No Arabic abstract
Transfer learning aims to learn robust classifiers for the target domain by leveraging knowledge from a source domain. Since the source and the target domains are usually from different distributions, existing methods mainly focus on adapting the cross-domain marginal or conditional distributions. However, in real applications, the marginal and conditional distributions usually have different contributions to the domain discrepancy. Existing methods fail to quantitatively evaluate the different importance of these two distributions, which will result in unsatisfactory transfer performance. In this paper, we propose a novel concept called Dynamic Distribution Adaptation (DDA), which is capable of quantitatively evaluating the relative importance of each distribution. DDA can be easily incorporated into the framework of structural risk minimization to solve transfer learning problems. On the basis of DDA, we propose two novel learning algorithms: (1) Manifold Dynamic Distribution Adaptation (MDDA) for traditional transfer learning, and (2) Dynamic Distribution Adaptation Network (DDAN) for deep transfer learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MDDA and DDAN significantly improve the transfer learning performance and setup a strong baseline over the latest deep and adversarial methods on digits recognition, sentiment analysis, and image classification. More importantly, it is shown that marginal and conditional distributions have different contributions to the domain divergence, and our DDA is able to provide good quantitative evaluation of their relative importance which leads to better performance. We believe this observation can be helpful for future research in transfer learning.
The recent advances in deep transfer learning reveal that adversarial learning can be embedded into deep networks to learn more transferable features to reduce the distribution discrepancy between two domains. Existing adversarial domain adaptation methods either learn a single domain discriminator to align the global source and target distributions or pay attention to align subdomains based on multiple discriminators. However, in real applications, the marginal (global) and conditional (local) distributions between domains are often contributing differently to the adaptation. There is currently no method to dynamically and quantitatively evaluate the relative importance of these two distributions for adversarial learning. In this paper, we propose a novel Dynamic Adversarial Adaptation Network (DAAN) to dynamically learn domain-invariant representations while quantitatively evaluate the relative importance of global and local domain distributions. To the best of our knowledge, DAAN is the first attempt to perform dynamic adversarial distribution adaptation for deep adversarial learning. DAAN is extremely easy to implement and train in real applications. We theoretically analyze the effectiveness of DAAN, and it can also be explained in an attention strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAAN achieves better classification accuracy compared to state-of-the-art deep and adversarial methods. Results also imply the necessity and effectiveness of the dynamic distribution adaptation in adversarial transfer learning.
Transfer learning has achieved promising results by leveraging knowledge from the source domain to annotate the target domain which has few or none labels. Existing methods often seek to minimize the distribution divergence between domains, such as the marginal distribution, the conditional distribution or both. However, these two distances are often treated equally in existing algorithms, which will result in poor performance in real applications. Moreover, existing methods usually assume that the dataset is balanced, which also limits their performances on imbalanced tasks that are quite common in real problems. To tackle the distribution adaptation problem, in this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach, named as Balanced Distribution underline{A}daptation~(BDA), which can adaptively leverage the importance of the marginal and conditional distribution discrepancies, and several existing methods can be treated as special cases of BDA. Based on BDA, we also propose a novel Weighted Balanced Distribution Adaptation~(W-BDA) algorithm to tackle the class imbalance issue in transfer learning. W-BDA not only considers the distribution adaptation between domains but also adaptively changes the weight of each class. To evaluate the proposed methods, we conduct extensive experiments on several transfer learning tasks, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms over several state-of-the-art methods.
Transfer learning has been demonstrated to be successful and essential in diverse applications, which transfers knowledge from related but different source domains to the target domain. Online transfer learning(OTL) is a more challenging problem where the target data arrive in an online manner. Most OTL methods combine source classifier and target classifier directly by assigning a weight to each classifier, and adjust the weights constantly. However, these methods pay little attention to reducing the distribution discrepancy between domains. In this paper, we propose a novel online transfer learning method which seeks to find a new feature representation, so that the marginal distribution and conditional distribution discrepancy can be online reduced simultaneously. We focus on online transfer learning with multiple source domains and use the Hedge strategy to leverage knowledge from source domains. We analyze the theoretical properties of the proposed algorithm and provide an upper mistake bound. Comprehensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
We introduce a general method for improving the convergence rate of gradient-based optimizers that is easy to implement and works well in practice. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in a range of optimization problems by applying it to stochastic gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent with Nesterov momentum, and Adam, showing that it significantly reduces the need for the manual tuning of the initial learning rate for these commonly used algorithms. Our method works by dynamically updating the learning rate during optimization using the gradient with respect to the learning rate of the update rule itself. Computing this hypergradient needs little additional computation, requires only one extra copy of the original gradient to be stored in memory, and relies upon nothing more than what is provided by reverse-mode automatic differentiation.
Machine learning models often encounter distribution shifts when deployed in the real world. In this paper, we focus on adaptation to label distribution shift in the online setting, where the test-time label distribution is continually changing and the model must dynamically adapt to it without observing the true label. Leveraging a novel analysis, we show that the lack of true label does not hinder estimation of the expected test loss, which enables the reduction of online label shift adaptation to conventional online learning. Informed by this observation, we propose adaptation algorithms inspired by classical online learning techniques such as Follow The Leader (FTL) and Online Gradient Descent (OGD) and derive their regret bounds. We empirically verify our findings under both simulated and real world label distribution shifts and show that OGD is particularly effective and robust to a variety of challenging label shift scenarios.