In biomedical imaging, deep learning-based methods are state-of-the-art for every modality (virtual slides, MRI, etc.) In histopathology, these methods can be used to detect certain biomarkers or classify lesions. However, such techniques require large amounts of data to train high-performing models which can be intrinsically difficult to acquire, especially when it comes to scarce biomarkers. To address this challenge, we use a single, pre-trained, deep embeddings extractor to convert images into deep features and train small, dedicated classification head on these embeddings for each classification task. This approach offers several benefits such as the ability to reuse a single pre-trained deep network for various tasks; reducing the amount of labeled data needed as classification heads have fewer parameters; and accelerating training time by up to 1000 times, which allows for much more tuning of the classification head. In this work, we perform an extensive comparison of various open-source backbones and assess their fit to the target histological image domain. This is achieved using a novel method based on a proxy classification task. We demonstrate that thanks to this selection method, an optimal feature extractor can be selected for different tasks on the target domain. We also introduce a feature space augmentation strategy which proves to substantially improve the final metrics computed for the different tasks considered. To demonstrate the benefit of such backbone selection and feature-space augmentation, our experiments are carried out on three separate classification tasks and show a clear improvement on each of them: microcalcifications (29.1% F1-score increase), lymph nodes metastasis (12.5% F1-score increase), mitosis (15.0% F1-score increase).
Strategic classification studies learning in settings where users can modify their features to obtain favorable predictions. Most current works focus on simple classifiers that trigger independent user responses. Here we examine the implications of learning with more elaborate models that break the independence assumption. Motivated by the idea that applications of strategic classification are often social in nature, we focus on \emph{graph neural networks}, which make use of social relations between users to improve predictions. Using a graph for learning introduces inter-user dependencies in prediction; our key point is that strategic users can exploit these to promote their goals. As we show through analysis and simulation, this can work either against the system -- or for it. Based on this, we propose a differentiable framework for strategically-robust learning of graph-based classifiers. Experiments on several real networked datasets demonstrate the utility of our approach.
Service robots are integrating more and more into our daily lives to help us with various tasks. In such environments, robots frequently face new objects while working in the environment and need to learn them in an open-ended fashion. Furthermore, such robots must be able to recognize a wide range of object categories. In this paper, we present a lifelong ensemble learning approach based on multiple representations to address the few-shot object recognition problem. In particular, we form ensemble methods based on deep representations and handcrafted 3D shape descriptors. To facilitate lifelong learning, each approach is equipped with a memory unit for storing and retrieving object information instantly. The proposed model is suitable for open-ended learning scenarios where the number of 3D object categories is not fixed and can grow over time. We have performed extensive sets of experiments to assess the performance of the proposed approach in offline, and open-ended scenarios. For the evaluation purpose, in addition to real object datasets, we generate a large synthetic household objects dataset consisting of 27000 views of 90 objects. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on online few-shot 3D object recognition tasks, as well as its superior performance over the state-of-the-art open-ended learning approaches. Furthermore, our results show that while ensemble learning is modestly beneficial in offline settings, it is significantly beneficial in lifelong few-shot learning situations. Additionally, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in both simulated and real-robot settings, where the robot rapidly learned new categories from limited examples.
Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a powerful tool to solve the weakly supervised classification in whole slide image (WSI) based pathology diagnosis. However, the current MIL methods are usually based on independent and identical distribution hypothesis, thus neglect the correlation among different instances. To address this problem, we proposed a new framework, called correlated MIL, and provided a proof for convergence. Based on this framework, we devised a Transformer based MIL (TransMIL), which explored both morphological and spatial information. The proposed TransMIL can effectively deal with unbalanced/balanced and binary/multiple classification with great visualization and interpretability. We conducted various experiments for three different computational pathology problems and achieved better performance and faster convergence compared with state-of-the-art methods. The test AUC for the binary tumor classification can be up to 93.09% over CAMELYON16 dataset. And the AUC over the cancer subtypes classification can be up to 96.03% and 98.82% over TCGA-NSCLC dataset and TCGA-RCC dataset, respectively.
Artificial neural networks thrive in solving the classification problem for a particular rigid task, acquiring knowledge through generalized learning behaviour from a distinct training phase. The resulting network resembles a static entity of knowledge, with endeavours to extend this knowledge without targeting the original task resulting in a catastrophic forgetting. Continual learning shifts this paradigm towards networks that can continually accumulate knowledge over different tasks without the need to retrain from scratch. We focus on task incremental classification, where tasks arrive sequentially and are delineated by clear boundaries. Our main contributions concern 1) a taxonomy and extensive overview of the state-of-the-art, 2) a novel framework to continually determine the stability-plasticity trade-off of the continual learner, 3) a comprehensive experimental comparison of 11 state-of-the-art continual learning methods and 4 baselines. We empirically scrutinize method strengths and weaknesses on three benchmarks, considering Tiny Imagenet and large-scale unbalanced iNaturalist and a sequence of recognition datasets. We study the influence of model capacity, weight decay and dropout regularization, and the order in which the tasks are presented, and qualitatively compare methods in terms of required memory, computation time, and storage.
