Mixed Robust/Average Submodular Partitioning: Fast Algorithms, Guarantees, and Applications to Parallel Machine Learning and Multi-Label Image Segmentation

We study two mixed robust/average-case submodular partitioning problems that we collectively call Submodular Partitioning. These problems generalize both purely robust instances of the problem (namely max-min submodular fair allocation (SFA) and min-max submodular load balancing (SLB) and also generalize average-case instances (that is the submodular welfare problem (SWP) and submodular multiway partition (SMP). While the robust versions have been studied in the theory community, existing work has focused on tight approximation guarantees, and the resultant algorithms are not, in general, scalable to very large real-world applications. This is in contrast to the average case, where most of the algorithms are scalable. In the present paper, we bridge this gap, by proposing several new algorithms (including those based on greedy, majorization-minimization, minorization-maximization, and relaxation algorithms) that not only scale to large sizes but that also achieve theoretical approximation guarantees close to the state-of-the-art, and in some cases achieve new tight bounds. We also provide new scalable algorithms that apply to additive combinations of the robust and average-case extreme objectives. We show that these problems have many applications in machine learning (ML). This includes: 1) data partitioning and load balancing for distributed machine algorithms on parallel machines; 2) data clustering; and 3) multi-label image segmentation with (only) Boolean submodular functions via pixel partitioning. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms on real-world problems involving data partitioning for distributed optimization of standard machine learning objectives (including both convex and deep neural network objectives), and also on purely unsupervised (i.e., no supervised or semi-supervised learning, and no interactive segmentation) image segmentation

Learning From Less Data: A Unified Data Subset Selection and Active Learning Framework for Computer Vision

Supervised machine learning based state-of-the-art computer vision techniques are in general data hungry. Their data curation poses the challenges of expensive human labeling, inadequate computing resources and larger experiment turn around times. Training data subset selection and active learning techniques have been proposed as possible solutions to these challenges. A special class of subset selection functions naturally model notions of diversity, coverage and representation and can be used to eliminate redundancy thus lending themselves well for training data subset selection. They can also help improve the efficiency of active learning in further reducing human labeling efforts by selecting a subset of the examples obtained using the conventional uncertainty sampling based techniques. In this work, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of two diversity models, namely the Facility-Location and Dispersion models for training-data subset selection and reducing labeling effort. We demonstrate this across the board for a variety of computer vision tasks including Gender Recognition, Face Recognition, Scene Recognition, Object Detection and Object Recognition. Our results show that diversity based subset selection done in the right way can increase the accuracy by upto 5 - 10% over existing baselines, particularly in settings in which less training data is available. This allows the training of complex machine learning models like Convolutional Neural Networks with much less training data and labeling costs while incurring minimal performance loss.Comment: Accepted to WACV 2019. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1805.1119

Diversity in Machine Learning

Machine learning methods have achieved good performance and been widely applied in various real-world applications. They can learn the model adaptively and be better fit for special requirements of different tasks. Generally, a good machine learning system is composed of plentiful training data, a good model training process, and an accurate inference. Many factors can affect the performance of the machine learning process, among which the diversity of the machine learning process is an important one. The diversity can help each procedure to guarantee a total good machine learning: diversity of the training data ensures that the training data can provide more discriminative information for the model, diversity of the learned model (diversity in parameters of each model or diversity among different base models) makes each parameter/model capture unique or complement information and the diversity in inference can provide multiple choices each of which corresponds to a specific plausible local optimal result. Even though the diversity plays an important role in machine learning process, there is no systematical analysis of the diversification in machine learning system. In this paper, we systematically summarize the methods to make data diversification, model diversification, and inference diversification in the machine learning process, respectively. In addition, the typical applications where the diversity technology improved the machine learning performance have been surveyed, including the remote sensing imaging tasks, machine translation, camera relocalization, image segmentation, object detection, topic modeling, and others. Finally, we discuss some challenges of the diversity technology in machine learning and point out some directions in future work.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Acces

Targeted Subset Selection for Limited-data ASR Accent Adaptation

We study the task of adapting an existing ASR model to a non-native accent while being constrained by a transcription budget on the duration of utterances selected from a large unlabeled corpus. We propose a subset selection approach using the recently proposed submodular mutual information functions, in which we identify a diverse set of utterances that match the target accent. This is specified through a few target utterances and achieved by modelling the relationship between the target and the selected subsets using these functions. The model adapts to the accent through fine-tuning with utterances selected and transcribed from the unlabeled corpus. We also use an accent classifier to learn accent-aware feature representations. Our method is also able to exploit samples from other accents to perform out-of-domain selections for low-resource accents which are not available in these corpora. We show that the targeted subset selection approach improves significantly upon random sampling - by around 5% to 10% (absolute) in most cases, and is around 10x more label-efficient. We also compare with an oracle method where we specifically pick from the target accent and our method is comparable to the oracle in its selections and WER performance.Comment: Under review (INTERSPEECH 2022

