Guo et al. study calibration of deep neural networks as post-processing step. Here, calibration means a correction of the predicted confidence scores as these are commonlz too overconfident in recent deep networks. They consider several state-of-the-art post-processing steps for calibration, but surprisingly, they show that a simple linear mapping, or even scaling, works surprisingly well. So if $z_i$ are the logits of the network, then (the network being fixed) a parameter $T$ is found such that

$\sigma(\frac{z_i}{T})$

is calibrated and minimized the NLL loss on a held-out validation set. Here, the temeratur $T$ either softens or roughens the probability distribution over classes. Interestingly, finding $T$ by optimizing the same training loss helps to reduce over-confidence.

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

They start with the neural machine translation model using alignment, by Bahdanau et al. (2014), and add an extra variational component.

https://i.imgur.com/6yIEbDf.png

The authors use two neural variational components to model a distribution over latent variables z that captures the semantics of a sentence being translated. First, they model the posterior probability of z, conditioned on both input and output. Then they also model the prior of z, conditioned only on the input. During training, these two distributions are optimised to be similar using Kullback-Leibler distance, and during testing the prior is used. They report improvements on Chinese-English and English-German translation, compared to using the original encoder-decoder NMT framework.

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)

This paper’s approach goes a step further away from the traditional word embedding approach - of training embeddings as the lookup-table first layer of an unsupervised monolingual network - and proposes a more holistic form of transfer learning that involves not just transferring over learned knowledge contained in a set of vectors, but a fully trained model. 

Transfer learning is the general idea of using part or all of a network trained on one task to perform a different task. The most common kind of transfer learning is in the image domain, where models are first trained on the enormous ImageNet dataset, and then several of the lower layers of the network (where more local, small-pixel-range patterns are detected) are transferred, with their weights fixed in place to a new network. The modeler then attaches a few more layers to the top, connects it to a new target, and then is able to much more quickly learn their new target, because the pre-training has gotten them into a useful region of parameter-space. 

https://i.imgur.com/wjloHdi.png
Within NLP, the most common form of transfer learning is initializing the lookup table of vectors that’s used to convert discrete words in to vectors (also known as an embedding) with embeddings pre-trained on huge unsupervised datasets, like GloVe, trained on all of English Wikipedia. Again, this makes your overall task easier to train, because you’ve already converted words from their un-useful binary representation (where the word cat is just as far from Peru as it is from kitten) to a meaningful real-valued representation.

The approach suggested in this paper goes beyond simply learning the vector input representation of words. Instead, the authors suggest using as word vectors the sequence of encodings produced by an encoder-decoder bi-directional recurrent model. An encoder-decoder model means that you have one part of the network that maps from input sentence to an “encoded” representation of the sentence, and then another part that maps that encoded representation into the proper tokens in the target language. Historically, this encoding had been a single vector for the whole sentence, which tried to conceptually capture all of the words into one vector. More recently, a different approach has grown popular, where the RNN produces a number of encodings equal to the number of input words. Then, when the decoder is producing words in the target sentence, it uses something called “attention” to select a weighted combination of these encodings at each point in time. Under this scheme, the decoder might pull out information about verbs when its own hidden state suggests it needs a verb, and might pull out information about pronoun referents when its own hidden state asks for that. The upshot of all of this is that you end up with a sequence of encoded vectors equal in length to your number of inputs. Because the RNN is bidirectional, which means the encoding is a concatenation of the forward RNN and backward RNN, that means that each of these encodings captures both information about its corresponding word, and contextual information about the rest of the sentence. 

The proposal of the authors is to train the encoder-decoder outlined above, and, once it is trained, lop off the decoder, and use the encoded sequence of words as your representation of the input sequence of words. An important note in all this is that recurrent encoder-decoder model was itself trained using a lookup table initialized with learned GloVe vectors, so in a sense they’re not substituting for the unsupervised embeddings so much as learning marginal information on top of them.

The authors went on to test this approach on a few problems - question answering, logical entailment, and sentiment classification. They compared their use of the RNN encoded word vectors (which they call Context Vectors, or CoVE) with models initialized just using the fixed GloVE word vectors. One important note here is that, because each word vector is learned fully in context, the same word will have a different vector in each sentence it appears in. That’s why you can’t transfer one single vector per word, but instead have to transfer the recurrent model that can produce the vectors. All in all, the authors found that concatenating CoVe vectors to GloVe vectors, and using the concatenated version as input, produced sizable gains on the problems where it was tried. 

