
* The significance of each of the available past observations might be dependent on some other factors that can change in time. Hence, the traditional econometric models such as AR, VAR, VARMA might not be sufficient.<br />
<br />
The predictability of financial dataset still remains an open problem and is discussed in various publications [2].<br />
<br />
[[File:Junyi1.png | 500px|thumb|center|Figure 1: Quotes from four different market participants (sources) for the same credit default swaps (CDS) throughout one day. Each trader displays from time to time the prices for which he offers to buy (bid) and sell (ask) the underlying CDS. The filled area marks the difference between the best sell and buy offers (spread) at each time.]]<br />
<br />
The paper also provides empirical evidence that their model which combines linear models with deep learning models could perform better than just DL models like CNN, LSTMs and Phased LSTMs.<br />
<br />
=Related Work=<br />
===Time series forecasting===<br />
From recent proceedings in main machine learning venues i.e. ICML, NIPS, AISTATS, UAI, we can notice that time series are often forecast using Gaussian processes[3,4], especially for irregularly sampled time series[5]. Though still largely independent, combined models have started to appear, for example, the Gaussian Copula Process Volatility model[6]. For this paper, the authors use coupling AR models and neural networks to achieve such combined models.<br />
<br />
Although deep neural networks have been applied into many fields and produced satisfactory results, there still is little literature on deep learning for time series forecasting. More recently, the papers include Sirignano (2016)[7] that used 4-layer perceptrons in modeling price change distributions in Limit Order Books, and Borovykh et al. (2017)[8] who applied more recent WaveNet architecture to several short univariate and bivariate time-series (including financial ones). Heaton et al. (2016)[9] claimed to use autoencoders with a single hidden layer to compress multivariate financial data. Neil et al. (2016)[10] presented augmentation of LSTM architecture suitable for asynchronous series, which stimulates learning dependencies of different frequencies through time gate. <br />
<br />
In this paper, the authors examine the capabilities of several architectures (CNN, residual network, multi-layer LSTM, and phase LSTM) on AR-like artificial asynchronous and noisy time series, household electricity consumption dataset, and on real financial data from the credit default swap market with some inefficiencies.<br />
<br />
====AR Model====<br />
<br />
An autoregressive (AR) model describes the next value in a time-series as a combination of previous values, scaling factors, a bias, and noise [https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat501/node/358/ (source)]. For a p-th order (relating the current state to the p last states), the equation of the model is:<br />
<br />
<math> X_t = c + \sum_{i=1}^p \varphi_i X_{t-i}+ \varepsilon_t \,</math> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregressive_model#Definition (equation source)]<br />
<br />
With parameters/coefficients <math>\varphi_i</math>, constant <math>c</math>, and noise <math>\varepsilon_t</math> This can be extended to vector form to create the VAR model mentioned in the paper.<br />
<br />
===Gating and weighting mechanisms===<br />
Gating mechanisms for neural networks has ability to overcome the problem of vanishing gradient, and can be expressed as <math display="inline">f(x)=c(x) \otimes \sigma(x)</math>, where <math>f</math> is the output function, <math>c</math> is a "candidate output" (a nonlinear function of <math>x</math>), <math>\otimes</math> is an element-wise matrix product, and <math>\sigma : \mathbb{R} \rightarrow [0,1] </math> is a sigmoid nonlinearity that controls the amount of output passed to the next layer. Different composition of functions of the same type as described above have proven to be an essential ingredient in popular recurrent architecture such as LSTM and GRU[11].<br />
<br />
The main purpose of the proposed gating system is to weight the outputs of the intermediate layers within neural networks, and is most closely related to softmax gating used in MuFuRu(Multi-Function Recurrent Unit)[12], i.e.<br />
<math display="inline"> f(x) = \sum_{l=1}^L p^l(x) \otimes f^l(x)\text{,}\ p(x)=\text{softmax}(\widehat{p}(x)), </math>, where <math>(f^l)_{l=1}^L </math>are candidate outputs (composition operators in MuFuRu), <math>(\widehat{p}^l)_{l=1}^L </math>are linear functions of inputs. <br />
<br />
This idea is also successfully used in attention networks[13] such as image captioning and machine translation. In this paper, the proposed method is similar as the separate inputs (time series steps in this case) are weighted in accordance with learned functions of these inputs. The difference is that the functions are being modeled using multi-layer CNNs. Another difference is that the proposed method is not using recurrent layers, which enables the network to remember parts of the sentence/image already translated/described.<br />
<br />
=Motivation=<br />
There are mainly five motivations that are stated in the paper by the authors:<br />
#The forecasting problem in this paper has been done almost independently by econometrics and machine learning communities. Unlike in machine learning, research in econometrics is more likely to explain variables rather than improving out-of-sample prediction power. These models tend to 'over-fit' on financial time series, their parameters are unstable and have poor performance on out-of-sample prediction.<br />
#It is difficult for the learning algorithms to deal with time series data where the observations have been made irregularly. Although Gaussian processes provide a useful theoretical framework that is able to handle asynchronous data, they are not suitable for financial datasets, which often follow heavy-tailed distribution .<br />
#Predictions of autoregressive time series may involve highly nonlinear functions if sampled irregularly. For AR time series with higher order and have more past observations, the expectation of it <math display="inline">\mathbb{E}[X(t)|{X(t-m), m=1,...,M}]</math> may involve more complicated functions that in general may not allow closed-form expression.<br />
#In practice, the dimensions of multivariate time series are often observed separately and asynchronously, such series at fixed frequency may lead to lose information or enlarge the dataset, which is shown in Figure 2(a). Therefore, the core of the proposed architecture SOCNN represents separate dimensions as a single one with dimension and duration indicators as additional features(Figure 2(b)).<br />
#Given a series of pairs of consecutive input values and corresponding durations, <math display="inline"> x_n = (X(t_n),t_n-t_{n-1}) </math>. One may expect that LSTM may memorize the input values in each step and weight them at the output according to the duration, but this approach may lead to an imbalance between the needs for memory and for linearity. The weights that are assigned to the memorized observations potentially require several layers of nonlinearity to be computed properly, while past observations might just need to be memorized as they are.<br />
<br />
[[File:Junyi2.png | 550px|thumb|center|Figure 2: (a) Fixed sampling frequency and its drawbacks; keep- ing all available information leads to much more datapoints. (b) Proposed data representation for the asynchronous series. Consecutive observations are stored together as a single value series, regardless of which series they belong to; this information, however, is stored in indicator features, alongside durations between observations.]]<br />
<br />
=Model Architecture=<br />
Suppose there exists a multivariate time series <math display="inline">(x_n)_{n=0}^{\infty} \subset \mathbb{R}^d </math>, we want to predict the conditional future values of a subset of elements of <math>x_n</math><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>y_n = \mathbb{E} [x_n^I | \{x_{n-m}, m=1,2,...\}], </math></div><br />
where <math> I=\{i_1,i_2,...i_{d_I}\} \subset \{1,2,...,d\} </math> is a subset of features of <math>x_n</math>.<br />
<br />
Let <math> \textbf{x}_n^{-M} = (x_{n-m})_{m=1}^M </math>. <br />
<br />
The estimator of <math>y_n</math> can be expressed as:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>\tilde{y}_n = \sum_{m=1}^M [F(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}) \otimes \sigma(S(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}))].,_m ,</math></div><br />
The estimate is the summation of the columns of the matrix in bracket. Here<br />
#<math>F,S : \mathbb{R}^{d \times M} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{d_I \times M}</math> are neural networks. <br />
#* <math>S</math> is a fully convolutional network which is composed of convolutional layers only. <br />
#* <math display="inline">F(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}) = W \otimes [\text{off}(x_{n-m}) + x_{n-m}^I)]_{m=1}^M </math> <br />
#** <math> W \in \mathbb{R}^{d_I \times M}</math> <br />
#** <math> \text{off}: \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{d_I} </math> is a multilayer perceptron.<br />
<br />
#<math>\sigma</math> is a normalized activation function independent at each row, i.e. <math display="inline"> \sigma ((a_1^T, ..., a_{d_I}^T)^T)=(\sigma(a_1)^T,..., \sigma(a_{d_I})^T)^T </math><br />
#* for any <math>a_{i} \in \mathbb{R}^{M}</math><br />
#* and <math>\sigma </math> is defined such that <math>\sigma(a)^{T} \mathbf{1}_{M}=1</math> for any <math>a \in \mathbb{R}^M</math>.<br />
# <math>\otimes</math> is element-wise matrix multiplication (also known as Hadamard matrix multiplication).<br />
#<math>A.,_m</math> denotes the m-th column of a matrix A.<br />
<br />
Since <math>\sum_{m=1}^M W.,_m=W\cdot(1,1,...,1)^T</math> and <math>\sum_{m=1}^M S.,_m=S\cdot(1,1,...,1)^T</math>, we can express <math>\hat{y}_n</math> as:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>\hat{y}_n = \sum_{m=1}^M W.,_m \otimes (off(x_{n-m}) + x_{n-m}^I) \otimes \sigma(S.,_m(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}))</math></div><br />
This is the proposed network, Significance-Offset Convolutional Neural Network, <math>\text{off}</math> and <math>S</math> in the equation are corresponding to Offset and Significance in the name respectively.<br />
Figure 3 shows the scheme of network.<br />
<br />
[[File:Junyi3.png | 600px|thumb|center|Figure 3: A scheme of the proposed SOCNN architecture. The network preserves the time-dimension up to the top layer, while the number of features per timestep (filters) in the hidden layers is custom. The last convolutional layer, however, has the number of filters equal to dimension of the output. The Weighting frame shows how outputs from offset and significance networks are combined in accordance with Eq. of <math>\hat{y}_n</math>.]]<br />
<br />
The form of <math>\tilde{y}_n</math> ensures the separation of the temporal dependence (obtained in weights <math>W_m</math>). <math>S</math>, which represents the local significance of observations, is determined by its filters which capture local dependencies and are independent of the relative position in time, and the predictors <math>\text{off}(x_{n-m})</math> are completely independent of position in time. An adjusted single regressor for the target variable is provided by each past observation through the offset network. Since in asynchronous sampling procedure, consecutive values of x come from different signals and might be heterogeneous, therefore adjustment of offset network is important. In addition, significance network provides data-dependent weight for each regressor and sums them up in an autoregressive manner.<br />
<br />
===Relation to asynchronous data===<br />
One common problem of time series is that durations are varying between consecutive observations, the paper states two ways to solve this problem<br />
#Data preprocessing: aligning the observations at some fixed frequency e.g. duplicating and interpolating observations as shown in Figure 2(a). However, as mentioned in the figure, this approach will tend to loss of information and enlarge the size of the dataset and model complexity.<br />
#Add additional features: Treating the duration or time of the observations as additional features, it is the core of SOCNN, which is shown in Figure 2(b).<br />
<br />
===Loss function===<br />
The L2 error is a natural loss function for the estimators of expected value: <math>L^2(y,y')=||y-y'||^2</math><br />
<br />
The output of the offset network is series of separate predictors of changes between corresponding observations <math>x_{n-m}^I</math> and the target value<math>y_n</math>, this is the reason why we use auxiliary loss function, which equals to mean squared error of such intermediate predictions:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>L^{aux}(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}, y_n)=\frac{1}{M} \sum_{m=1}^M ||off(x_{n-m}) + x_{n-m}^I -y_n||^2 </math></div><br />
The total loss for the sample <math> \textbf{x}_n^{-M},y_n) </math> is then given by:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>L^{tot}(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}, y_n)=L^2(\widehat{y}_n, y_n)+\alpha L^{aux}(\textbf{x}_n^{-M}, y_n)</math></div><br />
where <math>\widehat{y}_n</math> was mentioned before, <math>\alpha \geq 0</math> is a constant.<br />
<br />
=Experiments=<br />
The paper evaluated SOCNN architecture on three datasets: artificially generated datasets, [https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Individual+household+electric+power+consumption household electric power consumption dataset], and the financial dataset of bid/ask quotes provided by several market participants active in the credit derivatives market. Comparing its performance with simple CNN, single and multiplayer LSTM and 25-layer ResNet. Apart from the evaluation of the SOCNN architecture, the paper also discussed the impact of network components such as auxiliary<br />
loss and the depth of the offset sub-network. The code and datasets are available at [https://github.com/mbinkowski/nntimeseries here]<br />
<br />
==Datasets==<br />
Artificial data: They generated 4 artificial series, <math> X_{K \times N}</math>, where <math>K \in \{16,64\} </math>. Therefore there is a synchronous and an asynchronous series for each K value.<br />
<br />
Electricity data: This UCI dataset contains 7 different features excluding date and time. The features include global active power, global reactive power, voltage, global intensity, sub-metering 1, sub-metering 2 and sub-metering 3, recorded every minute for 47 months. The data has been altered so that one observation contains only one value of 7 features, while durations between consecutive observations are ranged from 1 to 7 minutes. The goal is to predict all 7 features for the next time step.<br />
<br />
Non-anonymous quotes: The dataset contains 2.1 million quotes from 28 different sources from different market participants such as analysts, banks etc. Each quote is characterized by 31 features: the offered price, 28 indicators of the quoting source, the direction indicator (the quote refers to either a buy or a sell offer) and duration from the previous quote. For each source and direction, we want to predict the next quoted price from this given source and direction considering the last 60 quotes.<br />
<br />
[[File:async.png | 520px|center|]]<br />
<br />
==Training details==<br />
They applied grid search on some hyperparameters in order to get the significance of its components. The hyperparameters include the offset sub-network's depth and the auxiliary weight <math>\alpha</math>. For offset sub-network's depth, they use 1, 10,1 for artificial, electricity and quotes dataset respectively; and they compared the values of <math>\alpha</math> in {0,0.1,0.01}.<br />
<br />
They chose LeakyReLU as activation function for all networks:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><math>\sigma^{LeakyReLU}(x) = x</math> if <math>x\geq 0</math>, and <math>0.1x</math> otherwise </div><br />
They use the same number of layers, same stride and similar kernel size structure in CNN. In each trained CNN, they applied max pooling with the pool size of 2 every 2 convolutional layers.<br />
<br />
Table 1 presents the configuration of network hyperparameters used in comparison<br />
<br />
[[File:Junyi4.png | 520px|center|]]<br />
<br />
===Network Training===<br />
The training and validation data were sampled randomly from the first 80% of timesteps in each series, with ratio of 3 to 1. The remaining 20% of data was used as a test set.<br />
<br />
All models were trained using Adam optimizer because the authors found that its rate of convergence was much faster than standard Stochastic Gradient Descent in early tests.<br />
<br />
They used a batch size of 128 for artificial and electricity data, and 256 for quotes dataset, and applied batch normalization between each convolution and the following activation. <br />
<br />
At the beginning of each epoch, the training samples were randomly sampled. To prevent overfitting, they applied dropout and early stopping.<br />
<br />
Weights were initialized using the normalized uniform procedure proposed by Glorot & Bengio (2010).[14]<br />
<br />
The authors carried out the experiments on Tensorflow and Keras and used different GPU to optimize the model for different datasets.<br />
<br />
==Results==<br />
Table 2 shows all results performed from all datasets.<br />
[[File:Junyi5.png | 800px|center|]]<br />
We can see that SOCNN outperforms in all asynchronous artificial, electricity and quotes datasets. For synchronous data, LSTM might be slightly better, but SOCNN almost has the same results with LSTM. Phased LSTM and ResNet have performed really bad on artificial asynchronous dataset and quotes dataset respectively. Notice that having more than one layer of offset network would have negative impact on results. Also, the higher weights of auxiliary loss(<math>\alpha</math>considerably improved the test error on asynchronous dataset, see Table 3. However, for other datasets, its impact was negligible.<br />
[[File:Junyi6.png | 480px|center|]]<br />
In general, SOCNN has significantly lower variance of the test and validation errors, especially in the early stage of the training process and for quotes dataset. This effect can be seen in the learning curves for Asynchronous 64 artificial dataset presented in Figure 5.<br />
[[File:Junyi7.png | 500px|thumb|center|Figure 5: Learning curves with different auxiliary weights for SOCNN model trained on Asynchronous 64 dataset. The solid lines indicate the test error while the dashed lines indicate the training error.]]<br />
<br />
Finally, we want to test the robustness of the proposed model SOCNN, adding noise terms to asynchronous 16 dataset and check how these networks perform. The result is shown in Figure 6.<br />
[[File:Junyi8.png | 600px|thumb|center|Figure 6: Experiment comparing robustness of the considered networks for Asynchronous 16 dataset. The plots show how the error would change if an additional noise term was added to the input series. The dotted curves show the total significance and average absolute offset (not to scale) outputs for the noisy observations. Interestingly, the significance of the noisy observations increases with the magnitude of noise; i.e. noisy observations are far from being discarded by SOCNN.]]<br />
From Figure 6, the purple lines and green lines seem to stay at the same position in training and testing process. SOCNN and single-layer LSTM are most robust and least prone to overfitting comparing to other networks.<br />
<br />
=Conclusion and Discussion=<br />
In this paper, the authors have proposed a new architecture called Significance-Offset Convolutional Neural Network, which combines AR-like weighting mechanism and convolutional neural network. This new architecture is designed for high-noise asynchronous time series and achieves outperformance in forecasting several asynchronous time series compared to popular convolutional and recurrent networks. <br />
<br />
The SOCNN can be extended further by adding intermediate weighting layers of the same type in the network structure. Another possible extension but needs further empirical studies is that we consider not just <math>1 \times 1</math> convolutional kernels on the offset sub-network. Also, this new architecture might be tested on other real-life datasets with relevant characteristics in the future, especially on econometric datasets and more generally for time series (stochastic processes) regression.<br />
<br />
=Critiques=<br />
#The paper is most likely an application paper, and the proposed new architecture shows improved performance over baselines in the asynchronous time series.<br />
#The quote data cannot be reached as they are proprietary. Also, only two datasets available.<br />
#The 'Significance' network was described as critical to the model in paper, but they did not show how the performance of SOCNN with respect to the significance network.<br />
#The transform of the original data to asynchronous data is not clear.<br />
#The experiments on the main application are not reproducible because the data is proprietary.<br />
#The way that train and test data were split is unclear. This could be important in the case of the financial data set.<br />
#Although the auxiliary loss function was mentioned as an important part, the advantages of it was not too clear in the paper. Maybe it is better that the paper describes a little more about its effectiveness.<br />
#It was not mentioned clearly in the paper whether the model training was done on a rolling basis for time series forecasting.<br />
#The noise term used in section 5's model robustness analysis uses evenly distributed noise (see Appendix B). While the analysis is a good start, analysis with different noise distributions would make the findings more generalizable.<br />
#The paper uses financial/economic data as one of its testing data set. Instead of comparing neural network models such as CNN which is known to work badly on time series data, it would be much better if the author compared to well-known econometric time series models such as GARCH and VAR.<br />
<br />
=References=<br />
[1] Hamilton, J. D. Time series analysis, volume 2. Princeton university press Princeton, 1994. <br />
<br />
[2] Fama, E. F. Efficient capital markets: A review of theory and empirical work. The journal of Finance, 25(2):383–417, 1970.<br />
<br />
[3] Petelin, D., Sˇindela ́ˇr, J., Pˇrikryl, J., and Kocijan, J. Financial modeling using gaussian process models. In Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems (IDAACS), 2011 IEEE 6th International Conference on, volume 2, pp. 672–677. IEEE, 2011.<br />
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[4] Tobar, F., Bui, T. D., and Turner, R. E. Learning stationary time series using Gaussian processes with nonparametric kernels. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 3501–3509, 2015.<br />
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[5] Hwang, Y., Tong, A., and Choi, J. Automatic construction of nonparametric relational regression models for multiple time series. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning, 2016.<br />
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[6] Wilson, A. and Ghahramani, Z. Copula processes. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 2460–2468, 2010.<br />
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[7] Sirignano, J. Extended abstract: Neural networks for limit order books, February 2016.<br />
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[8] Borovykh, A., Bohte, S., and Oosterlee, C. W. Conditional time series forecasting with convolutional neural networks, March 2017.<br />
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[9] Heaton, J. B., Polson, N. G., and Witte, J. H. Deep learning in finance, February 2016.<br />
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[10] Neil, D., Pfeiffer, M., and Liu, S.-C. Phased lstm: Accelerating recurrent network training for long or event-based sequences. In Advances In Neural Information Process- ing Systems, pp. 3882–3890, 2016.<br />
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[11] Chung, J., Gulcehre, C., Cho, K., and Bengio, Y. Empirical evaluation of gated recurrent neural networks on sequence modeling, December 2014.<br />
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[12] Weissenborn, D. and Rockta ̈schel, T. MuFuRU: The Multi-Function recurrent unit, June 2016.<br />
<br />
[13] Cho, K., Courville, A., and Bengio, Y. Describing multi- media content using attention-based Encoder–Decoder networks. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 17(11): 1875–1886, July 2015. ISSN 1520-9210.<br />
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[14] Glorot, X. and Bengio, Y. Understanding the difficulty of training deep feedforward neural net- works. In In Proceedings of the International Con- ference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AIS- TATSaˆ10). Society for Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2010.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:async.png&diff=41877File:async.png2018-11-29T17:11:38Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=policy_optimization_with_demonstrations&diff=41624policy optimization with demonstrations2018-11-27T17:56:59Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Conclusion */</p>
<hr />
<div>= Introduction =<br />
<br />
The reinforcement learning (RL) method has made significant progress in a variety of applications, but the exploration problems regarding how to gain more experience from novel policies to improve long-term performance are still challenges, especially in environments where reward signals are sparse and rare. There are currently two ways to solve such exploration problems in RL: <br />
<br />
1) Guide the agent to explore states that have never been seen. <br />
<br />
2) Guide the agent to imitate a demonstration trajectory sampled from an expert policy to learn. <br />
<br />
When guiding the agent to imitate the expert behavior for learning, there are also two methods: putting the demonstration directly into the replay memory [1] [2] [3] or using the demonstration trajectory to pre-train the policy in a supervised manner [4]. However, neither of these methods takes full advantage of the demonstration data. They instead treat the demonstration data identically to self-generated data, requiring a tremendous number of difficult to collect examples to learn effectively. To address this problem, a novel policy optimization method from demonstration (POfD) is proposed, which takes full advantage of the demonstration and there is no need to ensure that the expert policy is the optimal policy. To summarize, the authors bring forth this idea through the following techniques:<br />
<br />
1) A demonstration guided exploration term measuring the divergence between current and the expert policy is added to the policy optimization objective, increasing the similarity to expert-like exploration.<br />
<br />
2) They say that for better learning from demonstrations and getting an optimization friendly lower bound, the proposed objective could be defined on an occupancy measure as in [14].<br />
<br />
3) Finally, they show that the optimization can move towards optimizing the derived lower bound and the generative adversarial training.<br />
<br />
The authors also evaluate the performance of POfD on Mujoco [5] in sparse-reward environments. The experiments results show that the performance of POfD is greatly improved compared with some strong baselines and even to the policy gradient method in dense-reward environments.<br />
<br />
==Intuition==<br />
The agent should imitate the demonstrated behavior when rewards are sparse and then explore new states on its own after acquiring sufficient skills, which is a dynamic intrinsic reward mechanism that can be reshaped in terms of the native rewards in RL. At present the state of the art exploration in Reinforcement learning is simply epsilon greedy which just makes random moves for a small percentage of times to explore unexplored moves. This is very naive and is one of the main reasons for the high sample complexity in RL. On the other hand, if there is an expert demonstrator who can guide exploration, the agent can make more guided and accurate exploratory moves.<br />
<br />
=Related Work =<br />
There are some related works in overcoming exploration difficulties by learning from demonstration [6] and imitation learning in RL.<br />
<br />
For learning from demonstration (LfD),<br />
# Most LfD methods adopt value-based RL algorithms, such as DQfD (Deep Q-learning from Demonstrations) [2] which are applied into the discrete action spaces and DDPGfD (Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient from Demonstrations) [3] which extends this idea to the continuous spaces. But both of them under-utilize the demonstration data.<br />
# There are some methods based on policy iteration [7] [8], which shapes the value function by using demonstration data. But they get the bad performance when demonstration data is imperfect.<br />
# A hybrid framework [9] that learns the policy in which the probability of taking demonstrated actions is maximized is proposed, which considers less demonstration data.<br />
# A reward reshaping mechanism [10] that encourages taking actions close to the demonstrated ones is proposed. It is similar to the method in this paper, but there exists some differences as it is defined as a potential function based on multi-variate Gaussian to model the distribution of state-actions.<br />
All of the above methods require a lot of perfect demonstrations to get satisfactory performance, which is different from POfD in this paper.<br />
<br />
For imitation learning, <br />
# Inverse Reinforce Learning [11] problems are solved by alternating between fitting the reward function and selecting the policy [12] [13]. But it cannot be extended to big-scale problems.<br />
# Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) [14] uses a discriminator to distinguish whether a state-action pair is from the expert or the learned policy and it can be applied into the high-dimensional continuous control problems.<br />
<br />
Both of the above methods are effective for imitation learning, but cannot leverage the valuable feedback given by the environments and usually suffer from bad performance when the expert data is imperfect. That is different from POfD in this paper.<br />
<br />
There is also another idea in which an agent learns using hybrid imitation learning and reinforcement learning reward[23, 24]. However, unlike this paper, they did not provide some theoretical support for their method and only explained some intuitive explanations.<br />
<br />
=Background=<br />
<br />
==Preliminaries==<br />
Markov Decision Process (MDP) [15] is defined by a tuple <math>⟨\mathcal{S}, \mathcal{A}, \mathcal{P}, r, \gamma⟩ </math>, where <math>\mathcal{S}</math> is the state space, <math>\mathcal{A} </math> is the action space, <math>\mathcal{P}(s'|s,a)</math> is the transition distribution of taking action <math> a </math> at state <math>s </math>, <math> r(s,a) </math>is the reward function, and <math> \gamma </math> is the discount factor between 0 and 1. Policy <math> \pi(a|s) </math> is a mapping from state to action probabilities, the performance of <math> \pi </math> is usually evaluated by its expected discounted reward <math> \eta(\pi) </math>: <br />
\[\eta(\pi)=\mathbb{E}_{\pi}[r(s,a)]=\mathbb{E}_{(s_0,a_0,s_1,...)}[\sum_{t=0}^\infty\gamma^{t}r(s_t,a_t)] \]<br />
The value function is <math> V_{\pi}(s) =\mathbb{E}_{\pi}[r(·,·)|s_0=s] </math>, the action value function is <math> Q_{\pi}(s,a) =\mathbb{E}_{\pi}[r(·,·)|s_0=s,a_0=a] </math>, and the advantage function that reflects the expected additional reward after taking action a at state s is <math> A_{\pi}(s,a)=Q_{\pi}(s,a)-V_{\pi}(s)</math>.<br />
Then the authors define Occupancy measure, which is used to estimate the probability that state <math>s</math> and state action pairs <math>(s,a)</math> when executing a certain policy.<br />
[[File:def1.png|500px|center]]<br />
Then the performance of <math> \pi </math> can be rewritten to: <br />
[[File:equ2.png|500px|center]]<br />
At the same time, the authors propose a lemma: <br />
[[File:lemma1.png|500px|center]]<br />
<br />
==Problem Definition==<br />
Generally, RL tasks and environments do not provide a comprehensive reward and instead rely on sparse feedback indicating whether the goal is reached.<br />
<br />
In this paper, the authors aim to develop a method that can boost exploration by leveraging effectively the demonstrations <math>D^E </math>from the expert policy <math> \pi_E </math> and maximize <math> \eta(\pi) </math> in the sparse-reward environment. The authors define the demonstrations <math>D^E=\{\tau_1,\tau_2,...,\tau_N\} </math>, where the i-th trajectory <math>\tau_i=\{(s_0^i,a_0^i),(s_1^i,a_1^i),...,(s_T^i,a_T^i)\} </math> is generated from the unknown expert policy <math>\pi_E </math>. In addition, there is an assumption on the quality of the expert policy:<br />
[[File:asp1.png|500px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Throughout the paper, they use <math>\pi_E </math> to denote the expert policy that gives the relatively good <math>\eta_\pi </math>, and use <math>\hat{\mathbb{E}}_D </math>to denote empirical expectation estimated from the demonstrated trajectories <math>D^E </math>. We have the following reasonable and necessary assumption on the quality of the expert policy <math>\pi_E </math>.<br />
<br />
<br />
Moreover, it is not necessary to ensure that the expert policy is advantageous over all the policies. This is because that POfD will learn a better policy than expert policy by exploring on its own in later learning stages.<br />
<br />
=Method=<br />
<br />
==Policy Optimization with Demonstration (POfD)==<br />
<br />
[[File:ff1.png|thumb|500px|center |Figure 1: Demonstrations (the blue curve) enables POfD to explore in the high-reward regions (red arrows). On the other hand random explorations (olive green dashed curves) occur in sparse-reward environments.]]<br />
<br />
This method optimizes the policy by forcing the policy to explore in the nearby region of the expert policy that is specified by several demonstrated trajectories <math>D^E </math> (as shown in Fig.1) in order to avoid causing slow convergence or failure when the environment feedback is sparse. In addition, the authors encourage the policy π to explore by "following" the demonstrations <math>D^E </math>. Thus, a new learning objective is given:<br />
\[ \mathcal{L}(\pi_{\theta})=-\eta(\pi_{\theta})+\lambda_{1}D_{JS}(\pi_{\theta},\pi_{E})\]<br />
where <math>D_{JS}(\pi_{\theta},\pi_{E})</math> is Jensen-Shannon divergence between current policy <math>\pi_{\theta}</math> and the expert policy <math>\pi_{E}</math> , <math>\lambda_1</math> is a trading-off parameter, and <math>\theta</math> is policy parameter. According to Lemma 1, the authors use <math>D_{JS}(\rho_{\theta},\rho_{E})</math> to instead of <math>D_{JS}(\pi_{\theta},\pi_{E})</math>, because it is easier to optimize through adversarial training on demonstrations. The learning objective is: <br />
\[ \mathcal{L}(\pi_{\theta})=-\eta(\pi_{\theta})+\lambda_{1}D_{JS}(\rho_{\theta},\rho_{E})\]<br />
<br />
==Benefits of Exploration with Demonstrations==<br />
The authors introduce the benefits of POfD. Firstly, we consider the expression of expected return in policy gradient methods [16].<br />
\[ \eta(\pi)=\eta(\pi_{old})+\mathbb{E}_{\tau\sim\pi}[\sum_{t=0}^\infty\gamma^{t}A_{\pi_{old}}(s,a)]\]<br />
<math>\eta(\pi)</math>is the advantage over the policy <math>\pi_{old}</math> in the previous iteration, so the expression can be rewritten by<br />
\[ \eta(\pi)=\eta(\pi_{old})+\sum_{s}\rho_{\pi}(s)\sum_{a}\pi(a|s)A_{\pi_{old}}(s,a)\]<br />
The local approximation to <math>\eta(\pi)</math> up to first order is usually as the surrogate learning objective to be optimized by policy gradient methods due to the difficulties brought by complex dependency of <math>\rho_{\pi}(s)</math> over <math> \pi </math>:<br />
\[ J_{\pi_{old}}(\pi)=\eta(\pi_{old})+\sum_{s}\rho_{\pi_{old}}(s)\sum_{a}\pi(a|s)A_{\pi_{old}}(s,a)\]<br />
The policy gradient methods improve <math>\eta(\pi)</math> monotonically by optimizing the above <math>J_{\pi_{old}}(\pi)</math> with a sufficiently small update step from <math>\pi_{old}</math> to <math>\pi</math> such that <math>D_{KL}^{max}(\pi, \pi_{old})</math> is bounded [16] [17] [18]. POfD imposes an additional regularization <math>D_{JS}(\pi_{\theta}, \pi_{E})</math> between <math>\pi_\theta</math> and <math>\pi_{E}</math> in order to encourage explorations around regions demonstrated by the expert policy. Theorem 1 shows such benefits,<br />
[[File:them1.png|500px|center]]<br />
<br />
In fact, POfD brings another factor, <math>D_{J S}^{max}(\pi_{i}, \pi_{E})</math>, that would fully use the advantage <math>{\hat \delta}</math>and add improvements with a margin over pure policy gradient methods.<br />
<br />
==Optimization==<br />
<br />
For POfD, the authors choose to optimize the lower bound of the Jensen-Shannon divergence instead of directly optimizing the difficult Jensen-Shannon divergence. This optimization method is compatible with any policy gradient methods. Theorem 2 gives the lower bound of <math>D_{JS}(\rho_{\theta}, \rho_{E})</math>:<br />
[[File:them2.png|450px|center]]<br />
Thus, the occupancy measure matching objective can be written as:<br />
[[File:eqnlm.png|450px|center]]<br />
where <math> D(s,a)=\frac{1}{1+e^{-U(s,a)}}: \mathcal{S}\times \mathcal{A} \rightarrow (0,1)</math> is an arbitrary mapping function followed by a sigmoid activation function used for scaling, and its supremum ranging is like a discriminator for distinguishing whether the state-action pair is a current policy or an expert policy.<br />
To avoid overfitting, the authors add causal entropy <math>−H (\pi_{\theta}) </math> as the regularization term. Thus, the learning objective is: <br />
\[\min_{\theta}\mathcal{L}=-\eta(\pi_{\theta})-\lambda_{2}H(\pi_{\theta})+\lambda_{1} \sup_{{D\in(0,1)}^{S\times A}} \mathbb{E}_{\pi_{\theta}}[\log(D(s,a))]+\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{E}}[\log(1-D(s,a))]\]<br />
At this point, the problem closely resembles the minimax problem related to the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) [19]. The difference is that the discriminative model D of GANs is well-trained but the expert policy of POfD is not optimal. Then suppose D is parameterized by w. If it is from an expert policy, <math>D_w</math>is toward 1, otherwise it is toward 0. Thus, the minimax learning objective is:<br />
\[\min_{\theta}\max_{w}\mathcal{L}=-\eta(\pi_{\theta})-\lambda_{2}H (\pi_{\theta})+\lambda_{1}( \mathbb{E}_{\pi_{\theta}}[\log(D_{w}(s,a))]+\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{E}}[\log(1-D_{w}(s,a))])\]<br />
The minimax learning objective can be rewritten by substituting the expression of <math> \eta(\pi) </math>:<br />
\[\min_{\theta}\max_{w}-\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{\theta}}[r'(s,a)]-\lambda_{2}H (\pi_{\theta})+\lambda_{1}\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{E}}[\log(1-D_{w}(s,a))]\]<br />
where <math> r'(s,a)=r(a,b)-\lambda_{1}\log(D_{w}(s,a))</math> is the reshaped reward function.<br />
The above objective can be optimized efficiently by alternately updating policy parameters θ and discriminator parameters w, then the gradient is given by:<br />
\[\mathbb{E}_{\pi}[\nabla_{w}\log(D_{w}(s,a))]+\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{E}}[\nabla_{w}\log(1-D_{w}(s,a))]\]<br />
Then, fixing the discriminator <math>D_w</math>, the reshaped policy gradient is:<br />
\[\nabla_{\theta}\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{\theta}}[r'(s,a)]=\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{\theta}}[\nabla_{\theta}\log\pi_{\theta}(a|s)Q'(s,a)]\]<br />
where <math>Q'(\bar{s},\bar{a})=\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{\theta}}[r'(s,a)|s_0=\bar{s},a_0=\bar{a}]</math>.<br />
<br />
At the end, Algorithm 1 gives the detailed process.<br />
[[File:pofd.png|450px|center]]<br />
<br />
=Discussion on Existing LfD Methods=<br />
<br />
To connect with the proposed POfD method, interpretation of the existing methods DQfD and DDPGfD through occupancy measure matching is provided. Both of the existing methods leverage demonstrations to aid exploration in RL.<br />
<br />
==DQFD==<br />
DQFD [2] puts the demonstrations into a replay memory D and keeps them throughout the Q-learning process. The objective for DQFD is:<br />
\[J_{DQfD}={\hat{\mathbb{E}}}_{D}[(R_t(n)-Q_w(s_t,a_t))^2]+\alpha{\hat{\mathbb{E}}}_{D^E}[(R_t(n)-Q_w(s_t,a_t))^2]\]<br />
The second term can be rewritten as <math> {\hat{\mathbb{E}}}_{D^E}[(R_t(n)-Q_w(s_t,a_t))^2]={\hat{\mathbb{E}}}_{D^E}[(\hat{\rho}_E(s,a)-\rho_{\pi}(s,a))^{2}r^2(s,a)]</math>, which can be regarded as a regularization forcing current policy's occupancy measure to match the expert's empirical occupancy measure, weighted by the potential reward.<br />
<br />
==DDPGfD==<br />
DDPGfD [3] also puts the demonstrations into a replay memory D, but it is based on an actor-critic framework [21]. The objective for DDPGfD is the same as DQFD. Its policy gradient is:<br />
\[\nabla_{\theta}J_{DDPGfD}\approx \mathbb{E}_{s,a}[\nabla_{a}Q_w(s,a)\nabla_{\theta}\pi_{\theta}(s)], a=\pi_{\theta}(s) \]<br />
From this equation, policy is updated relying on learned Q-network <math>Q_w </math>rather than the demonstrations <math>D^{E} </math>. DDPGfD shares the same objective function for <math>Q_w </math> as DQfD, thus they have the same way of leveraging demonstrations, that is the demonstrations in DQfD and DDPGfD induce an occupancy measure matching regularization.<br />
<br />
=Experiments=<br />
<br />
==Goal==<br />
The authors aim at investigating 1) whether POfD can aid exploration by leveraging a few demonstrations, even though the demonstrations are imperfect. 2) whether POfD can succeed and achieve high empirical return, especially in environments where reward signals are sparse and rare. <br />
<br />
==Settings==<br />
The authors conduct the experiments on 8 physical control tasks, ranging from low-dimensional spaces to high-dimensional spaces and naturally sparse environments based on OpenAI Gym [20] and Mujoco (Multi-Joint dynamics with Contact) [5] (Gym is a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. It supports teaching agents everything from walking to playing games like Pong or Pinball. MuJoCo is a physics engine aiming to facilitate research and development in robotics, biomechanics, graphics and animation, and other areas where fast and accurate simulation is needed. In order to get familiar with OpenAI Gym and Mujoco environment, you can watch these videos, respectively: [http://www.mujoco.org/image/home/mujocodemo.mp4 Mujoco], [https://gym.openai.com/v2018-02-21/videos/SpaceInvaders-v0-4184afb3-1223-4ac6-b52b-8e863cbe24a5/original.mp4 OpenAI Gym]). Due to the uniqueness of the environments, the authors introduce 4 ways to sparsify their built-in dense rewards. TYPE1: a reward of +1 is given when the agent reaches the terminal state, and otherwisel 0. TYPE2: a reward of +1 is given when the agent survives for a while. TYPE3: a reward of +1 is given for every time the agent moves forward over a specific number of units in Mujoco environments. TYPE4: specially designed for InvertedDoublePendulum, a reward +1 is given when the second pole stays above a specific height of 0.89. The details are shown in Table 1. Moreover, only one single imperfect trajectory is used as the demonstrations in this paper. The authors collect the demonstrations by training an agent insufficiently by running TRPO (Trust Region Policy Optimization) in the corresponding dense environment. <br />
[[File:pofdt1.png|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
==Baselines==<br />
The authors compare POfD against 5 strong baselines:<br />
* training the policy with TRPO [17] in dense environments, which is called expert <br />
* training the policy with TRPO [17] in sparse environments<br />
* applying GAIL [14] to learn the policy from demonstrations<br />
* DQfD [2]<br />
* DDPGfD [3]<br />
<br />
==Results==<br />
Firstly, the authors test the performance of POfD in sparse control environments with discrete actions. From Table 1, POfD achieves performance comparable with the policy learned under dense environments. From Figure 2, only POfD successes to explore sufficiently and achieves great performance in both sparse environments. TRPO [17] and DQFD [2] fail to explore and GAIL [14] converges to the imperfect demonstration in MountainCar [22].<br />
<br />
[[File:pofdf2.png|500px|center]]<br />
<br />
Then, the authors test the performance of POfD under spares environments with continuous actions space. From Figure 3, POfD achieves expert-level performance in terms of accumulated rewards and surpasses other strong baselines training the policy with TRPO. By watching the learning process of different methods, we can see that TRPO consistently fails to explore the environments when the feedback is sparse, except for HalfCheetah. This may be because there is no terminal state in HalfCheetah, thus a random agent can perform reasonably well as long as the time horizon is sufficiently long. This is shown in Figure3 where the improvement of TRPO begins to show after 400 iterations. DDPGfD and GAIL have common drawback: during training process, they both converge to the imperfect demonstration data. For HalfCheetah, GAIL fails to converge and DDPGfD converges to an even worse point. This situation is expected because the policy and value networks tend to over-fit when having few data, so the training process of GAIL and DDPGfD is severely biased by the imperfect data. Finally, our proposed method can effectively explore the environment with the help of demonstration-based intrinsic reward reshaping, and succeeds consistently across different tasks both in terms of learning stability and convergence speed.<br />
[[File:pofdf3.png|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
The authors also implement a locomotion task <math>Humanoid</math>, which teaches a human-like robot to walk. The state space of dimension is 376, which is very hard to render. As a result, POfD still outperformed all three baselike methods, as they failed to learn policies in such a sparse reward environment.<br />
<br />
The reacher environment is a task that the target is to control a robot arm to touch an object. the location of the object is random for each instantiation. The environment reward is sparse: every time the arm reaches the ball and holds for a while (e.g., 5 time steps), it receives a reward of +1; otherwise it gets zero reward. The authors select 15 random trajectories as demonstration data, and the performance of POfD is much better than the expert, while all other baseline methods failed.<br />
<br />
=Conclusion=<br />
In this paper, a method, POfD, is proposed that can acquire knowledge from a limited amount of imperfect demonstration data to aid exploration in environments with sparse feedback. It is compatible with any policy gradient method. POfD induces implicit dynamic reward shaping and brings provable benefits for policy improvement. Moreover, the experiments results have shown the validity and effectivness of POfD in encouraging the agent to explore around the nearby region of the expert policy and learn better policies. The key contribution is that POfD helps the agent work with few and imperfect demonstrations in an environment with sparse rewards.<br />
<br />
=Critique=<br />
# A novel demonstration-based policy optimization method is proposed. In the process of policy optimization, POfD reshapes the reward function. This new reward function can guide the agent to imitate the expert behaviour when the reward is sparse and explore on its own when the reward value can be obtained, which can take full advantage of the demonstration data and there is no need to ensure that the expert policy is the optimal policy.<br />
# POfD can be combined with any policy gradient methods. Its performance surpasses five strong baselines and can be comparable to the agents trained in the dense-reward environment.<br />
# The paper is structured and the flow of ideas is easy to follow. For related work, the authors clearly explain similarities and differences among these related works.<br />
# This paper's scalability is demonstrated. The experiments environments are ranging from low-dimensional spaces to high-dimensional spaces and from discrete action spaces to continuous actions spaces. For future work, can it be realized in the real world?<br />
# There is a doubt that whether it is a correct method to use the trajectory that was insufficiently learned in dense-reward environment as the imperfect demonstration.<br />
# In this paper, the performance only is judged by the cumulative reward, can other evaluation terms be considered? For example, the convergence rate.<br />
# The performance of this algorithm hinges on the assumption that expert demonstrations are near optimal in the action space. As seen in figure 3, there appears to be an upper bound to performance near (or just above) the expert accuracy -- this may be an indication of a performance ceiling. In games where near-optimal policies can differ greatly (e.g.; offensive or defensive strategies in chess), the success of the model will depend on the selection of expert demonstrations that are closest to a truly optimal policy (i.e.; just because a policy is the current expert, it does not mean it resembles the true optimal policy).<br />
<br />
=References=<br />
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[11] Ng, A. Y., Russell, S. J., et al. Algorithms for inverse reinforcement learning. In Icml, pp. 663–670, 2000.<br />
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[12] Syed, U. and Schapire, R. E. A game-theoretic approach to apprenticeship learning. In Advances in neural informa- tion processing systems, pp. 1449–1456, 2008.<br />
<br />
[13] Syed, U., Bowling, M., and Schapire, R. E. Apprenticeship learning using linear programming. In Proceedings of the 25th international conference on Machine learning, pp. 1032–1039. ACM, 2008.<br />
<br />
[14] Ho, J. and Ermon, S. Generative adversarial imitation learn- ing. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Sys- tems, pp. 4565–4573, 2016.<br />
<br />
[15] Sutton, R. S. and Barto, A. G. Reinforcement learning: An introduction, volume 1. MIT press Cambridge, 1998.<br />
<br />
[16] Kakade, S. M. A natural policy gradient. In Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 1531–1538, 2002.<br />
<br />
[17] Schulman, J., Levine, S., Abbeel, P., Jordan, M., and Moritz, P. Trust region policy optimization. In Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-15), pp. 1889–1897, 2015.<br />
<br />
[18] Schulman, J., Wolski, F., Dhariwal, P., Radford, A., and Klimov, O. Proximal policy optimization algorithms. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.06347, 2017.<br />
<br />
[19] Goodfellow, I., Pouget-Abadie, J., Mirza, M., Xu, B., Warde-Farley, D., Ozair, S., Courville, A., and Bengio, Y. Generative adversarial nets. In Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 2672–2680, 2014.<br />
<br />
[20] Brockman, G., Cheung, V., Pettersson, L., Schneider, J., Schulman, J., Tang, J., and Zaremba, W. Openai gym, 2016.<br />
<br />
[21] Lillicrap, T. P., Hunt, J. J., Pritzel, A., Heess, N., Erez, T., Tassa, Y., Silver, D., and Wierstra, D. Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.02971, 2015.<br />
<br />
[22] Moore, A. W. Efficient memory-based learning for robot control. 1990.<br />
<br />
[23] Zhu, Y., Wang, Z., Merel, J., Rusu, A., Erez, T., Cabi, S., Tunyasuvunakool, S., Kramar, J., Hadsell, R., de Freitas, N., et al. Reinforcement and imitation learning for diverse visuomotor skills. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.09564, 2018.<br />
<br />
[24] Li, Y., Song, J., and Ermon, S. Infogail: Interpretable imitation learning from visual demonstrations. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 3815–3825, 2017.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=policy_optimization_with_demonstrations&diff=41520policy optimization with demonstrations2018-11-27T04:13:28Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Results */</p>
<hr />
<div>= Introduction =<br />
<br />
