While multi-task learning (MTL) has gained significant attention in recent years, its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Recent methods did not yield consistent performance improvements over single task learning (STL) baselines, underscoring the importance of gaining more profound insights about challenges specific to MTL. In our study, we challenge common assumptions in MTL in the context of STL: First, the choice of optimizer has only been mildly investigated in MTL. We show the pivotal role of common STL tools such as the Adam optimizer in MTL. We deduce the effectiveness of Adam to its partial loss-scale invariance. Second, the notion of gradient conflicts has often been phrased as a specific problem in MTL. We delve into the role of gradient conflicts in MTL and compare it to STL. For angular gradient alignment we find no evidence that this is a unique problem in MTL. We emphasize differences in gradient magnitude as the main distinguishing factor. Lastly, we compare the transferability of features learned through MTL and STL on common image corruptions, and find no conclusive evidence that MTL leads to superior transferability. Overall, we find surprising similarities between STL and MTL suggesting to consider methods from both fields in a broader context.
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With the recent success of representation learning methods, which includes deep learning as a special case, there has been considerable interest in developing techniques that incorporate known physical constraints into the learned representation. As one example, in many applications that involve a signal propagating through physical media (e.g., optics, acoustics, fluid dynamics, etc), it is known that the dynamics of the signal must satisfy constraints imposed by the wave equation. Here we propose a matrix factorization technique that decomposes such signals into a sum of components, where each component is regularized to ensure that it {nearly} satisfies wave equation constraints. Although our proposed formulation is non-convex, we prove that our model can be efficiently solved to global optimality. Through this line of work we establish theoretical connections between wave-informed learning and filtering theory in signal processing. We further demonstrate the application of this work on modal analysis problems commonly arising in structural diagnostics and prognostics.
Unsupervised learning has been widely used in many real-world applications. One of the simplest and most important unsupervised learning models is the Gaussian mixture model (GMM). In this work, we study the multi-task learning problem on GMMs, which aims to leverage potentially similar GMM parameter structures among tasks to obtain improved learning performance compared to single-task learning. We propose a multi-task GMM learning procedure based on the EM algorithm that not only can effectively utilize unknown similarity between related tasks but is also robust against a fraction of outlier tasks from arbitrary distributions. The proposed procedure is shown to achieve minimax optimal rate of convergence for both parameter estimation error and the excess mis-clustering error, in a wide range of regimes. Moreover, we generalize our approach to tackle the problem of transfer learning for GMMs, where similar theoretical results are derived. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods through simulations and real data examples. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work studying multi-task and transfer learning on GMMs with theoretical guarantees.
Contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a promising technique for improving recommender systems, addressing the challenge of data sparsity by leveraging self-supervised signals from raw data. Integration of CL with graph convolutional network (GCN)-based collaborative filterings (CFs) has been explored in recommender systems. However, current CL-based recommendation models heavily rely on low-pass filters and graph augmentations. In this paper, we propose a novel CL method for recommender systems called the reaction-diffusion graph contrastive learning model (RDGCL). We design our own GCN for CF based on both the diffusion, i.e., low-pass filter, and the reaction, i.e., high-pass filter, equations. Our proposed CL-based training occurs between reaction and diffusion-based embeddings, so there is no need for graph augmentations. Experimental evaluation on 6 benchmark datasets demonstrates that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art CL-based recommendation models. By enhancing recommendation accuracy and diversity, our method brings an advancement in CL for recommender systems.
Contrastive loss has been increasingly used in learning representations from multiple modalities. In the limit, the nature of the contrastive loss encourages modalities to exactly match each other in the latent space. Yet it remains an open question how the modality alignment affects the downstream task performance. In this paper, based on an information-theoretic argument, we first prove that exact modality alignment is sub-optimal in general for downstream prediction tasks. Hence we advocate that the key of better performance lies in meaningful latent modality structures instead of perfect modality alignment. To this end, we propose three general approaches to construct latent modality structures. Specifically, we design 1) a deep feature separation loss for intra-modality regularization; 2) a Brownian-bridge loss for inter-modality regularization; and 3) a geometric consistency loss for both intra- and inter-modality regularization. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular multi-modal representation learning frameworks: the CLIP-based two-tower model and the ALBEF-based fusion model. We test our model on a variety of tasks including zero/few-shot image classification, image-text retrieval, visual question answering, visual reasoning, and visual entailment. Our method achieves consistent improvements over existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed approach on latent modality structure regularization.
