No Arabic abstract
The objective of active learning (AL) is to train classification models with less number of labeled instances by selecting only the most informative instances for labeling. The AL algorithms designed for other data types such as images and text do not perform well on graph-structured data. Although a few heuristics-based AL algorithms have been proposed for graphs, a principled approach is lacking. In this paper, we propose MetAL, an AL approach that selects unlabeled instances that directly improve the future performance of a classification model. For a semi-supervised learning problem, we formulate the AL task as a bilevel optimization problem. Based on recent work in meta-learning, we use the meta-gradients to approximate the impact of retraining the model with any unlabeled instance on the model performance. Using multiple graph datasets belonging to different domains, we demonstrate that MetAL efficiently outperforms existing state-of-the-art AL algorithms.
We exploit a recently derived inversion scheme for arbitrary deep neural networks to develop a new semi-supervised learning framework that applies to a wide range of systems and problems. The approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on MNIST reaching $99.14%$ of test set accuracy while using $5$ labeled examples per class. Experiments with one-dimensional signals highlight the generality of the method. Importantly, our approach is simple, efficient, and requires no change in the deep network architecture.
While neural networks are powerful function approximators, they suffer from catastrophic forgetting when the data distribution is not stationary. One particular formalism that studies learning under non-stationary distribution is provided by continual learning, where the non-stationarity is imposed by a sequence of distinct tasks. Most methods in this space assume, however, the knowledge of task boundaries, and focus on alleviating catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we depart from this view and move the focus towards faster remembering -- i.e measuring how quickly the network recovers performance rather than measuring the networks performance without any adaptation. We argue that in many settings this can be more effective and that it opens the door to combining meta-learning and continual learning techniques, leveraging their complementary advantages. We propose a framework specific for the scenario where no information about task boundaries or task identity is given. It relies on a separation of concerns into what task is being solved and how the task should be solved. This framework is implemented by differentiating task specific parameters from task agnostic parameters, where the latter are optimized in a continual meta learning fashion, without access to multiple tasks at the same time. We showcase this framework in a supervised learning scenario and discuss the implication of the proposed formalism.
Recently proposed consistency-based Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods such as the $Pi$-model, temporal ensembling, the mean teacher, or the virtual adversarial training, have advanced the state of the art in several SSL tasks. These methods can typically reach performances that are comparable to their fully supervised counterparts while using only a fraction of labelled examples. Despite these methodological advances, the understanding of these methods is still relatively limited. In this text, we analyse (variations of) the $Pi$-model in settings where analytically tractable results can be obtained. We establish links with Manifold Tangent Classifiers and demonstrate that the quality of the perturbations is key to obtaining reasonable SSL performances. Importantly, we propose a simple extension of the Hidden Manifold Model that naturally incorporates data-augmentation schemes and offers a framework for understanding and experimenting with SSL methods.
Deep semi-supervised learning has been widely implemented in the real-world due to the rapid development of deep learning. Recently, attention has shifted to the approaches such as Mean-Teacher to penalize the inconsistency between two perturbed input sets. Although these methods may achieve positive results, they ignore the relationship information between data instances. To solve this problem, we propose a novel method named Metric Learning by Similarity Network (MLSN), which aims to learn a distance metric adaptively on different domains. By co-training with the classification network, similarity network can learn more information about pairwise relationships and performs better on some empirical tasks than state-of-art methods.
The problem of developing binary classifiers from positive and unlabeled data is often encountered in machine learning. A common requirement in this setting is to approximate posterior probabilities of positive and negative classes for a previously unseen data point. This problem can be decomposed into two steps: (i) the development of accurate predictors that discriminate between positive and unlabeled data, and (ii) the accurate estimation of the prior probabilities of positive and negative examples. In this work we primarily focus on the latter subproblem. We study nonparametric class prior estimation and formulate this problem as an estimation of mixing proportions in two-component mixture models, given a sample from one of the components and another sample from the mixture itself. We show that estimation of mixing proportions is generally ill-defined and propose a canonical form to obtain identifiability while maintaining the flexibility to model any distribution. We use insights from this theory to elucidate the optimization surface of the class priors and propose an algorithm for estimating them. To address the problems of high-dimensional density estimation, we provide practical transformations to low-dimensional spaces that preserve class priors. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method on univariate and multivariate data.