Data augmentation is becoming essential for improving regression accuracy in critical applications including manufacturing and finance. Existing techniques for data augmentation largely focus on classification tasks and do not readily apply to regression tasks. In particular, the recent Mixup techniques for classification rely on the key assumption that linearity holds among training examples, which is reasonable if the label space is discrete, but has limitations when the label space is continuous as in regression. We show that mixing examples that either have a large data or label distance may have an increasingly-negative effect on model performance. Hence, we use the stricter assumption that linearity only holds within certain data or label distances for regression where the degree may vary by each example. We then propose MixRL, a data augmentation meta learning framework for regression that learns for each example how many nearest neighbors it should be mixed with for the best model performance using a small validation set. MixRL achieves these objectives using Monte Carlo policy gradient reinforcement learning. Our experiments conducted both on synthetic and real datasets show that MixRL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art data augmentation baselines. MixRL can also be integrated with other classification Mixup techniques for better results.
Deep-learning techniques have been successfully used for time-series forecasting and have often shown superior performance on many standard benchmark datasets as compared to traditional techniques. Here we present a comprehensive and comparative study of performance of deep-learning techniques for forecasting prices in financial markets. We benchmark state-of-the-art deep-learning baselines, such as NBeats, etc., on data from currency as well as stock markets. We also generate synthetic data using a fuzzy-logic based model of demand driven by technical rules such as moving averages, which are often used by traders. We benchmark the baseline techniques on this synthetic data as well as use it for data augmentation. We also apply gradient-based meta-learning to account for non-stationarity of financial time-series. Our extensive experiments notwithstanding, the surprising result is that the standard ARIMA models outperforms deep-learning even using data augmentation or meta-learning. We conclude by speculating as to why this might be the case.
Tabular data are ubiquitous in real world applications. Although many commonly-used neural components (e.g., convolution) and extensible neural networks (e.g., ResNet) have been developed by the machine learning community, few of them were effective for tabular data and few designs were adequately tailored for tabular data structures. In this paper, we propose a novel and flexible neural component for tabular data, called Abstract Layer (AbstLay), which learns to explicitly group correlative input features and generate higher-level features for semantics abstraction. Also, we design a structure re-parameterization method to compress AbstLay, thus reducing the computational complexity by a clear margin in the reference phase. A special basic block is built using AbstLays, and we construct a family of Deep Abstract Networks (DANets) for tabular data classification and regression by stacking such blocks. In DANets, a special shortcut path is introduced to fetch information from raw tabular features, assisting feature interactions across different levels. Comprehensive experiments on seven real-world tabular datasets show that our AbstLay and DANets are effective for tabular data classification and regression, and the computational complexity is superior to competitive methods. Besides, we evaluate the performance gains of DANet as it goes deep, verifying the extendibility of our method. Our code is available at //github.com/WhatAShot/DANet.
Deep learning-based histopathology image classification is a key technique to help physicians in improving the accuracy and promptness of cancer diagnosis. However, the noisy labels are often inevitable in the complex manual annotation process, and thus mislead the training of the classification model. In this work, we introduce a novel hard sample aware noise robust learning method for histopathology image classification. To distinguish the informative hard samples from the harmful noisy ones, we build an easy/hard/noisy (EHN) detection model by using the sample training history. Then we integrate the EHN into a self-training architecture to lower the noise rate through gradually label correction. With the obtained almost clean dataset, we further propose a noise suppressing and hard enhancing (NSHE) scheme to train the noise robust model. Compared with the previous works, our method can save more clean samples and can be directly applied to the real-world noisy dataset scenario without using a clean subset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in both the synthetic and real-world noisy datasets. The source code and data are available at //github.com/bupt-ai-cz/HSA-NRL/.
We consider the novel problem of unsupervised domain adaptation of source models, without access to the source data for semantic segmentation. Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to adapt a model learned on the labeled source data, to a new unlabeled target dataset. Existing methods assume that the source data is available along with the target data during adaptation. However, in practical scenarios, we may only have access to the source model and the unlabeled target data, but not the labeled source, due to reasons such as privacy, storage, etc. In this work, we propose a self-training approach to extract the knowledge from the source model. To compensate for the distribution shift from source to target, we first update only the normalization parameters of the network with the unlabeled target data. Then we employ confidence-filtered pseudo labeling and enforce consistencies against certain transformations. Despite being very simple and intuitive, our framework is able to achieve significant performance gains compared to directly applying the source model on the target data as reflected in our extensive experiments and ablation studies. In fact, the performance is just a few points away from the recent state-of-the-art methods which use source data for adaptation. We further demonstrate the generalisability of the proposed approach for fully test-time adaptation setting, where we do not need any target training data and adapt only during test-time.
