We currently do not have an understanding of semi-supervised learning (SSL) objectives such as pseudo-labelling and entropy minimization as log-likelihoods, which precludes the development of e.g. Bayesian SSL. Here, we note that benchmark image datasets such as CIFAR-10 are carefully curated, and we formulate SSL objectives as a log-likelihood in a generative model of data curation that was initially developed to explain the cold-posterior effect (Aitchison 2020). SSL methods, from entropy minimization and pseudo-labelling, to state-of-the-art techniques similar to FixMatch can be understood as lower-bounds on our principled log-likelihood. We are thus able to give a proof-of-principle for Bayesian SSL on toy data. Finally, our theory suggests that SSL is effective in part due to the statistical patterns induced by data curation. This provides an explanation of past results which show SSL performs better on clean datasets without any "out of distribution" examples. Confirming these results we find that SSL gave much larger performance improvements on curated than on uncurated data, using matched curated and uncurated datasets based on Galaxy Zoo 2.
Dolby Laboratories（杜比实验室）；Telefónica Research（西班牙电信研究中心）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）
Likelihood-based generative models are a promising resource to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs which could compromise the robustness or reliability of a machine learning system. However, likelihoods derived from such models have been shown to be problematic for detecting certain types of inputs that significantly differ from training data. In this paper, we pose that this problem is due to the excessive influence that input complexity has in generative models' likelihoods. We report a set of experiments supporting this hypothesis, and use an estimate of input complexity to derive an ef…
Recent work has shown that deep generative models assign higher likelihood to out-of-distribution inputs than to training data. We show that a factor underlying this phenomenon is a mismatch between the nature of the prior distribution and that of the data distribution, a problem found in widely used deep generative models such as VAEs and Glow. While a typical choice for a prior distribution is a standard Gaussian distribution, properties of distributions of real data sets may not be consistent with a unimodal prior distribution. This paper focuses on the relationship between the choice of a …
Flow-based generative models leverage invertible generator functions to fit a distribution to the training data using maximum likelihood. Despite their use in several application domains, robustness of these models to adversarial attacks has hardly been explored. In this paper, we study adversarial robustness of flow-based generative models both theoretically (for some simple models) and empirically (for more complex ones). First, we consider a linear flow-based generative model and compute optimal sample-specific and universal adversarial perturbations that maximally decrease the likelihood s…
Deep probabilistic generative models enable modeling the likelihoods of very high dimensional data. An important application of generative modeling should be the ability to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) samples by setting a threshold on the likelihood. However, some recent studies show that probabilistic generative models can, in some cases, assign higher likelihoods on certain types of OOD samples, making the OOD detection rules based on likelihood threshold problematic. To address this issue, several OOD detection methods have been proposed for deep generative models. In this paper, we ma…
Likelihood from a generative model is a natural statistic for detecting out-of-distribution (OoD) samples. However, generative models have been shown to assign higher likelihood to OoD samples compared to ones from the training distribution, preventing simple threshold-based detection rules. We demonstrate that OoD detection fails even when using more sophisticated statistics based on the likelihoods of individual samples. To address these issues, we propose a new method that leverages batch normalization. We argue that batch normalization for generative models challenges the traditional i.i.d…
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Rice University（莱斯大学）
Out-of-distribution (OoD) detection is a natural downstream task for deep generative models, due to their ability to learn the input probability distribution. There are mainly two classes of approaches for OoD detection using deep generative models, viz., based on likelihood measure and the reconstruction loss. However, both approaches are unable to carry out OoD detection effectively, especially when the OoD samples have smaller variance than the training samples. For instance, both flow based and VAE models assign higher likelihood to images from SVHN when trained on CIFAR-10 images. We use …
Recent work has shown that deep generative models can assign higher likelihood to out-of-distribution data sets than to their training data (Nalisnick et al., 2019; Choi et al., 2019). We posit that this phenomenon is caused by a mismatch between the model's typical set and its areas of high probability density. In-distribution inputs should reside in the former but not necessarily in the latter, as previous work has presumed. To determine whether or not inputs reside in the typical set, we propose a statistically principled, easy-to-implement test using the empirical distribution of model lik…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）