While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has fueled multiple high-profile successes in machine learning, it is held back from more widespread adoption by its often poor data efficiency and the limited generality of the policies it produces. A promising approach for alleviating these limitations is to cast the development of better RL algorithms as a machine learning problem itself in a process called meta-RL. Meta-RL is most commonly studied in a problem setting where, given a distribution of tasks, the goal is to learn a policy that is capable of adapting to any new task from the task distribution with as little data as possible. In this survey, we describe the meta-RL problem setting in detail as well as its major variations. We discuss how, at a high level, meta-RL research can be clustered based on the presence of a task distribution and the learning budget available for each individual task. Using these clusters, we then survey meta-RL algorithms and applications. We conclude by presenting the open problems on the path to making meta-RL part of the standard toolbox for a deep RL practitioner.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
Meta-learning extracts the common knowledge acquired from learning different tasks and uses it for unseen tasks. It demonstrates a clear advantage on tasks that have insufficient training data, e.g., few-shot learning. In most meta-learning methods, tasks are implicitly related via the shared model or optimizer. In this paper, we show that a meta-learner that explicitly relates tasks on a graph describing the relations of their output dimensions (e.g., classes) can significantly improve the performance of few-shot learning. This type of graph is usually free or cheap to obtain but has rarely been explored in previous works. We study the prototype based few-shot classification, in which a prototype is generated for each class, such that the nearest neighbor search between the prototypes produces an accurate classification. We introduce "Gated Propagation Network (GPN)", which learns to propagate messages between prototypes of different classes on the graph, so that learning the prototype of each class benefits from the data of other related classes. In GPN, an attention mechanism is used for the aggregation of messages from neighboring classes, and a gate is deployed to choose between the aggregated messages and the message from the class itself. GPN is trained on a sequence of tasks from many-shot to few-shot generated by subgraph sampling. During training, it is able to reuse and update previously achieved prototypes from the memory in a life-long learning cycle. In experiments, we change the training-test discrepancy and test task generation settings for thorough evaluations. GPN outperforms recent meta-learning methods on two benchmark datasets in all studied cases.
Deep learning has revolutionized many machine learning tasks in recent years, ranging from image classification and video processing to speech recognition and natural language understanding. The data in these tasks are typically represented in the Euclidean space. However, there is an increasing number of applications where data are generated from non-Euclidean domains and are represented as graphs with complex relationships and interdependency between objects. The complexity of graph data has imposed significant challenges on existing machine learning algorithms. Recently, many studies on extending deep learning approaches for graph data have emerged. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in data mining and machine learning fields. We propose a new taxonomy to divide the state-of-the-art graph neural networks into different categories. With a focus on graph convolutional networks, we review alternative architectures that have recently been developed; these learning paradigms include graph attention networks, graph autoencoders, graph generative networks, and graph spatial-temporal networks. We further discuss the applications of graph neural networks across various domains and summarize the open source codes and benchmarks of the existing algorithms on different learning tasks. Finally, we propose potential research directions in this fast-growing field.
Recently, ensemble has been applied to deep metric learning to yield state-of-the-art results. Deep metric learning aims to learn deep neural networks for feature embeddings, distances of which satisfy given constraint. In deep metric learning, ensemble takes average of distances learned by multiple learners. As one important aspect of ensemble, the learners should be diverse in their feature embeddings. To this end, we propose an attention-based ensemble, which uses multiple attention masks, so that each learner can attend to different parts of the object. We also propose a divergence loss, which encourages diversity among the learners. The proposed method is applied to the standard benchmarks of deep metric learning and experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on image retrieval tasks.
While existing machine learning models have achieved great success for sentiment classification, they typically do not explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction, which can lead to poor results for fine-grained analysis at the snippet level (a phrase or sentence). Factorization Machine provides a possible approach to learning element-wise interaction for recommender systems, but they are not directly applicable to our task due to the inability to model contexts and word sequences. In this work, we develop two Position-aware Factorization Machines which consider word interaction, context and position information. Such information is jointly encoded in a set of sentiment-oriented word interaction vectors. Compared to traditional word embeddings, SWI vectors explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction and simplify the parameter learning. Experimental results show that while they have comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods for document-level classification, they benefit the snippet/sentence-level sentiment analysis.
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