How to perform multi labeling classification (for CNN)? - deep-learning

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.

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).

Using Softmax Activation function after calculating loss from BCEWithLogitLoss (Binary Cross Entropy + Sigmoid activation)

I am going through a Binary Classification tutorial using PyTorch and here, the last layer of the network is torch.Linear() with just one neuron. (Makes Sense) which will give us a single neuron. as pred=network(input_batch)
After that the choice of Loss function is loss_fn=BCEWithLogitsLoss() (which is numerically stable than using the softmax first and then calculating loss) which will apply Softmax function to the output of last layer to give us a probability. so after that, it'll calculate the binary cross entropy to minimize the loss.
loss=loss_fn(pred,true)
My concern is that after all this, the author used torch.round(torch.sigmoid(pred))
Why would that be? I mean I know it'll get the prediction probabilities in the range [0,1] and then round of the values with default threshold of 0.5.
Isn't it better to use the sigmoid once after the last layer within the network rather using a softmax and a sigmoid at 2 different places given it's a binary classification??
Wouldn't it be better to just
out = self.linear(batch_tensor)
return self.sigmoid(out)
and then calculate the BCE loss and use the argmax() for checking accuracy??
I am just curious that can it be a valid strategy?
You seem to be thinking of the binary classification as a multi-class classification with two classes, but that is not quite correct when using the binary cross-entropy approach. Let's start by clarifying the goal of the binary classification before looking at any implementation details.
Technically, there are two classes, 0 and 1, but instead of considering them as two separate classes, you can see them as opposites of each other. For example, you want to classify whether a StackOverflow answer was helpful or not. The two classes would be "helpful" and "not helpful". Naturally, you would simply ask "Was the answer helpful?", the negative aspect is left off, and if that wasn't the case, you could deduce that it was "not helpful". (Remember, it's a binary case, there is no middle ground).
Therefore, your model only needs to predict a single class, but to avoid confusion with the actual two classes, that can be expressed as: The model predicts the probability that the positive case occurs. In context of the previous example: What is the probability that the StackOverflow answer was helpful?
Sigmoid gives you values in the range [0, 1], which are the probabilities. Now you need to decide when the model is confident enough for it to be positive by defining a threshold. To make it balanced, the threshold is 0.5, therefore as long as the probability is greater than 0.5 it is positive (class 1: "helpful") otherwise it's negative (class 0: "not helpful"), which is achieved by rounding (i.e. torch.round(torch.sigmoid(pred))).
After that the choice of Loss function is loss_fn=BCEWithLogitsLoss() (which is numerically stable than using the softmax first and then calculating loss) which will apply Softmax function to the output of last layer to give us a probability.
Isn't it better to use the sigmoid once after the last layer within the network rather using a softmax and a sigmoid at 2 different places given it's a binary classification??
BCEWithLogitsLoss applies Sigmoid not Softmax, there is no Softmax involved at all. From the nn.BCEWithLogitsLoss documentation:
This loss combines a Sigmoid layer and the BCELoss in one single class. This version is more numerically stable than using a plain Sigmoid followed by a BCELoss as, by combining the operations into one layer, we take advantage of the log-sum-exp trick for numerical stability.
By not applying Sigmoid in the model you get a more numerically stable version of the binary cross-entropy, but that means you have to apply the Sigmoid manually if you want to make an actual prediction outside of training.
[...] and use the argmax() for checking accuracy??
Again, you're thinking of the multi-class scenario. You only have a single output class, i.e. output has size [batch_size, 1]. Taking argmax of that, will always give you 0, because that is the only available class.

How to deal with ordinal labels in keras?

