We introduce a novel co-learning paradigm for manifolds naturally equipped with a group action, motivated by recent developments on learning a manifold from attached fibre bundle structures. We utilize a representation theoretic mechanism that canonically associates multiple independent vector bundles over a common base manifold, which provides multiple views for the geometry of the underlying manifold. The consistency across these fibre bundles provide a common base for performing unsupervised manifold co-learning through the redundancy created artificially across irreducible representations of the transformation group. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithmic paradigm through drastically improved robust nearest neighbor search and community detection on rotation-invariant cryo-electron microscopy image analysis.
Unsupervised active learning has attracted increasing attention in recent years, where its goal is to select representative samples in an unsupervised setting for human annotating. Most existing works are based on shallow linear models by assuming that each sample can be well approximated by the span (i.e., the set of all linear combinations) of certain selected samples, and then take these selected samples as representative ones to label. However, in practice, the data do not necessarily conform to linear models, and how to model nonlinearity of data often becomes the key point to success. In this paper, we present a novel Deep neural network framework for Unsupervised Active Learning, called DUAL. DUAL can explicitly learn a nonlinear embedding to map each input into a latent space through an encoder-decoder architecture, and introduce a selection block to select representative samples in the the learnt latent space. In the selection block, DUAL considers to simultaneously preserve the whole input patterns as well as the cluster structure of data. Extensive experiments are performed on six publicly available datasets, and experimental results clearly demonstrate the efficacy of our method, compared with state-of-the-arts.
The idea behind the emph{unsupervised} learning of emph{disentangled} representations is that real-world data is generated by a few explanatory factors of variation which can be recovered by unsupervised learning algorithms. In this paper, we provide a sober look at recent progress in the field and challenge some common assumptions. We first theoretically show that the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is fundamentally impossible without inductive biases on both the models and the data. Then, we train over $14000$ models covering most prominent methods and evaluation metrics in a reproducible large-scale experimental study on eight data sets. We observe that while the different methods successfully enforce properties encouraged by the corresponding losses, well-disentangled models seemingly cannot be identified without supervision. Furthermore, different evaluation metrics do not always agree on what should be considered disentangled and exhibit systematic differences in the estimation. Finally, increased disentanglement does not seem to necessarily lead to a decreased sample complexity of learning for downstream tasks. Our results suggest that future work on disentanglement learning should be explicit about the role of inductive biases and (implicit) supervision, investigate concrete benefits of enforcing disentanglement of the learned representations, and consider a reproducible experimental setup covering several data sets.
Graph neural networks (GNN), as a popular methodology for node representation learning on graphs, currently mainly focus on preserving the smoothness and identifiability of node representations. A robust node representation on graphs should further hold the stability property which means a node representation is resistant to slight perturbations on the input. In this paper, we introduce the stability of node representations in addition to the smoothness and identifiability, and develop a novel method called contrastive graph neural networks (CGNN) that learns robust node representations in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, CGNN maintains the stability and identifiability by a contrastive learning objective, while preserving the smoothness with existing GNN models. Furthermore, the proposed method is a generic framework that can be equipped with many other backbone models (e.g. GCN, GraphSage and GAT). Extensive experiments on four benchmarks under both transductive and inductive learning setups demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in comparison with recent supervised and unsupervised models.
The goal of the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is to separate the independent explanatory factors of variation in the data without access to supervision. In this paper, we summarize the results of Locatello et al., 2019, and focus on their implications for practitioners. We discuss the theoretical result showing that the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is fundamentally impossible without inductive biases and the practical challenges it entails. Finally, we comment on our experimental findings, highlighting the limitations of state-of-the-art approaches and directions for future research.
Deep neural networks, trained with large amount of labeled data, can fail to generalize well when tested with examples from a emph{target domain} whose distribution differs from the training data distribution, referred as the emph{source domain}. It can be expensive or even infeasible to obtain required amount of labeled data in all possible domains. Unsupervised domain adaptation sets out to address this problem, aiming to learn a good predictive model for the target domain using labeled examples from the source domain but only unlabeled examples from the target domain. Domain alignment approaches this problem by matching the source and target feature distributions, and has been used as a key component in many state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods. However, matching the marginal feature distributions does not guarantee that the corresponding class conditional distributions will be aligned across the two domains. We propose co-regularized domain alignment for unsupervised domain adaptation, which constructs multiple diverse feature spaces and aligns source and target distributions in each of them individually, while encouraging that alignments agree with each other with regard to the class predictions on the unlabeled target examples. The proposed method is generic and can be used to improve any domain adaptation method which uses domain alignment. We instantiate it in the context of a recent state-of-the-art method and observe that it provides significant performance improvements on several domain adaptation benchmarks.