Extending Contrastive Learning to Unsupervised Coreset Selection

Self-supervised contrastive learning offers a means of learning informative features from a pool of unlabeled data. In this paper, we delve into another useful approach -- providing a way of selecting a core-set that is entirely unlabeled. In this regard, contrastive learning, one of a large number of self-supervised methods, was recently proposed and has consistently delivered the highest performance. This prompted us to choose two leading methods for contrastive learning: the simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations (SimCLR) and the momentum contrastive (MoCo) learning framework. We calculated the cosine similarities for each example of an epoch for the entire duration of the contrastive learning process and subsequently accumulated the cosine-similarity values to obtain the coreset score. Our assumption was that an sample with low similarity would likely behave as a coreset. Compared with existing coreset selection methods with labels, our approach reduced the cost associated with human annotation. The unsupervised method implemented in this study for coreset selection obtained improved results over a randomly chosen subset, and were comparable to existing supervised coreset selection on various classification datasets (e.g., CIFAR, SVHN, and QMNIST).Comment: 11page

A General Framework for Edited Video and Raw Video Summarization

In this paper, we build a general summarization framework for both of edited video and raw video summarization. Overall, our work can be divided into three folds: 1) Four models are designed to capture the properties of video summaries, i.e., containing important people and objects (importance), representative to the video content (representativeness), no similar key-shots (diversity) and smoothness of the storyline (storyness). Specifically, these models are applicable to both edited videos and raw videos. 2) A comprehensive score function is built with the weighted combination of the aforementioned four models. Note that the weights of the four models in the score function, denoted as property-weight, are learned in a supervised manner. Besides, the property-weights are learned for edited videos and raw videos, respectively. 3) The training set is constructed with both edited videos and raw videos in order to make up the lack of training data. Particularly, each training video is equipped with a pair of mixing-coefficients which can reduce the structure mess in the training set caused by the rough mixture. We test our framework on three datasets, including edited videos, short raw videos and long raw videos. Experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed framework

Diversity-aware Multi-Video Summarization

Most video summarization approaches have focused on extracting a summary from a single video; we propose an unsupervised framework for summarizing a collection of videos. We observe that each video in the collection may contain some information that other videos do not have, and thus exploring the underlying complementarity could be beneficial in creating a diverse informative summary. We develop a novel diversity-aware sparse optimization method for multi-video summarization by exploring the complementarity within the videos. Our approach extracts a multi-video summary which is both interesting and representative in describing the whole video collection. To efficiently solve our optimization problem, we develop an alternating minimization algorithm that minimizes the overall objective function with respect to one video at a time while fixing the other videos. Moreover, we introduce a new benchmark dataset, Tour20, that contains 140 videos with multiple human created summaries, which were acquired in a controlled experiment. Finally, by extensive experiments on the new Tour20 dataset and several other multi-view datasets, we show that the proposed approach clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the two problems-topic-oriented video summarization and multi-view video summarization in a camera network.Comment: IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, 2017 (In Press

Automatic Curation of Large-Scale Datasets for Audio-Visual Representation Learning

Large-scale datasets are the cornerstone of representation learning. Existing self-supervised approaches extract learning signals by making certain assumptions about the data, e.g., spatio-temporal continuity and multimodal correspondence. However, finding large amounts of data that satisfy such assumptions is not straightforward, and this restricts the community to rely on datasets collected through laborious annotation and/or manual filtering processes. In this paper, we propose a subset optimization approach for automatic dataset curation. Focusing on audio-visual representation learning, we find a subset that provides the maximum mutual information between audio and visual channels in videos. We show that self-supervised models trained on our data, despite being automatically constructed, achieve competitive downstream performances compared to existing datasets that require annotation and/or manual filtering. The most significant benefit of our approach is scalability. We release a dataset of 100M videos with high audio-visual correspondence

Submodularity-Inspired Data Selection for Goal-Oriented Chatbot Training Based on Sentence Embeddings

Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems, such as goal-oriented chatbots or personal assistants, rely on an initial natural language understanding (NLU) module to determine the intent and to extract the relevant information from the user queries they take as input. SLU systems usually help users to solve problems in relatively narrow domains and require a large amount of in-domain training data. This leads to significant data availability issues that inhibit the development of successful systems. To alleviate this problem, we propose a technique of data selection in the low-data regime that enables us to train with fewer labeled sentences, thus smaller labelling costs. We propose a submodularity-inspired data ranking function, the ratio-penalty marginal gain, for selecting data points to label based only on the information extracted from the textual embedding space. We show that the distances in the embedding space are a viable source of information that can be used for data selection. Our method outperforms two known active learning techniques and enables cost-efficient training of the NLU unit. Moreover, our proposed selection technique does not need the model to be retrained in between the selection steps, making it time efficient as well

Improved Noisy Student Training for Automatic Speech Recognition

Recently, a semi-supervised learning method known as "noisy student training" has been shown to improve image classification performance of deep networks significantly. Noisy student training is an iterative self-training method that leverages augmentation to improve network performance. In this work, we adapt and improve noisy student training for automatic speech recognition, employing (adaptive) SpecAugment as the augmentation method. We find effective methods to filter, balance and augment the data generated in between self-training iterations. By doing so, we are able to obtain word error rates (WERs) 4.2%/8.6% on the clean/noisy LibriSpeech test sets by only using the clean 100h subset of LibriSpeech as the supervised set and the rest (860h) as the unlabeled set. Furthermore, we are able to achieve WERs 1.7%/3.4% on the clean/noisy LibriSpeech test sets by using the unlab-60k subset of LibriLight as the unlabeled set for LibriSpeech 960h. We are thus able to improve upon the previous state-of-the-art clean/noisy test WERs achieved on LibriSpeech 100h (4.74%/12.20%) and LibriSpeech (1.9%/4.1%).Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables; v2: minor revisions, reference adde