Though supervised learning gains impressive success, the acquisition of indispensable large-scale labeled datasets are often impractical in biomedical imaging partially due to expensive costs and lengthy annotations done by experienced radiologists. Semi-supervised learning has been shown to be an effective way to address this limitation by leveraging useful information from unlabeled datasets. In this paper, we present a new semi-supervised learning method referred to as Dual-Decoder Consistency via Pseudo-Labels Guided Data Augmentation (DCPA) for medical image segmentation. We devise a consistency regularization to improve the semi-supervised learning. Specifically, to promote consistent representations during the training process, we use different decoders for student and teachers networks while maintain the same encoder. Moreover, to learn from unlabeled data, we create pseudo-labels generated by the teacher networks and augment the training data with the pseudo-labels. The two techniques contribute to the improved performance of the proposed method. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method on three representative medical image segmentation datasets. Extensive comparisons to the state-of-the-art medical image segmentation methods were carried out under typical scenarios with 10% and 20% labeled data. Experimental outcomes demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods over the three semi-supervised settings. Furthermore, to explore the performance of proposed method under extreme condition, we conduct experiments with only 5% labeled data. The results further verify the superior performance of the proposed method. Source code is publicly online at //github.com/BinYCn/DCPA.git.
The success of deep learning hinges on enormous data and large models, which require labor-intensive annotations and heavy computation costs. Subset selection is a fundamental problem that can play a key role in identifying smaller portions of the training data, which can then be used to produce similar models as the ones trained with full data. Two prior methods are shown to achieve impressive results: (1) margin sampling that focuses on selecting points with high uncertainty, and (2) core-sets or clustering methods such as k-center for informative and diverse subsets. We are not aware of any work that combines these methods in a principled manner. To this end, we develop a novel and efficient factor 3-approximation algorithm to compute subsets based on the weighted sum of both k-center and uncertainty sampling objective functions. To handle large datasets, we show a parallel algorithm to run on multiple machines with approximation guarantees. The proposed algorithm achieves similar or better performance compared to other strong baselines on vision datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet.
For some hypothesis classes and input distributions, active agnostic learning needs exponentially fewer samples than passive learning; for other classes and distributions, it offers little to no improvement. The most popular algorithms for agnostic active learning express their performance in terms of a parameter called the disagreement coefficient, but it is known that these algorithms are inefficient on some inputs. We take a different approach to agnostic active learning, getting an algorithm that is competitive with the optimal algorithm for any binary hypothesis class $H$ and distribution $D_X$ over $X$. In particular, if any algorithm can use $m^*$ queries to get $O(\eta)$ error, then our algorithm uses $O(m^* \log |H|)$ queries to get $O(\eta)$ error. Our algorithm lies in the vein of the splitting-based approach of Dasgupta [2004], which gets a similar result for the realizable ($\eta = 0$) setting. We also show that it is NP-hard to do better than our algorithm's $O(\log |H|)$ overhead in general.
In supervised learning, automatically assessing the quality of the labels before any learning takes place remains an open research question. In certain particular cases, hypothesis testing procedures have been proposed to assess whether a given instance-label dataset is contaminated with class-conditional label noise, as opposed to uniform label noise. The existing theory builds on the asymptotic properties of the Maximum Likelihood Estimate for parametric logistic regression. However, the parametric assumptions on top of which these approaches are constructed are often too strong and unrealistic in practice. To alleviate this problem, in this paper we propose an alternative path by showing how similar procedures can be followed when the underlying model is a product of Local Maximum Likelihood Estimation that leads to more flexible nonparametric logistic regression models, which in turn are less susceptible to model misspecification. This different view allows for wider applicability of the tests by offering users access to a richer model class. Similarly to existing works, we assume we have access to anchor points which are provided by the users. We introduce the necessary ingredients for the adaptation of the hypothesis tests to the case of nonparametric logistic regression and empirically compare against the parametric approach presenting both synthetic and real-world case studies and discussing the advantages and limitations of the proposed approach.
