Back propagation from decoder input to encoder output in variational autoencoder - machine-learning

I am trying to understand VAE in-depth by implementing it by myself and having difficulties when back-propagate losses of the decoder input layer to the encoder output layer.
My encoder network outputs 8 pairs (sigma, mu) which I then combine with the result of a stochastic sampler to produce 8 input values (z) for the decoder network:
decoder_in = sigma * N(0,I) + mu
Then I run forward propagation for the decoder network, compute MSE reconstruction loss and back-propagate weights, and losses up to the decoder input layer.
Here I stuck completely since there is no comprehensible explanation of how to back-propagate losses from the decoder input layer to the encoder output layer.
My best idea was to store the results of sampling from N(0,I) to (epsilon) and use them in such a way:
L(sigma) = epsilon * dLz(decoder_in)
L(mu) = 1.0 * dLz(decoder_in)
It kind of works, but in the long run the sigma components of the encoded vector of distributions tend to regress to zeroes, so my VAE as a result also regressed to AE.
Also, I still have no clue how to integrate KL-loss in this scheme. Should I add it to the encoder loss or somehow combine it with the decoder MSE loss?

The VAE does not use the reconstruction error as the cost objective if you use that the model just turns back into an autoencoder. The VAE uses the variational lower bound and a couple of neat tricks to make it easy to compute.
Referring to the original “auto-encoding variational bayes” paper
The variational lower bound objective is (eq 10):
1/2( d+log(sigmaTsigma) -(muTmu) - (sigmaTsigma)) + log p(x/z)
Where d is number of latent variable, mu and sigma is the output of the encoding neural network used to scale the standard normal samples and z is the encoded sample. p(x/z) is just the decoder probability of generating back the input x.
All the variables in the above equation are completely differentiable and hence can be optimized with gradient descent or any other gradient based optimizer you find in tensorflow

From what I understand, the solution should look like this:
L(sigma) = epsilon * dLz(decoder_in) - 0.5 * 2 / sigma + 0.5 * 2 * sigma
L(mu) = 1.0 * dLz(decoder_in) + 0.5 * 2 * mu

Related

Variational autoencoder (VAE) predicts 1 constant value

I'm currently traininig a VAE model.
The images in question are microstructure rocks images (like these).
I defind a compount loss function having the sum 2 folds:
MSE as my images are grayscale but non binary.
KLL divergence.
I was having nan values for loss function, but figured out that a way around this is to use the weighted sum of the 2 losses. I've chosen the weight the MSE by the images size (256x256), so it becomes:
MSE = MSEx256x256
and the KLL divergence by 0.1 factor.
The nan problem was solved then, but my model when predicting just predicts one value for the whole image, so if I predict an output it will be an array of 256*256 values all the same at e.g. 0.502.
Model specs:
10 layers encoder / decoder
Latent vector space of dimension 5
SGD optimizer at lr=0.001
Loss values upon training goes from a billion number to 3000 from 2nd epoch and fluctuates around it
Accuracy upon training or valiudating is below 0.001, I've read this metric is irrelavnt anyway when it comes to VAE
Here is how I sample from the latent vector specs:
sample = Lambda(get_sample_from_dist, output_shape=(latent_dim, ), name='sample')([mu, log_sigma])
def get_sample_from_dist(args):
mean_vec, std_dev_vec = args
eta_vec = K.random_normal(shape=(K.shape(mean_vec)[0], K.int_shape(mean_vec)[1]), mean=0, stddev=1)
return mean_vec + K.exp(std_dev_vec) * eta_vec
and here is how the encoder generate mu and log_sigma:
x is the output of the last encoder layer
mu = Dense(latent_dim, name='latent_mu')(x)
log_sigma = Dense(latent_dim, name='latent_sigma')(x)
and here is my loss
def vae_loss_func(inputs, outputs, mu, log_sigma):
x1 = K.flatten(inputs)
x2 = K.flatten(outputs)
reconstruction_loss = losses.mse(x1, x2)*256**2
kl_loss = -0.5* 0.1*K.sum(1 + log_sigma - K.square(mu) - K.square(K.exp(log_sigma)), axis=-1)
vae_loss = K.mean(reconstruction_loss + kl_loss)
return vae_loss
Any thoughts where things are going wrong?
I tried different weighing factors in the loss function and using strides and dropouts layers, none of these worked. I'm expecting the generated image to be varying in pixel value and evenatually capturing the rock structure.

