Large-scale object detection and instance segmentation face a severe data imbalance. The finer-grained object classes become, the less frequent they appear in our datasets. However, at test-time, we expect a detector that performs well for all classes and not just the most frequent ones. In this paper, we provide a theoretical understanding of the long-trail detection problem. We show how the commonly used mean average precision evaluation metric on an unknown test set is bound by a margin-based binary classification error on a long-tailed object detection training set. We optimize margin-based binary classification error with a novel surrogate objective called \textbf{Effective Class-Margin Loss} (ECM). The ECM loss is simple, theoretically well-motivated, and outperforms other heuristic counterparts on LVIS v1 benchmark over a wide range of architecture and detectors. Code is available at \url{//github.com/janghyuncho/ECM-Loss}.
An algorithm based on a deep probabilistic architecture referred to as a tree-structured sum-product network (t-SPN) is considered for cell classification. The t-SPN is constructed such that the unnormalized probability is represented as conditional probabilities of a subset of most similar cell classes. The constructed t-SPN architecture is learned by maximizing the margin, which is the difference in the conditional probability between the true and the most competitive false label. To enhance the generalization ability of the architecture, L2-regularization (REG) is considered along with the maximum margin (MM) criterion in the learning process. To highlight cell features, this paper investigates the effectiveness of two generic high-pass filters: ideal high-pass filtering and the Laplacian of Gaussian (LOG) filtering. On both HEp-2 and Feulgen benchmark datasets, the t-SPN architecture learned based on the max-margin criterion with regularization produced the highest accuracy rate compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms that include convolutional neural network (CNN) based algorithms. The ideal high-pass filter was more effective on the HEp-2 dataset, which is based on immunofluorescence staining, while the LOG was more effective on the Feulgen dataset, which is based on Feulgen staining.
Understanding generalization is crucial to confidently engineer and deploy machine learning models, especially when deployment implies a shift in the data domain. For such domain adaptation problems, we seek generalization bounds which are tractably computable and tight. If these desiderata can be reached, the bounds can serve as guarantees for adequate performance in deployment. However, in applications where deep neural networks are the models of choice, deriving results which fulfill these remains an unresolved challenge; most existing bounds are either vacuous or has non-estimable terms, even in favorable conditions. In this work, we evaluate existing bounds from the literature with potential to satisfy our desiderata on domain adaptation image classification tasks, where deep neural networks are preferred. We find that all bounds are vacuous and that sample generalization terms account for much of the observed looseness, especially when these terms interact with measures of domain shift. To overcome this and arrive at the tightest possible results, we combine each bound with recent data-dependent PAC-Bayes analysis, greatly improving the guarantees. We find that, when domain overlap can be assumed, a simple importance weighting extension of previous work provides the tightest estimable bound. Finally, we study which terms dominate the bounds and identify possible directions for further improvement.
In many industrial applications, obtaining labeled observations is not straightforward as it often requires the intervention of human experts or the use of expensive testing equipment. In these circumstances, active learning can be highly beneficial in suggesting the most informative data points to be used when fitting a model. Reducing the number of observations needed for model development alleviates both the computational burden required for training and the operational expenses related to labeling. Online active learning, in particular, is useful in high-volume production processes where the decision about the acquisition of the label for a data point needs to be taken within an extremely short time frame. However, despite the recent efforts to develop online active learning strategies, the behavior of these methods in the presence of outliers has not been thoroughly examined. In this work, we investigate the performance of online active linear regression in contaminated data streams. Our study shows that the currently available query strategies are prone to sample outliers, whose inclusion in the training set eventually degrades the predictive performance of the models. To address this issue, we propose a solution that bounds the search area of a conditional D-optimal algorithm and uses a robust estimator. Our approach strikes a balance between exploring unseen regions of the input space and protecting against outliers. Through numerical simulations, we show that the proposed method is effective in improving the performance of online active learning in the presence of outliers, thus expanding the potential applications of this powerful tool.
The error probability of block codes sent under a non-uniform input distribution over the memoryless binary symmetric channel (BSC) and decoded via the maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding rule is investigated. It is proved that the ratio of the probability of MAP decoder ties to the probability of error when no MAP decoding ties occur grows at most linearly in blocklength, thus showing that decoder ties do not affect the code's error exponent. This result generalizes a similar recent result shown for the case of block codes transmitted over the BSC under a uniform input distribution.
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a task that is receiving an increasing amount of research attention in the domain of deep learning for computer vision. However, the performance of detection methods is generally evaluated on the task in isolation, rather than also considering potential downstream tasks in tandem. In this work, we examine selective classification in the presence of OOD data (SCOD). That is to say, the motivation for detecting OOD samples is to reject them so their impact on the quality of predictions is reduced. We show under this task specification, that existing post-hoc methods perform quite differently compared to when evaluated only on OOD detection. This is because it is no longer an issue to conflate in-distribution (ID) data with OOD data if the ID data is going to be misclassified. However, the conflation within ID data of correct and incorrect predictions becomes undesirable. We also propose a novel method for SCOD, Softmax Information Retaining Combination (SIRC), that augments softmax-based confidence scores with feature-agnostic information such that their ability to identify OOD samples is improved without sacrificing separation between correct and incorrect ID predictions. Experiments on a wide variety of ImageNet-scale datasets and convolutional neural network architectures show that SIRC is able to consistently match or outperform the baseline for SCOD, whilst existing OOD detection methods fail to do so.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
In this paper, we propose a conceptually simple and geometrically interpretable objective function, i.e. additive margin Softmax (AM-Softmax), for deep face verification. In general, the face verification task can be viewed as a metric learning problem, so learning large-margin face features whose intra-class variation is small and inter-class difference is large is of great importance in order to achieve good performance. Recently, Large-margin Softmax and Angular Softmax have been proposed to incorporate the angular margin in a multiplicative manner. In this work, we introduce a novel additive angular margin for the Softmax loss, which is intuitively appealing and more interpretable than the existing works. We also emphasize and discuss the importance of feature normalization in the paper. Most importantly, our experiments on LFW BLUFR and MegaFace show that our additive margin softmax loss consistently performs better than the current state-of-the-art methods using the same network architecture and training dataset. Our code has also been made available at //github.com/happynear/AMSoftmax