The reinforcement learning (RL) method has made significant progress in a variety of applications, but the exploration problems regarding how to gain more experience from novel policies to improve long-term performance are still challenges, especially in environments where reward signals are sparse and rare. There are currently two ways to solve such exploration problems in RL: 1) Guide the agent to explore states that have never been seen. 2) Guide the agent to imitate a demonstration trajectory sampled from an expert policy to learn. When guiding the agent to imitate the expert behavior for learning, there are also two methods: putting the demonstration directly into the replay memory [1] [2] [3] or using the demonstration trajectory to pre-train the policy in a supervised manner [4]. However, neither of these methods takes full advantage of the demonstration data. To address this problem, a novel policy optimization method from demonstration (POfD) is proposed, which takes full advantage of the demonstration and there is no need to ensure that the expert policy is the optimal policy. In this paper, the authors evaluate the performance of POfD on Mujoco [5] in sparse-reward environments. The experiments results show that the performance of POfD is greatly improved compared with some strong baselines and even to the policy gradient method in dense-reward environments.<br />
<br />
==Intuition==<br />
The agent should imitate the demonstrated behavior when rewards are sparse and then explore new states on its own after acquiring sufficient skills, which is a dynamic intrinsic reward mechanism that can be reshaped in terms of the native rewards in RL. At present the state of the art exploration in Reinforcement learning is simply epsilon greedy which just makes random moves for a small percentage of times to explore unexplored moves. This is very naive and is one of the main reasons for the high sample complexity in RL. On the other hand, if there is an expert demonstrator who can guide exploration, the agent can make more guided and accurate exploratory moves.<br />
<br />
=Related Work =<br />
There are some related works in overcoming exploration difficulties by learning from demonstration [6] and imitation learning in RL.<br />
<br />
For learning from demonstration (LfD),<br />
# Most LfD methods adopt value-based RL algorithms, such as DQfD (Deep Q-learning from Demonstrations) [2] which are applied into the discrete action spaces and DDPGfD (Deep<br />
Deterministic Policy Gradient from Demonstrations) [3] which extends this idea to the continuous spaces. But both of them under-utilize the demonstration data.<br />
# There are some methods based on policy iteration [7] [8], which shapes the value function by using demonstration data. But they get the bad performance when demonstration data is imperfect.<br />
# A hybrid framework [9] that learns the policy in which the probability of taking demonstrated actions is maximized is proposed, which considers less demonstration data.<br />
# A reward reshaping mechanism [10] that encourages taking actions close to the demonstrated ones is proposed. It is similar to the method in this paper, but there exists some differences as it is defined as a potential function based on multi-variate Gaussian to model the distribution of state-actions.<br />
All of the above methods require a lot of perfect demonstrations to get satisfactory performance, which is different from POfD in this paper.<br />
<br />
For imitation learning, <br />
# Inverse Reinforce Learning [11] problems are solved by alternating between fitting the reward function and selecting the policy [12] [13]. But it cannot be extended to big-scale problems.<br />
# Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) [14] uses a discriminator to distinguish whether a state-action pair is from the expert or the learned policy and it can be applied into the high-dimensional continuous control problems.<br />
<br />
Both of the above methods are effective for imitation learning, but cannot leverage the valuable feedback given by the environments and usually suffer from bad performance when the expert data is imperfect. That is different from POfD in this paper.<br />
<br />
There is also another idea in which an agent learns using hybrid imitation learning and reinforcement learning reward[23, 24]. However, unlike this paper, they did not provide some theoretical support for their method and only explained some intuitive explanations.<br />
<br />
=Background=<br />
<br />
==Preliminaries==<br />
Markov Decision Process (MDP) [15] is defined by a tuple <math>⟨\mathcal{S}, \mathcal{A}, \mathcal{P}, r, \gamma⟩ </math>, where <math>\mathcal{S}</math> is the state space, <math>\mathcal{A} </math> is the action space, <math>\mathcal{P}(s'|s,a)</math> is the transition distribution of taking action <math> a </math> at state <math>s </math>, <math> r(s,a) </math>is the reward function, and <math> \gamma </math> is the discount factor between 0 and 1. Policy <math> \pi(a|s) </math> is a mapping from state to action probabilities, the performance of <math> \pi </math> is usually evaluated by its expected discounted reward <math> \eta(\pi) </math>: <br />
\[\eta(\pi)=\mathbb{E}_{\pi}[r(s,a)]=\mathbb{E}_{(s_0,a_0,s_1,...)}[\sum_{t=0}^\infty\gamma^{t}r(s_t,a_t)] \]<br />
The value function is <math> V_{\pi}(s) =\mathbb{E}_{\pi}[r(·,·)|s_0=s] </math>, the action value function is <math> Q_{\pi}(s,a) =\mathbb{E}_{\pi}[r(·,·)|s_0=s,a_0=a] </math>, and the advantage function that reflects the expected additional reward after taking action a at state s is <math> A_{\pi}(s,a)=Q_{\pi}(s,a)-V_{\pi}(s)</math>.<br />
Then the authors define Occupancy measure, which is used to estimate the probability that state <math>s</math> and state action pairs <math>(s,a)</math> when executing a certain policy.<br />
[[File:def1.png|500px|center]]<br />
Then the performance of <math> \pi </math> can be rewritten to: <br />
[[File:equ2.png|500px|center]]<br />
At the same time, the authors propose a lemma: <br />
[[File:lemma1.png|500px|center]]<br />
<br />
==Problem Definition==<br />
Generally, RL tasks and environments do not provide a comprehensive reward and instead rely on sparse feedback indicating whether the goal is reached.<br />
<br />
In this paper, the authors aim to develop a method that can boost exploration by leveraging effectively the demonstrations <math>D^E </math>from the expert policy <math> \pi_E </math> and maximize <math> \eta(\pi) </math> in the sparse-reward environment. The authors define the demonstrations <math>D^E=\{\tau_1,\tau_2,...,\tau_N\} </math>, where the i-th trajectory <math>\tau_i=\{(s_0^i,a_0^i),(s_1^i,a_1^i),...,(s_T^i,a_T^i)\} </math> is generated from the expert policy. In addition, there is an assumption on the quality of the expert policy:<br />
[[File:asp1.png|500px|center]]<br />
Moreover, it is not necessary to ensure that the expert policy is advantageous over all the policies. This is because that POfD will learn a better policy than expert policy by exploring on its own in later learning stages.<br />
<br />
=Method=<br />
<br />
==Policy Optimization with Demonstration (POfD)==<br />
[[File:ff1.png|500px|center]]<br />
This method optimizes the policy by forcing the policy to explore in the nearby region of the expert policy that is specified by several demonstrated trajectories <math>D^E </math> (as shown in Fig.1) in order to avoid causing slow convergence or failure when the environment feedback is sparse. In addition, the authors encourage the policy π to explore by "following" the demonstrations <math>D^E </math>. Thus, a new learning objective is given:<br />
\[ \mathcal{L}(\pi_{\theta})=-\eta(\pi_{\theta})+\lambda_{1}D_{JS}(\pi_{\theta},\pi_{E})\]<br />
where <math>D_{JS}(\pi_{\theta},\pi_{E})</math> is Jensen-Shannon divergence between current policy <math>\pi_{\theta}</math> and the expert policy <math>\pi_{E}</math> , <math>\lambda_1</math> is a trading-off parameter, and <math>\theta</math> is policy parameter. According to Lemma 1, the authors use <math>D_{JS}(\rho_{\theta},\rho_{E})</math> to instead of <math>D_{JS}(\pi_{\theta},\pi_{E})</math>, because it is easier to optimize through adversarial training on demonstrations. The learning objective is: <br />
\[ \mathcal{L}(\pi_{\theta})=-\eta(\pi_{\theta})+\lambda_{1}D_{JS}(\rho_{\theta},\rho_{E})\]<br />
<br />
==Benefits of Exploration with Demonstrations==<br />
The authors introduce the benefits of POfD. Firstly, we consider the expression of expected return in policy gradient methods [16].<br />
\[ \eta(\pi)=\eta(\pi_{old})+\mathbb{E}_{\tau\sim\pi}[\sum_{t=0}^\infty\gamma^{t}A_{\pi_{old}}(s,a)]\]<br />
<math>\eta(\pi)</math>is the advantage over the policy <math>\pi_{old}</math> in the previous iteration, so the expression can be rewritten by<br />
\[ \eta(\pi)=\eta(\pi_{old})+\sum_{s}\rho_{\pi}(s)\sum_{a}\pi(a|s)A_{\pi_{old}}(s,a)\]<br />
The local approximation to <math>\eta(\pi)</math> up to first order is usually as the surrogate learning objective to be optimized by policy gradient methods due to the difficulties brought by complex dependency of <math>\rho_{\pi}(s)</math> over <math> \pi </math>:<br />
\[ J_{\pi_{old}}(\pi)=\eta(\pi_{old})+\sum_{s}\rho_{\pi_{old}}(s)\sum_{a}\pi(a|s)A_{\pi_{old}}(s,a)\]<br />
The policy gradient methods improve <math>\eta(\pi)</math> monotonically by optimizing the above <math>J_{\pi_{old}}(\pi)</math> with a sufficiently small update step from <math>\pi_{old}</math> to <math>\pi</math> such that <math>D_{KL}^{max}(\pi, \pi_{old})</math> is bounded [16] [17] [18]. POfD imposes an additional regularization <math>D_{JS}(\pi_{\theta}, \pi_{E})</math> between <math>\pi_\theta</math> and <math>\pi_{E}</math> in order to encourage explorations around regions demonstrated by the expert policy. Theorem 1 shows such benefits,<br />
[[File:them1.png|500px|center]]<br />
<br />
In fact, POfD brings another factor, <math>D_{J S}^{max}(\pi_{i}, \pi_{E})</math>, that would fully use the advantage <math>{\hat \delta}</math>and add improvements with a margin over pure policy gradient methods.<br />
<br />
==Optimization==<br />
<br />
For POfD, the authors choose to optimize the lower bound of the Jensen-Shannon divergence instead of directly optimizing the difficult Jensen-Shannon divergence. This optimization method is compatible with any policy gradient methods. Theorem 2 gives the lower bound of <math>D_{JS}(\rho_{\theta}, \rho_{E})</math>:<br />
[[File:them2.png|450px|center]]<br />
Thus, the occupancy measure matching objective can be written as:<br />
[[File:eqnlm.png|450px|center]]<br />
where <math> D(s,a)=\frac{1}{1+e^{-U(s,a)}}: \mathcal{S}\times \mathcal{A} \rightarrow (0,1)</math> is an arbitrary mapping function followed by a sigmoid activation function used for scaling, and its supremum ranging is like a discriminator for distinguishing whether the state-action pair is a current policy or an expert policy.<br />
To avoid overfitting, the authors add causal entropy <math>−H (\pi_{\theta}) </math> as the regularization term. Thus, the learning objective is: <br />
\[\min_{\theta}\mathcal{L}=-\eta(\pi_{\theta})-\lambda_{2}H(\pi_{\theta})+\lambda_{1} \sup_{{D\in(0,1)}^{S\times A}} \mathbb{E}_{\pi_{\theta}}[\log(D(s,a))]+\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{E}}[\log(1-D(s,a))]\]<br />
At this point, the problem closely resembles the minimax problem related to the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) [19]. The difference is that the discriminative model D of GANs is well-trained but the expert policy of POfD is not optimal. Then suppose D is parameterized by w. If it is from an expert policy, <math>D_w</math>is toward 1, otherwise it is toward 0. Thus, the minimax learning objective is:<br />
\[\min_{\theta}\max_{w}\mathcal{L}=-\eta(\pi_{\theta})-\lambda_{2}H (\pi_{\theta})+\lambda_{1}( \mathbb{E}_{\pi_{\theta}}[\log(D_{w}(s,a))]+\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{E}}[\log(1-D_{w}(s,a))])\]<br />
The minimax learning objective can be rewritten by substituting the expression of <math> \eta(\pi) </math>:<br />
\[\min_{\theta}\max_{w}-\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{\theta}}[r'(s,a)]-\lambda_{2}H (\pi_{\theta})+\lambda_{1}\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{E}}[\log(1-D_{w}(s,a))]\]<br />
where <math> r'(s,a)=r(a,b)-\lambda_{1}\log(D_{w}(s,a))</math> is the reshaped reward function.<br />
The above objective can be optimized efficiently by alternately updating policy parameters θ and discriminator parameters w, then the gradient is given by:<br />
\[\mathbb{E}_{\pi}[\nabla_{w}\log(D_{w}(s,a))]+\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{E}}[\nabla_{w}\log(1-D_{w}(s,a))]\]<br />
Then, fixing the discriminator <math>D_w</math>, the reshaped policy gradient is:<br />
\[\nabla_{\theta}\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{\theta}}[r'(s,a)]=\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{\theta}}[\nabla_{\theta}\log\pi_{\theta}(a|s)Q'(s,a)]\]<br />
where <math>Q'(\bar{s},\bar{a})=\mathbb{E}_{\pi_{\theta}}[r'(s,a)|s_0=\bar{s},a_0=\bar{a}]</math>.<br />
<br />
At the end, Algorithm 1 gives the detailed process.<br />
[[File:pofd.png|450px|center]]<br />
<br />
=Discussion on Existing LfD Methods=<br />
<br />
==DQFD==<br />
DQFD [2] puts the demonstrations into a replay memory D and keeps them throughout the Q-learning process. The objective for DQFD is:<br />
\[J_{DQfD}={\hat{\mathbb{E}}}_{D}[(R_t(n)-Q_w(s_t,a_t))^2]+\alpha{\hat{\mathbb{E}}}_{D^E}[(R_t(n)-Q_w(s_t,a_t))^2]\]<br />
The second term can be rewritten as <math> {\hat{\mathbb{E}}}_{D^E}[(R_t(n)-Q_w(s_t,a_t))^2]={\hat{\mathbb{E}}}_{D^E}[(\hat{\rho}_E(s,a)-\rho_{\pi}(s,a))^{2}r^2(s,a)]</math>, which can be regarded as a regularization forcing current policy's occupancy measure to match the expert's empirical occupancy measure, weighted by the potential reward.<br />
<br />
==DDPGfD==<br />
DDPGfD [3] also puts the demonstrations into a replay memory D, but it is based on an actor-critic framework [21]. The objective for DDPGfD is the same as DQFD. Its policy gradient is:<br />
\[\nabla_{\theta}J_{DDPGfD}\approx \mathbb{E}_{s,a}[\nabla_{a}Q_w(s,a)\nabla_{\theta}\pi_{\theta}(s)], a=\pi_{\theta}(s) \]<br />
From this equation, policy is updated relying on learned Q-network <math>Q_w </math>rather than the demonstrations <math>D^{E} </math>. DDPGfD shares the same objective function for <math>Q_w </math> as DQfD, thus they have the same way of leveraging demonstrations, that is the demonstrations in DQfD and DDPGfD induce an occupancy measure matching regularization.<br />
<br />
=Experiments=<br />
<br />
==Goal==<br />
The authors aim at investigating 1) whether POfD can aid exploration by leveraging a few demonstrations, even though the demonstrations are imperfect. 2) whether POfD can succeed and achieve high empirical return, especially in environments where reward signals are sparse and rare. <br />
<br />
==Settings==<br />
The authors conduct the experiments on 8 physical control tasks, ranging from low-dimensional spaces to high-dimensional spaces and naturally sparse environments based on OpenAI Gym [20] and Mujoco (Multi-Joint dynamics with Contact) [5] (Gym is a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. It supports teaching agents everything from walking to playing games like Pong or Pinball. MuJoCo is a physics engine aiming to facilitate research and development in robotics, biomechanics, graphics and animation, and other areas where fast and accurate simulation is needed. In order to get familiar with OpenAI Gym and Mujoco environment, you can watch these videos, respectively: [http://www.mujoco.org/image/home/mujocodemo.mp4 Mujoco], [https://gym.openai.com/v2018-02-21/videos/SpaceInvaders-v0-4184afb3-1223-4ac6-b52b-8e863cbe24a5/original.mp4 OpenAI Gym]). Due to the uniqueness of the environments, the authors introduce 4 ways to sparsify their built-in dense rewards. TYPE1: a reward of +1 is given when the agent reaches the terminal state, and otherwisel 0. TYPE2: a reward of +1 is given when the agent survives for a while. TYPE3: a reward of +1 is given for every time the agent moves forward over a specific number of units in Mujoco environments. TYPE4: specially designed for InvertedDoublePendulum, a reward +1 is given when the second pole stays above a specific height of 0.89. The details are shown in Table 1. Moreover, only one single imperfect trajectory is used as the demonstrations in this paper. The authors collect the demonstrations by training an agent insufficiently by running TRPO (Trust Region Policy Optimization) in the corresponding dense environment. <br />
[[File:pofdt1.png|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
==Baselines==<br />
The authors compare POfD against 5 strong baselines:<br />
* training the policy with TRPO [17] in dense environments, which is called expert <br />
* training the policy with TRPO [17] in sparse environments<br />
* applying GAIL [14] to learn the policy from demonstrations<br />
* DQfD [2]<br />
* DDPGfD [3]<br />
<br />
==Results==<br />
Firstly, the authors test the performance of POfD in sparse control environments with discrete actions. From Table 1, POfD achieves performance comparable with the policy learned under dense environments. From Figure 2, only POfD successes to explore sufficiently and achieves great performance in both sparse environments. TRPO [17] and DQFD [2] fail to explore and GAIL [14] converges to the imperfect demonstration in MountainCar [22].<br />
<br />
[[File:pofdf2.png|500px|center]]<br />
<br />
Then, the authors test the performance of POfD under spares environments with continuous actions space. From Figure 3, POfD achieves expert-level performance in terms of accumulated rewards and surpasses other strong baselines training the policy with TRPO. By watching the learning process of different methods, we can see that TRPO consistently fails to explore the environments when the feedback is sparse, except for HalfCheetah. This may be because there is no terminal state in HalfCheetah, thus a random agent can perform reasonably well as long as the time horizon is sufficiently long. This is shown in Figure3 where the improvement of TRPO begins to show after 400 iterations. DDPGfD and GAIL have common drawback: during training process, they both converge to the imperfect demonstration data. For HalfCheetah, GAIL fails to converge and DDPGfD converges to an even worse point. This situation is expected because the policy and value networks tend to over-fit when having few data, so the training process of GAIL and DDPGfD is severely biased by the imperfect data. Finally, our proposed method can effectively explore the environment with the help of demonstration-based intrinsic reward reshaping, and succeeds consistently across different tasks both in terms of learning stability and convergence speed.<br />
[[File:pofdf3.png|900px|center]]<br />
<br />
The authors also implement a locomotion task <math>Humanoid</math>, which teaches a human-like robot to walk. The state space of dimension is 376, which is very hard to render. As a result, POfD still outperformed all three baselike methods, as they failed to learn policies in such a sparse reward environment.<br />
<br />
The reacher environment is a task that the target is to control a robot arm to touch an object. the location of the object is random for each instantiation. The environment reward is sparse: every time the arm reaches the ball and holds for a while (e.g., 5 time steps), it receives a reward of +1; otherwise it gets zero reward. The authors select 15 random trajectories as demonstration data, and the performance of POfD is much better than the expert, while all other baseline methods failed.<br />
<br />
=Conclusion=<br />
In this paper, a method, POfD, is proposed that can acquire knowledge from a limited amount of imperfect demonstration data to aid exploration in environments with sparse feedback. It is compatible with any policy gradient methods. POfD induces implicit dynamic reward shaping and brings provable benefits for policy improvement. Moreover, the experiments results have shown the validity and effectivness of POfD in encouraging the agent to explore around the nearby region of the expert policy and learn better policies. The key contribution is that POfD helps the agent work with few and imperfect demonstrations in an environment with sparse rewards.<br />
<br />
=Critique=<br />
# A novel demonstration-based policy optimization method is proposed. In the process of policy optimization, POfD reshapes the reward function. This new reward function can guide the agent to imitate the expert behaviour when the reward is sparse and explore on its own when the reward value can be obtained, which can take full advantage of the demonstration data and there is no need to ensure that the expert policy is the optimal policy.<br />
# POfD can be combined with any policy gradient methods. Its performance surpasses five strong baselines and can be comparable to the agents trained in the dense-reward environment.<br />
# The paper is structured and the flow of ideas is easy to follow. For related work, the authors clearly explain similarities and differences among these related works.<br />
# This paper's scalability is demonstrated. The experiments environments are ranging from low-dimensional spaces to high-dimensional spaces and from discrete action spaces to continuous actions spaces. For future work, can it be realized in the real world?<br />
# There is a doubt that whether it is a correct method to use the trajectory that was insufficiently learned in dense-reward environment as the imperfect demonstration.<br />
# In this paper, the performance only is judged by the cumulative reward, can other evaluation terms be considered? For example, the convergence rate.<br />
# The performance of this algorithm hinges on the assumption that expert demonstrations are near optimal in the action space. As seen in figure 3, there appears to be an upper bound to performance near (or just above) the expert accuracy -- this may be an indication of a performance ceiling. In games where near-optimal policies can differ greatly (e.g.; offensive or defensive strategies in chess), the success of the model will depend on the selection of expert demonstrations that are closest to a truly optimal policy (i.e.; just because a policy is the current expert, it does not mean it resembles the true optimal policy).<br />
<br />
=References=<br />
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[12] Syed, U. and Schapire, R. E. A game-theoretic approach to apprenticeship learning. In Advances in neural informa- tion processing systems, pp. 1449–1456, 2008.<br />
<br />
[13] Syed, U., Bowling, M., and Schapire, R. E. Apprenticeship learning using linear programming. In Proceedings of the 25th international conference on Machine learning, pp. 1032–1039. ACM, 2008.<br />
<br />
[14] Ho, J. and Ermon, S. Generative adversarial imitation learn- ing. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Sys- tems, pp. 4565–4573, 2016.<br />
<br />
[15] Sutton, R. S. and Barto, A. G. Reinforcement learning: An introduction, volume 1. MIT press Cambridge, 1998.<br />
<br />
[16] Kakade, S. M. A natural policy gradient. In Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 1531–1538, 2002.<br />
<br />
[17] Schulman, J., Levine, S., Abbeel, P., Jordan, M., and Moritz, P. Trust region policy optimization. In Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-15), pp. 1889–1897, 2015.<br />
<br />
[18] Schulman, J., Wolski, F., Dhariwal, P., Radford, A., and Klimov, O. Proximal policy optimization algorithms. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.06347, 2017.<br />
<br />
[19] Goodfellow, I., Pouget-Abadie, J., Mirza, M., Xu, B., Warde-Farley, D., Ozair, S., Courville, A., and Bengio, Y. Generative adversarial nets. In Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 2672–2680, 2014.<br />
<br />
[20] Brockman, G., Cheung, V., Pettersson, L., Schneider, J., Schulman, J., Tang, J., and Zaremba, W. Openai gym, 2016.<br />
<br />
[21] Lillicrap, T. P., Hunt, J. J., Pritzel, A., Heess, N., Erez, T., Tassa, Y., Silver, D., and Wierstra, D. Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.02971, 2015.<br />
<br />
[22] Moore, A. W. Efficient memory-based learning for robot control. 1990.<br />
<br />
[23] Zhu, Y., Wang, Z., Merel, J., Rusu, A., Erez, T., Cabi, S., Tunyasuvunakool, S., Kramar, J., Hadsell, R., de Freitas, N., et al. Reinforcement and imitation learning for diverse visuomotor skills. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.09564, 2018.<br />
<br />
[24] Li, Y., Song, J., and Ermon, S. Infogail: Interpretable imitation learning from visual demonstrations. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 3815–3825, 2017.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Visual_Reinforcement_Learning_with_Imagined_Goals&diff=41518Visual Reinforcement Learning with Imagined Goals2018-11-27T04:06:26Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Related Work */</p>
<hr />
<div>Video and details of this work are available [https://sites.google.com/site/visualrlwithimaginedgoals/ here]<br />
<br />
=Introduction and Motivation=<br />
<br />
Humans are able to accomplish many tasks without any explicit or supervised training, simply by exploring their environment. We are able to set our own goals and learn from our experiences, and thus able to accomplish specific tasks without ever having been trained explicitly for them. It would be ideal if an autonomous agent can also set its own goals and learn from its environment.<br />
<br />
In the paper “Visual Reinforcement Learning with Imagined Goals”, the authors are able to devise such an unsupervised reinforcement learning system. They introduce a system that sets abstract goals and autonomously learns to achieve those goals. They then show that the system can use these autonomously learned skills to perform a variety of user-specified goals, such as pushing objects, grasping objects, and opening doors, without any additional learning. Lastly, they demonstrate that their method is efficient enough to work in the real world on a Sawyer robot. The robot learns to set and achieve goals with only images as the input to the system.<br />
<br />
The algorithm proposed by the authors is summarised below. A Variational Auto Encoder (VAE) on the (left) is trained to learn a latent representation of images gathered during training time (center). These latent variables can then be used to train a policy on imagined goals (center), which can then be used for accomplishing user-specified goals (right).<br />
<br />
[[File: WF_Sec_11Nov25_01.png | 800px]]<br />
<br />
=Related Work =<br />
<br />
Many previous works on vision-based deep reinforcement learning for robotics studied a variety of behaviours such as grasping [1], pushing [2], navigation [3], and other manipulation tasks [4]. However, their assumptions on the models limit their suitability for training general-purpose robots. Some previous works such as Levine et al.[11] proposed time-varying models which require episodic setups. There are also other works such as Pinto et al.[12] that proposed an approach using goal images, but it requires instrumented training simulations. Lillicrap et al. [13] uses fully model-free training (Model-based RL uses experience to construct an internal model of the transitions and<br />
immediate outcomes in the environment. Appropriate actions are then chosen by searching or planning in this world model. Model-free RL, on the other hand, uses experience to learn directly one or both of two simpler quantities (state/action values or policies) which can achieve the same optimal behavior but without estimation or use of a world model. Given a policy, a state has a value, defined in terms of the future utility that is expected to accrue starting from that state [https://www.princeton.edu/~yael/Publications/DayanNiv2008.pdf Reinforcement learning: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly].), but does not learn goal-conditioned skills. There are currently no examples that use model-free reinforcement learning for learning policies to train on real-world robotic systems without having ground-truth information.<br />
<br />
In this paper, the authors utilize a goal-conditioned value function to tackle more general tasks through goal relabelling, which improves sample efficiency. Goal relabelling is to retroactively relabel samples in the replay buffer with goals sampled from the latent representation. The paper uses sample random goals from learned latent space to use as replay goals for off-policy Q-learning rather than restricting to states seen along the sampled trajectory as was done in the earlier works. Specifically, they use a model-free Q-learning method that operates on raw state observations and actions.<br />
<br />
Unsupervised learning has been used in a number of prior works to acquire better representations of reinforcement learning. In these methods, the learned representation is used as a substitute for the state for the policy. However, these methods require additional information, such as access to the ground truth reward function based on the true state during training time [5], expert trajectories [6], human demonstrations [7], or pre-trained object-detection features [8]. In contrast, the authors learn to generate goals and use the learned representation to get a reward function for those goals without any of these extra sources of supervision.<br />
<br />
=Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning=<br />
<br />
The ultimate goal in reinforcement learning is to learn a policy <math>\pi</math>, that when given a state <math>s_t</math> and goal <math>g</math>, can dictate the optimal action <math>a_t</math>. The optimal action <math>a_t</math> is defined as an action which maximizes the expected return denoted by <math>R_t</math> and defined as <math>R_t = \mathbb{E}[\sum_{i = t}^T\gamma^{(i-t)}r_i]</math>, where <math>r_i = r(s_i, a_i, s_{i+1})</math> and <math>\gamma</math> is a discount factor. In this paper, goals are not explicitly defined during training. If a goal is not explicitly defined, the agent must be able to generate a set of synthetic goals automatically. Thus, suppose we let an autonomous agent explore an environment with a random policy. After executing each action, state observations are collected and stored. These state observations are structured in the form of images. The agent can randomly select goals from the set of state observations, and can also randomly select initial states from the set of state observations.<br />
<br />
[[File:human-giving-goal.png|center|thumb|400px|The task: Make the world look like this image. [9]]]<br />
<br />
Now given a set of all possible states, a goal, and an initial state, a reinforcement learning framework can be used to find the optimal policy such that the value function is maximized. However, to implement such a framework, a reward function needs to be defined. One choice for the reward is the negative distance between the current state and the goal state, so that maximizing the reward corresponds to minimizing the distance to a goal state.<br />
<br />
In reinforcement learning, a goal-conditioned Q-function can be used to find a single policy to maximize rewards and therefore reach goal states. A goal-conditioned Q-function <math>Q(s,a,g)</math> tells us how good an action <math>a</math> is, given the current state <math>s</math> and goal <math>g</math>. For example, a Q-function tells us, “How good is it to move my hand up (action <math>a</math>), if I’m holding a plate (state <math>s</math>) and want to put the plate on the table (goal <math>g</math>)?” Once this Q-function is trained, a goal-conditioned policy can be obtained by performing the following optimization<br />
<br />
<div align="center"><br />
<math>\pi(s,g) = max_a Q(s,a,g)</math><br />
</div><br />
<br />
which effectively says, “choose the best action according to this Q-function.” By using this procedure, one can obtain a policy that maximizes the sum of rewards, i.e. reaches various goals.<br />
<br />
The reason why Q-learning is popular is that it can be trained in an off-policy manner. Therefore, the only things a Q-function needs are samples of state, action, next state, goal, and reward <math>(s,a,s′,g,r)</math>. This data can be collected by any policy and can be reused across multiples tasks. So a preliminary goal-conditioned Q-learning algorithm looks like this:<br />
<br />
[[File:ql.png|center|600px]]<br />
<br />
From the tuple <math>(s,a,s',g,r)</math>, an approximate Q-function paramaterized by <math>w</math> can be trained by minimizing the Bellman error:<br />
<br />
<div align="center"><br />
<math>\mathcal{E}(w) = \frac{1}{2} || Q_w(s,a,g) -(r + \gamma \max_{a'} Q_{\overline{w}}(s',a',g)) ||^2 </math><br />
</div><br />
<br />
where <math>\overline{w}</math> is treated as some constant.<br />
<br />
The main drawback in this training procedure is collecting data. In theory, one could learn to solve various tasks without even interacting with the world if more data are available. Unfortunately, it is difficult to learn an accurate model of the world, so sampling are usually used to get state-action-next-state data, (s,a,s′). However, if the reward function <math>r(s,g)</math> can be accessed, one can retroactively relabel goals and recompute rewards. This way, more data can be artificially generated given a single <math>(s,a,s′)</math> tuple. As a result, the training procedure can be modified like so:<br />
<br />
[[File:qlr.png|center|600px]]<br />
<br />
This goal resampling makes it possible to simultaneously learn how to reach multiple goals at once without needing more data from the environment. Thus, this simple modification can result in substantially faster learning. However, the method described above makes two major assumptions: (1) you have access to a reward function and (2) you have access to a goal sampling distribution <math>p(g)</math>. When moving to vision-based tasks where goals are images, both of these assumptions introduce practical concerns.<br />
<br />
For one, a fundamental problem with this reward function is that it assumes that the distance between raw images will yield semantically useful information. Images are noisy. A large amount of information in an image that may not be related to the object we analyze. Thus, the distance between two images may not correlate with their semantic distance.<br />
<br />
Second, because the goals are images, a goal image distribution <math>p(g)</math> is needed so that one can sample goal images. Manually designing a distribution over goal images is a non-trivial task and image generation is still an active field of research. It would be ideal if the agent can autonomously imagine its own goals and learn how to reach them.<br />
<br />
=Variational Autoencoder=<br />
An autoencoder is a type of machine learning model that can learn to extract a robust, space-efficient feature vector from an image. This generative model converts high-dimensional observations <math>x</math>, like images, into low-dimensional latent variables <math>z</math>, and vice versa. The model is trained so that the latent variables capture the underlying factors of variation in an image. A current image <math>x</math> and goal image <math>x_g</math> can be converted into latent variables <math>z</math> and <math>z_g</math>, respectively. These latent variables can then be used to represent the state and goal for the reinforcement learning algorithm. Learning Q functions and policies on top of this low-dimensional latent space rather than directly on images results in faster learning.<br />
<br />
[[File:robot-interpreting-scene.png|center|thumb|600px|The agent encodes the current image (<math>x</math>) and goal image (<math>x_g</math>) into a latent space and use distances in that latent space for reward. [9]]]<br />
<br />
Using the latent variable representations for the images and goals also solves the problem of computing rewards. Instead of using pixel-wise error as our reward, the distance in the latent space is used as the reward to train the agent to reach a goal. The paper shows that this corresponds to rewarding reaching states that maximize the probability of the latent goal <math>z_g</math>.<br />
<br />
This generative model is also important because it allows an agent to easily generate goals in the latent space. In particular, the authors design the generative model so that latent variables are sampled from the VAE prior. This sampling mechanism is used for two reasons: First, it provides a mechanism for an agent to set its own goals. The agent simply samples a value for the latent variable from the generative model, and tries to reach that latent goal. Second, this resampling mechanism is also used to relabel goals as mentioned above. Since the VAE prior is trained by real images, meaningful latent goals can be sampled from the latent variable prior. This will help the agent set its own goals and practice towards them if no goal is provided at test time.<br />
<br />
[[File:robot-imagining-goals.png|center|thumb|600px|Even without a human providing a goal, our agent can still generate its own goals, both for exploration and for goal relabeling. [9]]]<br />
<br />
The authors summarize the purpose of the latent variable representation of images as follows: (1) captures the underlying factors of a scene, (2) provides meaningful distances to optimize, and (3) provides an efficient goal sampling mechanism which can be used by the agent to generate its own goals. The overall method is called reinforcement learning with imagined goals (RIG) by the authors.<br />
The process involves starts with collecting data through a simple exploration policy. Possible alternative explorations could be employed here including off-the-shelf exploration bonuses or unsupervised reinforcement learning methods. Then, a VAE latent variable model is trained on state observations and fine-tuned during training. The latent variable model is used for multiple purposes: sampling a latent goal <math>z_g</math> from the model and conditioning the policy on this goal. All states and goals are embedded using the model’s encoder and then used to train the goal-conditioned value function. The authors then resample goals from the prior and compute rewards in the latent space.<br />
<br />
=Algorithm=<br />
[[File:algorithm1.png|center|thumb|600px|]]<br />
<br />
The data is first collected via a simple exploration policy. The proposed model allows for alternate exploration policies to be used which include off-the-shelf exploration bonuses or unsupervised reinforcement learning methods. Then, the authors train a VAE latent variable model on state observations and finetune it over the course of training. VAE latent space modeling is used to allow the conditioning of policy on the goal which is sampled from the latent model. The VAE model is also used to encode all the goals and the states. When the goal-conditioned value function is trained, the authors resample prior goals and compute rewards in the latent space.<br />
<br />
=Experiments=<br />
<br />
The authors evaluated their method against some prior algorithms and ablated versions of their approach on a suite of simulated and real-world tasks: Visual Reacher, Visual Pusher, and Visual Multi-Object Pusher. They compared their model with the following prior works: L&R, DSAE, HER, and Oracle. It is concluded that their approach substantially outperforms the previous methods and is close to the state-based "oracle" method in terms of efficiency and performance.<br />
<br />
The figure below shows the performance of different algorithms on this task. This involved a simulated environment with a Sawyer arm. The authors' algorithm was given only visual input, and the available controls were end-effector velocity. The plots show the distance to the goal state as a function of simulation steps. The oracle, as a baseline, was given true object location information, as opposed to visual pixel information.<br />
<br />
[[File:WF_Sec_11Nov_25_02.png|1000px]]<br />
<br />
<br />
They then investigated the effectiveness of distances in the VAE latent space for the Visual Pusher task. They observed that latent distance significantly outperforms the log probability and pixel mean-squared error. The resampling strategies are also varied while fixing other components of the algorithm to study the effect of relabeling strategy. In this experiment, the RIG, which is an equal mixture of the VAE and Future sampling strategies, performs best. Subsequently, learning with variable numbers of objects was studied by evaluating on a task where the environment, based on the Visual Multi-Object Pusher, randomly contains zero, one, or two objects during testing. The results show that their model can tackle this task successfully.<br />
<br />
Finally, the authors tested the RIG in a real-world robot for its ability to reach user-specified positions and push objects to desired locations, as indicated by a goal image. The robot is trained with access only to 84x84 RGB images and without access to joint angles or object positions. The robot first learns by settings its own goals in the latent space and autonomously practices reaching different positions without human involvement. After a reasonable amount of time of training, the robot is given a goal image. Because the robot has practiced reaching so many goals, it is able to reach this goal without additional training:<br />
<br />
[[File:reaching.JPG|center|thumb|600px|(Left) The robot setup is pictured. (Right) Test rollouts of the learned policy.]]<br />
<br />
The method for reaching only needs 10,000 samples and an hour of real-world interactions.<br />
<br />
They also used RIG to train a policy to push objects to target locations:<br />
<br />
[[File:pushing.JPG|center|thumb|600px|The robot pushing setup is<br />
pictured, with frames from test rollouts of the learned policy.]]<br />
<br />
The pushing task is more complicated and the method requires about 25,000 samples. Since the authors do not have the true position during training, so they used test episode returns as the VAE latent distance reward.<br />
<br />
=Conclusion & Future Work=<br />
<br />
In this paper, a new RL algorithm is proposed to efficiently solve goal-conditioned, vision-based tasks without any ground truth state information or reward functions. The author suggests that one could instead use other representations, such as language and demonstrations, to specify goals. Also, while the paper provides a mechanism to sample goals for autonomous exploration, one can combine the proposed method with existing work by choosing these goals in a more principled way, i.e. a procedure that is not only goal-oriented, but also information seeking or uncertainty aware, to perform even better exploration. Furthermore, combining the idea of this paper with methods from multitask learning and meta-learning is a promising path to create general-purpose agents that can continuously and efficiently acquire skill. Lastly, there are a variety of robot tasks whose state representation would be difficult to capture with sensors, such as manipulating deformable objects or handling scenes with variable number of objects. It is interesting to see whether the RIG can be scaled up to solve these tasks. [10] A new paper was published last week that built on the framework of goal conditioned Reinforcement Learning to extract state representations based on the actions required to reach them, which is abbreviated ARC for actionable representation for control.<br />
<br />
=Critique=<br />
1. This paper is novel because it uses visual data and trains in an unsupervised fashion. The algorithm has no access to a ground truth state or to a pre-defined reward function. It can perform well in a real-world environment with no explicit programming.<br />
<br />
2. From the videos, one major concern is that the output of robotic arm's position is not stable during training and test time. It is likely that the encoder reduces the image features too much so that the images in the latent space are too blury to be used goal images. It would be better if this can be investigated in future. It would be better, if a method is investigated with multiple data sources, and the agent is trained to choose the source which has more complete information. <br />
<br />
3. The algorithm seems to perform better when there is only one object in the images. For example, in Visual Multi-Object Pusher experiment, the relative positions of two pucks do not correspond well with the relative positions of two pucks in goal images. The same situation is also observed in Variable-object experiment. We may guess that the more information contained in an image, the less likely the robot will perform well. This limits the applicability of the current algorithm to solving real-world problems.<br />
<br />
4. The instability mentioned in #2 is even more apparent in the multi-object scenario, and appears to result from the model attempting to optimize on the position of both objects at the same time. Reducing the problem to a sequence of single-object targets may reduce the amount of time the robots spends moving between the multiple objects in the scene (which it currently does quite frequently).<br />
<br />
=References=<br />
1. Lerrel Pinto, Marcin Andrychowicz, Peter Welinder, Wojciech Zaremba, and Pieter Abbeel. Asymmetric<br />
Actor Critic for Image-Based Robot Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.06542, 2017.<br />
<br />
2. Pulkit Agrawal, Ashvin Nair, Pieter Abbeel, Jitendra Malik, and Sergey Levine. Learning to Poke by<br />
Poking: Experiential Learning of Intuitive Physics. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems<br />
(NIPS), 2016.<br />
<br />
3. Deepak Pathak, Parsa Mahmoudieh, Guanghao Luo, Pulkit Agrawal, Dian Chen, Yide Shentu, Evan<br />
Shelhamer, Jitendra Malik, Alexei A Efros, and Trevor Darrell. Zero-Shot Visual Imitation. In International<br />
Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2018.<br />
<br />
4. Timothy P Lillicrap, Jonathan J Hunt, Alexander Pritzel, Nicolas Heess, Tom Erez, Yuval Tassa, David<br />
Silver, and Daan Wierstra. Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning. In International<br />
Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2016.<br />
<br />
5. Irina Higgins, Arka Pal, Andrei A Rusu, Loic Matthey, Christopher P Burgess, Alexander Pritzel, Matthew<br />
Botvinick, Charles Blundell, and Alexander Lerchner. Darla: Improving zero-shot transfer in reinforcement<br />
learning. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2017.<br />
<br />
6. Aravind Srinivas, Allan Jabri, Pieter Abbeel, Sergey Levine, and Chelsea Finn. Universal Planning<br />
Networks. In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2018.<br />
<br />
7. Pierre Sermanet, Corey Lynch, Yevgen Chebotar, Jasmine Hsu, Eric Jang, Stefan Schaal, and Sergey<br />
Levine. Time-contrastive networks: Self-supervised learning from video. arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.06888,<br />
2017.<br />
<br />
8. Alex Lee, Sergey Levine, and Pieter Abbeel. Learning Visual Servoing with Deep Features and Fitted<br />
Q-Iteration. In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2017.<br />
<br />
9. Online source: https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2018/09/06/rig/<br />
<br />
10. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.07819.pdf<br />
<br />
11. Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Trevor Darrell, and Pieter Abbeel. End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies. Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), 17(1):1334–1373, 2016. ISSN 15337928.<br />
<br />
12. Lerrel Pinto, Marcin Andrychowicz, Peter Welinder, Wojciech Zaremba, and Pieter Abbeel. Asymmetric Actor Critic for Image-Based Robot Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.06542, 2017.<br />
<br />
13. Timothy P Lillicrap, Jonathan J Hunt, Alexander Pritzel, Nicolas Heess, Tom Erez, Yuval Tassa, David Silver, and Daan Wierstra. Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning. In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2016.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Unsupervised_Neural_Machine_Translation&diff=41506Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation2018-11-27T03:08:57Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Qualitative Analysis */</p>
<hr />
<div>This paper was published in ICLR 2018, authored by Mikel Artetxe, Gorka Labaka, Eneko Agirre, and Kyunghyun Cho. Open source implementation of this paper is available [https://github.com/artetxem/undreamt here]<br />
<br />
= Introduction =<br />
The paper presents an unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (NMT) method that uses monolingual corpora (single language texts) only. This contrasts with the usual supervised NMT approach which relies on parallel corpora (aligned text) from the source and target languages being available for training. This problem is important because parallel pairing for a majority of languages, e.g. for German-Russian, do not exist.<br />
<br />
Other authors have recently tried to address this problem using semi-supervised approaches (small set of parallel corpora). However, these methods still require a strong cross-lingual signal. The proposed method eliminates the need for cross-lingual information all together and relies solely on monolingual data. The proposed method builds upon the work done recently on unsupervised cross-lingual embeddings by Artetxe et al., 2017 and Zhang et al., 2017.<br />
<br />
The general approach of the methodology is to:<br />
<br />
# Use monolingual corpora in the source and target languages to learn single language word embeddings for both languages separately.<br />
# Align the 2 sets of word embeddings into a single cross lingual (language independent) embedding.<br />
Then iteratively perform:<br />
# Train an encoder-decoder model to reconstruct noisy versions of sentences in both source and target languages separately. The model uses a single encoder and different decoders for each language. The encoder uses cross lingual word embedding.<br />
# Tune the decoder in each language by back-translating between the source and target language.<br />
<br />
= Background =<br />
<br />
===Word Embedding Alignment===<br />
<br />
The paper uses word2vec [Mikolov, 2013] to convert each monolingual corpora to vector embeddings. These embeddings have been shown to contain the contextual and syntactic features independent of language, and so, in theory, there could exist a linear map that maps the embeddings from language L1 to language L2. <br />
<br />
Figure 1 shows an example of aligning the word embeddings in English and French.<br />
<br />
[[File:Figure1_lwali.png|frame|400px|center|Figure 1: the word embeddings in English and French (a & b), and (c) shows the aligned word embeddings after some linear transformation.[Gouws,2016]]]<br />
<br />
Most cross-lingual word embedding methods use bilingual signals in the form of parallel corpora. Usually, the embedding mapping methods train the embeddings in different languages using monolingual corpora, then use a linear transformation to map them into a shared space based on a bilingual dictionary.<br />
<br />
The paper uses the methodology proposed by [Artetxe, 2017] to do cross-lingual embedding aligning in an unsupervised manner and without parallel data. Without going into the details, the general approach of this paper is starting from a seed dictionary of numeral pairings (e.g. 1-1, 2-2, etc.), to iteratively learn the mapping between 2 language embeddings, while concurrently improving the dictionary with the learned mapping at each iteration. This is in contrast to earlier work which used dictionaries of a few thousand words.<br />
<br />
===Other related work and inspirations===<br />
====Statistical Decipherment for Machine Translation====<br />
There has been significant work in statistical deciphering techniques (decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of texts written in ancient or obscure languages or scripts) to develop a machine translation model from monolingual data (Ravi & Knight, 2011; Dou & Knight, 2012). These techniques treat the source language as ciphertext (encrypted or encoded information because it contains a form of the original plain text that is unreadable by a human or computer without the proper cipher for decoding) and model the generation process of the ciphertext as a two-stage process, which includes the generation of the original English sequence and the probabilistic replacement of the words in it. This approach takes advantage of the incorporation of syntactic knowledge of the languages. The use of word embeddings has also shown improvements in statistical decipherment.<br />
<br />
====Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation====<br />
There are also proposals that use techniques other than direct parallel corpora to do NMT. Some use a third intermediate language that is well connected to the source and target languages independently. For example, if we want to translate German into Russian, we can use English as an intermediate language (German-English and then English-Russian) since there are plenty of resources to connect English and other languages. Johnson et al. (2017) show that a multilingual extension of a standard NMT architecture performs reasonably well for language pairs when no parallel data for the source and target data was used during training. Firat et al. (2016) and Chen et al. (2017) showed that the use of advanced models like teacher-student framework can be used to improve over the baseline of translating using a third intermediate language.<br />
<br />
