Deep Active Learning in the Open World

Machine learning models deployed in open-world scenarios often encounter unfamiliar conditions and perform poorly in unanticipated situations. As AI systems advance and find application in safety-critical domains, effectively handling out-of-distribution (OOD) data is crucial to building open-world learning systems. In this work, we introduce ALOE, a novel active learning algorithm for open-world environments designed to enhance model adaptation by incorporating new OOD classes via a two-stage approach. First, diversity sampling selects a representative set of examples, followed by energy-based OOD detection to prioritize likely unknown classes for annotation. This strategy accelerates class discovery and learning, even under constrained annotation budgets. Evaluations on three long-tailed image classification benchmarks demonstrate that ALOE outperforms traditional active learning baselines, effectively expanding known categories while balancing annotation cost. Our findings reveal a crucial tradeoff between enhancing known-class performance and discovering new classes, setting the stage for future advancements in open-world machine learning.

Topology-aware Reinforcement Feature Space Reconstruction for Graph Data

Feature space is an environment where data points are vectorized to represent the original dataset. Reconstructing a good feature space is essential to augment the AI power of data, improve model generalization, and increase the availability of downstream ML models. Existing literature, such as feature transformation and feature selection, is labor-intensive (e.g., heavy reliance on empirical experience) and mostly designed for tabular data. Moreover, these methods regard data samples as independent, which ignores the unique topological structure when applied to graph data, thus resulting in a suboptimal reconstruction feature space. Can we consider the topological information to automatically reconstruct feature space for graph data without heavy experiential knowledge? To fill this gap, we leverage topology-aware reinforcement learning to automate and optimize feature space reconstruction for graph data. Our approach combines the extraction of core subgraphs to capture essential structural information with a graph neural network (GNN) to encode topological features and reduce computing complexity. Then we introduce three reinforcement agents within a hierarchical structure to systematically generate meaningful features through an iterative process, effectively reconstructing the feature space. This framework provides a principled solution for attributed graph feature space reconstruction. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of including topological awareness.

AHA: Human-Assisted Out-of-Distribution Generalization and Detection

Modern machine learning models deployed often encounter distribution shifts in real-world applications, manifesting as covariate or semantic out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts. These shifts give rise to challenges in OOD generalization and OOD detection. This paper introduces a novel, integrated approach AHA (Adaptive Human-Assisted OOD learning) to simultaneously address both OOD generalization and detection through a human-assisted framework by labeling data in the wild. Our approach strategically labels examples within a novel maximum disambiguation region, where the number of semantic and covariate OOD data roughly equalizes. By labeling within this region, we can maximally disambiguate the two types of OOD data, thereby maximizing the utility of the fixed labeling budget. Our algorithm first utilizes a noisy binary search algorithm that identifies the maximal disambiguation region with high probability. The algorithm then continues with annotating inside the identified labeling region, reaping the full benefit of human feedback. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our framework. We observed that with only a few hundred human annotations, our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods that do not involve human assistance, in both OOD generalization and OOD detection. Code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/HaoyueBaiZJU/aha}.

Out-of-Distribution Learning with Human Feedback

Out-of-distribution (OOD) learning often relies heavily on statistical approaches or predefined assumptions about OOD data distributions, hindering their efficacy in addressing multifaceted challenges of OOD generalization and OOD detection in real-world deployment environments. This paper presents a novel framework for OOD learning with human feedback, which can provide invaluable insights into the nature of OOD shifts and guide effective model adaptation. Our framework capitalizes on the freely available unlabeled data in the wild that captures the environmental test-time OOD distributions under both covariate and semantic shifts. To harness such data, our key idea is to selectively provide human feedback and label a small number of informative samples from the wild data distribution, which are then used to train a multi-class classifier and an OOD detector. By exploiting human feedback, we enhance the robustness and reliability of machine learning models, equipping them with the capability to handle OOD scenarios with greater precision. We provide theoretical insights on the generalization error bounds to justify our algorithm. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our method, outperforming the current state-of-the-art by a significant margin.

Boosting Multimedia Recommendation via Separate Generic and Unique Awareness

Multimedia recommendation, which incorporates various modalities (e.g., images, texts, etc.) into user or item representation to improve recommendation quality, has received widespread attention. Recent methods mainly focus on cross-modal alignment with self-supervised learning to obtain higher quality representation. Despite remarkable performance, we argue that there is still a limitation: completely aligning representation undermines modality-unique information. We consider that cross-modal alignment is right, but it should not be the entirety, as different modalities contain generic information between them, and each modality also contains unique information. Simply aligning each modality may ignore modality-unique features, thus degrading the performance of multimedia recommendation. To tackle the above limitation, we propose a Separate Alignment aNd Distancing framework (SAND) for multimedia recommendation, which concurrently learns both modal-unique and -generic representation to achieve more comprehensive items representation. First, we split each modal feature into generic and unique part. Then, in the alignment module, for better integration of semantic information between different modalities , we design a SoloSimLoss to align generic modalities. Furthermore, in the distancing module, we aim to distance the unique modalities from the modal-generic so that each modality retains its unique and complementary information. In the light of the flexibility of our framework, we give two technical solutions, the more capable mutual information minimization and the simple negative l2 distance. Finally, extensive experimental results on three popular datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed framework.

