Fair representation learning (FRL) is a popular class of methods aiming to produce fair classifiers via data preprocessing. Recent regulatory directives stress the need for FRL methods that provide practical certificates, i.e., provable upper bounds on the unfairness of any downstream classifier trained on preprocessed data, which directly provides assurance in a practical scenario. Creating such FRL methods is an important challenge that remains unsolved. In this work, we address that challenge and introduce FARE (Fairness with Restricted Encoders), the first FRL method with practical fairness certificates. FARE is based on our key insight that restricting the representation space of the encoder enables the derivation of practical guarantees, while still permitting favorable accuracy-fairness tradeoffs for suitable instantiations, such as one we propose based on fair trees. To produce a practical certificate, we develop and apply a statistical procedure that computes a finite sample high-confidence upper bound on the unfairness of any downstream classifier trained on FARE embeddings. In our comprehensive experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that FARE produces practical certificates that are tight and often even comparable with purely empirical results obtained by prior methods, which establishes the practical value of our approach.
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Lack of diversity in data collection has caused significant failures in machine learning (ML) applications. While ML developers perform post-collection interventions, these are time intensive and rarely comprehensive. Thus, new methods to track & manage data collection, iteration, and model training are necessary for evaluating whether datasets reflect real world variability. We present designing data, an iterative approach to data collection connecting HCI concepts with ML techniques. Our process includes (1) Pre-Collection Planning, to reflexively prompt and document expected data distributions; (2) Collection Monitoring, to systematically encourage sampling diversity; and (3) Data Familiarity, to identify samples that are unfamiliar to a model using density estimation. We apply designing data to a data collection and modeling task. We find models trained on ''designed'' datasets generalize better across intersectional groups than those trained on similarly sized but less targeted datasets, and that data familiarity is effective for debugging datasets.
Few-shot learning aims to adapt models trained on the base dataset to novel tasks where the categories are not seen by the model before. This often leads to a relatively uniform distribution of feature values across channels on novel classes, posing challenges in determining channel importance for novel tasks. Standard few-shot learning methods employ geometric similarity metrics such as cosine similarity and negative Euclidean distance to gauge the semantic relatedness between two features. However, features with high geometric similarities may carry distinct semantics, especially in the context of few-shot learning. In this paper, we demonstrate that the importance ranking of feature channels is a more reliable indicator for few-shot learning than geometric similarity metrics. We observe that replacing the geometric similarity metric with Kendall's rank correlation only during inference is able to improve the performance of few-shot learning across a wide range of datasets with different domains. Furthermore, we propose a carefully designed differentiable loss for meta-training to address the non-differentiability issue of Kendall's rank correlation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed rank-correlation-based approach substantially enhances few-shot learning performance.
Supervised classification algorithms are used to solve a growing number of real-life problems around the globe. Their performance is strictly connected with the quality of labels used in training. Unfortunately, acquiring good-quality annotations for many tasks is infeasible or too expensive to be done in practice. To tackle this challenge, active learning algorithms are commonly employed to select only the most relevant data for labeling. However, this is possible only when the quality and quantity of labels acquired from experts are sufficient. Unfortunately, in many applications, a trade-off between annotating individual samples by multiple annotators to increase label quality vs. annotating new samples to increase the total number of labeled instances is necessary. In this paper, we address the issue of faulty data annotations in the context of active learning. In particular, we propose two novel annotation unification algorithms that utilize unlabeled parts of the sample space. The proposed methods require little to no intersection between samples annotated by different experts. Our experiments on four public datasets indicate the robustness and superiority of the proposed methods in both, the estimation of the annotator's reliability, and the assignment of actual labels, against the state-of-the-art algorithms and the simple majority voting.