I have data with integer target class in the range 1-5 where one is the lowest and five the highest. In this case, should I consider it as regression problem and have one node in the output layer?
My way of handling it is:
1- first I convert the labels to binary class matrix
labels = to_categorical(np.asarray(labels))
2- in the output layer, I have five nodes
main_output = Dense(5, activation='sigmoid', name='main_output')(x)
3- I use 'categorical_crossentropy with mean_squared_error when compiling
model.compile(optimizer='rmsprop',loss='categorical_crossentropy',metrics=['mean_squared_error'],loss_weights=[0.2])
Also, can anyone tells me: what is the difference between using categorical_accuracy and 'mean_squared_error in this case?
Regression and classification are vastly different things. If you reimagine this as a regression task than the difference of predicting 2 when the ground truth is 4 will be rated more than if you predict 3 instead of 4. If you have class like car, animal, person you do not care for the ranking between those classes. Predicting car is just as wrong as animal, iff the image shows a person.
Metrics do not impact your learning at all. It is just something that is computed additionally to the loss to show the performance of the model. Here the accuracy makes sense, because this is mostly the metric that we care about. Mean squared error does not tell you how well your model performs. If you get something like 0.0015 mean squared error it sounds good, but it is hard to visualize just how well this performs. In contrast using accuracy and achieving 95% accuracy for example is meaningful.
One last thing you should use softmax instead of sigmoid as your final output to get a probability distribution in your final layer. Softmax will output percentages for every class that sum up to 1. Then crossentropy calculates the difference of the probability distribution of your network output and the ground truth.

Can I use autoencoder for clustering?

In the below code, they use autoencoder as supervised clustering or classification because they have data labels.
http://amunategui.github.io/anomaly-detection-h2o/
But, can I use autoencoder to cluster data if I did not have its labels.?
Regards
The deep-learning autoencoder is always unsupervised learning. The "supervised" part of the article you link to is to evaluate how well it did.
The following example (taken from ch.7 of my book, Practical Machine Learning with H2O, where I try all the H2O unsupervised algorithms on the same data set - please excuse the plug) takes 563 features, and tries to encode them into just two hidden nodes.
m <- h2o.deeplearning(
2:564, training_frame = tfidf,
hidden = c(2), auto-encoder = T, activation = "Tanh"
)
f <- h2o.deepfeatures(m, tfidf, layer = 1)
The second command there extracts the hidden node weights. f is a data frame, with two numeric columns, and one row for every row in the tfidf source data. I chose just two hidden nodes so that I could plot the clusters:
Results will change on each run. You can (maybe) get better results with stacked auto-encoders, or using more hidden nodes (but then you cannot plot them). Here I felt the results were limited by the data.
BTW, I made the above plot with this code:
d <- as.matrix(f[1:30,]) #Just first 30, to avoid over-cluttering
labels <- as.vector(tfidf[1:30, 1])
plot(d, pch = 17) #Triangle
text(d, labels, pos = 3) #pos=3 means above
(P.S. The original data came from Brandon Rose's excellent article on using NLTK. )
In some aspects encoding data and clustering data share some overlapping theory. As a result, you can use Autoencoders to cluster(encode) data.
A simple example to visualize is if you have a set of training data that you suspect has two primary classes. Such as voter history data for republicans and democrats. If you take an Autoencoder and encode it to two dimensions then plot it on a scatter plot, this clustering becomes more clear. Below is a sample result from one of my models. You can see a noticeable split between the two classes as well as a bit of expected overlap.
The code can be found here
This method does not require only two binary classes, you could also train on as many different classes as you wish. Two polarized classes is just easier to visualize.
This method is not limited to two output dimensions, that was just for plotting convenience. In fact, you may find it difficult to meaningfully map certain, large dimension spaces to such a small space.
In cases where the encoded (clustered) layer is larger in dimension it is not as clear to "visualize" feature clusters. This is where it gets a bit more difficult, as you'll have to use some form of supervised learning to map the encoded(clustered) features to your training labels.
A couple ways to determine what class features belong to is to pump the data into knn-clustering algorithm. Or, what I prefer to do is to take the encoded vectors and pass them to a standard back-error propagation neural network. Note that depending on your data you may find that just pumping the data straight into your back-propagation neural network is sufficient.