An Overview of Deep Semi-Supervised Learning

Deep neural networks demonstrated their ability to provide remarkable performances on a wide range of supervised learning tasks (e.g., image classification) when trained on extensive collections of labeled data (e.g., ImageNet). However, creating such large datasets requires a considerable amount of resources, time, and effort. Such resources may not be available in many practical cases, limiting the adoption and the application of many deep learning methods. In a search for more data-efficient deep learning methods to overcome the need for large annotated datasets, there is a rising research interest in semi-supervised learning and its applications to deep neural networks to reduce the amount of labeled data required, by either developing novel methods or adopting existing semi-supervised learning frameworks for a deep learning setting. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of deep semi-supervised learning, starting with an introduction to the field, followed by a summarization of the dominant semi-supervised approaches in deep learning.Comment: Preprin

Spatial Contrastive Learning for Few-Shot Classification

Existing few-shot classification methods rely to some degree on the cross-entropy (CE) loss to learn transferable representations that facilitate the test time adaptation to unseen classes with limited data. However, the CE loss has several shortcomings, e.g., inducing representations with excessive discrimination towards seen classes, which reduces their transferability to unseen classes and results in sub-optimal generalization. In this work, we explore contrastive learning as an additional auxiliary training objective, acting as a data-dependent regularizer to promote more general and transferable features. Instead of using the standard contrastive objective, which suppresses local discriminative features, we propose a novel attention-based spatial contrastive objective to learn locally discriminative and class-agnostic features. With extensive experiments, we show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, confirming the importance of learning good and transferable embeddings for few-shot learning.Comment: Preprin

Uncertain Trees: Dealing with Uncertain Inputs in Regression Trees

Tree-based ensemble methods, as Random Forests and Gradient Boosted Trees, have been successfully used for regression in many applications and research studies. Furthermore, these methods have been extended in order to deal with uncertainty in the output variable, using for example a quantile loss in Random Forests (Meinshausen, 2006). To the best of our knowledge, no extension has been provided yet for dealing with uncertainties in the input variables, even though such uncertainties are common in practical situations. We propose here such an extension by showing how standard regression trees optimizing a quadratic loss can be adapted and learned while taking into account the uncertainties in the inputs. By doing so, one no longer assumes that an observation lies into a single region of the regression tree, but rather that it belongs to each region with a certain probability. Experiments conducted on several data sets illustrate the good behavior of the proposed extension.Comment: 9 page

Stochastic Adversarial Gradient Embedding for Active Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to bridge the gap between a source domain, where labelled data are available, and a target domain only represented with unlabelled data. If domain invariant representations have dramatically improved the adaptability of models, to guarantee their good transferability remains a challenging problem. This paper addresses this problem by using active learning to annotate a small budget of target data. Although this setup, called Active Domain Adaptation (ADA), deviates from UDA's standard setup, a wide range of practical applications are faced with this situation. To this purpose, we introduce \textit{Stochastic Adversarial Gradient Embedding} (SAGE), a framework that makes a triple contribution to ADA. First, we select for annotation target samples that are likely to improve the representations' transferability by measuring the variation, before and after annotation, of the transferability loss gradient. Second, we increase sampling diversity by promoting different gradient directions. Third, we introduce a novel training procedure for actively incorporating target samples when learning invariant representations. SAGE is based on solid theoretical ground and validated on various UDA benchmarks against several baselines. Our empirical investigation demonstrates that SAGE takes the best of uncertainty \textit{vs} diversity samplings and improves representations transferability substantially

Simple Sorting Criteria Help Find the Causal Order in Additive Noise Models

Additive Noise Models (ANM) encode a popular functional assumption that enables learning causal structure from observational data. Due to a lack of real-world data meeting the assumptions, synthetic ANM data are often used to evaluate causal discovery algorithms. Reisach et al. (2021) show that, for common simulation parameters, a variable ordering by increasing variance is closely aligned with a causal order and introduce var-sortability to quantify the alignment. Here, we show that not only variance, but also the fraction of a variable's variance explained by all others, as captured by the coefficient of determination $R^2$, tends to increase along the causal order. Simple baseline algorithms can use $R^2$-sortability to match the performance of established methods. Since $R^2$-sortability is invariant under data rescaling, these algorithms perform equally well on standardized or rescaled data, addressing a key limitation of algorithms exploiting var-sortability. We characterize and empirically assess $R^2$-sortability for different simulation parameters. We show that all simulation parameters can affect $R^2$-sortability and must be chosen deliberately to control the difficulty of the causal discovery task and the real-world plausibility of the simulated data. We provide an implementation of the sortability measures and sortability-based algorithms in our library CausalDisco (https://github.com/CausalDisco/CausalDisco).Comment: See https://github.com/CausalDisco/CausalDisco for implementation

