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

The main contribution of this paper is introducing a new transformation that the authors call Batch Normalization (BN). The need for BN comes from the fact that during the training of deep neural networks (DNNs) the distribution of each layer’s input change. This phenomenon is called internal covariate shift (ICS).

#### What is BN?
Normalize each (scalar) feature independently with respect to the mean and variance of the mini batch. Scale and shift the normalized values with two new parameters (per activation) that will be learned. The BN consists of making normalization part of the model architecture.

#### What do we gain?
According to the author, the use of BN provides a great speed up in the training of DNNs. In particular, the gains are greater when it is combined with higher learning rates. In addition, BN works as a regularizer for the model which allows to use less dropout or less L2 normalization. Furthermore, since the distribution of the inputs is normalized, it also allows to use sigmoids as activation functions without the saturation problem.

#### What follows?
This seems to be specially promising for training recurrent neural networks (RNNs). The vanishing and exploding gradient problems \cite{journals/tnn/BengioSF94} have their origin in the iteration of transformation that scale up or down the activations in certain directions (eigenvectors). It seems that this regularization would be specially useful in this context since this would allow the gradient to flow more easily. When we unroll the RNNs, we usually have ultra deep networks.

#### Like
* Simple idea that seems to improve training.
* Makes training faster.
* Simple to implement. Probably.
* You can be less careful with initialization.

#### Dislike
* Does not work with stochastic gradient descent (minibatch size = 1).
* This could reduce the parallelism of the algorithm since now all the examples in a mini batch are tied.
* Results on ensemble of networks for ImageNet makes it harder to evaluate the relevance of BN by itself. (Although they do mention the performance of a single model).

**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)

Liu et al. provide a comprehensive study on the transferability of adversarial examples considering different attacks and models on ImageNet. In their experiments, they consider both targeted and non-targeted attack and also provide a real-world example by attacking clarifai.com. Here, I want to list some interesting conclusions drawn from their experiments:
- Non-targeted attacks easily transfer between models; targeted-attacks, in contrast, do generally not transfer – meaning that the target does not transfer across models.
- The level of transferability does also seem to heavily really on hyperparameters of the trained models. In the experiments, the author observed this on different ResNet models which share the general architecture building blocks, but are of different depth.
- Considering different models, it turns out that the gradient directions (i.e. the adversarial directions used in many gradient-based attacks) are mostly orthogonal – this means that different models have different vulnerabilities. However, the observed transferability suggests that this only holds for the “steepest” adversarial direction; the gradient direction of one model is, thus, still useful to craft adversarial examples for another model.
- The authors also provide an interesting visualization of the local decision landscape around individual examples. As illustrated in Figure 1, the region where the chosen image is classified correctly is often limited to a small central area. Of course, I believe that these examples are hand-picked to some extent, but they show the worst-case scenario relevant for defense mechanisms.

https://i.imgur.com/STz0iwo.png
Figure 1: Decision boundary showing different classes in different colors. The axes correspond to one pixel differences; the used images are computed using $x' = x +\delta_1u + \delta_2v$ where $u$ is the gradient direction and $v$ a random direction.

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

Lee et al. propose a generative model for obtaining confidence-calibrated classifiers. Neural networks are known to be overconfident in their predictions – not only on examples from the task’s data distribution, but also on other examples taken from different distributions. The authors propose a GAN-based approach to force the classifier to predict uniform predictions on examples not taken from the data distribution. In particular, in addition to the target classifier, a generator and a discriminator are introduced. The generator generates “hard” out-of-distribution examples; ideally these examples are close to the in-distribution, i.e., the data distribution of the actual task. The discriminator is intended to distinguish between out- and in-distribution. The overall algorithm, including the necessary losses, is given in Algorithm 1. In experiments, the approach is shown to allow detecting out-distribution examples nearly perfectly. Examples of the generated “hard” out-of-distribution samples are given in Figure 1.

https://i.imgur.com/NmF0fpN.png
Algorithm 1: The proposed joint training scheme of out-distribution generator $G$, the in-/out-distribution discriminator $G$ and the original classifier providing $P_\theta$(y|x)$ with parameters $\theta$.

https://i.imgur.com/kAclSQz.png
Figure 1: A comparison of a regular GAN (a and c) to the proposed framework (c and d). Clearly, the proposed approach generates out-of-distribution samples (i.e., no meaningful digits) close to the original data distribution.