# overcomplete sparse coding

2021-05-01

Highly overomplete sparse coding

## Formulation

We wish to model an image $I$ (where $I(\vec{x})$ refers to discrete segments of the image) as:

$$I(\vec{x}) = \sum_{i=1}^{M} \alpha_i \phi_i(\vec{x}) + \epsilon(\vec{x})$$

To evaluate “goodness” of reconstruction we define an energy function:

$$E = \frac{1}{2} \sum_{\vec{x}} [ I(\vec{x}) - \sum_{i=1}^{M} \alpha_i \phi_i(\vec{x}) ]^2$$

That essentially computes a mean squared error between a dictionary reconstruction and ground truth for each image segment.

We add an additional L1 constraint on our “code” to enforce sparsity:

$$\lambda \sum_{i=1}^{M} |a_i|$$

Together our loss becomes:

$$E = \frac{1}{2} \sum_{\vec{x}} [ I(\vec{x}) - \sum_{i=1}^{M} \alpha_i \phi_i(\vec{x}) ]^2 + \lambda \sum_{i=1}^{M} |a_i|$$

## Results

A complete dictionary $\phi$. Each tile is a learned transform in the dictionary.

Complete dictionaries yield basis transforms that are from the garbor filter family.

## Notes

The goal of a sparse code is not to improve reconstruction!

Reconstruction is perfect if your dictionary has the thing you are trying to reconstruct. This is trivial.

As Bruno taught us, reconstruction is a proxy to understand how good your latent representation scheme is. Highly-specialized (sparse) and variate (overcomplete) part “catalogs” are easier to work with because they produce parts that are semantic.

Intuitively, if you are forced to 10x the size of your toolbox but you are also forced to use each tool sparingly, those tools become specialized and good.