Open-Set Likelihood Maximization for Few-Shot Learning

We tackle the Few-Shot Open-Set Recognition (FSOSR) problem, i.e. classifying instances among a set of classes for which we only have a few labeled samples, while simultaneously detecting instances that do not belong to any known class. We explore the popular transductive setting, which leverages the unlabelled query instances at inference. Motivated by the observation that existing transductive methods perform poorly in open-set scenarios, we propose a generalization of the maximum likelihood principle, in which latent scores down-weighing the influence of potential outliers are introduced alongside the usual parametric model. Our formulation embeds supervision constraints from the support set and additional penalties discouraging overconfident predictions on the query set. We proceed with a block-coordinate descent, with the latent scores and parametric model co-optimized alternately, thereby benefiting from each other. We call our resulting formulation \textit{Open-Set Likelihood Optimization} (OSLO). OSLO is interpretable and fully modular; it can be applied on top of any pre-trained model seamlessly. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method surpasses existing inductive and transductive methods on both aspects of open-set recognition, namely inlier classification and outlier detection.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2206.0923

Transductive Learning for Textual Few-Shot Classification in API-based Embedding Models

Proprietary and closed APIs are becoming increasingly common to process natural language, and are impacting the practical applications of natural language processing, including few-shot classification. Few-shot classification involves training a model to perform a new classification task with a handful of labeled data. This paper presents three contributions. First, we introduce a scenario where the embedding of a pre-trained model is served through a gated API with compute-cost and data-privacy constraints. Second, we propose a transductive inference, a learning paradigm that has been overlooked by the NLP community. Transductive inference, unlike traditional inductive learning, leverages the statistics of unlabeled data. We also introduce a new parameter-free transductive regularizer based on the Fisher-Rao loss, which can be used on top of the gated API embeddings. This method fully utilizes unlabeled data, does not share any label with the third-party API provider and could serve as a baseline for future research. Third, we propose an improved experimental setting and compile a benchmark of eight datasets involving multiclass classification in four different languages, with up to 151 classes. We evaluate our methods using eight backbone models, along with an episodic evaluation over 1,000 episodes, which demonstrate the superiority of transductive inference over the standard inductive setting.Comment: EMNLP 202

EM estimation of a structural equation model

Les modèles d'équations structurelles à variables latentes permettent de modéliser des relations entre des variables observables et non observables. Les deux paradigmes actuels d'estimation de ces modèles sont les méthodes de moindres carrés partiels sur composantes et l'analyse de la structure de covariance. Dans ce travail, après avoir décrit les deux principales méthodes d'estimation que sont PLS et LISREL, nous proposons une approche d'estimation fondée sur la maximisation par algorithme EM de la vraisemblance globale d'un modèle à facteurs latents et à une équation structurelle. Nous en étudions les performances sur des données simulées et nous montrons, via une application sur des données réelles environnementales, comment construire pratiquement un modèle et en évaluer la qualité. Enfin, nous appliquons l'approche développée dans le contexte d'un essai clinique en cancérologie pour l'étude de données longitudinales de qualité de vie. Nous montrons que par la réduction efficace de la dimension des données, l'approche EM simplifie l'analyse longitudinale de la qualité de vie en évitant les tests multiples. Ainsi, elle contribue à faciliter l'évaluation du bénéfice clinique d'un traitement.Structural equation models enable the modeling of interactions between observed variables and latent ones. The two leading estimation methods are partial least squares on components and covariance-structure analysis. In this work, we first describe the PLS and LISREL methods and, then, we propose an estimation method using the EM algorithm in order to maximize the likelihood of a structural equation model with latent factors. Through a simulation study, we investigate how fast and accurate the method is, and thanks to an application to real environmental data, we show how one can handly construct a model or evaluate its quality. Finally, in the context of oncology, we apply the EM approach on health-related quality-of-life data. We show that it simplifies the longitudinal analysis of quality-of-life and helps evaluating the clinical benefit of a treatment