Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to continually fit new classes with limited training data, while maintaining the performance of previously learned classes. The main challenges are overfitting the rare new training samples and forgetting old classes. While catastrophic forgetting has been extensively studied, the overfitting problem has attracted less attention in FSCIL. To tackle overfitting challenge, we design a new ensemble model framework cooperated with data augmentation to boost generalization. In this way, the enhanced model works as a library storing abundant features to guarantee fast adaptation to downstream tasks. Specifically, the multi-input multi-output ensemble structure is applied with a spatial-aware data augmentation strategy, aiming at diversifying the feature extractor and alleviating overfitting in incremental sessions. Moreover, self-supervised learning is also integrated to further improve the model generalization. Comprehensive experimental results show that the proposed method can indeed mitigate the overfitting problem in FSCIL, and outperform the state-of-the-art methods.
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training while preserving data privacy, making it suitable for decentralized human-centered AI applications. However, a significant research gap remains in ensuring fairness in these systems. Current fairness strategies in FL require knowledge of bias-creating/sensitive attributes, clashing with FL's privacy principles. Moreover, in human-centered datasets, sensitive attributes may remain latent. To tackle these challenges, we present a novel bias mitigation approach inspired by "Fairness without Demographics" in machine learning. The presented approach achieves fairness without needing knowledge of sensitive attributes by minimizing the top eigenvalue of the Hessian matrix during training, ensuring equitable loss landscapes across FL participants. Notably, we introduce a novel FL aggregation scheme that promotes participating models based on error rates and loss landscape curvature attributes, fostering fairness across the FL system. This work represents the first approach to attaining "Fairness without Demographics" in human-centered FL. Through comprehensive evaluation, our approach demonstrates effectiveness in balancing fairness and efficacy across various real-world applications, FL setups, and scenarios involving single and multiple bias-inducing factors, representing a significant advancement in human-centered FL.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a key technique for training networks that can generalize well to diverse tasks without task-specific supervision. This property makes SSL desirable for computational pathology, the study of digitized images of tissues, as there are many target applications and often limited labeled training samples. However, SSL algorithms and models have been primarily developed in the field of natural images and whether their performance can be improved by adaptation to particular domains remains an open question. In this work, we present an investigation of modifications to SSL for pathology data, specifically focusing on the DINOv2 algorithm. We propose alternative augmentations, regularization functions, and position encodings motivated by the characteristics of pathology images. We evaluate the impact of these changes on several benchmarks to demonstrate the value of tailored approaches.
Unlearnable examples (UEs) seek to maximize testing error by making subtle modifications to training examples that are correctly labeled. Defenses against these poisoning attacks can be categorized based on whether specific interventions are adopted during training. The first approach is training-time defense, such as adversarial training, which can mitigate poisoning effects but is computationally intensive. The other approach is pre-training purification, e.g., image short squeezing, which consists of several simple compressions but often encounters challenges in dealing with various UEs. Our work provides a novel disentanglement mechanism to build an efficient pre-training purification method. Firstly, we uncover rate-constrained variational autoencoders (VAEs), demonstrating a clear tendency to suppress the perturbations in UEs. We subsequently conduct a theoretical analysis for this phenomenon. Building upon these insights, we introduce a disentangle variational autoencoder (D-VAE), capable of disentangling the perturbations with learnable class-wise embeddings. Based on this network, a two-stage purification approach is naturally developed. The first stage focuses on roughly eliminating perturbations, while the second stage produces refined, poison-free results, ensuring effectiveness and robustness across various scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the remarkable performance of our method across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and a 100-class ImageNet-subset. Code is available at //github.com/yuyi-sd/D-VAE.
Reinforcement learning (RL) for complex tasks remains a challenge, primarily due to the difficulties of engineering scalar reward functions and the inherent inefficiency of training models from scratch. Instead, it would be better to specify complex tasks in terms of elementary subtasks and to reuse subtask solutions whenever possible. In this work, we address continuous space lexicographic multi-objective RL problems, consisting of prioritized subtasks, which are notoriously difficult to solve. We show that these can be scalarized with a subtask transformation and then solved incrementally using value decomposition. Exploiting this insight, we propose prioritized soft Q-decomposition (PSQD), a novel algorithm for learning and adapting subtask solutions under lexicographic priorities in continuous state-action spaces. PSQD offers the ability to reuse previously learned subtask solutions in a zero-shot composition, followed by an adaptation step. Its ability to use retained subtask training data for offline learning eliminates the need for new environment interaction during adaptation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by presenting successful learning, reuse, and adaptation results for both low- and high-dimensional simulated robot control tasks, as well as offline learning results. In contrast to baseline approaches, PSQD does not trade off between conflicting subtasks or priority constraints and satisfies subtask priorities during learning. PSQD provides an intuitive framework for tackling complex RL problems, offering insights into the inner workings of the subtask composition.