Other works use monolingual data in combination with scarce parallel corpora. A simple but effective technique is back-translation [Sennrich et al, 2016]. First, a synthetic parallel corpus in the target language is created. Translated sentence and back translated to the source language and compared with the original sentence.<br />
<br />
The most important contribution to the problem of training an NMT model with monolingual data was from [He, 2016], which trains two agents to translate in opposite directions (e.g. French → English and English → French) and teach each other through reinforcement learning. However, this approach still required a large parallel corpus for a warm start (about 1.2 million sentences), while this paper does not use parallel data.<br />
<br />
= Methodology =<br />
<br />
The corpora data is first preprocessed in a standard way to tokenize and case the words. The authors also experiment with an alternative way of tokenizing words by using Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) [Sennrich, 2016](Byte pair encoding or digram coding is a simple form of data compression in which the most common pair of consecutive bytes of data is replaced with a byte that does not occur within that data). BPE has been shown to improve embeddings of rare-words. The vocabulary was limited to the most frequent 50,000 tokens (BPE tokens or words).<br />
<br />
The tokens are then converted to word embeddings using word2vec with 300 dimensions and then aligned between languages using the method proposed by [Artetxe, 2017]. The alignment method proposed by [Artetxe, 2017] is also used as a baseline to evaluate this model as discussed later in Results.<br />
<br />
The translation model uses a standard encoder-decoder model with attention. The encoder is a 2-layer bidirectional RNN, and the decoder is a 2 layer RNN. All RNNs use GRU cells with 600 hidden units. The encoder is shared by the source and target language, while the decoder is different for each language.<br />
<br />
Although the architecture uses standard models, the proposed system differs from the standard NMT through 3 aspects:<br />
<br />
#Dual structure: NMT usually are built for one direction translations English<math>\rightarrow</math>French or French<math>\rightarrow</math>English, whereas the proposed model trains both directions at the same time translating English<math>\leftrightarrow</math>French.<br />
#Shared encoder: one encoder is shared for both source and target languages in order to produce a representation in the latent space independent of language, and each decoder learns to transform the representation back to its corresponding language. <br />
#Fixed embeddings in the encoder: Most NMT systems initialize the embeddings and update them during training, whereas the proposed system trains the embeddings in the beginning and keeps these fixed throughout training, so the encoder receives language-independent representations of the words. This approach ensures that the encoder only learns how to compose the language independent representations to build representations of the larger phrases. This requires existing unsupervised methods to create embeddings using monolingual corpora as discussed in the background. In the proposed method, even though the embeddings used are cross-lingual, the vocabulary used for each language is language is different. This way a word which occurs in two different languages but has different meaning in those languages would get a different vector in each of these language despite being in the same vector space. <br />
<br />
[[File:Figure2_lwali.png|600px|center]]<br />
<br />
The translation model iteratively improves the encoder and decoder by performing 2 tasks: Denoising, and Back-translation.<br />
<br />
===Denoising===<br />
Random noise is added to the input sentences in order to allow the model to learn some structure of languages. Without noise, the model would simply learn to copy the input word by word. Noise also allows the shared encoder to compose the embeddings of both languages in a language-independent fashion, and then be decoded by the language dependent decoder.<br />
<br />
Denoising works by reconstructing a noisy version of a sentence back into the original sentence in the same language. In mathematical form, if <math>x</math> is a sentence in language L1:<br />
<br />
# Construct <math>C(x)</math>, noisy version of <math>x</math>. In the proposed model, <math>C(x)</math> is constructed by randomly swapping contiguous words. If the length of the input sequence <math>x</math> is <math>N</math>, then a total of <math>\frac{N}{2}</math> such swaps are made.<br />
# Input <math>C(x)</math> into the current iteration of the shared encoder and use decoder for L1 to get reconstructed <math>\hat{x}</math>.<br />
<br />
The training objective is to minimize the cross entropy loss between <math>{x}</math> and <math>\hat{x}</math>.<br />
<br />
In other words, the whole system is optimized to take an input sentence in a given language, encode it using the shared encoder, and reconstruct the original sentence using the decoder of that language.<br />
<br />
The proposed noise function is to perform <math>N/2</math> random swaps of words that are contiguous, where <math>N</math> is the number of words in the sentence. This noise model also helps reduce reliance of the model on the order of words in a sentence which may be different in the source and target languages. The system will also need to correctly learn the of a language to decode the sentence into the correct order.<br />
<br />
===Back-Translation===<br />
<br />
With only denoising, the system doesn't have a goal to improve the actual translation. Back-translation works by using the decoder of the target language to create a translation, then encoding this translation and decoding again using the source decoder to reconstruct a the original sentence. In mathematical form, if <math>C(x)</math> is a noisy version of sentence <math>x</math> in language L1:<br />
<br />
# Input <math>C(x)</math> into the current iteration of shared encoder and the decoder in L2 to construct translation <math>y</math> in L2,<br />
# Construct <math>C(y)</math>, noisy version of translation <math>y</math>,<br />
# Input <math>C(y)</math> into the current iteration of shared encoder and the decoder in L1 to reconstruct <math>\hat{x}</math> in L1.<br />
<br />
The training objective is to minimize the cross entropy loss between <math>{x}</math> and <math>\hat{x}</math>.<br />
<br />
Contrary to standard back-translation that uses an independent model to back-translate the entire corpus at one time, the system uses mini-batches and the dual architecture to generate pseudo-translations and then train the model with the translation, improving the model iteratively as the training progresses.<br />
<br />
===Training===<br />
<br />
Training is done by alternating these 2 objectives from mini-batch to mini-batch. Each iteration would perform one mini-batch of denoising for L1, another one for L2, one mini-batch of back-translation from L1 to L2, and another one from L2 to L1. The procedure is repeated until convergence. <br />
During decoding, greedy decoding was used at training time for back-translation, but actual inference at test time was done using beam-search with a beam size of 12.<br />
<br />
Optimizer choice and other hyperparameters can be found in the paper.<br />
<br />
=Experiments and Results=<br />
<br />
The model is evaluated using the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) Score, which is typically used to evaluate the quality of the translation, using a reference (ground-truth) translation.<br />
<br />
The paper trains translation model under 3 different settings to compare the performance (Table 1). All training and testing data used was from a standard NMT dataset, WMT'14.<br />
<br />
[[File:Table1_lwali.png|600px|center]]<br />
<br />
The results show that backtranslation is essential for the proposed system to work properly. The denoising technique alone is below the baseline while big improvements appear when introducing backtranslation.<br />
<br />
===Unsupervised===<br />
<br />
The model only has access to monolingual corpora, using the News Crawl corpus with articles from 2007 to 2013. The baseline for unsupervised is the method proposed by [Artetxe, 2017], which was the unsupervised word vector alignment method discussed in the Background section.<br />
<br />
The paper adds each component piece-wise when doing an evaluation to test the impact each piece has on the final score. As shown in Table 1, Unsupervised results compared to the baseline of word-by-word results are strong, with improvement between 40% to 140%. Results also show that back-translation is essential. Denoising doesn't show a big improvement however it is required for back-translation, because otherwise, back-translation would translate nonsensical sentences. The addition of backtranslation, however, does show large improvement on all tested cases.<br />
<br />
For the BPE experiment, results show it helps in some language pairs but detract in some other language pairs. This is because while BPE helped to translate some rare words, it increased the error rates in other words. It also did not perform well when translating named entities which occur infrequently.<br />
<br />
===Semi-supervised===<br />
<br />
Since there is often some small parallel data but not enough to train a Neural Machine Translation system, the authors test a semi-supervised setting with the same monolingual data from the unsupervised settings together with either 10,000 or 100,000 random sentence pairs from the News Commentary parallel corpus. The supervision is included to improve the model during the back-translation stage to directly predict sentences that are in the parallel corpus.<br />
<br />
Table 1 shows that the model can greatly benefit from the addition of a small parallel corpus to the monolingual corpora. It is surprising that semi-supervised in row 6 outperforms supervised in row 7, one possible explanation is that both the semi-supervised training set and the test set belong to the news domain, whereas the supervised training set is all domains of corpora.<br />
<br />
===Supervised===<br />
<br />
This setting provides an upper bound to the unsupervised proposed system. The data used was the combination of all parallel corpora provided at WMT 2014, which includes Europarl, Common Crawl and News Commentary for both language pairs plus the UN and the Gigaword corpus for French- English. Moreover, the authors use the same subsets of News Commentary alone to run the separate experiments in order to compare with the semi-supervised scenario.<br />
<br />
The Comparable NMT was trained using the same proposed model except it does not use monolingual corpora, and consequently, it was trained without denoising and back-translation. The proposed model under a supervised setting does much worse than the state of the NMT in row 10, which suggests that adding the additional constraints to enable unsupervised learning also limits the potential performance. To improve these results, the authors also suggest to use larger models, longer training times, and incorporating several well-known NMT techniques.<br />
<br />
===Qualitative Analysis===<br />
<br />
[[File:Table2_lwali.png|600px|center]]<br />
<br />
Table 2 shows 4 examples of French to English translations, which shows that the high-quality translations are produces by the proposed system, and this system adequately models non-trivial translation relations. Example 1 and 2 show that the model is able to not only go beyond a literal word-by-word substitution but also model structural differences in the languages (ex.e, it correctly translates "l’aeroport international de Los Angeles" as "Los Angeles International Airport", and it is capable of producing high-quality translations of long and more complex sentences. However, in Example 3 and 4, the system failed to translate the months and numbers correctly and having difficulty with comprehending odd sentence structures, which means that the proposed system has limitations. Specially, the authors points that the proposed model has difficulties to preserve some concrete details from source sentences. Results also show, the proposed model's translation quality often lags behind that of a standard supervised NMT system and also there are also some cases where there are both fluency and adequacy problems that severely hinders understanding the original message from the proposed translation, suggesting that there is still room for improvement and possible future work.<br />
<br />
=Conclusions and Future Work=<br />
<br />
The paper presented an unsupervised model to perform translations with monolingual corpora by using an attention-based encoder-decoder system and training using denoise and back-translation.<br />
<br />
Although experimental results show that the proposed model is effective as an unsupervised approach, there is significant room for improvement when using the model in a supervised way, suggesting the model is limited by the architectural modifications. Some ideas for future improvement include:<br />
*Instead of using fixed cross-lingual word embeddings at the beginning which forces the encoder to learn a common representation for both languages, progressively update the weight of the embeddings as training progresses.<br />
*Decouple the shared encoder into 2 independent encoders at some point during training<br />
*Progressively reduce the noise level<br />
*Incorporate character level information into the model, which might help address some of the adequacy issues observed in our manual analysis<br />
*Use other noise/denoising techniques, and analyze their effect in relation to the typological divergences of different language pairs.<br />
<br />
= Critique =<br />
<br />
While the idea is interesting and the results are impressive for an unsupervised approach, much of the model had actually already been proposed by other papers that are referenced. The paper doesn't add a lot of new ideas but only builds on existing techniques and combines them in a different way to achieve good experimental results. The paper is not a significant algorithmic contribution. <br />
<br />
Af pointed out, in order to critically analyze the effect of the algorithm, we need to formulate the algorithm in terms of mathematics.<br />
<br />
The results showed that the proposed system performed far worse than the state of the art when used in a supervised setting, which is concerning and shows that the techniques used creates a limitation and a ceiling for performance.<br />
<br />
Additionally, there was no rigorous hyperparameter exploration/optimization for the model. As a result, it is difficult to conclude whether the performance limit observed in the constrained supervised model is the absolute limit, or whether this could be overcome in both supervised/unsupervised models with the right constraints to achieve more competitive results. <br />
<br />
The best results shown are between two very closely related languages(English and French), and does much worse for English - German, even though English and German are also closely related (but less so than English and French) which suggests that the model may not be successful at translating between distant language pairs. More testing would be interesting to see.<br />
<br />
The results comparison could have shown how the semi-supervised version of the model scores compared to other semi-supervised approaches as touched on in the other works section.<br />
<br />
Their qualitative analysis just checks whether their proposed unsupervised NMT generates sensible translation. It is limited and it needs further detailed analysis regarding the characteristics and properties of translation which is generated by unsupervised NMT.<br />
<br />
* (As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer [https://openreview.net/forum?id=Sy2ogebAW])Future work is vague: “we would like to detect and mitigate the specific causes…” “We also think that a better handling of rare words…” That’s great, but how will you do these things? Do you have specific reasons to think this, or ideas on how to approach them? Otherwise, this is just hand-waving.<br />
<br />
= References =<br />
#'''[Mikolov, 2013]''' Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg S Corrado, and Jeff Dean. "Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality."<br />
#'''[Artetxe, 2017]''' Mikel Artetxe, Gorka Labaka, Eneko Agirre, "Learning bilingual word embeddings with (almost) no bilingual data".<br />
#'''[Gouws,2016]''' Stephan Gouws, Yoshua Bengio, Greg Corrado, "BilBOWA: Fast Bilingual Distributed Representations without Word Alignments."<br />
#'''[He, 2016]''' Di He, Yingce Xia, Tao Qin, Liwei Wang, Nenghai Yu, Tieyan Liu, and Wei-Ying Ma. "Dual learning for machine translation."<br />
#'''[Sennrich,2016]''' Rico Sennrich and Barry Haddow and Alexandra Birch, "Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units."<br />
#'''[Ravi & Knight, 2011]''' Sujith Ravi and Kevin Knight, "Deciphering foreign language."<br />
#'''[Dou & Knight, 2012]''' Qing Dou and Kevin Knight, "Large scale decipherment for out-of-domain machine translation."<br />
#'''[Johnson et al. 2017]''' Melvin Johnson,et al, "Google’s multilingual neural machine translation system: Enabling zero-shot translation."<br />
#'''[Zhang et al. 2017]''' Meng Zhang, Yang Liu, Huanbo Luan, and Maosong Sun. "Adversarial training for unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction"</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946w18/Wavelet_Pooling_For_Convolutional_Neural_Networks&diff=41472stat946w18/Wavelet Pooling For Convolutional Neural Networks2018-11-26T22:48:46Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Proposed Method */</p>
<hr />
<div>=Wavelet Pooling For Convolutional Neural Networks=<br />
<br />
[https://goo.gl/forms/8NucSpF36K6IUZ0V2 Your feedback on presentations]<br />
<br />
<br />
== Introduction, Important Terms and Brief Summary==<br />
<br />
This paper focuses on the following important techniques: <br />
<br />
1) Convolutional Neural Nets (CNN): These are networks with layered structures that conform to the shape of inputs rather than vector-based features and consistently obtain high accuracies in the classification of images and objects. Researchers continue to focus on CNN to improve their performances. <br />
<br />
2) Pooling: Pooling subsamples the results of the convolution layers and gradually reduces spatial dimensions of the data throughout the network. It is done to reduce parameters, increase computational efficiency and regulate overfitting. <br />
<br />
Some of the pooling methods, including max pooling and average pooling, are deterministic. Deterministic pooling methods are efficient and simple, but can hinder the potential for optimal network learning. In contrast, mixed pooling and stochastic pooling use a probabilistic approach, which can address some problems of deterministic methods. The neighborhood approach is used in all the mentioned pooling methods due to its simplicity and efficiency. Nevertheless, the approach can cause edge halos, blurring, and aliasing which need to be minimized. This paper introduces wavelet pooling, which uses a second-level wavelet decomposition to subsample features. The nearest neighbor interpolation is replaced by an organic, subband method that more accurately represents the feature contents with fewer artifacts. The method decomposes features into a second level decomposition and discards first level subbands to reduce feature dimensions. This method is compared to other state-of-the-art pooling methods to demonstrate superior results. Tests are conducted on benchmark classification tests like MNIST, CIFAR10, SHVN and KDEF.<br />
<br />
For further information on wavelets, follow this link to MathWorks' [https://www.mathworks.com/videos/understanding-wavelets-part-1-what-are-wavelets-121279.html Understanding Wavelets] video series.<br />
<br />
== Intuition ==<br />
<br />
Convolutional networks commonly employ convolutional layers to extract features and use pooling methods for spatial dimensionality reduction. In this study, wavelet pooling is introduced as an alternative to traditional neighborhood pooling by providing a more structural feature dimension reduction method. Max pooling is addressed to have over-fitting problems and average pooling is mentioned to smooth out or 'dilute' details in features.<br />
<br />
Pooling is often introduced within networks to ensure local invariance to prevent overfitting due to small transitional shifts within an image. Despite the effectiveness of traditional pooling methods such as max pooling introduce this translational invariance by discarding information using methods analogous to nearest neighbour interpolation. With the hope of providing a more organic way of pooling, the authors leverage all information within cells inputted within a pooling operation with the hope that the resulting dim-reduced features are able to contain information from all high level cells using various dot products.<br />
<br />
== History ==<br />
<br />
A history of different pooling methods have been introduced and referenced in this study:<br />
* manual subsampling at 1979<br />
* Max pooling at 1992<br />
* Mixed pooling at 2014<br />
* pooling methods with probabilistic approaches at 2014 and 2015<br />
<br />
== Background ==<br />
Average Pooling and Max Pooling are well-known pooling methods and are popular techniques used in the literature. These pooling methods reduce input data dimensionality by taking the maximum value or the average value of specific areas and condense them into one single value. While these methods are simple and effective, they still have some limitations. The authors identify the following limitations:<br />
<br />
'''Limitations of Max Pooling and Average Pooling'''<br />
<br />
'''Max pooling''': takes the maximum value of a region <math>R_{ij} </math> and selects it to obtain a condensed feature map. It can '''erase the details''' of the image (happens if the main details have less intensity than the insignificant details) and also commonly '''over-fits''' the training data. The max-pooling is defined as:<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
a_{kij} = max_{(p,q)\in R_{ij}}(a_{kpq})<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
'''Average pooling''': calculates the average value of a region and selects it to obtain a condensed feature map. Depending on the data, this method can '''dilute pertinent details''' from an image (happens for data with values much lower than the significant details) The avg-pooling is defined as:<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
a_{kij} = \frac{1}{|R_{ij}|}\sum_{(p,q)\in R_{ij}}{{a_{kpq}}}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
Where <math>a_{kij}</math> is the output activation of the <math>k^{th}</math> feature map at <math>(i,j)</math>, <math>a_{kpq}</math> is the input activation at<br />
<math>(p,q)</math> within <math>R_{ij}</math>, and <math>|R_{ij}|</math> is the size of the pooling region. Figure 2 provides an example of the weaknesses of these two methods using toy images:<br />
<br />
[[File: fig0001.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How the researchers try to '''combat these issues'''?'''<br />
Using '''probabilistic pooling methods''' such as:<br />
<br />
1. '''Mixed pooling''': In general, when facing a new problem in which one would want to use a CNN, it is unintuitive to whether average or max-pooling is preferred. Notably, both techniques have significant drawbacks. Average pooling forces the network to consider low magnitude (and possibly irrelevant information) in constructing representations, while max pooling can force the network to ignore fundamental differences between neighbouring groups of pixels. To counteract this, mixed pooling probabilistically decides which to use during training / testing. It should be noted that, for training, it is only probabilistic in the forward pass. During back-propagation the network defaults to the earlier chosen method. Mixed pooling can be applied in 3 different ways.<br />
<br />
* For all features within a layer<br />
* Mixed between features within a layer<br />
* Mixed between regions for different features within a layer<br />
<br />
Mixed Pooling is defined as:<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
a_{kij} = \lambda \cdot max_{(p,q)\in R_{ij}}(a_{kpq})+(1-\lambda) \cdot \frac{1}{|R_{ij}|}\sum_{(p,q)\in R_{ij}}{{a_{kpq}}}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
Where <math>\lambda</math> is a random value 0 or 1, indicating max or average pooling.<br />
<br />
2. '''Stochastic pooling''': improves upon max pooling by randomly sampling from neighborhood regions based on the probability values of each activation. This is defined as:<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
a_{kij} = a_l ~ \text{where } ~ l\sim P(p_1,p_2,...,p_{|R_{ij}|})<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
with probability of activations within each region defined as follows:<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
p_{pq} = \dfrac{a_{pq}}{\sum_{(p,q)} \in R_{ij} a_{pq}}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
The figure below describes the process of Stochastic Pooling. The figure on the left shows the activations of a given region, and the corresponding probability is shown in the center. The activations with the highest probability is selected by the pooling method. However, any activation can be selected. In this case, the midrange activation of 13% is selected. <br />
<br />
[[File: stochastic pooling.jpeg| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
As stochastic pooling is based on probability and is not deterministic, it avoids the shortcomings of max and average pooling and enjoys some of the advantages of max pooling.<br />
<br />
3. "Top-k activation pooling" is the method that picks the top-k activation in every pooling region. This makes sure that the maximum information can pass through subsampling gates. It is to be used with max pooling, but after max pooling, to further improve the representation capability, they pick top-k activation, sum them up, and constrain the summation by a constant. <br />
Details in this paper: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/wcmc/2018/8196906/<br />
<br />
'''Wavelets and Wavelet Transform'''<br />
A wavelet is a representation of some signal. For use in wavelet transforms, they are generally represented as combinations of basis signal functions.<br />
<br />
The wavelet transform involves taking the inner product of a signal (in this case, the image), with these basis functions. This produces a set of coefficients for the signal. These coefficients can then be quantized and coded in order to compress the image.<br />
<br />
One issue of note is that wavelets offer a tradeoff between resolution in frequency, or in time (or presumably, image location). For example, a sine wave will be useful to detect signals with its own frequency, but cannot detect where along the sine wave this alignment of signals is occuring. Thus, basis functions must be chosen with this tradeoff in mind.<br />
<br />
Source: Compressing still and moving images with wavelets<br />
<br />
== Proposed Method ==<br />
<br />
The proposed pooling method uses wavelets (i.e. small waves - generally used in signal processing) to reduce the dimensions of the feature maps. They use wavelet transform to minimize artifacts resulting from neighborhood reduction. They postulate that their approach, which discards the first-order sub-bands, more organically captures the data compression. The authors say that this organic reduction therefore lessens the creation of jagged edges and other artifacts that may impede correct image classification.<br />
<br />
* '''Forward Propagation'''<br />
<br />
The proposed wavelet pooling scheme pools features by performing a 2nd order decomposition in the wavelet domain according to the fast wavelet transform (FWT) which is a more efficient implementation of the two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (DWT) as follows:<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
W_{\varphi}[j+1,k] = h_{\varphi}[-n]*W_{\varphi}[j,n]|_{n=2k,k\leq0}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
W_{\psi}[j+1,k] = h_{\psi}[-n]*W_{\psi}[j,n]|_{n=2k,k\leq0}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
where <math>\varphi</math> is the approximation function, and <math>\psi</math> is the detail function, <math>W_{\varphi},W_{\psi}</math> are called approximation and detail coefficients. <math>h_{\varphi[-n]}</math> and <math>h_{\psi[-n]}</math> are the time reversed scaling and wavelet vectors, (n) represents the sample in the vector, while (j) denotes the resolution level<br />
<br />
When using the FWT on images, it is applied twice (once on the rows, then again on the columns). By doing this in combination, the detail sub-bands (LH, HL, HH) at each decomposition level, and approximation sub-band (LL) for the highest decomposition level is obtained.<br />
After performing the 2nd order decomposition, the image features are reconstructed, but only using the 2nd order wavelet sub-bands. This method pools the image features by a factor of 2 using the inverse FWT (IFWT) which is based off the inverse DWT (IDWT).<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
W_{\varphi}[j,k] = h_{\varphi}[-n]*W_{\varphi}[j+1,n]+h_{\psi}[-n]*W_{\psi}[j+1,n]|_{n=\frac{k}{2},k\leq0}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
[[File: wavelet pooling forward.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
* '''Backpropagation'''<br />
<br />
The proposed wavelet pooling algorithm performs backpropagation by reversing the process of its forward propagation. First, the image feature being backpropagated undergoes 1st order wavelet decomposition. After decomposition, the detail coefficient sub-bands up-sample by a factor of 2 to create a new 1st level decomposition. The initial decomposition then becomes the 2nd level decomposition. Finally, this new 2nd order wavelet decomposition reconstructs the image feature for further backpropagation using the IDWT. Figure 5, illustrates the wavelet pooling backpropagation algorithm in details:<br />
<br />
[[File:wavelet pooling backpropagation.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
== Results and Discussion ==<br />
<br />
All experiments have been performed using the MatConvNet(Vedaldi & Lenc, 2015) architecture. Stochastic gradient descent has been used for training. For the proposed method, the Haar wavelet has been chosen as the basis wavelet for its property of having even, square sub-bands. All CNN structures except for MNIST use a network loosely based on Zeilers network (Zeiler & Fergus, 2013). The experiments are repeated with Dropout (Srivastava, 2013) and the Local Response Normalization (Krizhevsky, 2009) is replaced with Batch Normalization (Ioffe & Szegedy, 2015) for CIFAR-10 and SHVN (Dropout only) to examine how these regularization techniques change the pooling results. The authors have tested the proposed method on four different datasets as shown in the figure:<br />
<br />
[[File: selection of image datasets.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
Different methods based on Max, Average, Mixed, Stochastic and Wavelet have been used at the pooling section of each architecture. Accuracy and Model Energy have been used as the metrics to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. These have been evaluated and their performances have been compared on different data-sets.<br />
<br />
* MNIST:<br />
<br />
The network architecture is based on the example MNIST structure from MatConvNet, with batch-normalization, inserted. All other parameters are the same. The figure below shows their network structure for the MNIST experiments.<br />
<br />
[[File: CNN MNIST.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
The input training data and test data come from the MNIST database of handwritten digits. The full training set of 60,000 images is used, as well as the full testing set of 10,000 images. The table below shows their proposed method outperforms all methods. Given the small number of epochs, max pooling is the only method to start to over-fit the data during training. Mixed and stochastic pooling show a rocky trajectory but do not over-fit. Average and wavelet pooling show a smoother descent in learning and error reduction. The figure below shows the energy of each method per epoch.<br />
<br />
[[File: MNIST pooling method energy.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
The accuracies for both paradigms are shown below:<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File: MNIST perf.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
* CIFAR-10:<br />
<br />
The authors perform two sets of experiments with the pooling methods. The first is a regular network structure with no dropout layers. They use this network to observe each pooling method without extra regularization. The second uses dropout and batch normalization and performs over 30 more epochs to observe the effects of these changes. <br />
<br />
[[File: CNN CIFAR.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
The input training and test data come from the CIFAR-10 dataset. <br />
The full training set of 50,000 images is used, as well as the full testing set of 10,000 images. For both cases, with no dropout, and with dropout, Tables below show that the proposed method has the second highest accuracy.<br />
<br />
[[File: fig0000.jpg| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
Max pooling over-fits fairly quickly, while wavelet pooling resists over-fitting. The change in learning rate prevents their method from over-fitting, and it continues to show a slower propensity for learning. Mixed and stochastic pooling maintain a consistent progression of learning, and their validation sets trend at a similar, but better rate than their proposed method. Average pooling shows the smoothest descent in learning and error reduction, especially in the validation set. The energy of each method per epoch is also shown below:<br />
<br />
[[File: CIFAR_pooling_method_energy.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
* SHVN:<br />
<br />
Two sets of experiments are performed with the pooling methods. The first is a regular network structure with no dropout layers. They use this network to observe each pooling method without extra regularization same as what happened in the previous datasets.<br />
The second network uses dropout to observe the effects of this change. The figure below shows their network structure for the SHVN experiments:<br />
<br />
[[File: CNN SHVN.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
The input training and test data come from the SHVN dataset. For the case with no dropout, they use 55,000 images from the training set. For the case with dropout, they use the full training set of 73,257 images, a validation set of 30,000 images they extract from the extra training set of 531,131 images, as well as the full testing set of 26,032 images. For both cases, with no dropout, and with dropout, Tables below show their proposed method has the second lowest accuracy.<br />
<br />
[[File: SHVN perf.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
Max and wavelet pooling both slightly over-fit the data. Their method follows the path of max pooling but performs slightly better in maintaining some stability. Mixed, stochastic, and average pooling maintain a slow progression of learning, and their validation sets trend at near identical rates. The figure below shows the energy of each method per epoch.<br />
<br />
[[File: SHVN pooling method energy.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
* KDEF:<br />
<br />
They run one set of experiments with the pooling methods that includes dropout. The figure below shows their network structure for the KDEF experiments:<br />
<br />
[[File:CNN KDEF.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
The input training and test data come from the KDEF dataset. This dataset contains 4,900 images of 35 people displaying seven basic emotions (afraid, angry, disgusted, happy, neutral, sad, and surprised) using facial expressions. They display emotions at five poses (full left and right profiles, half left and right profiles, and straight).<br />
<br />
This dataset contains a few errors that they have fixed (missing or corrupted images, uncropped images, etc.). All of the missing images are at angles of -90, -45, 45, or 90 degrees. They fix the missing and corrupt images by mirroring their counterparts in MATLAB and adding them back to the dataset. They manually crop the images that need to match the dimensions set by the creators (762 x 562).<br />
KDEF does not designate a training or test data set. They shuffle the data and separate 3,900 images as training data, and 1,000 images as test data. They resize the images to 128x128 because of memory and time constraints.<br />
<br />
The dropout layers regulate the network and maintain stability in spite of some pooling methods known to over-fit. The table below shows their proposed method has the second highest accuracy. Max pooling eventually over-fits, while wavelet pooling resists over-fitting. Average and mixed pooling resist over-fitting but are unstable for most of the learning. Stochastic pooling maintains a consistent progression of learning. Wavelet pooling also follows a smoother, consistent progression of learning.<br />
The figure below shows the energy of each method per epoch.<br />
<br />
[[File: KDEF pooling method energy.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
The accuracies for both paradigms are shown below:<br />
<br />
[[File: KDEF perf.PNG| 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
* Computational Complexity:<br />
Above experiments and implementations on wavelet pooling were more of a proof-of-concept rather than an optimized method. In terms of mathematical operations, the wavelet pooling method is the least computationally efficient compared to all other pooling methods mentioned above. Among all the methods, average pooling is the most efficient methods, max pooling and mix pooling are at a similar level while wavelet pooling is way more expensive to complete the calculation.<br />
<br />
== Conclusion ==<br />
<br />
They prove wavelet pooling has the potential to equal or eclipse some of the traditional methods currently utilized in CNNs. Their proposed method outperforms all others in the MNIST dataset, outperforms all but one in the CIFAR-10 and KDEF datasets, and performs within respectable ranges of the pooling methods that outdo it in the SHVN dataset. The addition of dropout and batch normalization show their proposed methods response to network regularization. Like the non-dropout cases, it outperforms all but one in both the CIFAR-10 & KDEF datasets and performs within respectable ranges of the pooling methods that outdo it in the SHVN dataset.<br />
<br />
== Suggested Future work ==<br />
<br />
Upsampling and downsampling factors in decomposition and reconstruction needs to be changed to achieve more feature reduction.<br />
The subbands that we previously discard should be kept for higher accuracies. To achieve higher computational efficiency, improving the FTW method is needed.<br />
<br />
== Critiques and Suggestions ==<br />
*The functionality of backpropagation process which can be a positive point of the study is not described enough comparing to the existing methods.<br />
* The main study is on wavelet decomposition while the reason of using Haar as mother wavelet and the number of decomposition levels selection has not been described and are just mentioned as a future study! <br />
* At the beginning, the study mentions that the pooling method is not under attention as it should be. In the end, results show that choosing the pooling method depends on the dataset and they mention trial and test as a reasonable approach to choose the pooling method. In my point of view, the authors have not really been focused on providing a pooling method which can help the current conditions to be improved effectively. At least, trying to extract a better pattern for relating results to the dataset structure could be so helpful.<br />
* Average pooling origins which are mentioned as the main pooling algorithm to compare with, is not even referenced in the introduction.<br />
* Combination of the wavelet, Max and Average pooling can be an interesting option to investigate more on this topic; both in a row(Max/Avg after wavelet pooling) and combined like mix pooling option.<br />
* While the current datasets express the performance of the proposed method in an appropriate way, it could be a good idea to evaluate the method using some larger datasets. Maybe it helps to understand whether the size of a dataset can affect the overfitting behavior of max pooling which is mentioned in the paper.<br />
* Adding asymptotic notations to the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm would be meaningful, particularly since the given results are for a single/fixed input size (one image in forward propagation) and consequently are not generalizable. <br />
* They could have considered comparing against Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Including a non wavelet form seems to be an obvious candidate for comparison<br />
* If they went beyond the 2x2 pooling window this would have further supported their method<br />
* ([[https://openreview.net/forum?id=rkhlb8lCZ]]) The experiments are largely conducted with very small scale datasets. As a result, I am not sure if they are representative enough to show the performance difference between different pooling methods.<br />
* ([[https://openreview.net/forum?id=rkhlb8lCZ]]) No comparison to non-wavelet methods. For example, one obvious comparison would have been to look at using a DCT or FFT transform where the output would discard high-frequency components (this can get very close to the wavelet idea!).<br />
<br />
== References ==<br />
<br />
Williams, Travis, and Robert Li. "Wavelet Pooling for Convolutional Neural Networks." (2018).<br />
<br />
Hilton, Michael L., Björn D. Jawerth, and Ayan Sengupta. "Compressing still and moving images with wavelets." Multimedia systems 2.5 (1994): 218-227.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Revisions == <br />
<br />
*Two reviewers really liked the paper and one of them called it in the top 15% papers in the conference which supports the novelty and potential of the idea. One other reviewer, however, believed that this was not good enough to be accepted and the main reason for rejection was the linearity nature of wavelet(which was not convincingly described). <br />
<br />
*The main concern of two of the reviewers has been the size of the datasets that have been used to test the method and the authors have mentioned future works concerning bigger datasets to test the method.<br />
<br />
*The computational cost section has not been in the paper at the first place and was added after one of the reviewer's concern. So, the other reviewers have not been curious about this and unfortunately, there is no comment on that from them. However, the description on the non-efficient implementation seemed to be satisfactory to the reviewer which resulted in being accepted. <br />
<br />
[https://openreview.net/forum?id=rkhlb8lCZ Revisions]<br />
<br />
At the end, if you are interested in implementing the method, they are willing to share their code but after making it efficient. So, maybe there will be another paper regarding less computational cost on larger datasets with a publishable code.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Synthesizing_Programs_for_Images_usingReinforced_Adversarial_Learning&diff=41471Synthesizing Programs for Images usingReinforced Adversarial Learning2018-11-26T22:45:04Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Other Resources */</p>
<hr />
<div>'''Synthesizing Programs for Images using Reinforced Adversarial Learning: ''' Summary of the ICML 2018 paper <br />
<br />
Paper: [[http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/ganin18a.html]]<br />
Video: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSyvwAwa7vk&feature=youtu.be]]<br />
<br />
== Presented by ==<br />
<br />
1. Nekoei, Hadi [Quest ID: 20727088]<br />
<br />
= Motivation =<br />
<br />
Conventional neural generative models have major problems. <br />
<br />
* It is not clear how to inject knowledge about the data into the model. <br />
<br />
* Latent space is not easily interpretative. <br />
<br />
The provided solution in this paper is to generate programs to incorporate tools, e.g. graphics editors, illustration software, CAD. and '''creating more meaningful API(sequence of complex actions vs raw pixels)'''.<br />
<br />
= Introduction =<br />
<br />
Humans, frequently, use the ability to recover structured representation from raw sensation to understand their environment. Decomposing a picture of a hand-written character into strokes or understanding the layout of a building can be exploited to learn how actually our brain works. <br />
<br />
In the visual domain, inversion of a renderer for the purposes of scene understanding is typically referred to as inverse graphics. However, training vision systems using the inverse graphics approach has remained a challenge. Renderers typically expect as input programs that have sequential semantics, are composed of discrete symbols (e.g., keystrokes in a CAD program), and are long (tens or hundreds of symbols). Additionally, matching rendered images to real data poses an optimization problem as black-box graphics simulators are not differentiable in general. <br />
<br />
To address these problems, a new approach is presented for interpreting and generating images using Deep Reinforced Adversarial Learning in order to solve the need for a large amount of supervision and scalability to larger real-world datasets. In this approach, an adversarially trained agent '''(SPIRAL)''' generates a program which is executed by a graphics engine to generate images, either conditioned on data or unconditionally. The agent is rewarded by fooling a discriminator network and is trained with distributed reinforcement learning without any extra supervision. The discriminator network itself is trained to distinguish between generated and real images.<br />
<br />
[[File:Fig1 SPIRAL.PNG | 400px|center]]<br />
<br />
== Related Work ==<br />
Related works in this filed is summarized as follows:<br />
* There has been a huge amount of studies on inverting simulators to interpret images (Nair et al., 2008; Paysan et al., 2009; Mansinghka et al., 2013; Loper & Black, 2014; Kulkarni et al., 2015a; Jampani et al., 2015)<br />
<br />
* Inferring motor programs for reconstruction of MNIST digits (Nair & Hinton, 2006)<br />
<br />
* Visual program induction in the context of hand-written characters on the OMNIGLOT dataset (Lake et al., 2015)<br />
<br />
* inferring and learning feed-forward or recurrent procedures for image generation (LeCun et al., 2015; Hinton & Salakhutdinov, 2006; Goodfellow et al., 2014; Ackley et al., 1987; Kingma & Welling, 2013; Oord et al., 2016; Kulkarni et al., 2015b; Eslami et al., 2016; Reed et al., 2017; Gregor et al., 2015).<br />
<br />
'''However, all of these methods have limitations such as:''' <br />
<br />
* Scaling to larger real-world datasets<br />
<br />
* Requiring hand-crafted parses and supervision in the form of sketches and corresponding images<br />
<br />
* Lack the ability to infer structured representations of images<br />
<br />
= The SPIRAL Agent =<br />
=== Overview ===<br />
The paper aims to construct a generative model <math>\mathbf{G}</math> to take samples from a distribution <math>p_{d}</math>. The generative model consists of a recurrent network <math>\pi</math> (called policy network or agent) and an external rendering simulator R that accepts a sequence of commands from the agent and maps them into the domain of interest, e.g. R could be a CAD program rendering descriptions of primitives into 3D scenes. <br />
In order to train policy network <math>\pi</math>, the paper has exploited generative adversarial network. In this framework, the generator tries to fool a discriminator network which is trained to distinguish between real and fake samples. Thus, the distribution generated by <math>\mathbf{G}</math> approaches <math>p_d</math>.<br />
<br />
== Objectives ==<br />
The authors give training objective for <math>\mathbf{G}</math> and <math>\mathbf{D}</math> as follows.<br />
<br />
'''Discriminator:''' Following (Gulrajani et al., 2017), the objective for <math>\mathbf{D}</math> is defined as: <br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\mathcal{L}_D = -\mathbb{E}_{x\sim p_d}[D(x)] + \mathbb{E}_{x\sim p_g}[D(x)] + R<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
where <math>\mathbf{R}</math> is a regularization term softly constraining <math>\mathbf{D}</math> to stay in the set of Lipschitz continuous functions (for some fixed Lipschitz constant).<br />
<br />
'''Generator:''' To define the objective for <math>\mathbf{G}</math>, a variant of the REINFORCE (Williams, 1992) algorithm, advantage actor-critic (A2C) is employed:<br />
<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\mathcal{L}_G = -\sum_{t}\log\pi(a_t|s_t;\theta)[R_t - V^{\pi}(s_t)]<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
<br />
where <math>V^{\pi}</math> is an approximation to the value function which is considered to be independent of theta, and <math>R_{t} = \sum_{t}^{N}r_{t}</math> is a <br />
1-sample Monte-Carlo estimate of the return. Rewards are set to:<br />
<br />
<math><br />
r_t = \begin{cases}<br />
0 & \text{for } t < N \\<br />
D(\mathcal{R}(a_1, a_2, \cdots, a_N)) & \text{for } t = N<br />
\end{cases}<br />
</math><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
One interesting aspect of this new formulation is that <br />
the search can be biased by introducing intermediate rewards<br />
which may depend not only on the output of R but also on<br />
commands used to generate that output.<br />
<br />
== Conditional generation: ==<br />
In some cases such as producing a given image <math>x_{target}</math>, conditioning the model on auxiliary inputs is useful. That can be done by feeding <math>x_{target}</math> to both policy and discriminator networks as:<br />
<math><br />
p_g = R(p_a(a|x_{target}))<br />
</math><br />
<br />
While <math>p_{d}</math> becomes a Dirac-<math>\delta</math> function centered at <math>x_{target}</math>. <br />
For the first two terms in the objective function for D, they reduce to <br />
<math><br />
-D(x_{target}|x_{target})+ \mathbb{E}_{x\sim p_g}[D(x|x_{target})] <br />
</math><br />
<br />
It can be proven that for this particular setting of <math>p_{g}</math> and <math>p_{d}</math>, the <math>l2</math>-distance is an optimal discriminator. It may be as a poor candidate for the reward signal of the generator, even if it is not the only solution of the objective function for D.<br />
<br />
===Traditional GAN generation: ===<br />
Traditional GANs use the following minimax objective function to quantify optimality for relationships between D and G:<br />
<br />
[[File:edit7.png| 400px|center]]<br />
<br />
Minimizing the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the two distribution often leads to vanishing gradients as the discriminator saturates. We circumvent this issue using the conditional generation function, which is much better behaved.<br />
<br />
== Distributed Learning: ==<br />
The training pipeline is outlined in Figure 2b. It is an extension of the recently proposed '''IMPALA''' architecture (Espeholt et al., 2018). For training, three kinds of workers are defined:<br />
<br />
<br />
* Actors are responsible for generating the training trajectories through interaction between the policy network and the rendering simulator. Each trajectory contains a sequence <math>((\pi_{t}; a_{t}) | 1 \leq t \leq N)</math> as well as all intermediate<br />
renderings produced by R.<br />
<br />
<br />
* A policy learner receives trajectories from the actors, combines them into a batch and updates <math>\pi</math> by performing '''SGD''' step on <math>\mathcal{L}_G</math> (2). Following common practice (Mnih et al., 2016), <math>\mathcal{L}_G</math> is augmented with an entropy penalty encouraging exploration.<br />
<br />
<br />
* In contrast to the base '''IMPALA''' setup, an additional discriminator learner is defined. This worker consumes random examples from <math>p_{d}</math>, as well as generated data (final renders) coming from the actor workers, and optimizes <math>\mathcal{L}_D</math> (1).<br />
<br />
[[File:Fig2 SPIRAL Architecture.png | 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
'''Note:''' no trajectories are omitted in the policy learner. Instead, the <math>D</math> updates is decoupled from the <math>\pi</math> updates by introducing a replay buffer that serves as a communication layer between the actors and the discriminator learner. That allows the latter to optimize <math>D</math> at a higher rate than the training of the policy network due to the difference in network sizes (<math>\pi</math> is a multi-step RNN, while <math>D</math> is a plain '''CNN'''). Even though sampling from a replay buffer inevitably results in smoothing of <math>p_{g}</math>, this setup is found to work well in practice.<br />
