Training out false positives in object detection - deep-learning

This is my first foray into the world of object recognition. I have successfully trained a model on yolo with images that I have found on Google and annotated myself in CVAT.
My questions are as follows.
a) How do I train the model to ignore some special variant that I am specifically NOT interested in detecting? Say I am getting false positives because something looks similar to one of my objects, and I want to train so that these are not detected. Does it simply work to include images that contain the unwanted object into the training set, but don't annotate the unwanted object?
b) If so, am I right in assuming that if I train on annotated images that have somehow missed occasional instances of desired objects, is that effectively telling the training engine that I'm not interested in that object? In other words, is it therefore BAD if images don't have every single instance of desired objects annotated?
c) If I happen to include an image in my training set with an empty annotation file, and there are desired objects in that image, that effectively disincentivizes the training engine to find those in future?
Thanks for any thoughts.

a) This is true. The model will consider space inside bounding boxes as positive for a certain class during training, and space outside the boxes for the class negative for that class.
b) See a, this is indeed the case.
c) Empty annotation files will be used during training, but the model will train on that image as a 'background' class, so these are negatives too.
So, in short, annotate all instances of objects of a certain class and maybe add 'background images' as negative examples to disincentivize those.

Related

Would this be a valid Implementation of an ordinal CrossEntropy?

Would this be a valid implementation of a cross entropy loss that takes the ordinal structure of the GT y into consideration? y_hat is the prediction from a neural network.
ce_loss = F.cross_entropy(y_hat, y, reduction="none")
distance_weight = torch.abs(y_hat.argmax(1) - y) + 1
ordinal_ce_loss = torch.mean(distance_weight * ce_loss)
I'll attempt to answer this question by first fully defining the task, since the question is a bit sparse on details.
I have a set of ordinal classes (e.g. first, second, third, fourth,
etc.) and I would like to predict the class of each data example from
among this set. I would like to define an entropy-based loss-function
for this problem. I would like this loss function to weight the loss
between a predicted class torch.argmax(y_hat) and the true class y
according to the ordinal distance between the two classes. Does the
given loss expression accomplish this?
Short answer: sure, it is "valid". You've roughly implemented L1-norm ordinal class weighting. I'd question whether this is truly the correct weighting strategy for this problem.
For instance, consider that for a true label n, the bin n response is weighted by 1, but the bin n+1 and n-1 responses are weighted by 2. This means that a lot more emphasis will be placed on NOT predicting false positives than on correctly predicting true positives, which may imbue your model with some strange bias.
It also means that examples on the edge will result in a larger total sum of weights, meaning that you'll be weighting examples where the true label is say "first" or "last" more highly than the intermediate classes. (Say you have 5 classes: 1,2,3,4,5. A true label of 1 will require distance_weight of [1,2,3,4,5], the sum of which is 15. A true label of 3 will require distance_weight of [3,2,1,2,3], the sum of which is 11.
In general, classification problems and entropy-based losses are underpinned by the assumption that no set of classes or categories is any more or less related than any other set of classes. In essence, the input data is embedded into an orthogonal feature space where each class represents one vector in the basis. This is quite plainly a bad assumption in your case, meaning that this embedding space is probably not particularly elegant: thus, you have to correct for it with sort of a hack-y weight fix. And in general, this assumption of class non-correlation is probably not true in a great many classification problems (consider e.g. the classic ImageNet classification problem, wherein the class pairs [bus,car], and [bus,zebra] are treated as equally dissimilar. But this is probably a digression into the inherent lack of usefulness of strict ontological structuring of information which is outside the scope of this answer...)
Long Answer: I'd highly suggest moving into a space where the ordinal value you care about is instead expressed in a continuous space. (In the first, second, third example, you might for instance output a continuous value over the range [1,max_place]. This allows you to benefit from loss functions that already capture well the notion that predictions closer in an ordered space are better than predictions farther away in an ordered space (e.g. MSE, Smooth-L1, etc.)
Let's consider one more time the case of the [first,second,third,etc.] ordinal class example, and say that we are trying to predict the places of a set of runners in a race. Consider two races, one in which the first place runner wins by 30% relative to the second place runner, and the second in which the first place runner wins by only 1%. This nuance is entirely discarded by the ordinal discrete classification. In essence, the selection of an ordinal set of classes truncates the amount of information conveyed in the prediction, which means not only that the final prediction is less useful, but also that the loss function encodes this strange truncation and binarization, which is then reflected (perhaps harmfully) in the learned model. This problem could likely be much more elegantly solved by regressing the finishing position, or perhaps instead by regressing the finishing time, of each athlete, and then performing the final ordinal classification into places OUTSIDE of the network training.
In conclusion, you might expect a well-trained ordinal classifier to produce essentially a normal distribution of responses across the class bins, with the distribution peak on the true value: a binned discretization of a space that almost certainly could, and likely should, be treated as a continuous space.

