Semi-supervised on-device neural network adaptation for remote and portable laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a popular, fast elemental analysis technique used to determine the chemical composition of target samples, such as in industrial analysis of metals or in space exploration. Recently, there has been a rise in the use of machine learning (ML) techniques for LIBS data processing. However, ML for LIBS is challenging as: (i) the predictive models must be lightweight since they need to be deployed in highly resource-constrained and battery-operated portable LIBS systems; and (ii) since these systems can be remote, the models must be able to self-adapt to any domain shift in input distributions which could be due to the lack of different types of inputs in training data or dynamic environmental/sensor noise. This on-device retraining of model should not only be fast but also unsupervised due to the absence of new labeled data in remote LIBS systems. We introduce a lightweight multi-layer perceptron (MLP) model for LIBS that can be adapted on-device without requiring labels for new input data. It shows 89.3% average accuracy during data streaming, and up to 2.1% better accuracy compared to an MLP model that does not support adaptation. Finally, we also characterize the inference and retraining performance of our model on Google Pixel2 phone.Comment: Accepted in On-Device Intelligence Workshop (held in conjunction with MLSys Conference), 202

Curriculum Manager for Source Selection in Multi-Source Domain Adaptation

The performance of Multi-Source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation depends significantly on the effectiveness of transfer from labeled source domain samples. In this paper, we proposed an adversarial agent that learns a dynamic curriculum for source samples, called Curriculum Manager for Source Selection (CMSS). The Curriculum Manager, an independent network module, constantly updates the curriculum during training, and iteratively learns which domains or samples are best suited for aligning to the target. The intuition behind this is to force the Curriculum Manager to constantly re-measure the transferability of latent domains over time to adversarially raise the error rate of the domain discriminator. CMSS does not require any knowledge of the domain labels, yet it outperforms other methods on four well-known benchmarks by significant margins. We also provide interpretable results that shed light on the proposed method

Unsupervised Calibration under Covariate Shift

A probabilistic model is said to be calibrated if its predicted probabilities match the corresponding empirical frequencies. Calibration is important for uncertainty quantification and decision making in safety-critical applications. While calibration of classifiers has been widely studied, we find that calibration is brittle and can be easily lost under minimal covariate shifts. Existing techniques, including domain adaptation ones, primarily focus on prediction accuracy and do not guarantee calibration neither in theory nor in practice. In this work, we formally introduce the problem of calibration under domain shift, and propose an importance sampling based approach to address it. We evaluate and discuss the efficacy of our method on both real-world datasets and synthetic datasets.Comment: Submitted to Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2020

Multi-Source Unsupervised Hyperparameter Optimization

How can we conduct efficient hyperparameter optimization for a completely new task? In this work, we consider a novel setting, where we search for the optimal hyperparameters for a target task of interest using only unlabeled target task and somewhat relevant source task datasets. In this setting, it is essential to estimate the ground-truth target task objective using only the available information. We propose estimators to unbiasedly approximate the ground-truth with a desirable variance property. Building on these estimators, we provide a general and tractable hyperparameter optimization procedure for our setting. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed framework broadens the applications of automated hyperparameter optimization.Comment: equal contributio

Cross-regional oil palm tree counting and detection via multi-level attention domain adaptation network

Providing an accurate evaluation of palm tree plantation in a large region can bring meaningful impacts in both economic and ecological aspects. However, the enormous spatial scale and the variety of geological features across regions has made it a grand challenge with limited solutions based on manual human monitoring efforts. Although deep learning based algorithms have demonstrated potential in forming an automated approach in recent years, the labelling efforts needed for covering different features in different regions largely constrain its effectiveness in large-scale problems. In this paper, we propose a novel domain adaptive oil palm tree detection method, i.e., a Multi-level Attention Domain Adaptation Network (MADAN) to reap cross-regional oil palm tree counting and detection. MADAN consists of 4 procedures: First, we adopted a batch-instance normalization network (BIN) based feature extractor for improving the generalization ability of the model, integrating batch normalization and instance normalization. Second, we embedded a multi-level attention mechanism (MLA) into our architecture for enhancing the transferability, including a feature level attention and an entropy level attention. Then we designed a minimum entropy regularization (MER) to increase the confidence of the classifier predictions through assigning the entropy level attention value to the entropy penalty. Finally, we employed a sliding window-based prediction and an IOU based post-processing approach to attain the final detection results. We conducted comprehensive ablation experiments using three different satellite images of large-scale oil palm plantation area with six transfer tasks. MADAN improves the detection accuracy by 14.98% in terms of average F1-score compared with the Baseline method (without DA), and performs 3.55%-14.49% better than existing domain adaptation methods.Comment: 39 pages, 13 figures, accepted by ISPRS PG&R