<br />
= Experiments=<br />
<br />
<br />
== Environments ==<br />
Two rendering environment is introduced. For MNIST, OMNIGLOT and CELEBA generation an open-source painting librabry LIMBYPAINT (libmypaint<br />
contributors, 2018).) is used. The agent controls a brush and produces<br />
a sequence of (possibly disjoint) strokes on a canvas<br />
C. The state of the environment is comprised of the contents<br />
of <math>C</math> as well as the current brush location <math>l_{t}</math>. Each action<br />
$a_{t}$ is a tuple of 8 discrete decisions <math>(a1t; a2t; ... ; a8t)</math> (see<br />
Figure 3). The first two components are the control point <math>p_{c}</math><br />
and the endpoint <math>l_{t+1}</math> of the stroke.<br />
<br />
[[File:Fig3_agent_action_space.PNG | 450px|center]]<br />
<br />
The next 5<br />
components represent the appearance of the stroke: the<br />
pressure that the agent applies to the brush (10 levels), the<br />
brush size, and the stroke color characterized by a mixture<br />
of red, green and blue (20 bins for each color component).<br />
The last element of at is a binary flag specifying the type<br />
of action: the agent can choose either to produce a stroke<br />
or to jump right to $l_{t+1}$.<br />
<br />
In the MUJOCO SCENES experiment, we render images<br />
using a MuJoCo-based environment (Todorov et al., 2012).<br />
At each time step, the agent has to decide on the object<br />
type (4 options), its location on a 16 $\times$ 16 grid, its size<br />
(3 options) and the color (3 color components with 4 bins<br />
each). The resulting tuple is sent to the environment, which<br />
adds an object to the scene according to the specification.<br />
<br />
== Datasets ==<br />
<br />
=== MNIST ===<br />
For the MNIST dataset, two sets of experiments are conducted:<br />
<br />
1- In this experiment, an unconditional agent is trained to model the data distribution. Along with the reward provided by the discriminator, a small negative reward is provided to the agent for each continuous sequence of strokes to encourage the agent to draw a digit in a continuous motion of stroke. Example of such generation is depicted in the Fig 4a. <br />
<br />
2- In the second experiment, an agent is trained to reproduce a given digit. <br />
Several examples of conditional generated digits are shown in Fig 4b. <br />
<br />
[[File:Fig4a MNIST.png | 450px|center]]<br />
<br />
=== OMNIGLOT ===<br />
Now the trained agents are tested in a similar but more challenging setting of handwritten characters. As can be seen in Fig 5a, the unconditional generation has a lower quality compared to digits in the previous dataset. The conditional agents, on the other hand, were able to reach a convincing quality (Fig 5b). Moreover, as OMNIGLOT has lots of different symbols, the model that we created was able to learn a general idea of image production without memorizing the training data. We tested this result by inputting new unseen line drawings to our trained agent. As we concluded, it provided excellent results as shown in Figure 6. <br />
<br />
[[File:Fig5 OMNIGLOT.png | 450px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
For the MNIST dataset, two kinds of rewards, discriminator score and <math>l^{2}-\text{distance}</math> has been compared. Note that the discriminator based approach has a significantly lower training time and lower final <math>l^{2}</math> error.<br />
Following (Sharma et al., 2017), also a “blind” version of the agent without feeding any intermediate canvas states as an input to <math>\pi</math> is trained. The training curve for this experiment is also reported in Fig 8a. <br />
(dotted blue line) The results of training agents with discriminator based and <math>l^{2}-\text{distance}</math> approach is shown in Fig 8a as well.<br />
<br />
=== CELEBA ===<br />
<br />
Since the ''libmypaint'' environment is also capable of producing<br />
complex color paintings, this direction is explored by<br />
training a conditional agent on the CELEBA dataset. In this<br />
experiment, the agent does not receive any intermediate rewards.<br />
In addition to the reconstruction reward (either <math>l^2</math> or<br />
discriminator-based), earth mover’s<br />
distance between the color histograms of the model’s output<br />
and <math>x_{target}</math> is penalized. (Figure 7)<br />
<br />
[[File:Fig6 CELEBA.png | 450px|center]]<br />
<br />
Although blurry, the model’s reconstruction closely matches<br />
the high-level structure of each image such as the<br />
background color, the position of the face, and the color of<br />
the person’s hair. In some cases, shadows around eyes and<br />
the nose are visible.<br />
<br />
=== MUJOCO SCENES ===<br />
<br />
For the MUJOCO SCENES dataset, the trained agent is used to construct simple CAD programs that best explain input images. Here only the case of the conditional generation is considered. Like before, the reward function for the generator can be either the <math>l^2</math> score or the discriminator output. In addition, there are not any auxiliary reward signals. This model has the capacity to infer and represent up to 20 objects and their attributes due to its unrolled 20 time steps.<br />
<br />
As shown in Figure 8b, the agent trained to directly minimize<br />
<math>l^2</math> is unable to solve the task and has significantly<br />
higher pixel-wise error. In comparison, the discriminator based<br />
variant solves the task and produces near-perfect reconstructions<br />
on a holdout set (Figure 10).<br />
<br />
[[File:Fig8 MUJOCO_SCENES.png | 500px|center]]<br />
For this experiment, the total number of possible execution traces is <math>M^N</math>, where <math>M = 4·16^2·3·4^3·3 </math> is the total number of attribute settings for a single object and N = 20 is the length of an episode. Then a general-purpose Metropolis-Hastings inference algorithm that samples an execution trace defining attributes for a maximum of 20 primitives was run on a set of 100 images. These attributes are considered as latent variables. During each time step of the inference, the attribute blocks (including presence/absence tags) corresponding to a single object are evenly flipped over the appropriate range. The resulting trace is presented as an output sample by the environment and then the output sample is accepted or rejected using the Metropolis-Hastings update rule, where the Gaussian likelihood is centered on the test image and the fixed diagonal covariance is 0.25. From Figure 9, the MCMC search baseline cannot solve the task even after a lot of evaluation.<br />
[[File:figure9 mcmc.PNG| 500px|center]]<br />
<br />
= Discussion =<br />
As in the OMNIGLOT<br />
experiment, the <math>l^2</math>-based agent demonstrates some<br />
improvements over the random policy but gets stuck and as<br />
a result, fails to learn sensible reconstructions (Figure 8b).<br />
<br />
[[File:Fig7 Results.png | 500px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Scaling visual program synthesis to the real world and combinatorial<br />
datasets has been a challenge. It has been shown that it is possible to train an adversarial generative agent employing<br />
black-box rendering simulator. Our results indicate that<br />
using the Wasserstein discriminator’s output as a reward<br />
function with asynchronous reinforcement learning can provide<br />
a scaling path for visual program synthesis. The current<br />
exploration strategy used in the agent is entropy-based but<br />
future work should address this limitation by employing sophisticated<br />
search algorithms for policy improvement. For<br />
instance, Monte Carlo Tree Search can be used, analogous<br />
to AlphaGo Zero (Silver et al., 2017). General-purpose<br />
inference algorithms could also be used for this purpose.<br />
<br />
= Future Work =<br />
Future work should explore different parameterizations of<br />
action spaces. For instance, the use of two arbitrary control<br />
points are perhaps not the best way to represent strokes, as it<br />
is hard to deal with straight lines. Actions could also directly parametrize 3D surfaces, planes, and learned texture models<br />
to invert richer visual scenes. On the reward side, using<br />
a joint image-action discriminator similar to BiGAN/ALI<br />
(Donahue et al., 2016; Dumoulin et al., 2016) (in this case,<br />
the policy can be viewed as an encoder, while the renderer becomes<br />
a decoder) could result in a more meaningful learning<br />
signal, since D will be forced to focus on the semantics of<br />
the image.<br />
<br />
= Other Resources =<br />
#Code implementation [https://github.com/carpedm20/SPIRAL-tensorflow]<br />
<br />
= References =<br />
<br />
# Yaroslav Ganin, Tejas Kulkarni, Igor Babuschkin, S.M. Ali Eslami, Oriol Vinyals, [[https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.01118]].</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Synthesizing_Programs_for_Images_usingReinforced_Adversarial_Learning&diff=41470Synthesizing Programs for Images usingReinforced Adversarial Learning2018-11-26T22:44:37Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Synthesizing Programs for Images using Reinforced Adversarial Learning: ''' Summary of the ICML 2018 paper <br />
<br />
Paper: [[http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/ganin18a.html]]<br />
Video: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSyvwAwa7vk&feature=youtu.be]]<br />
<br />
== Presented by ==<br />
<br />
1. Nekoei, Hadi [Quest ID: 20727088]<br />
<br />
= Motivation =<br />
<br />
Conventional neural generative models have major problems. <br />
<br />
* It is not clear how to inject knowledge about the data into the model. <br />
<br />
* Latent space is not easily interpretative. <br />
<br />
The provided solution in this paper is to generate programs to incorporate tools, e.g. graphics editors, illustration software, CAD. and '''creating more meaningful API(sequence of complex actions vs raw pixels)'''.<br />
<br />
= Introduction =<br />
<br />
Humans, frequently, use the ability to recover structured representation from raw sensation to understand their environment. Decomposing a picture of a hand-written character into strokes or understanding the layout of a building can be exploited to learn how actually our brain works. <br />
<br />
In the visual domain, inversion of a renderer for the purposes of scene understanding is typically referred to as inverse graphics. However, training vision systems using the inverse graphics approach has remained a challenge. Renderers typically expect as input programs that have sequential semantics, are composed of discrete symbols (e.g., keystrokes in a CAD program), and are long (tens or hundreds of symbols). Additionally, matching rendered images to real data poses an optimization problem as black-box graphics simulators are not differentiable in general. <br />
<br />
To address these problems, a new approach is presented for interpreting and generating images using Deep Reinforced Adversarial Learning in order to solve the need for a large amount of supervision and scalability to larger real-world datasets. In this approach, an adversarially trained agent '''(SPIRAL)''' generates a program which is executed by a graphics engine to generate images, either conditioned on data or unconditionally. The agent is rewarded by fooling a discriminator network and is trained with distributed reinforcement learning without any extra supervision. The discriminator network itself is trained to distinguish between generated and real images.<br />
<br />
[[File:Fig1 SPIRAL.PNG | 400px|center]]<br />
<br />
== Related Work ==<br />
Related works in this filed is summarized as follows:<br />
* There has been a huge amount of studies on inverting simulators to interpret images (Nair et al., 2008; Paysan et al., 2009; Mansinghka et al., 2013; Loper & Black, 2014; Kulkarni et al., 2015a; Jampani et al., 2015)<br />
<br />
* Inferring motor programs for reconstruction of MNIST digits (Nair & Hinton, 2006)<br />
<br />
* Visual program induction in the context of hand-written characters on the OMNIGLOT dataset (Lake et al., 2015)<br />
<br />
* inferring and learning feed-forward or recurrent procedures for image generation (LeCun et al., 2015; Hinton & Salakhutdinov, 2006; Goodfellow et al., 2014; Ackley et al., 1987; Kingma & Welling, 2013; Oord et al., 2016; Kulkarni et al., 2015b; Eslami et al., 2016; Reed et al., 2017; Gregor et al., 2015).<br />
<br />
'''However, all of these methods have limitations such as:''' <br />
<br />
* Scaling to larger real-world datasets<br />
<br />
* Requiring hand-crafted parses and supervision in the form of sketches and corresponding images<br />
<br />
* Lack the ability to infer structured representations of images<br />
<br />
= The SPIRAL Agent =<br />
=== Overview ===<br />
The paper aims to construct a generative model <math>\mathbf{G}</math> to take samples from a distribution <math>p_{d}</math>. The generative model consists of a recurrent network <math>\pi</math> (called policy network or agent) and an external rendering simulator R that accepts a sequence of commands from the agent and maps them into the domain of interest, e.g. R could be a CAD program rendering descriptions of primitives into 3D scenes. <br />
In order to train policy network <math>\pi</math>, the paper has exploited generative adversarial network. In this framework, the generator tries to fool a discriminator network which is trained to distinguish between real and fake samples. Thus, the distribution generated by <math>\mathbf{G}</math> approaches <math>p_d</math>.<br />
<br />
== Objectives ==<br />
The authors give training objective for <math>\mathbf{G}</math> and <math>\mathbf{D}</math> as follows.<br />
<br />
'''Discriminator:''' Following (Gulrajani et al., 2017), the objective for <math>\mathbf{D}</math> is defined as: <br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\mathcal{L}_D = -\mathbb{E}_{x\sim p_d}[D(x)] + \mathbb{E}_{x\sim p_g}[D(x)] + R<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
where <math>\mathbf{R}</math> is a regularization term softly constraining <math>\mathbf{D}</math> to stay in the set of Lipschitz continuous functions (for some fixed Lipschitz constant).<br />
<br />
'''Generator:''' To define the objective for <math>\mathbf{G}</math>, a variant of the REINFORCE (Williams, 1992) algorithm, advantage actor-critic (A2C) is employed:<br />
<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\mathcal{L}_G = -\sum_{t}\log\pi(a_t|s_t;\theta)[R_t - V^{\pi}(s_t)]<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
<br />
where <math>V^{\pi}</math> is an approximation to the value function which is considered to be independent of theta, and <math>R_{t} = \sum_{t}^{N}r_{t}</math> is a <br />
1-sample Monte-Carlo estimate of the return. Rewards are set to:<br />
<br />
<math><br />
r_t = \begin{cases}<br />
0 & \text{for } t < N \\<br />
D(\mathcal{R}(a_1, a_2, \cdots, a_N)) & \text{for } t = N<br />
\end{cases}<br />
</math><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
One interesting aspect of this new formulation is that <br />
the search can be biased by introducing intermediate rewards<br />
which may depend not only on the output of R but also on<br />
commands used to generate that output.<br />
<br />
== Conditional generation: ==<br />
In some cases such as producing a given image <math>x_{target}</math>, conditioning the model on auxiliary inputs is useful. That can be done by feeding <math>x_{target}</math> to both policy and discriminator networks as:<br />
<math><br />
p_g = R(p_a(a|x_{target}))<br />
</math><br />
<br />
While <math>p_{d}</math> becomes a Dirac-<math>\delta</math> function centered at <math>x_{target}</math>. <br />
For the first two terms in the objective function for D, they reduce to <br />
<math><br />
-D(x_{target}|x_{target})+ \mathbb{E}_{x\sim p_g}[D(x|x_{target})] <br />
</math><br />
<br />
It can be proven that for this particular setting of <math>p_{g}</math> and <math>p_{d}</math>, the <math>l2</math>-distance is an optimal discriminator. It may be as a poor candidate for the reward signal of the generator, even if it is not the only solution of the objective function for D.<br />
<br />
===Traditional GAN generation: ===<br />
Traditional GANs use the following minimax objective function to quantify optimality for relationships between D and G:<br />
<br />
[[File:edit7.png| 400px|center]]<br />
<br />
Minimizing the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the two distribution often leads to vanishing gradients as the discriminator saturates. We circumvent this issue using the conditional generation function, which is much better behaved.<br />
<br />
== Distributed Learning: ==<br />
The training pipeline is outlined in Figure 2b. It is an extension of the recently proposed '''IMPALA''' architecture (Espeholt et al., 2018). For training, three kinds of workers are defined:<br />
<br />
<br />
* Actors are responsible for generating the training trajectories through interaction between the policy network and the rendering simulator. Each trajectory contains a sequence <math>((\pi_{t}; a_{t}) | 1 \leq t \leq N)</math> as well as all intermediate<br />
renderings produced by R.<br />
<br />
<br />
* A policy learner receives trajectories from the actors, combines them into a batch and updates <math>\pi</math> by performing '''SGD''' step on <math>\mathcal{L}_G</math> (2). Following common practice (Mnih et al., 2016), <math>\mathcal{L}_G</math> is augmented with an entropy penalty encouraging exploration.<br />
<br />
<br />
* In contrast to the base '''IMPALA''' setup, an additional discriminator learner is defined. This worker consumes random examples from <math>p_{d}</math>, as well as generated data (final renders) coming from the actor workers, and optimizes <math>\mathcal{L}_D</math> (1).<br />
<br />
[[File:Fig2 SPIRAL Architecture.png | 700px|center]]<br />
<br />
'''Note:''' no trajectories are omitted in the policy learner. Instead, the <math>D</math> updates is decoupled from the <math>\pi</math> updates by introducing a replay buffer that serves as a communication layer between the actors and the discriminator learner. That allows the latter to optimize <math>D</math> at a higher rate than the training of the policy network due to the difference in network sizes (<math>\pi</math> is a multi-step RNN, while <math>D</math> is a plain '''CNN'''). Even though sampling from a replay buffer inevitably results in smoothing of <math>p_{g}</math>, this setup is found to work well in practice.<br />
<br />
= Experiments=<br />
<br />
<br />
== Environments ==<br />
Two rendering environment is introduced. For MNIST, OMNIGLOT and CELEBA generation an open-source painting librabry LIMBYPAINT (libmypaint<br />
contributors, 2018).) is used. The agent controls a brush and produces<br />
a sequence of (possibly disjoint) strokes on a canvas<br />
C. The state of the environment is comprised of the contents<br />
of <math>C</math> as well as the current brush location <math>l_{t}</math>. Each action<br />
$a_{t}$ is a tuple of 8 discrete decisions <math>(a1t; a2t; ... ; a8t)</math> (see<br />
Figure 3). The first two components are the control point <math>p_{c}</math><br />
and the endpoint <math>l_{t+1}</math> of the stroke.<br />
<br />
[[File:Fig3_agent_action_space.PNG | 450px|center]]<br />
<br />
The next 5<br />
components represent the appearance of the stroke: the<br />
pressure that the agent applies to the brush (10 levels), the<br />
brush size, and the stroke color characterized by a mixture<br />
of red, green and blue (20 bins for each color component).<br />
The last element of at is a binary flag specifying the type<br />
of action: the agent can choose either to produce a stroke<br />
or to jump right to $l_{t+1}$.<br />
<br />
In the MUJOCO SCENES experiment, we render images<br />
using a MuJoCo-based environment (Todorov et al., 2012).<br />
At each time step, the agent has to decide on the object<br />
type (4 options), its location on a 16 $\times$ 16 grid, its size<br />
(3 options) and the color (3 color components with 4 bins<br />
each). The resulting tuple is sent to the environment, which<br />
adds an object to the scene according to the specification.<br />
<br />
== Datasets ==<br />
<br />
=== MNIST ===<br />
For the MNIST dataset, two sets of experiments are conducted:<br />
<br />
1- In this experiment, an unconditional agent is trained to model the data distribution. Along with the reward provided by the discriminator, a small negative reward is provided to the agent for each continuous sequence of strokes to encourage the agent to draw a digit in a continuous motion of stroke. Example of such generation is depicted in the Fig 4a. <br />
<br />
2- In the second experiment, an agent is trained to reproduce a given digit. <br />
Several examples of conditional generated digits are shown in Fig 4b. <br />
<br />
[[File:Fig4a MNIST.png | 450px|center]]<br />
<br />
=== OMNIGLOT ===<br />
Now the trained agents are tested in a similar but more challenging setting of handwritten characters. As can be seen in Fig 5a, the unconditional generation has a lower quality compared to digits in the previous dataset. The conditional agents, on the other hand, were able to reach a convincing quality (Fig 5b). Moreover, as OMNIGLOT has lots of different symbols, the model that we created was able to learn a general idea of image production without memorizing the training data. We tested this result by inputting new unseen line drawings to our trained agent. As we concluded, it provided excellent results as shown in Figure 6. <br />
<br />
[[File:Fig5 OMNIGLOT.png | 450px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
For the MNIST dataset, two kinds of rewards, discriminator score and <math>l^{2}-\text{distance}</math> has been compared. Note that the discriminator based approach has a significantly lower training time and lower final <math>l^{2}</math> error.<br />
Following (Sharma et al., 2017), also a “blind” version of the agent without feeding any intermediate canvas states as an input to <math>\pi</math> is trained. The training curve for this experiment is also reported in Fig 8a. <br />
(dotted blue line) The results of training agents with discriminator based and <math>l^{2}-\text{distance}</math> approach is shown in Fig 8a as well.<br />
<br />
=== CELEBA ===<br />
<br />
Since the ''libmypaint'' environment is also capable of producing<br />
complex color paintings, this direction is explored by<br />
training a conditional agent on the CELEBA dataset. In this<br />
experiment, the agent does not receive any intermediate rewards.<br />
In addition to the reconstruction reward (either <math>l^2</math> or<br />
discriminator-based), earth mover’s<br />
distance between the color histograms of the model’s output<br />
and <math>x_{target}</math> is penalized. (Figure 7)<br />
<br />
[[File:Fig6 CELEBA.png | 450px|center]]<br />
<br />
Although blurry, the model’s reconstruction closely matches<br />
the high-level structure of each image such as the<br />
background color, the position of the face, and the color of<br />
the person’s hair. In some cases, shadows around eyes and<br />
the nose are visible.<br />
<br />
=== MUJOCO SCENES ===<br />
<br />
For the MUJOCO SCENES dataset, the trained agent is used to construct simple CAD programs that best explain input images. Here only the case of the conditional generation is considered. Like before, the reward function for the generator can be either the <math>l^2</math> score or the discriminator output. In addition, there are not any auxiliary reward signals. This model has the capacity to infer and represent up to 20 objects and their attributes due to its unrolled 20 time steps.<br />
<br />
As shown in Figure 8b, the agent trained to directly minimize<br />
<math>l^2</math> is unable to solve the task and has significantly<br />
higher pixel-wise error. In comparison, the discriminator based<br />
variant solves the task and produces near-perfect reconstructions<br />
on a holdout set (Figure 10).<br />
<br />
[[File:Fig8 MUJOCO_SCENES.png | 500px|center]]<br />
For this experiment, the total number of possible execution traces is <math>M^N</math>, where <math>M = 4·16^2·3·4^3·3 </math> is the total number of attribute settings for a single object and N = 20 is the length of an episode. Then a general-purpose Metropolis-Hastings inference algorithm that samples an execution trace defining attributes for a maximum of 20 primitives was run on a set of 100 images. These attributes are considered as latent variables. During each time step of the inference, the attribute blocks (including presence/absence tags) corresponding to a single object are evenly flipped over the appropriate range. The resulting trace is presented as an output sample by the environment and then the output sample is accepted or rejected using the Metropolis-Hastings update rule, where the Gaussian likelihood is centered on the test image and the fixed diagonal covariance is 0.25. From Figure 9, the MCMC search baseline cannot solve the task even after a lot of evaluation.<br />
[[File:figure9 mcmc.PNG| 500px|center]]<br />
<br />
= Discussion =<br />
As in the OMNIGLOT<br />
experiment, the <math>l^2</math>-based agent demonstrates some<br />
improvements over the random policy but gets stuck and as<br />
a result, fails to learn sensible reconstructions (Figure 8b).<br />
<br />
[[File:Fig7 Results.png | 500px|center]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Scaling visual program synthesis to the real world and combinatorial<br />
datasets has been a challenge. It has been shown that it is possible to train an adversarial generative agent employing<br />
black-box rendering simulator. Our results indicate that<br />
using the Wasserstein discriminator’s output as a reward<br />
function with asynchronous reinforcement learning can provide<br />
a scaling path for visual program synthesis. The current<br />
exploration strategy used in the agent is entropy-based but<br />
future work should address this limitation by employing sophisticated<br />
search algorithms for policy improvement. For<br />
instance, Monte Carlo Tree Search can be used, analogous<br />
to AlphaGo Zero (Silver et al., 2017). General-purpose<br />
inference algorithms could also be used for this purpose.<br />
<br />
= Future Work =<br />
Future work should explore different parameterizations of<br />
action spaces. For instance, the use of two arbitrary control<br />
points are perhaps not the best way to represent strokes, as it<br />
is hard to deal with straight lines. Actions could also directly parametrize 3D surfaces, planes, and learned texture models<br />
to invert richer visual scenes. On the reward side, using<br />
a joint image-action discriminator similar to BiGAN/ALI<br />
(Donahue et al., 2016; Dumoulin et al., 2016) (in this case,<br />
the policy can be viewed as an encoder, while the renderer becomes<br />
a decoder) could result in a more meaningful learning<br />
signal, since D will be forced to focus on the semantics of<br />
the image.<br />
<br />
== Other Resources ==<br />
#Code implementation [https://github.com/carpedm20/SPIRAL-tensorflow]<br />
= References =<br />
<br />
# Yaroslav Ganin, Tejas Kulkarni, Igor Babuschkin, S.M. Ali Eslami, Oriol Vinyals, [[https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.01118]].</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Fairness_Without_Demographics_in_Repeated_Loss_Minimization&diff=41469Fairness Without Demographics in Repeated Loss Minimization2018-11-26T22:30:58Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Other Sources */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains the summary of the paper "[http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/hashimoto18a.html Fairness Without Demographics in Repeated Loss Minimization]" by Hashimoto, T. B., Srivastava, M., Namkoong, H., & Liang, P. which was published at the International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML) in 2018. <br />
<br />
=Introduction=<br />
<br />
Usually, machine learning models are minimized in their average loss to achieve high overall accuracy. While this works well for the majority, minority groups that use the system suffer high error rates because they contribute fewer data to the model. For example, non-native speakers may contribute less to the speech recognizer machine learning model. This phenomenon is known as '''''representation disparity''''' and has been observed in many models that, for instance, recognize faces, or identify the language. This disparity further widens for minority users who suffer higher error rates, as they will lower usage of the system in the future. As a result, minority groups provide even less data for future optimization of the model. With less data points to work with, the disparity becomes even worse - a phenomenon referred to as '''''disparity amplification'''''. <br />
<br />
[[File:fairness_example.JPG|700px|center]]<br />
<br />
In this paper, Hashimoto et al. provide a strategy for controlling the worst case risk amongst all groups. They first show that standard '''''empirical risk minimization (ERM)''''' does not control the loss of minority groups, and thus causes representation disparity . This representation disparity is further amplified over time (even if the model is fair in the beginning). Second, the researchers try to mitigate this unfairness by proposing the use of '''''distributionally robust optimization (DRO)'''''. Indeed, Hashimoto et al. are able to show that DRO can bound the loss for minority groups at every step of time, and is fair for models that ERM turns unfair by applying it to Amazon Mechanical Turk task.<br />
<br />
===Note on Fairness===<br />
<br />
Hashimoto et al. follow the ''difference principle'' to achieve and measure fairness. It is defined as the maximization of the welfare of the worst-off group, rather than the whole group (cf. utilitarianism).<br />
<br />
===Related Works===<br />
The recent advancements on the topic of fairness in Machine learning can be classified into the following approaches:<br />
<br />
1. Rawls Difference principle (Rawls, 2001, p155) - Defines that maximizing the welfare of the worst-off group is fair and stable over time, which increases the chance that minorities will consent to status-quo. The current work builds on this as it sees predictive accuracy as a resource to be allocated.<br />
<br />
2. Labels of minorities present in the data:<br />
* Chouldechova, 2017: Use of race (a protected label) in recidivism protection. This study evaluated the likelihood for a criminal defendant to reoffend at a later time, which assisted with criminal justice decision-making. However, a risk assessment instrument called COMPAS was studied and discovered to be biased against black defendants. As the consequences for misclassification can be dire, fairness regarding using race as a label was studied.<br />
* Barocas & Selbst, 2016: Guaranteeing fairness for a protected label through constraints such as equalized odds, disparate impact, and calibration.<br />
In the case specific to this paper, this information is not present.<br />
<br />
3. Fairness when minority grouping are not present explicitly<br />
* Dwork et al., 2012 used Individual notions of fairness using fixed similarity function whereas Kearns et al., 2018; Hebert-Johnson et al., 2017 used subgroups of a set of protected labels.<br />
* Kearns et al. (2018); Hebert-Johnson et al. (2017) consider subgroups of a set of protected features.<br />
Again for the specific case in this paper, this is not possible.<br />
<br />
4. Online settings<br />
* Joseph et al., 2016; Jabbari et al., 2017 looked at fairness in bandit learning using algorithms compatible with Rawls’ principle on equality of opportunity.<br />
* Liu et al. (2018) analyzed fairness temporally in the context of constraint-based fairness criteria. It showed that fairness is not ensured over time when static fairness constraints are enforced.<br />
<br />
=Representation Disparity=<br />
<br />
If a user makes a query <math display="inline">Z \sim P</math>, the model <math display="inline">\theta \in \Theta</math> makes a prediction, and the user experiences loss <math display="inline">\ell (\theta; Z)</math>. <br />
<br />
The expected loss of a model <math display="inline">\theta</math> is denoted as the risk <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}(\theta) = \mathbb{E}_{Z \sim P} [\ell (\theta; Z)] </math>. <br />
<br />
If input queries are made by users from <math display="inline">K</math> groups, then the distribution over all queries can be re-written as <math display="inline">Z \sim P := \sum_{k \in [K]} \alpha_kP_k</math>, where <math display="inline">\alpha_k</math> is the population portion of group <math display="inline">k</math> and <math display="inline">P_k</math> is its individual distribution, and we assume these two variables are unknown.<br />
<br />
The risk associated with group <math>k</math> can be written as, <math>\mathcal{R}_k(\theta) := \mathbb{E}_{P_k} [\ell (\theta; Z)]</math>.<br />
<br />
The worst-case risk over all groups can then be defined as,<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\mathcal{R}_{max}(\theta) := \underset{k \in [K]}{max} \mathcal{R}_k(\theta).<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
Minimizing this function is equivalent to minimizing the risk for the worst-off group. <br />
<br />
There is high representation disparity if the expected loss of the model <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}(\theta)</math> is low, but the worst-case risk <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{max}(\theta)</math> is high. A model with high representation disparity performs well on average (i.e. has low overall loss), but fails to represent some groups <math display="inline">k</math> (i.e. the risk for the worst-off group is high).<br />
<br />
Often, groups are latent and <math display="inline">k, P_k</math> are unknown and the worst-case risks are inaccessible. The technique proposed by Hashimoto et al does not require direct access to these.<br />
<br />
=Disparity Amplification=<br />
<br />
Representation disparity can amplify as time passes and loss is minimized. Over <math display="inline">t = 1, 2, ..., T</math> minimization rounds, the group proportions <math display="inline">\alpha_k^{(t)}</math> are not constant, but vary depending on past losses. <br />
<br />
At each round the expected number of users <math display="inline">\lambda_k^{(t+1)}</math> from group <math display="inline">k</math> is determined by <br />
\begin{align}<br />
\lambda_k^{(t+1)} := \lambda_k^{(t)} \nu(\mathcal{R}_k(\theta^{(t)})) + b_k<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
where <math display="inline">\lambda_k^{(t)} \nu(\mathcal{R}_k(\theta^{(t)}))</math> describes the fraction of retained users from the previous optimization, <math>\nu(x)</math> is a function that decreases as <math>x</math> increases, and <math display="inline">b_k</math> is the number of new users of group <math display="inline">k</math>. <br />
<br />
Furthermore, the group proportions <math display="inline">\alpha_k^{(t)}</math>, dependent on past losses is defined as:<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\alpha_k^{(t+1)} := \dfrac{\lambda_k^{(t+1)}}{\sum_{k'\in[K]} \lambda_{k'}^{(t+1)}}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
To put simply, the number of expected users of a group depends on the number of new users of that group and the fraction of users that continue to use the system from the previous optimization step. If fewer users from minority groups return to the model (i.e. the model has a low retention rate of minority group users), Hashimoto et al. argue that the representation disparity amplifies. <br />
<br />
==Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM)==<br />
<br />
Without the knowledge of population proportions <math display="inline">\alpha_k^{(t)}</math>, the new user rate <math display="inline">b_k</math>, and the retention function <math display="inline">\nu</math> it is hard to control the worst-case risk over all time periods <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{max}^T</math>. That is why it is the standard approach to fit a sequence of models <math display="inline">\theta^{(t)}</math> by empirically approximating them. Using ERM, for instance, the optimal model is approached by minimizing the loss of the model:<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\theta^{(t)} = arg min_{\theta \in \Theta} \sum_i \ell(\theta; Z_i^{(t)})<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
However, ERM fails to prevent disparity amplification. By minimizing the expected loss of the model, minority groups experience higher loss (because the loss of the majority group is minimized), and do not return to use the system. In doing so, the population proportions <math display="inline">\alpha_k^{(t)}</math> shift, and certain minority groups contribute even less to the system. This is mirrored in the expected user count <math display="inline">\lambda^{(t)}</math> at each optimization point. In their paper Hashimoto et al. show that, if using ERM, <math display="inline">\lambda^{(t)}</math> is unstable because it loses its fair fixed point (i.e. the population fraction where risk minimization maintains the same population fraction over time). Therefore, ERM fails to control minority risk over time and is considered unfair.<br />
<br />
=Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO)=<br />
<br />
To overcome the unfairness of ERM, Hashimoto et al. developed a distributionally robust optimization (DRO). At this point the goal is still to minimize the worst-case group risk over a single time-step <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{max} (\theta^{(t)}) </math> (time steps are omitted in this section's formulas). As previously mentioned, this is difficult to do because neither the population proportions <math display="inline">\alpha_k </math> nor group distributions <math display="inline">P_k </math> are known, which means the data was sampled from different unknown groups. Therefore, in order to improve the performance across different groups, Hashimoto et al. developed an optimization technique that is robust "against '''''all''''' directions around the data generating distribution". This refers to the notion that DRO is robust to any group distribution <math display="inline">P_k </math> whose loss other optimization techniques such as ERM might try to optimize. To create this distributionally robustness, the optimizations risk function <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{dro} </math> has to "up-weigh" data <math display="inline">Z</math> that cause high loss <math display="inline">\ell(\theta, Z)</math>. In other words, the risk function has to over-represent mixture components (i.e. group distributions <math display="inline">P_k </math>) in relation to their original mixture weights (i.e. the population proportions <math display="inline">\alpha_k </math>) for groups that suffer high loss. <br />
<br />
To do this Hashimoto et al. considered the worst-case loss (i.e. the highest risk) over all perturbations <math display="inline">P_k </math> around <math display="inline">P</math> within a certain limit (because obviously not every outlier should be up-weighed). This limit is described by the <math display="inline">\chi^2</math>-divergence (i.e. the distance, roughly speaking) between probability distributions. For two distributions <math display="inline">P</math> and <math display="inline">Q</math> the divergence is defined as <math display="inline">D_{\chi^2} (P || Q):= \int (\frac{dP}{dQ} - 1)^2</math>. If <math display="inline">P</math> is not absolutely continuous w.r.t <math display="inline">Q</math>, then <math display="inline">D_{\chi^2} (P || Q):= \infty</math>. With the help of the <math display="inline">\chi^2</math>-divergence, Hashimoto et al. defined the chi-squared ball <math display="inline">\mathcal{B}(P,r)</math> around the probability distribution P. This ball is defined so that <math display="inline">\mathcal{B}(P,r) := \{Q \ll P : D_{\chi^2} (Q || P) \leq r \}</math>. With the help of this ball the worst-case loss (i.e. the highest risk) over all perturbations <math display="inline">P_k </math> that lie inside the ball (i.e. within reasonable range) around the probability distribution <math display="inline">P</math> can be considered. This loss is given by<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\mathcal{R}_{dro}(\theta, r) := \underset{Q \in \mathcal{B}(P,r)}{sup} \mathbb{E}_Q [\ell(\theta;Z)]<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
which for <math display="inline">P:= \sum_{k \in [K]} \alpha_k P_k</math> for all models <math display="inline">\theta \in \Theta</math> where <math display="inline">r_k := (1/a_k -1)^2</math> bounds the risk <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_k(\theta) \leq \mathcal{R}_{dro} (\theta; r_k)</math> for each group with risk <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_k(\theta)</math>. Furthermore, if the lower bound on the group proportions <math display="inline">\alpha_{min} \leq min_{k \in [K]} \alpha_k</math> is specified, and the radius is defined as <math display="inline">r_{max} := (1/\alpha_{min} -1)^2</math>, the worst-case risk <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{max} (\theta) </math> can be controlled by <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{dro} (\theta; r_{max}) </math> by forming an upper bound that can be minimized.<br />
<br />
==Optimization of DRO==<br />
<br />
To minimize <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{dro}(\theta, r) := \underset{Q \in \mathcal{B}(P,r)}{sup} \mathbb{E}_Q [\ell(\theta;Z)]</math> Hashimoto et al. look at the dual of this maximization problem (i.e. every maximization problem can be transformed into a minimization problem and vice-versa). This dual is given by the minimization problem<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\mathcal{R}_{dro}(\theta, r) = \underset{\eta \in \mathbb{R}}{inf} \left\{ F(\theta; \eta):= C\left(\mathbb{E}_P \left[ [\ell(\theta;Z) - \eta]_+^2 \right] \right)^\frac{1}{2} + \eta \right\}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
with <math display="inline">C = (2(1/a_{min} - 1)^2 + 1)^{1/2}</math>. <math display="inline">\eta</math> describes the dual variable (i.e. the variable that appears in creating the dual). Since <math display="inline">F(\theta; \eta)</math> involves an expectation <math display="inline">\mathbb{E}_P</math> over the data generating distribution <math display="inline">P</math>, <math display="inline">F(\theta; \eta)</math> can be directly minimized. For convex losses <math display="inline">\ell(\theta;Z)</math>, <math display="inline">F(\theta; \eta)</math> is convex, and can be minimized by performing a binary search over <math display="inline">\eta</math>. In their paper, Hashimoto et al. further show that optimizing <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{dro}(\theta, r_{max})</math> at each time step controls the ''future'' worst-case risk <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{max} (\theta) </math>, and therefore retention rates. That means if the initial group proportions satisfy <math display="inline">\alpha_k^{(0)} \geq a_{min}</math>, and <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{dro}(\theta, r_{max})</math> is optimized for every time step (and therefore <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{max} (\theta) </math> is minimized), <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{max}^T (\theta) </math> over all time steps is controlled. In other words, optimizing <math display="inline">\mathcal{R}_{dro}(\theta, r_{max})</math> every time step is enough to avoid disparity amplification.<br />
<br />
<br />
Pros of DRO: In many cases, the expected value is a good measure of performance<br />
Cons of DRO: One has to know the exact distribution of the underlying distribution to perform the stochastic optimization. Deviant from the assumed distribution may result in sub-optimal solutions. The paper makes strong assumptions on <math>\mathcal{P}</math> with respect to group allocations, and thus requires a high amount of data to optimize; when assumptions are violated, the algorithm fails to perform as intended.<br />
<br />
=Critiques=<br />
<br />
This paper works on representational disparity which is a critical problem to contribute to. The methods are well developed and the paper reads coherently. However, the authors have several limiting assumptions that are not very intuitive or scientifically suggestive. The first assumption is that the <math display="inline">\eta</math> function denoting the fraction of users retained is differentiable and strictly decreasing function. This assumption does not seem practical. The second assumption is that the learned parameters are having a Poisson distribution. There is no explanation of such an assumption and reasons hinted at are hand-wavy at best. Though the authors are building a case against the Empirical risk minimization method, this method is exactly solvable when the data is linearly separable. The DRO method is computationally more complex than ERM and is not entirely clear if it will always have an advantage for a different class of problems.<br />
<br />
=Other Sources=<br />
# [https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/08/17/fairness-without-demographics-in-repeated-loss-minimization/] is a easy-to-read paper description.<br />
# [https://vimeo.com/295743125] a video of the authors explaining the paper in ICML 2018<br />
<br />
=References=<br />
Rawls, J. Justice as fairness: a restatement. Harvard University Press, 2001.<br />
<br />
Barocas, S. and Selbst, A. D. Big data’s disparate impact. 104 California Law Review, 3:671–732, 2016.<br />
<br />
Chouldechova, A. A study of bias in recidivism prediction instruments. Big Data, pp. 153–163, 2017<br />
<br />
Dwork, C., Hardt, M., Pitassi, T., Reingold, O., and Zemel, R. Fairness through awareness. In Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS), pp. 214–226, 2012.<br />
<br />
Kearns, M., Neel, S., Roth, A., and Wu, Z. S. Preventing fairness gerrymandering: Auditing and learning for subgroup fairness. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.05144, 2018.<br />
<br />
Hebert-Johnson, ´ U., Kim, M. P., Reingold, O., and Roth-blum, G. N. Calibration for the (computationally identifiable) masses. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.08513, 2017.<br />
<br />
Joseph, M., Kearns, M., Morgenstern, J., Neel, S., and Roth, A. Rawlsian fairness for machine learning. In FATML, 2016.<br />
<br />
Jabbari, S., Joseph, M., Kearns, M., Morgenstern, J., and Roth, A. Fairness in reinforcement learning. In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), pp. 1617–1626, 2017.<br />
<br />
Liu, L. T., Dean, S., Rolf, E., Simchowitz, M., and Hardt, M. Delayed impact of fair machine learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.04383, 2018.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=DCN_plus:_Mixed_Objective_And_Deep_Residual_Coattention_for_Question_Answering&diff=41468DCN plus: Mixed Objective And Deep Residual Coattention for Question Answering2018-11-26T22:18:09Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Results */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Introduction ==<br />
Question Answering(QA) is one of the challenging computer science tasks that need an understanding of the natural language and the ability to reason efficiently. To accurately answer the question, the model must first have a detailed understanding of the context the question is being asked from. Because the questions are usually very detailed, having a shallow knowledge from the context would lead to poor and unacceptable performance. Moreover, the model should gather all the information provided in the question and match them with its knowledge from the context. Generating the answer is another interesting task. Based on the dataset the model is meant for, the output of the model might be in a completely different form.<br />
In the past years, QA datasets have improved significantly. Previous datasets were really simple and they usually did not simulate a real-world question-answer pair. For example, Children's book test was one of the popular datasets that have been used for QA for a long time. But the real task for this dataset was to just fill empty spaces in given sentences with the appropriate words. During the past years, the importance of the QA tasks and their practical uses encouraged many to gather and crowdsource useful and more realistic datasets. The Stanford Question Answering Dataset(SQuAD), Microsoft Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset(MS MARCO), and Visual Question Answering Dataset(VQA) are only a few examples of the currently advanced datasets.<br />
As a result of these advancements, many researchers are focusing to improve the performance of the question answering models on these datasets. Deep neural networks were able to outperform the human accuracy on a few of these datasets, but in many cases, there is still a gap between the state-of-the-art and human performance. Previously, Dynamic Coattention Networks(DCN) proved to be efficient on the SQuAD, achieving state-of-the-art performance at the time. In this work, a further modification to DCN has been done which improves the accuracy of the model by proposing a mixed objective that combines cross entropy loss with self-critical policy learning. Moreover, the rewards used are based on the word overlap to find a solution for the evaluation metric and objective misalignment.<br />
<br />
==Overview of previous work==<br />
Most of the current QA models are made from different modules and usually stacked on top of each other. Improving one of the modules would lead to an overall performance of the model. Thus, to evaluate the efficiency of an improvement, researchers usually take a previously submitted model and replace their own improved module with the current one in the model. This is mostly because QA is an interesting discipline and has practical uses.<br />
<br />
The state of the art approaches to this problem can be divided into 3. <br />
<br />
1. Neural Models for question answering: Models like coattention, bidirectional attention flow and self-matching attention build codependent representations of the question and the document. After building these representations, the models predict the answer by generating the start position and the end position corresponding to the estimated answer span. The generation process utilizes a pointer network. Another approach uses a dynamic decoder that iteratively proposes answers by alternating between start position and end position estimates, which in some cases allows it to recover from initial mistakes in predictions. <br />
<br />
2. Neural Attention Models: Models like self-attention have been applied to language modelling and sentimental analysis. A deep version of the same called deep self-attention networks attained state-of-the-art results in machine translation. Coattention, bidirectional attention and self-matching attention are some of the methods that build codependent representation between the question and the document. <br />
<br />
3. Reinforcement learning in NLP: Hierarchical RL techniques have been proposed for generating text in a simulated way finding domain. DQN have been used to learn policies in text-based games using game rewards as feedback. Neural conversational model have been proposed, that is trained using policy gradient methods, whose reward function consisted of heuristics for ease of answering, information flow, and semantic coherence. General actor-critic temporal-difference methods for sequence prediction have also been experimented, performing metric optimization on language modelling and machine translation. Direct word overlap metric optimization have also been applied to summarization and machine translation. <br />
<br />
<br />
==Important Terms==<br />
<br />
#Embedding layer: This layer maps each word (or images in the case of visual QA) to a vector space. There are many options to choose for the embedding layer. While pre-trained GloVes or Word2Vecs showed promising results on many tasks, most models use a combination of GloVe and character level embeddings. The character level embeddings are especially useful when dealing with out-of-vocab words. In the case of dealing with images, the embeddings are usually generated using pre-trained ResNets. Using different embedding layers for images has shown to change the overall performance of the model drastically.<br />
#Contextual_layer: The purpose of this layer is to add more features to each word embedding based on the surrounding words and the context. This layer is not presented in many models including the DCN.<br />