Recommender systems have seen significant advancements with the influence of deep learning and graph neural networks, particularly in capturing complex user-item relationships. However, these graph-based recommenders heavily depend on ID-based data, potentially disregarding valuable textual information associated with users and items, resulting in less informative learned representations. Moreover, the utilization of implicit feedback data introduces potential noise and bias, posing challenges for the effectiveness of user preference learning. While the integration of large language models (LLMs) into traditional ID-based recommenders has gained attention, challenges such as scalability issues, limitations in text-only reliance, and prompt input constraints need to be addressed for effective implementation in practical recommender systems. To address these challenges, we propose a model-agnostic framework RLMRec that aims to enhance existing recommenders with LLM-empowered representation learning. It proposes a recommendation paradigm that integrates representation learning with LLMs to capture intricate semantic aspects of user behaviors and preferences. RLMRec incorporates auxiliary textual signals, develops a user/item profiling paradigm empowered by LLMs, and aligns the semantic space of LLMs with the representation space of collaborative relational signals through a cross-view alignment framework. This work further establish a theoretical foundation demonstrating that incorporating textual signals through mutual information maximization enhances the quality of representations. In our evaluation, we integrate RLMRec with state-of-the-art recommender models, while also analyzing its efficiency and robustness to noise data. Our implementation codes are available at //github.com/HKUDS/RLMRec.
Theoretical guarantees in reinforcement learning (RL) are known to suffer multiplicative blow-up factors with respect to the misspecification error of function approximation. Yet, the nature of such \emph{approximation factors} -- especially their optimal form in a given learning problem -- is poorly understood. In this paper we study this question in linear off-policy value function estimation, where many open questions remain. We study the approximation factor in a broad spectrum of settings, such as with the weighted $L_2$-norm (where the weighting is the offline state distribution), the $L_\infty$ norm, the presence vs. absence of state aliasing, and full vs. partial coverage of the state space. We establish the optimal asymptotic approximation factors (up to constants) for all of these settings. In particular, our bounds identify two instance-dependent factors for the $L_2(\mu)$ norm and only one for the $L_\infty$ norm, which are shown to dictate the hardness of off-policy evaluation under misspecification.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used for document classification. However, most existing methods are based on static word co-occurrence graphs without sentence-level information, which poses three challenges:(1) word ambiguity, (2) word synonymity, and (3) dynamic contextual dependency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel GNN-based sparse structure learning model for inductive document classification. Specifically, a document-level graph is initially generated by a disjoint union of sentence-level word co-occurrence graphs. Our model collects a set of trainable edges connecting disjoint words between sentences and employs structure learning to sparsely select edges with dynamic contextual dependencies. Graphs with sparse structures can jointly exploit local and global contextual information in documents through GNNs. For inductive learning, the refined document graph is further fed into a general readout function for graph-level classification and optimization in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms most state-of-the-art results, and reveal the necessity to learn sparse structures for each document.
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).
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of ``labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
The potential of graph convolutional neural networks for the task of zero-shot learning has been demonstrated recently. These models are highly sample efficient as related concepts in the graph structure share statistical strength allowing generalization to new classes when faced with a lack of data. However, knowledge from distant nodes can get diluted when propagating through intermediate nodes, because current approaches to zero-shot learning use graph propagation schemes that perform Laplacian smoothing at each layer. We show that extensive smoothing does not help the task of regressing classifier weights in zero-shot learning. In order to still incorporate information from distant nodes and utilize the graph structure, we propose an Attentive Dense Graph Propagation Module (ADGPM). ADGPM allows us to exploit the hierarchical graph structure of the knowledge graph through additional connections. These connections are added based on a node's relationship to its ancestors and descendants and an attention scheme is further used to weigh their contribution depending on the distance to the node. Finally, we illustrate that finetuning of the feature representation after training the ADGPM leads to considerable improvements. Our method achieves competitive results, outperforming previous zero-shot learning approaches.