Discriminative Feature Alignment: Improving Transferability of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Gaussian-guided Latent Alignment

In this study, we focus on the unsupervised domain adaptation problem where an approximate inference model is to be learned from a labeled data domain and expected to generalize well to an unlabeled data domain. The success of unsupervised domain adaptation largely relies on the cross-domain feature alignment. Previous work has attempted to directly align latent features by the classifier-induced discrepancies. Nevertheless, a common feature space cannot always be learned via this direct feature alignment especially when a large domain gap exists. To solve this problem, we introduce a Gaussian-guided latent alignment approach to align the latent feature distributions of the two domains under the guidance of the prior distribution. In such an indirect way, the distributions over the samples from the two domains will be constructed on a common feature space, i.e., the space of the prior, which promotes better feature alignment. To effectively align the target latent distribution with this prior distribution, we also propose a novel unpaired L1-distance by taking advantage of the formulation of the encoder-decoder. The extensive evaluations on nine benchmark datasets validate the superior knowledge transferability through outperforming state-of-the-art methods and the versatility of the proposed method by improving the existing work significantly.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Learning to Match Distributions for Domain Adaptation

When the training and test data are from different distributions, domain adaptation is needed to reduce dataset bias to improve the model's generalization ability. Since it is difficult to directly match the cross-domain joint distributions, existing methods tend to reduce the marginal or conditional distribution divergence using predefined distances such as MMD and adversarial-based discrepancies. However, it remains challenging to determine which method is suitable for a given application since they are built with certain priors or bias. Thus they may fail to uncover the underlying relationship between transferable features and joint distributions. This paper proposes Learning to Match (L2M) to automatically learn the cross-domain distribution matching without relying on hand-crafted priors on the matching loss. Instead, L2M reduces the inductive bias by using a meta-network to learn the distribution matching loss in a data-driven way. L2M is a general framework that unifies task-independent and human-designed matching features. We design a novel optimization algorithm for this challenging objective with self-supervised label propagation. Experiments on public datasets substantiate the superiority of L2M over SOTA methods. Moreover, we apply L2M to transfer from pneumonia to COVID-19 chest X-ray images with remarkable performance. L2M can also be extended in other distribution matching applications where we show in a trial experiment that L2M generates more realistic and sharper MNIST samples.Comment: Preprint. 20 Pages. Code available at https://github.com/jindongwang/transferlearning/tree/master/code/deep/Learning-to-Matc

Selecting Treatment Effects Models for Domain Adaptation Using Causal Knowledge

Selecting causal inference models for estimating individualized treatment effects (ITE) from observational data presents a unique challenge since the counterfactual outcomes are never observed. The problem is challenged further in the unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) setting where we only have access to labeled samples in the source domain, but desire selecting a model that achieves good performance on a target domain for which only unlabeled samples are available. Existing techniques for UDA model selection are designed for the predictive setting. These methods examine discriminative density ratios between the input covariates in the source and target domain and do not factor in the model's predictions in the target domain. Because of this, two models with identical performance on the source domain would receive the same risk score by existing methods, but in reality, have significantly different performance in the test domain. We leverage the invariance of causal structures across domains to propose a novel model selection metric specifically designed for ITE methods under the UDA setting. In particular, we propose selecting models whose predictions of interventions' effects satisfy known causal structures in the target domain. Experimentally, our method selects ITE models that are more robust to covariate shifts on several healthcare datasets, including estimating the effect of ventilation in COVID-19 patients from different geographic locations