That said, it’s a pretty heavy lift to integrate someone else’s learned weights into your own model, just in terms of getting all the code to play together nicely. I’m not sure if this is a compelling enough result, a la ImageNet pretraining, for practitioners to want to go to the trouble of tacking a non-training RNN onto the bottom of all their models. If I ever get a chance, I’d be interested to play with the vectors you get out of this model, and look at how much variance you see in the vectors learned for different words across different sentences. Do you see clusters that correspond to sense disambiguation, (a la state of mind, vs a rogue state)? And, how does this contextual approach to the paper I reviewed yesterday, that also learns embeddings on a machine translation task, but does so in terms of training a lookup table, rather than using trained encodings? All in all, I enjoyed this paper: it was a simple idea, and I’m not sure whether it was a compelling one, but it did leave me with some interesting questions. 

At NIPS 2017, Ali Rahimi was invited on stage to give a keynote after a paper he was on received the “Test of Time” award. While there, in front of several thousand researchers, he gave an impassioned argument for more rigor: more small problems to validate our assumptions, more visibility into why our optimization algorithms work the way they do. The now-famous catchphrase of the talk was “alchemy”; he argued that the machine learning community has been effective at finding things that work, but less effective at understanding why the techniques we use work. A central example he used in his talk is that of Batch Normalization: a now nearly-universal step in optimizing deep nets, but one where our accepted explanation of “reducing internal covariate shift” is less rigorous than one might hope. 

With apologies for the long preamble, this is the context in which today’s paper is such a welcome push in the direction of what Rahimi was advocating for - small, focused experimentation that tries to build up knowledge from principles, and, specifically, asks the question: “Does Batch Norm really work via reducing covariate shift”. 

To answer the question of whether internal covariate shift is a likely mechanism of the - empirically very solid - improved performance of Batch Norm, the authors do a few simple experience. First, and most straightforwardly, they train a basic convolutional net with and without BatchNorm, pick a layer, and visualize the activation distribution of that layer over time, both in the Batch Norm and non-Batch Norm case. While they saw the expected performance boost, the Batch Norm case didn’t seem to be meaningfully more stable over time, relative to the normal case. Second, the authors tested what would happen if they added non-zero-mean random noise *after* Batch Norm in the network. The upshot of this was that they were explicitly engineering internal covariate shift, and, if control thereof was the primary useful purpose of Batch Norm, you would expect that to neutralize BN’s good performance. In this experiment, while the authors did indeed see noisier, less stable activation distributions in the noise + BN case (in particular: look at layer 13 activations in the attached image), but noisy BN performed nearly as well as non-noisy, and meaningfully better than the standard model without noise, but also without BN. 

As a final test, they approached the idea of “internal covariate shift” from a different definitional standpoint. Maybe a better way of thinking about it is in terms of stability of your gradients, in the face of updates made by lower layers of the network. That is to say: each parameter of the network pushes itself in the direction of lower loss all else held equal, but in practice, you change lower-level parameters simultaneously, which could cause the directional change the higher-layer parameter thought it needed to be off. So, the authors calculated the “gradient delta” between the gradient the model trains on, and what the gradient would be if you estimated it *after* all of the lower layers of the model had updated, such that the distribution of inputs to that layer has changed. Although the expectation would be that this gradient delta is smaller for batch norm, in fact, the authors found that, if anything, the opposite was true. 

So, in the face of none of these ideas panning out, the authors then introduce the best idea they’ve found for what motivates BN’s improved performance: a smoothing out of the loss function that SGD is optimizing. A smoother curve means, generally speaking, that the magnitudes of your gradients will be smaller, and also that the value of the gradient will change more slowly (i.e. low second derivative). As support for this idea, they show really different results for BN vs standard models in terms of, for example, how predictive a gradient at one point is of a gradient taken after you take a step in the direction of the first gradient. BN has meaningfully more predictive gradients, tied to lower variance in the values of the loss function in the direction of the gradient. The logic for why the mechanism of BN would cause this outcome is a bit tied up in math that’s hard to explain without LaTeX visuals, but basically comes from the idea that Batch Norm decreases the magnitude of the gradient of each layer output with respect to individual weight parameters, by averaging out those magnitudes over the batch. 

As Rahimi said in his initial talk, a lot of modern modeling is “applying brittle optimization techniques to loss surfaces we don’t understand.” And, by and large, that is in fact true: it’s devilishly difficult to get a good handle on what loss surfaces are doing when they’re doing it in several-million-dimensional space. But, it being hard doesn’t mean we should just give up on searching for principles we can build our understanding on, and I think this paper is a really fantastic example of how that can be done well.