No Arabic abstract
Representational learning forms the backbone of most deep learning applications, and the value of a learned representation is intimately tied to its information content regarding different factors of variation. Finding good representations depends on the nature of supervision and the learning algorithm. We propose a novel algorithm that relies on a weak form of supervision where the data is partitioned into sets according to certain inactive factors of variation. Our key insight is that by seeking approximate correspondence between elements of different sets, we learn strong representations that exclude the inactive factors of variation and isolate the active factors which vary within all sets. We demonstrate that the method can work in a semi-supervised scenario, and that a portion of the unsupervised data can belong to a different domain entirely. Further control over the content of the learned representations is possible by folding in data augmentation to suppress nuisance factors. We outperform competing baselines on the challenging problem of synthetic-to-real object pose transfer.
Learning disentangled representations is considered a cornerstone problem in representation learning. Recently, Locatello et al. (2019) demonstrated that unsupervised disentanglement learning without inductive biases is theoretically impossible and that existing inductive biases and unsupervised methods do not allow to consistently learn disentangled representations. However, in many practical settings, one might have access to a limited amount of supervision, for example through manual labeling of (some) factors of variation in a few training examples. In this paper, we investigate the impact of such supervision on state-of-the-art disentanglement methods and perform a large scale study, training over 52000 models under well-defined and reproducible experimental conditions. We observe that a small number of labeled examples (0.01--0.5% of the data set), with potentially imprecise and incomplete labels, is sufficient to perform model selection on state-of-the-art unsupervised models. Further, we investigate the benefit of incorporating supervision into the training process. Overall, we empirically validate that with little and imprecise supervision it is possible to reliably learn disentangled representations.
Statistical machine learning methods are increasingly used for neuroimaging data analysis. Their main virtue is their ability to model high-dimensional datasets, e.g. multivariate analysis of activation images or resting-state time series. Supervised learning is typically used in decoding or encoding settings to relate brain images to behavioral or clinical observations, while unsupervised learning can uncover hidden structures in sets of images (e.g. resting state functional MRI) or find sub-populations in large cohorts. By considering different functional neuroimaging applications, we illustrate how scikit-learn, a Python machine learning library, can be used to perform some key analysis steps. Scikit-learn contains a very large set of statistical learning algorithms, both supervised and unsupervised, and its application to neuroimaging data provides a versatile tool to study the brain.
Continual lifelong learning requires an agent or model to learn many sequentially ordered tasks, building on previous knowledge without catastrophically forgetting it. Much work has gone towards preventing the default tendency of machine learning models to catastrophically forget, yet virtually all such work involves manually-designed solutions to the problem. We instead advocate meta-learning a solution to catastrophic forgetting, allowing AI to learn to continually learn. Inspired by neuromodulatory processes in the brain, we propose A Neuromodulated Meta-Learning Algorithm (ANML). It differentiates through a sequential learning process to meta-learn an activation-gating function that enables context-dependent selective activation within a deep neural network. Specifically, a neuromodulatory (NM) neural network gates the forward pass of another (otherwise normal) neural network called the prediction learning network (PLN). The NM network also thus indirectly controls selective plasticity (i.e. the backward pass of) the PLN. ANML enables continual learning without catastrophic forgetting at scale: it produces state-of-the-art continual learning performance, sequentially learning as many as 600 classes (over 9,000 SGD updates).
Deep neural networks often have a huge number of parameters, which posts challenges in deployment in application scenarios with limited memory and computation capacity. Knowledge distillation is one approach to derive compact models from bigger ones. However, it has been observed that a converged heavy teacher model is strongly constrained for learning a compact student network and could make the optimization subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we propose ProKT, a new model-agnostic method by projecting the supervision signals of a teacher model into the students parameter space. Such projection is implemented by decomposing the training objective into local intermediate targets with an approximate mirror descent technique. The proposed method could be less sensitive with the quirks during optimization which could result in a better local optimum. Experiments on both image and text datasets show that our proposed ProKT consistently achieves superior performance compared to other existing knowledge distillation methods.
The assumption that training and testing samples are generated from the same distribution does not always hold for real-world machine-learning applications. The procedure of tackling this discrepancy between the training (source) and testing (target) domains is known as domain adaptation. We propose an unsupervised version of domain adaptation that considers the presence of only unlabelled data in the target domain. Our approach centers on finding correspondences between samples of each domain. The correspondences are obtained by treating the source and target samples as graphs and using a convex criterion to match them. The criteria used are first-order and second-order similarities between the graphs as well as a class-based regularization. We have also developed a computationally efficient routine for the convex optimization, thus allowing the proposed method to be used widely. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, computer simulations were conducted on synthetic, image classification and sentiment classification datasets. Results validated that the proposed local sample-to-sample matching method out-performs traditional moment-matching methods and is competitive with respect to current local domain-adaptation methods.