Subspace clustering is the classical problem of clustering a collection of data samples that approximately lie around several low-dimensional subspaces. The current state-of-the-art approaches for this problem are based on the self-expressive model which represents the samples as linear combination of other samples. However, these approaches require sufficiently well-spread samples for accurate representation which might not be necessarily accessible in many applications. In this paper, we shed light on this commonly neglected issue and argue that data distribution within each subspace plays a critical role in the success of self-expressive models. Our proposed solution to tackle this issue is motivated by the central role of data augmentation in the generalization power of deep neural networks. We propose two subspace clustering frameworks for both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings that use augmented samples as an enlarged dictionary to improve the quality of the self-expressive representation. We present an automatic augmentation strategy using a few labeled samples for the semi-supervised problem relying on the fact that the data samples lie in the union of multiple linear subspaces. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of data augmentation, as it significantly improves the performance of general self-expressive models.
As a successful approach to self-supervised learning, contrastive learning aims to learn invariant information shared among distortions of the input sample. While contrastive learning has yielded continuous advancements in sampling strategy and architecture design, it still remains two persistent defects: the interference of task-irrelevant information and sample inefficiency, which are related to the recurring existence of trivial constant solutions. From the perspective of dimensional analysis, we find out that the dimensional redundancy and dimensional confounder are the intrinsic issues behind the phenomena, and provide experimental evidence to support our viewpoint. We further propose a simple yet effective approach MetaMask, short for the dimensional Mask learned by Meta-learning, to learn representations against dimensional redundancy and confounder. MetaMask adopts the redundancy-reduction technique to tackle the dimensional redundancy issue and innovatively introduces a dimensional mask to reduce the gradient effects of specific dimensions containing the confounder, which is trained by employing a meta-learning paradigm with the objective of improving the performance of masked representations on a typical self-supervised task. We provide solid theoretical analyses to prove MetaMask can obtain tighter risk bounds for downstream classification compared to typical contrastive methods. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks.
Multivariate time series(MTS) is a universal data type related to many practical applications. However, MTS suffers from missing data problems, which leads to degradation or even collapse of the downstream tasks, such as prediction and classification. The concurrent missing data handling procedures could inevitably arouse the biased estimation and redundancy-training problem when encountering multiple downstream tasks. This paper presents a universally applicable MTS pre-train model, DBT-DMAE, to conquer the abovementioned obstacle. First, a missing representation module is designed by introducing dynamic positional embedding and random masking processing to characterize the missing symptom. Second, we proposed an auto-encoder structure to obtain the generalized MTS encoded representation utilizing an ameliorated TCN structure called dynamic-bidirectional-TCN as the basic unit, which integrates the dynamic kernel and time-fliping trick to draw temporal features effectively. Finally, the overall feed-in and loss strategy is established to ensure the adequate training of the whole model. Comparative experiment results manifest that the DBT-DMAE outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods in six real-world datasets and two different downstream tasks. Moreover, ablation and interpretability experiments are delivered to verify the validity of DBT-DMAE's substructures.
Recent advances in large pre-trained language models (PLMs) lead to impressive gains on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks with task-specific fine-tuning. However, direct fine-tuning PLMs heavily relies on a large amount of labeled instances, which are usually hard to obtain. Prompt-based tuning on PLMs has proven valuable for various few-shot tasks. Existing works studying prompt-based tuning for few-shot NLU tasks mainly focus on deriving proper label words with a verbalizer or generating prompt templates for eliciting semantics from PLMs. In addition, conventional data augmentation methods have also been verified useful for few-shot tasks. However, currently there are few data augmentation methods designed for the prompt-based tuning paradigm. Therefore, we study a new problem of data augmentation for prompt-based few shot learners. Since the label semantics are essential in prompt-based tuning, we propose a novel label-guided data augmentation method PromptDA which exploits the enriched label semantic information for data augmentation. Extensive experiment results on few-shot text classification tasks show that our proposed framework achieves superior performance by effectively leveraging label semantics and data augmentation for natural language understanding.