Graph classification aims to perform accurate information extraction and classification over graphstructured data. In the past few years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved satisfactory performance on graph classification tasks. However, most GNNs based methods focus on designing graph convolutional operations and graph pooling operations, overlooking that collecting or labeling graph-structured data is more difficult than grid-based data. We utilize meta-learning for fewshot graph classification to alleviate the scarce of labeled graph samples when training new tasks.More specifically, to boost the learning of graph classification tasks, we leverage GNNs as graph embedding backbone and meta-learning as training paradigm to capture task-specific knowledge rapidly in graph classification tasks and transfer them to new tasks. To enhance the robustness of meta-learner, we designed a novel step controller driven by Reinforcement Learning. The experiments demonstrate that our framework works well compared to baselines.
While deep learning strategies achieve outstanding results in computer vision tasks, one issue remains. The current strategies rely heavily on a huge amount of labeled data. In many real-world problems it is not feasible to create such an amount of labeled training data. Therefore, researchers try to incorporate unlabeled data into the training process to reach equal results with fewer labels. Due to a lot of concurrent research, it is difficult to keep track of recent developments. In this survey we provide an overview of often used techniques and methods in image classification with fewer labels. We compare 21 methods. In our analysis we identify three major trends. 1. State-of-the-art methods are scaleable to real world applications based on their accuracy. 2. The degree of supervision which is needed to achieve comparable results to the usage of all labels is decreasing. 3. All methods share common techniques while only few methods combine these techniques to achieve better performance. Based on all of these three trends we discover future research opportunities.
Few-shot image classification aims to classify unseen classes with limited labeled samples. Recent works benefit from the meta-learning process with episodic tasks and can fast adapt to class from training to testing. Due to the limited number of samples for each task, the initial embedding network for meta learning becomes an essential component and can largely affects the performance in practice. To this end, many pre-trained methods have been proposed, and most of them are trained in supervised way with limited transfer ability for unseen classes. In this paper, we proposed to train a more generalized embedding network with self-supervised learning (SSL) which can provide slow and robust representation for downstream tasks by learning from the data itself. We evaluate our work by extensive comparisons with previous baseline methods on two few-shot classification datasets ({\em i.e.,} MiniImageNet and CUB). Based on the evaluation results, the proposed method achieves significantly better performance, i.e., improve 1-shot and 5-shot tasks by nearly \textbf{3\%} and \textbf{4\%} on MiniImageNet, by nearly \textbf{9\%} and \textbf{3\%} on CUB. Moreover, the proposed method can gain the improvement of (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{13\%}) on MiniImageNet and (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{8\%}) on CUB by pretraining using more unlabeled data. Our code will be available at \hyperref[//github.com/phecy/SSL-FEW-SHOT.]{//github.com/phecy/ssl-few-shot.}
Extreme multi-label text classification (XMC) aims to tag each input text with the most relevant labels from an extremely large label set, such as those that arise in product categorization and e-commerce recommendation. Recently, pretrained language representation models such as BERT achieve remarkable state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of NLP tasks including sentence classification among small label sets (typically fewer than thousands). Indeed, there are several challenges in applying BERT to the XMC problem. The main challenges are: (i) the difficulty of capturing dependencies and correlations among labels, whose features may come from heterogeneous sources, and (ii) the tractability to scale to the extreme label setting as the model size can be very large and scale linearly with the size of the output space. To overcome these challenges, we propose X-BERT, the first feasible attempt to finetune BERT models for a scalable solution to the XMC problem. Specifically, X-BERT leverages both the label and document text to build label representations, which induces semantic label clusters in order to better model label dependencies. At the heart of X-BERT is finetuning BERT models to capture the contextual relations between input text and the induced label clusters. Finally, an ensemble of the different BERT models trained on heterogeneous label clusters leads to our best final model. Empirically, on a Wiki dataset with around 0.5 million labels, X-BERT achieves new state-of-the-art results where the precision@1 reaches 67:80%, a substantial improvement over 32.58%/60.91% of deep learning baseline fastText and competing XMC approach Parabel, respectively. This amounts to a 11.31% relative improvement over Parabel, which is indeed significant since the recent approach SLICE only has 5.53% relative improvement.
Text Classification is an important and classical problem in natural language processing. There have been a number of studies that applied convolutional neural networks (convolution on regular grid, e.g., sequence) to classification. However, only a limited number of studies have explored the more flexible graph convolutional neural networks (e.g., convolution on non-grid, e.g., arbitrary graph) for the task. In this work, we propose to use graph convolutional networks for text classification. We build a single text graph for a corpus based on word co-occurrence and document word relations, then learn a Text Graph Convolutional Network (Text GCN) for the corpus. Our Text GCN is initialized with one-hot representation for word and document, it then jointly learns the embeddings for both words and documents, as supervised by the known class labels for documents. Our experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that a vanilla Text GCN without any external word embeddings or knowledge outperforms state-of-the-art methods for text classification. On the other hand, Text GCN also learns predictive word and document embeddings. In addition, experimental results show that the improvement of Text GCN over state-of-the-art comparison methods become more prominent as we lower the percentage of training data, suggesting the robustness of Text GCN to less training data in text classification.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.