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

# Object detection system overview.

https://i.imgur.com/vd2YUy3.png
 
1.	takes an input image,
2.	extracts around 2000 bottom-up region proposals, 
3.	computes features for each proposal using a large convolutional neural network (CNN), and then
4.	classifies each region using class-specific linear SVMs.
* R-CNN achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 53.7% on PASCAL VOC 2010.
* On the 200-class ILSVRC2013 detection dataset, R-CNN’s mAP is 31.4%, a large improvement over OverFeat , which had the previous best result at 24.3%.

## There is a 2 challenges faced in object detection 
1.	localization problem
2.	labeling the data

1 localization problem :
*  One approach frames localization as a regression problem.  they report a mAP of 30.5% on VOC 2007 compared to the 58.5% achieved by our method.
* An alternative is to build a sliding-window detector.  considered adopting a sliding-window approach increases the number of convolutional layers to 5, have very large receptive fields (195 x 195 pixels) and strides (32x32 pixels) in the input image, which makes precise localization within the sliding-window paradigm.

2 labeling the data:
* The conventional solution to this problem is to use unsupervised pre-training, followed by supervise fine-tuning 
* supervised pre-training on a large auxiliary dataset (ILSVRC), followed by domain specific fine-tuning on a small dataset (PASCAL),
* fine-tuning for detection improves mAP performance by 8 percentage points. 
* Stochastic gradient descent via back propagation was used to  effective for training convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
 
##  Object detection with R-CNN
This  system consists of three modules
* The first generates category-independent region proposals. These proposals define the set of candidate detections available to our detector.
*  The second module is a large convolutional neural network that extracts a fixed-length feature vector from each region.
* The third module is a set of class specific linear SVMs.

Module design

1 Region proposals 
* which detect mitotic cells by applying a CNN to regularly-spaced square crops.
* use selective search method in fast mode (Capture All Scales, Diversification, Fast to Compute).
* the time spent computing region proposals and features (13s/image on a GPU or 53s/image on a CPU)

2 Feature extraction.
* extract a 4096-dimensional feature vector from each region proposal using the Caffe  implementation of the CNN 
* Features are computed by forward propagating a mean-subtracted 227x227 RGB image through five convolutional layers and two fully connected layers.
* warp all pixels in a tight bounding box around it to the required size
* The feature matrix is typically 2000x4096 

3 Test time detection
* At test time, run selective search on the test image to extract around 2000 region proposals (we use selective search’s “fast mode” in all experiments).
*  warp each proposal and forward propagate it through the CNN in order to compute features. Then, for each class, we score each extracted feature vector using the SVM trained for that class.
* Given all scored regions in an image, we apply a greedy non-maximum suppression (for each class independently) that rejects a region if it has an intersection-over union (IoU) overlap with a higher scoring selected region larger than a learned threshold.
## Training

1 Supervised pre-training:
 * pre-trained the CNN on a large auxiliary dataset (ILSVRC2012 classification)  using image-level annotations only (bounding box labels are not available for this data)

2  Domain-specific fine-tuning.
* use the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) training of the CNN parameters using only warped region proposals with  learning rate of 0.001.

3  Object category classifiers.
*   use intersection-over union (IoU) overlap threshold method  to label a region with The overlap threshold of 0.3.
* Once features are extracted and training labels are applied, we optimize one linear SVM per class.
* adopt the standard hard negative mining method to fit large training data in memory.

### Results on PASCAL VOC 201012

1  VOC 2010
* compared against four strong baselines including SegDPM, DPM, UVA, Regionlets. 
* Achieve a large improvement in mAP, from 35.1% to 53.7% mAP,  while also being much faster
 https://i.imgur.com/0dGX9b7.png
2 ILSVRC2013 detection.
* ran R-CNN on the 200-class ILSVRC2013 detection dataset
* R-CNN achieves a mAP of 31.4%
https://i.imgur.com/GFbULx3.png
#### Performance layer-by-layer, without fine-tuning
1 pool5 layer 
* which is the max pooled output of the network’s fifth and final convolutional layer.
*The pool5 feature map is 6 x6 x 256 = 9216 dimensional
* each pool5 unit has a receptive field of 195x195 pixels in the original 227x227 pixel input

2 Layer fc6
* fully connected to pool5
*  it multiplies a 4096x9216 weight matrix by the pool5 feature map (reshaped as a 9216-dimensional vector) and then adds a vector of biases

3 Layer fc7
* It is implemented by multiplying the features computed by fc6 by a 4096 x 4096 weight matrix, and similarly adding a vector of biases and applying half-wave rectification
#### Performance layer-by-layer, with fine-tuning
* CNN’s parameters  fine-tuned on PASCAL.
* fine-tuning increases mAP by 8.0 % points to 54.2%

### Network architectures
* 16-layer deep network, consisting of 13 layers of 3 _ 3 convolution kernels, with five max pooling layers interspersed, and topped with three fully-connected layers. We refer to this network as “O-Net” for OxfordNet and the baseline as “T-Net” for TorontoNet.
* RCNN with O-Net substantially outperforms R-CNN with TNet, increasing mAP from 58.5% to 66.0%
* drawback in terms of compute time, with in terms of compute time, with than T-Net.

