Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for cross-task generalization consists in pre-training adapters on a multi-task training set before few-shot adaptation to test tasks. Polytropon [Ponti et al., 2023] ($\texttt{Poly}$) jointly learns an inventory of adapters and a routing function that selects a (variable-size) subset of adapters for each task during both pre-training and few-shot adaptation. In this paper, we investigate the role that adapter routing plays in its success and design new variants based on our findings. First, we build on the intuition that finer-grained routing provides more expressivity. Hence, we propose $\texttt{MHR}$ (Multi-Head Routing) which combines subsets of adapter parameters and outperforms $\texttt{Poly}$ under a comparable parameter budget; by only fine-tuning the routing function and not the adapters ($\texttt{MHR}$-$z$) we achieve competitive performance with extreme parameter efficiency. Second, we find that $\texttt{Poly}$/$\texttt{MHR}$ performance is a result of better multi-task optimization, rather than modular inductive biases that facilitate adapter recombination and local adaptation, as previously hypothesized. In fact, we find that $\texttt{MHR}$ exhibits high gradient alignment between training tasks. We find that routing is most beneficial during multi-task pre-training rather than during few-shot adaptation and propose $\texttt{MHR}$-$\mu$, which discards routing and fine-tunes the average of the pre-trained adapters on each downstream tasks. This establishes $\texttt{MHR}$-$\mu$ as an effective method for single-adapter fine-tuning. We also show that $\texttt{MHR}$-$\mu$ can be used as an effective zero-shot transfer method by training the average of the pre-trained adapters for a few additional steps on the multi-task training set: this yields gains up to 3% on absolute accuracy w.r.t. the baselines.
Identifying labels that did not appear during training, known as multi-label zero-shot learning, is a non-trivial task in computer vision. To this end, recent studies have attempted to explore the multi-modal knowledge of vision-language pre-training (VLP) models by knowledge distillation, allowing to recognize unseen labels in an open-vocabulary manner. However, experimental evidence shows that knowledge distillation is suboptimal and provides limited performance gain in unseen label prediction. In this paper, a novel query-based knowledge sharing paradigm is proposed to explore the multi-modal knowledge from the pretrained VLP model for open-vocabulary multi-label classification. Specifically, a set of learnable label-agnostic query tokens is trained to extract critical vision knowledge from the input image, and further shared across all labels, allowing them to select tokens of interest as visual clues for recognition. Besides, we propose an effective prompt pool for robust label embedding, and reformulate the standard ranking learning into a form of classification to allow the magnitude of feature vectors for matching, which both significantly benefit label recognition. Experimental results show that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on zero-shot task by 5.9% and 4.5% in mAP on the NUS-WIDE and Open Images, respectively.
We describe a new general method for segmentation in MRI scans using Topological Data Analysis (TDA), offering several advantages over traditional machine learning approaches. It works in three steps, first identifying the whole object to segment via automatic thresholding, then detecting a distinctive subset whose topology is known in advance, and finally deducing the various components of the segmentation. Although convoking classical ideas of TDA, such an algorithm has never been proposed separately from deep learning methods. To achieve this, our approach takes into account, in addition to the homology of the image, the localization of representative cycles, a piece of information that seems never to have been exploited in this context. In particular, it offers the ability to perform segmentation without the need for large annotated data sets. TDA also provides a more interpretable and stable framework for segmentation by explicitly mapping topological features to segmentation components. By adapting the geometric object to be detected, the algorithm can be adjusted to a wide range of data segmentation challenges. We carefully study the examples of glioblastoma segmentation in brain MRI, where a sphere is to be detected, as well as myocardium in cardiac MRI, involving a cylinder, and cortical plate detection in fetal brain MRI, whose 2D slices are circles. We compare our method to state-of-the-art algorithms.
Federated learning (FL) underpins advancements in privacy-preserving distributed computing by collaboratively training neural networks without exposing clients' raw data. Current FL paradigms primarily focus on uni-modal data, while exploiting the knowledge from distributed multimodal data remains largely unexplored. Existing multimodal FL (MFL) solutions are mainly designed for statistical or modality heterogeneity from the input side, however, have yet to solve the fundamental issue,"modality imbalance", in distributed conditions, which can lead to inadequate information exploitation and heterogeneous knowledge aggregation on different modalities.In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-Modal Infiltration Federated Learning (FedCMI) framework that effectively alleviates modality imbalance and knowledge heterogeneity via knowledge transfer from the global dominant modality. To avoid the loss of information in the weak modality due to merely imitating the behavior of dominant modality, we design the two-projector module to integrate the knowledge from dominant modality while still promoting the local feature exploitation of weak modality. In addition, we introduce a class-wise temperature adaptation scheme to achieve fair performance across different classes. Extensive experiments over popular datasets are conducted and give us a gratifying confirmation of the proposed framework for fully exploring the information of each modality in MFL.