How to find if a data set can train a neural network?

I'm a newbie to machine learning and this is one of the first real-world ML tasks challenged.
Some experimental data contains 512 independent boolean features and a boolean result.
There are about 1e6 real experiment records in the provided data set.
In a classic XOR example all 4 out of 4 possible states are required to train NN. In my case its only 2^(10-512) = 2^-505 which is close to zero.
I have no more information about the data nature, just these (512 + 1) * 1e6 bits.
Tried NN with 1 hidden layer on available data. Output of the trained NN on the samples even from the training set are always close to 0, not a single close to "1". Played with weights initialization, gradient descent learning rate.
My code utilizing TensorFlow 1.3, Python 3. Model excerpt:
with tf.name_scope("Layer1"):
#W1 = tf.Variable(tf.random_uniform([512, innerN], minval=-2/512, maxval=2/512), name="Weights_1")
W1 = tf.Variable(tf.zeros([512, innerN]), name="Weights_1")
b1 = tf.Variable(tf.zeros([1]), name="Bias_1")
Out1 = tf.sigmoid( tf.matmul(x, W1) + b1)
with tf.name_scope("Layer2"):
W2 = tf.Variable(tf.random_uniform([innerN, 1], minval=-2/512, maxval=2/512), name="Weights_2")
#W2 = tf.Variable(tf.zeros([innerN, 1]), name="Weights_2")
b2 = tf.Variable(tf.zeros([1]), name="Bias_2")
y = tf.nn.sigmoid( tf.matmul(Out1, W2) + b2)
with tf.name_scope("Training"):
y_ = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None,1])
cross_entropy = tf.reduce_mean(
tf.nn.softmax_cross_entropy_with_logits(
labels = y_, logits = y)
)
train_step = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(0.005).minimize(cross_entropy)
with tf.name_scope("Testing"):
# Test trained model
correct_prediction = tf.equal( tf.round(y), tf.round(y_))
# ...
# Train
for step in range(500):
batch_xs, batch_ys = Datasets.train.next_batch(300, shuffle=False)
_, my_y, summary = sess.run([train_step, y, merged_summaries],
feed_dict={x: batch_xs, y_: batch_ys})
I suspect two cases:
my fault – bad NN implementation, wrong architecture;
bad data. Compared to XOR example, incomplete training data would result in a failing NN. However, the training examples fed to the trained NN are supposed to give right predictions, aren't they?
How to evaluate if it is possible at all to train a neural network (a 2-layer perceptron) on the provided data to forecast the result? A case of aceptable set would be the XOR example. Opposed to some random noise.
There are only ad hoc ways to know if it is possible to learn a function with a differentiable network from a dataset. That said, these ad hoc ways do usually work. For example, the network should be able to overfit the training set without any regularisation.
A common technique to gauge this is to only fit the network on a subset of the full dataset. Check that the network can overfit to that, then increase the size of the subset, and increase the size of the network as well. Unfortunately, deciding whether to add extra layers or add more units in a hidden layer is an arbitrary decision you'll have to make.
However, looking at your code, there are a few things that could be going wrong here:
Are your outputs balanced? By that I mean, do you have the same number of 1s as 0s in the dataset targets?
Your initialisation in the first layer is all zeros, the gradient to this will be zero, so it can't learn anything (although, you have a real initialisation above it commented out).
Sigmoid nonlinearities are more difficult to optimise than simpler nonlinearities, such as ReLUs.
I'd recommend using the built-in definitions for layers in Tensorflow to not worry about initialisation, and switching to ReLUs in any hidden layers (you need sigmoid at the output for your boolean target).
Finally, deep learning isn't actually very good at most "bag of features" machine learning problems because they lack structure. For example, the order of the features doesn't matter. Other methods often work better, but if you really want to use deep learning then you could look at this recent paper, showing improved performance by just using a very specific nonlinearity and weight initialisation (change 4 lines in your code above).

