The journey of reducing noise from distant supervision (DS) generated training data has been started since the DS was first introduced into the relation extraction (RE) task. For the past decade, researchers apply the multi-instance learning (MIL) framework to find the most reliable feature from a bag of sentences. Although the pattern of MIL bags can greatly reduce DS noise, it fails to represent many other useful sentence features in the datasets. In many cases, these sentence features can only be acquired by extra sentence-level human annotation with heavy costs. Therefore, the performance of distantly supervised RE models is bounded. In this paper, we go beyond typical MIL framework and propose a novel contrastive instance learning (CIL) framework. Specifically, we regard the initial MIL as the relational triple encoder and constraint positive pairs against negative pairs for each instance. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, with significant improvements over the previous methods on NYT10, GDS and KBP.
Collecting labeled data for the task of semantic segmentation is expensive and time-consuming, as it requires dense pixel-level annotations. While recent Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based semantic segmentation approaches have achieved impressive results by using large amounts of labeled training data, their performance drops significantly as the amount of labeled data decreases. This happens because deep CNNs trained with the de facto cross-entropy loss can easily overfit to small amounts of labeled data. To address this issue, we propose a simple and effective contrastive learning-based training strategy in which we first pretrain the network using a pixel-wise, label-based contrastive loss, and then fine-tune it using the cross-entropy loss. This approach increases intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, thereby resulting in a better pixel classifier. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed training strategy using the Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation datasets. Our results show that pretraining with the proposed contrastive loss results in large performance gains (more than 20% absolute improvement in some settings) when the amount of labeled data is limited. In many settings, the proposed contrastive pretraining strategy, which does not use any additional data, is able to match or outperform the widely-used ImageNet pretraining strategy that uses more than a million additional labeled images.
Unsupervised person re-identification (ReID) aims at learning discriminative identity features without annotations. Recently, self-supervised contrastive learning has gained increasing attention for its effectiveness in unsupervised representation learning. The main idea of instance contrastive learning is to match a same instance in different augmented views. However, the relationship between different instances has not been fully explored in previous contrastive methods, especially for instance-level contrastive loss. To address this issue, we propose Inter-instance Contrastive Encoding (ICE) that leverages inter-instance pairwise similarity scores to boost previous class-level contrastive ReID methods. We first use pairwise similarity ranking as one-hot hard pseudo labels for hard instance contrast, which aims at reducing intra-class variance. Then, we use similarity scores as soft pseudo labels to enhance the consistency between augmented and original views, which makes our model more robust to augmentation perturbations. Experiments on several large-scale person ReID datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed unsupervised method ICE, which is competitive with even supervised methods. Code is made available at //github.com/chenhao2345/ICE.
Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) aims to recognize objects from both seen and unseen classes, when only the labeled examples from seen classes are provided. Recent feature generation methods learn a generative model that can synthesize the missing visual features of unseen classes to mitigate the data-imbalance problem in GZSL. However, the original visual feature space is suboptimal for GZSL classification since it lacks discriminative information. To tackle this issue, we propose to integrate the generation model with the embedding model, yielding a hybrid GZSL framework. The hybrid GZSL approach maps both the real and the synthetic samples produced by the generation model into an embedding space, where we perform the final GZSL classification. Specifically, we propose a contrastive embedding (CE) for our hybrid GZSL framework. The proposed contrastive embedding can leverage not only the class-wise supervision but also the instance-wise supervision, where the latter is usually neglected by existing GZSL researches. We evaluate our proposed hybrid GZSL framework with contrastive embedding, named CE-GZSL, on five benchmark datasets. The results show that our CEGZSL method can outperform the state-of-the-arts by a significant margin on three datasets. Our codes are available on //github.com/Hanzy1996/CE-GZSL.
In this paper, we focus on the self-supervised learning of visual correspondence using unlabeled videos in the wild. Our method simultaneously considers intra- and inter-video representation associations for reliable correspondence estimation. The intra-video learning transforms the image contents across frames within a single video via the frame pair-wise affinity. To obtain the discriminative representation for instance-level separation, we go beyond the intra-video analysis and construct the inter-video affinity to facilitate the contrastive transformation across different videos. By forcing the transformation consistency between intra- and inter-video levels, the fine-grained correspondence associations are well preserved and the instance-level feature discrimination is effectively reinforced. Our simple framework outperforms the recent self-supervised correspondence methods on a range of visual tasks including video object tracking (VOT), video object segmentation (VOS), pose keypoint tracking, etc. It is worth mentioning that our method also surpasses the fully-supervised affinity representation (e.g., ResNet) and performs competitively against the recent fully-supervised algorithms designed for the specific tasks (e.g., VOT and VOS).
Recently, many unsupervised deep learning methods have been proposed to learn clustering with unlabelled data. By introducing data augmentation, most of the latest methods look into deep clustering from the perspective that the original image and its tansformation should share similar semantic clustering assignment. However, the representation features before softmax activation function could be quite different even the assignment probability is very similar since softmax is only sensitive to the maximum value. This may result in high intra-class diversities in the representation feature space, which will lead to unstable local optimal and thus harm the clustering performance. By investigating the internal relationship between mutual information and contrastive learning, we summarized a general framework that can turn any maximizing mutual information into minimizing contrastive loss. We apply it to both the semantic clustering assignment and representation feature and propose a novel method named Deep Robust Clustering by Contrastive Learning (DRC). Different to existing methods, DRC aims to increase inter-class diver-sities and decrease intra-class diversities simultaneously and achieve more robust clustering results. Extensive experiments on six widely-adopted deep clustering benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DRC in both stability and accuracy. e.g., attaining 71.6% mean accuracy on CIFAR-10, which is 7.1% higher than state-of-the-art results.
Knowledge graphs (KGs) are the key components of various natural language processing applications. To further expand KGs' coverage, previous studies on knowledge graph completion usually require a large number of training instances for each relation. However, we observe that long-tail relations are actually more common in KGs and those newly added relations often do not have many known triples for training. In this work, we aim at predicting new facts under a challenging setting where only one training instance is available. We propose a one-shot relational learning framework, which utilizes the knowledge extracted by embedding models and learns a matching metric by considering both the learned embeddings and one-hop graph structures. Empirically, our model yields considerable performance improvements over existing embedding models, and also eliminates the need of re-training the embedding models when dealing with newly added relations.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.
We study the problem of textual relation embedding with distant supervision. To combat the wrong labeling problem of distant supervision, we propose to embed textual relations with global statistics of relations, i.e., the co-occurrence statistics of textual and knowledge base relations collected from the entire corpus. This approach turns out to be more robust to the training noise introduced by distant supervision. On a popular relation extraction dataset, we show that the learned textual relation embedding can be used to augment existing relation extraction models and significantly improve their performance. Most remarkably, for the top 1,000 relational facts discovered by the best existing model, the precision can be improved from 83.9% to 89.3%.
Most previous event extraction studies have relied heavily on features derived from annotated event mentions, thus cannot be applied to new event types without annotation effort. In this work, we take a fresh look at event extraction and model it as a grounding problem. We design a transferable neural architecture, mapping event mentions and types jointly into a shared semantic space using structural and compositional neural networks, where the type of each event mention can be determined by the closest of all candidate types . By leveraging (1)~available manual annotations for a small set of existing event types and (2)~existing event ontologies, our framework applies to new event types without requiring additional annotation. Experiments on both existing event types (e.g., ACE, ERE) and new event types (e.g., FrameNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. \textit{Without any manual annotations} for 23 new event types, our zero-shot framework achieved performance comparable to a state-of-the-art supervised model which is trained from the annotations of 500 event mentions.