#Attention layer: There has been a lot of investigation on the attention mechanisms in recent years. These works, mostly inspired by Bahdanau et al. (2014), try to either modify the basic matrix-based attention mechanism or to develop innovative ones. The sole purpose of the attention mechanism is to make the model able to understand a context, based on the information gathered from somewhere else. For example, in image-based QA, attention layer helps the model to understand the question based on the information provided in the image such as object classes. This way, the model can realize what parts of the question are more important. This model uses '''co-attention layers''' (Xiong, 2017). Given two inputs sources (text and question), internal representations are built conditioned on one of the sources. In a way, this can be thought of as retaining (attending to) parts of the input that are relevant to the other source. From the text, only parts that are 'useful' to the question are kept, while from the question, parts that are useful for the text are retained. The intuition stems from the fact that it is easier to answer a question from a text, knowing the question beforehand compared with when the question is only available at the end. In the former, only information relevant to the question is kept, while in the latter case, all information from the text needs to be kept.<br />
#Output layer: This is the final layer of all models, generating the answer of the question based on the information provided from all the previous layers.<br />
<br />
==DCN+ structure==<br />
The DCN+ is an improvement on the previous DCN model. The overall structure of the model is the same as before. The first improvement is on the coattention module. By introducing a deep residual coattention encoder, the output of the attention layer becomes more feature-rich. The second improvement is achieved by mixing the previous cross-entropy loss with reinforcement learning rewards from self-critical policy learning. DCN+ has a decoder module that is only applicable to the SQuAD dataset since the decoder only predicts an answer span from the given context.<br />
<br />
===Deep residual coattention encoder===<br />
The previous coattention module was unable to grasp complex information based on the context and the question. Recent studies showed that stacked attention mechanisms are outperforming the single layer attention modules. In DCN+, the coattention module is stacked to make it able to self-attend to the context and grasp more information. The second modification is to use residual connectors when merging the coattention output from each layer.<br />
<br />
[[File:Coattention.png|700px|centre]]<br />
<br />
let <math>L^D \in R^{m×d}</math> and <math>L^Q \in R^{n×d}</math> denote the word embedding for the context and the question respectively. Here, <math>d, m, n</math> are the embedding vector size, document word count, and question word count respectively. The model uses a bidirectional LSTM as the contextual layer with shared wights. Also, an additional sentinel token is added at the end of the document and question to make it possible for the model to distinguish between the document and question. <math>E^D</math> and <math>E^Q</math> are outputs of the encoder(contextual) layer.<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
E_1^D = BiLSTM_1(L^D) \in R^{(h×(m+1))}<br />
\end{align}<br />
\begin{align}<br />
E_1^Q = tanh(W BiLSTM_1(L^Q) \in R^{(h×(n+1))}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
Here <math>h</math> is the hidden size of the LSTM. The affinity matrix is created based on the output of the encoder. The affinity matrix is the matrix that the has been used in the attention module from the introduction of attention. By performing a column-wise softmax function on the affinity matrix a vector would be generated that is a representation of the importance of each question token, based on the model's understanding of the context. Similarly, if a row-wise softmax function is applied to the affinity matrix, the output vector would represent the importance of each context word, based on the question. By multiplying these vectors to the outputs of the encoder layer, question-aware context and context-aware question representations would be created.<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
A = {(E_1^D)}^T E_1^Q \in R^{(m+1)×(n+1)}<br />
\end{align}<br />
\begin{align}<br />
{S_1^D} = E_1^Q softmax(A^T) \in R^{h×(m+1)}<br />
\end{align}<br />
\begin{align}<br />
{S_1^Q} = E_1^D softmax(A) \in R^{h×(n+1)}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
To make the question-aware context representation even deeper and more feature-rich, an output (called the co-attention context, <math> C_1^D </math>) of the first co-attention layer is fed directly into the decoder using a residual connection. <br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
{C_1^D} = S_1^Q softmax(A^T) \in R^{h×m}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
Note that the model drops the dimension corresponding to the sentinel vector. The summaries also get encoded after this stage, using two bidirectional LSTMs with shared variables.<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
{E_2^D} = BiLSTM_2(S_1^Q) \in R^{2h×m}<br />
\end{align}<br />
\begin{align}<br />
{E_2^Q} = BiLSTM_2(S_1^D) \in R^{2h×n}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
Finally, The <math>E_2^D</math> and <math>E_2^Q</math> are fed into the second co-attention layer. Similar to the first co-attention layer, three outputs are produced, <math>S_2^D, S_2^Q, C_2^D </math>. However, <math>S_2^Q</math> is not used. These co-attention modules can easily get stacked to create a deeper attention mechanism. <br />
<br />
The output of the second co-attention layer are concatenated with residual connections from <math>C_1^D, S_1^D, E_2^D</math>. The final output of model is obtained by passing the concatenated representation through another bi-direction LSTM:<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
U = BiLSTM(concat(E_1^D;E_2^D;S_1^D;S_2^D;C_1^D;C_2^D) \in R^{2h×m}<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
===Mixed objective using self-critical policy learning===<br />
DCN produces a distribution over that start and end positions of the answer span. Because of the dynamic nature of the decoder module, it estimates separate distributions over the start and end position of the answer dynamically.<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
l_{ce}(\theta) = - \sum_{t} (log \ p_t^{start}(s|s_{t-1},e_{t-1};\theta) + log \ p_t^{end}(e|s_{t-1},e_{t-1};\theta))<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
In the above equation, <math>s</math> and <math>e</math> denote the respective start and end points of the ground truth answer. <math>s_t</math> and <math>e_t</math> denote the greedy estimation of the start and end positions at the <math>t</math>th decoding time step. Similarly, <math>p_t^{start} \in R^m</math> and <math>p_t^{end} \in R^m</math> denote the distribution of the start and end positions respectively. The problem with the above loss functions is that it does not consider the F1 metric for evaluation of the model. There are two metrics to estimate QA models accuracy. The first metric is the exact match and it is a binary score. If the answer string does not match with the ground truth answer even by a single character, the exact match score would be zero. The second metric is the F1 score. F1 score is basically the degree of the overlap between the predicted answer and the ground truth. <br />
For example, suppose there are more than two correct answer spans in a context, <math>A</math> and <math>B</math>, but none of the match the ground truth positions. If A has an exact string match but B does not, The cross-entropy loss would penalize both of them equally. However, if we include can F1 scores in our calculations, the loss function would penalize B and not A. <br />
<br />
The main problem with including F1 score directly into cost functions is that it is non-differentiable. A trick from (Sutton et al.,1999; Schulman et al., 2015) is used to approximate the expected gradient. <br />
For this, DCN+ uses a self-critical reinforcement learning objective.<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
l_{rl}(\theta) = -E_{\hat{\tau} \sim p_\tau} [R(s,e,\hat{s}_T,\hat{e}_T;\theta)]<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\approx -E_{\hat{\tau} \sim p_\tau} [F_1 (ans(\hat{s}_T, \hat{e}_T), ans(s, e)) - F_1(ans(s_T, e_T), ans(s, e))]<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
Here <math>\hat{s} \sim p_t^{start}</math> and <math>\hat{e} \sim p_t^{end}</math> denote the sampled start and end positions respectively from the estimated distributions at <math>t</math>th decoding step. <math>\hat{\tau}</math> is the sequence of sampled start and end positions during all <math>T</math> decoder steps, <math>R</math> is the expected reward, <math>F_1</math> is the F1 score between the predicted answer and the expected answer. Rather than using the raw F1 score, mean subtracted F1 score is used (baseline). Previous studies show that using a baseline for the reward reduces the variance of gradient estimates and facilitates convergence. DCN+ uses a self-critic that uses the F1 produced during greedy inference by the current model.<br />
<br />
[[File:loss.png|700px|centre]]<br />
<br />
==Dataset==<br />
The dataset SQuAD (Reference: Stanford NP Group) was used in training the network. The SQuAD 1.1 dataset contains 100 000 questions, based on a set of Wikipedia articles. These questions are designed to be answered by a segment of text from the article. The solutions to each question are represented by a start location, and the text of the answer. An example question-answer pair of the SQuAD 2.0 dataset is: Q: "When did Beyonce start becoming popular?", A: (text: "in the late 1990s", start: 269).<br />
<br />
The SQuAD 2.0 dataset augments the SQuAD 1.1 collection with 50 000 unanswerable questions, designed in an adversarial manner. Samples were generated by crowdworkers in both cases.<br />
<br />
==Experiments==<br />
To achieve optimal performance, the hyperparameters and training environment are fine-tuned. The hyperparameters of DCN are duplicated. The model was trained and evaluated using the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD). For tokenizing the documents, the Stanford CoreNLP reversible tokenizers has been used. For word embeddings, a pre-trained GloVE (trained on 840B common crawl), as well as character ngram embeddings by Hashimoto et al. (2017), is used. Furthermore, these embeddings are then concatenated with context vectors (CoVe) trained on WMT. Words which are not found in the vocabulary have their embedding and context vectors set to zero. The optimizer has been set to Adam and a dropout is also applied on word embeddings that zeros a word embedding with a probability of 0.075. PyTorch is used to build the model.<br />
<br />
==Results==<br />
At the time of submission, the model was able to achieve state-of-the-art results on the SQuAD, outperforming the second model on the leaderboard by 2.0% both on the exact match and F1 scores. It is worth mentioning that a 5% improvement was also achieved with respect to the original DCN model.<br />
<br />
[[File:dcn_resutls1.png|700px|centre]]<br />
<br />
In general, DCN+ was able to a achieve consistent performance improvement in almost every question category.<br />
<br />
[[File:dcn_results2.png|700px|centre]]<br />
<br />
The training curves for DCN+ with reinforcement learning and DCN+ without reinforcement learning are shown in Figure 4 to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed mixed objective. <br />
<br />
[[File:dcn+.png|700px|centre]]<br />
<br />
===Ablation Study===<br />
An analysis of the significance of each part of the model found that the deep residual coattention contributed the most to the overall performance. The second highest contributor was the mixed objective. The sparse mixture of experts layer in the decoder also provided some minor contributions to improving the overall performance.<br />
<br />
==Summary and Critiques==<br />
<br />
This paper introduces a novel model for the task of question answering where the cross-entropy loss commonly used for such problems previously has been combined with self-critical policy learning. The rewards are obtained from word overlap to solve misalignment metric and optimization objective. This paper improves the state of the art in a popular question-answer data set. The critical drawback in this paper is that it only shows experimental improvements on one question answer dataset. Previous works in the same field have considered performances on at least three different comprehensive question answer data sets. This paper is only an incremental improvement over the previous algorithm DCN which was released a year back. For the policy learning objective, the authors consider the task as a multi-task learning problem where the dual losses are linearly combined. The authors should have used a weighted combination instead as the positional match objective using cross entropy is far more important than the word overlap objective with ground truth. Additionally, some methods adopted by the authors are not intuitive and not much explanation is given for the same. For example, it is not very clear why the F1 scores have been used as RL rewards as against some other distance objectives commonly used in previous works in the same field like cross entropy. The authors mention a common problem in using Reinforcement learning in NLP problems. NLP domains are discontinuous and discrete domains which the agents have to repeatedly explore to find a good policy. RL is very data hungry, but NLP domains don't offer sufficient datasets for exploration in most cases. The paper says that it is treating the optimization problem as a multi-task learning problem to get around the exploration problem. It is not clear how this is effected. <br />
<br />
==Other Sources==<br />
# An easy to understand blog on the base DCN model can be found at [https://einstein.ai/research/blog/state-of-the-art-deep-learning-model-for-question-answering].<br />
# Tensorflow Source code for this model can be found at [https://github.com/andrejonasson/dynamic-coattention-network-plus]<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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Noam Shazeer, Azalia Mirhoseini, Krzysztof Maziarz, Andy Davis, Quoc Le, Geoffrey Hinton, and Jeff Dean. Outrageously large neural networks: The sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts layer. In ICLR, 2017.<br />
<br />
Yelong Shen, Po-Sen Huang, Jianfeng Gao, and Weizhu Chen. Reasonet: Learning to stop reading in machine comprehension. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 1047–1055. ACM, 2017.<br />
<br />
Richard S. Sutton, David A. McAllester, Satinder P. Singh, and Yishay Mansour. Policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning with function approximation. In NIPS, 1999.<br />
<br />
Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. Attention is all you need. In NIPS, 2017. <br />
<br />
Oriol Vinyals, Meire Fortunato, and Navdeep Jaitly. Pointer networks. In NIPS, 2015.<br />
<br />
Shuohang Wang and Jing Jiang. Machine comprehension using match-lstm and answer pointer. In ICLR, 2017.<br />
<br />
Dirk Weissenborn, Georg Wiese, and Laura Seiffe. Making neural qa as simple as possible but not simpler. In CoNLL, 2017.<br />
<br />
Yonghui Wu, Mike Schuster, Zhifeng Chen, Quoc V Le, Mohammad Norouzi, Wolfgang Macherey, Maxim Krikun, Yuan Cao, Qin Gao, Klaus Macherey, et al. Google’s neural machine translation system: Bridging the gap between human and machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.08144, 2016.<br />
<br />
Caiming Xiong, Victor Zhong, and Richard Socher. Dynamic coattention networks for question<br />
answering. In ICLR, 2017.<br />
<br />
Stanford NLP Group. Squad 2.0: The Stanford Question Answering Dataset. https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/. Accessed October 24, 2018.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:dcn%2B.png&diff=41467File:dcn+.png2018-11-26T22:17:14Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Obfuscated_Gradients_Give_a_False_Sense_of_Security_Circumventing_Defenses_to_Adversarial_Examples&diff=39762Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples2018-11-18T09:27:41Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div>= Introduction =<br />
Over the past few years, neural network models have been the source of major breakthroughs in a variety of computer vision problems. However, these networks have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. In these attacks, small humanly-imperceptible changes are made to images (that are correctly classified) which causes these models to misclassify with high confidence. These attacks pose a major threat that needs to be addressed before these systems can be deployed on a large scale, especially in safety-critical scenarios. <br />
<br />
The seriousness of this threat has generated major interest in both the design and defense against them. In this paper, the authors identify a common technique employed by several recently proposed defenses and design a set of attacks that can be used to overcome them. The use of this technique, masking gradients, is so prevalent, that 7 out of the 8 defenses proposed in the ICLR 2018 conference employed them. The authors were able to circumvent the proposed defenses and successfully brought down the accuracy of their models to below 10%.<br />
Their reimplementation of each of the defenses and implementations of the attacks are available [https://github.com/anishathalye/obfuscated-gradients here].<br />
<br />
= Methodology =<br />
<br />
The paper assumes a lot of familiarity with adversarial attack literature. Section below briefly explains some key concepts.<br />
<br />
== Background ==<br />
<br />
==== Adversarial Images Mathematically ====<br />
Given an image <math>x</math> and a classifier <math>f(x)</math>, an adversarial image <math>x'</math> satisfies two properties:<br />
# <math>D(x,x') < \epsilon </math><br />
# <math>c(x') \neq c^*(x) </math><br />
<br />
Where <math>D</math> is some distance metric, <math>\epsilon </math> is a small constant, <math>c(x')</math> is the output ''class'' predicted by the model, and <math>c^*(x)</math> is the true class for input x. In words, the adversarial image is a small distance from the original image, but the classifier classifies it incorrectly.<br />
<br />
==== Adversarial Attacks Terminology ====<br />
#Adversarial attacks can be either '''black''' or '''white-box'''. In black box attacks, the attacker has access to the network output only, while white-box attackers have full access to the network, including its gradients, architecture and weights. This makes white-box attackers much more powerful. Given access to gradients, white-box attacks use back propagation to modify inputs (as opposed to the weights) with respect to the loss function.<br />
#In '''untargeted''' attacks, the objective is to ''maximize'' the loss of the true class, <math>x'=x \mathbf{+} \lambda(sign(\nabla_xL(x,c^*(x))))</math>. While in '''targeted''' attacks, the objective is to ''minimize loss for a target class'' <math>c^t(x)</math> that is different from the true class, <math>x'=x \mathbf{-} \epsilon(sign(\nabla_xL(x,c^t(x))))</math>. Here, <math>\nabla_xL()</math> is the gradient of the loss function with respect to the input, <math>\lambda</math> is a small gradient step and <math>sign()</math> is the sign of the gradient.<br />
# An attacker may be allowed to use a single step of back-propagation ('''single step''') or multiple ('''iterative''') steps. Iterative attackers can generate more powerful adversarial images. Typically, to bound iterative attackers a distance measure is used.<br />
<br />
In this paper the authors focus on the more difficult attacks; white-box iterative targeted and untargeted attacks.<br />
<br />
== Obfuscated Gradients ==<br />
As gradients are used in the generation of white-box adversarial images, many defense strategies have focused on methods that mask gradients. If gradients are masked, they cannot be followed to generate adversarial images. The authors argue against this general approach by showing that it can be easily circumvented. To emphasize their point, they looked at white-box defenses proposed in ICLR 2018. Three types of gradient masking techniques were found:<br />
<br />
# '''Shattered gradients''': Non-differentiable operations are introduced into the model, causing a gradient to be nonexistent or incorrect.<br />
# '''Stochastic gradients''': A stochastic process is added into the model at test time, causing the gradients to become randomized.<br />
# '''Vanishing Gradients ''': Very deep neural networks or those with recurrent connections are used. Because of the vanishing or exploding gradient problem common in these deep networks, effective gradients at the input are small and not very useful.<br />
<br />
== The Attacks ==<br />
To circumvent these gradient masking techniques, the authors propose:<br />
# '''Backward Pass Differentiable Approximation (BPDA)''': For defenses that introduce non-differentiable components, the authors replace it with an approximate function that is differentiable on the backward pass. In a white-box setting, the attacker has full access to any added non-linear transformation and can find its approximation. <br />
# '''Expectation over Transformation [Athalye, 2017]''': For defenses that add some form of test time randomness, the authors propose to use expectation over transformation technique in the backward pass. Rather than moving along the gradient every step, several gradients are sampled and the step is taken in the average direction. This can help with any stochastic misdirection from individual gradients. The technique is similar to using mini-batch gradient descent but applied in the construction of adversarial images.<br />
# '''Re-parameterize the exploration space''': For very deep networks that rely on vanishing or exploding gradients, the authors propose to re-parameterize and search over the range where the gradient does not explode/vanish.<br />
<br />
= Main Results =<br />
[[File:Summary_Table.png|600px|center]]<br />
<br />
The table above summarizes the results of their attacks. Attacks are mounted on the same dataset each defense targeted. If multiple datasets were used, attacks were performed on the largest one. Two different distance metrics (<math>\ell_{\infty}</math> and <math>\ell_{2}</math>) were used in the construction of adversarial images. Distance metrics specify how much an adversarial image can vary from an original image. For <math>\ell_{\infty}</math> adversarial images, each pixel is allowed to vary by a maximum amount. For example, <math>\ell_{\infty}=0.031</math> specifies that each pixel can vary by <math>256*0.031=8</math> from its original value. <math>\ell_{2}</math> distances specify the magnitude of the total distortion allowed over all pixels. For MNIST and CIFAR-10, untargeted adversarial images were constructed using the entire test set, while for Imagenet, 1000 test images were randomly selected and used to generate targeted adversarial images. <br />
<br />
Standard models were used in evaluating the accuracy of defense strategies under the attacks,<br />
# MNIST: 5-layer Convolutional Neural Network (99.3% top-1 accuracy)<br />
# CIFAR-10: Wide-Resnet (95.0% top-1 accuracy)<br />
# Imagenet: InceptionV3 (78.0% top-1 accuracy)<br />
<br />
The last column shows the accuracies each defense method achieved over the adversarial test set. Except for [Madry, 2018], all defense methods could only achieve an accuracy of <10%. Furthermore, the accuracy of most methods was 0%. The results of [Samangoui,2018] (double asterisk), show that their approach was not as successful. The authors claim that is is a result of implementation imperfections but theoretically the defense can be circumvented using their proposed method.<br />
<br />
==== The defense that worked - Adversarial Training [Madary, 2018] ====<br />
<br />
As a defense mechanism, [Madry, 2018] proposes training the neural networks with adversarial images. Although this approach is previously known [Szegedy, 2013] in their formulation, the problem is setup in a more systematic way using a min-max formulation:<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\theta^* = \arg \underset{\theta} \min \mathop{\mathbb{E_x}} \bigg{[} \underset{\delta \in [-\epsilon,\epsilon]}\max L(x+\delta,y;\theta)\bigg{]} <br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
where <math>\theta</math> is the parameter of the model, <math>\theta^*</math> is the optimal set of parameters and <math>\delta</math> is a small perturbation to the input image <math>x</math> and is bounded by <math>[-\epsilon,\epsilon]</math>. <br />
<br />
Train proceeds in the following way. For each clean input image, a distorted version of the image is found by maximizing the inner maximization problem for a fixed number of iterations. Gradient steps are constrained to fall within the allowed range (projected gradient descent). Next, the classification problem is solved by minimizing the outer minimization problem.<br />
<br />
This approach was shown to provide resilience to all types of adversarial attacks.<br />
<br />
==== How to check for Obfuscated Gradients ====<br />
For future defense proposals, it is recommended to avoid using masked gradients. To assist with this, the authors propose a set of conditions that can help identify if defense is relying on masked gradients:<br />
# If weaker one-step attacks are performing better than iterative attacks.<br />
# Black-box attacks can find stronger adversarial images compared with white-box attacks.<br />
# Unbounded iterative attacks do not reach 100% success.<br />
# If random brute force attempts are better than gradient based methods at finding adversarial images.<br />
<br />
==== Recommendations for future defense methods to encourage reproducibility ====<br />
<br />
= Detailed Results =<br />
<br />
== Non-obfuscated Gradients ==<br />
==== Adversarial Training [Madry 2018] ====<br />
'''Defence''': Proposed by Goodfellow et al. (2014b), adversarial training solves a min-max game through a conceptually simple process: train on adversarial examples until the model learns to classify them correctly. The authors study the adversarial training approach of Madry et al. (2018) which for a given <math>\epsilon</math>-ball solves <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:sb.png]]</div><br />
<br />
which the authors of original paper, solve by the inner maximization problem by generating adversarial examples using projected gradient descent. The author's experiments were not able to invalidate the claims of the paper. The authors also mention that this approach does not cause obfuscated gradients and the original authors’ evaluation of this defense performs all of the tests for characteristic behaviours of obfuscated gradients that the authors of this paper list. Also, the authors note that (1) adversarial retraining has been shown to be difficult at a large scale like ImageNet, and (2) training exclusively on <math> l_\infty</math> adversarial examples provides only limited robustness to adversarial examples under other distortion metrics.<br />
<br />
==== Cascade Adversarial Training [Na 2018] ====<br />
'''Defence''': Cascade adversarial machine learning approach is similar to the adversarial training approach mentioned above. The main difference is that instead of using iterative methods to generate adversarial examples at each mini-batch, a model is first trained, generate adversarial examples with iterative methods on that model, add those examples to training set, and then train a new model on the augmented dataset. Again, as above, the authors were unable to reduce the claims made by the paper even though the claims are a bit weaker in this case with 16% accuracy with <math>\epsilon</math> = .015, compared to over 70% at the same perturbation budget with adversarial training as in Madry et al. (2018).<br />
<br />
== Gradient Shattering ==<br />
<br />
==== Thermometer Coding, [Buckman, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': Inspired by the observation that neural networks learn linear boundaries between classes [Goodfellow, 2014] , [Buckman, 2018] sought to break this linearity by explicitly adding a highly non-linear transform at the input of their model. The non-linear transformation they chose was quantizing inputs to binary vectors. The quantization performed was termed thermometer encoding,<br />
<br />
Given an image, for each pixel value <math>x_{i,j,c}</math>, if an <math>l</math> dimensional thermometer code, the <math>kth</math> bit is given by:<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\tau(x_{i,j,c})_k = \bigg{\{}\begin{array}{ll}<br />
1 \space if \thinspace x_{i,j,c} >k/l \\<br />
0 \space otherwise \\<br />
\end{array}<br />
\end{align}<br />
Here it is assumed <math>x_{i,j,c} \in [0, 1] </math> and <math>i, j, c</math> are the row, column and channel index of the pixel respectively. This encoding is essentially like one-hot encoding, except all the points (not just one) greater than the target value are set to 1. This quantization technique preserves pairwise ordering between pixels.<br />
<br />
On CIFAR-10, the model gave 50% accuracy against <math>\ell_\infty</math> adversarial images with <math>\epsilon=0.031</math> attacks.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors attack this model using there BPDA approach. Given the non-linear transformation performed in the forward pass, <math>\tau(x)</math>, they develop a differentiable counterpart,<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\hat{\tau}(x_{i,j,c})_k = \min ( \max (x_{i,j,c} - \frac{k}{l}), 1 )<br />
\end{align}<br />
and use it in place of <math>\tau(x)</math> on the backward pass. With their modifications they were able to bring the accuracy of the model down to 0%.<br />
<br />
==== Input Transformation, [Guo, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''':[Gou, 2018] investigated the effect of including different input transformation on the robustness to adversarial images. In particular, they found two techniques provided the greatest resistance: total variance minimization and image quilting. Total variance minimization is a technique that removes high frequency noise while preserving legitimate edges (good high frequency components). In image quilting, a large database of image patches from clean images is collected. At test time, input patches, that contain a lot of noise, are replaced with similar but clean patches from the data base.<br />
<br />
Both techniques, removed perturbations from adversarial images which provides some robustness to adversarial attacks. Moreover, both approaches are non-differentiable which makes constructing white-box adversarial images difficult. Moreover, the techniques also include test time randomness as the modifications make are input dependent. The best model achieved 60% accuracy on adversarial images with <math>l_{2}=0.05</math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors used the BPDA attack where the input transformations were replaced by an identity function. They were able to bring the accuracy of the model down to 0% under the same type of adversarial attacks.<br />
<br />
==== Local Intrinsic Dimensionality, [Ma, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''' Local intrinsic dimensionality (LID) is a distance-based metric that measures the similarity between points in a high dimensional space. Given a set of points, let the distance between sample <math>x</math> and its <math>ith</math> neighbor be <math>r_i(x)</math>, then the LID under the choose distance metric is given by,<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
LID(x) = - \bigg{(} \frac{1}{k}\sum^k_{i=1}log \frac{r_i(x)}{r_k(x)} \bigg{)}^{-1}<br />
\end{align}<br />
where k is the number of nearest neighbors considered, <math>r_k(x)</math> is the maximum distance to any of the neighbors in the set k. <br />
<br />
First, <math>L_2</math> distances for all training and adversarial images. Next, the LID scores for each train and adversarial images were calculated. It was found that LID scores for adversarial images were significantly larger than those of clean images. Base on these results, the a separate classifier was created that can be used to detect adversarial inputs. [Ma, 2018] claim that this is not a defense method, but a method to study the properties of adversarial images.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': Instead of attacking this method, the authors show that this method is not able to detect, and is therefore venerable to, attacks of the [Carlini and Wagner, 2017a] variety.<br />
<br />
== Stochastic Gradients ==<br />
<br />
==== Stochastic Activation Pruning, [Dhillon, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Dhillon, 2018] use test time randomness in their model to guard against adversarial attacks. Within a layer, the activities of component nodes are randomly dropped with a probability proportional to its absolute value. The rest of the activation are scaled up to preserve accuracies. This is akin to test time drop-out. This technique was found to drop accuracy slightly on clean images, but improved performance on adversarial images.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors used the expectation over transformation attack to get useful gradients out of the model. With their attack they were able to reduce the accuracy of this method down to 0% on CIFAR-10.<br />
<br />
==== Mitigation Through Randomization, [Xie, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Xie, 2018] Add a randomization layer to their model to help defend against adversarial attacks. For an input image of size [299,299], first the image is randomly re-scaled to <math>r \in [299,331]</math>. Next the image is zero-padded to fix the dimension of the modified input. This modified input is then fed into a regular classifier. The authors claim that is strategy can provide an accuracy of 32.8% against ensemble attack patterns (fixed distortions, but many of them which are picked randomly). Because of the introduced randomness, the authors claim the model builds some robustness to other types of attacks as well.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The EOT method was used to build adversarial images to attack this model. With their attack, the authors were able to bring the accuracy of this model down to 0% using <math>L_{\infty}(\epsilon=0.031)</math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
== Vanishing and Exploding Gradients ==<br />
<br />
==== Pixel Defend, [Song, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Song, 2018] argues that adversarial images lie in low probability regions of the data manifold. Therefore, one way to handle adversarial attacks is to project them back in the high probability regions before feeding them into a classifier. They chose to do this by using a generative model (pixelCNN) in a denoising capacity. A PixelCNN model directly estimates the conditional probability of generating an image pixel by pixel [Van den Oord, 2016],<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
p(\mathbf{x}= \prod_{i=1}^{n^2} p(x_i|x_0,x_1 ....x_{i-1}))<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
The reason for choosing this model is the long iterative process of generation. In the backward pass, following the gradient all the way to the input would not be possible because of the vanishing/exploding gradient<br />
problem of deep networks. The proposed model was able to obtain an accuracy of 46% on CIFAR-10 images with <math>l_{\infty} (\epsilon=0.031) </math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The model was attacked using the BPDA technique where back-propagating though the pixelCNN was replaced with an identity function. With this apporach, the authors were able to bring down the accuracy to 9% under the same kind of perturbations.<br />
<br />
==== Defense-GAN, [Samangouei, 2018] ====<br />
<br />
= Conclusion =<br />
In this paper, it was found that gradient masking is a common technique used by many defense proposal that claim to be robust against a very difficult class of adversarial attacks; white-box, iterative attacks. However, the authors found that they can be easily circumvented. Three attack methods are presented that were able to defeat 7 out of the 8 defense proposal accepted in the 2018 ICLR conference for these types of attacks.<br />
<br />
= Critique =<br />
# The third attack method, reparameterization of the input distortion search space was presented very briefly and at a very high level. Moreover, the one defense proposal they chose to use it against, [Samangouei, 2018] prove to be resilient against the attack. The authors had to resort to one of their other methods to circumvent the defense.<br />
# The BPDA and reparameterization attacks require intrinsic knowledge of the networks. This information is not likely to be available to external users of a network. Most likely, the use-case for these attacks will be in-house to develop more robust networks. This also means that it is still possible to guard against adversarial attack using gradient masking techniques, provided the details of the network are kept secret.<br />
# The BPDA algorithm requires replacing a non-linear part of the model with a differentiable approximation. Since different networks are likely to use different transformations, this technique is not plug-and-play. For each network, the attack needs to be manually constructed.<br />
<br />
= Other Sources =<br />
= References =<br />
#'''[Madry, 2018]''' Madry, A., Makelov, A., Schmidt, L., Tsipras, D. and Vladu, A., 2017. Towards deep learning models resistant to adversarial attacks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.06083.<br />
#'''[Buckman, 2018]''' Buckman, J., Roy, A., Raffel, C. and Goodfellow, I., 2018. Thermometer encoding: One hot way to resist adversarial examples.<br />
#'''[Guo, 2018]''' Guo, C., Rana, M., Cisse, M. and van der Maaten, L., 2017. Countering adversarial images using input transformations. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.00117.<br />
#'''[Xie, 2018]''' Xie, C., Wang, J., Zhang, Z., Ren, Z. and Yuille, A., 2017. Mitigating adversarial effects through randomization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.01991.<br />
#'''[song, 2018]''' Song, Y., Kim, T., Nowozin, S., Ermon, S. and Kushman, N., 2017. Pixeldefend: Leveraging generative models to understand and defend against adversarial examples. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.10766.<br />
#'''[Szegedy, 2013]''' Szegedy, C., Zaremba, W., Sutskever, I., Bruna, J., Erhan, D., Goodfellow, I. and Fergus, R., 2013. Intriguing properties of neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.6199.<br />
#'''[Samangouei, 2018]''' Samangouei, P., Kabkab, M. and Chellappa, R., 2018. Defense-GAN: Protecting classifiers against adversarial attacks using generative models. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.06605.<br />
#'''[van den Oord, 2016]''' van den Oord, A., Kalchbrenner, N., Espeholt, L., Vinyals, O. and Graves, A., 2016. Conditional image generation with pixelcnn decoders. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 4790-4798).<br />
#'''[Athalye, 2017]''' Athalye, A. and Sutskever, I., 2017. Synthesizing robust adversarial examples. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07397.<br />
#'''[Ma, 2018]''' Ma, Xingjun, Bo Li, Yisen Wang, Sarah M. Erfani, Sudanthi Wijewickrema, Michael E. Houle, Grant Schoenebeck, Dawn Song, and James Bailey. "Characterizing adversarial subspaces using local intrinsic dimensionality." arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.02613 (2018).</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Obfuscated_Gradients_Give_a_False_Sense_of_Security_Circumventing_Defenses_to_Adversarial_Examples&diff=39761Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples2018-11-18T09:26:24Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Adversarial Training */</p>
<hr />
<div>= Introduction =<br />
Over the past few years, neural network models have been the source of major breakthroughs in a variety of computer vision problems. However, these networks have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. In these attacks, small humanly-imperceptible changes are made to images (that are correctly classified) which causes these models to misclassify with high confidence. These attacks pose a major threat that needs to be addressed before these systems can be deployed on a large scale, especially in safety-critical scenarios. <br />
<br />
The seriousness of this threat has generated major interest in both the design and defense against them. In this paper, the authors identify a common technique employed by several recently proposed defenses and design a set of attacks that can be used to overcome them. The use of this technique, masking gradients, is so prevalent, that 7 out of the 8 defenses proposed in the ICLR 2018 conference employed them. The authors were able to circumvent the proposed defenses and successfully brought down the accuracy of their models to below 10%.<br />
Their reimplementation of each of the defenses and implementations of the attacks are available [https://github.com/anishathalye/obfuscated-gradients here].<br />
<br />
= Methodology =<br />
<br />
The paper assumes a lot of familiarity with adversarial attack literature. Section below briefly explains some key concepts.<br />
<br />
== Background ==<br />
<br />
==== Adversarial Images Mathematically ====<br />
Given an image <math>x</math> and a classifier <math>f(x)</math>, an adversarial image <math>x'</math> satisfies two properties:<br />
# <math>D(x,x') < \epsilon </math><br />
# <math>c(x') \neq c^*(x) </math><br />
<br />
Where <math>D</math> is some distance metric, <math>\epsilon </math> is a small constant, <math>c(x')</math> is the output ''class'' predicted by the model, and <math>c^*(x)</math> is the true class for input x. In words, the adversarial image is a small distance from the original image, but the classifier classifies it incorrectly.<br />
<br />
==== Adversarial Attacks Terminology ====<br />
#Adversarial attacks can be either '''black''' or '''white-box'''. In black box attacks, the attacker has access to the network output only, while white-box attackers have full access to the network, including its gradients, architecture and weights. This makes white-box attackers much more powerful. Given access to gradients, white-box attacks use back propagation to modify inputs (as opposed to the weights) with respect to the loss function.<br />
#In '''untargeted''' attacks, the objective is to ''maximize'' the loss of the true class, <math>x'=x \mathbf{+} \lambda(sign(\nabla_xL(x,c^*(x))))</math>. While in '''targeted''' attacks, the objective is to ''minimize loss for a target class'' <math>c^t(x)</math> that is different from the true class, <math>x'=x \mathbf{-} \epsilon(sign(\nabla_xL(x,c^t(x))))</math>. Here, <math>\nabla_xL()</math> is the gradient of the loss function with respect to the input, <math>\lambda</math> is a small gradient step and <math>sign()</math> is the sign of the gradient.<br />
# An attacker may be allowed to use a single step of back-propagation ('''single step''') or multiple ('''iterative''') steps. Iterative attackers can generate more powerful adversarial images. Typically, to bound iterative attackers a distance measure is used.<br />
<br />
In this paper the authors focus on the more difficult attacks; white-box iterative targeted and untargeted attacks.<br />
<br />
== Obfuscated Gradients ==<br />
As gradients are used in the generation of white-box adversarial images, many defense strategies have focused on methods that mask gradients. If gradients are masked, they cannot be followed to generate adversarial images. The authors argue against this general approach by showing that it can be easily circumvented. To emphasize their point, they looked at white-box defenses proposed in ICLR 2018. Three types of gradient masking techniques were found:<br />
<br />
# '''Shattered gradients''': Non-differentiable operations are introduced into the model, causing a gradient to be nonexistent or incorrect.<br />
# '''Stochastic gradients''': A stochastic process is added into the model at test time, causing the gradients to become randomized.<br />
# '''Vanishing Gradients ''': Very deep neural networks or those with recurrent connections are used. Because of the vanishing or exploding gradient problem common in these deep networks, effective gradients at the input are small and not very useful.<br />
<br />
== The Attacks ==<br />
To circumvent these gradient masking techniques, the authors propose:<br />
# '''Backward Pass Differentiable Approximation (BPDA)''': For defenses that introduce non-differentiable components, the authors replace it with an approximate function that is differentiable on the backward pass. In a white-box setting, the attacker has full access to any added non-linear transformation and can find its approximation. <br />
# '''Expectation over Transformation [Athalye, 2017]''': For defenses that add some form of test time randomness, the authors propose to use expectation over transformation technique in the backward pass. Rather than moving along the gradient every step, several gradients are sampled and the step is taken in the average direction. This can help with any stochastic misdirection from individual gradients. The technique is similar to using mini-batch gradient descent but applied in the construction of adversarial images.<br />
# '''Re-parameterize the exploration space''': For very deep networks that rely on vanishing or exploding gradients, the authors propose to re-parameterize and search over the range where the gradient does not explode/vanish.<br />
<br />
= Main Results =<br />
[[File:Summary_Table.png|600px|center]]<br />
<br />
The table above summarizes the results of their attacks. Attacks are mounted on the same dataset each defense targeted. If multiple datasets were used, attacks were performed on the largest one. Two different distance metrics (<math>\ell_{\infty}</math> and <math>\ell_{2}</math>) were used in the construction of adversarial images. Distance metrics specify how much an adversarial image can vary from an original image. For <math>\ell_{\infty}</math> adversarial images, each pixel is allowed to vary by a maximum amount. For example, <math>\ell_{\infty}=0.031</math> specifies that each pixel can vary by <math>256*0.031=8</math> from its original value. <math>\ell_{2}</math> distances specify the magnitude of the total distortion allowed over all pixels. For MNIST and CIFAR-10, untargeted adversarial images were constructed using the entire test set, while for Imagenet, 1000 test images were randomly selected and used to generate targeted adversarial images. <br />
<br />
Standard models were used in evaluating the accuracy of defense strategies under the attacks,<br />
# MNIST: 5-layer Convolutional Neural Network (99.3% top-1 accuracy)<br />
# CIFAR-10: Wide-Resnet (95.0% top-1 accuracy)<br />
# Imagenet: InceptionV3 (78.0% top-1 accuracy)<br />
<br />
The last column shows the accuracies each defense method achieved over the adversarial test set. Except for [Madry, 2018], all defense methods could only achieve an accuracy of <10%. Furthermore, the accuracy of most methods was 0%. The results of [Samangoui,2018] (double asterisk), show that their approach was not as successful. The authors claim that is is a result of implementation imperfections but theoretically the defense can be circumvented using their proposed method.<br />
<br />
==== The defense that worked - Adversarial Training [Madary, 2018] ====<br />
<br />
As a defense mechanism, [Madry, 2018] proposes training the neural networks with adversarial images. Although this approach is previously known [Szegedy, 2013] in their formulation, the problem is setup in a more systematic way using a min-max formulation:<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\theta^* = \arg \underset{\theta} \min \mathop{\mathbb{E_x}} \bigg{[} \underset{\delta \in [-\epsilon,\epsilon]}\max L(x+\delta,y;\theta)\bigg{]} <br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
where <math>\theta</math> is the parameter of the model, <math>\theta^*</math> is the optimal set of parameters and <math>\delta</math> is a small perturbation to the input image <math>x</math> and is bounded by <math>[-\epsilon,\epsilon]</math>. <br />
<br />
Train proceeds in the following way. For each clean input image, a distorted version of the image is found by maximizing the inner maximization problem for a fixed number of iterations. Gradient steps are constrained to fall within the allowed range (projected gradient descent). Next, the classification problem is solved by minimizing the outer minimization problem.<br />
<br />
This approach was shown to provide resilience to all types of adversarial attacks.<br />
<br />
==== How to check for Obfuscated Gradients ====<br />
For future defense proposals, it is recommended to avoid using masked gradients. To assist with this, the authors propose a set of conditions that can help identify if defense is relying on masked gradients:<br />
# If weaker one-step attacks are performing better than iterative attacks.<br />
# Black-box attacks can find stronger adversarial images compared with white-box attacks.<br />
# Unbounded iterative attacks do not reach 100% success.<br />
# If random brute force attempts are better than gradient based methods at finding adversarial images.<br />
<br />
==== Recommendations for future defense methods to encourage reproducibility ====<br />
<br />
= Detailed Results =<br />
<br />
== Non-obfuscated Gradients ==<br />
=== Adversarial Training [Madry 2018] ===<br />
'''Defence''': Proposed by Goodfellow et al. (2014b), adversarial training solves a min-max game through a conceptually simple process: train on adversarial examples until the model learns to classify them correctly. The authors study the adversarial training approach of Madry et al. (2018) which for a given <math>\epsilon</math>-ball solves <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:sb.png]]</div><br />
<br />
which the authors of original paper, solve by the inner maximization problem by generating adversarial examples using projected gradient descent. The author's experiments were not able to invalidate the claims of the paper. The authors also mention that this approach does not cause obfuscated gradients and the original authors’ evaluation of this defense performs all of the tests for characteristic behaviours of obfuscated gradients that the authors of this paper list. Also, the authors note that (1) adversarial retraining has been shown to be difficult at a large scale like ImageNet, and (2) training exclusively on <math> l_\infty</math> adversarial examples provides only limited robustness to adversarial examples under other distortion metrics.<br />
<br />
=== Cascade Adversarial Training ===<br />
'''Defence''': Cascade adversarial machine learning (Na et al., 2018) approach is similar to the adversarial training approach mentioned above. The main difference is that instead of using iterative methods to generate adversarial examples at each mini-batch, a model is first trained, generate adversarial examples with iterative methods on that model, add those examples to training set, and then train a new model on the augmented dataset. Again, as above, the authors were unable to reduce the claims made by the paper even though the claims are a bit weaker in this case with 16% accuracy with <math>\epsilon</math> = .015, compared to over 70% at the same perturbation budget with adversarial training as in Madry et al. (2018).<br />
<br />
== Gradient Shattering ==<br />
<br />
==== Thermometer Coding, [Buckman, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': Inspired by the observation that neural networks learn linear boundaries between classes [Goodfellow, 2014] , [Buckman, 2018] sought to break this linearity by explicitly adding a highly non-linear transform at the input of their model. The non-linear transformation they chose was quantizing inputs to binary vectors. The quantization performed was termed thermometer encoding,<br />
<br />
Given an image, for each pixel value <math>x_{i,j,c}</math>, if an <math>l</math> dimensional thermometer code, the <math>kth</math> bit is given by:<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\tau(x_{i,j,c})_k = \bigg{\{}\begin{array}{ll}<br />
1 \space if \thinspace x_{i,j,c} >k/l \\<br />
0 \space otherwise \\<br />
\end{array}<br />
\end{align}<br />
Here it is assumed <math>x_{i,j,c} \in [0, 1] </math> and <math>i, j, c</math> are the row, column and channel index of the pixel respectively. This encoding is essentially like one-hot encoding, except all the points (not just one) greater than the target value are set to 1. This quantization technique preserves pairwise ordering between pixels.<br />
<br />