Neural network for multi label classification with large number of classes outputs only zero

I am training a neural network for multilabel classification, with a large number of classes (1000). Which means more than one output can be active for every input. On an average, I have two classes active per output frame. On training with a cross entropy loss the neural network resorts to outputting only zeros, because it gets the least loss with this output since 99.8% of my labels are zeros. Any suggestions on how I can push the network to give more weight to the positive classes?
Tensorflow has a loss function weighted_cross_entropy_with_logits, which can be used to give more weight to the 1's. So it should be applicable to a sparse multi-label classification setting like yours.
From the documentation:
This is like sigmoid_cross_entropy_with_logits() except that pos_weight, allows one to trade off recall and precision by up- or down-weighting the cost of a positive error relative to a negative error.
The argument pos_weight is used as a multiplier for the positive targets
If you use the tensorflow backend in Keras, you can use the loss function like this (Keras 2.1.1):
import tensorflow as tf
import keras.backend.tensorflow_backend as tfb
POS_WEIGHT = 10 # multiplier for positive targets, needs to be tuned
def weighted_binary_crossentropy(target, output):
"""
Weighted binary crossentropy between an output tensor
and a target tensor. POS_WEIGHT is used as a multiplier
for the positive targets.
Combination of the following functions:
* keras.losses.binary_crossentropy
* keras.backend.tensorflow_backend.binary_crossentropy
* tf.nn.weighted_cross_entropy_with_logits
"""
# transform back to logits
_epsilon = tfb._to_tensor(tfb.epsilon(), output.dtype.base_dtype)
output = tf.clip_by_value(output, _epsilon, 1 - _epsilon)
output = tf.log(output / (1 - output))
# compute weighted loss
loss = tf.nn.weighted_cross_entropy_with_logits(targets=target,
logits=output,
pos_weight=POS_WEIGHT)
return tf.reduce_mean(loss, axis=-1)
Then in your model:
model.compile(loss=weighted_binary_crossentropy, ...)
I have not found many resources yet which report well working values for the pos_weight in relation to the number of classes, average active classes, etc.
Many thanks to tobigue for the great solution.
The tensorflow and keras apis have changed since that answer. So the updated version of weighted_binary_crossentropy is below for Tensorflow 2.7.0.
import tensorflow as tf
POS_WEIGHT = 10
def weighted_binary_crossentropy(target, output):
"""
Weighted binary crossentropy between an output tensor
and a target tensor. POS_WEIGHT is used as a multiplier
for the positive targets.
Combination of the following functions:
* keras.losses.binary_crossentropy
* keras.backend.tensorflow_backend.binary_crossentropy
* tf.nn.weighted_cross_entropy_with_logits
"""
# transform back to logits
_epsilon = tf.convert_to_tensor(tf.keras.backend.epsilon(), output.dtype.base_dtype)
output = tf.clip_by_value(output, _epsilon, 1 - _epsilon)
output = tf.math.log(output / (1 - output))
loss = tf.nn.weighted_cross_entropy_with_logits(labels=target, logits=output, pos_weight=POS_WEIGHT)
return tf.reduce_mean(loss, axis=-1)

