Deep network models perform excellently on In-Distribution (ID) data, but can significantly fail on Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) data. While developing methods focus on improving OOD generalization, few attention has been paid to evaluating the capability of models to handle OOD data. This study is devoted to analyzing the problem of experimental ID test and designing OOD test paradigm to accurately evaluate the practical performance. Our analysis is based on an introduced categorization of three types of distribution shifts to generate OOD data. Main observations include: (1) ID test fails in neither reflecting the actual performance of a single model nor comparing between different models under OOD data. (2) The ID test failure can be ascribed to the learned marginal and conditional spurious correlations resulted from the corresponding distribution shifts. Based on this, we propose novel OOD test paradigms to evaluate the generalization capacity of models to unseen data, and discuss how to use OOD test results to find bugs of models to guide model debugging.
Out of distribution (OOD) detection is a crucial part of making machine learning systems robust. The ImageNet-O dataset is an important tool in testing the robustness of ImageNet trained deep neural networks that are widely used across a variety of systems and applications. We aim to perform a comparative analysis of OOD detection methods on ImageNet-O, a first of its kind dataset with a label distribution different than that of ImageNet, that has been created to aid research in OOD detection for ImageNet models. As this dataset is fairly new, we aim to provide a comprehensive benchmarking of some of the current state of the art OOD detection methods on this novel dataset. This benchmarking covers a variety of model architectures, settings where we haves prior access to the OOD data versus when we don't, predictive score based approaches, deep generative approaches to OOD detection, and more.
Recent studies have shown that the choice of activation function can significantly affect the performance of deep learning networks. However, the benefits of novel activation functions have been inconsistent and task dependent, and therefore the rectified linear unit (ReLU) is still the most commonly used. This paper proposes a technique for customizing activation functions automatically, resulting in reliable improvements in performance. Evolutionary search is used to discover the general form of the function, and gradient descent to optimize its parameters for different parts of the network and over the learning process. Experiments with four different neural network architectures on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 image classification datasets show that this approach is effective. It discovers both general activation functions and specialized functions for different architectures, consistently improving accuracy over ReLU and other activation functions by significant margins. The approach can therefore be used as an automated optimization step in applying deep learning to new tasks.
Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is regarded as one of the most promising techniques to provide intelligent services under strict privacy protection regulations for multiple clients. By applying DAI, training on raw data is carried out locally, while the trained outputs, e.g., model parameters, from multiple local clients, are sent back to a central server for aggregation. Recently, for achieving better practicality, DAI is studied in conjunction with wireless communication networks, incorporating various random effects brought by wireless channels. However, because of the complex and case-dependent nature of wireless channels, a generic simulator for applying DAI in wireless communication networks is still lacking. To accelerate the development of DAI applied in wireless communication networks, we propose a generic system design in this paper as well as an associated simulator that can be set according to wireless channels and system-level configurations. Details of the system design and analysis of the impacts of wireless environments are provided to facilitate further implementations and updates. We employ a series of experiments to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system design and reveal its superior scalability.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
Classic machine learning methods are built on the $i.i.d.$ assumption that training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. However, in real scenarios, the $i.i.d.$ assumption can hardly be satisfied, rendering the sharp drop of classic machine learning algorithms' performances under distributional shifts, which indicates the significance of investigating the Out-of-Distribution generalization problem. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem addresses the challenging setting where the testing distribution is unknown and different from the training. This paper serves as the first effort to systematically and comprehensively discuss the OOD generalization problem, from the definition, methodology, evaluation to the implications and future directions. Firstly, we provide the formal definition of the OOD generalization problem. Secondly, existing methods are categorized into three parts based on their positions in the whole learning pipeline, namely unsupervised representation learning, supervised model learning and optimization, and typical methods for each category are discussed in detail. We then demonstrate the theoretical connections of different categories, and introduce the commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize the whole literature and raise some future directions for OOD generalization problem. The summary of OOD generalization methods reviewed in this survey can be found at //out-of-distribution-generalization.com.
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.
While progress has been made on the visual question answering leaderboards, models often utilize spurious correlations and priors in datasets under the i.i.d. setting. As such, evaluation on out-of-distribution (OOD) test samples has emerged as a proxy for generalization. In this paper, we present \textit{MUTANT}, a training paradigm that exposes the model to perceptually similar, yet semantically distinct \textit{mutations} of the input, to improve OOD generalization, such as the VQA-CP challenge. Under this paradigm, models utilize a consistency-constrained training objective to understand the effect of semantic changes in input (question-image pair) on the output (answer). Unlike existing methods on VQA-CP, \textit{MUTANT} does not rely on the knowledge about the nature of train and test answer distributions. \textit{MUTANT} establishes a new state-of-the-art accuracy on VQA-CP with a $10.57\%$ improvement. Our work opens up avenues for the use of semantic input mutations for OOD generalization in question answering.
Over the past few years, we have seen fundamental breakthroughs in core problems in machine learning, largely driven by advances in deep neural networks. At the same time, the amount of data collected in a wide array of scientific domains is dramatically increasing in both size and complexity. Taken together, this suggests many exciting opportunities for deep learning applications in scientific settings. But a significant challenge to this is simply knowing where to start. The sheer breadth and diversity of different deep learning techniques makes it difficult to determine what scientific problems might be most amenable to these methods, or which specific combination of methods might offer the most promising first approach. In this survey, we focus on addressing this central issue, providing an overview of many widely used deep learning models, spanning visual, sequential and graph structured data, associated tasks and different training methods, along with techniques to use deep learning with less data and better interpret these complex models --- two central considerations for many scientific use cases. We also include overviews of the full design process, implementation tips, and links to a plethora of tutorials, research summaries and open-sourced deep learning pipelines and pretrained models, developed by the community. We hope that this survey will help accelerate the use of deep learning across different scientific domains.
Deep learning is the mainstream technique for many machine learning tasks, including image recognition, machine translation, speech recognition, and so on. It has outperformed conventional methods in various fields and achieved great successes. Unfortunately, the understanding on how it works remains unclear. It has the central importance to lay down the theoretic foundation for deep learning. In this work, we give a geometric view to understand deep learning: we show that the fundamental principle attributing to the success is the manifold structure in data, namely natural high dimensional data concentrates close to a low-dimensional manifold, deep learning learns the manifold and the probability distribution on it. We further introduce the concepts of rectified linear complexity for deep neural network measuring its learning capability, rectified linear complexity of an embedding manifold describing the difficulty to be learned. Then we show for any deep neural network with fixed architecture, there exists a manifold that cannot be learned by the network. Finally, we propose to apply optimal mass transportation theory to control the probability distribution in the latent space.
Steve Jobs, one of the greatest visionaries of our time was quoted in 1996 saying "a lot of times, people do not know what they want until you show it to them" [38] indicating he advocated products to be developed based on human intuition rather than research. With the advancements of mobile devices, social networks and the Internet of Things, enormous amounts of complex data, both structured and unstructured are being captured in hope to allow organizations to make better business decisions as data is now vital for an organizations success. These enormous amounts of data are referred to as Big Data, which enables a competitive advantage over rivals when processed and analyzed appropriately. However Big Data Analytics has a few concerns including Management of Data-lifecycle, Privacy & Security, and Data Representation. This paper reviews the fundamental concept of Big Data, the Data Storage domain, the MapReduce programming paradigm used in processing these large datasets, and focuses on two case studies showing the effectiveness of Big Data Analytics and presents how it could be of greater good in the future if handled appropriately.