Researchers have been facing a difficult problem that data generation mechanisms could be influenced by internal or external factors leading to the training and test data with quite different distributions, consequently traditional classification or regression from the training set is unable to achieve satisfying results on test data. In this paper, we address this nontrivial domain generalization problem by finding a central subspace in which domain-based covariance is minimized while the functional relationship is simultaneously maximally preserved. We propose a novel variance measurement for multiple domains so as to minimize the difference between conditional distributions across domains with solid theoretical demonstration and supports, meanwhile, the algorithm preserves the functional relationship via maximizing the variance of conditional expectations given output. Furthermore, we also provide a fast implementation that requires much less computation and smaller memory for large-scale matrix operations, suitable for not only domain generalization but also other kernel-based eigenvalue decompositions. To show the practicality of the proposed method, we compare our methods against some well-known dimension reduction and domain generalization techniques on both synthetic data and real-world applications. We show that for small-scale datasets, we are able to achieve better quantitative results indicating better generalization performance over unseen test datasets. For large-scale problems, the proposed fast implementation maintains the quantitative performance but at a substantially lower computational cost.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
We present and analyze a momentum-based gradient method for training linear classifiers with an exponentially-tailed loss (e.g., the exponential or logistic loss), which maximizes the classification margin on separable data at a rate of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/t^2)$. This contrasts with a rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/\log(t))$ for standard gradient descent, and $\mathcal{O}(1/t)$ for normalized gradient descent. This momentum-based method is derived via the convex dual of the maximum-margin problem, and specifically by applying Nesterov acceleration to this dual, which manages to result in a simple and intuitive method in the primal. This dual view can also be used to derive a stochastic variant, which performs adaptive non-uniform sampling via the dual variables.
Optimal transport distances have found many applications in machine learning for their capacity to compare non-parametric probability distributions. Yet their algorithmic complexity generally prevents their direct use on large scale datasets. Among the possible strategies to alleviate this issue, practitioners can rely on computing estimates of these distances over subsets of data, {\em i.e.} minibatches. While computationally appealing, we highlight in this paper some limits of this strategy, arguing it can lead to undesirable smoothing effects. As an alternative, we suggest that the same minibatch strategy coupled with unbalanced optimal transport can yield more robust behavior. We discuss the associated theoretical properties, such as unbiased estimators, existence of gradients and concentration bounds. Our experimental study shows that in challenging problems associated to domain adaptation, the use of unbalanced optimal transport leads to significantly better results, competing with or surpassing recent baselines.
To learn intrinsic low-dimensional structures from high-dimensional data that most discriminate between classes, we propose the principle of Maximal Coding Rate Reduction ($\text{MCR}^2$), an information-theoretic measure that maximizes the coding rate difference between the whole dataset and the sum of each individual class. We clarify its relationships with most existing frameworks such as cross-entropy, information bottleneck, information gain, contractive and contrastive learning, and provide theoretical guarantees for learning diverse and discriminative features. The coding rate can be accurately computed from finite samples of degenerate subspace-like distributions and can learn intrinsic representations in supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised settings in a unified manner. Empirically, the representations learned using this principle alone are significantly more robust to label corruptions in classification than those using cross-entropy, and can lead to state-of-the-art results in clustering mixed data from self-learned invariant features.
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. Existing neural networks mainly operate in the spatial domain with fixed input sizes. For practical applications, images are usually large and have to be downsampled to the predetermined input size of neural networks. Even though the downsampling operations reduce computation and the required communication bandwidth, it removes both redundant and salient information obliviously, which results in accuracy degradation. Inspired by digital signal processing theories, we analyze the spectral bias from the frequency perspective and propose a learning-based frequency selection method to identify the trivial frequency components which can be removed without accuracy loss. The proposed method of learning in the frequency domain leverages identical structures of the well-known neural networks, such as ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and Mask R-CNN, while accepting the frequency-domain information as the input. Experiment results show that learning in the frequency domain with static channel selection can achieve higher accuracy than the conventional spatial downsampling approach and meanwhile further reduce the input data size. Specifically for ImageNet classification with the same input size, the proposed method achieves 1.41% and 0.66% top-1 accuracy improvements on ResNet-50 and MobileNetV2, respectively. Even with half input size, the proposed method still improves the top-1 accuracy on ResNet-50 by 1%. In addition, we observe a 0.8% average precision improvement on Mask R-CNN for instance segmentation on the COCO dataset.
