Masked Image Modeling (MIM) methods, like Masked Autoencoders (MAE), efficiently learn a rich representation of the input. However, for adapting to downstream tasks, they require a sufficient amount of labeled data since their rich features code not only objects but also less relevant image background. In contrast, Instance Discrimination (ID) methods focus on objects. In this work, we study how to combine the efficiency and scalability of MIM with the ability of ID to perform downstream classification in the absence of large amounts of labeled data. To this end, we introduce Masked Autoencoder Contrastive Tuning (MAE-CT), a sequential approach that utilizes the implicit clustering of the Nearest Neighbor Contrastive Learning (NNCLR) objective to induce abstraction in the topmost layers of a pre-trained MAE. MAE-CT tunes the rich features such that they form semantic clusters of objects without using any labels. Notably, MAE-CT does not rely on hand-crafted augmentations and frequently achieves its best performances while using only minimal augmentations (crop & flip). Further, MAE-CT is compute efficient as it requires at most 10% overhead compared to MAE re-training. Applied to large and huge Vision Transformer (ViT) models, MAE-CT excels over previous self-supervised methods trained on ImageNet in linear probing, k-NN and low-shot classification accuracy as well as in unsupervised clustering accuracy. With ViT-H/16 MAE-CT achieves a new state-of-the-art in linear probing of 82.2%.
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive reasoning and data augmentation capabilities in various NLP tasks. However, what about small models? In this work, we propose TeacherLM-7.1B, capable of annotating relevant fundamentals, chain of thought, and common mistakes for most NLP samples, which makes annotation more than just an answer, thus allowing other models to learn "why" instead of just "what". The TeacherLM-7.1B model achieved a zero-shot score of 52.3 on MMLU, surpassing most models with over 100B parameters. Even more remarkable is its data augmentation ability. Based on TeacherLM-7.1B, we augmented 58 NLP datasets and taught various student models with different parameters from OPT and BLOOM series in a multi-task setting. The experimental results indicate that the data augmentation provided by TeacherLM has brought significant benefits. We will release the TeacherLM series of models and augmented datasets as open-source.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful tool for finding optimal policies in sequential decision processes. However, deep RL methods suffer from two weaknesses: collecting the amount of agent experience required for practical RL problems is prohibitively expensive, and the learned policies exhibit poor generalization on tasks outside of the training distribution. To mitigate these issues, we introduce automaton distillation, a form of neuro-symbolic transfer learning in which Q-value estimates from a teacher are distilled into a low-dimensional representation in the form of an automaton. We then propose two methods for generating Q-value estimates: static transfer, which reasons over an abstract Markov Decision Process constructed based on prior knowledge, and dynamic transfer, where symbolic information is extracted from a teacher Deep Q-Network (DQN). The resulting Q-value estimates from either method are used to bootstrap learning in the target environment via a modified DQN loss function. We list several failure modes of existing automaton-based transfer methods and demonstrate that both static and dynamic automaton distillation decrease the time required to find optimal policies for various decision tasks.
We consider the problem of estimating the learning rate in adaptive methods, such as Adagrad and Adam. We describe two techniques, Prodigy and Resetting, to provably estimate the distance to the solution $D$, which is needed to set the learning rate optimally. Our techniques are modifications of the D-Adaptation method for learning-rate-free learning. Our methods improve upon the convergence rate of D-Adaptation by a factor of $O(\sqrt{\log(D/d_0)})$, where $d_0$ is the initial estimate of $D$. We test our methods on 12 common logistic-regression benchmark datasets, VGG11 and ResNet-50 training on CIFAR10, ViT training on Imagenet, LSTM training on IWSLT14, DLRM training on Criteo dataset, VarNet on Knee MRI dataset, as well as RoBERTa and GPT transformer training on BookWiki. Our experimental results show that our approaches consistently outperform D-Adaptation and reach test accuracy values close to that of hand-tuned Adam.
Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI), where words are translated between two languages, is an important NLP task. While noticeable progress on BLI in rich resource languages using static word embeddings has been achieved. The word translation performance can be further improved by incorporating information from contextualized word embeddings. In this paper, we introduce ProMap, a novel approach for BLI that leverages the power of prompting pretrained multilingual and multidialectal language models to address these challenges. To overcome the employment of subword tokens in these models, ProMap relies on an effective padded prompting of language models with a seed dictionary that achieves good performance when used independently. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of ProMap in re-ranking results from other BLI methods such as with aligned static word embeddings. When evaluated on both rich-resource and low-resource languages, ProMap consistently achieves state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, ProMap enables strong performance in few-shot scenarios (even with less than 10 training examples), making it a valuable tool for low-resource language translation. Overall, we believe our method offers both exciting and promising direction for BLI in general and low-resource languages in particular. ProMap code and data are available at \url{//github.com/4mekki4/promap}.
