No Arabic abstract
Conditional generative models of high-dimensional images have many applications, but supervision signals from conditions to images can be expensive to acquire. This paper describes Diffusion-Decoding models with Contrastive representations (D2C), a paradigm for training unconditional variational autoencoders (VAEs) for few-shot conditional image generation. D2C uses a learned diffusion-based prior over the latent representations to improve generation and contrastive self-supervised learning to improve representation quality. D2C can adapt to novel generation tasks conditioned on labels or manipulation constraints, by learning from as few as 100 labeled examples. On conditional generation from new labels, D2C achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art VAEs and diffusion models. On conditional image manipulation, D2C generations are two orders of magnitude faster to produce over StyleGAN2 ones and are preferred by 50% - 60% of the human evaluators in a double-blind study.
Model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) effectively meta-learns an initialization of model parameters for few-shot learning where all learning problems share the same format of model parameters -- congruous meta-learning. However, there are few-shot learning scenarios, such as adversarial attack design, where different yet related few-shot learning problems may not share any optimizee variables, necessitating incongruous meta-learning. We extend MAML to this setting -- a Learned Fine Tuner (LFT) is used to replace hand-designed optimizers (such as SGD) for the task-specific fine-tuning. Here, MAML instead meta-learns the parameters of this LFT across incongruous tasks leveraging the learning-to-optimize (L2O) framework such that models fine-tuned with LFT (even from random initializations) adapt quickly to new tasks. As novel contributions, we show that the use of LFT within MAML (i) offers the capability to tackle few-shot learning tasks by meta-learning across incongruous yet related problems and (ii) can efficiently work with first-order and derivative-free few-shot learning problems. Theoretically, we quantify the difference between LFT (for MAML) and L2O. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of LFT through a novel application of generating universal adversarial attacks across different image sources and sizes in the few-shot learning regime.
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) (Ho et al. 2020) have shown impressive results on image and waveform generation in continuous state spaces. Here, we introduce Discrete Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (D3PMs), diffusion-like generative models for discrete data that generalize the multinomial diffusion model of Hoogeboom et al. 2021, by going beyond corruption processes with uniform transition probabilities. This includes corruption with transition matrices that mimic Gaussian kernels in continuous space, matrices based on nearest neighbors in embedding space, and matrices that introduce absorbing states. The third allows us to draw a connection between diffusion models and autoregressive and mask-based generative models. We show that the choice of transition matrix is an important design decision that leads to improved results in image and text domains. We also introduce a new loss function that combines the variational lower bound with an auxiliary cross entropy loss. For text, this model class achieves strong results on character-level text generation while scaling to large vocabularies on LM1B. On the image dataset CIFAR-10, our models approach the sample quality and exceed the log-likelihood of the continuous-space DDPM model.
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) have achieved high quality image generation without adversarial training, yet they require simulating a Markov chain for many steps to produce a sample. To accelerate sampling, we present denoising diffusion implicit models (DDIMs), a more efficient class of iterative implicit probabilistic models with the same training procedure as DDPMs. In DDPMs, the generative process is defined as the reverse of a Markovian diffusion process. We construct a class of non-Markovian diffusion processes that lead to the same training objective, but whose reverse process can be much faster to sample from. We empirically demonstrate that DDIMs can produce high quality samples $10 times$ to $50 times$ faster in terms of wall-clock time compared to DDPMs, allow us to trade off computation for sample quality, and can perform semantically meaningful image interpolation directly in the latent space.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to perform well when deployed to test distributions that shares high similarity with the training distribution. Feeding DNNs with new data sequentially that were unseen in the training distribution has two major challenges -- fast adaptation to new tasks and catastrophic forgetting of old tasks. Such difficulties paved way for the on-going research on few-shot learning and continual learning. To tackle these problems, we introduce Attentive Independent Mechanisms (AIM). We incorporate the idea of learning using fast and slow weights in conjunction with the decoupling of the feature extraction and higher-order conceptual learning of a DNN. AIM is designed for higher-order conceptual learning, modeled by a mixture of experts that compete to learn independent concepts to solve a new task. AIM is a modular component that can be inserted into existing deep learning frameworks. We demonstrate its capability for few-shot learning by adding it to SIB and trained on MiniImageNet and CIFAR-FS, showing significant improvement. AIM is also applied to ANML and OML trained on Omniglot, CIFAR-100 and MiniImageNet to demonstrate its capability in continual learning. Code made publicly available at https://github.com/huang50213/AIM-Fewshot-Continual.
Model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) is arguably the most popular meta-learning algorithm nowadays, given its flexibility to incorporate various model architectures and to be applied to different problems. Nevertheless, its performance on few-shot classification is far behind many recent algorithms dedicated to the problem. In this paper, we point out several key facets of how to train MAML to excel in few-shot classification. First, we find that a large number of gradient steps are needed for the inner loop update, which contradicts the common usage of MAML for few-shot classification. Second, we find that MAML is sensitive to the permutation of class assignments in meta-testing: for a few-shot task of $N$ classes, there are exponentially many ways to assign the learned initialization of the $N$-way classifier to the $N$ classes, leading to an unavoidably huge variance. Third, we investigate several ways for permutation invariance and find that learning a shared classifier initialization for all the classes performs the best. On benchmark datasets such as MiniImageNet and TieredImageNet, our approach, which we name UNICORN-MAML, performs on a par with or even outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, while keeping the simplicity of MAML without adding any extra sub-networks.