No Arabic abstract
Fundamental machine learning theory shows that different samples contribute unequally both in learning and testing processes. Contemporary studies on DNN imply that such sample difference is rooted on the distribution of intrinsic pattern information, namely sample regularity. Motivated by the recent discovery on network memorization and generalization, we proposed a pair of sample regularity measures for both processes with a formulation-consistent representation. Specifically, cumulative binary training/generalizing loss (CBTL/CBGL), the cumulative number of correct classiffcations of the training/testing sample within training stage, is proposed to quantize the stability in memorization-generalization process; while forgetting/mal-generalizing events, i.e., the mis-classification of previously learned or generalized sample, are utilized to represent the uncertainty of sample regularity with respect to optimization dynamics. Experiments validated the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approaches for mini-batch SGD optimization. Further applications on training/testing sample selection show the proposed measures sharing the unified computing procedure could benefit for both tasks.
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential in various control tasks in terms of both sample-efficiency and final performance. However, learning a generalizable dynamics model robust to changes in dynamics remains a challenge since the target transition dynamics follow a multi-modal distribution. In this paper, we present a new model-based RL algorithm, coined trajectory-wise multiple choice learning, that learns a multi-headed dynamics model for dynamics generalization. The main idea is updating the most accurate prediction head to specialize each head in certain environments with similar dynamics, i.e., clustering environments. Moreover, we incorporate context learning, which encodes dynamics-specific information from past experiences into the context latent vector, enabling the model to perform online adaptation to unseen environments. Finally, to utilize the specialized prediction heads more effectively, we propose an adaptive planning method, which selects the most accurate prediction head over a recent experience. Our method exhibits superior zero-shot generalization performance across a variety of control tasks, compared to state-of-the-art RL methods. Source code and videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/trajectory-mcl.
Randomized smoothing has recently emerged as an effective tool that enables certification of deep neural network classifiers at scale. All prior art on randomized smoothing has focused on isotropic $ell_p$ certification, which has the advantage of yielding certificates that can be easily compared among isotropic methods via $ell_p$-norm radius. However, isotropic certification limits the region that can be certified around an input to worst-case adversaries, i.e., it cannot reason about other close, potentially large, constant prediction safe regions. To alleviate this issue, (i) we theoretically extend the isotropic randomized smoothing $ell_1$ and $ell_2$ certificates to their generalized anisotropic counterparts following a simplified analysis. Moreover, (ii) we propose evaluation metrics allowing for the comparison of general certificates - a certificate is superior to another if it certifies a superset region - with the quantification of each certificate through the volume of the certified region. We introduce ANCER, a practical framework for obtaining anisotropic certificates for a given test set sample via volume maximization. Our empirical results demonstrate that ANCER achieves state-of-the-art $ell_1$ and $ell_2$ certified accuracy on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet at multiple radii, while certifying substantially larger regions in terms of volume, thus highlighting the benefits of moving away from isotropic analysis. Code used in our experiments is available in https://github.com/MotasemAlfarra/ANCER.
Few-shot learning, which aims at extracting new concepts rapidly from extremely few examples of novel classes, has been featured into the meta-learning paradigm recently. Yet, the key challenge of how to learn a generalizable classifier with the capability of adapting to specific tasks with severely limited data still remains in this domain. To this end, we propose a Transductive Episodic-wise Adaptive Metric (TEAM) framework for few-shot learning, by integrating the meta-learning paradigm with both deep metric learning and transductive inference. With exploring the pairwise constraints and regularization prior within each task, we explicitly formulate the adaptation procedure into a standard semi-definite programming problem. By solving the problem with its closed-form solution on the fly with the setup of transduction, our approach efficiently tailors an episodic-wise metric for each task to adapt all features from a shared task-agnostic embedding space into a more discriminative task-specific metric space. Moreover, we further leverage an attention-based bi-directional similarity strategy for extracting the more robust relationship between queries and prototypes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our framework is superior to other existing approaches and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the few-shot literature.
Few-shot dataset generalization is a challenging variant of the well-studied few-shot classification problem where a diverse training set of several datasets is given, for the purpose of training an adaptable model that can then learn classes from new datasets using only a few examples. To this end, we propose to utilize the diverse training set to construct a universal template: a partial model that can define a wide array of dataset-specialized models, by plugging in appropriate components. For each new few-shot classification problem, our approach therefore only requires inferring a small number of parameters to insert into the universal template. We design a separate network that produces an initialization of those parameters for each given task, and we then fine-tune its proposed initialization via a few steps of gradient descent. Our approach is more parameter-efficient, scalable and adaptable compared to previous methods, and achieves the state-of-the-art on the challenging Meta-Dataset benchmark.
Deep neural networks have been shown to easily overfit to biased training data with label noise or class imbalance. Meta-learning algorithms are commonly designed to alleviate this issue in the form of sample reweighting, by learning a meta weighting network that takes training losses as inputs to generate sample weights. In this paper, we advocate that choosing proper inputs for the meta weighting network is crucial for desired sample weights in a specific task, while training loss is not always the correct answer. In view of this, we propose a novel meta-learning algorithm, MetaInfoNet, which automatically learns effective representations as inputs for the meta weighting network by emphasizing task-related information with an information bottleneck strategy. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets with label noise or class imbalance validate that MetaInfoNet is superior to many state-of-the-art methods.