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This paper proposes a 3D human pose estimation in video method based on the dilated temporal convolutions applied on 2D keypoints (input to the network). 2D keypoints can be obtained using any person keypoint detector, but Mask R-CNN with ResNet-101 backbone, pre-trained on COCO and fine-tuned on 2D projections from Human3.6M, is used in the paper. https://i.imgur.com/CdQONiN.png The poses are presented as 2D keypoint coordinates in contrast to using heatmaps (i.e. Gaussian operation applied at the keypoint 2D location). Thus, 1D convolutions over the time series are applied, instead of 2D convolutions over heatmaps. The model is a fully convolutional architecture with residual connections that takes a sequence of 2D poses ( concatenated $(x,y)$ coordinates of the joints in each frame) as input and transforms them through temporal convolutions. https://i.imgur.com/tCZvt6M.png The `Slice` layer in the residual connection performs padding (or slicing) the sequence with replicas of boundary frames (to both left and right) to match the dimensions with the main block as zero-padding is not used in the convolution operations. 3D pose estimation is a difficult task particularly due to the limited data available online. Therefore, the authors propose semi-supervised approach of training the 2D->3D pose estimation by exploiting unlabeled video. Specifically, 2D keypoints are detected in the unlabeled video with any keypoint detector, then 3D keypoints are predicted from them and these 3D points are reprojected back to 2D (camera intrinsic parameters are required). This is idea similar to cycle consistency in the [CycleGAN](https://junyanz.github.io/CycleGAN/), for instance. https://i.imgur.com/CBHxFOd.png In the semi-supervised part (bottom part of the image above) training penalizes when the reprojected 2D keypoints are far from the original input. Weighted mean per-joint position error (WMPJPE) loss, weighted by the inverse of the depth to the object (since far objects should contribute less to the training than close ones) is used as the optimization goal. The two networks (`supervised` above, `semi-supervised` below) have the same architecture but do not share any weights. They are jointly optimized where `semi-supervised` part serves as a regularizer. They communicate through the path aiming to make sure that the mean bone length of the above and below branches match. The interesting tendency is observed from the MPJPE analysis with different amounts of supervised and unsupervised data available. Basically, the `semi-supervised` approach becomes more effective when less labeled data is available. https://i.imgur.com/bHpVcSi.png Additionally, the error is reduced when the ground truth keypoints are used. This means that a robust and accurate 2D keypoint detector is essential for the accurate 3D pose estimation in this setting. https://i.imgur.com/rhhTDfo.png |
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## General stuff about face recognition Face recognition has 4 main tasks: * **Face detection**: Given an image, draw a rectangle around every face * **Face alignment**: Transform a face to be in a canonical pose * **Face representation**: Find a representation of a face which is suitable for follow-up tasks (small size, computationally cheap to compare, invariant to irrelevant changes) * **Face verification**: Images of two faces are given. Decide if it is the same person or not. The face verification task is sometimes (more simply) a face classification task (given a face, decide which of a fixed set of people it is). Datasets being used are: * **LFW** (Labeled Faces in the Wild): 97.35% accuracy; 13 323 web photos of 5 749 celebrities * **YTF** (YouTube Faces): 3425 YouTube videos of 1 595 subjects * **SFC** (Social Face Classification): 4.4 million labeled faces from 4030 people, each 800 to 1200 faces * **USF** (Human-ID database): 3D scans of faces ## Ideas in this paper This paper deals with face alignment and face representation. **Face Alignment** They made an average face with the USF dataset. Then, for each new face, they apply the following procedure: * Find 6 points in a face (2 eyes, 1 nose tip, 2 corners of the lip, 1 middle point of the bottom lip) * Crop according to those * Find 67 points in the face / apply them to a normalized 3D model of a face * Transform (=align) face to a normalized position **Representation** Train a neural network on 152x152 images of faces to classify 4030 celebrities. Remove the softmax output layer and use the output of the second-last layer as the transformed representation. The network is: * C1 (convolution): 32 filters of size $11 \times 11 \times 3$ (RGB-channels) (returns $142\times 142$ "images") * M2 (max pooling): $3 \times 3$, stride of 2 (returns $71\times 71$ "images") * C3 (convolution): 16 filters of size $9 \times 9 \times 16$ (returns $63\times 63$ "images") * L4 (locally connected): $16\times9\times9\times16$ (returns $55\times 55$ "images") * L5 (locally connected): $16\times7\times7\times16$ (returns $25\times 25$ "images") * L6 (locally connected): $16\times5\times5\times16$ (returns $21\times 21$ "images") * F7 (fully connected): ReLU, 4096 units * F8 (fully connected): softmax layer with 4030 output neurons The training was done with: * Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) * Momentum of 0.9 * Performance scheduling (LR starting at 0.01, ending at 0.0001) * Weight initialization: $w \sim \mathcal{N}(\mu=0, \sigma=0.01)$, $b = 0.5$ * ~15 epochs ($\approx$ 3 days) of training ## Evaluation results * **Quality**: * 97.35% accuracy (or mean accuracy?) with an Ensemble of DNNs for LFW * 91.4% accuracy with a single network on YTF * **Speed**: DeepFace runs in 0.33 seconds per image (I'm not sure which size). This includes image decoding, face detection and alignment, **the** feed forward network (why only one? wasn't this the best performing Ensemble?) and final classification output ## See also * Andrew Ng: [C4W4L03 Siamese Network](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jfw8MuKwpI) |
