Attention Sampling

This repository provides a python library to accelerate the training and inference of neural networks on large data. This code is the reference implementation of the methods described in our ICML 2019 publication "Processing Megapixel Images with Deep Attention-Sampling Models".

Usage

You can find examples of how to use our library in the provided scripts or a very concise one below.

# Keras imports

from ats.core import attention_sampling
from ats.utils.layers import SampleSoftmax
from ats.utils.regularizers import multinomial_entropy

# Create our two inputs.
# Note that x_low could also be an input if we have access to a precomputed
# downsampled image.
x_high = Input(shape=(H, W, C))
x_low = AveragePooling2D(pool_size=(10,))(x_high)

# Create our attention model
attention = Sequential([
    ...
    Conv2D(1),
    SampleSoftmax(squeeze_channels=True)
])

# Create our feature extractor per patch, we assume that it returns a
# vector per patch.
feature = Sequential([
    ...
    GlobalAveragePooling2D(),
    L2Normalize()
])

features, attention, patches = attention_sampling(
    attention,
    feature,
    patch_size=(32, 32),
    n_patches=10,
    attention_regularizer=multinomial_entropy(0.01)
)([x_low, x_high])

y = Dense(output_size, activation="softmax")(features)

model = Model(inputs=x_high, outputs=y)

Dependencies & Installation

To install the library just run pip install attention-sampling. If you want to extend our code clone the repository and install it in development mode.

The dependencies of attention-sampling are

• TensorFlow
• C++ tool chain
• CUDA (optional)

Documentation

There exists a dedicated documentation site but you are also encouraged to read the source code <https://github.com/idiap/attention-sampling> and the scripts to get an idea of how the library should be used and extended.

Research

If you found this work influential or helpful in your research in any way, we would appreciate if you cited us.

@inproceedings{katharopoulos2019ats,
    title={Processing Megapixel Images with Deep Attention-Sampling Models},
    author={Katharopoulos, A. and Fleuret, F.},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
    year={2019}
}