MAGMA: Manifold Regularization for MAEs

Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) are an important divide in self-supervised learning (SSL) due to their independence from augmentation techniques for generating positive (and/or negative) pairs as in contrastive frameworks. Their masking and reconstruction strategy also nicely aligns with SSL approaches in natural language processing. Most MAEs are built upon Transformer-based architectures where visual features are not regularized as opposed to their convolutional neural network (CNN) based counterparts, which can potentially hinder their performance. To address this, we introduce MAGMA, a novel batch-wide layer-wise regularization loss applied to representations of different Transformer layers. We demonstrate that by plugging in the proposed regularization loss, one can significantly improve the performance of MAE-based models. We further demonstrate the impact of the proposed loss on optimizing other generic SSL approaches (such as VICReg and SimCLR), broadening the impact of the proposed approach. Our code base can be found at https://github.com/adondera/magma.

MAPL: Model Agnostic Peer-to-peer Learning

Effective collaboration among heterogeneous clients in a decentralized setting is a rather unexplored avenue in the literature. To structurally address this, we introduce Model Agnostic Peer-to-peer Learning (coined as MAPL) a novel approach to simultaneously learn heterogeneous personalized models as well as a collaboration graph through peer-to-peer communication among neighboring clients. MAPL is comprised of two main modules: (i) local-level Personalized Model Learning (PML), leveraging a combination of intra- and inter-client contrastive losses; (ii) network-wide decentralized Collaborative Graph Learning (CGL) dynamically refining collaboration weights in a privacy-preserving manner based on local task similarities. Our extensive experimentation demonstrates the efficacy of MAPL and its competitive (or, in most cases, superior) performance compared to its centralized model-agnostic counterparts, without relying on any central server. Our code is available and can be accessed here: https://github.com/SayakMukherjee/MAPL

BECLR: Batch Enhanced Contrastive Few-Shot Learning

Learning quickly from very few labeled samples is a fundamental attribute that separates machines and humans in the era of deep representation learning. Unsupervised few-shot learning (U-FSL) aspires to bridge this gap by discarding the reliance on annotations at training time. Intrigued by the success of contrastive learning approaches in the realm of U-FSL, we structurally approach their shortcomings in both pretraining and downstream inference stages. We propose a novel Dynamic Clustered mEmory (DyCE) module to promote a highly separable latent representation space for enhancing positive sampling at the pretraining phase and infusing implicit class-level insights into unsupervised contrastive learning. We then tackle the, somehow overlooked yet critical, issue of sample bias at the few-shot inference stage. We propose an iterative Optimal Transport-based distribution Alignment (OpTA) strategy and demonstrate that it efficiently addresses the problem, especially in low-shot scenarios where FSL approaches suffer the most from sample bias. We later on discuss that DyCE and OpTA are two intertwined pieces of a novel end-to-end approach (we coin as BECLR), constructively magnifying each other's impact. We then present a suite of extensive quantitative and qualitative experimentation to corroborate that BECLR sets a new state-of-the-art across ALL existing U-FSL benchmarks (to the best of our knowledge), and significantly outperforms the best of the current baselines (codebase available at: https://github.com/stypoumic/BECLR).

GeNIe: Generative Hard Negative Images Through Diffusion

Data augmentation is crucial in training deep models, preventing them from overfitting to limited data. Common data augmentation methods are effective, but recent advancements in generative AI, such as diffusion models for image generation, enable more sophisticated augmentation techniques that produce data resembling natural images. We recognize that augmented samples closer to the ideal decision boundary of a classifier are particularly effective and efficient in guiding the learning process. We introduce GeNIe which leverages a diffusion model conditioned on a text prompt to merge contrasting data points (an image from the source category and a text prompt from the target category) to generate challenging samples for the target category. Inspired by recent image editing methods, we limit the number of diffusion iterations and the amount of noise. This ensures that the generated image retains low-level and contextual features from the source image, potentially conflicting with the target category. Our extensive experiments, in few-shot and also long-tail distribution settings, demonstrate the effectiveness of our novel augmentation method, especially benefiting categories with a limited number of examples.

LAB: Learnable Activation Binarizer for Binary Neural Networks

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) are receiving an upsurge of attention for bringing power-hungry deep learning towards edge devices. The traditional wisdom in this space is to employ sign() for binarizing featuremaps. We argue and illustrate that sign() is a uniqueness bottleneck, limiting information propagation throughout the network. To alleviate this, we propose to dispense sign(), replacing it with a learnable activation binarizer (LAB), allowing the network to learn a fine-grained binarization kernel per layer - as opposed to global thresholding. LAB is a novel universal module that can seamlessly be integrated into existing architectures. To confirm this, we plug it into four seminal BNNs and show a considerable performance boost at the cost of tolerable increase in delay and complexity. Finally, we build an end-to-end BNN (coined as LAB-BNN) around LAB, and demonstrate that it achieves competitive performance on par with the state-of-the-art on ImageNet.