Deep-learning-based techniques have been widely adopted for autonomous driving software stacks for mass production in recent years, focusing primarily on perception modules, with some work extending this method to prediction modules. However, the downstream planning and control modules are still designed with hefty handcrafted rules, dominated by optimization-based methods such as quadratic programming or model predictive control. This results in a performance bottleneck for autonomous driving systems in that corner cases simply cannot be solved by enumerating hand-crafted rules. We present a deep-learning-based approach that brings prediction, decision, and planning modules together with the attempt to overcome the rule-based methods' deficiency in real-world applications of autonomous driving, especially for urban scenes. The DNN model we proposed is solely trained with 10 hours of human driver data, and it supports all mass-production ADAS features available on the market to date. This method is deployed onto a Jiyue test car with no modification to its factory-ready sensor set and compute platform. the feasibility, usability, and commercial potential are demonstrated in this article.
Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization (VICReg) is a self-supervised learning (SSL) method that has shown promising results on a variety of tasks. However, the fundamental mechanisms underlying VICReg remain unexplored. In this paper, we present an information-theoretic perspective on the VICReg objective. We begin by deriving information-theoretic quantities for deterministic networks as an alternative to unrealistic stochastic network assumptions. We then relate the optimization of the VICReg objective to mutual information optimization, highlighting underlying assumptions and facilitating a constructive comparison with other SSL algorithms and derive a generalization bound for VICReg, revealing its inherent advantages for downstream tasks. Building on these results, we introduce a family of SSL methods derived from information-theoretic principles that outperform existing SSL techniques.
To create useful reinforcement learning (RL) agents, step zero is to design a suitable reward function that captures the nuances of the task. However, reward engineering can be a difficult and time-consuming process. Instead, human-in-the-loop (HitL) RL allows agents to learn reward functions from human feedback. Despite recent successes, many of the HitL RL methods still require numerous human interactions to learn successful reward functions. To improve the feedback efficiency of HitL RL methods (i.e., require less feedback), this paper introduces Sub-optimal Data Pre-training, SDP, an approach that leverages reward-free, sub-optimal data to improve scalar- and preference-based HitL RL algorithms. In SDP, we start by pseudo-labeling all low-quality data with rewards of zero. Through this process, we obtain free reward labels to pre-train our reward model. This pre-training phase provides the reward model a head start in learning, whereby it can identify that low-quality transitions should have a low reward, all without any actual feedback. Through extensive experiments with a simulated teacher, we demonstrate that SDP can significantly improve or achieve competitive performance with state-of-the-art (SOTA) HitL RL algorithms across nine robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks.
To date, most existing self-supervised learning methods are designed and optimized for image classification. These pre-trained models can be sub-optimal for dense prediction tasks due to the discrepancy between image-level prediction and pixel-level prediction. To fill this gap, we aim to design an effective, dense self-supervised learning method that directly works at the level of pixels (or local features) by taking into account the correspondence between local features. We present dense contrastive learning, which implements self-supervised learning by optimizing a pairwise contrastive (dis)similarity loss at the pixel level between two views of input images. Compared to the baseline method MoCo-v2, our method introduces negligible computation overhead (only <1% slower), but demonstrates consistently superior performance when transferring to downstream dense prediction tasks including object detection, semantic segmentation and instance segmentation; and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Specifically, over the strong MoCo-v2 baseline, our method achieves significant improvements of 2.0% AP on PASCAL VOC object detection, 1.1% AP on COCO object detection, 0.9% AP on COCO instance segmentation, 3.0% mIoU on PASCAL VOC semantic segmentation and 1.8% mIoU on Cityscapes semantic segmentation. Code is available at: //git.io/AdelaiDet
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have received increasing attention in recent machine learning. How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly optimizing the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the GEneralized Multi-relational Graph Convolutional Networks (GEM-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge-base embedding methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that GEM-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of GEM-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
Conventional methods for object detection typically require a substantial amount of training data and preparing such high-quality training data is very labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot object detection network that aims at detecting objects of unseen categories with only a few annotated examples. Central to our method are our Attention-RPN, Multi-Relation Detector and Contrastive Training strategy, which exploit the similarity between the few shot support set and query set to detect novel objects while suppressing false detection in the background. To train our network, we contribute a new dataset that contains 1000 categories of various objects with high-quality annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first datasets specifically designed for few-shot object detection. Once our few-shot network is trained, it can detect objects of unseen categories without further training or fine-tuning. Our method is general and has a wide range of potential applications. We produce a new state-of-the-art performance on different datasets in the few-shot setting. The dataset link is //github.com/fanq15/Few-Shot-Object-Detection-Dataset.