Long-tailed distributions frequently emerge in real-world data, where a large number of minority categories contain a limited number of samples. Such imbalance issue considerably impairs the performance of standard supervised learning algorithms, which are mainly designed for balanced training sets. Recent investigations have revealed that supervised contrastive learning exhibits promising potential in alleviating the data imbalance. However, the performance of supervised contrastive learning is plagued by an inherent challenge: it necessitates sufficiently large batches of training data to construct contrastive pairs that cover all categories, yet this requirement is difficult to meet in the context of class-imbalanced data. To overcome this obstacle, we propose a novel probabilistic contrastive (ProCo) learning algorithm that estimates the data distribution of the samples from each class in the feature space, and samples contrastive pairs accordingly. In fact, estimating the distributions of all classes using features in a small batch, particularly for imbalanced data, is not feasible. Our key idea is to introduce a reasonable and simple assumption that the normalized features in contrastive learning follow a mixture of von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions on unit space, which brings two-fold benefits. First, the distribution parameters can be estimated using only the first sample moment, which can be efficiently computed in an online manner across different batches. Second, based on the estimated distribution, the vMF distribution allows us to sample an infinite number of contrastive pairs and derive a closed form of the expected contrastive loss for efficient optimization. Our code is available at //github.com/LeapLabTHU/ProCo.
The optimal coordination rates are determined in three primary settings of multi-partite quantum networks, thus characterizing the minimal resources required in order to simulate a joint quantum state among multiple parties. We study the following models: (1) a cascade network with limited entanglement, (2) a broadcast network, which consists of a single sender and two receivers, (3) a multiple-access network with two senders and a single receiver. We establish the necessary and sufficient conditions on the asymptotically-achievable communication and entanglement rates in each setting. At last, we show the implications of our results on nonlocal games with quantum strategies.
Neural reflectance models are capable of reproducing the spatially-varying appearance of many real-world materials at different scales. Unfortunately, existing techniques such as NeuMIP have difficulties handling materials with strong shadowing effects or detailed specular highlights. In this paper, we introduce a neural appearance model that offers a new level of accuracy. Central to our model is an inception-based core network structure that captures material appearances at multiple scales using parallel-operating kernels and ensures multi-stage features through specialized convolution layers. Furthermore, we encode the inputs into frequency space, introduce a gradient-based loss, and employ it adaptive to the progress of the learning phase. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using a variety of synthetic and real examples.
Many data distributions in the real world are hardly uniform. Instead, skewed and long-tailed distributions of various kinds are commonly observed. This poses an interesting problem for machine learning, where most algorithms assume or work well with uniformly distributed data. The problem is further exacerbated by current state-of-the-art deep learning models requiring large volumes of training data. As such, learning from imbalanced data remains a challenging research problem and a problem that must be solved as we move towards more real-world applications of deep learning. In the context of class imbalance, state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracies on standard benchmark datasets for classification typically fall less than 75%, even for less challenging datasets such as CIFAR100. Nonetheless, there has been progress in this niche area of deep learning. To this end, in this survey, we provide a taxonomy of various methods proposed for addressing the problem of long-tail classification, focusing on works that happened in the last few years under a single mathematical framework. We also discuss standard performance metrics, convergence studies, feature distribution and classifier analysis. We also provide a quantitative comparison of the performance of different SOTA methods and conclude the survey by discussing the remaining challenges and future research direction.
Qini curves have emerged as an attractive and popular approach for evaluating the benefit of data-driven targeting rules for treatment allocation. We propose a generalization of the Qini curve to multiple costly treatment arms, that quantifies the value of optimally selecting among both units and treatment arms at different budget levels. We develop an efficient algorithm for computing these curves and propose bootstrap-based confidence intervals that are exact in large samples for any point on the curve. These confidence intervals can be used to conduct hypothesis tests comparing the value of treatment targeting using an optimal combination of arms with using just a subset of arms, or with a non-targeting assignment rule ignoring covariates, at different budget levels. We demonstrate the statistical performance in a simulation experiment and an application to treatment targeting for election turnout.
Due to the limited and even imbalanced data, semi-supervised semantic segmentation tends to have poor performance on some certain categories, e.g., tailed categories in Cityscapes dataset which exhibits a long-tailed label distribution. Existing approaches almost all neglect this problem, and treat categories equally. Some popular approaches such as consistency regularization or pseudo-labeling may even harm the learning of under-performing categories, that the predictions or pseudo labels of these categories could be too inaccurate to guide the learning on the unlabeled data. In this paper, we look into this problem, and propose a novel framework for semi-supervised semantic segmentation, named adaptive equalization learning (AEL). AEL adaptively balances the training of well and badly performed categories, with a confidence bank to dynamically track category-wise performance during training. The confidence bank is leveraged as an indicator to tilt training towards under-performing categories, instantiated in three strategies: 1) adaptive Copy-Paste and CutMix data augmentation approaches which give more chance for under-performing categories to be copied or cut; 2) an adaptive data sampling approach to encourage pixels from under-performing category to be sampled; 3) a simple yet effective re-weighting method to alleviate the training noise raised by pseudo-labeling. Experimentally, AEL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on the Cityscapes and Pascal VOC benchmarks under various data partition protocols. Code is available at //github.com/hzhupku/SemiSeg-AEL
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
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.
Approaches based on deep neural networks have achieved striking performance when testing data and training data share similar distribution, but can significantly fail otherwise. Therefore, eliminating the impact of distribution shifts between training and testing data is crucial for building performance-promising deep models. Conventional methods assume either the known heterogeneity of training data (e.g. domain labels) or the approximately equal capacities of different domains. In this paper, we consider a more challenging case where neither of the above assumptions holds. We propose to address this problem by removing the dependencies between features via learning weights for training samples, which helps deep models get rid of spurious correlations and, in turn, concentrate more on the true connection between discriminative features and labels. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on multiple distribution generalization benchmarks compared with state-of-the-art counterparts. Through extensive experiments on distribution generalization benchmarks including PACS, VLCS, MNIST-M, and NICO, we show the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art counterparts.
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.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.