FaceNet directly maps face images to $\mathbb{R}^{128}$ where distances directly correspond to a measure of face similarity. They use a triplet loss function. The triplet is (face of person A, other face of person A, face of person which is not A). Later, this is called (anchor, positive, negative).

The loss function is learned and inspired by LMNN. The idea is to minimize the distance between the two images of the same person and maximize the distance to the other persons image.

## LMNN

Large Margin Nearest Neighbor (LMNN) is learning a pseudo-metric

$$d(x, y) = (x -y) M  (x -y)^T$$

where $M$ is a positive-definite matrix. The only difference between a pseudo-metric and a metric is that $d(x, y) = 0 \Leftrightarrow x = y$ does not hold.

## Curriculum Learning: Triplet selection

Show simple examples first, then increase the difficulty. This is done by selecting the triplets.

They use the triplets which are *hard*. For the positive example, this means the distance between the anchor and the positive example is high. For the negative example this means the distance between the anchor and the negative example is low.

They want to have

$$||f(x_i^a) - f(x_i^p)||_2^2 + \alpha < ||f(x_i^a) - f(x_i^n)||_2^2$$

where $\alpha$ is a margin and $x_i^a$ is the anchor, $x_i^p$ is the positive face example and $x_i^n$ is the negative example. They increase $\alpha$ over time. It is crucial that $f$ maps the images not in the complete $\mathbb{R}^{128}$, but on the unit sphere. Otherwise one could double $\alpha$ by simply making $f' = 2 \cdot f$.

## Tasks

* **Face verification**: Is this the same person?
* **Face recognition**: Who is this person?

## Datasets

* 99.63% accuracy on Labeled FAces in the Wild (LFW)
* 95.12% accuracy on YouTube Faces DB

## Network

Two models are evaluated: The [Zeiler & Fergus model](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=journals/corr/ZeilerF13)  and an architecture based on the [Inception model](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=journals/corr/SzegedyLJSRAEVR14).

## See also

* [DeepFace](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=conf/cvpr/TaigmanYRW14#martinthoma)

Shaham et al. provide an interpretation of adversarial training in the context of robust optimization. In particular, adversarial training is posed as min-max problem (similar to other related work, as I found):

$\min_\theta \sum_i \max_{r \in U_i} J(\theta, x_i + r, y_i)$

where $U_i$ is called the uncertainty set corresponding to sample $x_i$ – in the context of adversarial examples, this might be an $\epsilon$-ball around the sample quantifying the maximum perturbation allowed; $(x_i, y_i)$ are training samples, $\theta$ the parameters and $J$ the trianing objective. In practice, when the overall minimization problem is tackled using gradient descent, the inner maximization problem cannot be solved exactly (as this would be inefficient). Instead Shaham et al. Propose to alternatingly make single steps both for the minimization and the maximization problems – in the spirit of generative adversarial network training.

Also find this summary at [davidstutz.de](https://davidstutz.de/category/reading/).

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

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

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

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

This paper deals with the question what / how exactly CNNs learn, considering the fact that they usually have more trainable parameters than data points on which they are trained.

When the authors write "deep neural networks", they are talking about Inception V3, AlexNet and MLPs.

## Key contributions

* Deep neural networks easily fit random labels (achieving a training error of 0 and a test error which is just randomly guessing labels as expected). $\Rightarrow$Those architectures can simply brute-force memorize the training data.
* Deep neural networks fit random images (e.g. Gaussian noise) with 0 training error. The authors conclude that VC-dimension / Rademacher complexity, and uniform stability are bad explanations for generalization capabilities of neural networks
* The authors give a construction for a 2-layer network with $p = 2n+d$ parameters - where $n$ is the number of samples and $d$ is the dimension of each sample - which can easily fit any labeling. (Finite sample expressivity). See section 4.


## What I learned

* Any measure $m$ of the generalization capability of classifiers $H$ should take the percentage of corrupted labels ($p_c \in [0, 1]$, where $p_c =0$ is a perfect labeling and $p_c=1$ is totally random) into account: If $p_c = 1$, then $m()$ should be 0, too, as it is impossible to learn something meaningful with totally random labels.
* We seem to have built models which work well on image data in general, but not "natural" / meaningful images as we thought.


## Funny

> deep neural nets remain mysterious for many reasons

> Note that this is not exactly simple as the kernel matrix requires 30GB to store in memory. Nonetheless, this system can be solved in under 3 minutes in on a commodity workstation with 24 cores and 256 GB of RAM with a conventional LAPACK call.


## See also

* [Deep Nets Don't Learn Via Memorization](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rJv6ZgHYg)

This paper is an interesting extension of earlier work, in the TransformerXL paper, that sought to give Transformers access to a "memory" beyond the scope of the subsequence where full self-attention was being performed. This was done by caching the activations from prior subsequences, and making them available to the subsequence currently being calculated in a "read-only" way, with gradients not propagated backwards. This had the effect of (1) reducing the maximum memory size compared to simply doubling the subsequence length, and (2) reducing the extent to which gradients had to propagate backward through time. 

The authors of the Compressive Transformers paper want to build on that set of ideas to construct an even longer accessible memory. So, they take the baseline non-backpropogated memory design of TransformerXL, but instead of having tokens roll out of memory after the end of the previous (cached) subsequence, they create an extra compressed memory. Each token in this compressed memory is a function of C inputs in the normal memory. So, if C=3, you would input 3 memory vectors into your compression function to get one instance of a compressed memory vector. Depending on the scale of your C, you can turn up the temporal distance into the past that your compressed memory had to. 

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

While the gradients from the main loss function didn't, as far as I could tell, pass back into the compression function, they did apply a compression loss to incentivize the compression to be coherent. They considered an autoencoder loss to reconstruct the input tokens from the compressed memory, but decided against that on the principle that memory inherently has to be compressed and lossy to be effective, and an autoencoder loss would promote infeasibly lossless compression. Instead, they take the interesting approach of incentivizing the compressed representations to be able to reconstruct the attention calculation performed on the pre-compressed representations. Basically, any information pulled out of the pre-compressed memories by content-based lookup also needs to be able to be pulled out of the compressed memories. This incentives the network to preferentially keep the information that was being actively used by the attention mechanisms in prior steps, and discard less useful information. 

One framing from this paper that I enjoyed was them drawing a comparison between the approach of Transformers (of keeping all lower-level activations in memory, and recombining them "in real time," for each downstream use of that information), and the approach of RNNs (of keeping a running compressed representation of everything seen up to this point). In this frame, their method is somewhere in between, with a tunable compression rate C (by contrast, a RNN would have an effectively unlimited compression rate, since all prior tokens would be compressed into a single state representation).