We develop methods for forming prediction sets in an online setting where the data generating distribution is allowed to vary over time in an unknown fashion. Our framework builds on ideas from conformal inference to provide a general wrapper that can be combined with any black box method that produces point predictions of the unseen label or estimated quantiles of its distribution. While previous conformal inference methods rely on the assumption that the data points are exchangeable, our adaptive approach provably achieves the desired coverage frequency over long-time intervals irrespective of the true data generating process. We accomplish this by modelling the distribution shift as a learning problem in a single parameter whose optimal value is varying over time and must be continuously re-estimated. We test our method, adaptive conformal inference, on two real world datasets and find that its predictions are robust to visible and significant distribution shifts.
Correlations between factors of variation are prevalent in real-world data. Machine learning algorithms may benefit from exploiting such correlations, as they can increase predictive performance on noisy data. However, often such correlations are not robust (e.g., they may change between domains, datasets, or applications) and we wish to avoid exploiting them. Disentanglement methods aim to learn representations which capture different factors of variation in latent subspaces. A common approach involves minimizing the mutual information between latent subspaces, such that each encodes a single underlying attribute. However, this fails when attributes are correlated. We solve this problem by enforcing independence between subspaces conditioned on the available attributes, which allows us to remove only dependencies that are not due to the correlation structure present in the training data. We achieve this via an adversarial approach to minimize the conditional mutual information (CMI) between subspaces with respect to categorical variables. We first show theoretically that CMI minimization is a good objective for robust disentanglement on linear problems with Gaussian data. We then apply our method on real-world datasets based on MNIST and CelebA, and show that it yields models that are disentangled and robust under correlation shift, including in weakly supervised settings.
A fundamental and still largely unsolved question in the context of Generative Adversarial Networks is whether they are truly able to capture the real data distribution and, consequently, to sample from it. In particular, the multidimensional nature of image distributions leads to a complex evaluation of the diversity of GAN distributions. Existing approaches provide only a partial understanding of this issue, leaving the question unanswered. In this work, we introduce a loop-training scheme for the systematic investigation of observable shifts between the distributions of real training data and GAN generated data. Additionally, we introduce several bounded measures for distribution shifts, which are both easy to compute and to interpret. Overall, the combination of these methods allows an explorative investigation of innate limitations of current GAN algorithms. Our experiments on different data-sets and multiple state-of-the-art GAN architectures show large shifts between input and output distributions, showing that existing theoretical guarantees towards the convergence of output distributions appear not to be holding in practice.
Handling clustering problems are important in data statistics, pattern recognition and image processing. The mean-shift algorithm, a common unsupervised algorithms, is widely used to solve clustering problems. However, the mean-shift algorithm is restricted by its huge computational resource cost. In previous research[10], we proposed a novel GPU-accelerated Faster Mean-shift algorithm, which greatly speed up the cosine-embedding clustering problem. In this study, we extend and improve the previous algorithm to handle Euclidean distance metrics. Different from conventional GPU-based mean-shift algorithms, our algorithm adopts novel Seed Selection & Early Stopping approaches, which greatly increase computing speed and reduce GPU memory consumption. In the simulation testing, when processing a 200K points clustering problem, our algorithm achieved around 3 times speedup compared to the state-of-the-art GPU-based mean-shift algorithms with optimized GPU memory consumption. Moreover, in this study, we implemented a plug-and-play model for faster mean-shift algorithm, which can be easily deployed. (Plug-and-play model is available: //github.com/masqm/Faster-Mean-Shift-Euc)
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
Invariant approaches have been remarkably successful in tackling the problem of domain generalization, where the objective is to perform inference on data distributions different from those used in training. In our work, we investigate whether it is possible to leverage domain information from the unseen test samples themselves. We propose a domain-adaptive approach consisting of two steps: a) we first learn a discriminative domain embedding from unsupervised training examples, and b) use this domain embedding as supplementary information to build a domain-adaptive model, that takes both the input as well as its domain into account while making predictions. For unseen domains, our method simply uses few unlabelled test examples to construct the domain embedding. This enables adaptive classification on any unseen domain. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on various domain generalization benchmarks. In addition, we introduce the first real-world, large-scale domain generalization benchmark, Geo-YFCC, containing 1.1M samples over 40 training, 7 validation, and 15 test domains, orders of magnitude larger than prior work. We show that the existing approaches either do not scale to this dataset or underperform compared to the simple baseline of training a model on the union of data from all training domains. In contrast, our approach achieves a significant improvement.