Popularity-Aware Alignment and Contrast for Mitigating Popularity Bias

Collaborative Filtering (CF) typically suffers from the significant challenge of popularity bias due to the uneven distribution of items in real-world datasets. This bias leads to a significant accuracy gap between popular and unpopular items. It not only hinders accurate user preference understanding but also exacerbates the Matthew effect in recommendation systems. To alleviate popularity bias, existing efforts focus on emphasizing unpopular items or separating the correlation between item representations and their popularity. Despite the effectiveness, existing works still face two persistent challenges: (1) how to extract common supervision signals from popular items to improve the unpopular item representations, and (2) how to alleviate the representation separation caused by popularity bias. In this work, we conduct an empirical analysis of popularity bias and propose Popularity-Aware Alignment and Contrast (PAAC) to address two challenges. Specifically, we use the common supervisory signals modeled in popular item representations and propose a novel popularity-aware supervised alignment module to learn unpopular item representations. Additionally, we suggest re-weighting the contrastive learning loss to mitigate the representation separation from a popularity-centric perspective. Finally, we validate the effectiveness and rationale of PAAC in mitigating popularity bias through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/miaomiao-cai2/KDD2024-PAAC.

Double Correction Framework for Denoising Recommendation

As its availability and generality in online services, implicit feedback is more commonly used in recommender systems. However, implicit feedback usually presents noisy samples in real-world recommendation scenarios (such as misclicks or non-preferential behaviors), which will affect precise user preference learning. To overcome the noisy samples problem, a popular solution is based on dropping noisy samples in the model training phase, which follows the observation that noisy samples have higher training losses than clean samples. Despite the effectiveness, we argue that this solution still has limits. (1) High training losses can result from model optimization instability or hard samples, not just noisy samples. (2) Completely dropping of noisy samples will aggravate the data sparsity, which lacks full data exploitation. To tackle the above limitations, we propose a Double Correction Framework for Denoising Recommendation (DCF), which contains two correction components from views of more precise sample dropping and avoiding more sparse data. In the sample dropping correction component, we use the loss value of the samples over time to determine whether it is noise or not, increasing dropping stability. Instead of averaging directly, we use the damping function to reduce the bias effect of outliers. Furthermore, due to the higher variance exhibited by hard samples, we derive a lower bound for the loss through concentration inequality to identify and reuse hard samples. In progressive label correction, we iteratively re-label highly deterministic noisy samples and retrain them to further improve performance. Finally, extensive experimental results on three datasets and four backbones demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed framework.

HYPO: Hyperspherical Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is critical for machine learning models deployed in the real world. However, achieving this can be fundamentally challenging, as it requires the ability to learn invariant features across different domains or environments. In this paper, we propose a novel framework HYPO (HYPerspherical OOD generalization) that provably learns domain-invariant representations in a hyperspherical space. In particular, our hyperspherical learning algorithm is guided by intra-class variation and inter-class separation principles -- ensuring that features from the same class (across different training domains) are closely aligned with their class prototypes, while different class prototypes are maximally separated. We further provide theoretical justifications on how our prototypical learning objective improves the OOD generalization bound. Through extensive experiments on challenging OOD benchmarks, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms competitive baselines and achieves superior performance. Code is available at https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/hypo.

Image change detection with only a few samples

This paper considers image change detection with only a small number of samples, which is a significant problem in terms of a few annotations available. A major impediment of image change detection task is the lack of large annotated datasets covering a wide variety of scenes. Change detection models trained on insufficient datasets have shown poor generalization capability. To address the poor generalization issue, we propose using simple image processing methods for generating synthetic but informative datasets, and design an early fusion network based on object detection which could outperform the siamese neural network. Our key insight is that the synthetic data enables the trained model to have good generalization ability for various scenarios. We compare the model trained on the synthetic data with that on the real-world data captured from a challenging dataset, CDNet, using six different test sets. The results demonstrate that the synthetic data is informative enough to achieve higher generalization ability than the insufficient real-world data. Besides, the experiment shows that utilizing a few (often tens of) samples to fine-tune the model trained on the synthetic data will achieve excellent results.

Improving Out-of-Distribution Robustness of Classifiers via Generative Interpolation

Deep neural networks achieve superior performance for learning from independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data. However, their performance deteriorates significantly when handling out-of-distribution (OoD) data, where the training and test are drawn from different distributions. In this paper, we explore utilizing the generative models as a data augmentation source for improving out-of-distribution robustness of neural classifiers. Specifically, we develop a simple yet effective method called Generative Interpolation to fuse generative models trained from multiple domains for synthesizing diverse OoD samples. Training a generative model directly on the source domains tends to suffer from mode collapse and sometimes amplifies the data bias. Instead, we first train a StyleGAN model on one source domain and then fine-tune it on the other domains, resulting in many correlated generators where their model parameters have the same initialization thus are aligned. We then linearly interpolate the model parameters of the generators to spawn new sets of generators. Such interpolated generators are used as an extra data augmentation source to train the classifiers. The interpolation coefficients can flexibly control the augmentation direction and strength. In addition, a style-mixing mechanism is applied to further improve the diversity of the generated OoD samples. Our experiments show that the proposed method explicitly increases the diversity of training domains and achieves consistent improvements over baselines across datasets and multiple different distribution shifts.