Recent studies revealed that convolutional neural networks do not generalize well to small image transformations, e.g. rotations by a few degrees or translations of a few pixels. To improve the robustness to such transformations, we propose to introduce data augmentation at intermediate layers of the neural architecture, in addition to the common data augmentation applied on the input images. By introducing small perturbations to activation maps (features) at various levels, we develop the capacity of the neural network to cope with such transformations. We conduct experiments on three image classification benchmarks (Tiny ImageNet, Caltech-256 and Food-101), considering two different convolutional architectures (ResNet-18 and DenseNet-121). When compared with two state-of-the-art methods, the empirical results show that our approach consistently attains the best trade-off between accuracy and mean flip rate.
High-capacity deep neural networks (DNNs) trained with Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) often suffer from poor worst-group accuracy despite good on-average performance, where worst-group accuracy measures a model's robustness towards certain subpopulations of the input space. Spurious correlations and memorization behaviors of ERM trained DNNs are typically attributed to this degradation in performance. We develop a method, called CRIS, that address these issues by performing robust classifier retraining on independent splits of the dataset. This results in a simple method that improves upon state-of-the-art methods, such as Group DRO, on standard datasets while relying on much fewer group labels and little additional hyperparameter tuning.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are one of the most popular architectures that are used to solve classification problems accompanied by graphical information. We present a rigorous theoretical understanding of the effects of graph convolutions in multi-layer networks. We study these effects through the node classification problem of a non-linearly separable Gaussian mixture model coupled with a stochastic block model. First, we show that a single graph convolution expands the regime of the distance between the means where multi-layer networks can classify the data by a factor of at least $1/\sqrt[4]{\mathbb{E}{\rm deg}}$, where $\mathbb{E}{\rm deg}$ denotes the expected degree of a node. Second, we show that with a slightly stronger graph density, two graph convolutions improve this factor to at least $1/\sqrt[4]{n}$, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the graph. Finally, we provide both theoretical and empirical insights into the performance of graph convolutions placed in different combinations among the layers of a network, concluding that the performance is mutually similar for all combinations of the placement. We present extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data that illustrate our results.
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to invisible perturbations on the images generated by adversarial attacks, which raises researches on the adversarial robustness of DNNs. A series of methods represented by the adversarial training and its variants have proven as one of the most effective techniques in enhancing the DNN robustness. Generally, adversarial training focuses on enriching the training data by involving perturbed data. Despite of the efficiency in defending specific attacks, adversarial training is benefited from the data augmentation, which does not contribute to the robustness of DNN itself and usually suffers from accuracy drop on clean data as well as inefficiency in unknown attacks. Towards the robustness of DNN itself, we propose a novel defense that aims at augmenting the model in order to learn features adaptive to diverse inputs, including adversarial examples. Specifically, we introduce multiple paths to augment the network, and impose orthogonality constraints on these paths. In addition, a margin-maximization loss is designed to further boost DIversity via Orthogonality (DIO). Extensive empirical results on various data sets, architectures, and attacks demonstrate the adversarial robustness of the proposed DIO.
Multi-class classification problems often have many semantically similar classes. For example, 90 of ImageNet's 1000 classes are for different breeds of dog. We should expect that these semantically similar classes will have similar parameter vectors, but the standard cross entropy loss does not enforce this constraint. We introduce the tree loss as a drop-in replacement for the cross entropy loss. The tree loss re-parameterizes the parameter matrix in order to guarantee that semantically similar classes will have similar parameter vectors. Using simple properties of stochastic gradient descent, we show that the tree loss's generalization error is asymptotically better than the cross entropy loss's. We then validate these theoretical results on synthetic data, image data (CIFAR100, ImageNet), and text data (Twitter).
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalizability of machine learning models. However, comparatively little work studies data augmentation for graphs. This is largely due to the complex, non-Euclidean structure of graphs, which limits possible manipulation operations. Augmentation operations commonly used in vision and language have no analogs for graphs. Our work studies graph data augmentation for graph neural networks (GNNs) in the context of improving semi-supervised node-classification. We discuss practical and theoretical motivations, considerations and strategies for graph data augmentation. Our work shows that neural edge predictors can effectively encode class-homophilic structure to promote intra-class edges and demote inter-class edges in given graph structure, and our main contribution introduces the GAug graph data augmentation framework, which leverages these insights to improve performance in GNN-based node classification via edge prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that augmentation via GAug improves performance across GNN architectures and datasets.
Modern neural network training relies heavily on data augmentation for improved generalization. After the initial success of label-preserving augmentations, there has been a recent surge of interest in label-perturbing approaches, which combine features and labels across training samples to smooth the learned decision surface. In this paper, we propose a new augmentation method that leverages the first and second moments extracted and re-injected by feature normalization. We replace the moments of the learned features of one training image by those of another, and also interpolate the target labels. As our approach is fast, operates entirely in feature space, and mixes different signals than prior methods, one can effectively combine it with existing augmentation methods. We demonstrate its efficacy across benchmark data sets in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing, where it consistently improves the generalization performance of highly competitive baseline networks.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.
Adversarial attacks to image classification systems present challenges to convolutional networks and opportunities for understanding them. This study suggests that adversarial perturbations on images lead to noise in the features constructed by these networks. Motivated by this observation, we develop new network architectures that increase adversarial robustness by performing feature denoising. Specifically, our networks contain blocks that denoise the features using non-local means or other filters; the entire networks are trained end-to-end. When combined with adversarial training, our feature denoising networks substantially improve the state-of-the-art in adversarial robustness in both white-box and black-box attack settings. On ImageNet, under 10-iteration PGD white-box attacks where prior art has 27.9% accuracy, our method achieves 55.7%; even under extreme 2000-iteration PGD white-box attacks, our method secures 42.6% accuracy. A network based on our method was ranked first in Competition on Adversarial Attacks and Defenses (CAAD) 2018 --- it achieved 50.6% classification accuracy on a secret, ImageNet-like test dataset against 48 unknown attackers, surpassing the runner-up approach by ~10%. Code and models will be made publicly available.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning of graphs broadly follow a neighborhood aggregation framework, where the representation vector of a node is computed by recursively aggregating and transforming feature vectors of its neighboring nodes. Many GNN variants have been proposed and have achieved state-of-the-art results on both node and graph classification tasks. However, despite GNNs revolutionizing graph representation learning, there is limited understanding of their representational properties and limitations. Here, we present a theoretical framework for analyzing the expressive power of GNNs in capturing different graph structures. Our results characterize the discriminative power of popular GNN variants, such as Graph Convolutional Networks and GraphSAGE, and show that they cannot learn to distinguish certain simple graph structures. We then develop a simple architecture that is provably the most expressive among the class of GNNs and is as powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman graph isomorphism test. We empirically validate our theoretical findings on a number of graph classification benchmarks, and demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.