Test-time adaptation (TTA) is a task that continually adapts a pre-trained source model to the target domain during inference. One popular approach involves fine-tuning model with cross-entropy loss according to estimated pseudo-labels. However, its performance is significantly affected by noisy pseudo-labels. This study reveals that minimizing the classification error of each sample causes the cross-entropy loss's vulnerability to label noise. To address this issue, we propose a novel Decoupled Prototype Learning (DPL) method that features prototype-centric loss computation. First, we decouple the optimization of class prototypes. For each class prototype, we reduce its distance with positive samples and enlarge its distance with negative samples in a contrastive manner. This strategy prevents the model from overfitting to noisy pseudo-labels. Second, we propose a memory-based strategy to enhance DPL's robustness for the small batch sizes often encountered in TTA. We update each class's pseudo-feature from a memory in a momentum manner and insert an additional DPL loss. Finally, we introduce a consistency regularization-based approach to leverage samples with unconfident pseudo-labels. This approach transfers feature styles of samples with unconfident pseudo-labels to those with confident pseudo-labels. Thus, more reliable samples for TTA are created. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on domain generalization benchmarks, and reliably improve the performance of self-training-based methods on image corruption benchmarks. The code will be released.
Pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown remarkable few-shot learning capabilities when provided with properly formatted examples. However, selecting the "best" examples remains an open challenge. We propose a complexity-based prompt selection approach for sequence tagging tasks. This approach avoids the training of a dedicated model for selection of examples, and instead uses certain metrics to align the syntactico-semantic complexity of test sentences and examples. We use both sentence- and word-level metrics to match the complexity of examples to the (test) sentence being considered. Our results demonstrate that our approach extracts greater performance from PLMs: it achieves state-of-the-art performance on few-shot NER, achieving a 5% absolute improvement in F1 score on the CoNLL2003 dataset for GPT-4. We also see large gains of upto 28.85 points (F1/Acc.) in smaller models like GPT-j-6B.
We consider unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation in which the model is trained on a labeled source dataset and adapted to an unlabeled target dataset. Unfortunately, current self-training methods are susceptible to misclassified pseudo-labels resulting from erroneous predictions. Since certain classes are typically associated with less reliable predictions in UDA, reducing the impact of such pseudo-labels without skewing the training towards some classes is notoriously difficult. To this end, we propose an extensive cut-and-paste strategy (ECAP) to leverage reliable pseudo-labels through data augmentation. Specifically, ECAP maintains a memory bank of pseudo-labeled target samples throughout training and cut-and-pastes the most confident ones onto the current training batch. We implement ECAP on top of the recent method MIC and boost its performance on two synthetic-to-real domain adaptation benchmarks. Notably, MIC+ECAP reaches an unprecedented performance of 69.1 mIoU on the Synthia->Cityscapes benchmark. Our code is available at //github.com/ErikBrorsson/ECAP.
Explicit finite-sample statistical guarantees on model performance are an important ingredient in responsible machine learning. Previous work has focused mainly on bounding either the expected loss of a predictor or the probability that an individual prediction will incur a loss value in a specified range. However, for many high-stakes applications, it is crucial to understand and control the dispersion of a loss distribution, or the extent to which different members of a population experience unequal effects of algorithmic decisions. We initiate the study of distribution-free control of statistical dispersion measures with societal implications and propose a simple yet flexible framework that allows us to handle a much richer class of statistical functionals beyond previous work. Our methods are verified through experiments in toxic comment detection, medical imaging, and film recommendation.
Video stabilization is a longstanding computer vision problem, particularly pixel-level synthesis solutions for video stabilization which synthesize full frames add to the complexity of this task. These techniques aim to stabilize videos by synthesizing full frames while enhancing the stability of the considered video. This intensifies the complexity of the task due to the distinct mix of unique motion profiles and visual content present in each video sequence, making robust generalization with fixed parameters difficult. In our study, we introduce a novel approach to enhance the performance of pixel-level synthesis solutions for video stabilization by adapting these models to individual input video sequences. The proposed adaptation exploits low-level visual cues accessible during test-time to improve both the stability and quality of resulting videos. We highlight the efficacy of our methodology of "test-time adaptation" through simple fine-tuning of one of these models, followed by significant stability gain via the integration of meta-learning techniques. Notably, significant improvement is achieved with only a single adaptation step. The versatility of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by consistently improving the performance of various pixel-level synthesis models for video stabilization in real-world scenarios.
