We want to find two matrices $W$ and $H$ such that $V = WH$. Often a goal is to determine underlying patterns in the relationships between the concepts represented by each row and column. $W$ is some $m$ by $n$ matrix and we want the inner dimension of the factorization to be $r$. So 

$$\underbrace{V}_{m \times n} = \underbrace{W}_{m \times r} \underbrace{H}_{r \times n}$$

Let's consider an example matrix where of three customers (as rows) are associated with three movies (the columns) by a rating value.

$$
V = \left[\begin{array}{c c c}
5 & 4 & 1  \\\\
4 & 5 & 1 \\\\
2 & 1 & 5
\end{array}\right]
$$


We can decompose this into two matrices with $r = 1$. First lets do this without any non-negative constraint using an SVD reshaping matrices based on removing eigenvalues:


$$
W = \left[\begin{array}{c c c}
-0.656 \\\
 -0.652 \\\
 -0.379
\end{array}\right],
H = \left[\begin{array}{c c c}
-6.48 & -6.26 & -3.20\\\\
\end{array}\right]
$$

We can also decompose this into two matrices with $r = 1$ subject to the constraint that $w_{ij} \ge 0$ and  $h_{ij} \ge 0$. (Note: this is only possible when $v_{ij} \ge 0$):

$$
W = \left[\begin{array}{c c c}
0.388 \\\\
0.386 \\\\
0.224
\end{array}\right],
H = \left[\begin{array}{c c c}
11.22 & 10.57 & 5.41  \\\\
\end{array}\right]
$$

Both of these $r=1$ factorizations reconstruct matrix $V$ with the same error. 

$$
V \approx WH = \left[\begin{array}{c c c}
4.36 & 4.11 & 2.10 \\\
4.33 & 4.08 & 2.09 \\\
2.52 & 2.37 & 1.21 \\\
\end{array}\right]
$$


If they both yield the same reconstruction error then why is a non-negativity constraint useful? We can see above that it is easy to observe patterns in both factorizations such as similar customers and similar movies. `TODO: motivate why NMF is better`



#### Paper Contribution 

This paper discusses two approaches for iteratively creating a non-negative $W$ and $H$ based on random initial matrices. The paper discusses a multiplicative update rule where the elements of $W$ and $H$ are iteratively transformed by scaling each value such that error is not increased. 

The multiplicative approach is discussed in contrast to an additive gradient decent based approach where small corrections are iteratively applied. The multiplicative approach can be reduced to this by setting the learning rate ($\eta$) to a ratio that represents the magnitude of the element in $H$ to the scaling factor of $W$ on $H$.



### Still a draft

SSD aims to solve the major problem with most of the current state of the art object detectors namely Faster RCNN and like. All the object detection algortihms have same  methodology 

- Train 2 different nets - Region Proposal Net (RPN) and advanced classifier to detect class of an object and bounding box separately.
- During inference, run the test image at different scales to detect object at multiple scales to account for invariance

This makes the nets extremely slow. Faster RCNN could operate at **7 FPS with 73.2% mAP** while SSD could achieve **59 FPS with 74.3% mAP ** on VOC 2007 dataset.

#### Methodology

SSD uses a single net for predict object class and bounding box. However it doesn't do that directly. It uses a mechanism for choosing ROIs, training end-to-end for predicting class and boundary shift for that ROI.

##### ROI selection

Borrowing from FasterRCNNs SSD uses the  concept of anchor boxes for generating ROIs from the feature maps of last layer of shared conv layer. For each pixel in layer of feature maps, k default boxes with different aspect ratios are chosen around every pixel in the map. So if there are feature maps each of m x n resolutions - that's *mnk* ROIs for a single feature layer. Now SSD uses multiple feature layers (with differing resolutions) for generating such ROIs primarily to capture size invariance of objects. But because earlier layers in deep conv net tends to capture low level features, it uses features after certain levels and layers henceforth.

##### ROI labelling
Any ROI that matches to Ground Truth for a class after applying appropriate transforms and having Jaccard overlap greater than 0.5 is positive. Now, given all feature maps are at different resolutions and each boxes are at different aspect ratios, doing that's not simple. SDD uses simple scaling and aspect ratios to get to the appropriate  ground truth dimensions for calculating Jaccard overlap for default boxes for each pixel at the given resolution

##### ROI classification

SSD uses single convolution kernel of 3*3 receptive fields to predict for each ROI the 4 offsets (centre-x offset, centre-y offset, height offset , width offset) from the Ground Truth box for each RoI, along with class confidence scores for each class. So that is if there are c classes (including background), there are (c+4) filters for each convolution kernels that looks at a ROI. 

So summarily we have convolution kernels  that look at ROIs (which are default boxes around each pixel in feature map layer) to generate (c+4) scores for each RoI. Multiple feature map layers with different resolutions are used for generating such ROIs. Some ROIs are positive and some negative depending on jaccard overlap after ground box has scaled appropriately taking resolution differences in input image and feature map into consideration.

Here's how it looks :
![](https://i.imgur.com/HOhsPZh.png)

##### Training

For each ROI a combined loss is calculated as a combination of localisation error and classification error. The details are best explained in the figure. 
![](https://i.imgur.com/zEDuSgi.png)

##### Inference
For each ROI predictions a small threshold is used to first filter out irrelevant predictions, Non Maximum Suppression (nms) with jaccard overlap of 0.45 per class is applied then on the remaining candidate ROIs and the top 200 detections per image are kept.

