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

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

#### Methodology

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

##### Major Changes and intutions

**Mask prediction**

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

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

**RoIAlign**

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

**Backbone architecture**

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

**Training Objective**

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

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

#### Observation

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

_Objective:_ Design Feed-Forward Neural Network (fully connected) that can be trained even with very deep architectures.

*   _Dataset:_ [MNIST](yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/), [CIFAR10](https://www.cs.toronto.edu/%7Ekriz/cifar.html), [Tox21](https://tripod.nih.gov/tox21/challenge/) and [UCI tasks](https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/optical+recognition+of+handwritten+digits).
*   _Code:_ [here](https://github.com/bioinf-jku/SNNs)

## Inner-workings:

They introduce a new activation functio the Scaled Exponential Linear Unit (SELU) which has the nice property of making neuron activations converge to a fixed point with zero-mean and unit-variance.  
They also demonstrate that upper and lower bounds and the variance and mean for very mild conditions which basically means that there will be no exploding or vanishing gradients.

The activation function is:  
[![screen shot 2017-06-14 at 11 38 27 am](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17261080/27125901-1a4f7276-50f6-11e7-857d-ebad1ac94789.png)](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17261080/27125901-1a4f7276-50f6-11e7-857d-ebad1ac94789.png)  
With specific parameters for alpha and lambda to ensure the previous properties. The tensorflow impementation is:

    def selu(x):
        alpha = 1.6732632423543772848170429916717
        scale = 1.0507009873554804934193349852946
        return scale*np.where(x>=0.0, x, alpha*np.exp(x)-alpha)
    

They also introduce a new dropout (alpha-dropout) to compensate for the fact that [![screen shot 2017-06-14 at 11 44 42 am](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17261080/27126174-e67d212c-50f6-11e7-8952-acad98b850be.png)](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17261080/27126174-e67d212c-50f6-11e7-8952-acad98b850be.png)

## Results:

Batch norm becomes obsolete and they are also able to train deeper architectures. This becomes a good choice to replace shallow architectures where random forest or SVM used to be the best results. They outperform most other techniques on small datasets.  
[![screen shot 2017-06-14 at 11 36 30 am](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17261080/27125798-bd04c256-50f5-11e7-8a74-b3b6a3fe82ee.png)](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17261080/27125798-bd04c256-50f5-11e7-8a74-b3b6a3fe82ee.png)

Might become a new standard for fully-connected activations in the future.

Ma et al. detect adversarial examples based on their estimated intrinsic dimensionality. I want to note that this work is also similar to [1] – in both publications, local intrinsic dimensionality is used to analyze adversarial examples. Specifically, the intrinsic dimensionality of a sample is estimated based on the radii $r_i(x)$ of the $k$-nearest neighbors around a sample $x$:

$- \left(\frac{1}{k} \sum_{i = 1}^k \log \frac{r_i(x)}{r_k(x)}\right)^{-1}$.

For details regarding the original, theoretical formulation of local intrinsic dimensionality I refer to the paper. In experiments, the authors show that adversarial examples exhibit a significant higher intrinsic dimensionality than training samples or randomly perturbed examples. This observation allows detection of adversarial examples. A proper interpretation of this finding is, however, missing. It would be interesting to investigate what this finding implies about the properties of adversarial examples.

Pereyra et al. propose an entropy regularizer for penalizing over-confident predictions of deep neural networks. Specifically, given the predicted distribution $p_\theta(y_i|x)$ for labels $y_i$ and network parameters $\theta$, a regularizer

$-\beta \max(0, \Gamma – H(p_\theta(y|x))$

is added to the learning objective. Here, $H$ denotes the entropy and $\beta$, $\Gamma$ are hyper-parameters allowing to weight and limit the regularizers influence. In experiments, this regularizer showed slightly improved performance on MNIST and Cifar-10.

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

Sharif et al. study the effectiveness of $L_p$ norms for creating adversarial perturbations. In this context, their main discussion revolves around whether $L_p$ norms are sufficient and/or necessary for perceptual similarity. Their main conclusion is that $L_p$ norms are neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure perceptual similarity. For example, an adversarial example might be within a specific $L_p$ bal, but humans might still identify it as not similar enough to the originally attacked sample; on the other hand, there are also some imperceptible perturbations that usually extend beyond a reasonable $L_p$ ball. Such transformatons might for example include small rotations or translation. These findings are interesting because it indicates that our current model, or approximation, or perceptual similarity is not meaningful in all cases.

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