Over the past few years, the rapid development of deep learning technologies for computer vision has greatly promoted the performance of medical image segmentation (MedISeg). However, the recent MedISeg publications usually focus on presentations of the major contributions (e.g., network architectures, training strategies, and loss functions) while unwittingly ignoring some marginal implementation details (also known as "tricks"), leading to a potential problem of the unfair experimental result comparisons. In this paper, we collect a series of MedISeg tricks for different model implementation phases (i.e., pre-training model, data pre-processing, data augmentation, model implementation, model inference, and result post-processing), and experimentally explore the effectiveness of these tricks on the consistent baseline models. Compared to paper-driven surveys that only blandly focus on the advantages and limitation analyses of segmentation models, our work provides a large number of solid experiments and is more technically operable. With the extensive experimental results on both the representative 2D and 3D medical image datasets, we explicitly clarify the effect of these tricks. Moreover, based on the surveyed tricks, we also open-sourced a strong MedISeg repository, where each of its components has the advantage of plug-and-play. We believe that this milestone work not only completes a comprehensive and complementary survey of the state-of-the-art MedISeg approaches, but also offers a practical guide for addressing the future medical image processing challenges including but not limited to small dataset learning, class imbalance learning, multi-modality learning, and domain adaptation. The code has been released at: //github.com/hust-linyi/MedISeg
Learning on big data brings success for artificial intelligence (AI), but the annotation and training costs are expensive. In future, learning on small data is one of the ultimate purposes of AI, which requires machines to recognize objectives and scenarios relying on small data as humans. A series of machine learning models is going on this way such as active learning, few-shot learning, deep clustering. However, there are few theoretical guarantees for their generalization performance. Moreover, most of their settings are passive, that is, the label distribution is explicitly controlled by one specified sampling scenario. This survey follows the agnostic active sampling under a PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) framework to analyze the generalization error and label complexity of learning on small data using a supervised and unsupervised fashion. With these theoretical analyses, we categorize the small data learning models from two geometric perspectives: the Euclidean and non-Euclidean (hyperbolic) mean representation, where their optimization solutions are also presented and discussed. Later, some potential learning scenarios that may benefit from small data learning are then summarized, and their potential learning scenarios are also analyzed. Finally, some challenging applications such as computer vision, natural language processing that may benefit from learning on small data are also surveyed.
The Q-learning algorithm is known to be affected by the maximization bias, i.e. the systematic overestimation of action values, an important issue that has recently received renewed attention. Double Q-learning has been proposed as an efficient algorithm to mitigate this bias. However, this comes at the price of an underestimation of action values, in addition to increased memory requirements and a slower convergence. In this paper, we introduce a new way to address the maximization bias in the form of a "self-correcting algorithm" for approximating the maximum of an expected value. Our method balances the overestimation of the single estimator used in conventional Q-learning and the underestimation of the double estimator used in Double Q-learning. Applying this strategy to Q-learning results in Self-correcting Q-learning. We show theoretically that this new algorithm enjoys the same convergence guarantees as Q-learning while being more accurate. Empirically, it performs better than Double Q-learning in domains with rewards of high variance, and it even attains faster convergence than Q-learning in domains with rewards of zero or low variance. These advantages transfer to a Deep Q Network implementation that we call Self-correcting DQN and which outperforms regular DQN and Double DQN on several tasks in the Atari 2600 domain.
We present a new method to learn video representations from large-scale unlabeled video data. Ideally, this representation will be generic and transferable, directly usable for new tasks such as action recognition and zero or few-shot learning. We formulate unsupervised representation learning as a multi-modal, multi-task learning problem, where the representations are shared across different modalities via distillation. Further, we introduce the concept of loss function evolution by using an evolutionary search algorithm to automatically find optimal combination of loss functions capturing many (self-supervised) tasks and modalities. Thirdly, we propose an unsupervised representation evaluation metric using distribution matching to a large unlabeled dataset as a prior constraint, based on Zipf's law. This unsupervised constraint, which is not guided by any labeling, produces similar results to weakly-supervised, task-specific ones. The proposed unsupervised representation learning results in a single RGB network and outperforms previous methods. Notably, it is also more effective than several label-based methods (e.g., ImageNet), with the exception of large, fully labeled video datasets.
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.
Humans and animals have the ability to continually acquire, fine-tune, and transfer knowledge and skills throughout their lifespan. This ability, referred to as lifelong learning, is mediated by a rich set of neurocognitive mechanisms that together contribute to the development and specialization of our sensorimotor skills as well as to long-term memory consolidation and retrieval. Consequently, lifelong learning capabilities are crucial for autonomous agents interacting in the real world and processing continuous streams of information. However, lifelong learning remains a long-standing challenge for machine learning and neural network models since the continual acquisition of incrementally available information from non-stationary data distributions generally leads to catastrophic forgetting or interference. This limitation represents a major drawback for state-of-the-art deep neural network models that typically learn representations from stationary batches of training data, thus without accounting for situations in which information becomes incrementally available over time. In this review, we critically summarize the main challenges linked to lifelong learning for artificial learning systems and compare existing neural network approaches that alleviate, to different extents, catastrophic forgetting. We discuss well-established and emerging research motivated by lifelong learning factors in biological systems such as structural plasticity, memory replay, curriculum and transfer learning, intrinsic motivation, and multisensory integration.
The era of big data provides researchers with convenient access to copious data. However, people often have little knowledge about it. The increasing prevalence of big data is challenging the traditional methods of learning causality because they are developed for the cases with limited amount of data and solid prior causal knowledge. This survey aims to close the gap between big data and learning causality with a comprehensive and structured review of traditional and frontier methods and a discussion about some open problems of learning causality. We begin with preliminaries of learning causality. Then we categorize and revisit methods of learning causality for the typical problems and data types. After that, we discuss the connections between learning causality and machine learning. At the end, some open problems are presented to show the great potential of learning causality with data.
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