Using RNN to recover sine wave from noisy signal

I am involved with an application that needs to estimate the state of a certain system in real time by measuring a set of (non-linearly) dependent parameters. Up until now the application was using an extended Kalman filter, but it was found to be underperforming in certain circumstances, which is likely caused by the fact that the differences between the real system and its model used in the filter are too significant to be modeled as white noise. We cannot use a more precise model for a number of unrelated reasons.
We decided to try recurrent neural networks for the task. Since my experience with neural networks is quite limited, before tackling the real task itself, I decided to practice with a hand crafted problem first. That problem, however, I could not solve, so I'm asking for help here.
Here's what I did: I generated some sine waveforms of varying phase, frequency, amplitude, and offset. Then I distorted the waveforms with some white noise, and (unsuccessfully) attempted to train an LSTM network to recover my waveforms from the noisy signal. I expected that the network will eventually learn to fit a sine waveform into the noisy data set.
Here's the source (slightly abridged, but it should work):
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import time
import numpy as np
from keras.models import Sequential
from keras.layers import Dense, LSTM
from keras.layers.wrappers import TimeDistributed
from keras.objectives import mean_absolute_error, cosine_proximity
POINTS_PER_WF = int(1e4)
X_SPACE = np.linspace(0, 100, POINTS_PER_WF)
def make_waveform_with_noise():
def add_noise(vec):
stdev = float(np.random.uniform(0.01, 0.2))
return vec + np.random.normal(0, stdev, size=len(vec))
f = np.random.choice((np.sin, np.cos))
wf = f(X_SPACE * np.random.normal(scale=5)) *\
np.random.normal(scale=5) + np.random.normal(scale=50)
return wf, add_noise(wf)
RESCALING = 1e-3
BATCH_SHAPE = (1, POINTS_PER_WF, 1)
model = Sequential([
TimeDistributed(Dense(5, activation='tanh'), batch_input_shape=BATCH_SHAPE),
LSTM(20, activation='tanh', inner_activation='sigmoid', return_sequences=True),
LSTM(20, activation='tanh', inner_activation='sigmoid', return_sequences=True),
TimeDistributed(Dense(1, activation='tanh'))
])
def compute_loss(y_true, y_pred):
skip_first = POINTS_PER_WF // 2
y_true = y_true[:, skip_first:, :] * RESCALING
y_pred = y_pred[:, skip_first:, :] * RESCALING
me = mean_absolute_error(y_true, y_pred)
cp = cosine_proximity(y_true, y_pred)
return me + cp
model.summary()
model.compile(optimizer='adam', loss=compute_loss,
metrics=['mae', 'cosine_proximity'])
NUM_ITERATIONS = 30000
for iteration in range(NUM_ITERATIONS):
wf, noisy_wf = make_waveform_with_noise()
y = wf.reshape(BATCH_SHAPE) * RESCALING
x = noisy_wf.reshape(BATCH_SHAPE) * RESCALING
info = model.train_on_batch(x, y)
model.save_weights('final.hdf5')
The first dense layer is actually useless, the reason I added it is because I wanted to make sure I can successfully combine LSTM and time distributed dense layers, since my real application will likely need that setup.
The error function was modified a number of times. Initially I was using plain mean squared error, but the training process was extremely slow, and it was mostly converging to simply copying the input noisy signal into the output. The cosine proximity metric I added later essentially defines the degree of similarity between the shapes of the functions; it seemed to speed up the learning quite a bit. Also note that I'm applying the loss function only to the last half of the dataset; the motivation for that is that I expected that the network will need to see a few periods of the signal in order to be able to correctly identify the parameters of the waveform. However, I found that this modification has no visible effect on the performance of the network.
The latest modification of the script uses Adam optimizer, I also experimented with RMSProp with varying learning rate and decay settings, but I found no noticeable difference in behavior of the network.
I am using Theano 0.9 (dev) backend configured to use 64 bit floating point, in order to prevent possible issues with numerical stability. The epsilon value is set accordingly to 1e-14.
This is what the output looks like after 15k..30k training steps (performance stops improving starting from about 15k steps) (the first plot is zoomed in for the sake of clarity):
Plot legend:
blue (0) - noisy signal, input of the RNN
green (1) - recovered signal, output of the RNN
red (2) - ground truth
My question is: what am I doing wrong?

Why input is scaled in tf.nn.dropout in tensorflow?

