We explore contemporary robust classification algorithms for overcoming class-dependant labelling noise: Forward, Importance Re-weighting and T-revision. The classifiers are trained and evaluated on class-conditional random label noise data while the final test data is clean. We demonstrate methods for estimating the transition matrix in order to obtain better classifier performance when working with noisy data. We apply deep learning to three data-sets and derive an end-to-end analysis with unknown noise on the CIFAR data-set from scratch. The effectiveness and robustness of the classifiers are analysed, and we compare and contrast the results of each experiment are using top-1 accuracy as our criterion.
Federated learning enables multiple parties to collaboratively train a machine learning model without communicating their local data. A key challenge in federated learning is to handle the heterogeneity of local data distribution across parties. Although many studies have been proposed to address this challenge, we find that they fail to achieve high performance in image datasets with deep learning models. In this paper, we propose MOON: model-contrastive federated learning. MOON is a simple and effective federated learning framework. The key idea of MOON is to utilize the similarity between model representations to correct the local training of individual parties, i.e., conducting contrastive learning in model-level. Our extensive experiments show that MOON significantly outperforms the other state-of-the-art federated learning algorithms on various image classification tasks.
We propose a novel framework to perform classification via deep learning in the presence of noisy annotations. When trained on noisy labels, deep neural networks have been observed to first fit the training data with clean labels during an "early learning" phase, before eventually memorizing the examples with false labels. We prove that early learning and memorization are fundamental phenomena in high-dimensional classification tasks, even in simple linear models, and give a theoretical explanation in this setting. Motivated by these findings, we develop a new technique for noisy classification tasks, which exploits the progress of the early learning phase. In contrast with existing approaches, which use the model output during early learning to detect the examples with clean labels, and either ignore or attempt to correct the false labels, we take a different route and instead capitalize on early learning via regularization. There are two key elements to our approach. First, we leverage semi-supervised learning techniques to produce target probabilities based on the model outputs. Second, we design a regularization term that steers the model towards these targets, implicitly preventing memorization of the false labels. The resulting framework is shown to provide robustness to noisy annotations on several standard benchmarks and real-world datasets, where it achieves results comparable to the state of the art.
This paper presents SimCLR: a simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. We simplify recently proposed contrastive self-supervised learning algorithms without requiring specialized architectures or a memory bank. In order to understand what enables the contrastive prediction tasks to learn useful representations, we systematically study the major components of our framework. We show that (1) composition of data augmentations plays a critical role in defining effective predictive tasks, (2) introducing a learnable nonlinear transformation between the representation and the contrastive loss substantially improves the quality of the learned representations, and (3) contrastive learning benefits from larger batch sizes and more training steps compared to supervised learning. By combining these findings, we are able to considerably outperform previous methods for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A linear classifier trained on self-supervised representations learned by SimCLR achieves 76.5% top-1 accuracy, which is a 7% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art, matching the performance of a supervised ResNet-50. When fine-tuned on only 1% of the labels, we achieve 85.8% top-5 accuracy, outperforming AlexNet with 100X fewer labels.
We present a simple self-training method that achieves 87.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, which is 1.0% better than the state-of-the-art model that requires 3.5B weakly labeled Instagram images. On robustness test sets, it improves ImageNet-A top-1 accuracy from 16.6% to 74.2%, reduces ImageNet-C mean corruption error from 45.7 to 31.2, and reduces ImageNet-P mean flip rate from 27.8 to 16.1. To achieve this result, we first train an EfficientNet model on labeled ImageNet images and use it as a teacher to generate pseudo labels on 300M unlabeled images. We then train a larger EfficientNet as a student model on the combination of labeled and pseudo labeled images. We iterate this process by putting back the student as the teacher. During the generation of the pseudo labels, the teacher is not noised so that the pseudo labels are as good as possible. But during the learning of the student, we inject noise such as data augmentation, dropout, stochastic depth to the student so that the noised student is forced to learn harder from the pseudo labels.