For further understanding of the intuitions regarding the paper and the results obtained please consider giving the full paper a read. 

The open sourced code is available at this [Github repo](https://github.com/weiliu89/caffe/tree/ssd)
 

Dash et al. present a reasonably recent survey on radial basis function (RBF) networks. RBF networks can be understood as two-layer perceptrons, consisting of an input layer, a hidden layer and an output layer. Instead of using a linear operation for computing the hidden layers, RBF kernels are used; as simple example the hidden units are computed as

$h_i = \phi_i(x) = \exp\left(-\frac{\|x - \mu_i\|^2}{2\sigma_i^2}\right)$

where $\mu_i$ and $\sigma_i^2$ are parameters of the kernel. In a clustering interpretation, the $\mu_i$’s correspond to the kernel’s center and the $\sigma_i^2$’s correspond to the kernels bandwidth. The hidden units are then summed with weights $w_i$; for one output $y \in \mathbb{R}$ this can be written as

$y_i = \sum_i w_i h_i$.

Originally, RBF networks were trained in a “clustering”-fashion in order to find the centers $\mu_i$; the bandwidths are often treated as hyper-parameters. Dash et al. show several alternative approaches based on clustering or orthogonal least squares; I refer to the paper for details.

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

This was a really cool-to-me paper that asked whether contrastive losses, of the kind that have found widespread success in semi-supervised domains, can add value in a supervised setting as well. In a semi-supervised context, contrastive loss works by pushing together the representations of an "anchor" data example with an augmented version of itself (which is taken as a positive or target, because the image is understood to not be substantively changed by being augmented), and pushing the representation of that example away from other examples in the batch, which are negatives in the sense that they are assumed to not be related to the anchor image. 

This paper investigates whether this same structure - of training representations of positives to be close relative to negatives - could be expanded to the supervised setting, where "positives" wouldn't just mean augmented versions of a single image, but augmented versions of other images belonging to the same class. This would ideally combine the advantages of self-supervised contrastive loss - that explicitly incentivizes invariance to augmentation-based changes - with the advantages of a supervised signal, which allows the representation to learn that it should also see instances of the same class as close to one another. 

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

To evaluate the performance of this as a loss function, the authors first train the representation - either with their novel supervised contrastive loss SupCon, or with a control cross-entropy loss - and then train a linear regression with cross-entropy on top of that learned representation. (Just because, structurally, a contrastive loss doesn't lead to assigning probabilities to particular classes, even if it is supervised in the sense of capturing information relevant to classification in the representation) 

The authors investigate two versions of this contrastive loss, which differ, as shown below, in terms of the relative position of the sum and the log operation, and show that the L_out version dramatically outperforms (and I mean dramatically, with a top-one accuracy of 78.7 vs 67.4%). 

https://i.imgur.com/X5F1DDV.png

The authors suggest that the L_out version is superior in terms of training dynamics, and while I didn't fully follow their explanation, I believe it had to do with L_out version doing its normalization outside of the log, which meant it actually functioned as a multiplicative normalizer, as opposed to happening inside the log, where it would have just become an additive (or, really, subtractive) constant in the gradient term. Due to this stronger normalization, the authors positive the L_out loss was less noisy and more stable. 

Overall, the authors show that SupCon consistently (if not dramatically) outperforms cross-entropy when it comes to final accuracy. They also show that it is comparable in transfer performance to a self-supervised contrastive loss. One interesting extension to this work, which I'd enjoy seeing more explored in the future, is how the performance of this sort of loss scales with the number of different augmentations that performed of each element in the batch (this work uses two different augmentations, but there's no reason this number couldn't be higher, which would presumably give additional useful signal and robustness?)

TLDR; The authors propose two different architectures to improve the performance of character-level RNNs. In the first architecture ("mixed") the authors condition the model on the state of a word-level RNN. In the second architecture ("cond") they condition the output classifier on character n-grams. The authors show that the proposed architecture outperform plain character-level RNNs in terms of entropy in bits per character.

#### Key Points

- Plain character-level RNNs need a huge hidden representation in order to model long-term dependencies. But Word-level RNNs can't generalize to new vocabulary and may require a huge output vocab.
- Model 1: Jointly train word-level and char-level CNN. Interpolate the losses of the two models.
- Model 2: Condition softmax on n-grams before character, "relieving" the network of memorizing some of the sequence.
- Training: Constant learning rate, reduce every epoch when validation accuracy decreases
- N-gram model can be applied to arbitrary data, not just characters. Authors evaluate on binary data.

#### Notes / Questions

- In the comparison table the authors don't show the number of parameters for the models. They compare models with the same number of hidden units, but their proposed architecture need extra parameters and computation. Unfair comparison?
- People typically use LSTMs/GRUs for language modeling. Of course the proposed techniques can be applied to LSTM/GRU networks, but the experimental result may look very different. Do these architectures result in any benefit when using LSTM/GRU char data?
- Entropy in bits per character seems like somewhat of a strange evaluation metric. I don't really know what to make of it, and no intuitive explanations are given.
- One argument the authors make in the paper is that character-level models can be applied to arbitrary input data (different languages, binary data, code, etc). But their mixed is clearly very language-specific. It can't be applied to arbitrary data, and many languages don't have clear word boundaries. Similarly, n-grams may be prohibituvely expensive depending on what kind of data we're working with. 
- The n-gram conditioned models isn't clearly explained, I *think* I understand what it does, but I'm not quite sure. No intuitive explanations what any of the models are learning are given.