Bayesian Likelihood-Free Inference methods yield posterior approximations for simulator models with intractable likelihood. Recently, many works trained neural networks to approximate either the intractable likelihood or the posterior directly. Most proposals use normalizing flows, namely neural networks parametrizing invertible maps used to transform samples from an underlying base measure; the probability density of the transformed samples is then accessible and the normalizing flow can be trained via maximum likelihood on simulated parameter-observation pairs. A recent work [Ramesh et al., …
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Recent work in adversarial attacks has developed provably robust methods for training deep neural network classifiers. However, although they are often mentioned in the context of robustness, deep generative models themselves have received relatively little attention in terms of formally analyzing their robustness properties. In this paper, we propose a method for training provably robust generative models, specifically a provably robust version of the variational auto-encoder (VAE). To do so, we first formally define a (certifiably) robust lower bound on the variational lower bound of the lik…
Discriminative neural networks offer little or no performance guarantees when deployed on data not generated by the same process as the training distribution. On such out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs, the prediction may not only be erroneous, but confidently so, limiting the safe deployment of classifiers in real-world applications. One such challenging application is bacteria identification based on genomic sequences, which holds the promise of early detection of diseases, but requires a model that can output low confidence predictions on OOD genomic sequences from new bacteria that were not …
Deep generative models trained with large amounts of unlabelled data have proven to be powerful within the domain of unsupervised learning. Many real life data sets contain a small amount of labelled data points, that are typically disregarded when training generative models. We propose the Cluster-aware Generative Model, that uses unlabelled information to infer a latent representation that models the natural clustering of the data, and additional labelled data points to refine this clustering. The generative performances of the model significantly improve when labelled information is exploit…
A neural network deployed in the wild may be asked to make predictions for inputs that were drawn from a different distribution than that of the training data. A plethora of work has demonstrated that it is easy to find or synthesize inputs for which a neural network is highly confident yet wrong. Generative models are widely viewed to be robust to such mistaken confidence as modeling the density of the input features can be used to detect novel, out-of-distribution inputs. In this paper we challenge this assumption. We find that the density learned by flow-based models, VAEs, and PixelCNNs ca…
Modern applications and progress in deep learning research have created renewed interest for generative models of text and of images. However, even today it is unclear what objective functions one should use to train and evaluate these models. In this paper we present two contributions. Firstly, we present a critique of scheduled sampling, a state-of-the-art training method that contributed to the winning entry to the MSCOCO image captioning benchmark in 2015. Here we show that despite this impressive empirical performance, the objective function underlying scheduled sampling is improper and l…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；DeepMind
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a powerful approach to unsupervised learning. They have achieved state-of-the-art performance in the image domain. However, GANs are limited in two ways. They often learn distributions with low support---a phenomenon known as mode collapse---and they do not guarantee the existence of a probability density, which makes evaluating generalization using predictive log-likelihood impossible. In this paper, we develop the prescribed GAN (PresGAN) to address these shortcomings. PresGANs add noise to the output of a density network and optimize an entropy-reg…
Modern deep generative models can assign high likelihood to inputs drawn from outside the training distribution, posing threats to models in open-world deployments. While much research attention has been placed on defining new test-time measures of OOD uncertainty, these methods do not fundamentally change how deep generative models are regularized and optimized in training. In particular, generative models are shown to overly rely on the background information to estimate the likelihood. To address the issue, we propose a novel frequency-regularized learning FRL framework for OOD detection, w…
To ensure robust and reliable classification results, OoD (out-of-distribution) indicators based on deep generative models are proposed recently and are shown to work well on small datasets. In this paper, we conduct the first large collection of benchmarks (containing 92 dataset pairs, which is 1 order of magnitude larger than previous ones) for existing OoD indicators and observe that none perform well. We thus advocate that a large collection of benchmarks is mandatory for evaluating OoD indicators. We propose a novel theoretical framework, DOI, for divergence-based Out-of-Distribution indi…
