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.
Recently, it is shown that deploying a proper self-supervision is a prospective way to enhance the performance of supervised learning. Yet, the benefits of self-supervision are not fully exploited as previous pretext tasks are specialized for unsupervised representation learning. To this end, we begin by presenting three desirable properties for such auxiliary tasks to assist the supervised objective. First, the tasks need to guide the model to learn rich features. Second, the transformations involved in the self-supervision should not significantly alter the training distribution. Third, the tasks are preferred to be light and generic for high applicability to prior arts. Subsequently, to show how existing pretext tasks can fulfill these and be tailored for supervised learning, we propose a simple auxiliary self-supervision task, predicting localizable rotation (LoRot). Our exhaustive experiments validate the merits of LoRot as a pretext task tailored for supervised learning in terms of robustness and generalization capability. Our code is available at //github.com/wjun0830/Localizable-Rotation.
We consider unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where labeled data from a source domain (e.g., photographs) and unlabeled data from a target domain (e.g., sketches) are used to learn a classifier for the target domain. Conventional UDA methods (e.g., domain adversarial training) learn domain-invariant features to improve generalization to the target domain. In this paper, we show that contrastive pre-training, which learns features on unlabeled source and target data and then fine-tunes on labeled source data, is competitive with strong UDA methods. However, we find that contrastive pre-training does not learn domain-invariant features, diverging from conventional UDA intuitions. We show theoretically that contrastive pre-training can learn features that vary subtantially across domains but still generalize to the target domain, by disentangling domain and class information. Our results suggest that domain invariance is not necessary for UDA. We empirically validate our theory on benchmark vision datasets.
What is the best way to learn a universal face representation? Recent work on Deep Learning in the area of face analysis has focused on supervised learning for specific tasks of interest (e.g. face recognition, facial landmark localization etc.) but has overlooked the overarching question of how to find a facial representation that can be readily adapted to several facial analysis tasks and datasets. To this end, we make the following 4 contributions: (a) we introduce, for the first time, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for facial representation learning consisting of 5 important face analysis tasks. (b) We systematically investigate two ways of large-scale representation learning applied to faces: supervised and unsupervised pre-training. Importantly, we focus our evaluations on the case of few-shot facial learning. (c) We investigate important properties of the training datasets including their size and quality (labelled, unlabelled or even uncurated). (d) To draw our conclusions, we conducted a very large number of experiments. Our main two findings are: (1) Unsupervised pre-training on completely in-the-wild, uncurated data provides consistent and, in some cases, significant accuracy improvements for all facial tasks considered. (2) Many existing facial video datasets seem to have a large amount of redundancy. We will release code, and pre-trained models to facilitate future research.
It has been shown that deep neural networks are prone to overfitting on biased training data. Towards addressing this issue, meta-learning employs a meta model for correcting the training bias. Despite the promising performances, super slow training is currently the bottleneck in the meta learning approaches. In this paper, we introduce a novel Faster Meta Update Strategy (FaMUS) to replace the most expensive step in the meta gradient computation with a faster layer-wise approximation. We empirically find that FaMUS yields not only a reasonably accurate but also a low-variance approximation of the meta gradient. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the proposed method on two tasks. We show our method is able to save two-thirds of the training time while still maintaining the comparable or achieving even better generalization performance. In particular, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and realistic noisy labels, and obtains promising performance on long-tailed recognition on standard benchmarks.
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.
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.
Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: `Open World Object Detection', where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as `unknown', without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call ORE: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyze the efficacy of ORE in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterizing unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.
In this paper, we study the few-shot multi-label classification for user intent detection. For multi-label intent detection, state-of-the-art work estimates label-instance relevance scores and uses a threshold to select multiple associated intent labels. To determine appropriate thresholds with only a few examples, we first learn universal thresholding experience on data-rich domains, and then adapt the thresholds to certain few-shot domains with a calibration based on nonparametric learning. For better calculation of label-instance relevance score, we introduce label name embedding as anchor points in representation space, which refines representations of different classes to be well-separated from each other. Experiments on two datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms strong baselines in both one-shot and five-shot settings.
Current deep learning research is dominated by benchmark evaluation. A method is regarded as favorable if it empirically performs well on the dedicated test set. This mentality is seamlessly reflected in the resurfacing area of continual learning, where consecutively arriving sets of benchmark data are investigated. The core challenge is framed as protecting previously acquired representations from being catastrophically forgotten due to the iterative parameter updates. However, comparison of individual methods is nevertheless treated in isolation from real world application and typically judged by monitoring accumulated test set performance. The closed world assumption remains predominant. It is assumed that during deployment a model is guaranteed to encounter data that stems from the same distribution as used for training. This poses a massive challenge as neural networks are well known to provide overconfident false predictions on unknown instances and break down in the face of corrupted data. In this work we argue that notable lessons from open set recognition, the identification of statistically deviating data outside of the observed dataset, and the adjacent field of active learning, where data is incrementally queried such that the expected performance gain is maximized, are frequently overlooked in the deep learning era. Based on these forgotten lessons, we propose a consolidated view to bridge continual learning, active learning and open set recognition in deep neural networks. Our results show that this not only benefits each individual paradigm, but highlights the natural synergies in a common framework. We empirically demonstrate improvements when alleviating catastrophic forgetting, querying data in active learning, selecting task orders, while exhibiting robust open world application where previously proposed methods fail.
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. Existing neural networks mainly operate in the spatial domain with fixed input sizes. For practical applications, images are usually large and have to be downsampled to the predetermined input size of neural networks. Even though the downsampling operations reduce computation and the required communication bandwidth, it removes both redundant and salient information obliviously, which results in accuracy degradation. Inspired by digital signal processing theories, we analyze the spectral bias from the frequency perspective and propose a learning-based frequency selection method to identify the trivial frequency components which can be removed without accuracy loss. The proposed method of learning in the frequency domain leverages identical structures of the well-known neural networks, such as ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and Mask R-CNN, while accepting the frequency-domain information as the input. Experiment results show that learning in the frequency domain with static channel selection can achieve higher accuracy than the conventional spatial downsampling approach and meanwhile further reduce the input data size. Specifically for ImageNet classification with the same input size, the proposed method achieves 1.41% and 0.66% top-1 accuracy improvements on ResNet-50 and MobileNetV2, respectively. Even with half input size, the proposed method still improves the top-1 accuracy on ResNet-50 by 1%. In addition, we observe a 0.8% average precision improvement on Mask R-CNN for instance segmentation on the COCO dataset.