Due to the limited availability of data, existing few-shot learning methods trained from scratch fail to achieve satisfactory performance. In contrast, large-scale pre-trained models such as CLIP demonstrate remarkable few-shot and zero-shot capabilities. To enhance the performance of pre-trained models for downstream tasks, fine-tuning the model on downstream data is frequently necessary. However, fine-tuning the pre-trained model leads to a decrease in its generalizability in the presence of distribution shift, while the limited number of samples in few-shot learning makes the model highly susceptible to overfitting. Consequently, existing methods for fine-tuning few-shot learning primarily focus on fine-tuning the model's classification head or introducing additional structure. In this paper, we introduce a fine-tuning approach termed Feature Discrimination Alignment (FD-Align). Our method aims to bolster the model's generalizability by preserving the consistency of spurious features across the fine-tuning process. Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach for both ID and OOD tasks. Once fine-tuned, the model can seamlessly integrate with existing methods, leading to performance improvements. Our code can be found in //github.com/skingorz/FD-Align.
We study cyclic scheduling for generate-at-will (GAW) multi-source status update systems with heterogeneous service times and packet drop probabilities, with the aim of minimizing the weighted sum age of information (AoI), called system AoI, or the weighted sum peak AoI (PAoI), called system PAoI. In particular, we obtain well-performing cyclic schedulers which can easily scale to thousands of information sources and which also have low online implementation complexity. The proposed schedulers are comparatively studied against existing scheduling algorithms in terms of computational load and system AoI/PAoI performance, to validate their effectiveness.
Machine learning (ML) models are fundamentally shaped by data, and building inclusive ML systems requires significant considerations around how to design representative datasets. Yet, few novice-oriented ML modeling tools are designed to foster hands-on learning of dataset design practices, including how to design for data diversity and inspect for data quality. To this end, we outline a set of four data design practices (DDPs) for designing inclusive ML models and share how we designed a tablet-based application called Co-ML to foster learning of DDPs through a collaborative ML model building experience. With Co-ML, beginners can build image classifiers through a distributed experience where data is synchronized across multiple devices, enabling multiple users to iteratively refine ML datasets in discussion and coordination with their peers. We deployed Co-ML in a 2-week-long educational AIML Summer Camp, where youth ages 13-18 worked in groups to build custom ML-powered mobile applications. Our analysis reveals how multi-user model building with Co-ML, in the context of student-driven projects created during the summer camp, supported development of DDPs including incorporating data diversity, evaluating model performance, and inspecting for data quality. Additionally, we found that students' attempts to improve model performance often prioritized learnability over class balance. Through this work, we highlight how the combination of collaboration, model testing interfaces, and student-driven projects can empower learners to actively engage in exploring the role of data in ML systems.
Large Pretrained models for Zero/Few-shot learning excel in language and vision domains but encounter challenges in multivariate time series (TS) due to the diverse nature and scarcity of publicly available pretraining data. Consequently, there has been a recent surge in utilizing pretrained large language models (LLMs) with various adaptations for time series forecasting. These approaches employ cross-domain transfer learning, yielding highly impressive results. However, these models are typically very large ($\sim$ billion parameters), exhibit slow execution, and do not consider cross-channel correlations. To address this, we present Multi-level Tiny Time Mixers (TTM), a significantly smaller model based on the lightweight TSMixer architecture. TTM marks the first success in developing tiny pretrained models ($\le$1 million parameters), exclusively trained on public TS data with effective transfer learning capabilities. To tackle the complexity of pretraining on multiple datasets with varied temporal resolutions, we introduce several novel enhancements such as adaptive patching, dataset augmentation via downsampling, and resolution prefix tuning. Moreover, we employ a multi-level modeling strategy to effectively model channel correlations and incorporate exogenous signals during finetuning, a crucial capability lacking in existing benchmarks. TTM excels in few/zero-shot forecasting, demonstrating significant accuracy gains (12-38%) over existing benchmarks. Further, it achieves a remarkable 14-106X reduction in model parameters, enabling 54-65X faster training/inference as compared to the LLM-TS benchmarks. In fact, TTM's zero-shot results often surpass the few-shot results in many benchmarks, highlighting the efficacy of our approach. Code and Pretrained Models will be open-sourced.
Equipping a deep model the abaility of few-shot learning, i.e., learning quickly from only few examples, is a core challenge for artificial intelligence. Gradient-based meta-learning approaches effectively address the challenge by learning how to learn novel tasks. Its key idea is learning a deep model in a bi-level optimization manner, where the outer-loop process learns a shared gradient descent algorithm (i.e., its hyperparameters), while the inner-loop process leverage it to optimize a task-specific model by using only few labeled data. Although these existing methods have shown superior performance, the outer-loop process requires calculating second-order derivatives along the inner optimization path, which imposes considerable memory burdens and the risk of vanishing gradients. Drawing inspiration from recent progress of diffusion models, we find that the inner-loop gradient descent process can be actually viewed as a reverse process (i.e., denoising) of diffusion where the target of denoising is model weights but the origin data. Based on this fact, in this paper, we propose to model the gradient descent optimizer as a diffusion model and then present a novel task-conditional diffusion-based meta-learning, called MetaDiff, that effectively models the optimization process of model weights from Gaussion noises to target weights in a denoising manner. Thanks to the training efficiency of diffusion models, our MetaDiff do not need to differentiate through the inner-loop path such that the memory burdens and the risk of vanishing gradients can be effectvely alleviated. Experiment results show that our MetaDiff outperforms the state-of-the-art gradient-based meta-learning family in few-shot learning tasks.
