This paper described an algorithm of parametrically adding noise and applying a variational regulariser similar to that in ["Variational Dropout Sparsifies Deep Neural Networks"][vardrop]. Both have the same goal: make neural networks more efficient by removing parameters (and therefore the computation applied with those parameters). Although, this paper also has the goal of giving a prescription of how many bits to store each parameter with as well.

There is a very nice derivation of the hierarchical variational approximation being used here, which I won't try to replicate here. In practice, the difference to prior work is that the stochastic gradient variational method uses hierarchical samples; ie it samples from a prior, then incorporates these samples when sampling over the weights (both applied through local reparameterization tricks). It's a powerful method, which allows them to test two different priors (although they are clearly not limited to just these), and compare both against competing methods. They are comparable, and the choice of prior offers some tradeoffs in terms of sparsity versus quantization.

[vardrop]: http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=journals/corr/1701.05369

Cheney et al. study the robustness of deep neural networks, especially AlexNet, with regard to randomly dropping or perturbing weights. In particular, the authors consider three types of perturbations: synapse knockouts set random weights to zero, node knockouts set all weights corresponding to a set of neurons to zero, and weight perturbations add random Gaussian noise to the weights of a specific layer. These perturbations are studied on AlexNet, considering the top-5 accuracy on ImageNet; perturbations are considered per layer. For example, Figure 1 (left) shows the influence on accuracy when knocking out synapses. As can be seen, the lower layers, especially the first convolutional layer, are impacted significantly by these perturbations. Similar observations, Figure 1 (right) are made for random perturbations of weights; although the impact is less significant. Especially high-level features, i.e., the corresponding layers, seem to be robust to these kind of perturbations. The authors also provide evidence that these results extend to the top-1 accuracy, as well as other architectures. For VGG, however, the impact is significantly less pronounced which may also be due to the employed dropout layers.

https://i.imgur.com/78T6Gg2.png
Figure 1: Left: Influence of setting weights in the corresponding layers to zero. Right: Influence of randomly perturbing weights of specific layers. Experiments are on ImageNet using AlexNet.

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

**Object detection** is the task of drawing one bounding box around each instance of the type of object one wants to detect. Typically, image classification is done before object detection. With neural networks, the usual procedure for object detection is to train a classification network, replace the last layer with a regression layer which essentially predicts pixel-wise if the object is there or not. An bounding box inference algorithm is added at last to make a consistent prediction (see [Deep Neural Networks for Object Detection](http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5207-deep-neural-networks-for-object-detection.pdf)).

The paper introduces RPNs (Region Proposal Networks). They are end-to-end trained to generate region proposals.They simoultaneously regress region bounds and bjectness scores at each location on a regular grid.

RPNs are one type of fully convolutional networks. They take an image of any size as input and output a set of rectangular object proposals, each with an objectness score.

## See also
* [R-CNN](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=conf/iccv/Girshick15#joecohen)
* [Fast R-CNN](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=conf/iccv/Girshick15#joecohen)
* [Faster R-CNN](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=conf/nips/RenHGS15#martinthoma)
* [Mask R-CNN](http://www.shortscience.org/paper?bibtexKey=journals/corr/HeGDG17)

This work expands on prior techniques for designing models that can both be stored using fewer parameters, and also execute using fewer operations and less memory, both of which are key desiderata for having trained machine learning models be usable on phones and other personal devices. 

The main contribution of the original MobileNets paper was to introduce the idea of using "factored" decompositions of Depthwise and Pointwise convolutions, which separate the procedures of "pull information from a spatial range" and "mix information across channels" into two distinct steps. In this paper, they continue to use this basic Depthwise infrastructure, but also add a new design element: the inverted-residual linear bottleneck. 

The reasoning behind this new layer type comes from the observation that, often, the set of relevant points in a high-dimensional space (such as the 'per-pixel' activations inside a conv net) actually lives on a lower-dimensional manifold. So, theoretically, and naively, one could just try to use lower dimensional internal representations to map the dimensionality of that assumed manifold. However, the authors argue that ReLU non-linearities kill information (because of the region where all inputs are mapped to zero), and so having layers contain only the number of dimensions needed for the manifold would mean that you end up with too-few dimensions after the ReLU information loss. However, you need to have non-linearities somewhere in the network in order to be able to learn complex, non-linear functions. 

