State of the art (SOTA) few-shot learning (FSL) methods suffer significant performance drop in the presence of domain differences between source and target datasets. The strong discrimination ability on the source dataset does not necessarily translate to high classification accuracy on the target dataset. In this work, we address this cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL) problem by boosting the generalization capability of the model. Specifically, we teach the model to capture broader variations of the feature distributions with a novel noise-enhanced supervised autoencoder (NSAE). NSAE trains the model by jointly reconstructing inputs and predicting the labels of inputs as well as their reconstructed pairs. Theoretical analysis based on intra-class correlation (ICC) shows that the feature embeddings learned from NSAE have stronger discrimination and generalization abilities in the target domain. We also take advantage of NSAE structure and propose a two-step fine-tuning procedure that achieves better adaption and improves classification performance in the target domain. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that our proposed method consistently outperforms SOTA methods under various conditions.
Crowdsourcing is regarded as one prospective solution for effective supervised learning, aiming to build large-scale annotated training data by crowd workers. Previous studies focus on reducing the influences from the noises of the crowdsourced annotations for supervised models. We take a different point in this work, regarding all crowdsourced annotations as gold-standard with respect to the individual annotators. In this way, we find that crowdsourcing could be highly similar to domain adaptation, and then the recent advances of cross-domain methods can be almost directly applied to crowdsourcing. Here we take named entity recognition (NER) as a study case, suggesting an annotator-aware representation learning model that inspired by the domain adaptation methods which attempt to capture effective domain-aware features. We investigate both unsupervised and supervised crowdsourcing learning, assuming that no or only small-scale expert annotations are available. Experimental results on a benchmark crowdsourced NER dataset show that our method is highly effective, leading to a new state-of-the-art performance. In addition, under the supervised setting, we can achieve impressive performance gains with only a very small scale of expert annotations.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods for person re-identification (re-ID) aim at transferring re-ID knowledge from labeled source data to unlabeled target data. Although achieving great success, most of them only use limited data from a single-source domain for model pre-training, making the rich labeled data insufficiently exploited. To make full use of the valuable labeled data, we introduce the multi-source concept into UDA person re-ID field, where multiple source datasets are used during training. However, because of domain gaps, simply combining different datasets only brings limited improvement. In this paper, we try to address this problem from two perspectives, \ie{} domain-specific view and domain-fusion view. Two constructive modules are proposed, and they are compatible with each other. First, a rectification domain-specific batch normalization (RDSBN) module is explored to simultaneously reduce domain-specific characteristics and increase the distinctiveness of person features. Second, a graph convolutional network (GCN) based multi-domain information fusion (MDIF) module is developed, which minimizes domain distances by fusing features of different domains. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art UDA person re-ID methods by a large margin, and even achieves comparable performance to the supervised approaches without any post-processing techniques.
In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of ``labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
Learning with limited data is a key challenge for visual recognition. Few-shot learning methods address this challenge by learning an instance embedding function from seen classes and apply the function to instances from unseen classes with limited labels. This style of transfer learning is task-agnostic: the embedding function is not learned optimally discriminative with respect to the unseen classes, where discerning among them is the target task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to adapt the embedding model to the target classification task, yielding embeddings that are task-specific and are discriminative. To this end, we employ a type of self-attention mechanism called Transformer to transform the embeddings from task-agnostic to task-specific by focusing on relating instances from the test instances to the training instances in both seen and unseen classes. Our approach also extends to both transductive and generalized few-shot classification, two important settings that have essential use cases. We verify the effectiveness of our model on two standard benchmark few-shot classification datasets --- MiniImageNet and CUB, where our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art empirical performance.
