Machine learning models usually assume i.i.d data during training and testing, but data and tasks in real world often change over time. To emulate the transient nature of real world, we propose a challenging but practical task: text classification in-the-wild, which introduces different non-stationary training/testing stages. Decomposing a complex task into modular components can enable robust generalisation under such non-stationary environment. However, current modular approaches in NLP do not take advantage of recent advances in parameter efficient tuning of pretrained language models. To close this gap, we propose MODULARPROMPT, a label-modular prompt tuning framework for text classification tasks. In MODULARPROMPT, the input prompt consists of a sequence of soft label prompts, each encoding modular knowledge related to the corresponding class label. In two of most formidable settings, MODULARPROMPT outperforms relevant baselines by a large margin demonstrating strong generalisation ability. We also conduct comprehensive analysis to validate whether the learned prompts satisfy properties of a modular representation.
Real-world recognition system often encounters the challenge of unseen labels. To identify such unseen labels, multi-label zero-shot learning (ML-ZSL) focuses on transferring knowledge by a pre-trained textual label embedding (e.g., GloVe). However, such methods only exploit single-modal knowledge from a language model, while ignoring the rich semantic information inherent in image-text pairs. Instead, recently developed open-vocabulary (OV) based methods succeed in exploiting such information of image-text pairs in object detection, and achieve impressive performance. Inspired by the success of OV-based methods, we propose a novel open-vocabulary framework, named multi-modal knowledge transfer (MKT), for multi-label classification. Specifically, our method exploits multi-modal knowledge of image-text pairs based on a vision and language pre-training (VLP) model. To facilitate transferring the image-text matching ability of VLP model, knowledge distillation is employed to guarantee the consistency of image and label embeddings, along with prompt tuning to further update the label embeddings. To further enable the recognition of multiple objects, a simple but effective two-stream module is developed to capture both local and global features. Extensive experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on public benchmark datasets. The source code is available at //github.com/sunanhe/MKT.
Large-scale models trained on broad data have recently become the mainstream architecture in computer vision due to their strong generalization performance. In this paper, the main focus is on an emergent ability in large vision models, known as in-context learning, which allows inference on unseen tasks by conditioning on in-context examples (a.k.a.~prompt) without updating the model parameters. This concept has been well-known in natural language processing but has only been studied very recently for large vision models. We for the first time provide a comprehensive investigation on the impact of in-context examples in computer vision, and find that the performance is highly sensitive to the choice of in-context examples. To overcome the problem, we propose a prompt retrieval framework to automate the selection of in-context examples. Specifically, we present (1) an unsupervised prompt retrieval method based on nearest example search using an off-the-shelf model, and (2) a supervised prompt retrieval method, which trains a neural network to choose examples that directly maximize in-context learning performance. The results demonstrate that our methods can bring non-trivial improvements to visual in-context learning in comparison to the commonly-used random selection.
Text classification of unseen classes is a challenging Natural Language Processing task and is mainly attempted using two different types of approaches. Similarity-based approaches attempt to classify instances based on similarities between text document representations and class description representations. Zero-shot text classification approaches aim to generalize knowledge gained from a training task by assigning appropriate labels of unknown classes to text documents. Although existing studies have already investigated individual approaches to these categories, the experiments in literature do not provide a consistent comparison. This paper addresses this gap by conducting a systematic evaluation of different similarity-based and zero-shot approaches for text classification of unseen classes. Different state-of-the-art approaches are benchmarked on four text classification datasets, including a new dataset from the medical domain. Additionally, novel SimCSE and SBERT-based baselines are proposed, as other baselines used in existing work yield weak classification results and are easily outperformed. Finally, the novel similarity-based Lbl2TransformerVec approach is presented, which outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised text classification. Our experiments show that similarity-based approaches significantly outperform zero-shot approaches in most cases. Additionally, using SimCSE or SBERT embeddings instead of simpler text representations increases similarity-based classification results even further.
Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing the generalization capabilities of a model, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data over regularizing the objective to limiting the amount data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation (C1) and a taxonomy for existing works (C2), this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims to achieve a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners (C3). Derived from the taxonomy, we divided more than 100 methods into 12 different groupings and provide state-of-the-art references expounding which methods are highly promising (C4). Finally, research perspectives that may constitute a building block for future work are given (C5).
