Label smoothing (LS) is an arising learning paradigm that uses the positively weighted average of both the hard training labels and uniformly distributed soft labels. It was shown that LS serves as a regularizer for training data with hard labels and therefore improves the generalization of the model. Later it was reported LS even helps with improving robustness when learning with noisy labels. However, we observed that the advantage of LS vanishes when we operate in a high label noise regime. Intuitively speaking, this is due to the increased entropy of $\mathbb{P}(\text{noisy label}|X)$ when the noise rate is high, in which case, further applying LS tends to "oversmooth" the estimated posterior. We proceeded to discover that several learning-with-noisy-labels solutions in the literature instead relate more closely to negative/not label smoothing (NLS), which acts counter to LS and defines as using a negative weight to combine the hard and soft labels! We provide understandings for the properties of LS and NLS when learning with noisy labels. Among other established properties, we theoretically show NLS is considered more beneficial when the label noise rates are high. We provide extensive experimental results on multiple benchmarks to support our findings too.
In this paper, we study learning in probabilistic domains where the learner may receive incorrect labels but can improve the reliability of labels by repeatedly sampling them. In such a setting, one faces the problem of whether the fixed budget for obtaining training examples should rather be used for obtaining all different examples or for improving the label quality of a smaller number of examples by re-sampling their labels. We motivate this problem in an application to compare the strength of poker hands where the training signal depends on the hidden community cards, and then study it in depth in an artificial setting where we insert controlled noise levels into the MNIST database. Our results show that with increasing levels of noise, resampling previous examples becomes increasingly more important than obtaining new examples, as classifier performance deteriorates when the number of incorrect labels is too high. In addition, we propose two different validation strategies; switching from lower to higher validations over the course of training and using chi-square statistics to approximate the confidence in obtained labels.
The goal of this paper is to bypass the need for labelled examples in few-shot video understanding at run time. While proven effective, in many practical video settings even labelling a few examples appears unrealistic. This is especially true as the level of details in spatio-temporal video understanding and with it, the complexity of annotations continues to increase. Rather than performing few-shot learning with a human oracle to provide a few densely labelled support videos, we propose to automatically learn to find appropriate support videos given a query. We call this self-shot learning and we outline a simple self-supervised learning method to generate an embedding space well-suited for unsupervised retrieval of relevant samples. To showcase this novel setting, we tackle, for the first time, video instance segmentation in a self-shot (and few-shot) setting, where the goal is to segment instances at the pixel-level across the spatial and temporal domains. We provide strong baseline performances that utilize a novel transformer-based model and show that self-shot learning can even surpass few-shot and can be positively combined for further performance gains. Experiments on new benchmarks show that our approach achieves strong performance, is competitive to oracle support in some settings, scales to large unlabelled video collections, and can be combined in a semi-supervised setting.
In this work we examine the classification accuracy and robustness of a state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithm applied to the morphological classification of radio galaxies. We test if SSL with fewer labels can achieve test accuracies comparable to the supervised state-of-the-art and whether this holds when incorporating previously unseen data. We find that for the radio galaxy classification problem considered, SSL provides additional regularisation and outperforms the baseline test accuracy. However, in contrast to model performance metrics reported on computer science benchmarking data-sets, we find that improvement is limited to a narrow range of label volumes, with performance falling off rapidly at low label volumes. Additionally, we show that SSL does not improve model calibration, regardless of whether classification is improved. Moreover, we find that when different underlying catalogues drawn from the same radio survey are used to provide the labelled and unlabelled data-sets required for SSL, a significant drop in classification performance is observered, highlighting the difficulty of applying SSL techniques under dataset shift. We show that a class-imbalanced unlabelled data pool negatively affects performance through prior probability shift, which we suggest may explain this performance drop, and that using the Frechet Distance between labelled and unlabelled data-sets as a measure of data-set shift can provide a prediction of model performance, but that for typical radio galaxy data-sets with labelled sample volumes of O(1000), the sample variance associated with this technique is high and the technique is in general not sufficiently robust to replace a train-test cycle.
