No Arabic abstract
User data confidentiality protection is becoming a rising challenge in the present deep learning research. Without access to data, conventional data-driven model compression faces a higher risk of performance degradation. Recently, some works propose to generate images from a specific pretrained model to serve as training data. However, the inversion process only utilizes biased feature statistics stored in one model and is from low-dimension to high-dimension. As a consequence, it inevitably encounters the difficulties of generalizability and inexact inversion, which leads to unsatisfactory performance. To address these problems, we propose MixMix based on two simple yet effective techniques: (1) Feature Mixing: utilizes various models to construct a universal feature space for generalized inversion; (2) Data Mixing: mixes the synthesized images and labels to generate exact label information. We prove the effectiveness of MixMix from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Extensive experiments show that MixMix outperforms existing methods on the mainstream compression tasks, including quantization, knowledge distillation, and pruning. Specifically, MixMix achieves up to 4% and 20% accuracy uplift on quantization and pruning, respectively, compared to existing data-free compression work.
We investigate a general formulation for clustering and transductive few-shot learning, which integrates prototype-based objectives, Laplacian regularization and supervision constraints from a few labeled data points. We propose a concave-convex relaxation of the problem, and derive a computationally efficient block-coordinate bound optimizer, with convergence guarantee. At each iteration,our optimizer computes independent (parallel) updates for each point-to-cluster assignment. Therefore, it could be trivially distributed for large-scale clustering and few-shot tasks. Furthermore, we provides a thorough convergence analysis based on point-to-set maps. Were port comprehensive clustering and few-shot learning experiments over various data sets, showing that our method yields competitive performances, in term of accuracy and optimization quality, while scaling up to large problems. Using standard training on the base classes, without resorting to complex meta-learning and episodic-training strategies, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art few-shot methods by significant margins, across various models, settings and data sets. Surprisingly, we found that even standard clustering procedures (e.g., K-means), which correspond to particular, non-regularized cases of our general model, already achieve competitive performances in comparison to the state-of-the-art in few-shot learning. These surprising results point to the limitations of the current few-shot benchmarks, and question the viability of a large body of convoluted few-shot learning techniques in the recent literature.
Recently, an extensive amount of research has been focused on compressing and accelerating Deep Neural Networks (DNN). So far, high compression rate algorithms require part of the training dataset for a low precision calibration, or a fine-tuning process. However, this requirement is unacceptable when the data is unavailable or contains sensitive information, as in medical and biometric use-cases. We present three methods for generating synthetic samples from trained models. Then, we demonstrate how these samples can be used to calibrate and fine-tune quantized models without using any real data in the process. Our best performing method has a negligible accuracy degradation compared to the original training set. This method, which leverages intrinsic batch normalization layers statistics of the trained model, can be used to evaluate data similarity. Our approach opens a path towards genuine data-free model compression, alleviating the need for training data during model deployment.
Tabular datasets are the last unconquered castle for deep learning, with traditional ML methods like Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees still performing strongly even against recent specialized neural architectures. In this paper, we hypothesize that the key to boosting the performance of neural networks lies in rethinking the joint and simultaneous application of a large set of modern regularization techniques. As a result, we propose regularizing plain Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) networks by searching for the optimal combination/cocktail of 13 regularization techniques for each dataset using a joint optimization over the decision on which regularizers to apply and their subsidiary hyperparameters. We empirically assess the impact of these regularization cocktails for MLPs on a large-scale empirical study comprising 40 tabular datasets and demonstrate that (i) well-regularized plain MLPs significantly outperform recent state-of-the-art specialized neural network architectures, and (ii) they even outperform strong traditional ML methods, such as XGBoost.
Can AI help automate human-easy but computer-hard data preparation tasks that burden data scientists, practitioners, and crowd workers? We answer this question by presenting RPT, a denoising auto-encoder for tuple-to-X models (X could be tuple, token, label, JSON, and so on). RPT is pre-trained for a tuple-to-tuple model by corrupting the input tuple and then learning a model to reconstruct the original tuple. It adopts a Transformer-based neural translation architecture that consists of a bidirectional encoder (similar to BERT) and a left-to-right autoregressive decoder (similar to GPT), leading to a generalization of both BERT and GPT. The pre-trained RPT can already support several common data preparation tasks such as data cleaning, auto-completion and schema matching. Better still, RPT can be fine-tuned on a wide range of data preparation tasks, such as value normalization, data transformation, data annotation, etc. To complement RPT, we also discuss several appealing techniques such as collaborative training and few-shot learning for entity resolution, and few-shot learning and NLP question-answering for information extraction. In addition, we identify a series of research opportunities to advance the field of data preparation.
Gradient-based meta-learning has proven to be highly effective at learning model initializations, representations, and update rules that allow fast adaptation from a few samples. The core idea behind these approaches is to use fast adaptation and generalization -- two second-order metrics -- as training signals on a meta-training dataset. However, little attention has been given to other possible second-order metrics. In this paper, we investigate a different training signal -- robustness to catastrophic interference -- and demonstrate that representations learned by directing minimizing interference are more conducive to incremental learning than those learned by just maximizing fast adaptation.