Contrastive learning has become a key component of self-supervised learning approaches for computer vision. By learning to embed two augmented versions of the same image close to each other and to push the embeddings of different images apart, one can train highly transferable visual representations. As revealed by recent studies, heavy data augmentation and large sets of negatives are both crucial in learning such representations. At the same time, data mixing strategies either at the image or the feature level improve both supervised and semi-supervised learning by synthesizing novel examples, forcing networks to learn more robust features. In this paper, we argue that an important aspect of contrastive learning, i.e., the effect of hard negatives, has so far been neglected. To get more meaningful negative samples, current top contrastive self-supervised learning approaches either substantially increase the batch sizes, or keep very large memory banks; increasing the memory size, however, leads to diminishing returns in terms of performance. We therefore start by delving deeper into a top-performing framework and show evidence that harder negatives are needed to facilitate better and faster learning. Based on these observations, and motivated by the success of data mixing, we propose hard negative mixing strategies at the feature level, that can be computed on-the-fly with a minimal computational overhead. We exhaustively ablate our approach on linear classification, object detection and instance segmentation and show that employing our hard negative mixing procedure improves the quality of visual representations learned by a state-of-the-art self-supervised learning method.
Language model based pre-trained models such as BERT have provided significant gains across different NLP tasks. In this paper, we study different types of pre-trained transformer based models such as auto-regressive models (GPT-2), auto-encoder models (BERT), and seq2seq models (BART) for conditional data augmentation. We show that prepending the class labels to text sequences provides a simple yet effective way to condition the pre-trained models for data augmentation. On three classification benchmarks, pre-trained Seq2Seq model outperforms other models. Further, we explore how different pre-trained model based data augmentation differs in-terms of data diversity, and how well such methods preserve the class-label information.
Modern neural network training relies heavily on data augmentation for improved generalization. After the initial success of label-preserving augmentations, there has been a recent surge of interest in label-perturbing approaches, which combine features and labels across training samples to smooth the learned decision surface. In this paper, we propose a new augmentation method that leverages the first and second moments extracted and re-injected by feature normalization. We replace the moments of the learned features of one training image by those of another, and also interpolate the target labels. As our approach is fast, operates entirely in feature space, and mixes different signals than prior methods, one can effectively combine it with existing augmentation methods. We demonstrate its efficacy across benchmark data sets in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing, where it consistently improves the generalization performance of highly competitive baseline networks.
Biomedical image segmentation is an important task in many medical applications. Segmentation methods based on convolutional neural networks attain state-of-the-art accuracy; however, they typically rely on supervised training with large labeled datasets. Labeling datasets of medical images requires significant expertise and time, and is infeasible at large scales. To tackle the lack of labeled data, researchers use techniques such as hand-engineered preprocessing steps, hand-tuned architectures, and data augmentation. However, these techniques involve costly engineering efforts, and are typically dataset-specific. We present an automated data augmentation method for medical images. We demonstrate our method on the task of segmenting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans, focusing on the one-shot segmentation scenario -- a practical challenge in many medical applications. Our method requires only a single segmented scan, and leverages other unlabeled scans in a semi-supervised approach. We learn a model of transforms from the images, and use the model along with the labeled example to synthesize additional labeled training examples for supervised segmentation. Each transform is comprised of a spatial deformation field and an intensity change, enabling the synthesis of complex effects such as variations in anatomy and image acquisition procedures. Augmenting the training of a supervised segmenter with these new examples provides significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods for one-shot biomedical image segmentation. Our code is available at //github.com/xamyzhao/brainstorm.
Meta-learning is a powerful tool that builds on multi-task learning to learn how to quickly adapt a model to new tasks. In the context of reinforcement learning, meta-learning algorithms can acquire reinforcement learning procedures to solve new problems more efficiently by meta-learning prior tasks. The performance of meta-learning algorithms critically depends on the tasks available for meta-training: in the same way that supervised learning algorithms generalize best to test points drawn from the same distribution as the training points, meta-learning methods generalize best to tasks from the same distribution as the meta-training tasks. In effect, meta-reinforcement learning offloads the design burden from algorithm design to task design. If we can automate the process of task design as well, we can devise a meta-learning algorithm that is truly automated. In this work, we take a step in this direction, proposing a family of unsupervised meta-learning algorithms for reinforcement learning. We describe a general recipe for unsupervised meta-reinforcement learning, and describe an effective instantiation of this approach based on a recently proposed unsupervised exploration technique and model-agnostic meta-learning. We also discuss practical and conceptual considerations for developing unsupervised meta-learning methods. Our experimental results demonstrate that unsupervised meta-reinforcement learning effectively acquires accelerated reinforcement learning procedures without the need for manual task design, significantly exceeds the performance of learning from scratch, and even matches performance of meta-learning methods that use hand-specified task distributions.
Although reinforcement learning methods can achieve impressive results in simulation, the real world presents two major challenges: generating samples is exceedingly expensive, and unexpected perturbations can cause proficient but narrowly-learned policies to fail at test time. In this work, we propose to learn how to quickly and effectively adapt online to new situations as well as to perturbations. To enable sample-efficient meta-learning, we consider learning online adaptation in the context of model-based reinforcement learning. Our approach trains a global model such that, when combined with recent data, the model can be be rapidly adapted to the local context. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach can enable simulated agents to adapt their behavior online to novel terrains, to a crippled leg, and in highly-dynamic environments.