Matthew Petroff

Last month, I presented a preliminary analysis of ranking color sets using responses collected in the Color Cycle Survey. Now, I extend this analysis to look at color ordering within a given color set. For this analysis, the same artificial neural network architecture was used as was used before, except that batch normalization, with a batch size of 2048, was used after the two Gaussian dropout layers. Determining ordering turned out to be a slightly more difficult problem, in part because the data cannot be augmented, since the ordering, obviously, matters. However, due to the way the survey is structured, with the user picking the best of four potential orderings, there are three pairwise data points per response. The same set of responses was used, ignoring the additional responses collected since the previous analysis was performed (there are now ~10k total responses).

To maximize the information gleaned from the survey responses, the network was trained in four steps. The process started with a single network and ended with a conjoined network, as before, except the single network underwent three stages of training instead of one. First, the color set responses—the responses that were used in the previous analysis—were used to train the network for 50 epochs, to learn color representations. Next, the ordering responses were used with the data augmented with all possible cyclic shifts to train the network for an additional 50 epochs, to learn internal cycle orderings. Then, the non-augmented ordering responses were used to train the network for another 100 epochs, to learn the ideal starting color. Finally, the last layer of the network was replaced, as before, to make a conjoined network, and the new network was trained for a final 100 epochs, again with the non-augmented ordering responses. Continue reading →

Since I launched my color cycle survey in December, it has collected ~9.7k responses across ~800 user sessions. Although the responses are not as numerous as I’d like, there’s currently enough data for preliminary analysis. The data are split between sets of six, eight, and ten colors with ratios of approximately 2:2:1; there are fewer ten-color color set responses as I disabled that portion of the survey months ago, to more quickly record six- and eight-color color set responses. So far, I’ve focused on analyzing the set ranking of the six-color color sets, for which there are ~4k responses, using artificial neural networks. The gist of the problem is to use the survey’s pair-wise responses to train a neural network such that it can rank 10k previously-generated color sets; these colors sets each have a minimum perceptual distance between colors, both with and without color vision deficiency simulations applied.

As inputs with identical structure are being compared, a network architecture that is invariant to input order, i.e., one that produces identical output for inputs (A, B) and (B, A), is desirable. Conjoined neural networks¹ satisfy this property; they consist of two identical neural networks with shared weights, the outputs of which are combined to produce a single result. In this case, each network takes a single color set as input and produces a single scalar output, a “score” for the input color set. The two scores are then compared, with the better scoring color set of the input pair chosen as the preferred set; put more concretely, the difference of the two scores is computed and used to calculate binary cross-entropy during network training. The architecture of the network appears in the figure below and contains 2077 trainable parameters.

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1. Bromley, Jane, Isabelle Guyon, Yann LeCun, Eduard Säckinger, and Roopak Shah. “Signature verification using a ‘Siamese’ time delay neural network.” In Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 737-744. 1994. ↩