No Arabic abstract
Adapting deep networks to new concepts from a few examples is challenging, due to the high computational requirements of standard fine-tuning procedures. Most work on few-shot learning has thus focused on simple learning techniques for adaptation, such as nearest neighbours or gradient descent. Nonetheless, the machine learning literature contains a wealth of methods that learn non-deep models very efficiently. In this paper, we propose to use these fast convergent methods as the main adaptation mechanism for few-shot learning. The main idea is to teach a deep network to use standard machine learning tools, such as ridge regression, as part of its own internal model, enabling it to quickly adapt to novel data. This requires back-propagating errors through the solver steps. While normally the cost of the matrix operations involved in such a process would be significant, by using the Woodbury identity we can make the small number of examples work to our advantage. We propose both closed-form and iterative solvers, based on ridge regression and logistic regression components. Our methods constitute a simple and novel approach to the problem of few-shot learning and achieve performance competitive with or superior to the state of the art on three benchmarks.
Many meta-learning approaches for few-shot learning rely on simple base learners such as nearest-neighbor classifiers. However, even in the few-shot regime, discriminatively trained linear predictors can offer better generalization. We propose to use these predictors as base learners to learn representations for few-shot learning and show they offer better tradeoffs between feature size and performance across a range of few-shot recognition benchmarks. Our objective is to learn feature embeddings that generalize well under a linear classification rule for novel categories. To efficiently solve the objective, we exploit two properties of linear classifiers: implicit differentiation of the optimality conditions of the convex problem and the dual formulation of the optimization problem. This allows us to use high-dimensional embeddings with improved generalization at a modest increase in computational overhead. Our approach, named MetaOptNet, achieves state-of-the-art performance on miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CIFAR-FS, and FC100 few-shot learning benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/kjunelee/MetaOptNet.
Adversarial representation learning aims to learn data representations for a target task while removing unwanted sensitive information at the same time. Existing methods learn model parameters iteratively through stochastic gradient descent-ascent, which is often unstable and unreliable in practice. To overcome this challenge, we adopt closed-form solvers for the adversary and target task. We model them as kernel ridge regressors and analytically determine an upper-bound on the optimal dimensionality of representation. Our solution, dubbed OptNet-ARL, reduces to a stable one one-shot optimization problem that can be solved reliably and efficiently. OptNet-ARL can be easily generalized to the case of multiple target tasks and sensitive attributes. Numerical experiments, on both small and large scale datasets, show that, from an optimization perspective, OptNet-ARL is stable and exhibits three to five times faster convergence. Performance wise, when the target and sensitive attributes are dependent, OptNet-ARL learns representations that offer a better trade-off front between (a) utility and bias for fair classification and (b) utility and privacy by mitigating leakage of private information than existing solutions.
To address the annotation scarcity issue in some cases of semantic segmentation, there have been a few attempts to develop the segmentation model in the few-shot learning paradigm. However, most existing methods only focus on the traditional 1-way segmentation setting (i.e., one image only contains a single object). This is far away from practical semantic segmentation tasks where the K-way setting (K>1) is usually required by performing the accurate multi-object segmentation. To deal with this issue, we formulate the few-shot semantic segmentation task as a learning-based pixel classification problem and propose a novel framework called MetaSegNet based on meta-learning. In MetaSegNet, an architecture of embedding module consisting of the global and local feature branches is developed to extract the appropriate meta-knowledge for the few-shot segmentation. Moreover, we incorporate a linear model into MetaSegNet as a base learner to directly predict the label of each pixel for the multi-object segmentation. Furthermore, our MetaSegNet can be trained by the episodic training mechanism in an end-to-end manner from scratch. Experiments on two popular semantic segmentation datasets, i.e., PASCAL VOC and COCO, reveal the effectiveness of the proposed MetaSegNet in the K-way few-shot semantic segmentation task.
Meta-learning has been the most common framework for few-shot learning in recent years. It learns the model from collections of few-shot classification tasks, which is believed to have a key advantage of making the training objective consistent with the testing objective. However, some recent works report that by training for whole-classification, i.e. classification on the whole label-set, it can get comparable or even better embedding than many meta-learning algorithms. The edge between these two lines of works has yet been underexplored, and the effectiveness of meta-learning in few-shot learning remains unclear. In this paper, we explore a simple process: meta-learning over a whole-classification pre-trained model on its evaluation metric. We observe this simple method achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks. Our further analysis shed some light on understanding the trade-offs between the meta-learning objective and the whole-classification objective in few-shot learning.
MixUp is an effective data augmentation method to regularize deep neural networks via random linear interpolations between pairs of samples and their labels. It plays an important role in model regularization, semi-supervised learning and domain adaption. However, despite its empirical success, its deficiency of randomly mixing samples has poorly been studied. Since deep networks are capable of memorizing the entire dataset, the corrupted samples generated by vanilla MixUp with a badly chosen interpolation policy will degrade the performance of networks. To overcome the underfitting by corrupted samples, inspired by Meta-learning (learning to learn), we propose a novel technique of learning to mixup in this work, namely, MetaMixUp. Unlike the vanilla MixUp that samples interpolation policy from a predefined distribution, this paper introduces a meta-learning based online optimization approach to dynamically learn the interpolation policy in a data-adaptive way. The validation set performance via meta-learning captures the underfitting issue, which provides more information to refine interpolation policy. Furthermore, we adapt our method for pseudo-label based semisupervised learning (SSL) along with a refined pseudo-labeling strategy. In our experiments, our method achieves better performance than vanilla MixUp and its variants under supervised learning configuration. In particular, extensive experiments show that our MetaMixUp adapted SSL greatly outperforms MixUp and many state-of-the-art methods on CIFAR-10 and SVHN benchmarks under SSL configuration.