Self-Attention Message Passing for Contrastive Few-Shot Learning

Humans have a unique ability to learn new representations from just a handful of examples with little to no supervision. Deep learning models, however, require an abundance of data and supervision to perform at a satisfactory level. Unsupervised few-shot learning (U-FSL) is the pursuit of bridging this gap between machines and humans. Inspired by the capacity of graph neural networks (GNNs) in discovering complex inter-sample relationships, we propose a novel self-attention based message passing contrastive learning approach (coined as SAMP-CLR) for U-FSL pre-training. We also propose an optimal transport (OT) based fine-tuning strategy (we call OpT-Tune) to efficiently induce task awareness into our novel end-to-end unsupervised few-shot classification framework (SAMPTransfer). Our extensive experimental results corroborate the efficacy of SAMPTransfer in a variety of downstream few-shot classification scenarios, setting a new state-of-the-art for U-FSL on both miniImagenet and tieredImagenet benchmarks, offering up to 7%+ and 5%+ improvements, respectively. Our further investigations also confirm that SAMPTransfer remains on-par with some supervised baselines on miniImagenet and outperforms all existing U-FSL baselines in a challenging cross-domain scenario. Our code can be found in our GitHub repository at https://github.com/ojss/SAMPTransfer/.

Transductive Decoupled Variational Inference for Few-Shot Classification

The versatility to learn from a handful of samples is the hallmark of human intelligence. Few-shot learning is an endeavour to transcend this capability down to machines. Inspired by the promise and power of probabilistic deep learning, we propose a novel variational inference network for few-shot classification (coined as TRIDENT) to decouple the representation of an image into semantic and label latent variables, and simultaneously infer them in an intertwined fashion. To induce task-awareness, as part of the inference mechanics of TRIDENT, we exploit information across both query and support images of a few-shot task using a novel built-in attention-based transductive feature extraction module (we call AttFEX). Our extensive experimental results corroborate the efficacy of TRIDENT and demonstrate that, using the simplest of backbones, it sets a new state-of-the-art in the most commonly adopted datasets miniImageNet and tieredImageNet (offering up to 4% and 5% improvements, respectively), as well as for the recent challenging cross-domain miniImagenet --> CUB scenario offering a significant margin (up to 20% improvement) beyond the best existing cross-domain baselines. Code and experimentation can be found in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/anujinho/trident

Self-Supervised Class-Cognizant Few-Shot Classification

Unsupervised learning is argued to be the dark matter of human intelligence. To build in this direction, this paper focuses on unsupervised learning from an abundance of unlabeled data followed by few-shot fine-tuning on a downstream classification task. To this aim, we extend a recent study on adopting contrastive learning for self-supervised pre-training by incorporating class-level cognizance through iterative clustering and re-ranking and by expanding the contrastive optimization loss to account for it. To our knowledge, our experimentation both in standard and cross-domain scenarios demonstrate that we set a new state-of-the-art (SoTA) in (5-way, 1 and 5-shot) settings of standard mini-ImageNet benchmark as well as the (5-way, 5 and 20-shot) settings of cross-domain CDFSL benchmark. Our code and experimentation can be found in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/ojss/c3lr.

Federated Learning with Taskonomy for Non-IID Data

Classical federated learning approaches incur significant performance degradation in the presence of non-IID client data. A possible direction to address this issue is forming clusters of clients with roughly IID data. Most solutions following this direction are iterative and relatively slow, also prone to convergence issues in discovering underlying cluster formations. We introduce federated learning with taskonomy (FLT) that generalizes this direction by learning the task-relatedness between clients for more efficient federated aggregation of heterogeneous data. In a one-off process, the server provides the clients with a pretrained (and fine-tunable) encoder to compress their data into a latent representation, and transmit the signature of their data back to the server. The server then learns the task-relatedness among clients via manifold learning, and performs a generalization of federated averaging. FLT can flexibly handle a generic client relatedness graph, when there are no explicit clusters of clients, as well as efficiently decompose it into (disjoint) clusters for clustered federated learning. We demonstrate that FLT not only outperforms the existing state-of-the-art baselines in non-IID scenarios but also offers improved fairness across clients.

Tilted Cross Entropy (TCE): Promoting Fairness in Semantic Segmentation

Traditional empirical risk minimization (ERM) for semantic segmentation can disproportionately advantage or disadvantage certain target classes in favor of an (unfair but) improved overall performance. Inspired by the recently introduced tilted ERM (TERM), we propose tilted cross-entropy (TCE) loss and adapt it to the semantic segmentation setting to minimize performance disparity among target classes and promote fairness. Through quantitative and qualitative performance analyses, we demonstrate that the proposed Stochastic TCE for semantic segmentation can efficiently improve the low-performing classes of Cityscapes and ADE20k datasets trained with multi-class cross-entropy (MCCE), and also results in improved overall fairness.