On CIFAR-10, the model gave 50% accuracy against <math>\ell_\infty</math> adversarial images with <math>\epsilon=0.031</math> attacks.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors attack this model using there BPDA approach. Given the non-linear transformation performed in the forward pass, <math>\tau(x)</math>, they develop a differentiable counterpart,<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\hat{\tau}(x_{i,j,c})_k = \min ( \max (x_{i,j,c} - \frac{k}{l}), 1 )<br />
\end{align}<br />
and use it in place of <math>\tau(x)</math> on the backward pass. With their modifications they were able to bring the accuracy of the model down to 0%.<br />
<br />
==== Input Transformation, [Guo, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''':[Gou, 2018] investigated the effect of including different input transformation on the robustness to adversarial images. In particular, they found two techniques provided the greatest resistance: total variance minimization and image quilting. Total variance minimization is a technique that removes high frequency noise while preserving legitimate edges (good high frequency components). In image quilting, a large database of image patches from clean images is collected. At test time, input patches, that contain a lot of noise, are replaced with similar but clean patches from the data base.<br />
<br />
Both techniques, removed perturbations from adversarial images which provides some robustness to adversarial attacks. Moreover, both approaches are non-differentiable which makes constructing white-box adversarial images difficult. Moreover, the techniques also include test time randomness as the modifications make are input dependent. The best model achieved 60% accuracy on adversarial images with <math>l_{2}=0.05</math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors used the BPDA attack where the input transformations were replaced by an identity function. They were able to bring the accuracy of the model down to 0% under the same type of adversarial attacks.<br />
<br />
==== Local Intrinsic Dimensionality, [Ma, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''' Local intrinsic dimensionality (LID) is a distance-based metric that measures the similarity between points in a high dimensional space. Given a set of points, let the distance between sample <math>x</math> and its <math>ith</math> neighbor be <math>r_i(x)</math>, then the LID under the choose distance metric is given by,<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
LID(x) = - \bigg{(} \frac{1}{k}\sum^k_{i=1}log \frac{r_i(x)}{r_k(x)} \bigg{)}^{-1}<br />
\end{align}<br />
where k is the number of nearest neighbors considered, <math>r_k(x)</math> is the maximum distance to any of the neighbors in the set k. <br />
<br />
First, <math>L_2</math> distances for all training and adversarial images. Next, the LID scores for each train and adversarial images were calculated. It was found that LID scores for adversarial images were significantly larger than those of clean images. Base on these results, the a separate classifier was created that can be used to detect adversarial inputs. [Ma, 2018] claim that this is not a defense method, but a method to study the properties of adversarial images.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': Instead of attacking this method, the authors show that this method is not able to detect, and is therefore venerable to, attacks of the [Carlini and Wagner, 2017a] variety.<br />
<br />
== Stochastic Gradients ==<br />
<br />
==== Stochastic Activation Pruning, [Dhillon, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Dhillon, 2018] use test time randomness in their model to guard against adversarial attacks. Within a layer, the activities of component nodes are randomly dropped with a probability proportional to its absolute value. The rest of the activation are scaled up to preserve accuracies. This is akin to test time drop-out. This technique was found to drop accuracy slightly on clean images, but improved performance on adversarial images.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors used the expectation over transformation attack to get useful gradients out of the model. With their attack they were able to reduce the accuracy of this method down to 0% on CIFAR-10.<br />
<br />
==== Mitigation Through Randomization, [Xie, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Xie, 2018] Add a randomization layer to their model to help defend against adversarial attacks. For an input image of size [299,299], first the image is randomly re-scaled to <math>r \in [299,331]</math>. Next the image is zero-padded to fix the dimension of the modified input. This modified input is then fed into a regular classifier. The authors claim that is strategy can provide an accuracy of 32.8% against ensemble attack patterns (fixed distortions, but many of them which are picked randomly). Because of the introduced randomness, the authors claim the model builds some robustness to other types of attacks as well.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The EOT method was used to build adversarial images to attack this model. With their attack, the authors were able to bring the accuracy of this model down to 0% using <math>L_{\infty}(\epsilon=0.031)</math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
== Vanishing and Exploding Gradients ==<br />
<br />
==== Pixel Defend, [Song, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Song, 2018] argues that adversarial images lie in low probability regions of the data manifold. Therefore, one way to handle adversarial attacks is to project them back in the high probability regions before feeding them into a classifier. They chose to do this by using a generative model (pixelCNN) in a denoising capacity. A PixelCNN model directly estimates the conditional probability of generating an image pixel by pixel [Van den Oord, 2016],<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
p(\mathbf{x}= \prod_{i=1}^{n^2} p(x_i|x_0,x_1 ....x_{i-1}))<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
The reason for choosing this model is the long iterative process of generation. In the backward pass, following the gradient all the way to the input would not be possible because of the vanishing/exploding gradient<br />
problem of deep networks. The proposed model was able to obtain an accuracy of 46% on CIFAR-10 images with <math>l_{\infty} (\epsilon=0.031) </math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The model was attacked using the BPDA technique where back-propagating though the pixelCNN was replaced with an identity function. With this apporach, the authors were able to bring down the accuracy to 9% under the same kind of perturbations.<br />
<br />
==== Defense-GAN, [Samangouei, 2018] ====<br />
<br />
= Conclusion =<br />
In this paper, it was found that gradient masking is a common technique used by many defense proposal that claim to be robust against a very difficult class of adversarial attacks; white-box, iterative attacks. However, the authors found that they can be easily circumvented. Three attack methods are presented that were able to defeat 7 out of the 8 defense proposal accepted in the 2018 ICLR conference for these types of attacks.<br />
<br />
= Critique =<br />
# The third attack method, reparameterization of the input distortion search space was presented very briefly and at a very high level. Moreover, the one defense proposal they chose to use it against, [Samangouei, 2018] prove to be resilient against the attack. The authors had to resort to one of their other methods to circumvent the defense.<br />
# The BPDA and reparameterization attacks require intrinsic knowledge of the networks. This information is not likely to be available to external users of a network. Most likely, the use-case for these attacks will be in-house to develop more robust networks. This also means that it is still possible to guard against adversarial attack using gradient masking techniques, provided the details of the network are kept secret.<br />
# The BPDA algorithm requires replacing a non-linear part of the model with a differentiable approximation. Since different networks are likely to use different transformations, this technique is not plug-and-play. For each network, the attack needs to be manually constructed.<br />
<br />
= Other Sources =<br />
= References =<br />
#'''[Madry, 2018]''' Madry, A., Makelov, A., Schmidt, L., Tsipras, D. and Vladu, A., 2017. Towards deep learning models resistant to adversarial attacks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.06083.<br />
#'''[Buckman, 2018]''' Buckman, J., Roy, A., Raffel, C. and Goodfellow, I., 2018. Thermometer encoding: One hot way to resist adversarial examples.<br />
#'''[Guo, 2018]''' Guo, C., Rana, M., Cisse, M. and van der Maaten, L., 2017. Countering adversarial images using input transformations. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.00117.<br />
#'''[Xie, 2018]''' Xie, C., Wang, J., Zhang, Z., Ren, Z. and Yuille, A., 2017. Mitigating adversarial effects through randomization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.01991.<br />
#'''[song, 2018]''' Song, Y., Kim, T., Nowozin, S., Ermon, S. and Kushman, N., 2017. Pixeldefend: Leveraging generative models to understand and defend against adversarial examples. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.10766.<br />
#'''[Szegedy, 2013]''' Szegedy, C., Zaremba, W., Sutskever, I., Bruna, J., Erhan, D., Goodfellow, I. and Fergus, R., 2013. Intriguing properties of neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.6199.<br />
#'''[Samangouei, 2018]''' Samangouei, P., Kabkab, M. and Chellappa, R., 2018. Defense-GAN: Protecting classifiers against adversarial attacks using generative models. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.06605.<br />
#'''[van den Oord, 2016]''' van den Oord, A., Kalchbrenner, N., Espeholt, L., Vinyals, O. and Graves, A., 2016. Conditional image generation with pixelcnn decoders. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 4790-4798).<br />
#'''[Athalye, 2017]''' Athalye, A. and Sutskever, I., 2017. Synthesizing robust adversarial examples. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07397.<br />
#'''[Ma, 2018]''' Ma, Xingjun, Bo Li, Yisen Wang, Sarah M. Erfani, Sudanthi Wijewickrema, Michael E. Houle, Grant Schoenebeck, Dawn Song, and James Bailey. "Characterizing adversarial subspaces using local intrinsic dimensionality." arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.02613 (2018).</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Obfuscated_Gradients_Give_a_False_Sense_of_Security_Circumventing_Defenses_to_Adversarial_Examples&diff=39760Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples2018-11-18T09:21:01Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Cascade Adversarial Training */</p>
<hr />
<div>= Introduction =<br />
Over the past few years, neural network models have been the source of major breakthroughs in a variety of computer vision problems. However, these networks have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. In these attacks, small humanly-imperceptible changes are made to images (that are correctly classified) which causes these models to misclassify with high confidence. These attacks pose a major threat that needs to be addressed before these systems can be deployed on a large scale, especially in safety-critical scenarios. <br />
<br />
The seriousness of this threat has generated major interest in both the design and defense against them. In this paper, the authors identify a common technique employed by several recently proposed defenses and design a set of attacks that can be used to overcome them. The use of this technique, masking gradients, is so prevalent, that 7 out of the 8 defenses proposed in the ICLR 2018 conference employed them. The authors were able to circumvent the proposed defenses and successfully brought down the accuracy of their models to below 10%.<br />
Their reimplementation of each of the defenses and implementations of the attacks are available [https://github.com/anishathalye/obfuscated-gradients here].<br />
<br />
= Methodology =<br />
<br />
The paper assumes a lot of familiarity with adversarial attack literature. Section below briefly explains some key concepts.<br />
<br />
== Background ==<br />
<br />
==== Adversarial Images Mathematically ====<br />
Given an image <math>x</math> and a classifier <math>f(x)</math>, an adversarial image <math>x'</math> satisfies two properties:<br />
# <math>D(x,x') < \epsilon </math><br />
# <math>c(x') \neq c^*(x) </math><br />
<br />
Where <math>D</math> is some distance metric, <math>\epsilon </math> is a small constant, <math>c(x')</math> is the output ''class'' predicted by the model, and <math>c^*(x)</math> is the true class for input x. In words, the adversarial image is a small distance from the original image, but the classifier classifies it incorrectly.<br />
<br />
==== Adversarial Attacks Terminology ====<br />
#Adversarial attacks can be either '''black''' or '''white-box'''. In black box attacks, the attacker has access to the network output only, while white-box attackers have full access to the network, including its gradients, architecture and weights. This makes white-box attackers much more powerful. Given access to gradients, white-box attacks use back propagation to modify inputs (as opposed to the weights) with respect to the loss function.<br />
#In '''untargeted''' attacks, the objective is to ''maximize'' the loss of the true class, <math>x'=x \mathbf{+} \lambda(sign(\nabla_xL(x,c^*(x))))</math>. While in '''targeted''' attacks, the objective is to ''minimize loss for a target class'' <math>c^t(x)</math> that is different from the true class, <math>x'=x \mathbf{-} \epsilon(sign(\nabla_xL(x,c^t(x))))</math>. Here, <math>\nabla_xL()</math> is the gradient of the loss function with respect to the input, <math>\lambda</math> is a small gradient step and <math>sign()</math> is the sign of the gradient.<br />
# An attacker may be allowed to use a single step of back-propagation ('''single step''') or multiple ('''iterative''') steps. Iterative attackers can generate more powerful adversarial images. Typically, to bound iterative attackers a distance measure is used.<br />
<br />
In this paper the authors focus on the more difficult attacks; white-box iterative targeted and untargeted attacks.<br />
<br />
== Obfuscated Gradients ==<br />
As gradients are used in the generation of white-box adversarial images, many defense strategies have focused on methods that mask gradients. If gradients are masked, they cannot be followed to generate adversarial images. The authors argue against this general approach by showing that it can be easily circumvented. To emphasize their point, they looked at white-box defenses proposed in ICLR 2018. Three types of gradient masking techniques were found:<br />
<br />
# '''Shattered gradients''': Non-differentiable operations are introduced into the model, causing a gradient to be nonexistent or incorrect.<br />
# '''Stochastic gradients''': A stochastic process is added into the model at test time, causing the gradients to become randomized.<br />
# '''Vanishing Gradients ''': Very deep neural networks or those with recurrent connections are used. Because of the vanishing or exploding gradient problem common in these deep networks, effective gradients at the input are small and not very useful.<br />
<br />
== The Attacks ==<br />
To circumvent these gradient masking techniques, the authors propose:<br />
# '''Backward Pass Differentiable Approximation (BPDA)''': For defenses that introduce non-differentiable components, the authors replace it with an approximate function that is differentiable on the backward pass. In a white-box setting, the attacker has full access to any added non-linear transformation and can find its approximation. <br />
# '''Expectation over Transformation [Athalye, 2017]''': For defenses that add some form of test time randomness, the authors propose to use expectation over transformation technique in the backward pass. Rather than moving along the gradient every step, several gradients are sampled and the step is taken in the average direction. This can help with any stochastic misdirection from individual gradients. The technique is similar to using mini-batch gradient descent but applied in the construction of adversarial images.<br />
# '''Re-parameterize the exploration space''': For very deep networks that rely on vanishing or exploding gradients, the authors propose to re-parameterize and search over the range where the gradient does not explode/vanish.<br />
<br />
= Main Results =<br />
[[File:Summary_Table.png|600px|center]]<br />
<br />
The table above summarizes the results of their attacks. Attacks are mounted on the same dataset each defense targeted. If multiple datasets were used, attacks were performed on the largest one. Two different distance metrics (<math>\ell_{\infty}</math> and <math>\ell_{2}</math>) were used in the construction of adversarial images. Distance metrics specify how much an adversarial image can vary from an original image. For <math>\ell_{\infty}</math> adversarial images, each pixel is allowed to vary by a maximum amount. For example, <math>\ell_{\infty}=0.031</math> specifies that each pixel can vary by <math>256*0.031=8</math> from its original value. <math>\ell_{2}</math> distances specify the magnitude of the total distortion allowed over all pixels. For MNIST and CIFAR-10, untargeted adversarial images were constructed using the entire test set, while for Imagenet, 1000 test images were randomly selected and used to generate targeted adversarial images. <br />
<br />
Standard models were used in evaluating the accuracy of defense strategies under the attacks,<br />
# MNIST: 5-layer Convolutional Neural Network (99.3% top-1 accuracy)<br />
# CIFAR-10: Wide-Resnet (95.0% top-1 accuracy)<br />
# Imagenet: InceptionV3 (78.0% top-1 accuracy)<br />
<br />
The last column shows the accuracies each defense method achieved over the adversarial test set. Except for [Madry, 2018], all defense methods could only achieve an accuracy of <10%. Furthermore, the accuracy of most methods was 0%. The results of [Samangoui,2018] (double asterisk), show that their approach was not as successful. The authors claim that is is a result of implementation imperfections but theoretically the defense can be circumvented using their proposed method.<br />
<br />
==== The defense that worked - Adversarial Training [Madary, 2018] ====<br />
<br />
As a defense mechanism, [Madry, 2018] proposes training the neural networks with adversarial images. Although this approach is previously known [Szegedy, 2013] in their formulation, the problem is setup in a more systematic way using a min-max formulation:<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\theta^* = \arg \underset{\theta} \min \mathop{\mathbb{E_x}} \bigg{[} \underset{\delta \in [-\epsilon,\epsilon]}\max L(x+\delta,y;\theta)\bigg{]} <br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
where <math>\theta</math> is the parameter of the model, <math>\theta^*</math> is the optimal set of parameters and <math>\delta</math> is a small perturbation to the input image <math>x</math> and is bounded by <math>[-\epsilon,\epsilon]</math>. <br />
<br />
Train proceeds in the following way. For each clean input image, a distorted version of the image is found by maximizing the inner maximization problem for a fixed number of iterations. Gradient steps are constrained to fall within the allowed range (projected gradient descent). Next, the classification problem is solved by minimizing the outer minimization problem.<br />
<br />
This approach was shown to provide resilience to all types of adversarial attacks.<br />
<br />
==== How to check for Obfuscated Gradients ====<br />
For future defense proposals, it is recommended to avoid using masked gradients. To assist with this, the authors propose a set of conditions that can help identify if defense is relying on masked gradients:<br />
# If weaker one-step attacks are performing better than iterative attacks.<br />
# Black-box attacks can find stronger adversarial images compared with white-box attacks.<br />
# Unbounded iterative attacks do not reach 100% success.<br />
# If random brute force attempts are better than gradient based methods at finding adversarial images.<br />
<br />
==== Recommendations for future defense methods to encourage reproducibility ====<br />
<br />
= Detailed Results =<br />
<br />
== Non-obfuscated Gradients ==<br />
=== Adversarial Training ===<br />
'''Defence''': Proposed by Goodfellow et al. (2014b), adversarial training solves a min-max game through a conceptually simple process: train on adversarial examples until the model learns to classify them correctly. The authors study the adversarial training approach of Madry et al. (2018) which for a given <math>\epsilon</math>-ball solves <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:sb.png]]</div><br />
<br />
which the authors of original paper, solve by the inner maximization problem by generating adversarial examples using projected gradient descent. The author's experiments were not able to invalidate the claims of the paper. The authors also mention that this approach does not cause obfuscated gradients and the original authors’ evaluation of this defense performs all of the tests for characteristic behaviours of obfuscated gradients that the authors of this paper list. Also, the authors note that (1) adversarial retraining has been shown to be difficult at a large scale like ImageNet, and (2) training exclusively on <math> l_\infty</math> adversarial examples provides only limited robustness to adversarial examples under other distortion metrics.<br />
<br />
=== Cascade Adversarial Training ===<br />
'''Defence''': Cascade adversarial machine learning (Na et al., 2018) approach is similar to the adversarial training approach mentioned above. The main difference is that instead of using iterative methods to generate adversarial examples at each mini-batch, a model is first trained, generate adversarial examples with iterative methods on that model, add those examples to training set, and then train a new model on the augmented dataset. Again, as above, the authors were unable to reduce the claims made by the paper even though the claims are a bit weaker in this case with 16% accuracy with <math>\epsilon</math> = .015, compared to over 70% at the same perturbation budget with adversarial training as in Madry et al. (2018).<br />
<br />
== Gradient Shattering ==<br />
<br />
==== Thermometer Coding, [Buckman, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': Inspired by the observation that neural networks learn linear boundaries between classes [Goodfellow, 2014] , [Buckman, 2018] sought to break this linearity by explicitly adding a highly non-linear transform at the input of their model. The non-linear transformation they chose was quantizing inputs to binary vectors. The quantization performed was termed thermometer encoding,<br />
<br />
Given an image, for each pixel value <math>x_{i,j,c}</math>, if an <math>l</math> dimensional thermometer code, the <math>kth</math> bit is given by:<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\tau(x_{i,j,c})_k = \bigg{\{}\begin{array}{ll}<br />
1 \space if \thinspace x_{i,j,c} >k/l \\<br />
0 \space otherwise \\<br />
\end{array}<br />
\end{align}<br />
Here it is assumed <math>x_{i,j,c} \in [0, 1] </math> and <math>i, j, c</math> are the row, column and channel index of the pixel respectively. This encoding is essentially like one-hot encoding, except all the points (not just one) greater than the target value are set to 1. This quantization technique preserves pairwise ordering between pixels.<br />
<br />
On CIFAR-10, the model gave 50% accuracy against <math>\ell_\infty</math> adversarial images with <math>\epsilon=0.031</math> attacks.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors attack this model using there BPDA approach. Given the non-linear transformation performed in the forward pass, <math>\tau(x)</math>, they develop a differentiable counterpart,<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\hat{\tau}(x_{i,j,c})_k = \min ( \max (x_{i,j,c} - \frac{k}{l}), 1 )<br />
\end{align}<br />
and use it in place of <math>\tau(x)</math> on the backward pass. With their modifications they were able to bring the accuracy of the model down to 0%.<br />
<br />
==== Input Transformation, [Guo, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''':[Gou, 2018] investigated the effect of including different input transformation on the robustness to adversarial images. In particular, they found two techniques provided the greatest resistance: total variance minimization and image quilting. Total variance minimization is a technique that removes high frequency noise while preserving legitimate edges (good high frequency components). In image quilting, a large database of image patches from clean images is collected. At test time, input patches, that contain a lot of noise, are replaced with similar but clean patches from the data base.<br />
<br />
Both techniques, removed perturbations from adversarial images which provides some robustness to adversarial attacks. Moreover, both approaches are non-differentiable which makes constructing white-box adversarial images difficult. Moreover, the techniques also include test time randomness as the modifications make are input dependent. The best model achieved 60% accuracy on adversarial images with <math>l_{2}=0.05</math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors used the BPDA attack where the input transformations were replaced by an identity function. They were able to bring the accuracy of the model down to 0% under the same type of adversarial attacks.<br />
<br />
==== Local Intrinsic Dimensionality, [Ma, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''' Local intrinsic dimensionality (LID) is a distance-based metric that measures the similarity between points in a high dimensional space. Given a set of points, let the distance between sample <math>x</math> and its <math>ith</math> neighbor be <math>r_i(x)</math>, then the LID under the choose distance metric is given by,<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
LID(x) = - \bigg{(} \frac{1}{k}\sum^k_{i=1}log \frac{r_i(x)}{r_k(x)} \bigg{)}^{-1}<br />
\end{align}<br />
where k is the number of nearest neighbors considered, <math>r_k(x)</math> is the maximum distance to any of the neighbors in the set k. <br />
<br />
First, <math>L_2</math> distances for all training and adversarial images. Next, the LID scores for each train and adversarial images were calculated. It was found that LID scores for adversarial images were significantly larger than those of clean images. Base on these results, the a separate classifier was created that can be used to detect adversarial inputs. [Ma, 2018] claim that this is not a defense method, but a method to study the properties of adversarial images.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': Instead of attacking this method, the authors show that this method is not able to detect, and is therefore venerable to, attacks of the [Carlini and Wagner, 2017a] variety.<br />
<br />
== Stochastic Gradients ==<br />
<br />
==== Stochastic Activation Pruning, [Dhillon, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Dhillon, 2018] use test time randomness in their model to guard against adversarial attacks. Within a layer, the activities of component nodes are randomly dropped with a probability proportional to its absolute value. The rest of the activation are scaled up to preserve accuracies. This is akin to test time drop-out. This technique was found to drop accuracy slightly on clean images, but improved performance on adversarial images.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors used the expectation over transformation attack to get useful gradients out of the model. With their attack they were able to reduce the accuracy of this method down to 0% on CIFAR-10.<br />
<br />
==== Mitigation Through Randomization, [Xie, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Xie, 2018] Add a randomization layer to their model to help defend against adversarial attacks. For an input image of size [299,299], first the image is randomly re-scaled to <math>r \in [299,331]</math>. Next the image is zero-padded to fix the dimension of the modified input. This modified input is then fed into a regular classifier. The authors claim that is strategy can provide an accuracy of 32.8% against ensemble attack patterns (fixed distortions, but many of them which are picked randomly). Because of the introduced randomness, the authors claim the model builds some robustness to other types of attacks as well.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The EOT method was used to build adversarial images to attack this model. With their attack, the authors were able to bring the accuracy of this model down to 0% using <math>L_{\infty}(\epsilon=0.031)</math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
== Vanishing and Exploding Gradients ==<br />
<br />
==== Pixel Defend, [Song, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Song, 2018] argues that adversarial images lie in low probability regions of the data manifold. Therefore, one way to handle adversarial attacks is to project them back in the high probability regions before feeding them into a classifier. They chose to do this by using a generative model (pixelCNN) in a denoising capacity. A PixelCNN model directly estimates the conditional probability of generating an image pixel by pixel [Van den Oord, 2016],<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
p(\mathbf{x}= \prod_{i=1}^{n^2} p(x_i|x_0,x_1 ....x_{i-1}))<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
The reason for choosing this model is the long iterative process of generation. In the backward pass, following the gradient all the way to the input would not be possible because of the vanishing/exploding gradient<br />
problem of deep networks. The proposed model was able to obtain an accuracy of 46% on CIFAR-10 images with <math>l_{\infty} (\epsilon=0.031) </math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The model was attacked using the BPDA technique where back-propagating though the pixelCNN was replaced with an identity function. With this apporach, the authors were able to bring down the accuracy to 9% under the same kind of perturbations.<br />
<br />
==== Defense-GAN, [Samangouei, 2018] ====<br />
<br />
= Conclusion =<br />
In this paper, it was found that gradient masking is a common technique used by many defense proposal that claim to be robust against a very difficult class of adversarial attacks; white-box, iterative attacks. However, the authors found that they can be easily circumvented. Three attack methods are presented that were able to defeat 7 out of the 8 defense proposal accepted in the 2018 ICLR conference for these types of attacks.<br />
<br />
= Critique =<br />
# The third attack method, reparameterization of the input distortion search space was presented very briefly and at a very high level. Moreover, the one defense proposal they chose to use it against, [Samangouei, 2018] prove to be resilient against the attack. The authors had to resort to one of their other methods to circumvent the defense.<br />
# The BPDA and reparameterization attacks require intrinsic knowledge of the networks. This information is not likely to be available to external users of a network. Most likely, the use-case for these attacks will be in-house to develop more robust networks. This also means that it is still possible to guard against adversarial attack using gradient masking techniques, provided the details of the network are kept secret.<br />
# The BPDA algorithm requires replacing a non-linear part of the model with a differentiable approximation. Since different networks are likely to use different transformations, this technique is not plug-and-play. For each network, the attack needs to be manually constructed.<br />
<br />
= Other Sources =<br />
= References =<br />
#'''[Madry, 2018]''' Madry, A., Makelov, A., Schmidt, L., Tsipras, D. and Vladu, A., 2017. Towards deep learning models resistant to adversarial attacks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.06083.<br />
#'''[Buckman, 2018]''' Buckman, J., Roy, A., Raffel, C. and Goodfellow, I., 2018. Thermometer encoding: One hot way to resist adversarial examples.<br />
#'''[Guo, 2018]''' Guo, C., Rana, M., Cisse, M. and van der Maaten, L., 2017. Countering adversarial images using input transformations. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.00117.<br />
#'''[Xie, 2018]''' Xie, C., Wang, J., Zhang, Z., Ren, Z. and Yuille, A., 2017. Mitigating adversarial effects through randomization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.01991.<br />
#'''[song, 2018]''' Song, Y., Kim, T., Nowozin, S., Ermon, S. and Kushman, N., 2017. Pixeldefend: Leveraging generative models to understand and defend against adversarial examples. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.10766.<br />
#'''[Szegedy, 2013]''' Szegedy, C., Zaremba, W., Sutskever, I., Bruna, J., Erhan, D., Goodfellow, I. and Fergus, R., 2013. Intriguing properties of neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.6199.<br />
#'''[Samangouei, 2018]''' Samangouei, P., Kabkab, M. and Chellappa, R., 2018. Defense-GAN: Protecting classifiers against adversarial attacks using generative models. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.06605.<br />
#'''[van den Oord, 2016]''' van den Oord, A., Kalchbrenner, N., Espeholt, L., Vinyals, O. and Graves, A., 2016. Conditional image generation with pixelcnn decoders. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 4790-4798).<br />
#'''[Athalye, 2017]''' Athalye, A. and Sutskever, I., 2017. Synthesizing robust adversarial examples. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07397.<br />
#'''[Ma, 2018]''' Ma, Xingjun, Bo Li, Yisen Wang, Sarah M. Erfani, Sudanthi Wijewickrema, Michael E. Houle, Grant Schoenebeck, Dawn Song, and James Bailey. "Characterizing adversarial subspaces using local intrinsic dimensionality." arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.02613 (2018).</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Obfuscated_Gradients_Give_a_False_Sense_of_Security_Circumventing_Defenses_to_Adversarial_Examples&diff=39759Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples2018-11-18T09:20:16Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Adversarial Training */</p>
<hr />
<div>= Introduction =<br />
Over the past few years, neural network models have been the source of major breakthroughs in a variety of computer vision problems. However, these networks have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. In these attacks, small humanly-imperceptible changes are made to images (that are correctly classified) which causes these models to misclassify with high confidence. These attacks pose a major threat that needs to be addressed before these systems can be deployed on a large scale, especially in safety-critical scenarios. <br />
<br />
The seriousness of this threat has generated major interest in both the design and defense against them. In this paper, the authors identify a common technique employed by several recently proposed defenses and design a set of attacks that can be used to overcome them. The use of this technique, masking gradients, is so prevalent, that 7 out of the 8 defenses proposed in the ICLR 2018 conference employed them. The authors were able to circumvent the proposed defenses and successfully brought down the accuracy of their models to below 10%.<br />
Their reimplementation of each of the defenses and implementations of the attacks are available [https://github.com/anishathalye/obfuscated-gradients here].<br />
<br />
= Methodology =<br />
<br />
The paper assumes a lot of familiarity with adversarial attack literature. Section below briefly explains some key concepts.<br />
<br />
== Background ==<br />
<br />
==== Adversarial Images Mathematically ====<br />
Given an image <math>x</math> and a classifier <math>f(x)</math>, an adversarial image <math>x'</math> satisfies two properties:<br />
# <math>D(x,x') < \epsilon </math><br />
# <math>c(x') \neq c^*(x) </math><br />
<br />
Where <math>D</math> is some distance metric, <math>\epsilon </math> is a small constant, <math>c(x')</math> is the output ''class'' predicted by the model, and <math>c^*(x)</math> is the true class for input x. In words, the adversarial image is a small distance from the original image, but the classifier classifies it incorrectly.<br />
<br />
==== Adversarial Attacks Terminology ====<br />
#Adversarial attacks can be either '''black''' or '''white-box'''. In black box attacks, the attacker has access to the network output only, while white-box attackers have full access to the network, including its gradients, architecture and weights. This makes white-box attackers much more powerful. Given access to gradients, white-box attacks use back propagation to modify inputs (as opposed to the weights) with respect to the loss function.<br />
#In '''untargeted''' attacks, the objective is to ''maximize'' the loss of the true class, <math>x'=x \mathbf{+} \lambda(sign(\nabla_xL(x,c^*(x))))</math>. While in '''targeted''' attacks, the objective is to ''minimize loss for a target class'' <math>c^t(x)</math> that is different from the true class, <math>x'=x \mathbf{-} \epsilon(sign(\nabla_xL(x,c^t(x))))</math>. Here, <math>\nabla_xL()</math> is the gradient of the loss function with respect to the input, <math>\lambda</math> is a small gradient step and <math>sign()</math> is the sign of the gradient.<br />
# An attacker may be allowed to use a single step of back-propagation ('''single step''') or multiple ('''iterative''') steps. Iterative attackers can generate more powerful adversarial images. Typically, to bound iterative attackers a distance measure is used.<br />
<br />
In this paper the authors focus on the more difficult attacks; white-box iterative targeted and untargeted attacks.<br />
<br />
== Obfuscated Gradients ==<br />
As gradients are used in the generation of white-box adversarial images, many defense strategies have focused on methods that mask gradients. If gradients are masked, they cannot be followed to generate adversarial images. The authors argue against this general approach by showing that it can be easily circumvented. To emphasize their point, they looked at white-box defenses proposed in ICLR 2018. Three types of gradient masking techniques were found:<br />
<br />
# '''Shattered gradients''': Non-differentiable operations are introduced into the model, causing a gradient to be nonexistent or incorrect.<br />
# '''Stochastic gradients''': A stochastic process is added into the model at test time, causing the gradients to become randomized.<br />
# '''Vanishing Gradients ''': Very deep neural networks or those with recurrent connections are used. Because of the vanishing or exploding gradient problem common in these deep networks, effective gradients at the input are small and not very useful.<br />
<br />
== The Attacks ==<br />
To circumvent these gradient masking techniques, the authors propose:<br />
# '''Backward Pass Differentiable Approximation (BPDA)''': For defenses that introduce non-differentiable components, the authors replace it with an approximate function that is differentiable on the backward pass. In a white-box setting, the attacker has full access to any added non-linear transformation and can find its approximation. <br />
# '''Expectation over Transformation [Athalye, 2017]''': For defenses that add some form of test time randomness, the authors propose to use expectation over transformation technique in the backward pass. Rather than moving along the gradient every step, several gradients are sampled and the step is taken in the average direction. This can help with any stochastic misdirection from individual gradients. The technique is similar to using mini-batch gradient descent but applied in the construction of adversarial images.<br />
# '''Re-parameterize the exploration space''': For very deep networks that rely on vanishing or exploding gradients, the authors propose to re-parameterize and search over the range where the gradient does not explode/vanish.<br />
<br />
= Main Results =<br />
[[File:Summary_Table.png|600px|center]]<br />
<br />
The table above summarizes the results of their attacks. Attacks are mounted on the same dataset each defense targeted. If multiple datasets were used, attacks were performed on the largest one. Two different distance metrics (<math>\ell_{\infty}</math> and <math>\ell_{2}</math>) were used in the construction of adversarial images. Distance metrics specify how much an adversarial image can vary from an original image. For <math>\ell_{\infty}</math> adversarial images, each pixel is allowed to vary by a maximum amount. For example, <math>\ell_{\infty}=0.031</math> specifies that each pixel can vary by <math>256*0.031=8</math> from its original value. <math>\ell_{2}</math> distances specify the magnitude of the total distortion allowed over all pixels. For MNIST and CIFAR-10, untargeted adversarial images were constructed using the entire test set, while for Imagenet, 1000 test images were randomly selected and used to generate targeted adversarial images. <br />
<br />
Standard models were used in evaluating the accuracy of defense strategies under the attacks,<br />
# MNIST: 5-layer Convolutional Neural Network (99.3% top-1 accuracy)<br />
# CIFAR-10: Wide-Resnet (95.0% top-1 accuracy)<br />
# Imagenet: InceptionV3 (78.0% top-1 accuracy)<br />
<br />
The last column shows the accuracies each defense method achieved over the adversarial test set. Except for [Madry, 2018], all defense methods could only achieve an accuracy of <10%. Furthermore, the accuracy of most methods was 0%. The results of [Samangoui,2018] (double asterisk), show that their approach was not as successful. The authors claim that is is a result of implementation imperfections but theoretically the defense can be circumvented using their proposed method.<br />
<br />
==== The defense that worked - Adversarial Training [Madary, 2018] ====<br />
<br />
As a defense mechanism, [Madry, 2018] proposes training the neural networks with adversarial images. Although this approach is previously known [Szegedy, 2013] in their formulation, the problem is setup in a more systematic way using a min-max formulation:<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\theta^* = \arg \underset{\theta} \min \mathop{\mathbb{E_x}} \bigg{[} \underset{\delta \in [-\epsilon,\epsilon]}\max L(x+\delta,y;\theta)\bigg{]} <br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
where <math>\theta</math> is the parameter of the model, <math>\theta^*</math> is the optimal set of parameters and <math>\delta</math> is a small perturbation to the input image <math>x</math> and is bounded by <math>[-\epsilon,\epsilon]</math>. <br />
<br />
Train proceeds in the following way. For each clean input image, a distorted version of the image is found by maximizing the inner maximization problem for a fixed number of iterations. Gradient steps are constrained to fall within the allowed range (projected gradient descent). Next, the classification problem is solved by minimizing the outer minimization problem.<br />
<br />
This approach was shown to provide resilience to all types of adversarial attacks.<br />
<br />
==== How to check for Obfuscated Gradients ====<br />
For future defense proposals, it is recommended to avoid using masked gradients. To assist with this, the authors propose a set of conditions that can help identify if defense is relying on masked gradients:<br />
# If weaker one-step attacks are performing better than iterative attacks.<br />
# Black-box attacks can find stronger adversarial images compared with white-box attacks.<br />
# Unbounded iterative attacks do not reach 100% success.<br />
# If random brute force attempts are better than gradient based methods at finding adversarial images.<br />
<br />
==== Recommendations for future defense methods to encourage reproducibility ====<br />
<br />
= Detailed Results =<br />
<br />
== Non-obfuscated Gradients ==<br />
=== Adversarial Training ===<br />
'''Defence''': Proposed by Goodfellow et al. (2014b), adversarial training solves a min-max game through a conceptually simple process: train on adversarial examples until the model learns to classify them correctly. The authors study the adversarial training approach of Madry et al. (2018) which for a given <math>\epsilon</math>-ball solves <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:sb.png]]</div><br />
<br />
which the authors of original paper, solve by the inner maximization problem by generating adversarial examples using projected gradient descent. The author's experiments were not able to invalidate the claims of the paper. The authors also mention that this approach does not cause obfuscated gradients and the original authors’ evaluation of this defense performs all of the tests for characteristic behaviours of obfuscated gradients that the authors of this paper list. Also, the authors note that (1) adversarial retraining has been shown to be difficult at a large scale like ImageNet, and (2) training exclusively on <math> l_\infty</math> adversarial examples provides only limited robustness to adversarial examples under other distortion metrics.<br />
<br />
=== Cascade Adversarial Training ===<br />
'''Defence''': Cascade adversarial machine learning (Na et al., 2018) approach is similar to the adversarial training approach mentioned above. The main difference is that instead of using iterative methods to generate adversarial examples at each mini-batch, a model is first trained, generate adversarial examples with iterative methods on that model, add those examples to training set, and then train a new model on the augmented dataset. Again, as above, the authors were unable to reduce the claims made by the paper even though the claims are a bit weaker in this case with 16% accuracy with � = .015, compared to over 70% at the same perturbation budget with adversarial training as in Madry et al. (2018).<br />
<br />
== Gradient Shattering ==<br />
<br />
==== Thermometer Coding, [Buckman, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': Inspired by the observation that neural networks learn linear boundaries between classes [Goodfellow, 2014] , [Buckman, 2018] sought to break this linearity by explicitly adding a highly non-linear transform at the input of their model. The non-linear transformation they chose was quantizing inputs to binary vectors. The quantization performed was termed thermometer encoding,<br />
<br />
Given an image, for each pixel value <math>x_{i,j,c}</math>, if an <math>l</math> dimensional thermometer code, the <math>kth</math> bit is given by:<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\tau(x_{i,j,c})_k = \bigg{\{}\begin{array}{ll}<br />
1 \space if \thinspace x_{i,j,c} >k/l \\<br />
0 \space otherwise \\<br />
\end{array}<br />
\end{align}<br />
Here it is assumed <math>x_{i,j,c} \in [0, 1] </math> and <math>i, j, c</math> are the row, column and channel index of the pixel respectively. This encoding is essentially like one-hot encoding, except all the points (not just one) greater than the target value are set to 1. This quantization technique preserves pairwise ordering between pixels.<br />
<br />
On CIFAR-10, the model gave 50% accuracy against <math>\ell_\infty</math> adversarial images with <math>\epsilon=0.031</math> attacks.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors attack this model using there BPDA approach. Given the non-linear transformation performed in the forward pass, <math>\tau(x)</math>, they develop a differentiable counterpart,<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\hat{\tau}(x_{i,j,c})_k = \min ( \max (x_{i,j,c} - \frac{k}{l}), 1 )<br />
\end{align}<br />
and use it in place of <math>\tau(x)</math> on the backward pass. With their modifications they were able to bring the accuracy of the model down to 0%.<br />
<br />
==== Input Transformation, [Guo, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''':[Gou, 2018] investigated the effect of including different input transformation on the robustness to adversarial images. In particular, they found two techniques provided the greatest resistance: total variance minimization and image quilting. Total variance minimization is a technique that removes high frequency noise while preserving legitimate edges (good high frequency components). In image quilting, a large database of image patches from clean images is collected. At test time, input patches, that contain a lot of noise, are replaced with similar but clean patches from the data base.<br />
<br />
Both techniques, removed perturbations from adversarial images which provides some robustness to adversarial attacks. Moreover, both approaches are non-differentiable which makes constructing white-box adversarial images difficult. Moreover, the techniques also include test time randomness as the modifications make are input dependent. The best model achieved 60% accuracy on adversarial images with <math>l_{2}=0.05</math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors used the BPDA attack where the input transformations were replaced by an identity function. They were able to bring the accuracy of the model down to 0% under the same type of adversarial attacks.<br />
<br />
==== Local Intrinsic Dimensionality, [Ma, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''' Local intrinsic dimensionality (LID) is a distance-based metric that measures the similarity between points in a high dimensional space. Given a set of points, let the distance between sample <math>x</math> and its <math>ith</math> neighbor be <math>r_i(x)</math>, then the LID under the choose distance metric is given by,<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
LID(x) = - \bigg{(} \frac{1}{k}\sum^k_{i=1}log \frac{r_i(x)}{r_k(x)} \bigg{)}^{-1}<br />
\end{align}<br />
where k is the number of nearest neighbors considered, <math>r_k(x)</math> is the maximum distance to any of the neighbors in the set k. <br />
<br />
First, <math>L_2</math> distances for all training and adversarial images. Next, the LID scores for each train and adversarial images were calculated. It was found that LID scores for adversarial images were significantly larger than those of clean images. Base on these results, the a separate classifier was created that can be used to detect adversarial inputs. [Ma, 2018] claim that this is not a defense method, but a method to study the properties of adversarial images.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': Instead of attacking this method, the authors show that this method is not able to detect, and is therefore venerable to, attacks of the [Carlini and Wagner, 2017a] variety.<br />
<br />
== Stochastic Gradients ==<br />
<br />
==== Stochastic Activation Pruning, [Dhillon, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Dhillon, 2018] use test time randomness in their model to guard against adversarial attacks. Within a layer, the activities of component nodes are randomly dropped with a probability proportional to its absolute value. The rest of the activation are scaled up to preserve accuracies. This is akin to test time drop-out. This technique was found to drop accuracy slightly on clean images, but improved performance on adversarial images.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors used the expectation over transformation attack to get useful gradients out of the model. With their attack they were able to reduce the accuracy of this method down to 0% on CIFAR-10.<br />
<br />
==== Mitigation Through Randomization, [Xie, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Xie, 2018] Add a randomization layer to their model to help defend against adversarial attacks. For an input image of size [299,299], first the image is randomly re-scaled to <math>r \in [299,331]</math>. Next the image is zero-padded to fix the dimension of the modified input. This modified input is then fed into a regular classifier. The authors claim that is strategy can provide an accuracy of 32.8% against ensemble attack patterns (fixed distortions, but many of them which are picked randomly). Because of the introduced randomness, the authors claim the model builds some robustness to other types of attacks as well.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The EOT method was used to build adversarial images to attack this model. With their attack, the authors were able to bring the accuracy of this model down to 0% using <math>L_{\infty}(\epsilon=0.031)</math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
== Vanishing and Exploding Gradients ==<br />
<br />
==== Pixel Defend, [Song, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Song, 2018] argues that adversarial images lie in low probability regions of the data manifold. Therefore, one way to handle adversarial attacks is to project them back in the high probability regions before feeding them into a classifier. They chose to do this by using a generative model (pixelCNN) in a denoising capacity. A PixelCNN model directly estimates the conditional probability of generating an image pixel by pixel [Van den Oord, 2016],<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
