Sketching based Representations for Robust Image Classification with Provable Guarantees
Authors: Nishanth Dikkala, Sankeerth Rao Karingula, Raghu Meka, Jelani Nelson, Rina Panigrahy, Xin Wang

How do we provably represent images succinctly so that their essential latent attributes are correctly captured by the representation to as high level of detail as possible? While today's deep networks (such as CNNs)  produce image embeddings they do not have any provable properties and seem to work in mysterious non-interpretable ways. In this work we theoretically study synthetic images that are composed of a union or intersection of several mathematically specified shapes using thresholded polynomial functions (for e.g. ellipses, rectangles).  We show how to produce a succinct sketch of such an image so that the sketch “smoothly” maps to the latent-coefficients producing the different shapes in the image.  We prove several important properties  such as: easy reconstruction of the image from the sketch, similarity preservation (similar shapes produce similar sketches), being able to index sketches so that other similar images and parts of other images can be retrieved,  being able to store the sketches into a dictionary of concepts and shapes so parts of the same or different images that refer to the same shape can point to the same entry in this dictionary of common shape attributes.