As per the PSF calendar, for this week I will try to write a blog post instead of the usual check-in post. I will be answering three questions: what I am working on, what I struggled with, and what solutions I have come to.
First, a recap of week 1.
I started working with Grad-CAM for Keras and images. Just to explain that, say we have neural network that takes in an input such as an image, and gives an output, for example a category that tells you what is in the image. By using Grad-CAM, we can highlight the pixels in the image that helped the network decide on the category that it picked. We can check where the network “looks”.
Right away I struggled with implementing such “explanations”. Like any respectable student does I found a GitHub repo that contained all the work I needed to do and copy pasted it real fast. In the end this worked well, but my approach was not good. I started out by adding code function-by-function, making “optimisations” as I saw fit. Unfortunately I could not check if I have made any errors, and ended up with some exceptions that I could not resolve.
The solution to this was testing, then making small changes. It’s hard to take something that does not work and make changes to it. It’s much easier to take what works and change it, then check that nothing broke. I thank the mentors for advising me this.
Going forward to week 2, I added automated tests for what I have done in week 1, and as per a sync up call with a mentor made some optimisations to the Grad-CAM implementation.
There were a couple of issues I ran into. Firstly, testing image output is a problem in itself. There were only a few comments on this online, but I talked to my mentors and we agreed that doing a rough check (checking average values in a region) would be good (pixel-by-pixel checks are too fragile). This led to some “integration” tests.
Next, I found it hard to come up with a few “unit tests”. I clarified the API with the mentors and changed some function signatures, and that helped.
I think these were the main “issues” of week 2. It went by fast and I am much happier with the code now. Looking forward to learning about RNN’s and adapting Grad-CAM next week! But first I have to write some docs :(
See you next week,
Tomas Baltrunas