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is an important task in machine learning systems for ensuring their reliability and safety. Deep probabilistic generative models facilitate OOD detection by estimating the likelihood of a data sample. However, such models frequently assign a suspiciously high likelihood to a specific outlier. Several recent works have addressed this issue by training a neural network with auxiliary outliers, which are generated by perturbing the input data. In this paper, we discover that these approaches fail for certain OOD datasets. Thus, we suggest a new detection metric…
University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）
The tremendous success of generative models in recent years raises the question whether they can also be used to perform classification. Generative models have been used as adversarially robust classifiers on simple datasets such as MNIST, but this robustness has not been observed on more complex datasets like CIFAR-10. Additionally, on natural image datasets, previous results have suggested a trade-off between the likelihood of the data and classification accuracy. In this work, we investigate score-based generative models as classifiers for natural images. We show that these models not only …
Deep generative models (DGMs) seem a natural fit for detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs, but such models have been shown to assign higher probabilities or densities to OOD images than images from the training distribution. In this work, we explain why this behavior should be attributed to model misestimation. We first prove that no method can guarantee performance beyond random chance without assumptions on which out-distributions are relevant. We then interrogate the typical set hypothesis, the claim that relevant out-distributions can lie in high likelihood regions of the data distri…
We introduce a simple modification to the standard maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) framework. Rather than maximizing a single unconditional likelihood of the data under the model, we maximize a family of \textit{noise conditional} likelihoods consisting of the data perturbed by a continuum of noise levels. We find that models trained this way are more robust to noise, obtain higher test likelihoods, and generate higher quality images. They can also be sampled from via a novel score-based sampling scheme which combats the classical \textit{covariate shift} problem that occurs during sample …
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences（电气工程与计算机科学系）；University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）
Deep generative modeling using flows has gained popularity owing to the tractable exact log-likelihood estimation with efficient training and synthesis process. However, flow models suffer from the challenge of having high dimensional latent space, the same in dimension as the input space. An effective solution to the above challenge as proposed by Dinh et al. (2016) is a multi-scale architecture, which is based on iterative early factorization of a part of the total dimensions at regular intervals. Prior works on generative flow models involving a multi-scale architecture perform the dimensio…
Machine learning models encounter Out-of-Distribution (OoD) errors when the data seen at test time are generated from a different stochastic generator than the one used to generate the training data. One proposal to scale OoD detection to high-dimensional data is to learn a tractable likelihood approximation of the training distribution, and use it to reject unlikely inputs. However, likelihood models on natural data are themselves susceptible to OoD errors, and even assign large likelihoods to samples from other datasets. To mitigate this problem, we propose Generative Ensembles, which robust…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；CAS Center for Excellence of Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Anomaly detection aims to detect abnormal events by a model of normality. It plays an important role in many domains such as network intrusion detection, criminal activity identity and so on. With the rapidly growing size of accessible training data and high computation capacities, deep learning based anomaly detection has become more and more popular. In this paper, a new domain-based anomaly detection method based on generative adversarial networks (GAN) is proposed. Minimum likelihood regularization is proposed to make the generator produce more anomalies and prevent it from converging to n…