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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) |
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This paper tests the following hypothesis, about features learned by a deep network trained on the ImageNet dataset: *Object features and anticausal features are closely related. Context features and causal features are not necessarily related.* First, some definitions. Let $X$ be a visual feature (i.e. value of a hidden unit) and $Y$ be information about a label (e.g. the log-odds of probability of different object appearing in the image). A causal feature would be one for which the causal direction is $X \rightarrow Y$. An anticausal feature would be the opposite case, $X \leftarrow Y$. As for object features, in this paper they are features whose value tends to change a lot when computed on a complete original image versus when computed on an image whose regions *falling inside* object bounding boxes have been blacked out (see Figure 4). Contextual features are the opposite, i.e. values change a lot when blacking out the regions *outside* object bounding boxes. See section 4.2.1 for how "object scores" and "context scores" are computed following this description, to quantitatively measure to what extent a feature is an "object feature" or a "context feature". Thus, the paper investigates whether 1) for object features, their relationship with object appearance information is anticausal (i.e. whether the object feature's value seems to be caused by the presence of the object) and whether 2) context features are not clearly causal or anticausal. To perform this investigation, the paper first proposes a generic neural network model (dubbed the Neural Causation Coefficient architecture or NCC) to predict a score of whether the relationship between an input variable $X$ and target variable $Y$ is causal. This model is trained by taking as input datasets of $X$ and $Y$ pairs synthetically generated in such a way that we know whether $X$ caused $Y$ or the opposite. The NCC architecture first embeds each individual $X$,$Y$ instance pair into some hidden representation, performs mean pooling of these representations and then feeds the result to fully connected layers (see Figure 3). The paper shows that the proposed NCC model actually achieves SOTA performance on the Tübingen dataset, a collection of real-world cause-effect observational samples. Then, the proposed NCC model is used to measure the average object score of features of a deep residual CNN identified as being most causal and most anticausal by NCC. The same is done with the context score. What is found is that indeed, the object score is always higher for the top anticausal features than for the top causal features. However, for the context score, no such clear trend is observed (see Figure 5). **My two cents** I haven't been following the growing literature on machine learning for causal inference, so it was a real pleasure to read this paper and catch up a little bit on that. Just for that I would recommend the reading of this paper. The paper does a really good job at explaining the notion of *observational causal inference*, which in short builds on the observation that if we assume IID noise on top of a causal (or anticausal) phenomenon, then causation can possibly be inferred by verifying in which direction of causation the IID assumption on the noise seems to hold best (see Figure 2 for a nice illustration, where in (a) the noise is clearly IID, but isn't in (b)). Also, irrespective of the study of causal phenomenon in images, the NCC architecture, which achieves SOTA causal prediction performance, is in itself a nice contribution. Regarding the application to image features, one thing that is hard to wrap your head around is that, for the $Y$ variable, instead of using the true image label, the log-odds at the output layer are used instead in the study. The paper justifies this choice by highlighting that the NCC network was trained on examples where $Y$ is continuous, not discrete. On one hand, that justification makes sense. On the other, this is odd since the log-odds were in fact computed directly from the visual features, meaning that technically the value of the log-odds are directly caused by all the features (which goes against the hypothesis being tested). My best guess is that this isn't an issue only because NCC makes a causal prediction between *a single feature* and $Y$, not *from all features* to $Y$. I'd be curious to read the authors' perspective on this. Still, this paper at this point is certainly just scratching the surface on this topic. For instance, the paper mentions that NCC could be used to encourage the learning of causal or anticausal features, providing a new and intriguing type of regularization. This sounds like a very interesting future direction for research, which I'm looking forward to.
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Dinh et al. show that it is unclear whether flat minima necessarily generalize better than sharp ones. In particular, they study several notions of flatness, both based on the local curvature and based on the notion of “low change in error”. The authors show that the parameterization of the network has a significant impact on the flatness; this means that functions leading to the same prediction function (i.e., being indistinguishable based on their test performance) might have largely varying flatness around the obtained minima, as illustrated in Figure 1. In conclusion, while networks that generalize well usually correspond to flat minima, it is not necessarily true that flat minima generalize better than sharp ones. https://i.imgur.com/gHfolEV.jpg Figure 1: Illustration of the influence of parameterization on the flatness of the obtained minima. Also find this summary at [davidstutz.de](https://davidstutz.de/category/reading/). |