Transfer Learning for Speech and Language Processing

Transfer learning is a vital technique that generalizes models trained for one setting or task to other settings or tasks. For example in speech recognition, an acoustic model trained for one language can be used to recognize speech in another language, with little or no re-training data. Transfer learning is closely related to multi-task learning (cross-lingual vs. multilingual), and is traditionally studied in the name of `model adaptation'. Recent advance in deep learning shows that transfer learning becomes much easier and more effective with high-level abstract features learned by deep models, and the `transfer' can be conducted not only between data distributions and data types, but also between model structures (e.g., shallow nets and deep nets) or even model types (e.g., Bayesian models and neural models). This review paper summarizes some recent prominent research towards this direction, particularly for speech and language processing. We also report some results from our group and highlight the potential of this very interesting research field.Comment: 13 pages, APSIPA 201

Multi-task Learning by Leveraging the Semantic Information

One crucial objective of multi-task learning is to align distributions across tasks so that the information between them can be transferred and shared. However, existing approaches only focused on matching the marginal feature distribution while ignoring the semantic information, which may hinder the learning performance. To address this issue, we propose to leverage the label information in multi-task learning by exploring the semantic conditional relations among tasks. We first theoretically analyze the generalization bound of multi-task learning based on the notion of Jensen-Shannon divergence, which provides new insights into the value of label information in multi-task learning. Our analysis also leads to a concrete algorithm that jointly matches the semantic distribution and controls label distribution divergence. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, we first compare the algorithm with several baselines on some benchmarks and then test the algorithms under label space shift conditions. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method could outperform most baselines and achieve state-of-the-art performance, particularly showing the benefits under the label shift conditions

CoNet: Collaborative Cross Networks for Cross-Domain Recommendation

The cross-domain recommendation technique is an effective way of alleviating the data sparse issue in recommender systems by leveraging the knowledge from relevant domains. Transfer learning is a class of algorithms underlying these techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach for cross-domain recommendation by using neural networks as the base model. In contrast to the matrix factorization based cross-domain techniques, our method is deep transfer learning, which can learn complex user-item interaction relationships. We assume that hidden layers in two base networks are connected by cross mappings, leading to the collaborative cross networks (CoNet). CoNet enables dual knowledge transfer across domains by introducing cross connections from one base network to another and vice versa. CoNet is achieved in multi-layer feedforward networks by adding dual connections and joint loss functions, which can be trained efficiently by back-propagation. The proposed model is thoroughly evaluated on two large real-world datasets. It outperforms baselines by relative improvements of 7.84\% in NDCG. We demonstrate the necessity of adaptively selecting representations to transfer. Our model can reduce tens of thousands training examples comparing with non-transfer methods and still has the competitive performance with them.Comment: Deep transfer learning for recommender system

Joint learning from multiple information sources for biological problems

Thanks to technological advancements, more and more biological data havebeen generated in recent years. Data availability offers unprecedented opportunities to look at the same problem from multiple aspects. It also unveils a more global view of the problem that takes into account the intricated inter-play between the involved molecules/entities. Nevertheless, biological datasets are biased, limited in quantity, and contain many false-positive samples. Such challenges often drastically downgrade the performance of a predictive model on unseen data and, thus, limit its applicability in real biological studies. Human learning is a multi-stage process in which we usually start with simple things. Through the accumulated knowledge over time, our cognition ability extends to more complex concepts. Children learn to speak simple words before being able to formulate sentences. Similarly, being able to speak correct sentences supports our learning to speak correct and meaningful paragraphs, etc. Generally, knowledge acquired from related learning tasks would help boost our learning capability in the current task. Motivated by such a phenomenon, in this thesis, we study supervised machine learning models for bioinformatics problems that can improve their performance through exploiting multiple related knowledge sources. More specifically, we concern with ways to enrich the supervised models’ knowledge base with publicly available related data to enhance the computational models’ prediction performance. Our work shares commonality with existing works in multimodal learning, multi-task learning, and transfer learning. Nevertheless, there are certain differences in some cases. Besides the proposed architectures, we present large-scale experiment setups with consensus evaluation metrics along with the creation and release of large datasets to showcase our approaches’ superiority. Moreover, we add case studies with detailed analyses in which we place no simplified assumptions to demonstrate the systems’ utilities in realistic application scenarios. Finally, we develop and make available an easy-to-use website for non-expert users to query the model’s generated prediction results to facilitate field experts’ assessments and adaptation. We believe that our work serves as one of the first steps in bridging the gap between “Computer Science” and “Biology” that will open a new era of fruitful collaboration between computer scientists and biological field experts