Problem
----------
Given an unconstrained image, estimate:
1. 3d pose of human skeleton 
2. 3d body mesh


Contributions
-----------
1. full body mesh extraction from image
2. improvement of state of the art


Datasets
-------------
1. Leeds Sports
2. HumanEva
3. Human3.6M


Approach
----------------
Consider the problem both bottom-up and top-down.
1. Bottom-up: DeepCut cnn model to fit joints 2d positions onto the image.
2. top-down: A skinned multi-person linear model (SMPL) is fitted and projected onto 2d joint positions and image.

#### Introduction

* The paper proposes a general and end-to-end approach for sequence learning that uses two deep LSTMs, one to map input sequence to vector space and another to map vector to the output sequence.
* For sequence learning, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) requires the dimensionality of input and output sequences be known and fixed. This limitation is overcome by using the two LSTMs.
* [Link to the paper](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learning-with-neural-networks.pdf)

#### Model

* Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) generalizes feed forward neural networks to sequences.
* Given a sequence of inputs $(x_{1}, x_{2}...x_{t})$, RNN computes a sequence of outputs $(y_1, y_2...y_t')$ by iterating over the following equation:

$$h_t = sigm(W^{hx}x_t + W^{hh} h_{t-1})$$

$$y^{t} = W^{yh}h_{t}$$

* To map variable length sequences, the input is mapped to a fixed size vector using an RNN and this fixed size vector is mapped to output sequence using another RNN.
* Given the long-term dependencies between the two sequences, LSTMs are preferred over RNNs.
* LSTMs estimate the conditional probability *p(output sequence | input sequence)* by first mapping the input sequence to a fixed dimensional representation and then computing the probability of output with a standard LST-LM formulation.

##### Differences between the model and standard LSTMs

* The model uses two LSTMs (one for input sequence and another for output sequence), thereby increasing the number of model parameters at negligible computing cost.
* Model uses Deep LSTMs (4 layers).
* The words in the input sequences are reversed to introduce short-term dependencies and to reduce the "minimal time lag". By reversing the word order, the first few words in the source sentence (input sentence) are much closer to first few words in the target sentence (output sentence) thereby making it easier for LSTM to "establish" communication between input and output sentences.


#### Experiments

* WMT'14 English to French dataset containing 12 million sentences consisting of 348 million French words and 304 million English words.
* Model tested on translation task and on the task of re-scoring the n-best results of baseline approach.
* Deep LSTMs trained in sentence pairs by maximizing the log probability of a correct translation $T$, given the source sentence $S$
* The training objective is to maximize this log probability, averaged over all the pairs in the training set.
* Most likely translation is found by performing a simple, left-to-right beam search for translation.
* A hard constraint is enforced on the norm of the gradient to avoid the exploding gradient problem.
* Min batches are selected to have sentences of similar lengths to reduce training time.
* Model performs better when reversed sentences are used for training.
* While the model does not beat the state-of-the-art, it is the first pure neural translation system to outperform a phrase-based SMT baseline.
* The model performs well on long sentences as well with only a minor degradation for the largest sentences.
* The paper prepares ground for the application of sequence-to-sequence based learning models in other domains by demonstrating how a simple and relatively unoptimised neural model could outperform a mature SMT system on translation tasks.

Tree-based ML models are becoming increasingly popular, but in the explanation space for these type of models is woefully lacking explanations on a local level. Local level explanations can give a clearer picture on specific use-cases and help pin point exact areas where the ML model maybe lacking in accuracy.

**Idea**: We need a local explanation system for trees, that is not based on simple decision path, but rather weighs each feature in comparison to every other feature to gain better insight on the model's inner workings.

**Solution**: This paper outlines a new methodology using SHAP relative values, to weigh pairs of features to get a better local explanation of a tree-based model. The paper also outlines how we can garner global level explanations from several local explanations, using the relative score for a large sample space. The paper also walks us through existing methodologies for local explanation, and why these are biased toward tree depth as opposed to actual feature importance.

The proposed explanation model titled TreeExplainer exposes methods to compute optimal local explanation, garner global understanding from local explanations, and capture feature interaction within a tree based model.

This method assigns Shapley interaction values to pairs of features essentially ranking the features so as to understand which features have a higher impact on overall outcomes, and analyze feature interaction.

Adversarial examples are datapoints that are designed to fool a classifier. For example, we can take an image that is classified correctly using a neural network, then backprop through the model to find which changes we need to make in order for it to be classified as something else. And these changes can be quite small, such that a human would hardly notice a difference.

https://i.imgur.com/pkK570X.png

Examples of adversarial images.

In this paper, they show that much of this property holds even when the images are fed into the classifier from the real world – after being photographed with a cell phone camera. While the accuracy goes from 85.3% to 36.3% when adversarial modifications are applied on the source images, the performance still drops from 79.8% to 36.4% when the images are photographed. They also propose two modifications to the process of generating adversarial images  – making it into a more gradual iterative process, and optimising for a specific adversarial class.

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.