The landscape of deep learning research is moving towards innovative strategies to harness the true potential of data. Traditionally, emphasis has been on scaling model architectures, resulting in large and complex neural networks, which can be difficult to train with limited computational resources. However, independently of the model size, data quality (i.e. amount and variability) is still a major factor that affects model generalization. In this work, we propose a novel technique to exploit available data through the use of automatic data augmentation for the tasks of image classification and semantic segmentation. We introduce the first Differentiable Augmentation Search method (DAS) to generate variations of images that can be processed as videos. Compared to previous approaches, DAS is extremely fast and flexible, allowing the search on very large search spaces in less than a GPU day. Our intuition is that the increased receptive field in the temporal dimension provided by DAS could lead to benefits also to the spatial receptive field. More specifically, we leverage DAS to guide the reshaping of the spatial receptive field by selecting task-dependant transformations. As a result, compared to standard augmentation alternatives, we improve in terms of accuracy on ImageNet, Cifar10, Cifar100, Tiny-ImageNet, Pascal-VOC-2012 and CityScapes datasets when plugging-in our DAS over different light-weight video backbones.
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is playing an increasingly important role in real-world applications. However, obtaining an optimally performing DRL agent for complex tasks, especially with sparse rewards, remains a significant challenge. The training of a DRL agent can be often trapped in a bottleneck without further progress. In this paper, we propose RICE, an innovative refining scheme for reinforcement learning that incorporates explanation methods to break through the training bottlenecks. The high-level idea of RICE is to construct a new initial state distribution that combines both the default initial states and critical states identified through explanation methods, thereby encouraging the agent to explore from the mixed initial states. Through careful design, we can theoretically guarantee that our refining scheme has a tighter sub-optimality bound. We evaluate RICE in various popular RL environments and real-world applications. The results demonstrate that RICE significantly outperforms existing refining schemes in enhancing agent performance.
Understanding the interpretation of machine learning (ML) models has been of paramount importance when making decisions with societal impacts such as transport control, financial activities, and medical diagnosis. While current model interpretation methodologies focus on using locally linear functions to approximate the models or creating self-explanatory models that give explanations to each input instance, they do not focus on model interpretation at the subpopulation level, which is the understanding of model interpretations across different subset aggregations in a dataset. To address the challenges of providing explanations of an ML model across the whole dataset, we propose SUBPLEX, a visual analytics system to help users understand black-box model explanations with subpopulation visual analysis. SUBPLEX is designed through an iterative design process with machine learning researchers to address three usage scenarios of real-life machine learning tasks: model debugging, feature selection, and bias detection. The system applies novel subpopulation analysis on ML model explanations and interactive visualization to explore the explanations on a dataset with different levels of granularity. Based on the system, we conduct user evaluation to assess how understanding the interpretation at a subpopulation level influences the sense-making process of interpreting ML models from a user's perspective. Our results suggest that by providing model explanations for different groups of data, SUBPLEX encourages users to generate more ingenious ideas to enrich the interpretations. It also helps users to acquire a tight integration between programming workflow and visual analytics workflow. Last but not least, we summarize the considerations observed in applying visualization to machine learning interpretations.
Understanding what makes high-dimensional data learnable is a fundamental question in machine learning. On the one hand, it is believed that the success of deep learning lies in its ability to build a hierarchy of representations that become increasingly more abstract with depth, going from simple features like edges to more complex concepts. On the other hand, learning to be insensitive to invariances of the task, such as smooth transformations for image datasets, has been argued to be important for deep networks and it strongly correlates with their performance. In this work, we aim to explain this correlation and unify these two viewpoints. We show that by introducing sparsity to generative hierarchical models of data, the task acquires insensitivity to spatial transformations that are discrete versions of smooth transformations. In particular, we introduce the Sparse Random Hierarchy Model (SRHM), where we observe and rationalize that a hierarchical representation mirroring the hierarchical model is learnt precisely when such insensitivity is learnt, thereby explaining the strong correlation between the latter and performance. Moreover, we quantify how the sample complexity of CNNs learning the SRHM depends on both the sparsity and hierarchical structure of the task.
