Tensorflow Autoencoder - How To Calculate Reconstruction Error?

Question

I've implemented the following Autoencoder in Tensorflow as shown below. It basically takes MNIST digits as inputs, learns the structure of the data and reproduces the input at its output.

from __future__ import division, print_function, absolute_import

import tensorflow as tf
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Import MNIST data
from tensorflow.examples.tutorials.mnist import input_data
mnist = input_data.read_data_sets("MNIST_data", one_hot=True)

# Parameters
learning_rate = 0.01
training_epochs = 20
batch_size = 256
display_step = 1
examples_to_show = 10

# Network Parameters
n_hidden_1 = 256 # 1st layer num features
n_hidden_2 = 128 # 2nd layer num features
n_input = 784 # MNIST data input (img shape: 28*28)

# tf Graph input (only pictures)
X = tf.placeholder("float", [None, n_input])

weights = {
    'encoder_h1': tf.Variable(tf.random_normal([n_input, n_hidden_1])),
    'encoder_h2': tf.Variable(tf.random_normal([n_hidden_1, n_hidden_2])),
    'decoder_h1': tf.Variable(tf.random_normal([n_hidden_2, n_hidden_1])),
    'decoder_h2': tf.Variable(tf.random_normal([n_hidden_1, n_input])),
}
biases = {
    'encoder_b1': tf.Variable(tf.random_normal([n_hidden_1])),
    'encoder_b2': tf.Variable(tf.random_normal([n_hidden_2])),
    'decoder_b1': tf.Variable(tf.random_normal([n_hidden_1])),
    'decoder_b2': tf.Variable(tf.random_normal([n_input])),
}


# Building the encoder
def encoder(x):
    # Encoder Hidden layer with sigmoid activation #1
    layer_1 = tf.nn.sigmoid(tf.add(tf.matmul(x, weights['encoder_h1']),
                                   biases['encoder_b1']))
    # Decoder Hidden layer with sigmoid activation #2
    layer_2 = tf.nn.sigmoid(tf.add(tf.matmul(layer_1, weights['encoder_h2']),
                                   biases['encoder_b2']))
    return layer_2


# Building the decoder
def decoder(x):
    # Encoder Hidden layer with sigmoid activation #1
    layer_1 = tf.nn.sigmoid(tf.add(tf.matmul(x, weights['decoder_h1']),
                                   biases['decoder_b1']))
    # Decoder Hidden layer with sigmoid activation #2
    layer_2 = tf.nn.sigmoid(tf.add(tf.matmul(layer_1, weights['decoder_h2']),
                                   biases['decoder_b2']))
    return layer_2

# Construct model
encoder_op = encoder(X)
decoder_op = decoder(encoder_op)

# Prediction
y_pred = decoder_op
# Targets (Labels) are the input data.
y_true = X

# Define loss and optimizer, minimize the squared error
cost = tf.reduce_mean(tf.pow(y_true - y_pred, 2))
optimizer = tf.train.RMSPropOptimizer(learning_rate).minimize(cost)

# Initializing the variables
init = tf.global_variables_initializer()

# Launch the graph
with tf.Session() as sess:
    sess.run(init)
    total_batch = int(mnist.train.num_examples/batch_size)
    # Training cycle
    for epoch in range(training_epochs):
        # Loop over all batches
        for i in range(total_batch):
            batch_xs, batch_ys = mnist.train.next_batch(batch_size)
            # Run optimization op (backprop) and cost op (to get loss value)
            _, c = sess.run([optimizer, cost], feed_dict={X: batch_xs})
        # Display logs per epoch step
        if epoch % display_step == 0:
            print("Epoch:", '%04d' % (epoch+1),
                  "cost=", "{:.9f}".format(c))

    print("Optimization Finished!")

    # Applying encode and decode over test set
    encode_decode = sess.run(
        y_pred, feed_dict={X: mnist.test.images[:examples_to_show]})
    # Compare original images with their reconstructions
    f, a = plt.subplots(2, 10, figsize=(10, 2))
    for i in range(examples_to_show):
        a[0][i].imshow(np.reshape(mnist.test.images[i], (28, 28)))
        a[1][i].imshow(np.reshape(encode_decode[i], (28, 28)))
    f.show()
    plt.draw()
    plt.waitforbuttonpress()

When I am encoding and decoding over the test set, how do I calculate the reconstruction error (i.e. the Mean Squared Error/Loss) for each sample?

In other words I'd like to see how well the Autoencoder is able to reconstruct its input so that I can use the Autoencoder as a single-class classifier.

Many thanks in advance.

Barry

Answer 1

You can take the output of the decoder and take the difference with the true image and take the average.

Say y is the output of the decoder and the original test image is x then you can do something like for each of the examples and take an average over it:

tf.square(y-x)

This will be your reconstruction cost for the test set.