Despite the remarkable performance that modern deep neural networks have achieved on independent and identically distributed (I.I.D.) data, they can crash under distribution shifts. Most current evaluation methods for domain generalization (DG) adopt the leave-one-out strategy as a compromise on the limited number of domains. We propose a large-scale benchmark with extensive labeled domains named NICO++{\ddag} along with more rational evaluation methods for comprehensively evaluating DG algorithms. To evaluate DG datasets, we propose two metrics to quantify covariate shift and concept shift, respectively. Two novel generalization bounds from the perspective of data construction are proposed to prove that limited concept shift and significant covariate shift favor the evaluation capability for generalization. Through extensive experiments, NICO++ shows its superior evaluation capability compared with current DG datasets and its contribution in alleviating unfairness caused by the leak of oracle knowledge in model selection.
Blind Face Restoration (BFR) aims to construct a high-quality (HQ) face image from its corresponding low-quality (LQ) input. Recently, many BFR methods have been proposed and they have achieved remarkable success. However, these methods are trained or evaluated on privately synthesized datasets, which makes it infeasible for the subsequent approaches to fairly compare with them. To address this problem, we first synthesize two blind face restoration benchmark datasets called EDFace-Celeb-1M (BFR128) and EDFace-Celeb-150K (BFR512). State-of-the-art methods are benchmarked on them under five settings including blur, noise, low resolution, JPEG compression artifacts, and the combination of them (full degradation). To make the comparison more comprehensive, five widely-used quantitative metrics and two task-driven metrics including Average Face Landmark Distance (AFLD) and Average Face ID Cosine Similarity (AFICS) are applied. Furthermore, we develop an effective baseline model called Swin Transformer U-Net (STUNet). The STUNet with U-net architecture applies an attention mechanism and a shifted windowing scheme to capture long-range pixel interactions and focus more on significant features while still being trained efficiently. Experimental results show that the proposed baseline method performs favourably against the SOTA methods on various BFR tasks.
Modern machine learning (ML) models are becoming increasingly popular and are widely used in decision-making systems. However, studies have shown critical issues of ML discrimination and unfairness, which hinder their adoption on high-stake applications. Recent research on fair classifiers has drawn significant attention to develop effective algorithms to achieve fairness and good classification performance. Despite the great success of these fairness-aware machine learning models, most of the existing models require sensitive attributes to preprocess the data, regularize the model learning or postprocess the prediction to have fair predictions. However, sensitive attributes are often incomplete or even unavailable due to privacy, legal or regulation restrictions. Though we lack the sensitive attribute for training a fair model in the target domain, there might exist a similar domain that has sensitive attributes. Thus, it is important to exploit auxiliary information from the similar domain to help improve fair classification in the target domain. Therefore, in this paper, we study a novel problem of exploring domain adaptation for fair classification. We propose a new framework that can simultaneously estimate the sensitive attributes while learning a fair classifier in the target domain. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for fair classification, even when no sensitive attributes are available in the target domain.
In this paper, we investigate $\textit{open-set recognition}$ with domain shift, where the final goal is to achieve $\textit{Source-free Universal Domain Adaptation}$ (SF-UNDA), which addresses the situation where there exist both domain and category shifts between source and target domains. Under the SF-UNDA setting, the model cannot access source data anymore during target adaptation, which aims to address data privacy concerns. We propose a novel training scheme to learn a ($n$+1)-way classifier to predict the $n$ source classes and the unknown class, where samples of only known source categories are available for training. Furthermore, for target adaptation, we simply adopt a weighted entropy minimization to adapt the source pretrained model to the unlabeled target domain without source data. In experiments, we show: $\textbf{1)}$ After source training, the resulting source model can get excellent performance for $\textit{open-set single domain generalization}$ and also $\textit{open-set recognition}$ tasks; $\textbf{2)}$ After target adaptation, our method surpasses current UNDA approaches which demand source data during adaptation on several benchmarks. The versatility to several different tasks strongly proves the efficacy and generalization ability of our method. $\textbf{3)}$ When augmented with a closed-set domain adaptation approach during target adaptation, our source-free method further outperforms the current state-of-the-art UNDA method by 2.5%, 7.2% and 13% on Office-31, Office-Home and VisDA respectively. Code will be available in //github.com/Albert0147/OneRing.
Recent advances in Federated Learning (FL) have brought large-scale collaborative machine learning opportunities for massively distributed clients with performance and data privacy guarantees. However, most current works focus on the interest of the central controller in FL,and overlook the interests of the FL clients. This may result in unfair treatment of clients which discourages them from actively participating in the learning process and damages the sustainability of the FL ecosystem. Therefore, the topic of ensuring fairness in FL is attracting a great deal of research interest. In recent years, diverse Fairness-Aware FL (FAFL) approaches have been proposed in an effort to achieve fairness in FL from different perspectives. However, there is no comprehensive survey which helps readers gain insight into this interdisciplinary field. This paper aims to provide such a survey. By examining the fundamental and simplifying assumptions, as well as the notions of fairness adopted by existing literature in this field, we propose a taxonomy of FAFL approaches covering major steps in FL, including client selection, optimization, contribution evaluation and incentive distribution. In addition, we discuss the main metrics for experimentally evaluating the performance of FAFL approaches, and suggest promising future research directions towards fairness-aware federated learning.