I can't understand why dropout works like this in tensorflow. The blog of CS231n says that, "dropout is implemented by only keeping a neuron active with some probability p (a hyperparameter), or setting it to zero otherwise." Also you can see this from picture(Taken from the same site)
From tensorflow site, With probability keep_prob, outputs the input element scaled up by 1 / keep_prob, otherwise outputs 0.
Now, why the input element is scaled up by 1/keep_prob? Why not keep the input element as it is with probability and not scale it with 1/keep_prob?
This scaling enables the same network to be used for training (with keep_prob < 1.0) and evaluation (with keep_prob == 1.0). From the Dropout paper:
The idea is to use a single neural net at test time without dropout. The weights of this network are scaled-down versions of the trained weights. If a unit is retained with probability p during training, the outgoing weights of that unit are multiplied by p at test time as shown in Figure 2.
Rather than adding ops to scale down the weights by keep_prob at test time, the TensorFlow implementation adds an op to scale up the weights by 1. / keep_prob at training time. The effect on performance is negligible, and the code is simpler (because we use the same graph and treat keep_prob as a tf.placeholder() that is fed a different value depending on whether we are training or evaluating the network).
Let's say the network had n neurons and we applied dropout rate 1/2
Training phase, we would be left with n/2 neurons. So if you were expecting output x with all the neurons, now you will get on x/2. So for every batch, the network weights are trained according to this x/2
Testing/Inference/Validation phase, we dont apply any dropout so the output is x. So, in this case, the output would be with x and not x/2, which would give you the incorrect result. So what you can do is scale it to x/2 during testing.
Rather than the above scaling specific to Testing phase. What Tensorflow's dropout layer does is that whether it is with dropout or without (Training or testing), it scales the output so that the sum is constant.
Here is a quick experiment to disperse any remaining confusion.
Statistically the weights of a NN-layer follow a distribution that is usually close to normal (but not necessarily), but even in the case when trying to sample a perfect normal distribution in practice, there are always computational errors.
Then consider the following experiment:
DIM = 1_000_000 # set our dims for weights and input
x = np.ones((DIM,1)) # our input vector
#x = np.random.rand(DIM,1)*2-1.0 # or could also be a more realistic normalized input
probs = [1.0, 0.7, 0.5, 0.3] # define dropout probs
W = np.random.normal(size=(DIM,1)) # sample normally distributed weights
print("W-mean = ", W.mean()) # note the mean is not perfect --> sampling error!
# DO THE DRILL
h = defaultdict(list)
for i in range(1000):
for p in probs:
M = np.random.rand(DIM,1)
M = (M < p).astype(int)
Wp = W * M
a = np.dot(Wp.T, x)
h[str(p)].append(a)
for k,v in h.items():
print("For drop-out prob %r the average linear activation is %r (unscaled) and %r (scaled)" % (k, np.mean(v), np.mean(v)/float(k)))
Sample output:
x-mean = 1.0
W-mean = -0.001003985674840264
For drop-out prob '1.0' the average linear activation is -1003.985674840258 (unscaled) and -1003.985674840258 (scaled)
For drop-out prob '0.7' the average linear activation is -700.6128015029908 (unscaled) and -1000.8754307185584 (scaled)
For drop-out prob '0.5' the average linear activation is -512.1602655283492 (unscaled) and -1024.3205310566984 (scaled)
For drop-out prob '0.3' the average linear activation is -303.21194422742315 (unscaled) and -1010.7064807580772 (scaled)
Notice that the unscaled activations diminish due to the statistically imperfect normal distribution.
Can you spot an obvious correlation between the W-mean and the average linear activation means?
If you keep reading in cs231n, the difference between dropout and inverted dropout is explained.
In a network with no dropout, the activations in layer L will be aL. The weights of next layer (L+1) will be learned in such a manner that it receives aL and produces output accordingly. But with a network containing dropout (with keep_prob = p), the weights of L+1 will be learned in such a manner that it receives p*aL and produces output accordingly. Why p*aL? Because the Expected value, E(aL), will be probability_of_keeping(aL)*aL + probability_of_not_keeping(aL)*0 which will be equal to p*aL + (1-p)*0 = p*aL. In the same network, during testing time there will be no dropout. Hence the layer L+1 will receive aL simply. But its weights were trained to expect p*aL as input. Therefore, during testing time you will have to multiply the activations with p. But instead of doing this, you can multiply the activations with 1/p during training only. This is called inverted dropout.
Since we want to leave the forward pass at test time untouched (and tweak our network just during training), tf.nn.dropout directly implements inverted dropout, scaling the values.

Resources