Annotating data for supervised learning can be costly. When the annotation budget is limited, active learning can be used to select and annotate those observations that are likely to give the most gain in model performance. We propose an active learning algorithm that, in addition to selecting which observation to annotate, selects the precision of the annotation that is acquired. Assuming that annotations with low precision are cheaper to obtain, this allows the model to explore a larger part of the input space, with the same annotation budget. We build our acquisition function on the previously proposed BALD objective for Gaussian Processes, and empirically demonstrate the gains of being able to adjust the annotation precision in the active learning loop.
Lifelong learning aims to create AI systems that continuously and incrementally learn during a lifetime, similar to biological learning. Attempts so far have met problems, including catastrophic forgetting, interference among tasks, and the inability to exploit previous knowledge. While considerable research has focused on learning multiple supervised classification tasks that involve changes in the input distribution, lifelong reinforcement learning (LRL) must deal with variations in the state and transition distributions, and in the reward functions. Modulating masks with a fixed backbone network, recently developed for classification, are particularly suitable to deal with such a large spectrum of task variations. In this paper, we adapted modulating masks to work with deep LRL, specifically PPO and IMPALA agents. The comparison with LRL baselines in both discrete and continuous RL tasks shows superior performance. We further investigated the use of a linear combination of previously learned masks to exploit previous knowledge when learning new tasks: not only is learning faster, the algorithm solves tasks that we could not otherwise solve from scratch due to extremely sparse rewards. The results suggest that RL with modulating masks is a promising approach to lifelong learning, to the composition of knowledge to learn increasingly complex tasks, and to knowledge reuse for efficient and faster learning.
Online continual learning (CL) studies the problem of learning continuously from a single-pass data stream while adapting to new data and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Recently, by storing a small subset of old data, replay-based methods have shown promising performance. Unlike previous methods that focus on sample storage or knowledge distillation against catastrophic forgetting, this paper aims to understand why the online learning models fail to generalize well from a new perspective of shortcut learning. We identify shortcut learning as the key limiting factor for online CL, where the learned features may be biased, not generalizable to new tasks, and may have an adverse impact on knowledge distillation. To tackle this issue, we present the online prototype learning (OnPro) framework for online CL. First, we propose online prototype equilibrium to learn representative features against shortcut learning and discriminative features to avoid class confusion, ultimately achieving an equilibrium status that separates all seen classes well while learning new classes. Second, with the feedback of online prototypes, we devise a novel adaptive prototypical feedback mechanism to sense the classes that are easily misclassified and then enhance their boundaries. Extensive experimental results on widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of OnPro over the state-of-the-art baseline methods. Source code is available at //github.com/weilllllls/OnPro.
Federated learning is a learning method for training models over multiple participants without directly sharing their raw data, and it has been expected to be a privacy protection method for training data. In contrast, attack methods have been studied to restore learning data from model information shared with clients, so enhanced security against attacks has become an urgent problem. Accordingly, in this article, we propose a novel framework of federated learning on the bases of the embedded structure of the vision transformer by using the model information encrypted with a random sequence. In image classification experiments, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on the CIFAR-10 dataset in terms of classification accuracy and robustness against attacks.
A learning-based modular motion planning pipeline is presented that is compliant, safe, and reactive to perturbations at task execution. A nominal motion plan, defined as a nonlinear autonomous dynamical system (DS), is learned offline from kinesthetic demonstrations using a Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE) model. To ensure both stability and safety during inference, a novel approach is proposed which selects a target point at each time step for the robot to follow, using a time-varying target trajectory generated by the learned NODE. A correction term to the NODE model is computed online by solving a Quadratic Program that guarantees stability and safety using Control Lyapunov Functions and Control Barrier Functions, respectively. Our approach outperforms baseline DS learning techniques on the LASA handwriting dataset and is validated on real-robot experiments where it is shown to produce stable motions, such as wiping and stirring, while being robust to physical perturbations and safe around humans and obstacles.
Variable selection or importance measurement of input variables to a machine learning model has become the focus of much research. It is no longer enough to have a good model, one also must explain its decisions. This is why there are so many intelligibility algorithms available today. Among them, Shapley value estimation algorithms are intelligibility methods based on cooperative game theory. In the case of the naive Bayes classifier, and to our knowledge, there is no ``analytical" formulation of Shapley values. This article proposes an exact analytic expression of Shapley values in the special case of the naive Bayes Classifier. We analytically compare this Shapley proposal, to another frequently used indicator, the Weight of Evidence (WoE) and provide an empirical comparison of our proposal with (i) the WoE and (ii) KernelShap results on real world datasets, discussing similar and dissimilar results. The results show that our Shapley proposal for the naive Bayes classifier provides informative results with low algorithmic complexity so that it can be used on very large datasets with extremely low computation time.
Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing the generalization capabilities of a model, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data over regularizing the objective to limiting the amount data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation (C1) and a taxonomy for existing works (C2), this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims to achieve a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners (C3). Derived from the taxonomy, we divided more than 100 methods into 12 different groupings and provide state-of-the-art references expounding which methods are highly promising (C4). Finally, research perspectives that may constitute a building block for future work are given (C5).
Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a successful method for unsupervised graph representation learning. Most graph CL methods first perform stochastic augmentation on the input graph to obtain two graph views and maximize the agreement of representations in the two views. Despite the prosperous development of graph CL methods, the design of graph augmentation schemes -- a crucial component in CL -- remains rarely explored. We argue that the data augmentation schemes should preserve intrinsic structures and attributes of graphs, which will force the model to learn representations that are insensitive to perturbation on unimportant nodes and edges. However, most existing methods adopt uniform data augmentation schemes, like uniformly dropping edges and uniformly shuffling features, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel graph contrastive representation learning method with adaptive augmentation that incorporates various priors for topological and semantic aspects of the graph. Specifically, on the topology level, we design augmentation schemes based on node centrality measures to highlight important connective structures. On the node attribute level, we corrupt node features by adding more noise to unimportant node features, to enforce the model to recognize underlying semantic information. We perform extensive experiments of node classification on a variety of real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines and even surpasses some supervised counterparts, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive framework with adaptive augmentation.
Spectral clustering (SC) is a popular clustering technique to find strongly connected communities on a graph. SC can be used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to implement pooling operations that aggregate nodes belonging to the same cluster. However, the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian is expensive and, since clustering results are graph-specific, pooling methods based on SC must perform a new optimization for each new sample. In this paper, we propose a graph clustering approach that addresses these limitations of SC. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the normalized minCUT problem and train a GNN to compute cluster assignments that minimize this objective. Our GNN-based implementation is differentiable, does not require to compute the spectral decomposition, and learns a clustering function that can be quickly evaluated on out-of-sample graphs. From the proposed clustering method, we design a graph pooling operator that overcomes some important limitations of state-of-the-art graph pooling techniques and achieves the best performance in several supervised and unsupervised tasks.
In structure learning, the output is generally a structure that is used as supervision information to achieve good performance. Considering the interpretation of deep learning models has raised extended attention these years, it will be beneficial if we can learn an interpretable structure from deep learning models. In this paper, we focus on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) whose inner mechanism is still not clearly understood. We find that Finite State Automaton (FSA) that processes sequential data has more interpretable inner mechanism and can be learned from RNNs as the interpretable structure. We propose two methods to learn FSA from RNN based on two different clustering methods. We first give the graphical illustration of FSA for human beings to follow, which shows the interpretability. From the FSA's point of view, we then analyze how the performance of RNNs are affected by the number of gates, as well as the semantic meaning behind the transition of numerical hidden states. Our results suggest that RNNs with simple gated structure such as Minimal Gated Unit (MGU) is more desirable and the transitions in FSA leading to specific classification result are associated with corresponding words which are understandable by human beings.
Recently, deep learning has achieved very promising results in visual object tracking. Deep neural networks in existing tracking methods require a lot of training data to learn a large number of parameters. However, training data is not sufficient for visual object tracking as annotations of a target object are only available in the first frame of a test sequence. In this paper, we propose to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking by using tree structure based Recursive Neural Networks (RNN), which have fewer parameters than other deep neural networks, e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). First, we learn RNN parameters to discriminate between the target object and background in the first frame of a test sequence. Tree structure over local patches of an exemplar region is randomly generated by using a bottom-up greedy search strategy. Given the learned RNN parameters, we create two dictionaries regarding target regions and corresponding local patches based on the learned hierarchical features from both top and leaf nodes of multiple random trees. In each of the subsequent frames, we conduct sparse dictionary coding on all candidates to select the best candidate as the new target location. In addition, we online update two dictionaries to handle appearance changes of target objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our feature learning algorithm can significantly improve tracking performance on benchmark datasets.