Incorporating symmetry as an inductive bias into multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has led to improvements in generalization, data efficiency, and physical consistency. While prior research has succeeded in using perfect symmetry prior, the realm of partial symmetry in the multi-agent domain remains unexplored. To fill in this gap, we introduce the partially symmetric Markov game, a new subclass of the Markov game. We then theoretically show that the performance error introduced by utilizing symmetry in MARL is bounded, implying that the symmetry prior can still be useful in MARL even in partial symmetry situations. Motivated by this insight, we propose the Partial Symmetry Exploitation (PSE) framework that is able to adaptively incorporate symmetry prior in MARL under different symmetry-breaking conditions. Specifically, by adaptively adjusting the exploitation of symmetry, our framework is able to achieve superior sample efficiency and overall performance of MARL algorithms. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed framework over baselines. Finally, we implement the proposed framework in real-world multi-robot testbed to show its superiority.
To date, most existing self-supervised learning methods are designed and optimized for image classification. These pre-trained models can be sub-optimal for dense prediction tasks due to the discrepancy between image-level prediction and pixel-level prediction. To fill this gap, we aim to design an effective, dense self-supervised learning method that directly works at the level of pixels (or local features) by taking into account the correspondence between local features. We present dense contrastive learning, which implements self-supervised learning by optimizing a pairwise contrastive (dis)similarity loss at the pixel level between two views of input images. Compared to the baseline method MoCo-v2, our method introduces negligible computation overhead (only <1% slower), but demonstrates consistently superior performance when transferring to downstream dense prediction tasks including object detection, semantic segmentation and instance segmentation; and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Specifically, over the strong MoCo-v2 baseline, our method achieves significant improvements of 2.0% AP on PASCAL VOC object detection, 1.1% AP on COCO object detection, 0.9% AP on COCO instance segmentation, 3.0% mIoU on PASCAL VOC semantic segmentation and 1.8% mIoU on Cityscapes semantic segmentation. Code is available at: //git.io/AdelaiDet
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.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Conventional methods for object detection typically require a substantial amount of training data and preparing such high-quality training data is very labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot object detection network that aims at detecting objects of unseen categories with only a few annotated examples. Central to our method are our Attention-RPN, Multi-Relation Detector and Contrastive Training strategy, which exploit the similarity between the few shot support set and query set to detect novel objects while suppressing false detection in the background. To train our network, we contribute a new dataset that contains 1000 categories of various objects with high-quality annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first datasets specifically designed for few-shot object detection. Once our few-shot network is trained, it can detect objects of unseen categories without further training or fine-tuning. Our method is general and has a wide range of potential applications. We produce a new state-of-the-art performance on different datasets in the few-shot setting. The dataset link is //github.com/fanq15/Few-Shot-Object-Detection-Dataset.
We propose to pre-train a unified language model for both autoencoding and partially autoregressive language modeling tasks using a novel training procedure, referred to as a pseudo-masked language model (PMLM). Given an input text with masked tokens, we rely on conventional masks to learn inter-relations between corrupted tokens and context via autoencoding, and pseudo masks to learn intra-relations between masked spans via partially autoregressive modeling. With well-designed position embeddings and self-attention masks, the context encodings are reused to avoid redundant computation. Moreover, conventional masks used for autoencoding provide global masking information, so that all the position embeddings are accessible in partially autoregressive language modeling. In addition, the two tasks pre-train a unified language model as a bidirectional encoder and a sequence-to-sequence decoder, respectively. Our experiments show that the unified language models pre-trained using PMLM achieve new state-of-the-art results on a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks across several widely used benchmarks.
Language model pre-training, such as BERT, has significantly improved the performances of many natural language processing tasks. However, pre-trained language models are usually computationally expensive and memory intensive, so it is difficult to effectively execute them on some resource-restricted devices. To accelerate inference and reduce model size while maintaining accuracy, we firstly propose a novel transformer distillation method that is a specially designed knowledge distillation (KD) method for transformer-based models. By leveraging this new KD method, the plenty of knowledge encoded in a large teacher BERT can be well transferred to a small student TinyBERT. Moreover, we introduce a new two-stage learning framework for TinyBERT, which performs transformer distillation at both the pre-training and task-specific learning stages. This framework ensures that TinyBERT can capture both the general-domain and task-specific knowledge of the teacher BERT. TinyBERT is empirically effective and achieves comparable results with BERT in GLUE datasets, while being 7.5x smaller and 9.4x faster on inference. TinyBERT is also significantly better than state-of-the-art baselines, even with only about 28% parameters and 31% inference time of baselines.