Artificial neural networks thrive in solving the classification problem for a particular rigid task, acquiring knowledge through generalized learning behaviour from a distinct training phase. The resulting network resembles a static entity of knowledge, with endeavours to extend this knowledge without targeting the original task resulting in a catastrophic forgetting. Continual learning shifts this paradigm towards networks that can continually accumulate knowledge over different tasks without the need to retrain from scratch. We focus on task incremental classification, where tasks arrive sequentially and are delineated by clear boundaries. Our main contributions concern 1) a taxonomy and extensive overview of the state-of-the-art, 2) a novel framework to continually determine the stability-plasticity trade-off of the continual learner, 3) a comprehensive experimental comparison of 11 state-of-the-art continual learning methods and 4 baselines. We empirically scrutinize method strengths and weaknesses on three benchmarks, considering Tiny Imagenet and large-scale unbalanced iNaturalist and a sequence of recognition datasets. We study the influence of model capacity, weight decay and dropout regularization, and the order in which the tasks are presented, and qualitatively compare methods in terms of required memory, computation time, and storage.
While deep learning strategies achieve outstanding results in computer vision tasks, one issue remains. The current strategies rely heavily on a huge amount of labeled data. In many real-world problems it is not feasible to create such an amount of labeled training data. Therefore, researchers try to incorporate unlabeled data into the training process to reach equal results with fewer labels. Due to a lot of concurrent research, it is difficult to keep track of recent developments. In this survey we provide an overview of often used techniques and methods in image classification with fewer labels. We compare 21 methods. In our analysis we identify three major trends. 1. State-of-the-art methods are scaleable to real world applications based on their accuracy. 2. The degree of supervision which is needed to achieve comparable results to the usage of all labels is decreasing. 3. All methods share common techniques while only few methods combine these techniques to achieve better performance. Based on all of these three trends we discover future research opportunities.
Few-shot image classification aims to classify unseen classes with limited labeled samples. Recent works benefit from the meta-learning process with episodic tasks and can fast adapt to class from training to testing. Due to the limited number of samples for each task, the initial embedding network for meta learning becomes an essential component and can largely affects the performance in practice. To this end, many pre-trained methods have been proposed, and most of them are trained in supervised way with limited transfer ability for unseen classes. In this paper, we proposed to train a more generalized embedding network with self-supervised learning (SSL) which can provide slow and robust representation for downstream tasks by learning from the data itself. We evaluate our work by extensive comparisons with previous baseline methods on two few-shot classification datasets ({\em i.e.,} MiniImageNet and CUB). Based on the evaluation results, the proposed method achieves significantly better performance, i.e., improve 1-shot and 5-shot tasks by nearly \textbf{3\%} and \textbf{4\%} on MiniImageNet, by nearly \textbf{9\%} and \textbf{3\%} on CUB. Moreover, the proposed method can gain the improvement of (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{13\%}) on MiniImageNet and (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{8\%}) on CUB by pretraining using more unlabeled data. Our code will be available at \hyperref[//github.com/phecy/SSL-FEW-SHOT.]{//github.com/phecy/ssl-few-shot.}
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 recent years, there has been an exponential growth in the number of complex documents and texts that require a deeper understanding of machine learning methods to be able to accurately classify texts in many applications. Many machine learning approaches have achieved surpassing results in natural language processing. The success of these learning algorithms relies on their capacity to understand complex models and non-linear relationships within data. However, finding suitable structures, architectures, and techniques for text classification is a challenge for researchers. In this paper, a brief overview of text classification algorithms is discussed. This overview covers different text feature extractions, dimensionality reduction methods, existing algorithms and techniques, and evaluations methods. Finally, the limitations of each technique and their application in the real-world problem are discussed.
Language model pre-training has proven to be useful in learning universal language representations. As a state-of-the-art language model pre-training model, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) has achieved amazing results in many language understanding tasks. In this paper, we conduct exhaustive experiments to investigate different fine-tuning methods of BERT on text classification task and provide a general solution for BERT fine-tuning. Finally, the proposed solution obtains new state-of-the-art results on eight widely-studied text classification datasets.