Exploring a substantial amount of unlabeled data, semi-supervised learning (SSL) boosts the recognition performance when only a limited number of labels are provided. However, traditional methods assume that the data distribution is class-balanced, which is difficult to achieve in reality due to the long-tailed nature of real-world data. While the data imbalance problem has been extensively studied in supervised learning (SL) paradigms, directly transferring existing approaches to SSL is nontrivial, as prior knowledge about data distribution remains unknown in SSL. In light of this, we propose Balanced Memory Bank (BMB), a semi-supervised framework for long-tailed recognition. The core of BMB is an online-updated memory bank that caches historical features with their corresponding pseudo labels, and the memory is also carefully maintained to ensure the data therein are class-rebalanced. Additionally, an adaptive weighting module is introduced to work jointly with the memory bank so as to further re-calibrate the biased training process. We conduct experiments on multiple datasets and demonstrate, among other things, that BMB surpasses state-of-the-art approaches by clear margins, for example 8.2$\%$ on the 1$\%$ labeled subset of ImageNet127 (with a resolution of 64$\times$64) and 4.3$\%$ on the 50$\%$ labeled subset of ImageNet-LT.
Deep active learning in the presence of outlier examples poses a realistic yet challenging scenario. Acquiring unlabeled data for annotation requires a delicate balance between avoiding outliers to conserve the annotation budget and prioritizing useful inlier examples for effective training. In this work, we present an approach that leverages three highly synergistic components, which are identified as key ingredients: joint classifier training with inliers and outliers, semi-supervised learning through pseudo-labeling, and model ensembling. Our work demonstrates that ensembling significantly enhances the accuracy of pseudo-labeling and improves the quality of data acquisition. By enabling semi-supervision through the joint training process, where outliers are properly handled, we observe a substantial boost in classifier accuracy through the use of all available unlabeled examples. Notably, we reveal that the integration of joint training renders explicit outlier detection unnecessary; a conventional component for acquisition in prior work. The three key components align seamlessly with numerous existing approaches. Through empirical evaluations, we showcase that their combined use leads to a performance increase. Remarkably, despite its simplicity, our proposed approach outperforms all other methods in terms of performance. Code: //github.com/vladan-stojnic/active-outliers
In this paper, we introduce a realistic and challenging domain adaptation problem called Universal Semi-supervised Model Adaptation (USMA), which i) requires only a pre-trained source model, ii) allows the source and target domain to have different label sets, i.e., they share a common label set and hold their own private label set, and iii) requires only a few labeled samples in each class of the target domain. To address USMA, we propose a collaborative consistency training framework that regularizes the prediction consistency between two models, i.e., a pre-trained source model and its variant pre-trained with target data only, and combines their complementary strengths to learn a more powerful model. The rationale of our framework stems from the observation that the source model performs better on common categories than the target-only model, while on target-private categories, the target-only model performs better. We also propose a two-perspective, i.e., sample-wise and class-wise, consistency regularization to improve the training. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on several benchmark datasets.
Traditional centralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms are sometimes unpractical in complicated applications, due to non-interactivity between agents, curse of dimensionality and computation complexity. Hence, several decentralized MARL algorithms are motivated. However, existing decentralized methods only handle the fully cooperative setting where massive information needs to be transmitted in training. The block coordinate gradient descent scheme they used for successive independent actor and critic steps can simplify the calculation, but it causes serious bias. In this paper, we propose a flexible fully decentralized actor-critic MARL framework, which can combine most of actor-critic methods, and handle large-scale general cooperative multi-agent setting. A primal-dual hybrid gradient descent type algorithm framework is designed to learn individual agents separately for decentralization. From the perspective of each agent, policy improvement and value evaluation are jointly optimized, which can stabilize multi-agent policy learning. Furthermore, our framework can achieve scalability and stability for large-scale environment and reduce information transmission, by the parameter sharing mechanism and a novel modeling-other-agents methods based on theory-of-mind and online supervised learning. Sufficient experiments in cooperative Multi-agent Particle Environment and StarCraft II show that our decentralized MARL instantiation algorithms perform competitively against conventional centralized and decentralized methods.
Adversarial imitation learning (AIL) is a popular method that has recently achieved much success. However, the performance of AIL is still unsatisfactory on the more challenging tasks. We find that one of the major reasons is due to the low quality of AIL discriminator representation. Since the AIL discriminator is trained via binary classification that does not necessarily discriminate the policy from the expert in a meaningful way, the resulting reward might not be meaningful either. We propose a new method called Policy Contrastive Imitation Learning (PCIL) to resolve this issue. PCIL learns a contrastive representation space by anchoring on different policies and generates a smooth cosine-similarity-based reward. Our proposed representation learning objective can be viewed as a stronger version of the AIL objective and provide a more meaningful comparison between the agent and the policy. From a theoretical perspective, we show the validity of our method using the apprenticeship learning framework. Furthermore, our empirical evaluation on the DeepMind Control suite demonstrates that PCIL can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Finally, qualitative results suggest that PCIL builds a smoother and more meaningful representation space for imitation learning.
The prevalent use of benchmarks in current offline reinforcement learning (RL) research has led to a neglect of the imbalance of real-world dataset distributions in the development of models. The real-world offline RL dataset is often imbalanced over the state space due to the challenge of exploration or safety considerations. In this paper, we specify properties of imbalanced datasets in offline RL, where the state coverage follows a power law distribution characterized by skewed policies. Theoretically and empirically, we show that typically offline RL methods based on distributional constraints, such as conservative Q-learning (CQL), are ineffective in extracting policies under the imbalanced dataset. Inspired by natural intelligence, we propose a novel offline RL method that utilizes the augmentation of CQL with a retrieval process to recall past related experiences, effectively alleviating the challenges posed by imbalanced datasets. We evaluate our method on several tasks in the context of imbalanced datasets with varying levels of imbalance, utilizing the variant of D4RL. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our method over other baselines.