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
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.
In light of the emergence of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in recommender systems research and several fruitful results in recent years, this survey aims to provide a timely and comprehensive overview of the recent trends of deep reinforcement learning in recommender systems. We start with the motivation of applying DRL in recommender systems. Then, we provide a taxonomy of current DRL-based recommender systems and a summary of existing methods. We discuss emerging topics and open issues, and provide our perspective on advancing the domain. This survey serves as introductory material for readers from academia and industry into the topic and identifies notable opportunities for further research.
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
There recently has been a surge of interest in developing a new class of deep learning (DL) architectures that integrate an explicit time dimension as a fundamental building block of learning and representation mechanisms. In turn, many recent results show that topological descriptors of the observed data, encoding information on the shape of the dataset in a topological space at different scales, that is, persistent homology of the data, may contain important complementary information, improving both performance and robustness of DL. As convergence of these two emerging ideas, we propose to enhance DL architectures with the most salient time-conditioned topological information of the data and introduce the concept of zigzag persistence into time-aware graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Zigzag persistence provides a systematic and mathematically rigorous framework to track the most important topological features of the observed data that tend to manifest themselves over time. To integrate the extracted time-conditioned topological descriptors into DL, we develop a new topological summary, zigzag persistence image, and derive its theoretical stability guarantees. We validate the new GCNs with a time-aware zigzag topological layer (Z-GCNETs), in application to traffic forecasting and Ethereum blockchain price prediction. Our results indicate that Z-GCNET outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods on 4 time series datasets.
Influenced by the stunning success of deep learning in computer vision and language understanding, research in recommendation has shifted to inventing new recommender models based on neural networks. In recent years, we have witnessed significant progress in developing neural recommender models, which generalize and surpass traditional recommender models owing to the strong representation power of neural networks. In this survey paper, we conduct a systematic review on neural recommender models, aiming to summarize the field to facilitate future progress. Distinct from existing surveys that categorize existing methods based on the taxonomy of deep learning techniques, we instead summarize the field from the perspective of recommendation modeling, which could be more instructive to researchers and practitioners working on recommender systems. Specifically, we divide the work into three types based on the data they used for recommendation modeling: 1) collaborative filtering models, which leverage the key source of user-item interaction data; 2) content enriched models, which additionally utilize the side information associated with users and items, like user profile and item knowledge graph; and 3) context enriched models, which account for the contextual information associated with an interaction, such as time, location, and the past interactions. After reviewing representative works for each type, we finally discuss some promising directions in this field, including benchmarking recommender systems, graph reasoning based recommendation models, and explainable and fair recommendations for social good.
Current deep learning research is dominated by benchmark evaluation. A method is regarded as favorable if it empirically performs well on the dedicated test set. This mentality is seamlessly reflected in the resurfacing area of continual learning, where consecutively arriving sets of benchmark data are investigated. The core challenge is framed as protecting previously acquired representations from being catastrophically forgotten due to the iterative parameter updates. However, comparison of individual methods is nevertheless treated in isolation from real world application and typically judged by monitoring accumulated test set performance. The closed world assumption remains predominant. It is assumed that during deployment a model is guaranteed to encounter data that stems from the same distribution as used for training. This poses a massive challenge as neural networks are well known to provide overconfident false predictions on unknown instances and break down in the face of corrupted data. In this work we argue that notable lessons from open set recognition, the identification of statistically deviating data outside of the observed dataset, and the adjacent field of active learning, where data is incrementally queried such that the expected performance gain is maximized, are frequently overlooked in the deep learning era. Based on these forgotten lessons, we propose a consolidated view to bridge continual learning, active learning and open set recognition in deep neural networks. Our results show that this not only benefits each individual paradigm, but highlights the natural synergies in a common framework. We empirically demonstrate improvements when alleviating catastrophic forgetting, querying data in active learning, selecting task orders, while exhibiting robust open world application where previously proposed methods fail.