Recently, hyperspherical embeddings have established themselves as a dominant technique for face and voice recognition. Specifically, Euclidean space vector embeddings are learned to encode person-specific information in their direction while ignoring the magnitude. However, recent studies have shown that the magnitudes of the embeddings extracted by deep neural networks may indicate the quality of the corresponding inputs. This paper explores the properties of the magnitudes of the embeddings related to quality assessment and out-of-distribution detection. We propose a new probabilistic speaker embedding extractor using the information encoded in the embedding magnitude and leverage it in the speaker verification pipeline. We also propose several quality-aware diarization methods and incorporate the magnitudes in those. Our results indicate significant improvements over magnitude-agnostic baselines both in speaker verification and diarization tasks.
The paper addresses the problem of finding the causal direction between two associated variables. The proposed solution is to build an autoencoder of their joint distribution and to maximize its estimation capacity relative to both the marginal distributions. It is shown that the resulting two capacities cannot, in general, be equal. This leads to a new criterion for causal discovery: the higher capacity is consistent with the unconstrained choice of a distribution representing the cause while the lower capacity reflects the constraints imposed by the mechanism on the distribution of the effect. Estimation capacity is defined as the ability of the auto-encoder to represent arbitrary datasets. A regularization term forces it to decide which one of the variables to model in a more generic way i.e., while maintaining higher model capacity. The causal direction is revealed by the constraints encountered while encoding the data instead of being measured as a property of the data itself. The idea is implemented and tested using a restricted Boltzmann machine.
As ride-hailing services become increasingly popular, being able to accurately predict demand for such services can help operators efficiently allocate drivers to customers, and reduce idle time, improve congestion, and enhance the passenger experience. This paper proposes UberNet, a deep learning Convolutional Neural Network for short-term prediction of demand for ride-hailing services. UberNet empploys a multivariate framework that utilises a number of temporal and spatial features that have been found in the literature to explain demand for ride-hailing services. The proposed model includes two sub-networks that aim to encode the source series of various features and decode the predicting series, respectively. To assess the performance and effectiveness of UberNet, we use 9 months of Uber pickup data in 2014 and 28 spatial and temporal features from New York City. By comparing the performance of UberNet with several other approaches, we show that the prediction quality of the model is highly competitive. Further, Ubernet's prediction performance is better when using economic, social and built environment features. This suggests that Ubernet is more naturally suited to including complex motivators in making real-time passenger demand predictions for ride-hailing services.
Fine-tuning of self-supervised models is a powerful transfer learning method in a variety of fields, including speech processing, since it can utilize generic feature representations obtained from large amounts of unlabeled data. Fine-tuning, however, requires a new parameter set for each downstream task, which is parameter inefficient. Adapter architecture is proposed to partially solve this issue by inserting lightweight learnable modules into a frozen pre-trained model. However, existing adapter architectures fail to adaptively leverage low- to high-level features stored in different layers, which is necessary for solving various kinds of speech processing tasks. Thus, we propose a new adapter architecture to acquire feature representations more flexibly for various speech tasks. In experiments, we applied this adapter to WavLM on four speech tasks. It performed on par or better than naive fine-tuning, with only 11% of learnable parameters. It also outperformed an existing adapter architecture.
Self-supervised learning has been widely used to obtain transferrable representations from unlabeled images. Especially, recent contrastive learning methods have shown impressive performances on downstream image classification tasks. While these contrastive methods mainly focus on generating invariant global representations at the image-level under semantic-preserving transformations, they are prone to overlook spatial consistency of local representations and therefore have a limitation in pretraining for localization tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation. Moreover, aggressively cropped views used in existing contrastive methods can minimize representation distances between the semantically different regions of a single image. In this paper, we propose a spatially consistent representation learning algorithm (SCRL) for multi-object and location-specific tasks. In particular, we devise a novel self-supervised objective that tries to produce coherent spatial representations of a randomly cropped local region according to geometric translations and zooming operations. On various downstream localization tasks with benchmark datasets, the proposed SCRL shows significant performance improvements over the image-level supervised pretraining as well as the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods.
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.
Clustering is one of the most fundamental and wide-spread techniques in exploratory data analysis. Yet, the basic approach to clustering has not really changed: a practitioner hand-picks a task-specific clustering loss to optimize and fit the given data to reveal the underlying cluster structure. Some types of losses---such as k-means, or its non-linear version: kernelized k-means (centroid based), and DBSCAN (density based)---are popular choices due to their good empirical performance on a range of applications. Although every so often the clustering output using these standard losses fails to reveal the underlying structure, and the practitioner has to custom-design their own variation. In this work we take an intrinsically different approach to clustering: rather than fitting a dataset to a specific clustering loss, we train a recurrent model that learns how to cluster. The model uses as training pairs examples of datasets (as input) and its corresponding cluster identities (as output). By providing multiple types of training datasets as inputs, our model has the ability to generalize well on unseen datasets (new clustering tasks). Our experiments reveal that by training on simple synthetically generated datasets or on existing real datasets, we can achieve better clustering performance on unseen real-world datasets when compared with standard benchmark clustering techniques. Our meta clustering model works well even for small datasets where the usual deep learning models tend to perform worse.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.
Learning similarity functions between image pairs with deep neural networks yields highly correlated activations of embeddings. In this work, we show how to improve the robustness of such embeddings by exploiting the independence within ensembles. To this end, we divide the last embedding layer of a deep network into an embedding ensemble and formulate training this ensemble as an online gradient boosting problem. Each learner receives a reweighted training sample from the previous learners. Further, we propose two loss functions which increase the diversity in our ensemble. These loss functions can be applied either for weight initialization or during training. Together, our contributions leverage large embedding sizes more effectively by significantly reducing correlation of the embedding and consequently increase retrieval accuracy of the embedding. Our method works with any differentiable loss function and does not introduce any additional parameters during test time. We evaluate our metric learning method on image retrieval tasks and show that it improves over state-of-the-art methods on the CUB 200-2011, Cars-196, Stanford Online Products, In-Shop Clothes Retrieval and VehicleID datasets.