Let ${\mathcal M}\subset {\mathbb R}^n$ be a $C^2$-smooth compact submanifold of dimension $d$. Assume that the volume of ${\mathcal M}$ is at most $V$ and the reach (i.e. the normal injectivity radius) of ${\mathcal M}$ is greater than $\tau$. Moreover, let $\mu$ be a probability measure on ${\mathcal M}$ whose density on ${\mathcal M}$ is a strictly positive Lipschitz-smooth function. Let $x_j\in {\mathcal M}$, $j=1,2,\dots,N$ be $N$ independent random samples from distribution $\mu$. Also, let $\xi_j$, $j=1,2,\dots, N$ be independent random samples from a Gaussian random variable in ${\mathbb R}^n$ having covariance $\sigma^2I$, where $\sigma$ is less than a certain specified function of $d, V$ and $\tau$. We assume that we are given the data points $y_j=x_j+\xi_j,$ $j=1,2,\dots,N$, modelling random points of ${\mathcal M}$ with measurement noise. We develop an algorithm which produces from these data, with high probability, a $d$ dimensional submanifold ${\mathcal M}_o\subset {\mathbb R}^n$ whose Hausdorff distance to ${\mathcal M}$ is less than $Cd\sigma^2/\tau$ and whose reach is greater than $c{\tau}/d^6$ with universal constants $C,c > 0$. The number $N$ of random samples required depends almost linearly on $n$, polynomially on $\sigma^{-1}$ and exponentially on $d$.
To simulate noisy boson sampling approximating it by only the lower-order multi-boson interferences (e.g., by a smaller number of interfering bosons and classical particles) is very popular idea. I show that the output data from any such classical simulations can be efficiently distinguished from that of the quantum device they try to simulate, even with finite noise in the latter. The distinguishing datasets can be the experimental estimates of some large probabilities, a wide class of such is presented. This is a sequel of \textit{Quantum} \textbf{5}, 423 (2021), where I present more accessible account of the main result enhanced by additional insight on the contribution from the higher-order multi-boson interferences in presence of noise.
This paper studies how well generative adversarial networks (GANs) learn probability distributions from finite samples. Our main results establish the convergence rates of GANs under a collection of integral probability metrics defined through H\"older classes, including the Wasserstein distance as a special case. We also show that GANs are able to adaptively learn data distributions with low-dimensional structures or have H\"older densities, when the network architectures are chosen properly. In particular, for distributions concentrated around a low-dimensional set, we show that the learning rates of GANs do not depend on the high ambient dimension, but on the lower intrinsic dimension. Our analysis is based on a new oracle inequality decomposing the estimation error into the generator and discriminator approximation error and the statistical error, which may be of independent interest.
Few-shot learning (FSL) methods typically assume clean support sets with accurately labeled samples when training on novel classes. This assumption can often be unrealistic: support sets, no matter how small, can still include mislabeled samples. Robustness to label noise is therefore essential for FSL methods to be practical, but this problem surprisingly remains largely unexplored. To address mislabeled samples in FSL settings, we make several technical contributions. (1) We offer simple, yet effective, feature aggregation methods, improving the prototypes used by ProtoNet, a popular FSL technique. (2) We describe a novel Transformer model for Noisy Few-Shot Learning (TraNFS). TraNFS leverages a transformer's attention mechanism to weigh mislabeled versus correct samples. (3) Finally, we extensively test these methods on noisy versions of MiniImageNet and TieredImageNet. Our results show that TraNFS is on-par with leading FSL methods on clean support sets, yet outperforms them, by far, in the presence of label noise.
This paper presents SimCLR: a simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. We simplify recently proposed contrastive self-supervised learning algorithms without requiring specialized architectures or a memory bank. In order to understand what enables the contrastive prediction tasks to learn useful representations, we systematically study the major components of our framework. We show that (1) composition of data augmentations plays a critical role in defining effective predictive tasks, (2) introducing a learnable nonlinear transformation between the representation and the contrastive loss substantially improves the quality of the learned representations, and (3) contrastive learning benefits from larger batch sizes and more training steps compared to supervised learning. By combining these findings, we are able to considerably outperform previous methods for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A linear classifier trained on self-supervised representations learned by SimCLR achieves 76.5% top-1 accuracy, which is a 7% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art, matching the performance of a supervised ResNet-50. When fine-tuned on only 1% of the labels, we achieve 85.8% top-5 accuracy, outperforming AlexNet with 100X fewer labels.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.