p(\mathbf{x}= \prod_{i=1}^{n^2} p(x_i|x_0,x_1 ....x_{i-1}))<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
The reason for choosing this model is the long iterative process of generation. In the backward pass, following the gradient all the way to the input would not be possible because of the vanishing/exploding gradient<br />
problem of deep networks. The proposed model was able to obtain an accuracy of 46% on CIFAR-10 images with <math>l_{\infty} (\epsilon=0.031) </math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The model was attacked using the BPDA technique where back-propagating though the pixelCNN was replaced with an identity function. With this apporach, the authors were able to bring down the accuracy to 9% under the same kind of perturbations.<br />
<br />
==== Defense-GAN, [Samangouei, 2018] ====<br />
<br />
= Conclusion =<br />
In this paper, it was found that gradient masking is a common technique used by many defense proposal that claim to be robust against a very difficult class of adversarial attacks; white-box, iterative attacks. However, the authors found that they can be easily circumvented. Three attack methods are presented that were able to defeat 7 out of the 8 defense proposal accepted in the 2018 ICLR conference for these types of attacks.<br />
<br />
= Critique =<br />
# The third attack method, reparameterization of the input distortion search space was presented very briefly and at a very high level. Moreover, the one defense proposal they chose to use it against, [Samangouei, 2018] prove to be resilient against the attack. The authors had to resort to one of their other methods to circumvent the defense.<br />
# The BPDA and reparameterization attacks require intrinsic knowledge of the networks. This information is not likely to be available to external users of a network. Most likely, the use-case for these attacks will be in-house to develop more robust networks. This also means that it is still possible to guard against adversarial attack using gradient masking techniques, provided the details of the network are kept secret.<br />
# The BPDA algorithm requires replacing a non-linear part of the model with a differentiable approximation. Since different networks are likely to use different transformations, this technique is not plug-and-play. For each network, the attack needs to be manually constructed.<br />
<br />
= Other Sources =<br />
= References =<br />
#'''[Madry, 2018]''' Madry, A., Makelov, A., Schmidt, L., Tsipras, D. and Vladu, A., 2017. Towards deep learning models resistant to adversarial attacks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.06083.<br />
#'''[Buckman, 2018]''' Buckman, J., Roy, A., Raffel, C. and Goodfellow, I., 2018. Thermometer encoding: One hot way to resist adversarial examples.<br />
#'''[Guo, 2018]''' Guo, C., Rana, M., Cisse, M. and van der Maaten, L., 2017. Countering adversarial images using input transformations. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.00117.<br />
#'''[Xie, 2018]''' Xie, C., Wang, J., Zhang, Z., Ren, Z. and Yuille, A., 2017. Mitigating adversarial effects through randomization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.01991.<br />
#'''[song, 2018]''' Song, Y., Kim, T., Nowozin, S., Ermon, S. and Kushman, N., 2017. Pixeldefend: Leveraging generative models to understand and defend against adversarial examples. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.10766.<br />
#'''[Szegedy, 2013]''' Szegedy, C., Zaremba, W., Sutskever, I., Bruna, J., Erhan, D., Goodfellow, I. and Fergus, R., 2013. Intriguing properties of neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.6199.<br />
#'''[Samangouei, 2018]''' Samangouei, P., Kabkab, M. and Chellappa, R., 2018. Defense-GAN: Protecting classifiers against adversarial attacks using generative models. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.06605.<br />
#'''[van den Oord, 2016]''' van den Oord, A., Kalchbrenner, N., Espeholt, L., Vinyals, O. and Graves, A., 2016. Conditional image generation with pixelcnn decoders. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 4790-4798).<br />
#'''[Athalye, 2017]''' Athalye, A. and Sutskever, I., 2017. Synthesizing robust adversarial examples. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07397.<br />
#'''[Ma, 2018]''' Ma, Xingjun, Bo Li, Yisen Wang, Sarah M. Erfani, Sudanthi Wijewickrema, Michael E. Houle, Grant Schoenebeck, Dawn Song, and James Bailey. "Characterizing adversarial subspaces using local intrinsic dimensionality." arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.02613 (2018).</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Obfuscated_Gradients_Give_a_False_Sense_of_Security_Circumventing_Defenses_to_Adversarial_Examples&diff=39758Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples2018-11-18T09:18:17Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div>= Introduction =<br />
Over the past few years, neural network models have been the source of major breakthroughs in a variety of computer vision problems. However, these networks have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. In these attacks, small humanly-imperceptible changes are made to images (that are correctly classified) which causes these models to misclassify with high confidence. These attacks pose a major threat that needs to be addressed before these systems can be deployed on a large scale, especially in safety-critical scenarios. <br />
<br />
The seriousness of this threat has generated major interest in both the design and defense against them. In this paper, the authors identify a common technique employed by several recently proposed defenses and design a set of attacks that can be used to overcome them. The use of this technique, masking gradients, is so prevalent, that 7 out of the 8 defenses proposed in the ICLR 2018 conference employed them. The authors were able to circumvent the proposed defenses and successfully brought down the accuracy of their models to below 10%.<br />
Their reimplementation of each of the defenses and implementations of the attacks are available [https://github.com/anishathalye/obfuscated-gradients here].<br />
<br />
= Methodology =<br />
<br />
The paper assumes a lot of familiarity with adversarial attack literature. Section below briefly explains some key concepts.<br />
<br />
== Background ==<br />
<br />
==== Adversarial Images Mathematically ====<br />
Given an image <math>x</math> and a classifier <math>f(x)</math>, an adversarial image <math>x'</math> satisfies two properties:<br />
# <math>D(x,x') < \epsilon </math><br />
# <math>c(x') \neq c^*(x) </math><br />
<br />
Where <math>D</math> is some distance metric, <math>\epsilon </math> is a small constant, <math>c(x')</math> is the output ''class'' predicted by the model, and <math>c^*(x)</math> is the true class for input x. In words, the adversarial image is a small distance from the original image, but the classifier classifies it incorrectly.<br />
<br />
==== Adversarial Attacks Terminology ====<br />
#Adversarial attacks can be either '''black''' or '''white-box'''. In black box attacks, the attacker has access to the network output only, while white-box attackers have full access to the network, including its gradients, architecture and weights. This makes white-box attackers much more powerful. Given access to gradients, white-box attacks use back propagation to modify inputs (as opposed to the weights) with respect to the loss function.<br />
#In '''untargeted''' attacks, the objective is to ''maximize'' the loss of the true class, <math>x'=x \mathbf{+} \lambda(sign(\nabla_xL(x,c^*(x))))</math>. While in '''targeted''' attacks, the objective is to ''minimize loss for a target class'' <math>c^t(x)</math> that is different from the true class, <math>x'=x \mathbf{-} \epsilon(sign(\nabla_xL(x,c^t(x))))</math>. Here, <math>\nabla_xL()</math> is the gradient of the loss function with respect to the input, <math>\lambda</math> is a small gradient step and <math>sign()</math> is the sign of the gradient.<br />
# An attacker may be allowed to use a single step of back-propagation ('''single step''') or multiple ('''iterative''') steps. Iterative attackers can generate more powerful adversarial images. Typically, to bound iterative attackers a distance measure is used.<br />
<br />
In this paper the authors focus on the more difficult attacks; white-box iterative targeted and untargeted attacks.<br />
<br />
== Obfuscated Gradients ==<br />
As gradients are used in the generation of white-box adversarial images, many defense strategies have focused on methods that mask gradients. If gradients are masked, they cannot be followed to generate adversarial images. The authors argue against this general approach by showing that it can be easily circumvented. To emphasize their point, they looked at white-box defenses proposed in ICLR 2018. Three types of gradient masking techniques were found:<br />
<br />
# '''Shattered gradients''': Non-differentiable operations are introduced into the model, causing a gradient to be nonexistent or incorrect.<br />
# '''Stochastic gradients''': A stochastic process is added into the model at test time, causing the gradients to become randomized.<br />
# '''Vanishing Gradients ''': Very deep neural networks or those with recurrent connections are used. Because of the vanishing or exploding gradient problem common in these deep networks, effective gradients at the input are small and not very useful.<br />
<br />
== The Attacks ==<br />
To circumvent these gradient masking techniques, the authors propose:<br />
# '''Backward Pass Differentiable Approximation (BPDA)''': For defenses that introduce non-differentiable components, the authors replace it with an approximate function that is differentiable on the backward pass. In a white-box setting, the attacker has full access to any added non-linear transformation and can find its approximation. <br />
# '''Expectation over Transformation [Athalye, 2017]''': For defenses that add some form of test time randomness, the authors propose to use expectation over transformation technique in the backward pass. Rather than moving along the gradient every step, several gradients are sampled and the step is taken in the average direction. This can help with any stochastic misdirection from individual gradients. The technique is similar to using mini-batch gradient descent but applied in the construction of adversarial images.<br />
# '''Re-parameterize the exploration space''': For very deep networks that rely on vanishing or exploding gradients, the authors propose to re-parameterize and search over the range where the gradient does not explode/vanish.<br />
<br />
= Main Results =<br />
[[File:Summary_Table.png|600px|center]]<br />
<br />
The table above summarizes the results of their attacks. Attacks are mounted on the same dataset each defense targeted. If multiple datasets were used, attacks were performed on the largest one. Two different distance metrics (<math>\ell_{\infty}</math> and <math>\ell_{2}</math>) were used in the construction of adversarial images. Distance metrics specify how much an adversarial image can vary from an original image. For <math>\ell_{\infty}</math> adversarial images, each pixel is allowed to vary by a maximum amount. For example, <math>\ell_{\infty}=0.031</math> specifies that each pixel can vary by <math>256*0.031=8</math> from its original value. <math>\ell_{2}</math> distances specify the magnitude of the total distortion allowed over all pixels. For MNIST and CIFAR-10, untargeted adversarial images were constructed using the entire test set, while for Imagenet, 1000 test images were randomly selected and used to generate targeted adversarial images. <br />
<br />
Standard models were used in evaluating the accuracy of defense strategies under the attacks,<br />
# MNIST: 5-layer Convolutional Neural Network (99.3% top-1 accuracy)<br />
# CIFAR-10: Wide-Resnet (95.0% top-1 accuracy)<br />
# Imagenet: InceptionV3 (78.0% top-1 accuracy)<br />
<br />
The last column shows the accuracies each defense method achieved over the adversarial test set. Except for [Madry, 2018], all defense methods could only achieve an accuracy of <10%. Furthermore, the accuracy of most methods was 0%. The results of [Samangoui,2018] (double asterisk), show that their approach was not as successful. The authors claim that is is a result of implementation imperfections but theoretically the defense can be circumvented using their proposed method.<br />
<br />
==== The defense that worked - Adversarial Training [Madary, 2018] ====<br />
<br />
As a defense mechanism, [Madry, 2018] proposes training the neural networks with adversarial images. Although this approach is previously known [Szegedy, 2013] in their formulation, the problem is setup in a more systematic way using a min-max formulation:<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\theta^* = \arg \underset{\theta} \min \mathop{\mathbb{E_x}} \bigg{[} \underset{\delta \in [-\epsilon,\epsilon]}\max L(x+\delta,y;\theta)\bigg{]} <br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
where <math>\theta</math> is the parameter of the model, <math>\theta^*</math> is the optimal set of parameters and <math>\delta</math> is a small perturbation to the input image <math>x</math> and is bounded by <math>[-\epsilon,\epsilon]</math>. <br />
<br />
Train proceeds in the following way. For each clean input image, a distorted version of the image is found by maximizing the inner maximization problem for a fixed number of iterations. Gradient steps are constrained to fall within the allowed range (projected gradient descent). Next, the classification problem is solved by minimizing the outer minimization problem.<br />
<br />
This approach was shown to provide resilience to all types of adversarial attacks.<br />
<br />
==== How to check for Obfuscated Gradients ====<br />
For future defense proposals, it is recommended to avoid using masked gradients. To assist with this, the authors propose a set of conditions that can help identify if defense is relying on masked gradients:<br />
# If weaker one-step attacks are performing better than iterative attacks.<br />
# Black-box attacks can find stronger adversarial images compared with white-box attacks.<br />
# Unbounded iterative attacks do not reach 100% success.<br />
# If random brute force attempts are better than gradient based methods at finding adversarial images.<br />
<br />
==== Recommendations for future defense methods to encourage reproducibility ====<br />
<br />
= Detailed Results =<br />
<br />
== Non-obfuscated Gradients ==<br />
=== Adversarial Training ===<br />
'''Defence''': Proposed by Goodfellow et al. (2014b), adversarial training solves a min-max game through a conceptually simple process: train on adversarial examples until the model learns to classify them correctly. The authors study the adversarial training approach of Madry et al. (2018) which for a given <math>\epsilon</math>-ball solves <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:sb.png]]</div><br />
<br />
which the authors of original paper, solve by the inner maximization problem by generating adversarial examples using projected gradient descent. The author's experiments were not able to invalidate the claims of the paper. The authors also mention that this approach does not cause obfuscated gradients and the original authors’ evaluation of this defense performs all of the tests for characteristic behaviours of obfuscated gradients that the authors of this paper list. Also, the authors note that (1) adversarial retraining has been shown to be difficult at a large scale like ImageNet, and (2) training exclusively on <math> l_/inf</math> adversarial examples provides only limited robustness to adversarial examples under other distortion metrics.<br />
<br />
=== Cascade Adversarial Training ===<br />
'''Defence''': Cascade adversarial machine learning (Na et al., 2018) approach is similar to the adversarial training approach mentioned above. The main difference is that instead of using iterative methods to generate adversarial examples at each mini-batch, a model is first trained, generate adversarial examples with iterative methods on that model, add those examples to training set, and then train a new model on the augmented dataset. Again, as above, the authors were unable to reduce the claims made by the paper even though the claims are a bit weaker in this case with 16% accuracy with � = .015, compared to over 70% at the same perturbation budget with adversarial training as in Madry et al. (2018).<br />
<br />
== Gradient Shattering ==<br />
<br />
==== Thermometer Coding, [Buckman, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': Inspired by the observation that neural networks learn linear boundaries between classes [Goodfellow, 2014] , [Buckman, 2018] sought to break this linearity by explicitly adding a highly non-linear transform at the input of their model. The non-linear transformation they chose was quantizing inputs to binary vectors. The quantization performed was termed thermometer encoding,<br />
<br />
Given an image, for each pixel value <math>x_{i,j,c}</math>, if an <math>l</math> dimensional thermometer code, the <math>kth</math> bit is given by:<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\tau(x_{i,j,c})_k = \bigg{\{}\begin{array}{ll}<br />
1 \space if \thinspace x_{i,j,c} >k/l \\<br />
0 \space otherwise \\<br />
\end{array}<br />
\end{align}<br />
Here it is assumed <math>x_{i,j,c} \in [0, 1] </math> and <math>i, j, c</math> are the row, column and channel index of the pixel respectively. This encoding is essentially like one-hot encoding, except all the points (not just one) greater than the target value are set to 1. This quantization technique preserves pairwise ordering between pixels.<br />
<br />
On CIFAR-10, the model gave 50% accuracy against <math>\ell_\infty</math> adversarial images with <math>\epsilon=0.031</math> attacks.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors attack this model using there BPDA approach. Given the non-linear transformation performed in the forward pass, <math>\tau(x)</math>, they develop a differentiable counterpart,<br />
\begin{align}<br />
\hat{\tau}(x_{i,j,c})_k = \min ( \max (x_{i,j,c} - \frac{k}{l}), 1 )<br />
\end{align}<br />
and use it in place of <math>\tau(x)</math> on the backward pass. With their modifications they were able to bring the accuracy of the model down to 0%.<br />
<br />
==== Input Transformation, [Guo, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''':[Gou, 2018] investigated the effect of including different input transformation on the robustness to adversarial images. In particular, they found two techniques provided the greatest resistance: total variance minimization and image quilting. Total variance minimization is a technique that removes high frequency noise while preserving legitimate edges (good high frequency components). In image quilting, a large database of image patches from clean images is collected. At test time, input patches, that contain a lot of noise, are replaced with similar but clean patches from the data base.<br />
<br />
Both techniques, removed perturbations from adversarial images which provides some robustness to adversarial attacks. Moreover, both approaches are non-differentiable which makes constructing white-box adversarial images difficult. Moreover, the techniques also include test time randomness as the modifications make are input dependent. The best model achieved 60% accuracy on adversarial images with <math>l_{2}=0.05</math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors used the BPDA attack where the input transformations were replaced by an identity function. They were able to bring the accuracy of the model down to 0% under the same type of adversarial attacks.<br />
<br />
==== Local Intrinsic Dimensionality, [Ma, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''' Local intrinsic dimensionality (LID) is a distance-based metric that measures the similarity between points in a high dimensional space. Given a set of points, let the distance between sample <math>x</math> and its <math>ith</math> neighbor be <math>r_i(x)</math>, then the LID under the choose distance metric is given by,<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
LID(x) = - \bigg{(} \frac{1}{k}\sum^k_{i=1}log \frac{r_i(x)}{r_k(x)} \bigg{)}^{-1}<br />
\end{align}<br />
where k is the number of nearest neighbors considered, <math>r_k(x)</math> is the maximum distance to any of the neighbors in the set k. <br />
<br />
First, <math>L_2</math> distances for all training and adversarial images. Next, the LID scores for each train and adversarial images were calculated. It was found that LID scores for adversarial images were significantly larger than those of clean images. Base on these results, the a separate classifier was created that can be used to detect adversarial inputs. [Ma, 2018] claim that this is not a defense method, but a method to study the properties of adversarial images.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': Instead of attacking this method, the authors show that this method is not able to detect, and is therefore venerable to, attacks of the [Carlini and Wagner, 2017a] variety.<br />
<br />
== Stochastic Gradients ==<br />
<br />
==== Stochastic Activation Pruning, [Dhillon, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Dhillon, 2018] use test time randomness in their model to guard against adversarial attacks. Within a layer, the activities of component nodes are randomly dropped with a probability proportional to its absolute value. The rest of the activation are scaled up to preserve accuracies. This is akin to test time drop-out. This technique was found to drop accuracy slightly on clean images, but improved performance on adversarial images.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The authors used the expectation over transformation attack to get useful gradients out of the model. With their attack they were able to reduce the accuracy of this method down to 0% on CIFAR-10.<br />
<br />
==== Mitigation Through Randomization, [Xie, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Xie, 2018] Add a randomization layer to their model to help defend against adversarial attacks. For an input image of size [299,299], first the image is randomly re-scaled to <math>r \in [299,331]</math>. Next the image is zero-padded to fix the dimension of the modified input. This modified input is then fed into a regular classifier. The authors claim that is strategy can provide an accuracy of 32.8% against ensemble attack patterns (fixed distortions, but many of them which are picked randomly). Because of the introduced randomness, the authors claim the model builds some robustness to other types of attacks as well.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The EOT method was used to build adversarial images to attack this model. With their attack, the authors were able to bring the accuracy of this model down to 0% using <math>L_{\infty}(\epsilon=0.031)</math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
== Vanishing and Exploding Gradients ==<br />
<br />
==== Pixel Defend, [Song, 2018] ====<br />
'''Defense''': [Song, 2018] argues that adversarial images lie in low probability regions of the data manifold. Therefore, one way to handle adversarial attacks is to project them back in the high probability regions before feeding them into a classifier. They chose to do this by using a generative model (pixelCNN) in a denoising capacity. A PixelCNN model directly estimates the conditional probability of generating an image pixel by pixel [Van den Oord, 2016],<br />
<br />
\begin{align}<br />
p(\mathbf{x}= \prod_{i=1}^{n^2} p(x_i|x_0,x_1 ....x_{i-1}))<br />
\end{align}<br />
<br />
The reason for choosing this model is the long iterative process of generation. In the backward pass, following the gradient all the way to the input would not be possible because of the vanishing/exploding gradient<br />
problem of deep networks. The proposed model was able to obtain an accuracy of 46% on CIFAR-10 images with <math>l_{\infty} (\epsilon=0.031) </math> perturbations.<br />
<br />
'''Attack''': The model was attacked using the BPDA technique where back-propagating though the pixelCNN was replaced with an identity function. With this apporach, the authors were able to bring down the accuracy to 9% under the same kind of perturbations.<br />
<br />
==== Defense-GAN, [Samangouei, 2018] ====<br />
<br />
= Conclusion =<br />
In this paper, it was found that gradient masking is a common technique used by many defense proposal that claim to be robust against a very difficult class of adversarial attacks; white-box, iterative attacks. However, the authors found that they can be easily circumvented. Three attack methods are presented that were able to defeat 7 out of the 8 defense proposal accepted in the 2018 ICLR conference for these types of attacks.<br />
<br />
= Critique =<br />
# The third attack method, reparameterization of the input distortion search space was presented very briefly and at a very high level. Moreover, the one defense proposal they chose to use it against, [Samangouei, 2018] prove to be resilient against the attack. The authors had to resort to one of their other methods to circumvent the defense.<br />
# The BPDA and reparameterization attacks require intrinsic knowledge of the networks. This information is not likely to be available to external users of a network. Most likely, the use-case for these attacks will be in-house to develop more robust networks. This also means that it is still possible to guard against adversarial attack using gradient masking techniques, provided the details of the network are kept secret.<br />
# The BPDA algorithm requires replacing a non-linear part of the model with a differentiable approximation. Since different networks are likely to use different transformations, this technique is not plug-and-play. For each network, the attack needs to be manually constructed.<br />
<br />
= Other Sources =<br />
= References =<br />
#'''[Madry, 2018]''' Madry, A., Makelov, A., Schmidt, L., Tsipras, D. and Vladu, A., 2017. Towards deep learning models resistant to adversarial attacks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.06083.<br />
#'''[Buckman, 2018]''' Buckman, J., Roy, A., Raffel, C. and Goodfellow, I., 2018. Thermometer encoding: One hot way to resist adversarial examples.<br />
#'''[Guo, 2018]''' Guo, C., Rana, M., Cisse, M. and van der Maaten, L., 2017. Countering adversarial images using input transformations. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.00117.<br />
#'''[Xie, 2018]''' Xie, C., Wang, J., Zhang, Z., Ren, Z. and Yuille, A., 2017. Mitigating adversarial effects through randomization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.01991.<br />
#'''[song, 2018]''' Song, Y., Kim, T., Nowozin, S., Ermon, S. and Kushman, N., 2017. Pixeldefend: Leveraging generative models to understand and defend against adversarial examples. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.10766.<br />
#'''[Szegedy, 2013]''' Szegedy, C., Zaremba, W., Sutskever, I., Bruna, J., Erhan, D., Goodfellow, I. and Fergus, R., 2013. Intriguing properties of neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.6199.<br />
#'''[Samangouei, 2018]''' Samangouei, P., Kabkab, M. and Chellappa, R., 2018. Defense-GAN: Protecting classifiers against adversarial attacks using generative models. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.06605.<br />
#'''[van den Oord, 2016]''' van den Oord, A., Kalchbrenner, N., Espeholt, L., Vinyals, O. and Graves, A., 2016. Conditional image generation with pixelcnn decoders. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 4790-4798).<br />
#'''[Athalye, 2017]''' Athalye, A. and Sutskever, I., 2017. Synthesizing robust adversarial examples. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07397.<br />
#'''[Ma, 2018]''' Ma, Xingjun, Bo Li, Yisen Wang, Sarah M. Erfani, Sudanthi Wijewickrema, Michael E. Houle, Grant Schoenebeck, Dawn Song, and James Bailey. "Characterizing adversarial subspaces using local intrinsic dimensionality." arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.02613 (2018).</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:sb.png&diff=39757File:sb.png2018-11-18T08:38:27Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38476MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-09T00:49:17Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Background */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the popular GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
<br />
===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
<br />
''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
<br />
Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
<br />
The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
<br />
C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
<br />
Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
<br />
The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2 ~ p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Experiments and Results==<br />
<br />
The authors have given a exhaustive set of results and experiments.<br />
<br />
Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
<br />
Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Contents and Views===<br />
<br />
Figure 1 shows examples of generated images by our model and Figure 4 shows images sampled by DCGAN based models (DCGANx2, DCGANx4, and DCGANx8) on 3DChairs and CelebA datasets.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig1_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig4_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Figure 5 shows additional results, using the same presentation, for the GMV model only on two other datasets<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig5_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
Figure 6 shows generated samples obtained by interpolation between two different view factors (left) or two content factors (right). It allows us to have a better idea of the underlying view/content structure captured by GMV. We can see that our approach is able to smoothly move from one content/view to another content/view while keeping the other factor constant. This also illustrates that content and view factors are well independently handled by the generator i.e. changing the view<br />
does not modify the content and vice versa.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig6_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Views of a Given Object===<br />
<br />
The second set of experiments evaluates the ability of C-GMV to capture a particular content from an input sample, and to use this content to generate multiple views of the same object. Figure 7 and 8 illustrate the diversity of views in samples generated by our model and compare our results with those obtained with the CGAN model and to models from Mathieu et al. (2016). For each row the input sample is shown in the left column. New views are generated from that input and shown on the right.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig7_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig8_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
=== Evaluation of the Quality of Generated Samples ===<br />
<br />
The authors did sets of experiments aimed at evaluating the quality of the generated samples. They have been made on the CelebA dataset and evaluate (i) the ability of the models to preserve the identity of a person in multiple generated views, (ii) to generate realistic samples, (iii) to preserve the diversity in the generated views and (iv) to capture the view distributions of the original dataset.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:tab3.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:tab4.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Critique==<br />
<br />
The main idea is to train the model with pairs of images with different views. It is not that clear as to what defines a view in particular. The algorithms are largely based on earlier concepts of GAN and CGAN The authors give reference to the previous papers tackling the same problem and clearly define that the novelty in this approach is not making use of view labels. The authors give a very thorough list of experiments which clearly establish the superiority of the proposed models to baselines. <br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
[1] Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2018<br />
<br />
[2] Michael F Mathieu, Junbo Jake Zhao, Junbo Zhao, Aditya Ramesh, Pablo Sprechmann, and Yann LeCun. Disentangling factors of variation in deep representation using adversarial training. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 5040–5048, 2016.<br />
<br />
[3] Mathieu Aubry, Daniel Maturana, Alexei Efros, Bryan Russell, and Josef Sivic. Seeing 3d chairs: exemplar part-based 2d-3d alignment using a large dataset of cad models. In CVPR, 2014.<br />
<br />
[4] Ian Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio. Generative adversarial nets. In Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 2672–2680, 2014.<br />
<br />
[5] Emily Denton and Vighnesh Birodkar. Unsupervised learning of disentangled representations from video. arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.10915, 2017.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946F18&diff=38475stat946F182018-11-09T00:47:15Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Record your contributions here [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SxkjNfhOg_eXWpUnVHuIP93E6tEiXEdpm68dQGencgE/edit?usp=sharing] */</p>
<hr />
<div>== [[F18-STAT946-Proposal| Project Proposal ]] ==<br />
<br />
=Paper presentation=<br />
<br />
[https://goo.gl/forms/8NucSpF36K6IUZ0V2 Your feedback on presentations]<br />
<br />
<br />
= Record your contributions here [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SxkjNfhOg_eXWpUnVHuIP93E6tEiXEdpm68dQGencgE/edit?usp=sharing]=<br />
<br />
Use the following notations:<br />
<br />
P: You have written a summary/critique on the paper.<br />
<br />
T: You had a technical contribution on a paper (excluding the paper that you present).<br />
<br />
E: You had an editorial contribution on a paper (excluding the paper that you present).<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
<br />
{| border="1" cellpadding="3"<br />
|-<br />
|width="60pt"|Date<br />
|width="100pt"|Name <br />
|width="30pt"|Paper number <br />
|width="700pt"|Title<br />
|width="30pt"|Link to the paper<br />
|width="30pt"|Link to the summary<br />
|-<br />
|Feb 15 (example)||Ri Wang || ||Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks.||[http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learning-with-neural-networks.pdf Paper] || [[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946w18/Unsupervised_Machine_Translation_Using_Monolingual_Corpora_Only Summary]]<br />
|-<br />
|Oct 25 || Dhruv Kumar || 1 || Beyond Word Importance: Contextual Decomposition to Extract Interactions from LSTMs || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rkRwGg-0Z Paper] || <br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946F18/Beyond_Word_Importance_Contextual_Decomposition_to_Extract_Interactions_from_LSTMs Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/images/e/ea/Beyond_Word_Importance.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Oct 25 || Amirpasha Ghabussi || 2 || DCN+: Mixed Objective And Deep Residual Coattention for Question Answering || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=H1meywxRW Paper] ||<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=DCN_plus:_Mixed_Objective_And_Deep_Residual_Coattention_for_Question_Answering Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|Oct 25 || Juan Carrillo || 3 || Hierarchical Representations for Efficient Architecture Search || [https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00436 Paper] || <br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946F18/Hierarchical_Representations_for_Efficient_Architecture_Search Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/images/1/15/HierarchicalRep-slides.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Oct 30 || Manpreet Singh Minhas || 4 || End-to-end Active Object Tracking via Reinforcement Learning || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/luo18a/luo18a.pdf Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=End_to_end_Active_Object_Tracking_via_Reinforcement_Learning Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|Oct 30 || Marvin Pafla || 5 || Fairness Without Demographics in Repeated Loss Minimization || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/hashimoto18a.html Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Fairness_Without_Demographics_in_Repeated_Loss_Minimization Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|Oct 30 || Glen Chalatov || 6 || Pixels to Graphs by Associative Embedding || [http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6812-pixels-to-graphs-by-associative-embedding Paper] ||<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Pixels_to_Graphs_by_Associative_Embedding Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 1 || Sriram Ganapathi Subramanian || 7 ||Differentiable plasticity: training plastic neural networks with backpropagation || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/miconi18a.html Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946F18/differentiableplasticity Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/images/3/3c/Deep_learning_course_presentation.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 1 || Hadi Nekoei || 8 || Synthesizing Programs for Images using Reinforced Adversarial Learning || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/ganin18a.html Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Synthesizing_Programs_for_Images_usingReinforced_Adversarial_Learning Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:Synthesizing_Programs_for_Images_using_Reinforced_Adversarial_Learning.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 1 || Henry Chen || 9 || DeepVO: Towards end-to-end visual odometry with deep Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks || [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7989236 Paper] || <br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=DeepVO_Towards_end_to_end_visual_odometry_with_deep_RNN Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:DeepVO_Presentation_Henry.pdf Slides] <br />
|-<br />
|Nov 6 || Nargess Heydari || 10 ||Wavelet Pooling For Convolutional Neural Networks Networks || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rkhlb8lCZ Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946w18/Wavelet_Pooling_For_Convolutional_Neural_Networks Summary] [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/images/1/1a/Wavelet_Pooling_for_Convolutional_Neural_Networks.pptx Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 6 || Aravind Ravi || 11 || Towards Image Understanding from Deep Compression Without Decoding || [https://openreview.net/forum?id=HkXWCMbRW Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946w18/Towards_Image_Understanding_From_Deep_Compression_Without_Decoding Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:DL_STAT946_PPT_AravindRavi.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 6 || Ronald Feng || 12 || Learning to Teach || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=HJewuJWCZ Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Learning_to_Teach Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:946_L2T_slides.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 8 || Neel Bhatt || 13 || Annotating Object Instances with a Polygon-RNN || [https://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~fidler/papers/paper_polyrnn.pdf Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Annotating_Object_Instances_with_a_Polygon_RNN Summary] [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/images/a/af/ANNOTATING_OBJECT_INSTANCES_NEEL_BHATT.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 8 || Jacob Manuel || 14 || Co-teaching: Robust Training Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels || [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06872.pdf Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Co-Teaching Summary] [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/images/3/33/Co-Teaching.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 8 || Charupriya Sharma|| 15 || A Bayesian Perspective on Generalization and Stochastic Gradient Descent|| [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BJij4yg0Z Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=A_Bayesian_Perspective_on_Generalization_and_Stochastic_Gradient_Descent Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|NOv 13 || Sagar Rajendran || 16 || Zero-Shot Visual Imitation || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BkisuzWRW Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Zero-Shot_Visual_Imitation Summary]<br />
|-<br />
<br />
|Nov 13 || Ruijie Zhang || 17 || Searching for Efficient Multi-Scale Architectures for Dense Image Prediction || [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.04184.pdf Paper]||<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 13 || Neil Budnarain || 18 || Predicting Floor Level For 911 Calls with Neural Networks and Smartphone Sensor Data || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=ryBnUWb0b Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Predicting_Floor_Level_For_911_Calls_with_Neural_Network_and_Smartphone_Sensor_Data Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|NOv 15 || Zheng Ma || 19 || Reinforcement Learning of Theorem Proving || [https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.07563 Paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|Nov 15 || Abdul Khader Naik || 20 || Multi-View Data Generation Without View Supervision || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=ryRh0bb0Z Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 15 || Johra Muhammad Moosa || 21 || Attend and Predict: Understanding Gene Regulation by Selective Attention on Chromatin || [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/7255-attend-and-predict-understanding-gene-regulation-by-selective-attention-on-chromatin.pdf Paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|NOv 20 || Zahra Rezapour Siahgourabi || 22 ||Robot Learning in Homes: Improving Generalization and Reducing Dataset Bias ||[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.07049 Paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|Nov 20 || Shubham Koundinya || 23 || TBD || || <br />
|-<br />
|Nov 20 || Salman Khan || 24 || Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/athalye18a.html paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|NOv 22 ||Soroush Ameli || 25 || Learning to Navigate in Cities Without a Map || [https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.00168 paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|Nov 22 ||Ivan Li || 26 || Mapping Images to Scene Graphs with Permutation-Invariant Structured Prediction || [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.05451v3.pdf Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 22 ||Sigeng Chen || 27 || || ||<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 27 || Aileen Li || 28 || Spatially Transformed Adversarial Examples ||[https://openreview.net/pdf?id=HyydRMZC- Paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|NOv 27 ||Xudong Peng || 29 || Multi-Scale Dense Networks for Resource Efficient Image Classification || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Hk2aImxAb Paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|Nov 27 ||Xinyue Zhang || 30 || An Inference-Based Policy Gradient Method for Learning Options || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/smith18a/smith18a.pdf Paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|NOv 29 ||Junyi Zhang || 31 || Autoregressive Convolutional Neural Networks for Asynchronous Time Series || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/binkowski18a/binkowski18a.pdf Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 29 ||Travis Bender || 32 || Automatic Goal Generation for Reinforcement Learning Agents || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/florensa18a/florensa18a.pdf Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 29 ||Patrick Li || 33 || Matrix Capsules with EM Routing || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=HJWLfGWRb Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Jiazhen Chen || 34 || || || <br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Ahmed Afify || 35 ||Don't Decay the Learning Rate, Increase the Batch Size || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=B1Yy1BxCZ Paper]||<br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Gaurav Sahu || 36 || TBD || ||<br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Kashif Khan || 37 || Wasserstein Auto-Encoders || [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.01558.pdf Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Shala Chen || 38 || A NEURAL REPRESENTATION OF SKETCH DRAWINGS || ||<br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Ki Beom Lee || 39 || Detecting Statistical Interactions from Neural Network Weights|| [https://openreview.net/forum?id=ByOfBggRZ Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Wesley Fisher || 40 || Deep Reinforcement Learning in Continuous Action Spaces: a Case Study in the Game of Simulated Curling || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/lee18b/lee18b.pdf Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Deep_Reinforcement_Learning_in_Continuous_Action_Spaces_a_Case_Study_in_the_Game_of_Simulated_Curling Summary]</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946F18&diff=38474stat946F182018-11-09T00:46:39Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Record your contributions here [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SxkjNfhOg_eXWpUnVHuIP93E6tEiXEdpm68dQGencgE/edit?usp=sharing] */</p>
<hr />
<div>== [[F18-STAT946-Proposal| Project Proposal ]] ==<br />
<br />
=Paper presentation=<br />
<br />
[https://goo.gl/forms/8NucSpF36K6IUZ0V2 Your feedback on presentations]<br />
<br />
<br />
= Record your contributions here [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SxkjNfhOg_eXWpUnVHuIP93E6tEiXEdpm68dQGencgE/edit?usp=sharing]=<br />
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Use the following notations:<br />
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{| class="wikitable"<br />
<br />
{| border="1" cellpadding="3"<br />
|-<br />
|width="60pt"|Date<br />
|width="100pt"|Name <br />
|width="30pt"|Paper number <br />
|width="700pt"|Title<br />
|width="30pt"|Link to the paper<br />
|width="30pt"|Link to the summary<br />
|-<br />
|Feb 15 (example)||Ri Wang || ||Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks.||[http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learning-with-neural-networks.pdf Paper] || [[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946w18/Unsupervised_Machine_Translation_Using_Monolingual_Corpora_Only Summary]]<br />
|-<br />
|Oct 25 || Dhruv Kumar || 1 || Beyond Word Importance: Contextual Decomposition to Extract Interactions from LSTMs || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rkRwGg-0Z Paper] || <br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946F18/Beyond_Word_Importance_Contextual_Decomposition_to_Extract_Interactions_from_LSTMs Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/images/e/ea/Beyond_Word_Importance.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Oct 25 || Amirpasha Ghabussi || 2 || DCN+: Mixed Objective And Deep Residual Coattention for Question Answering || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=H1meywxRW Paper] ||<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=DCN_plus:_Mixed_Objective_And_Deep_Residual_Coattention_for_Question_Answering Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|Oct 25 || Juan Carrillo || 3 || Hierarchical Representations for Efficient Architecture Search || [https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00436 Paper] || <br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946F18/Hierarchical_Representations_for_Efficient_Architecture_Search Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/images/1/15/HierarchicalRep-slides.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Oct 30 || Manpreet Singh Minhas || 4 || End-to-end Active Object Tracking via Reinforcement Learning || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/luo18a/luo18a.pdf Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=End_to_end_Active_Object_Tracking_via_Reinforcement_Learning Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|Oct 30 || Marvin Pafla || 5 || Fairness Without Demographics in Repeated Loss Minimization || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/hashimoto18a.html Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Fairness_Without_Demographics_in_Repeated_Loss_Minimization Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|Oct 30 || Glen Chalatov || 6 || Pixels to Graphs by Associative Embedding || [http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6812-pixels-to-graphs-by-associative-embedding Paper] ||<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Pixels_to_Graphs_by_Associative_Embedding Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 1 || Sriram Ganapathi Subramanian || 7 ||Differentiable plasticity: training plastic neural networks with backpropagation || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/miconi18a.html Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946F18/differentiableplasticity Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/images/3/3c/Deep_learning_course_presentation.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 1 || Hadi Nekoei || 8 || Synthesizing Programs for Images using Reinforced Adversarial Learning || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/ganin18a.html Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Synthesizing_Programs_for_Images_usingReinforced_Adversarial_Learning Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:Synthesizing_Programs_for_Images_using_Reinforced_Adversarial_Learning.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 1 || Henry Chen || 9 || DeepVO: Towards end-to-end visual odometry with deep Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks || [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7989236 Paper] || <br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=DeepVO_Towards_end_to_end_visual_odometry_with_deep_RNN Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:DeepVO_Presentation_Henry.pdf Slides] <br />
|-<br />
|Nov 6 || Nargess Heydari || 10 ||Wavelet Pooling For Convolutional Neural Networks Networks || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rkhlb8lCZ Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946w18/Wavelet_Pooling_For_Convolutional_Neural_Networks Summary] [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/images/1/1a/Wavelet_Pooling_for_Convolutional_Neural_Networks.pptx Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 6 || Aravind Ravi || 11 || Towards Image Understanding from Deep Compression Without Decoding || [https://openreview.net/forum?id=HkXWCMbRW Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=stat946w18/Towards_Image_Understanding_From_Deep_Compression_Without_Decoding Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:DL_STAT946_PPT_AravindRavi.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 6 || Ronald Feng || 12 || Learning to Teach || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=HJewuJWCZ Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Learning_to_Teach Summary]<br />
[https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:946_L2T_slides.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 8 || Neel Bhatt || 13 || Annotating Object Instances with a Polygon-RNN || [https://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~fidler/papers/paper_polyrnn.pdf Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Annotating_Object_Instances_with_a_Polygon_RNN Summary] [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/images/a/af/ANNOTATING_OBJECT_INSTANCES_NEEL_BHATT.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 8 || Jacob Manuel || 14 || Co-teaching: Robust Training Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels || [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06872.pdf Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Co-Teaching Summary] [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/images/3/33/Co-Teaching.pdf Slides]<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 8 || Charupriya Sharma|| 15 || A Bayesian Perspective on Generalization and Stochastic Gradient Descent|| [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BJij4yg0Z Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=A_Bayesian_Perspective_on_Generalization_and_Stochastic_Gradient_Descent Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|NOv 13 || Sagar Rajendran || 16 || Zero-Shot Visual Imitation || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BkisuzWRW Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Zero-Shot_Visual_Imitation Summary]<br />