A learned generative model often produces biased statistics relative to the underlying data distribution. A standard technique to correct this bias is importance sampling, where samples from the model are weighted by the likelihood ratio under model and true distributions. When the likelihood ratio is unknown, it can be estimated by training a probabilistic classifier to distinguish samples from the two distributions. We employ this likelihood-free importance weighting method to correct for the bias in generative models. We find that this technique consistently improves standard goodness-of-fi…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Building on the success of deep learning, two modern approaches to learn a probability model from the data are Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs). VAEs consider an explicit probability model for the data and compute a generative distribution by maximizing a variational lower-bound on the log-likelihood function. GANs, however, compute a generative model by minimizing a distance between observed and generated probability distributions without considering an explicit model for the observed data. The lack of having explicit probability models in GANs prohib…
Pohang University of Science and Technology（浦项科技大学）；Sungshin Women’s University（诚信女子大学）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）
We investigate statistical properties of a likelihood approach to nonparametric estimation of a singular distribution using deep generative models. More specifically, a deep generative model is used to model high-dimensional data that are assumed to concentrate around some low-dimensional structure. Estimating the distribution supported on this low-dimensional structure, such as a low-dimensional manifold, is challenging due to its singularity with respect to the Lebesgue measure in the ambient space. In the considered model, a usual likelihood approach can fail to estimate the target distribu…
In this paper, we present a general method that can improve the sample quality of pre-trained likelihood based generative models. Our method constructs an energy function on the latent variable space that yields an energy function on samples produced by the pre-trained generative model. The energy based model is efficiently trained by maximizing the data likelihood, and after training, new samples in the latent space are generated from the energy based model and passed through the generator to producing samples in observation space. We show that using our proposed method, we can greatly improv…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（向量人工智能研究院）；Borealis AI（博瑞利斯人工智能研究所）
The field of deep generative modeling has succeeded in producing astonishingly realistic-seeming images and audio, but quantitative evaluation remains a challenge. Log-likelihood is an appealing metric due to its grounding in statistics and information theory, but it can be challenging to estimate for implicit generative models, and scalar-valued metrics give an incomplete picture of a model's quality. In this work, we propose to use rate distortion (RD) curves to evaluate and compare deep generative models. While estimating RD curves is seemingly even more computationally demanding than log-l…
Adversarial learning of probabilistic models has recently emerged as a promising alternative to maximum likelihood. Implicit models such as generative adversarial networks (GAN) often generate better samples compared to explicit models trained by maximum likelihood. Yet, GANs sidestep the characterization of an explicit density which makes quantitative evaluations challenging. To bridge this gap, we propose Flow-GANs, a generative adversarial network for which we can perform exact likelihood evaluation, thus supporting both adversarial and maximum likelihood training. When trained adversariall…
To combine explicit and implicit generative models, we introduce semi-implicit generator (SIG) as a flexible hierarchical model that can be trained in the maximum likelihood framework. Both theoretically and experimentally, we demonstrate that SIG can generate high quality samples especially when dealing with multi-modality. By introducing SIG as an unbiased regularizer to the generative adversarial network (GAN), we show the interplay between maximum likelihood and adversarial learning can stabilize the adversarial training, resist the notorious mode collapsing problem of GANs, and improve th…
Auto-encoding generative adversarial networks (GANs) combine the standard GAN algorithm, which discriminates between real and model-generated data, with a reconstruction loss given by an auto-encoder. Such models aim to prevent mode collapse in the learned generative model by ensuring that it is grounded in all the available training data. In this paper, we develop a principle upon which auto-encoders can be combined with generative adversarial networks by exploiting the hierarchical structure of the generative model. The underlying principle shows that variational inference can be used a basi…
Flow-based generative models (Dinh et al., 2014) are conceptually attractive due to tractability of the exact log-likelihood, tractability of exact latent-variable inference, and parallelizability of both training and synthesis. In this paper we propose Glow, a simple type of generative flow using an invertible 1x1 convolution. Using our method we demonstrate a significant improvement in log-likelihood on standard benchmarks. Perhaps most strikingly, we demonstrate that a generative model optimized towards the plain log-likelihood objective is capable of efficient realistic-looking synthesis a…
Vector Institute（向量研究所）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Class-conditional generative models hold promise to overcome the shortcomings of their discriminative counterparts. They are a natural choice to solve discriminative tasks in a robust manner as they jointly optimize for predictive performance and accurate modeling of the input distribution. In this work, we investigate robust classification with likelihood-based generative models from a theoretical and practical perspective to investigate if they can deliver on their promises. Our analysis focuses on a spectrum of robustness properties: (1) Detection of worst-case outliers in the form of adver…
Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（向量人工智能研究院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
In this paper, we describe the "implicit autoencoder" (IAE), a generative autoencoder in which both the generative path and the recognition path are parametrized by implicit distributions. We use two generative adversarial networks to define the reconstruction and the regularization cost functions of the implicit autoencoder, and derive the learning rules based on maximum-likelihood learning. Using implicit distributions allows us to learn more expressive posterior and conditional likelihood distributions for the autoencoder. Learning an expressive conditional likelihood distribution enables t…
This report works out the details of a closed-form, fully Bayesian, multiclass, openset, generative pattern classifier using multivariate Gaussian likelihoods, with conjugate priors. The generative model has a common within-class covariance, which is proportional to the between-class covariance in the conjugate prior. The scalar proportionality constant is the only plugin parameter. All other model parameters are intergated out in closed form. An expression is given for the model evidence, which can be used to make plugin estimates for the proportionality constant. Pattern recognition is done …
Deep generative models for graph-structured data offer a new angle on the problem of chemical synthesis: by optimizing differentiable models that directly generate molecular graphs, it is possible to side-step expensive search procedures in the discrete and vast space of chemical structures. We introduce MolGAN, an implicit, likelihood-free generative model for small molecular graphs that circumvents the need for expensive graph matching procedures or node ordering heuristics of previous likelihood-based methods. Our method adapts generative adversarial networks (GANs) to operate directly on g…
Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) can be viewed as an implicit estimator of a data distribution, and this perspective motivates using the adversarial concept in the true input parameter estimation of black-box generators. While previous works on likelihood-free inference introduces an implicit proposal distribution on the generator input, this paper analyzes theoretic limitations of the proposal distribution approach. On top of that, we introduce a new algorithm, Adversarial Likelihood-Free Inference (ALFI), to mitigate the analyzed limitations, so ALFI is able to find the posterior distrib…
Normalizing flows are deep generative models that allow efficient likelihood calculation and sampling. The core requirement for this advantage is that they are constructed using functions that can be efficiently inverted and for which the determinant of the function's Jacobian can be efficiently computed. Researchers have introduced various such flow operations, but few of these allow rich interactions among variables without incurring significant computational costs. In this paper, we introduce Woodbury transformations, which achieve efficient invertibility via the Woodbury matrix identity an…
KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）；Karolinska Institute（卡罗林斯卡学院）
Hidden Markov model (HMM) has been successfully used for sequential data modeling problems. In this work, we propose to power the modeling capacity of HMM by bringing in neural network based generative models. The proposed model is termed as GenHMM. In the proposed GenHMM, each HMM hidden state is associated with a neural network based generative model that has tractability of exact likelihood and provides efficient likelihood computation. A generative model in GenHMM consists of mixture of generators that are realized by flow models. A learning algorithm for GenHMM is proposed in expectation-…
Iowa State University（爱荷华州立大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Advances in deep generative and density models have shown impressive capacity to model complex probability density functions in lower-dimensional space. Also, applying such models to high-dimensional image data to model the PDF has shown poor generalization, with out-of-distribution data being assigned equal or higher likelihood than in-sample data. Methods to deal with this have been proposed that deviate from a fully unsupervised approach, requiring large ensembles or additional knowledge about the data, not commonly available in the real-world. In this work, the previously offered reasoning…
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Royal Philips B. V.（皇家飞利浦有限公司）
Many important data analysis applications present with severely imbalanced datasets with respect to the target variable. A typical example is medical image analysis, where positive samples are scarce, while performance is commonly estimated against the correct detection of these positive examples. We approach this challenge by formulating the problem as anomaly detection with generative models. We train a generative model without supervision on the `negative' (common) datapoints and use this model to estimate the likelihood of unseen data. A successful model allows us to detect the `positive' …
Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学）；Rice University（莱斯大学）
Normalizing flows are exact-likelihood generative neural networks which approximately transform samples from a simple prior distribution to samples of the probability distribution of interest. Recent work showed that such generative models can be utilized in statistical mechanics to sample equilibrium states of many-body systems in physics and chemistry. To scale and generalize these results, it is essential that the natural symmetries in the probability density -- in physics defined by the invariances of the target potential -- are built into the flow. We provide a theoretical sufficient crit…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；University of Patras（帕特雷大学）
We are interested in the design of generative networks. The training of these mathematical structures is mostly performed with the help of adversarial (min-max) optimization problems. We propose a simple methodology for constructing such problems assuring, at the same time, consistency of the corresponding solution. We give characteristic examples developed by our method, some of which can be recognized from other applications, and some are introduced here for the first time. We present a new metric, the likelihood ratio, that can be employed online to examine the convergence and stability dur…
Traditional structured prediction models try to learn the conditional likelihood, i.e., p(y|x), to capture the relationship between the structured output y and the input features x. For many models, computing the likelihood is intractable. These models are therefore hard to train, requiring the use of surrogate objectives or variational inference to approximate likelihood. In this paper, we propose conditional Glow (c-Glow), a conditional generative flow for structured output learning. C-Glow benefits from the ability of flow-based models to compute p(y|x) exactly and efficiently. Learning wit…
Identifiable Bayesian Deep Generative Copulas with Unknown Layer Widths for Data with Arbitrary Marginal Distributions
Department of Statistics and Data Science（统计与数据科学系）；Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；Department of Statistics（统计系）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
We formulate a new class of conditional generative models based on probability flows. Trained with maximum likelihood, it provides efficient inference and sampling from class-conditionals or the joint distribution, and does not require a priori knowledge of the number of classes or the relationships between classes. This allows one to train generative models from multiple, heterogeneous datasets, while retaining strong prior models over subsets of the data (e.g., from a single dataset, class label, or attribute). In this paper, in addition to end-to-end learning, we show how one can learn a si…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Jiangsu Normal University（江苏师范大学）；Samsung Research China（三星中国研究院）；AWS AI Lab（亚马逊云科技人工智能实验室）
The recent, counter-intuitive discovery that deep generative models (DGMs) can frequently assign a higher likelihood to outliers has implications for both outlier detection applications as well as our overall understanding of generative modeling. In this work, we present a possible explanation for this phenomenon, starting from the observation that a model's typical set and high-density region may not conincide. From this vantage point we propose a novel outlier test, the empirical success of which suggests that the failure of existing likelihood-based outlier tests does not necessarily imply …
We introduce a framework using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for likelihood--free inference (LFI) and Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) where we replace the black-box simulator model with an approximator network and generate a rich set of summary features in a data driven fashion. On benchmark data sets, our approach improves on others with respect to scalability, ability to handle high dimensional data and complex probability distributions.
Royal Institute of Technology（皇家理工学院）；Volvo Car Corporation（沃尔沃汽车公司）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）
Learning generative models and inferring latent trajectories have shown to be challenging for time series due to the intractable marginal likelihoods of flexible generative models. It can be addressed by surrogate objectives for optimization. We propose Monte Carlo filtering objectives (MCFOs), a family of variational objectives for jointly learning parametric generative models and amortized adaptive importance proposals of time series. MCFOs extend the choices of likelihood estimators beyond Sequential Monte Carlo in state-of-the-art objectives, possess important properties revealing the fact…
The Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) can be used either as classifiers or as generative models. The quality of the generative RBM is measured through the average log-likelihood on test data. Due to the high computational complexity of evaluating the partition function, exact calculation of test log-likelihood is very difficult. In recent years some estimation methods are suggested for approximate computation of test log-likelihood. In this paper we present an empirical comparison of the main estimation methods, namely, the AIS algorithm for estimating the partition function, the CSL method …
