No Arabic abstract
Do visual tasks have a relationship, or are they unrelated? For instance, could having surface normals simplify estimating the depth of an image? Intuition answers these questions positively, implying existence of a structure among visual tasks. Knowing this structure has notable values; it is the concept underlying transfer learning and provides a principled way for identifying redundancies across tasks, e.g., to seamlessly reuse supervision among related tasks or solve many tasks in one system without piling up the complexity. We proposes a fully computational approach for modeling the structure of space of visual tasks. This is done via finding (first and higher-order) transfer learning dependencies across a dictionary of twenty six 2D, 2.5D, 3D, and semantic tasks in a latent space. The product is a computational taxonomic map for task transfer learning. We study the consequences of this structure, e.g. nontrivial emerged relationships, and exploit them to reduce the demand for labeled data. For example, we show that the total number of labeled datapoints needed for solving a set of 10 tasks can be reduced by roughly 2/3 (compared to training independently) while keeping the performance nearly the same. We provide a set of tools for computing and probing this taxonomical structure including a solver that users can employ to devise efficient supervision policies for their use cases.
Transfer learning is widely used in deep neural network models when there are few labeled examples available. The common approach is to take a pre-trained network in a similar task and finetune the model parameters. This is usually done blindly without a pre-selection from a set of pre-trained models, or by finetuning a set of models trained on different tasks and selecting the best performing one by cross-validation. We address this problem by proposing an approach to assess the relationship between visual tasks and their task-specific models. Our method uses Representation Similarity Analysis (RSA), which is commonly used to find a correlation between neuronal responses from brain data and models. With RSA we obtain a similarity score among tasks by computing correlations between models trained on different tasks. Our method is efficient as it requires only pre-trained models, and a few images with no further training. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method for generating task taxonomy on Taskonomy dataset. We next evaluate the relationship of RSA with the transfer learning performance on Taskonomy tasks and a new task: Pascal VOC semantic segmentation. Our results reveal that models trained on tasks with higher similarity score show higher transfer learning performance. Surprisingly, the best transfer learning result for Pascal VOC semantic segmentation is not obtained from the pre-trained model on semantic segmentation, probably due to the domain differences, and our method successfully selects the high performing models.
Most few-shot learning techniques are pre-trained on a large, labeled base dataset. In problem domains where such large labeled datasets are not available for pre-training (e.g., X-ray, satellite images), one must resort to pre-training in a different source problem domain (e.g., ImageNet), which can be very different from the desired target task. Traditional few-shot and transfer learning techniques fail in the presence of such extreme differences between the source and target tasks. In this paper, we present a simple and effective solution to tackle this extreme domain gap: self-training a source domain representation on unlabeled data from the target domain. We show that this improves one-shot performance on the target domain by 2.9 points on average on the challenging BSCD-FSL benchmark consisting of datasets from multiple domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/cpphoo/STARTUP.
While deep and large pre-trained models are the state-of-the-art for various natural language processing tasks, their huge size poses significant challenges for practical uses in resource constrained settings. Recent works in knowledge distillation propose task-agnostic as well as task-specific methods to compress these models, with task-specific ones often yielding higher compression rate. In this work, we develop a new task-agnostic distillation framework XtremeDistilTransformers that leverages the advantage of task-specific methods for learning a small universal model that can be applied to arbitrary tasks and languages. To this end, we study the transferability of several source tasks, augmentation resources and model architecture for distillation. We evaluate our model performance on multiple tasks, including the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark, SQuAD question answering dataset and a massive multi-lingual NER dataset with 41 languages. We release three distilled task-agnostic checkpoints with 13MM, 22MM and 33MM parameters obtaining SOTA performance in several tasks.
In this paper, we propose an end-to-end multi-task neural network called FetalNet with an attention mechanism and stacked module for spatio-temporal fetal ultrasound scan video analysis. Fetal biometric measurement is a standard examination during pregnancy used for the fetus growth monitoring and estimation of gestational age and fetal weight. The main goal in fetal ultrasound scan video analysis is to find proper standard planes to measure the fetal head, abdomen and femur. Due to natural high speckle noise and shadows in ultrasound data, medical expertise and sonographic experience are required to find the appropriate acquisition plane and perform accurate measurements of the fetus. In addition, existing computer-aided methods for fetal US biometric measurement address only one single image frame without considering temporal features. To address these shortcomings, we propose an end-to-end multi-task neural network for spatio-temporal ultrasound scan video analysis to simultaneously localize, classify and measure the fetal body parts. We propose a new encoder-decoder segmentation architecture that incorporates a classification branch. Additionally, we employ an attention mechanism with a stacked module to learn salient maps to suppress irrelevant US regions and efficient scan plane localization. We trained on the fetal ultrasound video comes from routine examinations of 700 different patients. Our method called FetalNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both classification and segmentation in fetal ultrasound video recordings.
In this paper, we propose Minimalist Transfer Learning (MinTL) to simplify the system design process of task-oriented dialogue systems and alleviate the over-dependency on annotated data. MinTL is a simple yet effective transfer learning framework, which allows us to plug-and-play pre-trained seq2seq models, and jointly learn dialogue state tracking and dialogue response generation. Unlike previous approaches, which use a copy mechanism to carryover the old dialogue states to the new one, we introduce Levenshtein belief spans (Lev), that allows efficient dialogue state tracking with a minimal generation length. We instantiate our learning framework with two pre-trained backbones: T5 and BART, and evaluate them on MultiWOZ. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: 1) our systems establish new state-of-the-art results on end-to-end response generation, 2) MinTL-based systems are more robust than baseline methods in the low resource setting, and they achieve competitive results with only 20% training data, and 3) Lev greatly improves the inference efficiency.