This paper explores post-disaster analytics using multimodal deep learning models trained with curriculum learning method. Studying post-disaster analytics is important as it plays a crucial role in mitigating the impact of disasters by providing timely and accurate insights into the extent of damage and the allocation of resources. We propose a curriculum learning strategy to enhance the performance of multimodal deep learning models. Curriculum learning emulates the progressive learning sequence in human education by training deep learning models on increasingly complex data. Our primary objective is to develop a curriculum-trained multimodal deep learning model, with a particular focus on visual question answering (VQA) capable of jointly processing image and text data, in conjunction with semantic segmentation for disaster analytics using the FloodNet\footnote{//github.com/BinaLab/FloodNet-Challenge-EARTHVISION2021} dataset. To achieve this, U-Net model is used for semantic segmentation and image encoding. A custom built text classifier is used for visual question answering. Existing curriculum learning methods rely on manually defined difficulty functions. We introduce a novel curriculum learning approach termed Dynamic Task and Weight Prioritization (DATWEP), which leverages a gradient-based method to automatically decide task difficulty during curriculum learning training, thereby eliminating the need for explicit difficulty computation. The integration of DATWEP into our multimodal model shows improvement on VQA performance. Source code is available at //github.com/fualsan/DATWEP.
Transfer learning (TL) from pretrained deep models is a standard practice in modern medical image classification (MIC). However, what levels of features to be reused are problem-dependent, and uniformly finetuning all layers of pretrained models may be suboptimal. This insight has partly motivated the recent differential TL strategies, such as TransFusion (TF) and layer-wise finetuning (LWFT), which treat the layers in the pretrained models differentially. In this paper, we add one more strategy into this family, called TruncatedTL, which reuses and finetunes appropriate bottom layers and directly discards the remaining layers. This yields not only superior MIC performance but also compact models for efficient inference, compared to other differential TL methods. Our code is available at: //github.com/sun-umn/TTL
We study simple binary hypothesis testing under both local differential privacy (LDP) and communication constraints. We qualify our results as either minimax optimal or instance optimal: the former hold for the set of distribution pairs with prescribed Hellinger divergence and total variation distance, whereas the latter hold for specific distribution pairs. For the sample complexity of simple hypothesis testing under pure LDP constraints, we establish instance-optimal bounds for distributions with binary support; minimax-optimal bounds for general distributions; and (approximately) instance-optimal, computationally efficient algorithms for general distributions. When both privacy and communication constraints are present, we develop instance-optimal, computationally efficient algorithms that achieve the minimum possible sample complexity (up to universal constants). Our results on instance-optimal algorithms hinge on identifying the extreme points of the joint range set $\mathcal A$ of two distributions $p$ and $q$, defined as $\mathcal A := \{(\mathbf T p, \mathbf T q) | \mathbf T \in \mathcal C\}$, where $\mathcal C$ is the set of channels characterizing the constraints.
This paper presents a method for learning Hamiltonian dynamics from a limited set of data points. The Hamiltonian vector field is found by regularized optimization over a reproducing kernel Hilbert space of vector fields that are inherently Hamiltonian, and where the vector field is required to be odd or even. This is done with a symplectic kernel, and it is shown how this symplectic kernel can be modified to be odd or even. The performance of the method is validated in simulations for two Hamiltonian systems. It is shown that the learned dynamics are Hamiltonian, and that the learned Hamiltonian vector field can be prescribed to be odd or even.
We study the problem of designing hard negative sampling distributions for unsupervised contrastive representation learning. We propose and analyze a novel min-max framework that seeks a representation which minimizes the maximum (worst-case) generalized contrastive learning loss over all couplings (joint distributions between positive and negative samples subject to marginal constraints) and prove that the resulting min-max optimum representation will be degenerate. This provides the first theoretical justification for incorporating additional regularization constraints on the couplings. We re-interpret the min-max problem through the lens of Optimal Transport (OT) theory and utilize regularized transport couplings to control the degree of hardness of negative examples. Through experiments we demonstrate that the negative samples generated from our designed negative distribution are more similar to the anchor than those generated from the baseline negative distribution. We also demonstrate that entropic regularization yields negative sampling distributions with parametric form similar to that in a recent state-of-the-art negative sampling design and has similar performance in multiple datasets. Utilizing the uncovered connection with OT, we propose a new ground cost for designing the negative distribution and show improved performance of the learned representation on downstream tasks compared to the representation learned when using squared Euclidean cost.
Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires quickly finding informative task-relevant experiences in both meta-training and adaptation. To address this challenge, we explicitly model an exploration policy learning problem for meta-RL, which is separated from exploitation policy learning, and introduce a novel empowerment-driven exploration objective, which aims to maximize information gain for task identification. We derive a corresponding intrinsic reward and develop a new off-policy meta-RL framework, which efficiently learns separate context-aware exploration and exploitation policies by sharing the knowledge of task inference. Experimental evaluation shows that our meta-RL method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on various sparse-reward MuJoCo locomotion tasks and more complex sparse-reward Meta-World tasks.
This paper aims to mitigate straggler effects in synchronous distributed learning for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems. Stragglers arise frequently in a distributed learning system, due to the existence of various system disturbances such as slow-downs or failures of compute nodes and communication bottlenecks. To resolve this issue, we propose a coded distributed learning framework, which speeds up the training of MARL algorithms in the presence of stragglers, while maintaining the same accuracy as the centralized approach. As an illustration, a coded distributed version of the multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient(MADDPG) algorithm is developed and evaluated. Different coding schemes, including maximum distance separable (MDS)code, random sparse code, replication-based code, and regular low density parity check (LDPC) code are also investigated. Simulations in several multi-robot problems demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed framework.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.
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.
Graph representation learning resurges as a trending research subject owing to the widespread use of deep learning for Euclidean data, which inspire various creative designs of neural networks in the non-Euclidean domain, particularly graphs. With the success of these graph neural networks (GNN) in the static setting, we approach further practical scenarios where the graph dynamically evolves. Existing approaches typically resort to node embeddings and use a recurrent neural network (RNN, broadly speaking) to regulate the embeddings and learn the temporal dynamics. These methods require the knowledge of a node in the full time span (including both training and testing) and are less applicable to the frequent change of the node set. In some extreme scenarios, the node sets at different time steps may completely differ. To resolve this challenge, we propose EvolveGCN, which adapts the graph convolutional network (GCN) model along the temporal dimension without resorting to node embeddings. The proposed approach captures the dynamism of the graph sequence through using an RNN to evolve the GCN parameters. Two architectures are considered for the parameter evolution. We evaluate the proposed approach on tasks including link prediction, edge classification, and node classification. The experimental results indicate a generally higher performance of EvolveGCN compared with related approaches. The code is available at \url{//github.com/IBM/EvolveGCN}.
This paper surveys the machine learning literature and presents machine learning as optimization models. Such models can benefit from the advancement of numerical optimization techniques which have already played a distinctive role in several machine learning settings. Particularly, mathematical optimization models are presented for commonly used machine learning approaches for regression, classification, clustering, and deep neural networks as well new emerging applications in machine teaching and empirical model learning. The strengths and the shortcomings of these models are discussed and potential research directions are highlighted.