In classification problems, the datasets are usually imbalanced, noisy or complex. Most sampling algorithms only make some improvements to the linear sampling mechanism of the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE). Nevertheless, linear oversampling has several unavoidable drawbacks. Linear oversampling is susceptible to overfitting, and the synthetic samples lack diversity and rarely account for the original distribution characteristics. An informed nonlinear oversampling framework with the granular ball (INGB) as a new direction of oversampling is proposed in this paper. It uses granular balls to simulate the spatial distribution characteristics of datasets, and informed entropy is utilized to further optimize the granular-ball space. Then, nonlinear oversampling is performed by following high-dimensional sparsity and the isotropic Gaussian distribution. Furthermore, INGB has good compatibility. Not only can it be combined with most SMOTE-based sampling algorithms to improve their performance, but it can also be easily extended to noisy imbalanced multi-classification problems. The mathematical model and theoretical proof of INGB are given in this work. Extensive experiments demonstrate that INGB outperforms the traditional linear sampling frameworks and algorithms in oversampling on complex datasets.
The real-world data tends to be heavily imbalanced and severely skew the data-driven deep neural networks, which makes Long-Tailed Recognition (LTR) a massive challenging task. Existing LTR methods seldom train Vision Transformers (ViTs) with Long-Tailed (LT) data, while the off-the-shelf pretrain weight of ViTs always leads to unfair comparisons. In this paper, we systematically investigate the ViTs' performance in LTR and propose LiVT to train ViTs from scratch only with LT data. With the observation that ViTs suffer more severe LTR problems, we conduct Masked Generative Pretraining (MGP) to learn generalized features. With ample and solid evidence, we show that MGP is more robust than supervised manners. In addition, Binary Cross Entropy (BCE) loss, which shows conspicuous performance with ViTs, encounters predicaments in LTR. We further propose the balanced BCE to ameliorate it with strong theoretical groundings. Specially, we derive the unbiased extension of Sigmoid and compensate extra logit margins to deploy it. Our Bal-BCE contributes to the quick convergence of ViTs in just a few epochs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that with MGP and Bal-BCE, LiVT successfully trains ViTs well without any additional data and outperforms comparable state-of-the-art methods significantly, e.g., our ViT-B achieves 81.0% Top-1 accuracy in iNaturalist 2018 without bells and whistles. Code is available at //github.com/XuZhengzhuo/LiVT.
Multimodal learning helps to comprehensively understand the world, by integrating different senses. Accordingly, multiple input modalities are expected to boost model performance, but we actually find that they are not fully exploited even when the multimodal model outperforms its uni-modal counterpart. Specifically, in this paper we point out that existing multimodal discriminative models, in which uniform objective is designed for all modalities, could remain under-optimized uni-modal representations, caused by another dominated modality in some scenarios, e.g., sound in blowing wind event, vision in drawing picture event, etc. To alleviate this optimization imbalance, we propose on-the-fly gradient modulation to adaptively control the optimization of each modality, via monitoring the discrepancy of their contribution towards the learning objective. Further, an extra Gaussian noise that changes dynamically is introduced to avoid possible generalization drop caused by gradient modulation. As a result, we achieve considerable improvement over common fusion methods on different multimodal tasks, and this simple strategy can also boost existing multimodal methods, which illustrates its efficacy and versatility. The source code is available at \url{//github.com/GeWu-Lab/OGM-GE_CVPR2022}.
While recent studies on semi-supervised learning have shown remarkable progress in leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data, most of them presume a basic setting of the model is randomly initialized. In this work, we consider semi-supervised learning and transfer learning jointly, leading to a more practical and competitive paradigm that can utilize both powerful pre-trained models from source domain as well as labeled/unlabeled data in the target domain. To better exploit the value of both pre-trained weights and unlabeled target examples, we introduce adaptive consistency regularization that consists of two complementary components: Adaptive Knowledge Consistency (AKC) on the examples between the source and target model, and Adaptive Representation Consistency (ARC) on the target model between labeled and unlabeled examples. Examples involved in the consistency regularization are adaptively selected according to their potential contributions to the target task. We conduct extensive experiments on several popular benchmarks including CUB-200-2011, MIT Indoor-67, MURA, by fine-tuning the ImageNet pre-trained ResNet-50 model. Results show that our proposed adaptive consistency regularization outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning techniques such as Pseudo Label, Mean Teacher, and MixMatch. Moreover, our algorithm is orthogonal to existing methods and thus able to gain additional improvements on top of MixMatch and FixMatch. Our code is available at //github.com/SHI-Labs/Semi-Supervised-Transfer-Learning.
Semi-supervised learning on class-imbalanced data, although a realistic problem, has been under studied. While existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods are known to perform poorly on minority classes, we find that they still generate high precision pseudo-labels on minority classes. By exploiting this property, in this work, we propose Class-Rebalancing Self-Training (CReST), a simple yet effective framework to improve existing SSL methods on class-imbalanced data. CReST iteratively retrains a baseline SSL model with a labeled set expanded by adding pseudo-labeled samples from an unlabeled set, where pseudo-labeled samples from minority classes are selected more frequently according to an estimated class distribution. We also propose a progressive distribution alignment to adaptively adjust the rebalancing strength dubbed CReST+. We show that CReST and CReST+ improve state-of-the-art SSL algorithms on various class-imbalanced datasets and consistently outperform other popular rebalancing methods.