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is to predict the sentiment polarity towards a particular aspect in a sentence. Recently, this task has been widely addressed by the neural attention mechanism, which computes attention weights to softly select words for generating aspect-specific sentence representations. The attention is expected to concentrate on opinion words for accurate sentiment prediction. However, attention is prone to be distracted by noisy or misleading words, or opinion words from other aspects. In this paper, we propose an alternative hard-selection approach, which determines the start and end positions of the opinion snippet, and selects the words between these two positions for sentiment prediction. Specifically, we learn deep associations between the sentence and aspect, and the long-term dependencies within the sentence by leveraging the pre-trained BERT model. We further detect the opinion snippet by self-critical reinforcement learning. Especially, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and prove that our hard-selection approach outperforms soft-selection approaches when handling multi-aspect sentences.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
In information retrieval (IR) and related tasks, term weighting approaches typically consider the frequency of the term in the document and in the collection in order to compute a score reflecting the importance of the term for the document. In tasks characterized by the presence of training data (such as text classification) it seems logical that the term weighting function should take into account the distribution (as estimated from training data) of the term across the classes of interest. Although `supervised term weighting' approaches that use this intuition have been described before, they have failed to show consistent improvements. In this article we analyse the possible reasons for this failure, and call consolidated assumptions into question. Following this criticism we propose a novel supervised term weighting approach that, instead of relying on any predefined formula, learns a term weighting function optimised on the training set of interest; we dub this approach \emph{Learning to Weight} (LTW). The experiments that we run on several well-known benchmarks, and using different learning methods, show that our method outperforms previous term weighting approaches in text classification.
We study object recognition under the constraint that each object class is only represented by very few observations. In such cases, naive supervised learning would lead to severe over-fitting in deep neural networks due to limited training data. We tackle this problem by creating much more training data through label propagation from the few labeled examples to a vast collection of unannotated images. Our main insight is that such a label propagation scheme can be highly effective when the similarity metric used for propagation is learned and transferred from other related domains with lots of data. We test our approach on semi-supervised learning, transfer learning and few-shot recognition, where we learn our similarity metric using various supervised/unsupervised pretraining methods, and transfer it to unlabeled data across different data distributions. By taking advantage of unlabeled data in this way, we achieve significant improvements on all three tasks. Notably, our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques by an absolute $20\%$ for semi-supervised learning on CIFAR10, $10\%$ for transfer learning from ImageNet to CIFAR10, and $6\%$ for few-shot recognition on mini-ImageNet, when labeled examples are limited.
Deep learning has shown promising results in medical image analysis, however, the lack of very large annotated datasets confines its full potential. Although transfer learning with ImageNet pre-trained classification models can alleviate the problem, constrained image sizes and model complexities can lead to unnecessary increase in computational cost and decrease in performance. As many common morphological features are usually shared by different classification tasks of an organ, it is greatly beneficial if we can extract such features to improve classification with limited samples. Therefore, inspired by the idea of curriculum learning, we propose a strategy for building medical image classifiers using features from segmentation networks. By using a segmentation network pre-trained on similar data as the classification task, the machine can first learn the simpler shape and structural concepts before tackling the actual classification problem which usually involves more complicated concepts. Using our proposed framework on a 3D three-class brain tumor type classification problem, we achieved 82% accuracy on 191 testing samples with 91 training samples. When applying to a 2D nine-class cardiac semantic level classification problem, we achieved 86% accuracy on 263 testing samples with 108 training samples. Comparisons with ImageNet pre-trained classifiers and classifiers trained from scratch are presented.
Clustering and classification critically rely on distance metrics that provide meaningful comparisons between data points. We present mixed-integer optimization approaches to find optimal distance metrics that generalize the Mahalanobis metric extensively studied in the literature. Additionally, we generalize and improve upon leading methods by removing reliance on pre-designated "target neighbors," "triplets," and "similarity pairs." Another salient feature of our method is its ability to enable active learning by recommending precise regions to sample after an optimal metric is computed to improve classification performance. This targeted acquisition can significantly reduce computational burden by ensuring training data completeness, representativeness, and economy. We demonstrate classification and computational performance of the algorithms through several simple and intuitive examples, followed by results on real image and medical datasets.