Designing and generating new data under targeted properties has been attracting various critical applications such as molecule design, image editing and speech synthesis. Traditional hand-crafted approaches heavily rely on expertise experience and intensive human efforts, yet still suffer from the insufficiency of scientific knowledge and low throughput to support effective and efficient data generation. Recently, the advancement of deep learning induces expressive methods that can learn the underlying representation and properties of data. Such capability provides new opportunities in figuring out the mutual relationship between the structural patterns and functional properties of the data and leveraging such relationship to generate structural data given the desired properties. This article provides a systematic review of this promising research area, commonly known as controllable deep data generation. Firstly, the potential challenges are raised and preliminaries are provided. Then the controllable deep data generation is formally defined, a taxonomy on various techniques is proposed and the evaluation metrics in this specific domain are summarized. After that, exciting applications of controllable deep data generation are introduced and existing works are experimentally analyzed and compared. Finally, the promising future directions of controllable deep data generation are highlighted and five potential challenges are identified.
As an effective strategy, data augmentation (DA) alleviates data scarcity scenarios where deep learning techniques may fail. It is widely applied in computer vision then introduced to natural language processing and achieves improvements in many tasks. One of the main focuses of the DA methods is to improve the diversity of training data, thereby helping the model to better generalize to unseen testing data. In this survey, we frame DA methods into three categories based on the diversity of augmented data, including paraphrasing, noising, and sampling. Our paper sets out to analyze DA methods in detail according to the above categories. Further, we also introduce their applications in NLP tasks as well as the challenges.
Generative models are now capable of producing highly realistic images that look nearly indistinguishable from the data on which they are trained. This raises the question: if we have good enough generative models, do we still need datasets? We investigate this question in the setting of learning general-purpose visual representations from a black-box generative model rather than directly from data. Given an off-the-shelf image generator without any access to its training data, we train representations from the samples output by this generator. We compare several representation learning methods that can be applied to this setting, using the latent space of the generator to generate multiple "views" of the same semantic content. We show that for contrastive methods, this multiview data can naturally be used to identify positive pairs (nearby in latent space) and negative pairs (far apart in latent space). We find that the resulting representations rival those learned directly from real data, but that good performance requires care in the sampling strategy applied and the training method. Generative models can be viewed as a compressed and organized copy of a dataset, and we envision a future where more and more "model zoos" proliferate while datasets become increasingly unwieldy, missing, or private. This paper suggests several techniques for dealing with visual representation learning in such a future. Code is released on our project page: //ali-design.github.io/GenRep/
In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of ``labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
While recent studies on semi-supervised learning have shown remarkable progress in leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data, most of them presume a basic setting of the model is randomly initialized. In this work, we consider semi-supervised learning and transfer learning jointly, leading to a more practical and competitive paradigm that can utilize both powerful pre-trained models from source domain as well as labeled/unlabeled data in the target domain. To better exploit the value of both pre-trained weights and unlabeled target examples, we introduce adaptive consistency regularization that consists of two complementary components: Adaptive Knowledge Consistency (AKC) on the examples between the source and target model, and Adaptive Representation Consistency (ARC) on the target model between labeled and unlabeled examples. Examples involved in the consistency regularization are adaptively selected according to their potential contributions to the target task. We conduct extensive experiments on several popular benchmarks including CUB-200-2011, MIT Indoor-67, MURA, by fine-tuning the ImageNet pre-trained ResNet-50 model. Results show that our proposed adaptive consistency regularization outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning techniques such as Pseudo Label, Mean Teacher, and MixMatch. Moreover, our algorithm is orthogonal to existing methods and thus able to gain additional improvements on top of MixMatch and FixMatch. Our code is available at //github.com/SHI-Labs/Semi-Supervised-Transfer-Learning.
In this paper, we propose a one-stage online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, the positive and negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations and then projected into a feature space. Therein, the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning are respectively conducted in the row and column space by maximizing the similarities of positive pairs while minimizing those of negative ones. Our key observation is that the rows of the feature matrix could be regarded as soft labels of instances, and accordingly the columns could be further regarded as cluster representations. By simultaneously optimizing the instance- and cluster-level contrastive loss, the model jointly learns representations and cluster assignments in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results show that CC remarkably outperforms 17 competitive clustering methods on six challenging image benchmarks. In particular, CC achieves an NMI of 0.705 (0.431) on the CIFAR-10 (CIFAR-100) dataset, which is an up to 19\% (39\%) performance improvement compared with the best baseline.
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.