While existing work in robust deep learning has focused on small pixel-level $\ell_p$ norm-based perturbations, this may not account for perturbations encountered in several real world settings. In many such cases although test data might not be available, broad specifications about the types of perturbations (such as an unknown degree of rotation) may be known. We consider a setup where robustness is expected over an unseen test domain that is not i.i.d. but deviates from the training domain. While this deviation may not be exactly known, its broad characterization is specified a priori, in terms of attributes. We propose an adversarial training approach which learns to generate new samples so as to maximize exposure of the classifier to the attributes-space, without having access to the data from the test domain. Our adversarial training solves a min-max optimization problem, with the inner maximization generating adversarial perturbations, and the outer minimization finding model parameters by optimizing the loss on adversarial perturbations generated from the inner maximization. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on three types of naturally occurring perturbations -- object-related shifts, geometric transformations, and common image corruptions. Our approach enables deep neural networks to be robust against a wide range of naturally occurring perturbations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach by showing the robustness gains of deep neural networks trained using our adversarial training on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and a new variant of the CLEVR dataset.
Recently, adaptive inference is gaining increasing attention due to its high computational efficiency. Different from existing works, which mainly exploit architecture redundancy for adaptive network design, in this paper, we focus on spatial redundancy of input samples, and propose a novel Resolution Adaptive Network (RANet). Our motivation is that low-resolution representations can be sufficient for classifying "easy" samples containing canonical objects, while high-resolution features are curial for recognizing some "hard" ones. In RANet, input images are first routed to a lightweight sub-network that efficiently extracts coarse feature maps, and samples with high confident predictions will exit early from the sub-network. The high-resolution paths are only activated for those "hard" samples whose previous predictions are unreliable. By adaptively processing the features in varying resolutions, the proposed RANet can significantly improve its computational efficiency. Experiments on three classification benchmark tasks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in both anytime prediction setting and budgeted batch classification setting.
We propose an approach for unsupervised adaptation of object detectors from label-rich to label-poor domains which can significantly reduce annotation costs associated with detection. Recently, approaches that align distributions of source and target images using an adversarial loss have been proven effective for adapting object classifiers. However, for object detection, fully matching the entire distributions of source and target images to each other at the global image level may fail, as domains could have distinct scene layouts and different combinations of objects. On the other hand, strong matching of local features such as texture and color makes sense, as it does not change category level semantics. This motivates us to propose a novel approach for detector adaptation based on strong local alignment and weak global alignment. Our key contribution is the weak alignment model, which focuses the adversarial alignment loss on images that are globally similar and puts less emphasis on aligning images that are globally dissimilar. Additionally, we design the strong domain alignment model to only look at local receptive fields of the feature map. We empirically verify the effectiveness of our approach on several detection datasets comprising both large and small domain shifts.
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.
Methods that align distributions by minimizing an adversarial distance between them have recently achieved impressive results. However, these approaches are difficult to optimize with gradient descent and they often do not converge well without careful hyperparameter tuning and proper initialization. We investigate whether turning the adversarial min-max problem into an optimization problem by replacing the maximization part with its dual improves the quality of the resulting alignment and explore its connections to Maximum Mean Discrepancy. Our empirical results suggest that using the dual formulation for the restricted family of linear discriminators results in a more stable convergence to a desirable solution when compared with the performance of a primal min-max GAN-like objective and an MMD objective under the same restrictions. We test our hypothesis on the problem of aligning two synthetic point clouds on a plane and on a real-image domain adaptation problem on digits. In both cases, the dual formulation yields an iterative procedure that gives more stable and monotonic improvement over time.