Diffusion models create data from noise by inverting the forward paths of data towards noise and have emerged as a powerful generative modeling technique for high-dimensional, perceptual data such as images and videos. Rectified flow is a recent generative model formulation that connects data and noise in a straight line. Despite its better theoretical properties and conceptual simplicity, it is not yet decisively established as standard practice. In this work, we improve existing noise sampling techniques for training rectified flow models by biasing them towards perceptually relevant scales. Through a large-scale study, we demonstrate the superior performance of this approach compared to established diffusion formulations for high-resolution text-to-image synthesis. Additionally, we present a novel transformer-based architecture for text-to-image generation that uses separate weights for the two modalities and enables a bidirectional flow of information between image and text tokens, improving text comprehension, typography, and human preference ratings. We demonstrate that this architecture follows predictable scaling trends and correlates lower validation loss to improved text-to-image synthesis as measured by various metrics and human evaluations. Our largest models outperform state-of-the-art models, and we will make our experimental data, code, and model weights publicly available.
The stability-plasticity dilemma is a major challenge in continual learning, as it involves balancing the conflicting objectives of maintaining performance on previous tasks while learning new tasks. In this paper, we propose the recall-oriented continual learning framework to address this challenge. Inspired by the human brain's ability to separate the mechanisms responsible for stability and plasticity, our framework consists of a two-level architecture where an inference network effectively acquires new knowledge and a generative network recalls past knowledge when necessary. In particular, to maximize the stability of past knowledge, we investigate the complexity of knowledge depending on different representations, and thereby introducing generative adversarial meta-model (GAMM) that incrementally learns task-specific parameters instead of input data samples of the task. Through our experiments, we show that our framework not only effectively learns new knowledge without any disruption but also achieves high stability of previous knowledge in both task-aware and task-agnostic learning scenarios. Our code is available at: //github.com/bigdata-inha/recall-oriented-cl-framework.
Rare object detection is a fundamental task in applied geospatial machine learning, however is often challenging due to large amounts of high-resolution satellite or aerial imagery and few or no labeled positive samples to start with. This paper addresses the problem of bootstrapping such a rare object detection task assuming there is no labeled data and no spatial prior over the area of interest. We propose novel offline and online cluster-based approaches for sampling patches that are significantly more efficient, in terms of exposing positive samples to a human annotator, than random sampling. We apply our methods for identifying bomas, or small enclosures for herd animals, in the Serengeti Mara region of Kenya and Tanzania. We demonstrate a significant enhancement in detection efficiency, achieving a positive sampling rate increase from 2% (random) to 30%. This advancement enables effective machine learning mapping even with minimal labeling budgets, exemplified by an F1 score on the boma detection task of 0.51 with a budget of 300 total patches.
In search of a simple baseline for Deep Reinforcement Learning in locomotion tasks, we propose a model-free open-loop strategy. By leveraging prior knowledge and the elegance of simple oscillators to generate periodic joint motions, it achieves respectable performance in five different locomotion environments, with a number of tunable parameters that is a tiny fraction of the thousands typically required by DRL algorithms. We conduct two additional experiments using open-loop oscillators to identify current shortcomings of these algorithms. Our results show that, compared to the baseline, DRL is more prone to performance degradation when exposed to sensor noise or failure. Furthermore, we demonstrate a successful transfer from simulation to reality using an elastic quadruped, where RL fails without randomization or reward engineering. Overall, the proposed baseline and associated experiments highlight the existing limitations of DRL for robotic applications, provide insights on how to address them, and encourage reflection on the costs of complexity and generality.
Reservoir computing (RC) offers a neuromorphic framework that is particularly effective for processing spatiotemporal signals. Known for its temporal processing prowess, RC significantly lowers training costs compared to conventional recurrent neural networks. A key component in its hardware deployment is the ability to generate dynamic reservoir states. Our research introduces a novel dual-memory RC system, integrating a short-term memory via a WOx-based memristor, capable of achieving 16 distinct states encoded over 4 bits, and a long-term memory component using a TiOx-based memristor within the readout layer. We thoroughly examine both memristor types and leverage the RC system to process temporal data sets. The performance of the proposed RC system is validated through two benchmark tasks: isolated spoken digit recognition with incomplete inputs and Mackey-Glass time series prediction. The system delivered an impressive 98.84% accuracy in digit recognition and sustained a low normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) of 0.036 in the time series prediction task, underscoring its capability. This study illuminates the adeptness of memristor-based RC systems in managing intricate temporal challenges, laying the groundwork for further innovations in neuromorphic computing.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.