So, the authors suggest a method to mostly use smaller-dimensional representations internally, but still maintain ReLus and the network's needed complexity. 

https://i.imgur.com/pN4d9Wi.png

- A lower-dimensional output is "projected up" into a higher dimensional output
- A ReLu is applied on this higher-dimensional layer
- That layer is then projected down into a smaller-dimensional layer, which uses a linear activation to avoid information loss
- A residual connection between the lower-dimensional output at the beginning and end of the expansion

This way, we still maintain the network's non-linearity, but also replace some of the network's higher-dimensional layers with lower-dimensional linear ones

I admit it - the title of the paper pulled me in, existing as it does in the chain of weirdly insider-meme papers, starting with Vaswani’s 2017 “Attention Is All You Need”. That paper has been hugely influential, and the domain of machine translation as a whole has begun to move away from processing (or encoding) source sentences with recurrent architectures, to instead processing them using self-attention architectures. (Self-attention is a little too nuanced to go into in full depth here, but the basic idea is: instead of summarizing varying-length sequences by feeding each timestep into a recurrent loop and building up hidden states, generate a query, and weight the contribution of each timestep to each “hidden state” based on the dot product between that query and each timestep’s representation). There has been an overall move in recent years away from recurrence being the accepted default for sequence data, and towards attention and (often dilated) convolution taking up more space. I find this an interesting set of developments, and had hopes that this paper would address that arc. 

However, unfortunately, the title was quite out of sync with the actual focus of the paper - instead of addressing the contribution of attention mechanisms vs recurrence, or even directly addressing any of the particular ideas posed in the “Attention is All You Need” paper, this YMNNA instead takes aim at a more fundamental structural feature of translation models: the encoder/decoder structure. The basic idea of an encoder/decoder approach, in a translation paradigm, is that you process the entire source sentence before you start generating the tokens of the predicted, other-language target sentence. Initially, this would work by running a RNN over the full sentence, and using the final hidden state of that RNN as a compressed representation of the full sentence. More recently, the norm has been to use multiple layers of RNN, and to represent the source sentence via the hidden states at each timestep (so: as many hidden states as you have input tokens), and then at each step in the decoding process, calculate an attention-weighted average over all of those hidden states. But, fundamentally, both of these structures share the fact that some kind of global representation is calculated and made available to the decoder before it starts predicting words in the output sentence. 

This makes sense for a few reasons. First, and most obviously, languages aren’t naturally aligned with one another, in the sense of one word in language X corresponding to one word in language Y. It’s not possible for you to predict a word in the target sentence if its corresponding source sentence token has not yet been processed. For another, there can be contextual information from the sentence as a whole that can disambiguate between different senses of a word, which may have different translations - think Teddy Bear vs Teddy Roosevelt. However, this paper poses the question: how well can you do if you throw away this structure, and build a model that continually emits tokens of the target sequence as it reads in the source sentence? Using a recurrent model, the YMNNA model takes, at each timestep, the new source token, the previous target token, and the prior hidden state from the last time step of the RNN, and uses that to predict a token.

However, that problem mentioned earlier - of languages not natively being aligned such that you have the necessary information to predict a word by the time you get to its point in the target sequence - hasn’t gone away, and is still alive and kicking. This paper solves it in a pretty unsatisfying way - by relying on an external tool, fast-align, that does the work of guessing which source tokens correspond to which target tokens, and inserting buffer tokens into the target, so that you don’t need to predict a word until it’s already been seen by the source-reading RNN; until then you just predict the buffer. This is fine and clever as a practical heuristic, but it really does make their comparisons against models that do alignment and translation jointly feel a little weak. 

https://i.imgur.com/Gitpxi7.png

An additional heuristic that makes the overall narrative of the paper less compelling is the fact that, in order to get comparable performance to their baselines, they padded the target sequences with between 3 and 5 buffer tokens, meaning that the models learned that they could process the first 3-5 tokens of the sentence before they need to start emitting the target. Again, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this, but, since they are consuming a portion of the sentence before they start emitting translations, it does make for a less stark comparison with the “read the whole sentence” encoder/decoder framework. 

A few other frustrations, and notes from the paper’s results section: 
As earlier mentioned, the authors don’t actually compare their work against the “Attention is All You Need” paper, but instead to a 2014 paper. This is confusing both in terms of using an old baseline for SOTA, and also in terms of their title implicitly arguing they are refuting a paper they didn’t compare to 
Comparing against their old baseline, their eager translation model performs worse on all sentences less than 60 tokens in length (which makes up the vast majority of all the sentences there are), and only beats the baseline on sentences > 60 tokens in length 
Additionally, they note as a sort of throwaway line that their model took almost three times as long to train as the baseline, with the same amount of parameters, simply because it took so much longer to converge. 

Being charitable, it seems like there is some argument that an eager translation framework performs well on long sentences, and can do so while only keeping a hidden state in memory, rather than having to keep the hidden states for each source sequence element around, like attention-based decoders require. However, overall, I found this paper to be a frustrating let-down, that used too many heuristics and hacks to be a compelling comparison to prior work.