Point-to-set distance functions for output-constrained neural networks
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Training a neural network for semantic segmentation with many images and pixel-level segmentations is a well-established computer-vision technique. When pixel-level segmentations are unavailable, weak supervision or prior information like bounding boxes and the size/shape of objects still enables training a network. Directly including prior knowledge on the segmentations means constraining the network output. This complicates the possible optimization strategies because the regularization then acts on the non-linear neural-network function output and not on the optimization variables. We present a new algorithm to include prior information via constraints on the network output, implemented via projection-based point-to-set distance functions, that are differentiable and always have the same functional form for the derivative. Thus, there is no need to adapt penalty functions or algorithms to various constraints. The distance function's differentiability also avoids issues related to constraining properties typically associated with non-differentiable penalties. We show that by explicitly taking a general neural network structure into account, the Lagrangian for the problem 'naturally' decouples the constraints and neural network, which allows for a gradient computation via backpropagation/adjoint-state as is common in deep learning. We present a suite of constraint sets suitable for segmentation problems. The numerical experiments show that learning from constraint sets applies to the broader imaging sciences, including visual and non-visual imagery, even when training a network for a single example.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it