Co-regularized Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Deep neural networks, trained with large amount of labeled data, can fail to generalize well when tested with examples from a \emph{target domain} whose distribution differs from the training data distribution, referred as the \emph{source domain}. It can be expensive or even infeasible to obtain required amount of labeled data in all possible domains. Unsupervised domain adaptation sets out to address this problem, aiming to learn a good predictive model for the target domain using labeled examples from the source domain but only unlabeled examples from the target domain. Domain alignment approaches this problem by matching the source and target feature distributions, and has been used as a key component in many state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods. However, matching the marginal feature distributions does not guarantee that the corresponding class conditional distributions will be aligned across the two domains. We propose co-regularized domain alignment for unsupervised domain adaptation, which constructs multiple diverse feature spaces and aligns source and target distributions in each of them individually, while encouraging that alignments agree with each other with regard to the class predictions on the unlabeled target examples. The proposed method is generic and can be used to improve any domain adaptation method which uses domain alignment. We instantiate it in the context of a recent state-of-the-art method and observe that it provides significant performance improvements on several domain adaptation benchmarks.Comment: NIPS 2018 accepted versio

Issue Brief: Focus on Education

This brief focuses on education of boys and young men of color and was prepared for the, "Investing in Boys and Young Men of Color: The Promise and Opportunity," briefing held on June 11, 2014 in Washington, DC. The brief includes data providing the national context, promising program models, and strategies for moving forward

Identical and Fraternal Twins: Fine-Grained Semantic Contrastive Learning of Sentence Representations

The enhancement of unsupervised learning of sentence representations has been significantly achieved by the utility of contrastive learning. This approach clusters the augmented positive instance with the anchor instance to create a desired embedding space. However, relying solely on the contrastive objective can result in sub-optimal outcomes due to its inability to differentiate subtle semantic variations between positive pairs. Specifically, common data augmentation techniques frequently introduce semantic distortion, leading to a semantic margin between the positive pair. While the InfoNCE loss function overlooks the semantic margin and prioritizes similarity maximization between positive pairs during training, leading to the insensitive semantic comprehension ability of the trained model. In this paper, we introduce a novel Identical and Fraternal Twins of Contrastive Learning (named IFTCL) framework, capable of simultaneously adapting to various positive pairs generated by different augmentation techniques. We propose a \textit{Twins Loss} to preserve the innate margin during training and promote the potential of data enhancement in order to overcome the sub-optimal issue. We also present proof-of-concept experiments combined with the contrastive objective to prove the validity of the proposed Twins Loss. Furthermore, we propose a hippocampus queue mechanism to restore and reuse the negative instances without additional calculation, which further enhances the efficiency and performance of the IFCL. We verify the IFCL framework on nine semantic textual similarity tasks with both English and Chinese datasets, and the experimental results show that IFCL outperforms state-of-the-art methods.Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI2023). 9 pages, 4 figure

Bivariate Beta-LSTM

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) infers the long term dependency through a cell state maintained by the input and the forget gate structures, which models a gate output as a value in [0,1] through a sigmoid function. However, due to the graduality of the sigmoid function, the sigmoid gate is not flexible in representing multi-modality or skewness. Besides, the previous models lack modeling on the correlation between the gates, which would be a new method to adopt inductive bias for a relationship between previous and current input. This paper proposes a new gate structure with the bivariate Beta distribution. The proposed gate structure enables probabilistic modeling on the gates within the LSTM cell so that the modelers can customize the cell state flow with priors and distributions. Moreover, we theoretically show the higher upper bound of the gradient compared to the sigmoid function, and we empirically observed that the bivariate Beta distribution gate structure provides higher gradient values in training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of bivariate Beta gate structure on the sentence classification, image classification, polyphonic music modeling, and image caption generation.Comment: AAAI 202