No Arabic abstract
Federated learning has emerged as an important distributed learning paradigm, where a server aggregates a global model from many client-trained models while having no access to the client data. Although it is recognized that statistical heterogeneity of the client local data yields slower global model convergence, it is less commonly recognized that it also yields a biased federated global model with a high variance of accuracy across clients. In this work, we aim to provide federated learning schemes with improved fairness. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel federated learning system that employs zero-shot data augmentation on under-represented data to mitigate statistical heterogeneity and encourage more uniform accuracy performance across clients in federated networks. We study two variants of this scheme, Fed-ZDAC (federated learning with zero-shot data augmentation at the clients) and Fed-ZDAS (federated learning with zero-shot data augmentation at the server). Empirical results on a suite of datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on simultaneously improving the test accuracy and fairness.
Zero-shot learning transfers knowledge from seen classes to novel unseen classes to reduce human labor of labelling data for building new classifiers. Much effort on zero-shot learning however has focused on the standard multi-class setting, the more challenging multi-label zero-shot problem has received limited attention. In this paper we propose a transfer-aware embedding projection approach to tackle multi-label zero-shot learning. The approach projects the label embedding vectors into a low-dimensional space to induce better inter-label relationships and explicitly facilitate information transfer from seen labels to unseen labels, while simultaneously learning a max-margin multi-label classifier with the projected label embeddings. Auxiliary information can be conveniently incorporated to guide the label embedding projection to further improve label relation structures for zero-shot knowledge transfer. We conduct experiments for zero-shot multi-label image classification. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.
Most of the Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) algorithms currently use pre-trained models as their feature extractors, which are usually trained on the ImageNet data set by using deep neural networks. The richness of the feature information embedded in the pre-trained models can help the ZSL model extract more useful features from its limited training samples. However, sometimes the difference between the training data set of the current ZSL task and the ImageNet data set is too large, which may lead to the use of pre-trained models has no obvious help or even negative impact on the performance of the ZSL model. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a biologically inspired feature enhancement framework for ZSL. Specifically, we design a dual-channel learning framework that uses auxiliary data sets to enhance the feature extractor of the ZSL model and propose a novel method to guide the selection of the auxiliary data sets based on the knowledge of biological taxonomy. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively improve the generalization ability of the ZSL model and achieve state-of-the-art results on three benchmark ZSL tasks. We also explained the experimental phenomena through the way of feature visualization.
In Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL), unseen categories (for which no visual data are available at training time) can be predicted by leveraging their class embeddings (e.g., a list of attributes describing them) together with a complementary pool of seen classes (paired with both visual data and class embeddings). Despite GZSL is arguably challenging, we posit that knowing in advance the class embeddings, especially for unseen categories, is an actual limit of the applicability of GZSL towards real-world scenarios. To relax this assumption, we propose Open Zero-Shot Learning (OZSL) to extend GZSL towards the open-world settings. We formalize OZSL as the problem of recognizing seen and unseen classes (as in GZSL) while also rejecting instances from unknown categories, for which neither visual data nor class embeddings are provided. We formalize the OZSL problem introducing evaluation protocols, error metrics and benchmark datasets. We also suggest to tackle the OZSL problem by proposing the idea of performing unknown feature generation (instead of only unseen features generation as done in GZSL). We achieve this by optimizing a generative process to sample unknown class embeddings as complementary to the seen and the unseen. We intend these results to be the ground to foster future research, extending the standard closed-world zero-shot learning (GZSL) with the novel open-world counterpart (OZSL).
The rapid progress in machine learning methods has been empowered by i) huge datasets that have been collected and annotated, ii) improved engineering (e.g. data pre-processing/normalization). The existing datasets typically include several million samples, which constitutes their extension a colossal task. In addition, the state-of-the-art data-driven methods demand a vast amount of data, hence a standard engineering trick employed is artificial data augmentation for instance by adding into the data cropped and (affinely) transformed images. However, this approach does not correspond to any change in the natural 3D scene. We propose instead to perform data augmentation through learning realistic local transformations. We learn a forward and an inverse transformation that maps an image from the high-dimensional space of pixel intensities to a latent space which varies (approximately) linearly with the latent space of a realistically transformed version of the image. Such transformed images can be considered two successive frames in a video. Next, we utilize these transformations to learn a linear model that modifies the latent spaces and then use the inverse transformation to synthesize a new image. We argue that the this procedure produces powerful invariant representations. We perform both qualitative and quantitative experiments that demonstrate our proposed method creates new realistic images.
Traditional computer vision models are trained to predict a fixed set of predefined categories. Recently, natural language has been shown to be a broader and richer source of supervision that provides finer descriptions to visual concepts than supervised gold labels. Previous works, such as CLIP, use a simple pretraining task of predicting the pairings between images and text captions. CLIP, however, is data hungry and requires more than 400M image text pairs for training. We propose a data-efficient contrastive distillation method that uses soft labels to learn from noisy image-text pairs. Our model transfers knowledge from pretrained image and sentence encoders and achieves strong performance with only 3M image text pairs, 133x smaller than CLIP. Our method exceeds the previous SoTA of general zero-shot learning on ImageNet 21k+1k by 73% relatively with a ResNet50 image encoder and DeCLUTR text encoder. We also beat CLIP by 10.5% relatively on zero-shot evaluation on Google Open Images (19,958 classes).