No Arabic abstract
This paper presents to integrate the auxiliary information (e.g., additional attributes for data such as the hashtags for Instagram images) in the self-supervised learning process. We first observe that the auxiliary information may bring us useful information about data structures: for instance, the Instagram images with the same hashtags can be semantically similar. Hence, to leverage the structural information from the auxiliary information, we present to construct data clusters according to the auxiliary information. Then, we introduce the Clustering InfoNCE (Cl-InfoNCE) objective that learns similar representations for augmented variants of data from the same cluster and dissimilar representations for data from different clusters. Our approach contributes as follows: 1) Comparing to conventional self-supervised representations, the auxiliary-information-infused self-supervised representations bring the performance closer to the supervised representations; 2) The presented Cl-InfoNCE can also work with unsupervised constructed clusters (e.g., k-means clusters) and outperform strong clustering-based self-supervised learning approaches, such as the Prototypical Contrastive Learning (PCL) method; 3) We show that Cl-InfoNCE may be a better approach to leverage the data clustering information, by comparing it to the baseline approach - learning to predict the clustering assignments with cross-entropy loss. For analysis, we connect the goodness of the learned representations with the statistical relationships: i) the mutual information between the labels and the clusters and ii) the conditional entropy of the clusters given the labels.
In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted in the representation learning of graph-structured data and provided state-of-the-art performance in various applications such as link prediction, node classification, and recommendation. Motivated by recent advances of self-supervision for representation learning in natural language processing and computer vision, self-supervised learning has been recently studied to leverage unlabeled graph-structured data. However, employing self-supervision tasks as auxiliary tasks to assist a primary task has been less explored in the literature on graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised auxiliary learning framework to effectively learn graph neural networks. Moreover, this work is the first study showing that a meta-path prediction is beneficial as a self-supervised auxiliary task for heterogeneous graphs. Our method is learning to learn a primary task with various auxiliary tasks to improve generalization performance. The proposed method identifies an effective combination of auxiliary tasks and automatically balances them to improve the primary task. Our methods can be applied to any graph neural network in a plug-in manner without manual labeling or additional data. Also, it can be extended to any other auxiliary tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves the performance of node classification and link prediction.
Graph neural networks have shown superior performance in a wide range of applications providing a powerful representation of graph-structured data. Recent works show that the representation can be further improved by auxiliary tasks. However, the auxiliary tasks for heterogeneous graphs, which contain rich semantic information with various types of nodes and edges, have less explored in the literature. In this paper, to learn graph neural networks on heterogeneous graphs we propose a novel self-supervised auxiliary learning method using meta-paths, which are composite relations of multiple edge types. Our proposed method is learning to learn a primary task by predicting meta-paths as auxiliary tasks. This can be viewed as a type of meta-learning. The proposed method can identify an effective combination of auxiliary tasks and automatically balance them to improve the primary task. Our methods can be applied to any graph neural networks in a plug-in manner without manual labeling or additional data. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves the performance of link prediction and node classification on heterogeneous graphs.
Self-supervised learning is a form of unsupervised learning that leverages rich information in data to learn representations. However, data sometimes contains certain information that may be undesirable for downstream tasks. For instance, gender information may lead to biased decisions on many gender-irrelevant tasks. In this paper, we develop conditional contrastive learning to remove undesirable information in self-supervised representations. To remove the effect of the undesirable variable, our proposed approach conditions on the undesirable variable (i.e., by fixing the variations of it) during the contrastive learning process. In particular, inspired by the contrastive objective InfoNCE, we introduce Conditional InfoNCE (C-InfoNCE), and its computationally efficient variant, Weak-Conditional InfoNCE (WeaC-InfoNCE), for conditional contrastive learning. We demonstrate empirically that our methods can successfully learn self-supervised representations for downstream tasks while removing a great level of information related to the undesirable variables. We study three scenarios, each with a different type of undesirable variables: task-irrelevant meta-information for self-supervised speech representation learning, sensitive attributes for fair representation learning, and domain specification for multi-domain visual representation learning.
Machine learning analysis of longitudinal neuroimaging data is typically based on supervised learning, which requires a large number of ground-truth labels to be informative. As ground-truth labels are often missing or expensive to obtain in neuroscience, we avoid them in our analysis by combing factor disentanglement with self-supervised learning to identify changes and consistencies across the multiple MRIs acquired of each individual over time. Specifically, we propose a new definition of disentanglement by formulating a multivariate mapping between factors (e.g., brain age) associated with an MRI and a latent image representation. Then, factors that evolve across acquisitions of longitudinal sequences are disentangled from that mapping by self-supervised learning in such a way that changes in a single factor induce change along one direction in the representation space. We implement this model, named Longitudinal Self-Supervised Learning (LSSL), via a standard autoencoding structure with a cosine loss to disentangle brain age from the image representation. We apply LSSL to two longitudinal neuroimaging studies to highlight its strength in extracting the brain-age information from MRI and revealing informative characteristics associated with neurodegenerative and neuropsychological disorders. Moreover, the representations learned by LSSL facilitate supervised classification by recording faster convergence and higher (or similar) prediction accuracy compared to several other representation learning techniques.
We propose self-adaptive training -- a unified training algorithm that dynamically calibrates and enhances training process by model predictions without incurring extra computational cost -- to advance both supervised and self-supervised learning of deep neural networks. We analyze the training dynamics of deep networks on training data that are corrupted by, e.g., random noise and adversarial examples. Our analysis shows that model predictions are able to magnify useful underlying information in data and this phenomenon occurs broadly even in the absence of emph{any} label information, highlighting that model predictions could substantially benefit the training process: self-adaptive training improves the generalization of deep networks under noise and enhances the self-supervised representation learning. The analysis also sheds light on understanding deep learning, e.g., a potential explanation of the recently-discovered double-descent phenomenon in empirical risk minimization and the collapsing issue of the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning algorithms. Experiments on the CIFAR, STL and ImageNet datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach in three applications: classification with label noise, selective classification and linear evaluation. To facilitate future research, the code has been made public available at https://github.com/LayneH/self-adaptive-training.