This paper investigates methods for improving generative data augmentation for deep learning. Generative data augmentation leverages the synthetic samples produced by generative models as an additional dataset for classification with small dataset settings. A key challenge of generative data augmentation is that the synthetic data contain uninformative samples that degrade accuracy. This is because the synthetic samples do not perfectly represent class categories in real data and uniform sampling does not necessarily provide useful samples for tasks. In this paper, we present a novel strategy for generative data augmentation called meta generative regularization (MGR). To avoid the degradation of generative data augmentation, MGR utilizes synthetic samples in the regularization term for feature extractors instead of in the loss function, e.g., cross-entropy. These synthetic samples are dynamically determined to minimize the validation losses through meta-learning. We observed that MGR can avoid the performance degradation of na\"ive generative data augmentation and boost the baselines. Experiments on six datasets showed that MGR is effective particularly when datasets are smaller and stably outperforms baselines.
The domain shift between training and testing data presents a significant challenge for training generalizable deep learning models. As a consequence, the performance of models trained with the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) assumption deteriorates when deployed in the real world. This problem is exacerbated in the medical imaging context due to variations in data acquisition across clinical centers, medical apparatus, and patients. Domain generalization (DG) aims to address this problem by learning a model that generalizes well to any unseen target domain. Many domain generalization techniques were unsuccessful in learning domain-invariant representations due to the large domain shift. Furthermore, multiple tasks in medical imaging are not yet extensively studied in existing literature when it comes to DG point of view. In this paper, we introduce a DG method that re-establishes the model objective function as a maximization of mutual information with a large pretrained model to the medical imaging field. We re-visit the problem of DG in Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) classification to establish a clear benchmark with a correct model selection strategy and to achieve robust domain-invariant representation for an improved generalization. Moreover, we conduct extensive experiments on public datasets to show that our proposed method consistently outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by a margin of 5.25% in average accuracy and a lower standard deviation. Source code available at //github.com/BioMedIA-MBZUAI/DGM-DR
Probabilistic diffusion models enjoy increasing popularity in the deep learning community. They generate convincing samples from a learned distribution of input images with a wide field of practical applications. Originally, these approaches were motivated from drift-diffusion processes, but these origins find less attention in recent, practice-oriented publications. We investigate probabilistic diffusion models from the viewpoint of scale-space research and show that they fulfil generalised scale-space properties on evolving probability distributions. Moreover, we discuss similarities and differences between interpretations of the physical core concept of drift-diffusion in the deep learning and model-based world. To this end, we examine relations of probabilistic diffusion to osmosis filters.
The performance of deep learning models depends significantly on their capacity to encode input features efficiently and decode them into meaningful outputs. Better input and output representation has the potential to boost models' performance and generalization. In the context of acoustic-to-articulatory speech inversion (SI) systems, we study the impact of utilizing speech representations acquired via self-supervised learning (SSL) models, such as HuBERT compared to conventional acoustic features. Additionally, we investigate the incorporation of novel tract variables (TVs) through an improved geometric transformation model. By combining these two approaches, we improve the Pearson product-moment correlation (PPMC) scores which evaluate the accuracy of TV estimation of the SI system from 0.7452 to 0.8141, a 6.9% increase. Our findings underscore the profound influence of rich feature representations from SSL models and improved geometric transformations with target TVs on the enhanced functionality of SI systems.
The structure learning problem consists of fitting data generated by a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to correctly reconstruct its arcs. In this context, differentiable approaches constrain or regularize the optimization problem using a continuous relaxation of the acyclicity property. The computational cost of evaluating graph acyclicity is cubic on the number of nodes and significantly affects scalability. In this paper we introduce COSMO, a constraint-free continuous optimization scheme for acyclic structure learning. At the core of our method, we define a differentiable approximation of an orientation matrix parameterized by a single priority vector. Differently from previous work, our parameterization fits a smooth orientation matrix and the resulting acyclic adjacency matrix without evaluating acyclicity at any step. Despite the absence of explicit constraints, we prove that COSMO always converges to an acyclic solution. In addition to being asymptotically faster, our empirical analysis highlights how COSMO performance on graph reconstruction compares favorably with competing structure learning methods.
Unsupervised contrastive learning methods have recently seen significant improvements, particularly through data augmentation strategies that aim to produce robust and generalizable representations. However, prevailing data augmentation methods, whether hand designed or based on foundation models, tend to rely heavily on prior knowledge or external data. This dependence often compromises their effectiveness and efficiency. Furthermore, the applicability of most existing data augmentation strategies is limited when transitioning to other research domains, especially science-related data. This limitation stems from the paucity of prior knowledge and labeled data available in these domains. To address these challenges, we introduce DiffAug-a novel and efficient Diffusion-based data Augmentation technique. DiffAug aims to ensure that the augmented and original data share a smoothed latent space, which is achieved through diffusion steps. Uniquely, unlike traditional methods, DiffAug first mines sufficient prior semantic knowledge about the neighborhood. This provides a constraint to guide the diffusion steps, eliminating the need for labels, external data/models, or prior knowledge. Designed as an architecture-agnostic framework, DiffAug provides consistent improvements. Specifically, it improves image classification and clustering accuracy by 1.6%~4.5%. When applied to biological data, DiffAug improves performance by up to 10.1%, with an average improvement of 5.8%. DiffAug shows good performance in both vision and biological domains.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
This paper aims to mitigate straggler effects in synchronous distributed learning for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems. Stragglers arise frequently in a distributed learning system, due to the existence of various system disturbances such as slow-downs or failures of compute nodes and communication bottlenecks. To resolve this issue, we propose a coded distributed learning framework, which speeds up the training of MARL algorithms in the presence of stragglers, while maintaining the same accuracy as the centralized approach. As an illustration, a coded distributed version of the multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient(MADDPG) algorithm is developed and evaluated. Different coding schemes, including maximum distance separable (MDS)code, random sparse code, replication-based code, and regular low density parity check (LDPC) code are also investigated. Simulations in several multi-robot problems demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed framework.
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.
This paper presents a new multi-objective deep reinforcement learning (MODRL) framework based on deep Q-networks. We propose the use of linear and non-linear methods to develop the MODRL framework that includes both single-policy and multi-policy strategies. The experimental results on two benchmark problems including the two-objective deep sea treasure environment and the three-objective mountain car problem indicate that the proposed framework is able to converge to the optimal Pareto solutions effectively. The proposed framework is generic, which allows implementation of different deep reinforcement learning algorithms in different complex environments. This therefore overcomes many difficulties involved with standard multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) methods existing in the current literature. The framework creates a platform as a testbed environment to develop methods for solving various problems associated with the current MORL. Details of the framework implementation can be referred to //www.deakin.edu.au/~thanhthi/drl.htm.
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.