1 The ILSVRC2013 detection dataset
* dataset is split into three sets: train (395,918), val (20,121), and test (40,152) 

#### CNN features for segmentation.
* full R-CNN: The first strategy (full) ignores the re region’s shape and computes CNN features directly on the warped window. Two regions might have very similar bounding boxes while having very little overlap. 
* fg R-CNN: the second strategy (fg) computes CNN features only on a region’s foreground mask. We replace the background with the mean input so that background regions are zero after mean subtraction.
* full+fg R-CNN: The third strategy (full+fg) simply concatenates the full and fg features
 https://i.imgur.com/n1bhmKo.png

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)

Feinman et al. use dropout to compute an uncertainty measure that helps to identify adversarial examples. Their so-called Bayesian Neural Network Uncertainty is computed as follows:

$\frac{1}{T} \sum_{i=1}^T \hat{y}_i^T \hat{y}_i - \left(\sum_{i=1}^T \hat{y}_i\right)\left(\sum_{i=1}^T \hat{y}_i\right)$

where $\{\hat{y}_1,\ldots,\hat{y}_T\}$ is a set of stochastic predictions (i.e. predictions with different noise patterns in the dropout layers). Here, is can easily be seen that this measure corresponds to a variance computatin where the first term is correlation and the second term is the product of expectations. In Figure 1, the authors illustrate the distributions of this uncertainty measure for regular training samples, adversarial samples and noisy samples for two attacks (BIM and JSMA, see paper for details).

https://i.imgur.com/kTWTHb5.png
Figure 1: Uncertainty distributions for two attacks (BIM and JSMA, see paper for details) and normal samples, adversarial samples and noisy samples.

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

Coming from the perspective of the rest of machine learning, a somewhat odd thing about reinforcement learning that often goes unnoticed is the fact that, in basically all reinforcement learning, performance of an algorithm is judged by its performance on the same environment it was trained on. In the parlance of ML writ large: training on the test set. In RL, most of the focus has historically been on whether automatic systems would be able to learn a policy from the state distribution of a single environment, already a fairly hard task. But, now that RL has had more success in the single-environment case, there comes the question: how can we train reinforcement algorithms that don't just perform well on a single environment, but over a range of environments. One lens onto this question is that of meta-learning, but this paper takes a different approach, and looks at how straightforward regularization techniques pulled from the land of supervised learning can (or can't straightforwardly) be applied to reinforcement learning. 

In general, the regularization techniques discussed here are all ways of reducing the capacity of the model, and preventing it from overfitting. Some ways to reduce capacity are: 

- Apply L2 weight penalization
- Apply dropout, which handicaps the model by randomly zeroing out neurons
- Use Batch Norm, which uses noisy batch statistics, and increases randomness in a way that, similar to above, deteriorates performance
- Use an information bottleneck: similar to a VAE, this approach works by learning some compressed representation of your input, p(z|x), and then predicting your output off of that z, in a way that incentivizes your z to be informative (because you want to be able to predict y well) but also penalizes too much information being put in it (because you penalize differences between your learned p(z|x) distribution and an unconditional prior p(z) ). This pushes your model to use its conditional-on-x capacity wisely, and only learn features if they're quite valuable in predicting y

However, the paper points out that there are some complications in straightforwardly applying these techniques to RL. The central one is the fact that in (most) RL, the distribution of transitions you train on comes from prior iterations of your policy. This means that a noisier and less competent policy will also leave you with less data to train on. Additionally, using a noisy policy can increase variance, both by making your trained policy more different than your rollout policy (in an off-policy setting) and by making your estimate of the value function higher-variance, which is problematic because that's what you're using as a target training signal in a temporal difference framework. 

The paper is a bit disconnected in its connection between justification and theory, and makes two broad, mostly distinct proposals: 

1. The most successful (though also the one least directly justified by the earlier-discussed theoretical difficulties of applying regularization in RL) is an information bottleneck ported into a RL setting. It works almost the same as the classification-model one, except that you're trying to increase the value of your actions given compressed-from-state representation z, rather than trying to increase your ability to correctly predict y. The justification given here is that it's good to incentivize RL algorithms in particular to learn simpler, more compressible features, because they often have such poor data and also training signal earlier in training 
2. SNI (Selective Noise Injection) works by only applying stochastic aspects of regularization (sampling from z in an information bottleneck, applying different dropout masks, etc) to certain parts of the training procedure. In particular, the rollout used to collect data is non-stochastic, removing the issue of noisiness impacting the data that's collected. They then do an interesting thing where they calculate a weighted mixture of the policy update with a deterministic model, and the update with a stochastic one. The best performing of these that they tested seems to have been a 50/50 split.  This is essentially just a knob you can turn on stochasticity, to trade off between the regularizing effect of noise and the variance-increasing-negative effect of it. 

https://i.imgur.com/fi0dHgf.png

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

Based on my read of the experiments in the paper, the most impressive thing here is how well their information bottleneck mechanism works as a way to improve generalization, compared to both the baseline and other regularization approaches. It does look like there's some additional benefit to SNI, particularly in the CoinRun setting, but very little in the MultiRoom setting, and in general the difference is less dramatic than the difference from using the information bottleneck.