Given a single image x from domain A and a set of images from domain B, our task is to generate the analogous of x in B. We argue that this task could be a key AI capability that underlines the ability of cognitive agents to act in the world and present empirical evidence that the existing unsupervised domain translation methods fail on this task. Our method follows a two step process. First, a variational autoencoder for domain B is trained. Then, given the new sample x, we create a variational autoencoder for domain A by adapting the layers that are close to the image in order to directly fit x, and only indirectly adapt the other layers. Our experiments indicate that the new method does as well, when trained on one sample x, as the existing domain transfer methods, when these enjoy a multitude of training samples from domain A. Our code is made publicly available at //github.com/sagiebenaim/OneShotTranslation
The key issue of few-shot learning is learning to generalize. In this paper, we propose a large margin principle to improve the generalization capacity of metric based methods for few-shot learning. To realize it, we develop a unified framework to learn a more discriminative metric space by augmenting the softmax classification loss function with a large margin distance loss function for training. Extensive experiments on two state-of-the-art few-shot learning models, graph neural networks and prototypical networks, show that our method can improve the performance of existing models substantially with very little computational overhead, demonstrating the effectiveness of the large margin principle and the potential of our method.
We show that the task of question answering (QA) can significantly benefit from the transfer learning of models trained on a different large, fine-grained QA dataset. We achieve the state of the art in two well-studied QA datasets, WikiQA and SemEval-2016 (Task 3A), through a basic transfer learning technique from SQuAD. For WikiQA, our model outperforms the previous best model by more than 8%. We demonstrate that finer supervision provides better guidance for learning lexical and syntactic information than coarser supervision, through quantitative results and visual analysis. We also show that a similar transfer learning procedure achieves the state of the art on an entailment task.
A major goal of unsupervised learning is to discover data representations that are useful for subsequent tasks, without access to supervised labels during training. Typically, this goal is approached by minimizing a surrogate objective, such as the negative log likelihood of a generative model, with the hope that representations useful for subsequent tasks will arise incidentally. In this work, we propose instead to directly target a later desired task by meta-learning an unsupervised learning rule, which leads to representations useful for that task. Here, our desired task (meta-objective) is the performance of the representation on semi-supervised classification, and we meta-learn an algorithm -- an unsupervised weight update rule -- that produces representations that perform well under this meta-objective. Additionally, we constrain our unsupervised update rule to a be a biologically-motivated, neuron-local function, which enables it to generalize to novel neural network architectures. We show that the meta-learned update rule produces useful features and sometimes outperforms existing unsupervised learning techniques. We further show that the meta-learned unsupervised update rule generalizes to train networks with different widths, depths, and nonlinearities. It also generalizes to train on data with randomly permuted input dimensions and even generalizes from image datasets to a text task.
In this paper, we propose the Cross-Domain Adversarial Auto-Encoder (CDAAE) to address the problem of cross-domain image inference, generation and transformation. We make the assumption that images from different domains share the same latent code space for content, while having separate latent code space for style. The proposed framework can map cross-domain data to a latent code vector consisting of a content part and a style part. The latent code vector is matched with a prior distribution so that we can generate meaningful samples from any part of the prior space. Consequently, given a sample of one domain, our framework can generate various samples of the other domain with the same content of the input. This makes the proposed framework different from the current work of cross-domain transformation. Besides, the proposed framework can be trained with both labeled and unlabeled data, which makes it also suitable for domain adaptation. Experimental results on data sets SVHN, MNIST and CASIA show the proposed framework achieved visually appealing performance for image generation task. Besides, we also demonstrate the proposed method achieved superior results for domain adaptation. Code of our experiments is available in //github.com/luckycallor/CDAAE.
Unsupervised learning is of growing interest because it unlocks the potential held in vast amounts of unlabelled data to learn useful representations for inference. Autoencoders, a form of generative model, may be trained by learning to reconstruct unlabelled input data from a latent representation space. More robust representations may be produced by an autoencoder if it learns to recover clean input samples from corrupted ones. Representations may be further improved by introducing regularisation during training to shape the distribution of the encoded data in latent space. We suggest denoising adversarial autoencoders, which combine denoising and regularisation, shaping the distribution of latent space using adversarial training. We introduce a novel analysis that shows how denoising may be incorporated into the training and sampling of adversarial autoencoders. Experiments are performed to assess the contributions that denoising makes to the learning of representations for classification and sample synthesis. Our results suggest that autoencoders trained using a denoising criterion achieve higher classification performance, and can synthesise samples that are more consistent with the input data than those trained without a corruption process.