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a highly popular model-free reinforcement learning (RL) approach. However, in continuous state and actions spaces and a Gaussian policy -- common in computer animation and robotics -- PPO is prone to getting stuck in local optima. In this paper, we observe a tendency of PPO to prematurely shrink the exploration variance, which naturally leads to slow progress. Motivated by this, we borrow ideas from CMA-ES, a black-box optimization method designed for intelligent adaptive Gaussian exploration, to derive PPO-CMA, a novel proximal policy optimization approach that can expand the exploration variance on objective function slopes and shrink the variance when close to the optimum. This is implemented by using separate neural networks for policy mean and variance and training the mean and variance in separate passes. Our experiments demonstrate a clear improvement over vanilla PPO in many difficult OpenAI Gym MuJoCo tasks.
In this paper, we propose to tackle the problem of reducing discrepancies between multiple domains referred to as multi-source domain adaptation and consider it under the target shift assumption: in all domains we aim to solve a classification problem with the same output classes, but with labels' proportions differing across them. We design a method based on optimal transport, a theory that is gaining momentum to tackle adaptation problems in machine learning due to its efficiency in aligning probability distributions. Our method performs multi-source adaptation and target shift correction simultaneously by learning the class probabilities of the unlabeled target sample and the coupling allowing to align two (or more) probability distributions. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data related to satellite image segmentation task show the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art.
We develop an approach to risk minimization and stochastic optimization that provides a convex surrogate for variance, allowing near-optimal and computationally efficient trading between approximation and estimation error. Our approach builds off of techniques for distributionally robust optimization and Owen's empirical likelihood, and we provide a number of finite-sample and asymptotic results characterizing the theoretical performance of the estimator. In particular, we show that our procedure comes with certificates of optimality, achieving (in some scenarios) faster rates of convergence than empirical risk minimization by virtue of automatically balancing bias and variance. We give corroborating empirical evidence showing that in practice, the estimator indeed trades between variance and absolute performance on a training sample, improving out-of-sample (test) performance over standard empirical risk minimization for a number of classification problems.
In this paper, we study the optimal convergence rate for distributed convex optimization problems in networks. We model the communication restrictions imposed by the network as a set of affine constraints and provide optimal complexity bounds for four different setups, namely: the function $F(\xb) \triangleq \sum_{i=1}^{m}f_i(\xb)$ is strongly convex and smooth, either strongly convex or smooth or just convex. Our results show that Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent on the dual problem can be executed in a distributed manner and obtains the same optimal rates as in the centralized version of the problem (up to constant or logarithmic factors) with an additional cost related to the spectral gap of the interaction matrix. Finally, we discuss some extensions to the proposed setup such as proximal friendly functions, time-varying graphs, improvement of the condition numbers.
In this paper we introduce a covariance framework for the analysis of EEG and MEG data that takes into account observed temporal stationarity on small time scales and trial-to-trial variations. We formulate a model for the covariance matrix, which is a Kronecker product of three components that correspond to space, time and epochs/trials, and consider maximum likelihood estimation of the unknown parameter values. An iterative algorithm that finds approximations of the maximum likelihood estimates is proposed. We perform a simulation study to assess the performance of the estimator and investigate the influence of different assumptions about the covariance factors on the estimated covariance matrix and on its components. Apart from that, we illustrate our method on real EEG and MEG data sets. The proposed covariance model is applicable in a variety of cases where spontaneous EEG or MEG acts as source of noise and realistic noise covariance estimates are needed for accurate dipole localization, such as in evoked activity studies, or where the properties of spontaneous EEG or MEG are themselves the topic of interest, such as in combined EEG/fMRI experiments in which the correlation between EEG and fMRI signals is investigated.