The ability to evolve is fundamental for any valuable autonomous agent whose knowledge cannot remain limited to that injected by the manufacturer. Consider for example a home assistant robot: it should be able to incrementally learn new object categories when requested, but also to recognize the same objects in different environments (rooms) and poses (hand-held/on the floor/above furniture), while rejecting unknown ones. Despite its importance, this scenario has started to raise interest in the robotic community only recently and the related research is still in its infancy, with existing experimental testbeds but no tailored methods. With this work, we propose the first learning approach that deals with all the previously mentioned challenges at once by exploiting a single contrastive objective. We show how it learns a feature space perfectly suitable to incrementally include new classes and is able to capture knowledge which generalizes across a variety of visual domains. Our method is endowed with a tailored effective stopping criterion for each learning episode and exploits a self-paced thresholding strategy that provides the classifier with a reliable rejection option. Both these novel contributions are based on the observation of the data statistics and do not need manual tuning. An extensive experimental analysis confirms the effectiveness of the proposed approach in establishing the new state-of-the-art. The code is available at //github.com/FrancescoCappio/Contrastive_Open_World.
Classic machine learning methods are built on the $i.i.d.$ assumption that training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. However, in real scenarios, the $i.i.d.$ assumption can hardly be satisfied, rendering the sharp drop of classic machine learning algorithms' performances under distributional shifts, which indicates the significance of investigating the Out-of-Distribution generalization problem. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem addresses the challenging setting where the testing distribution is unknown and different from the training. This paper serves as the first effort to systematically and comprehensively discuss the OOD generalization problem, from the definition, methodology, evaluation to the implications and future directions. Firstly, we provide the formal definition of the OOD generalization problem. Secondly, existing methods are categorized into three parts based on their positions in the whole learning pipeline, namely unsupervised representation learning, supervised model learning and optimization, and typical methods for each category are discussed in detail. We then demonstrate the theoretical connections of different categories, and introduce the commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize the whole literature and raise some future directions for OOD generalization problem. The summary of OOD generalization methods reviewed in this survey can be found at //out-of-distribution-generalization.com.
In the domain generalization literature, a common objective is to learn representations independent of the domain after conditioning on the class label. We show that this objective is not sufficient: there exist counter-examples where a model fails to generalize to unseen domains even after satisfying class-conditional domain invariance. We formalize this observation through a structural causal model and show the importance of modeling within-class variations for generalization. Specifically, classes contain objects that characterize specific causal features, and domains can be interpreted as interventions on these objects that change non-causal features. We highlight an alternative condition: inputs across domains should have the same representation if they are derived from the same object. Based on this objective, we propose matching-based algorithms when base objects are observed (e.g., through data augmentation) and approximate the objective when objects are not observed (MatchDG). Our simple matching-based algorithms are competitive to prior work on out-of-domain accuracy for rotated MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, PACS, and Chest-Xray datasets. Our method MatchDG also recovers ground-truth object matches: on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, top-10 matches from MatchDG have over 50% overlap with ground-truth matches.
Invariant approaches have been remarkably successful in tackling the problem of domain generalization, where the objective is to perform inference on data distributions different from those used in training. In our work, we investigate whether it is possible to leverage domain information from the unseen test samples themselves. We propose a domain-adaptive approach consisting of two steps: a) we first learn a discriminative domain embedding from unsupervised training examples, and b) use this domain embedding as supplementary information to build a domain-adaptive model, that takes both the input as well as its domain into account while making predictions. For unseen domains, our method simply uses few unlabelled test examples to construct the domain embedding. This enables adaptive classification on any unseen domain. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on various domain generalization benchmarks. In addition, we introduce the first real-world, large-scale domain generalization benchmark, Geo-YFCC, containing 1.1M samples over 40 training, 7 validation, and 15 test domains, orders of magnitude larger than prior work. We show that the existing approaches either do not scale to this dataset or underperform compared to the simple baseline of training a model on the union of data from all training domains. In contrast, our approach achieves a significant improvement.
Domain generalization (DG), i.e., out-of-distribution generalization, has attracted increased interests in recent years. Domain generalization deals with a challenging setting where one or several different but related domain(s) are given, and the goal is to learn a model that can generalize to an unseen test domain. For years, great progress has been achieved. This paper presents the first review for recent advances in domain generalization. First, we provide a formal definition of domain generalization and discuss several related fields. Next, we thoroughly review the theories related to domain generalization and carefully analyze the theory behind generalization. Then, we categorize recent algorithms into three classes and present them in detail: data manipulation, representation learning, and learning strategy, each of which contains several popular algorithms. Third, we introduce the commonly used datasets and applications. Finally, we summarize existing literature and present some potential research topics for the future.
Rehearsal, seeking to remind the model by storing old knowledge in lifelong learning, is one of the most effective ways to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, i.e., biased forgetting of previous knowledge when moving to new tasks. However, the old tasks of the most previous rehearsal-based methods suffer from the unpredictable domain shift when training the new task. This is because these methods always ignore two significant factors. First, the Data Imbalance between the new task and old tasks that makes the domain of old tasks prone to shift. Second, the Task Isolation among all tasks will make the domain shift toward unpredictable directions; To address the unpredictable domain shift, in this paper, we propose Multi-Domain Multi-Task (MDMT) rehearsal to train the old tasks and new task parallelly and equally to break the isolation among tasks. Specifically, a two-level angular margin loss is proposed to encourage the intra-class/task compactness and inter-class/task discrepancy, which keeps the model from domain chaos. In addition, to further address domain shift of the old tasks, we propose an optional episodic distillation loss on the memory to anchor the knowledge for each old task. Experiments on benchmark datasets validate the proposed approach can effectively mitigate the unpredictable domain shift.