How to use K means clustering to visualise learnt features of a CNN model?

Recently I was going through the paper : "Intriguing Properties of Contrastive Losses"(https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02803). In the paper(section 3.2) the authors try to determine how well the SimCLR framework has allowed the ResNet50 Model to learn good quality/generalised features that exhibit hierarchical properties. To achieve this, they make use of K-means on intermediate features of the ResNet50 model (intermediate means o/p of block 2,3,4..) & quote the reason -> "If the model learns good representations then regions of similar objects should be grouped together".
Final Results :
KMeans feature visualisation
I am trying to replicate the same procedure but with a different model (like VggNet, Xception), are there any resources explaining how to perform such visualisations ?
The procedure would be as follow:
Let us assume that you want to visualize the 8th layer from VGG. This layer's output might have the shape (64, 64, 256) (I just took some random numbers, this does not correspond to actual VGG). This means that you have 4096 256-dimensional vectors (for one specific image). Now you can apply K-Means on these vectors (for example with 5 clusters) and then color your image corresponding to the clustering result. The coloring is easy, since the 64x64 feature map represents a scaled down version of your image, and thus you just color the corresponding image region for each of these vectors.
I don't know if it might be a good idea to do the K-Means clustering on the combined output of many images, theoretically doing it on many images and one a single one should both give good results (even though for many images you probably would increase the number of clusters to account for the higher variation in your feature vectors).

Question about dimensions when processing lists with a multi layer perceptron

I'm quite new to PyTorch and I'm trying to build a net that is composed only of linear layers that will get a list of objects as input and output some score (which is a scalar) for each object. I'm wondering if my input tensor's dimensions should be (batch_size, list_size, object_size) or should I flatten each list and get (batch_size, list_size*object_size)? According to my understanding, in the first option I will have an output dimension of (batch_size, list_size, 1) and in the second (batch_size, list_size), does it matter? I read the documentation but it still wasn't very clear to me.
If you want to do the classification for each object in your input, you should keep the objects separate from each other; i.e., your input should be in the shape of (batch_size, list_size, object_size). Then considering the number of classes you got (let's say m classes), the linear layer would transform the input to the shape of (batch_size, list_size, m). In this case, you will have m scores for each object which can be utilized to predict the class label.
But question arises now; why do we flatten in neural networks at all? The answer is simple: because you want to couple the whole information (in your specific case, the information pieces are the objects) within a batch to see if they somehow affect each other, and if that's the case, to examine whether your network is able to learn these features/patterns. In practice, considering the nature of your problem and the data you are working with, if different objects really relate to each other, then your network will be able to learn those.