|-<br />
<br />
|Nov 13 || Ruijie Zhang || 17 || Searching for Efficient Multi-Scale Architectures for Dense Image Prediction || [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.04184.pdf Paper]||<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 13 || Neil Budnarain || 18 || Predicting Floor Level For 911 Calls with Neural Networks and Smartphone Sensor Data || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=ryBnUWb0b Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Predicting_Floor_Level_For_911_Calls_with_Neural_Network_and_Smartphone_Sensor_Data Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|NOv 15 || Zheng Ma || 19 || Reinforcement Learning of Theorem Proving || [https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.07563 Paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|Nov 15 || Abdul Khader Naik || 20 || Multi-View Data Generation Without View Supervision || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=ryRh0bb0Z Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 15 || Johra Muhammad Moosa || 21 || Attend and Predict: Understanding Gene Regulation by Selective Attention on Chromatin || [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/7255-attend-and-predict-understanding-gene-regulation-by-selective-attention-on-chromatin.pdf Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION Summary]<br />
|-<br />
|NOv 20 || Zahra Rezapour Siahgourabi || 22 ||Robot Learning in Homes: Improving Generalization and Reducing Dataset Bias ||[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.07049 Paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|Nov 20 || Shubham Koundinya || 23 || TBD || || <br />
|-<br />
|Nov 20 || Salman Khan || 24 || Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/athalye18a.html paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|NOv 22 ||Soroush Ameli || 25 || Learning to Navigate in Cities Without a Map || [https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.00168 paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|Nov 22 ||Ivan Li || 26 || Mapping Images to Scene Graphs with Permutation-Invariant Structured Prediction || [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.05451v3.pdf Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 22 ||Sigeng Chen || 27 || || ||<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 27 || Aileen Li || 28 || Spatially Transformed Adversarial Examples ||[https://openreview.net/pdf?id=HyydRMZC- Paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|NOv 27 ||Xudong Peng || 29 || Multi-Scale Dense Networks for Resource Efficient Image Classification || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Hk2aImxAb Paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|Nov 27 ||Xinyue Zhang || 30 || An Inference-Based Policy Gradient Method for Learning Options || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/smith18a/smith18a.pdf Paper] || <br />
|-<br />
|NOv 29 ||Junyi Zhang || 31 || Autoregressive Convolutional Neural Networks for Asynchronous Time Series || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/binkowski18a/binkowski18a.pdf Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 29 ||Travis Bender || 32 || Automatic Goal Generation for Reinforcement Learning Agents || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/florensa18a/florensa18a.pdf Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Nov 29 ||Patrick Li || 33 || Matrix Capsules with EM Routing || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=HJWLfGWRb Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Jiazhen Chen || 34 || || || <br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Ahmed Afify || 35 ||Don't Decay the Learning Rate, Increase the Batch Size || [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=B1Yy1BxCZ Paper]||<br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Gaurav Sahu || 36 || TBD || ||<br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Kashif Khan || 37 || Wasserstein Auto-Encoders || [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.01558.pdf Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Shala Chen || 38 || A NEURAL REPRESENTATION OF SKETCH DRAWINGS || ||<br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Ki Beom Lee || 39 || Detecting Statistical Interactions from Neural Network Weights|| [https://openreview.net/forum?id=ByOfBggRZ Paper] ||<br />
|-<br />
|Makeup || Wesley Fisher || 40 || Deep Reinforcement Learning in Continuous Action Spaces: a Case Study in the Game of Simulated Curling || [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/lee18b/lee18b.pdf Paper] || [https://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=Deep_Reinforcement_Learning_in_Continuous_Action_Spaces_a_Case_Study_in_the_Game_of_Simulated_Curling Summary]</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38473MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-09T00:34:44Z<p>Ak2naik: /* References */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the poplar GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
<br />
''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
<br />
Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
<br />
The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
<br />
C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
<br />
Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
<br />
The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2 ~ p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Experiments and Results==<br />
<br />
The authors have given a exhaustive set of results and experiments.<br />
<br />
Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
<br />
Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Contents and Views===<br />
<br />
Figure 1 shows examples of generated images by our model and Figure 4 shows images sampled by DCGAN based models (DCGANx2, DCGANx4, and DCGANx8) on 3DChairs and CelebA datasets.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig1_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig4_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Figure 5 shows additional results, using the same presentation, for the GMV model only on two other datasets<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig5_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
Figure 6 shows generated samples obtained by interpolation between two different view factors (left) or two content factors (right). It allows us to have a better idea of the underlying view/content structure captured by GMV. We can see that our approach is able to smoothly move from one content/view to another content/view while keeping the other factor constant. This also illustrates that content and view factors are well independently handled by the generator i.e. changing the view<br />
does not modify the content and vice versa.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig6_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Views of a Given Object===<br />
<br />
The second set of experiments evaluates the ability of C-GMV to capture a particular content from an input sample, and to use this content to generate multiple views of the same object. Figure 7 and 8 illustrate the diversity of views in samples generated by our model and compare our results with those obtained with the CGAN model and to models from Mathieu et al. (2016). For each row the input sample is shown in the left column. New views are generated from that input and shown on the right.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig7_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig8_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
=== Evaluation of the Quality of Generated Samples ===<br />
<br />
The authors did sets of experiments aimed at evaluating the quality of the generated samples. They have been made on the CelebA dataset and evaluate (i) the ability of the models to preserve the identity of a person in multiple generated views, (ii) to generate realistic samples, (iii) to preserve the diversity in the generated views and (iv) to capture the view distributions of the original dataset.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:tab3.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:tab4.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Critique==<br />
<br />
The main idea is to train the model with pairs of images with different views. It is not that clear as to what defines a view in particular. The algorithms are largely based on earlier concepts of GAN and CGAN The authors give reference to the previous papers tackling the same problem and clearly define that the novelty in this approach is not making use of view labels. The authors give a very thorough list of experiments which clearly establish the superiority of the proposed models to baselines. <br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
[1] Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2018<br />
<br />
[2] Michael F Mathieu, Junbo Jake Zhao, Junbo Zhao, Aditya Ramesh, Pablo Sprechmann, and Yann LeCun. Disentangling factors of variation in deep representation using adversarial training. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 5040–5048, 2016.<br />
<br />
[3] Mathieu Aubry, Daniel Maturana, Alexei Efros, Bryan Russell, and Josef Sivic. Seeing 3d chairs: exemplar part-based 2d-3d alignment using a large dataset of cad models. In CVPR, 2014.<br />
<br />
[4] Ian Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio. Generative adversarial nets. In Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 2672–2680, 2014.<br />
<br />
[5] Emily Denton and Vighnesh Birodkar. Unsupervised learning of disentangled representations from video. arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.10915, 2017.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38472MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-09T00:33:02Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the poplar GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
<br />
''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
<br />
Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
<br />
The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
<br />
C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
<br />
Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
<br />
The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2 ~ p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Experiments and Results==<br />
<br />
The authors have given a exhaustive set of results and experiments.<br />
<br />
Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
<br />
Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Contents and Views===<br />
<br />
Figure 1 shows examples of generated images by our model and Figure 4 shows images sampled by DCGAN based models (DCGANx2, DCGANx4, and DCGANx8) on 3DChairs and CelebA datasets.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig1_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig4_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Figure 5 shows additional results, using the same presentation, for the GMV model only on two other datasets<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig5_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
Figure 6 shows generated samples obtained by interpolation between two different view factors (left) or two content factors (right). It allows us to have a better idea of the underlying view/content structure captured by GMV. We can see that our approach is able to smoothly move from one content/view to another content/view while keeping the other factor constant. This also illustrates that content and view factors are well independently handled by the generator i.e. changing the view<br />
does not modify the content and vice versa.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig6_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Views of a Given Object===<br />
<br />
The second set of experiments evaluates the ability of C-GMV to capture a particular content from an input sample, and to use this content to generate multiple views of the same object. Figure 7 and 8 illustrate the diversity of views in samples generated by our model and compare our results with those obtained with the CGAN model and to models from Mathieu et al. (2016). For each row the input sample is shown in the left column. New views are generated from that input and shown on the right.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig7_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig8_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
=== Evaluation of the Quality of Generated Samples ===<br />
<br />
The authors did sets of experiments aimed at evaluating the quality of the generated samples. They have been made on the CelebA dataset and evaluate (i) the ability of the models to preserve the identity of a person in multiple generated views, (ii) to generate realistic samples, (iii) to preserve the diversity in the generated views and (iv) to capture the view distributions of the original dataset.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:tab3.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:tab4.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Critique==<br />
<br />
The main idea is to train the model with pairs of images with different views. It is not that clear as to what defines a view in particular. The algorithms are largely based on earlier concepts of GAN and CGAN The authors give reference to the previous papers tackling the same problem and clearly define that the novelty in this approach is not making use of view labels. The authors give a very thorough list of experiments which clearly establish the superiority of the proposed models to baselines. <br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
[1] Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2018<br />
<br />
[2] Michael F Mathieu, Junbo Jake Zhao, Junbo Zhao, Aditya Ramesh, Pablo Sprechmann, and Yann LeCun. Disentangling factors of variation in deep representation using adversarial training. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 5040–5048, 2016.<br />
<br />
[3] Mathieu Aubry, Daniel Maturana, Alexei Efros, Bryan Russell, and Josef Sivic. Seeing 3d chairs: exemplar part-based 2d-3d alignment using a large dataset of cad models. In CVPR, 2014.<br />
<br />
[4] Ian Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio. Generative adversarial nets. In Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 2672–2680, 2014.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38471MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-09T00:28:06Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the poplar GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
<br />
''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
<br />
Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
<br />
The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
<br />
C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
<br />
Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
<br />
The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2 ~ p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Experiments and Results==<br />
<br />
The authors have given a exhaustive set of results and experiments.<br />
<br />
Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
<br />
Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Contents and Views===<br />
<br />
Figure 1 shows examples of generated images by our model and Figure 4 shows images sampled by DCGAN based models (DCGANx2, DCGANx4, and DCGANx8) on 3DChairs and CelebA datasets.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig1_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig4_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Figure 5 shows additional results, using the same presentation, for the GMV model only on two other datasets<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig5_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
Figure 6 shows generated samples obtained by interpolation between two different view factors (left) or two content factors (right). It allows us to have a better idea of the underlying view/content structure captured by GMV. We can see that our approach is able to smoothly move from one content/view to another content/view while keeping the other factor constant. This also illustrates that content and view factors are well independently handled by the generator i.e. changing the view<br />
does not modify the content and vice versa.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig6_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Views of a Given Object===<br />
<br />
The second set of experiments evaluates the ability of C-GMV to capture a particular content from an input sample, and to use this content to generate multiple views of the same object. Figure 7 and 8 illustrate the diversity of views in samples generated by our model and compare our results with those obtained with the CGAN model and to models from Mathieu et al. (2016). For each row the input sample is shown in the left column. New views are generated from that input and shown on the right.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig7_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig8_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
=== Evaluation of the Quality of Generated Samples ===<br />
<br />
The authors did sets of experiments aimed at evaluating the quality of the generated samples. They have been made on the CelebA dataset and evaluate (i) the ability of the models to preserve the identity of a person in multiple generated views, (ii) to generate realistic samples, (iii) to preserve the diversity in the generated views and (iv) to capture the view distributions of the original dataset.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:tab3.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:tab4.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Critique==<br />
<br />
The main idea is to train the model with pairs of images with different views. It is not that clear as to what defines a view in particular. The authors give reference to the previous papers tackling the same problem and clearly define that the novelty in this approach is not making use of view labels.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<br />
[1] Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2018<br />
<br />
[2] Michael F Mathieu, Junbo Jake Zhao, Junbo Zhao, Aditya Ramesh, Pablo Sprechmann, and Yann LeCun. Disentangling factors of variation in deep representation using adversarial training. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 5040–5048, 2016.<br />
<br />
[3] Mathieu Aubry, Daniel Maturana, Alexei Efros, Bryan Russell, and Josef Sivic. Seeing 3d chairs: exemplar part-based 2d-3d alignment using a large dataset of cad models. In CVPR, 2014.<br />
<br />
[4] Ian Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio. Generative adversarial nets. In Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 2672–2680, 2014.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38470MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-09T00:16:23Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Experiments and Results */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018 in Poster Category. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the poplar GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
<br />
''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
<br />
Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
<br />
The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
<br />
C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
<br />
Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
<br />
The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2 ~ p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Experiments and Results==<br />
<br />
Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
<br />
Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Contents and Views===<br />
<br />
Figure 1 shows examples of generated images by our model and Figure 4 shows images sampled by DCGAN based models (DCGANx2, DCGANx4, and DCGANx8) on 3DChairs and CelebA datasets.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig1_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig4_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Figure 5 shows additional results, using the same presentation, for the GMV model only on two other datasets<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig5_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
Figure 6 shows generated samples obtained by interpolation between two different view factors (left) or two content factors (right). It allows us to have a better idea of the underlying view/content structure captured by GMV. We can see that our approach is able to smoothly move from one content/view to another content/view while keeping the other factor constant. This also illustrates that content and view factors are well independently handled by the generator i.e. changing the view<br />
does not modify the content and vice versa.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig6_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Views of a Given Object===<br />
<br />
The second set of experiments evaluates the ability of C-GMV to capture a particular content from an input sample, and to use this content to generate multiple views of the same object. Figure 7 and 8 illustrate the diversity of views in samples generated by our model and compare our results with those obtained with the CGAN model and to models from Mathieu et al. (2016). For each row the input sample is shown in the left column. New views are generated from that input and shown on the right.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig7_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig8_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
=== Evaluation of the Quality of Generated Samples ===<br />
<br />
The authors did sets of experiments aimed at evaluating the quality of the generated samples. They have been made on the CelebA dataset and evaluate (i) the ability of the models to preserve the identity of a person in multiple generated views, (ii) to generate realistic samples, (iii) to preserve the diversity in the generated views and (iv) to capture the view distributions of the original dataset.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:tab3.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:tab4.png]]</div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:tab4.png&diff=38469File:tab4.png2018-11-09T00:15:56Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
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<div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:tab3.png&diff=38468File:tab3.png2018-11-09T00:15:45Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38467MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-09T00:14:24Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Experiments and Results */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018 in Poster Category. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the poplar GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
<br />
''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
<br />
Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
<br />
The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
<br />
C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
<br />
Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
<br />
The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2 ~ p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Experiments and Results==<br />
<br />
Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
<br />
Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Contents and Views===<br />
<br />
Figure 1 shows examples of generated images by our model and Figure 4 shows images sampled by DCGAN based models (DCGANx2, DCGANx4, and DCGANx8) on 3DChairs and CelebA datasets.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig1_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig4_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Figure 5 shows additional results, using the same presentation, for the GMV model only on two other datasets<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig5_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
Figure 6 shows generated samples obtained by interpolation between two different view factors (left) or two content factors (right). It allows us to have a better idea of the underlying view/content structure captured by GMV. We can see that our approach is able to smoothly move from one content/view to another content/view while keeping the other factor constant. This also illustrates that content and view factors are well independently handled by the generator i.e. changing the view<br />
does not modify the content and vice versa.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig6_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Views of a Given Object===<br />
<br />
The second set of experiments evaluates the ability of C-GMV to capture a particular content from an input sample, and to use this content to generate multiple views of the same object. Figure 7 and 8 illustrate the diversity of views in samples generated by our model and compare our results with those obtained with the CGAN model and to models from Mathieu et al. (2016). For each row the input sample is shown in the left column. New views are generated from that input and shown on the right.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig7_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig8_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
=== Evaluation of the Quality of Generated Samples ===<br />
<br />
The authors did sets of experiments aimed at evaluating the quality of the generated samples. They have been made on the CelebA dataset and evaluate (i) the ability of the models to preserve the identity of a person in multiple generated views, (ii) to generate realistic samples, (iii) to preserve the diversity in the generated views and (iv) to capture the view distributions of the original dataset.</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38466MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-08T23:00:25Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Experiments and Results */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018 in Poster Category. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the poplar GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
<br />
''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
<br />
Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
<br />
The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
<br />
C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
<br />
Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
<br />
The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2 ~ p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Experiments and Results==<br />
<br />
Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
<br />
Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Contents and Views===<br />
<br />
Figure 1 shows examples of generated images by our model and Figure 4 shows images sampled by DCGAN based models (DCGANx2, DCGANx4, and DCGANx8) on 3DChairs and CelebA datasets.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig1_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig4_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Figure 5 shows additional results, using the same presentation, for the GMV model only on two other datasets<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig5_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
Figure 6 shows generated samples obtained by interpolation between two different view factors (left) or two content factors (right). It allows us to have a better idea of the underlying view/content structure captured by GMV. We can see that our approach is able to smoothly move from one content/view to another content/view while keeping the other factor constant. This also illustrates that content and view factors are well independently handled by the generator i.e. changing the view<br />
does not modify the content and vice versa.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig6_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Views of a Given Object===<br />
<br />
The second set of experiments evaluates the ability of C-GMV to capture a particular content from an input sample, and to use this content to generate multiple views of the same object. Figure 7 and 8 illustrate the diversity of views in samples generated by our model and compare our results with those obtained with the CGAN model and to models from Mathieu et al. (2016). For each row the input sample is shown in the left column. New views are generated from that input and shown on the right.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig7_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig8_gmv.png]]</div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:fig8_gmv.png&diff=38465File:fig8 gmv.png2018-11-08T23:00:12Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:fig7_gmv.png&diff=38464File:fig7 gmv.png2018-11-08T22:59:58Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38463MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-08T22:53:49Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Experiments and Results */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018 in Poster Category. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the poplar GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
<br />
''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
<br />
Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
<br />
The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
<br />
C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
<br />
Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
<br />
The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2 ~ p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Experiments and Results==<br />
<br />
Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
<br />
Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Contents and Views===<br />
<br />
Figure 1 shows examples of generated images by our model and Figure 4 shows images sampled by DCGAN based models (DCGANx2, DCGANx4, and DCGANx8) on 3DChairs and CelebA datasets.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig1_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig4_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Figure 5 shows additional results, using the same presentation, for the GMV model only on two other datasets<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig5_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
Figure 6 shows generated samples obtained by interpolation between two different view factors (left) or two content factors (right). It allows us to have a better idea of the underlying view/content structure captured by GMV. We can see that our approach is able to smoothly move from one content/view to another content/view while keeping the other factor constant. This also illustrates that content and view factors are well independently handled by the generator i.e. changing the view<br />
does not modify the content and vice versa.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig6_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Generating Multiple Views of a Given Object===</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38462MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-08T22:49:45Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Experiments and Results */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018 in Poster Category. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the poplar GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
<br />
''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
<br />
Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
<br />
The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
<br />
C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
<br />
Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
<br />
The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2 ~ p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Experiments and Results==<br />
<br />
Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
<br />
Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
'''Generating Multiple Contents and Views:'''<br />
<br />
Figure 1 shows examples of generated images by our model and Figure 4 shows images sampled by DCGAN based models (DCGANx2, DCGANx4, and DCGANx8) on 3DChairs and CelebA datasets.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig1_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig4_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Figure 5 shows additional results, using the same presentation, for the GMV model only on two other datasets<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig5_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
Figure 6 shows generated samples obtained by interpolation between two different view factors (left) or two content factors (right). It allows us to have a better idea of the underlying view/content structure captured by GMV. We can see that our approach is able to smoothly move from one content/view to another content/view while keeping the other factor constant. This also illustrates that content and view factors are well independently handled by the generator i.e. changing the view<br />
does not modify the content and vice versa.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig6_gmv.png]]</div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38461MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-08T22:48:00Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Experiments and Results */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018 in Poster Category. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the poplar GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
<br />
''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
<br />
Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
<br />
The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
<br />
C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
<br />
Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
<br />
The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2 ~ p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Experiments and Results==<br />
<br />
Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
<br />
Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
'''Generating Multiple Contents and Views:'''<br />
<br />
Figure 1 shows examples of generated images by our model and Figure 4 shows images sampled by DCGAN based models (DCGANx2, DCGANx4, and DCGANx8) on 3DChairs and CelebA datasets.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig1_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig4_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Figure 5 shows additional results, using the same presentation, for the GMV model only on two other datasets<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig5_gmv.png]]</div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38460MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-08T22:41:18Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Experiments and Results */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018 in Poster Category. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the poplar GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
<br />
''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
<br />
Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
<br />
The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
<br />
C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
<br />
Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
<br />
The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2 ~ p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Experiments and Results==<br />
<br />
Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
<br />
Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
'''Generating Multiple Contents and Views:'''<br />
<br />
Figure 1 shows examples of generated images by our model and Figure 4 shows images sampled by DCGAN based models (DCGANx2, DCGANx4, and DCGANx8) on 3DChairs and CelebA datasets.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig1_gmv.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:fig4_gmv.png]]</div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:fig6_gmv.png&diff=38459File:fig6 gmv.png2018-11-08T22:39:39Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:fig5_gmv.png&diff=38458File:fig5 gmv.png2018-11-08T22:39:07Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:fig4_gmv.png&diff=38457File:fig4 gmv.png2018-11-08T22:38:51Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=File:fig1_gmv.png&diff=38456File:fig1 gmv.png2018-11-08T22:38:30Z<p>Ak2naik: </p>
<hr />
<div></div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38455MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-08T22:27:24Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV) */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018 in Poster Category. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the poplar GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
<br />
''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
<br />
Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
<br />
The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
<br />
C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
<br />
Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
<br />
The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2 ~ p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
<br />
==Experiments and Results==<br />
<br />
Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
<br />
<br />
Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
<br />
Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
'''Generating Multiple Contents and Views:'''</div>Ak2naikhttp://wiki.math.uwaterloo.ca/statwiki/index.php?title=MULTI-VIEW_DATA_GENERATION_WITHOUT_VIEW_SUPERVISION&diff=38454MULTI-VIEW DATA GENERATION WITHOUT VIEW SUPERVISION2018-11-08T22:27:02Z<p>Ak2naik: /* Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV) */</p>
<hr />
<div>This page contains a summary of the paper "[https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryRh0bb0Z Multi-View Data Generation without Supervision]" by Mickael Chen, Ludovic Denoyer, Thierry Artieres. It was published at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in 2018 in Poster Category. <br />
<br />
==Introduction==<br />
<br />
===Motivation===<br />
High Dimensional Generative models have seen a surge of interest off late with introduction of Variational auto-encoders and generative adversarial networks. This paper focuses on a particular problem where one aims at generating samples corresponding to a number of objects under various views. The distribution of the data is assumed to be driven by two independent latent factors: the content, which represents the intrinsic features of an object, and the view, which stands for the settings of a particular observation of that object (for example, the different angles of the same object). The paper proposes two models using this disentanglement of latent space - a generative model and a conditional variant of the same.<br />
<br />
===Related Work===<br />
<br />
The problem of handling multi-view inputs has mainly been studied from the predictive point of view where one wants, for example, to learn a model able to predict/classify over multiple views of the same object (Su et al. (2015); Qi et al. (2016)). These approaches generally involve (early or late) fusion of the different views at a particular level of a deep architecture. Recent studies have focused on identifying factors of variations from multiview datasets. The underlying idea is to consider that a particular data sample may be thought as the mix of a content information (e.g. related to its class label like a given person in a face dataset) and of a side information, the view, which accounts for factors of variability (e.g. exposure, viewpoint, with/wo glasses...). So, all the samples of same class contain the same content but different view. A number of approaches have been proposed to disentangle the content from the view, also referred as the style in some papers (Mathieu et al. (2016); Denton & Birodkar (2017)). The two common limitations the earlier approaches pose - as claimed by the paper - are that (i) they usually<br />
consider discrete views that are characterized by a domain or a set of discrete (binary/categorical) attributes (e.g. face with/wo glasses, the color of the hair, etc.) and could not easily scale to a large number of attributes or to continuous views. (ii) most models are trained using view supervision (e.g. the view attributes), which of course greatly helps learning such model, yet prevents their use on many datasets where this information is not available. <br />
<br />
===Contributions===<br />
<br />
The contributions that authors claim are the following: (i) A new generative model able to generate data with various content and high view diversity using a supervision on the content information only. (ii) Extend the generative model to a conditional model that allows generating new views over any input sample.<br />
<br />
==Paper Overview==<br />
<br />
===Background===<br />
<br />
The paper uses concept of the poplar GAN (Generative Adverserial Networks) proposed by Goodfellow et al.(2014).<br />
<br />
GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”). GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014. Referring to GANs, Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML.”<br />
<br />
Let us denote <math>X</math> an input space composed of multidimensional samples x e.g. vector, matrix or tensor. Given a latent space <math>R^n</math> and a prior distribution <math>p_z(z)</math> over this latent space, any generator function <math>G : R^n → X</math> defines a distribution <math>p_G </math> on <math> X</math> which is the distribution of samples G(z) where <math>z ∼ p_z</math>. A GAN defines, in addition to G, a discriminator function D : X → [0; 1] which aims at differentiating between real inputs sampled from the training set and fake inputs sampled following <math>p_G</math>, while the generator is learned to fool the discriminator D. Usually both G and D are implemented with neural networks. The objective function is based on the following adversarial criterion:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(z)))]</math></div><br />
<br />
where px is the empirical data distribution on X .<br />
It has been shown in Goodfellow et al. (2014) that if G∗ and D∗ are optimal for the above criterion, the Jensen-Shannon divergence between <math>p_{G∗}</math> and the empirical distribution of the data <math>p_x</math> in the dataset is minimized, making GAN able to estimate complex continuous data distributions.<br />
<br />
CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK:<br />
<br />
In the Conditional GAN (CGAN), the generator learns to generate a fake sample with a specific condition or characteristics (such as a label associated with an image or more detailed tag) rather than a generic sample from unknown noise distribution. Now, to add such a condition to both generator and discriminator, we will simply feed some vector y, into both networks. Hence, both the discriminator D(X,y) and generator G(z,y) are jointly conditioned to two variables, z or X and y.<br />
<br />
Now, the objective function of CGAN is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{p_x}[log D(x,y)] + Ep_z[log(1 − D(G(y,z)))]</math></div><br />
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The paper also suggests that, many studies have reported that on when dealing with high-dimensional input spaces, CGAN tends to collapse the modes of the data distribution,mostly ignoring the latent factor z and generating x only based on the condition y, exhibiting an almost deterministic behaviour.<br />
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===Generative Multi-View Model===<br />
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''' Objective and Notations: ''' The distribution of the data x ∈ X is assumed to be driven by two latent factors: a content factor denoted c which corresponds to the invariant proprieties of the object,and a view factor denoted v which corresponds to the factor of variations. Typically, if X is the space of people’s faces, c stands for the intrinsic features of a person’s face while v stands for the transient features and the viewpoint of a particular photo of the face, including the photo exposure<br />
and additional elements like a hat, glasses, etc.... These two factors c and v are assumed to be independent and these are the factors needed to learn.<br />
<br />
The paper defines two tasks here to be done: <br />
(i) '''Multi View Generation''': we want to be able to sample over X by controlling the two factors c and v. Given two priors, p(c) and p(v), this sampling will be possible if we are able to estimate p(x|c, v) from a training set.<br />
(ii) '''Conditional Multi-View Generation''': the second objective is to be able to sample different views of a given object. Given a prior p(v), this sampling will be achieved by learning the probability p(c|x), in addition to p(x|c, v). Ability to learn generative models able to generate from a disentangled latent space would allow controlling the sampling on the two different axis,<br />
the content and the view. The authors claim the originality of work is to learn such generative models without using any view labelling information.<br />
<br />
''' Generative Multi-view Model: '''<br />
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Consider two prior distributions over the content and view factors denoted as <math>p_c</math> and <math>pv</math>, corresponding to the prior distribution over content and latent factors. Moreover, we consider a generator G that implements a distribution over samples x, denoted as <math>p_G</math> by computing G(c, v) with <math>c ∼ p_c</math> and <math>v ∼ p_v</math>. Objective is to learn this generator so that its first input c corresponds to the content of the generated sample while its second input v, captures the underlying view of the sample. Doing so would allow one to control the output sample of the generator by tuning its content or its view (i.e. c and v).<br />
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The key idea that authors propose is to focus on the distribution of pairs of inputs rather than on the distribution over individual samples. When no view supervision is available the only valuable pairs of samples that one may build from the dataset consist of two samples of a given object under two different views. When we choose any two samples randomly from the dataset from a same object, it is most likely that we get two different views. The paper explains that there are three goals here, (i) As in regular GAN, each sample generated by G needs to look realistic. (ii) As, real pairs are composed of two views of the same object, the generator should generate pairs of the same object. Since the two sampled view factors v1 and v2 are different, the only way this can be achieved is by encoding the content vector c which is invariant. (iii) It is expected that the discriminator should easily discriminate between a pair of samples corresponding to the same object under different views from a pair of samples corresponding to a same object under the same view. Because the pair shares the same content factor c, this should force the generator to use the view factors v1 and v2 to produce diversity in the generated pair.<br />
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Now, the objective function of GMV Model is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{v_1,v_2}[log(1 − D(G(c,v_1),G(c,v_2)))]</math></div><br />
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Once the model is learned, generator G that generates single samples by first sampling c and v following <math>p_c</math> and <math>p_v</math>, then by computing G(c, v). By freezing c or v, one may then generate samples corresponding to multiple views of any particular content, or corresponding to many contents under a particular view. One can also make interpolations between two given views over a particular content, or between two contents using a particular view<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:GMV.png]]</div><br />
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===Conditional Generative Model (C-GMV)===<br />
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C-GMV is proposed by the authors to be able to change the view of a given object that would be provided as an input to the model.This model extends the generative model's the ability to extract the content factor from any given input and to use this extracted content in order to generate new views of the corresponding object. To achieve such a goal, we must add to our generative model an encoder function denoted <math>E : X → R^C</math> that will map any input in X to the content space <math>R^C</math><br />
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Input sample x is encoded in the content space using an encoder function, noted E (implemented as a neural network).<br />
This encoder serves to generate a content vector c = E(x) that will be combined with a randomly sampled view <math>v ∼ p_v</math> to generate an artificial example. The artificial sample is then combined with the original input x to form a negative pair. The issue with this approach is that CGAN are known to easily miss modes of the underlying distribution. The generator enters in a state where it ignores the noisy component v. To overcome this phenomenon, we use the same idea as in GMV. We build negative pairs <math>(G(c, v_1), G(c, v_2))</math> by randomly sampling two views <math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math> that are combined to get a unique content c. c is computed from a sample x using the encoder E, i.e. c= E(x). By doing so, the ability of our approach to generating pairs with view diversity is preserved. Since this diversity can only be captured by taking into account the two different view vectors provided to the model (<math>v_1</math> and <math>v_2</math>), this will encourage G(c, v) to generate samples containing both the content information c, and the view v. Positive pairs are sampled from the training set and correspond to two views of a given object.<br />
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The Objective function for C-GMV will be:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%"><math>\underset{G}{min} \ \underset{D}{max}</math> <math>E_{x_1,x_2 ~ p_x|l(x_1)=l(x_2)}[log D(x_1,x_2)] + E_{(v_1,v_2)} ~ {p_v,x~p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x),v_1),G(E(x),v_2)))]+E_{v∼p_v,x∼p_x}[log(1 − D(G(E(x), v), x))] </math></div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:CGMV.png]]</div><br />
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==Experiments and Results==<br />
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Datasets: The two models were evaluated by performing experiments over four image datasets of various domains. Note that when supervision is available on the views (like CelebA for example where images are labeled with attributes) it is not used for learning models. The only supervision that is used if two samples correspond or not to the same object.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;font-size:100%">[[File:table_data.png]]</div><br />
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Model Architecture: Same architectures for every dataset. The images were rescaled to 3×64×64 tensors. The generator G and the discriminator D follow that of the DCGAN implementation proposed in Radford et al. (2015).<br />
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Baselines: Most existing methods are learned on datasets with view labeling. To fairly compare with alternative models authors have built baselines working in the same conditions as our models. In addition models are compared with the model from Mathieu et al. (2016). Results gained with two implementations are reported, the first one based on the implementation provided by the authors2 (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016)), and the second one (denoted Mathieu et al. (2016) (DCGAN) ) that implements the same model using architectures inspired from DCGAN Radford et al. (2015), which is more stable and that was tuned to allow a fair comparison with our approach. For pure multi-view generative setting, generative model(GMV) is compared with standard GANs that are learned to approximate the joint generation of multiple samples: DCGANx2 is learned to output pairs of views over the same object, DCGANx4 is trained on quadruplets, and DCGANx8 on eight different views. <br />
<br />
'''Generating Multiple Contents and Views:'''</div>Ak2naik