No Arabic abstract
Brain imaging data are important in brain sciences yet expensive to obtain, with big volume (i.e., large p) but small sample size (i.e., small n). To tackle this problem, transfer learning is a promising direction that leverages source data to improve performance on related, target data. Most transfer learning methods focus on minimizing data distribution mismatch. However, a big challenge in brain imaging is the large domain discrepancies in cognitive experiment designs and subject-specific structures and functions. A recent transfer learning approach minimizes domain dependence to learn common features across domains, via the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC). Inspired by this method, we propose a new Domain Independent Support Vector Machine (DI-SVM) for transfer learning in brain condition decoding. Specifically, DI-SVM simultaneously minimizes the SVM empirical risk and the dependence on domain information via a simplified HSIC. We use public data to construct 13 transfer learning tasks in brain decoding, including three interesting multi-source transfer tasks. Experiments show that DI-SVMs superior performance over eight competing methods on these tasks, particularly an improvement of more than 24% on multi-source transfer tasks.
One crucial aspect of partial domain adaptation (PDA) is how to select the relevant source samples in the shared classes for knowledge transfer. Previous PDA methods tackle this problem by re-weighting the source samples based on their high-level information (deep features). However, since the domain shift between source and target domains, only using the deep features for sample selection is defective. We argue that it is more reasonable to additionally exploit the pixel-level information for PDA problem, as the appearance difference between outlier source classes and target classes is significantly large. In this paper, we propose a reinforced transfer network (RTNet), which utilizes both high-level and pixel-level information for PDA problem. Our RTNet is composed of a reinforced data selector (RDS) based on reinforcement learning (RL), which filters out the outlier source samples, and a domain adaptation model which minimizes the domain discrepancy in the shared label space. Specifically, in the RDS, we design a novel reward based on the reconstruct errors of selected source samples on the target generator, which introduces the pixel-level information to guide the learning of RDS. Besides, we develope a state containing high-level information, which used by the RDS for sample selection. The proposed RDS is a general module, which can be easily integrated into existing DA models to make them fit the PDA situation. Extensive experiments indicate that RTNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance for PDA tasks on several benchmark datasets.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging produces high dimensional data, with a less then ideal number of labelled samples for brain decoding tasks (predicting brain states). In this study, we propose a new deep temporal convolutional neural network architecture with spatial pooling for brain decoding which aims to reduce dimensionality of feature space along with improved classification performance. Temporal representations (filters) for each layer of the convolutional model are learned by leveraging unlabelled fMRI data in an unsupervised fashion with regularized autoencoders. Learned temporal representations in multiple levels capture the regularities in the temporal domain and are observed to be a rich bank of activation patterns which also exhibit similarities to the actual hemodynamic responses. Further, spatial pooling layers in the convolutional architecture reduce the dimensionality without losing excessive information. By employing the proposed temporal convolutional architecture with spatial pooling, raw input fMRI data is mapped to a non-linear, highly-expressive and low-dimensional feature space where the final classification is conducted. In addition, we propose a simple heuristic approach for hyper-parameter tuning when no validation data is available. Proposed method is tested on a ten class recognition memory experiment with nine subjects. The results support the efficiency and potential of the proposed model, compared to the baseline multi-voxel pattern analysis techniques.
We propose a new gradient-based approach for extracting sub-architectures from a given large model. Contrarily to existing pruning methods, which are unable to disentangle the network architecture and the corresponding weights, our architecture-pruning scheme produces transferable new structures that can be successfully retrained to solve different tasks. We focus on a transfer-learning setup where architectures can be trained on a large data set but very few data points are available for fine-tuning them on new tasks. We define a new gradient-based algorithm that trains architectures of arbitrarily low complexity independently from the attached weights. Given a search space defined by an existing large neural model, we reformulate the architecture search task as a complexity-penalized subset-selection problem and solve it through a two-temperature relaxation scheme. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees and validate the proposed transfer-learning strategy on real data.
Heterogeneous domain adaptation (HDA) aims to facilitate the learning task in a target domain by borrowing knowledge from a heterogeneous source domain. In this paper, we propose a Soft Transfer Network (STN), which jointly learns a domain-shared classifier and a domain-invariant subspace in an end-to-end manner, for addressing the HDA problem. The proposed STN not only aligns the discriminative directions of domains but also matches both the marginal and conditional distributions across domains. To circumvent negative transfer, STN aligns the conditional distributions by using the soft-label strategy of unlabeled target data, which prevents the hard assignment of each unlabeled target data to only one category that may be incorrect. Further, STN introduces an adaptive coefficient to gradually increase the importance of the soft-labels since they will become more and more accurate as the number of iterations increases. We perform experiments on the transfer tasks of image-to-image, text-to-image, and text-to-text. Experimental results testify that the STN significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches.
In the low-data regime, it is difficult to train good supervised models from scratch. Instead practitioners turn to pre-trained models, leveraging transfer learning. Ensembling is an empirically and theoretically appealing way to construct powerful predictive models, but the predominant approach of training multiple deep networks with different random initialisations collides with the need for transfer via pre-trained weights. In this work, we study different ways of creating ensembles from pre-trained models. We show that the nature of pre-training itself is a performant source of diversity, and propose a practical algorithm that efficiently identifies a subset of pre-trained models for any downstream dataset. The approach is simple: Use nearest-neighbour accuracy to rank pre-trained models, fine-tune the best ones with a small hyperparameter sweep, and greedily construct an ensemble to minimise validation cross-entropy. When evaluated together with strong baselines on 19 different downstream tasks (the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark), this achieves state-of-the-art performance at a much lower inference budget, even when selecting from over 2,000 pre-trained models. We also assess our ensembles on ImageNet variants and show improved robustness to distribution shift.