Keras LSTM input - Predicting a parabolic trajectory

I want to predict the trajectory of a ball falling. That trajectory is parabolic. I know that LSTM may be too much for this (i.e. a simpler method could suffice).
I thought that we can do this with 2 LSTM layers and a Dense layer at the end.
The end result that I want is to give the model 3 heights h0,h1,h2 and let it predict h3. Then, I want to give it h1, h2, and the h3 it outputted previously to predict h4, and so on, until I can predict the whole trajectory.
Firstly, what would the input shape be for the first LSTM layer ?
Would it be input_shape = (3,1) ?
Secondly, would the LSTM be able to predict a parabolic path ?
I am getting almost a flat line, not a parabola, and I want to rule out the possibility that I am misunderstanding how to feed and shape input.
Thank you
The input shape is in the form (samples, timeSteps, features).
Your only feature is "height", so features = 1.
And since you're going to input sequences with different lengths, you can use timeSteps = None.
So, your input_shape could be (None, 1).
Since we're going to use a stateful=True layer below, we can use batch_input_shape=(1,None,1). Choose the amount of "samples" you want.
Your model can predict the trajectory indeed, but maybe it will need more than one layer. (The exact answer about how many layers and cells depend on knowing how the match inside LSTM works).
Training:
Now, first you need to train your network (only then it will be able to start predicting good things).
For training, suppose you have a sequence of [h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6...], true values in the correct sequence. (I suggest you have actually many sequences (samples), so your model learns better).
For this sequence, you want an output predicting the next step, then your target would be [h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,h7...]
So, suppose you have a data array with shape (manySequences, steps, 1), you make:
x_train = data[:,:-1,:]
y_train = data[:,1:,:]
Now, your layers should be using return_sequences=True. (Every input step produces an output step). And you train the model with this data.
A this point, whether you're using stateful=True or stateful=False is not very relevant. (But if true, you always need model.reset_state() before every single epoch and sequence)
Predicting:
For predicting, you can use stateful=True in the model. This means that when you input h1, it will produce h2. And when you input h2 it will remember the "current speed" (the state of the model) to predict the correct h3.
(In the training phase, it's not important to have this, because you're inputting the entire sequences at once. So the speed will be understood between steps of the long sequences).
You can se the method reset_states() as set_current_speed_to(0). You will use it whenever the step you're going to input is the first step in a sequence.
Then you can do loops like this:
model.reset_states() #make speed = 0
nextH = someValueWithShape((1,1,1))
predictions = [nextH]
for i in range(steps):
nextH = model.predict(nextH)
predictions.append(nextH)
There is an example here, but using two features. There is a difference that I use two models, one for training, one for predicting, but you can use only one with return_sequences=True and stateful=True (don't forget to reset_states() at the beginning of every epoch in training).

How to perform multi labeling classification (for CNN)?

I am currently looking into multi-labeling classification and I have some questions (and I couldn't find clear answers).
For the sake of clarity let's take an example : I want to classify images of vehicles (car, bus, truck, ...) and their make (Audi, Volkswagen, Ferrari, ...).
So I thought about training two independant CNN (one for the "type" classification and one fore the "make" classifiaction) but I thought it might be possible to train only one CNN on all the classes.
I read that people tend to use sigmoid function instead of softmax to do that. I understand that sigmoid does not sum up to 1 like softmax does but I dont understand in what doing that enables to do multi-labeling classification ?
My second question is : Is it possible to take into account that some classes are completly independant ?
Thridly, in term of performances (accuracy and time to give the classification for a new image), isn't training two independant better ?
Thank you for those who could give my some answers or some ideas :)
Softmax is a special output function; it forces the output vector to have a single large value. Now, training neural networks works by calculating an output vector, comparing that to a target vector, and back-propagating the error. There's no reason to restrict your target vector to a single large value, and for multi-labeling you'd use a 1.0 target for every label that applies. But in that case, using a softmax for the output layer will cause unintended differences between output and target, differences that are then back-propagated.
For the second part: you define the target vectors; you can encode any sort of dependency you like there.
Finally, no - a combined network performs better than the two halves would do independently. You'd only run two networks in parallel when there's a difference in network layout, e.g. a regular NN and CNN in parallel might be viable.