Text Classification is the most essential and fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing. While numerous recent text classification models applied the sequential deep learning technique, graph neural network-based models can directly deal with complex structured text data and exploit global information. Many real text classification applications can be naturally cast into a graph, which captures words, documents, and corpus global features. In this survey, we bring the coverage of methods up to 2023, including corpus-level and document-level graph neural networks. We discuss each of these methods in detail, dealing with the graph construction mechanisms and the graph-based learning process. As well as the technological survey, we look at issues behind and future directions addressed in text classification using graph neural networks. We also cover datasets, evaluation metrics, and experiment design and present a summary of published performance on the publicly available benchmarks. Note that we present a comprehensive comparison between different techniques and identify the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics in this survey.
Recently, Self-Supervised Representation Learning (SSRL) has attracted much attention in the field of computer vision, speech, natural language processing (NLP), and recently, with other types of modalities, including time series from sensors. The popularity of self-supervised learning is driven by the fact that traditional models typically require a huge amount of well-annotated data for training. Acquiring annotated data can be a difficult and costly process. Self-supervised methods have been introduced to improve the efficiency of training data through discriminative pre-training of models using supervisory signals that have been freely obtained from the raw data. Unlike existing reviews of SSRL that have pre-dominately focused upon methods in the fields of CV or NLP for a single modality, we aim to provide the first comprehensive review of multimodal self-supervised learning methods for temporal data. To this end, we 1) provide a comprehensive categorization of existing SSRL methods, 2) introduce a generic pipeline by defining the key components of a SSRL framework, 3) compare existing models in terms of their objective function, network architecture and potential applications, and 4) review existing multimodal techniques in each category and various modalities. Finally, we present existing weaknesses and future opportunities. We believe our work develops a perspective on the requirements of SSRL in domains that utilise multimodal and/or temporal data
Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a capability natural to humans yet challenging for machines to reproduce. This is because most learning algorithms strongly rely on the i.i.d.~assumption on source/target data, which is often violated in practice due to domain shift. Domain generalization (DG) aims to achieve OOD generalization by using only source data for model learning. Since first introduced in 2011, research in DG has made great progresses. In particular, intensive research in this topic has led to a broad spectrum of methodologies, e.g., those based on domain alignment, meta-learning, data augmentation, or ensemble learning, just to name a few; and has covered various vision applications such as object recognition, segmentation, action recognition, and person re-identification. In this paper, for the first time a comprehensive literature review is provided to summarize the developments in DG for computer vision over the past decade. Specifically, we first cover the background by formally defining DG and relating it to other research fields like domain adaptation and transfer learning. Second, we conduct a thorough review into existing methods and present a categorization based on their methodologies and motivations. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions.
Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.
Deep Learning (DL) is vulnerable to out-of-distribution and adversarial examples resulting in incorrect outputs. To make DL more robust, several posthoc anomaly detection techniques to detect (and discard) these anomalous samples have been proposed in the recent past. This survey tries to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of the research on anomaly detection for DL based applications. We provide a taxonomy for existing techniques based on their underlying assumptions and adopted approaches. We discuss various techniques in each of the categories and provide the relative strengths and weaknesses of the approaches. Our goal in this survey is to provide an easier yet better understanding of the techniques belonging to different categories in which research has been done on this topic. Finally, we highlight the unsolved research challenges while applying anomaly detection techniques in DL systems and present some high-impact future research directions.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have gained significant traction in the field of machine learning, particularly due to their high accuracy in visual recognition. Recent works have pushed the performance of GPU implementations of CNNs to significantly improve their classification and training times. With these improvements, many frameworks have become available for implementing CNNs on both CPUs and GPUs, with no support for FPGA implementations. In this work we present a modified version of the popular CNN framework Caffe, with FPGA support. This allows for classification using CNN models and specialized FPGA implementations with the flexibility of reprogramming the device when necessary, seamless memory transactions between host and device, simple-to-use test benches, and the ability to create pipelined layer implementations. To validate the framework, we use the Xilinx SDAccel environment to implement an FPGA-based Winograd convolution engine and show that the FPGA layer can be used alongside other layers running on a host processor to run several popular CNNs (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG A, Overfeat). The results show that our framework achieves 50 GFLOPS across 3x3 convolutions in the benchmarks. This is achieved within a practical framework, which will aid in future development of FPGA-based CNNs.