Many adversarial attacks target natural language processing systems, most of which succeed through modifying the individual tokens of a document. Despite the apparent uniqueness of each of these attacks, fundamentally they are simply a distinct configuration of four components: a goal function, allowable transformations, a search method, and constraints. In this survey, we systematically present the different components used throughout the literature, using an attack-independent framework which allows for easy comparison and categorisation of components. Our work aims to serve as a comprehensive guide for newcomers to the field and to spark targeted research into refining the individual attack components.
When exploring the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a critical task for these models involves interpreting and processing information from multiple image inputs. However, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) encounter two issues in such scenarios: (1) a lack of fine-grained perception, and (2) a tendency to blend information across multiple images. We first extensively investigate the capability of LMMs to perceive fine-grained visual details when dealing with multiple input images. The research focuses on two aspects: first, image-to-image matching (to evaluate whether LMMs can effectively reason and pair relevant images), and second, multi-image-to-text matching (to assess whether LMMs can accurately capture and summarize detailed image information). We conduct evaluations on a range of both open-source and closed-source large models, including GPT-4V, Gemini, OpenFlamingo, and MMICL. To enhance model performance, we further develop a Contrastive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT) prompting approach based on multi-input multimodal models. This method requires LMMs to compare the similarities and differences among multiple image inputs, and then guide the models to answer detailed questions about multi-image inputs based on the identified similarities and differences. Our experimental results showcase CoCoT's proficiency in enhancing the multi-image comprehension capabilities of large multimodal models.
We propose a data-driven approach for propagating uncertainty in stochastic power grid simulations and apply it to the estimation of transmission line failure probabilities. A reduced-order equation governing the evolution of the observed line energy probability density function is derived from the Fokker--Planck equation of the full-order continuous Markov process. Our method consists of estimates produced by numerically integrating this reduced equation. Numerical experiments for scalar- and vector-valued energy functions are conducted using the classical multimachine model under spatiotemporally correlated noise perturbation. The method demonstrates a more sample-efficient approach for computing probabilities of tail events when compared with kernel density estimation. Moreover, it produces vastly more accurate estimates of joint event occurrence when compared with independent models.
The rapid development of deep learning has made a great progress in segmentation, one of the fundamental tasks of computer vision. However, the current segmentation algorithms mostly rely on the availability of pixel-level annotations, which are often expensive, tedious, and laborious. To alleviate this burden, the past years have witnessed an increasing attention in building label-efficient, deep-learning-based segmentation algorithms. This paper offers a comprehensive review on label-efficient segmentation methods. To this end, we first develop a taxonomy to organize these methods according to the supervision provided by different types of weak labels (including no supervision, coarse supervision, incomplete supervision and noisy supervision) and supplemented by the types of segmentation problems (including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation and panoptic segmentation). Next, we summarize the existing label-efficient segmentation methods from a unified perspective that discusses an important question: how to bridge the gap between weak supervision and dense prediction -- the current methods are mostly based on heuristic priors, such as cross-pixel similarity, cross-label constraint, cross-view consistency, cross-image relation, etc. Finally, we share our opinions about the future research directions for label-efficient deep segmentation.
Learning with limited data is a key challenge for visual recognition. Few-shot learning methods address this challenge by learning an instance embedding function from seen classes and apply the function to instances from unseen classes with limited labels. This style of transfer learning is task-agnostic: the embedding function is not learned optimally discriminative with respect to the unseen classes, where discerning among them is the target task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to adapt the embedding model to the target classification task, yielding embeddings that are task-specific and are discriminative. To this end, we employ a type of self-attention mechanism called Transformer to transform the embeddings from task-agnostic to task-specific by focusing on relating instances from the test instances to the training instances in both seen and unseen classes. Our approach also extends to both transductive and generalized few-shot classification, two important settings that have essential use cases. We verify the effectiveness of our model on two standard benchmark few-shot classification datasets --- MiniImageNet and CUB, where our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art empirical performance.
State-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benefits a lot from multi-task learning (MTL), which learns multiple related tasks simultaneously to obtain shared or mutually related representations for different tasks. The most widely-used MTL CNN structure is based on an empirical or heuristic split on a specific layer (e.g., the last convolutional layer) to minimize different task-specific losses. However, this heuristic sharing/splitting strategy may be harmful to the final performance of one or multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN structure for MTL, which enables automatic feature fusing at every layer. Specifically, we first concatenate features from different tasks according to their channel dimension, and then formulate the feature fusing problem as discriminative dimensionality reduction. We show that this discriminative dimensionality reduction can be done by 1x1 Convolution, Batch Normalization, and Weight Decay in one CNN, which we refer to as Neural Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction (NDDR). We perform ablation analysis in details for different configurations in training the network. The experiments carried out on different network structures and different task sets demonstrate the promising performance and desirable generalizability of our proposed method.