Rethinking Meta-Learning from a Learning Lens

Meta-learning has emerged as a powerful approach for leveraging knowledge from previous tasks to solve new tasks. The mainstream methods focus on training a well-generalized model initialization, which is then adapted to different tasks with limited data and updates. However, it pushes the model overfitting on the training tasks. Previous methods mainly attributed this to the lack of data and used augmentations to address this issue, but they were limited by sufficient training and effective augmentation strategies. In this work, we focus on the more fundamental ``learning to learn'' strategy of meta-learning to explore what causes errors and how to eliminate these errors without changing the environment. Specifically, we first rethink the algorithmic procedure of meta-learning from a ``learning'' lens. Through theoretical and empirical analyses, we find that (i) this paradigm faces the risk of both overfitting and underfitting and (ii) the model adapted to different tasks promote each other where the effect is stronger if the tasks are more similar. Based on this insight, we propose using task relations to calibrate the optimization process of meta-learning and propose a plug-and-play method called Task Relation Learner (TRLearner) to achieve this goal. Specifically, it first obtains task relation matrices from the extracted task-specific meta-data. Then, it uses the obtained matrices with relation-aware consistency regularization to guide optimization. Extensive theoretical and empirical analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of TRLearner.

Image-based Freeform Handwriting Authentication with Energy-oriented Self-Supervised Learning

Freeform handwriting authentication verifies a person's identity from their writing style and habits in messy handwriting data. This technique has gained widespread attention in recent years as a valuable tool for various fields, e.g., fraud prevention and cultural heritage protection. However, it still remains a challenging task in reality due to three reasons: (i) severe damage, (ii) complex high-dimensional features, and (iii) lack of supervision. To address these issues, we propose SherlockNet, an energy-oriented two-branch contrastive self-supervised learning framework for robust and fast freeform handwriting authentication. It consists of four stages: (i) pre-processing: converting manuscripts into energy distributions using a novel plug-and-play energy-oriented operator to eliminate the influence of noise; (ii) generalized pre-training: learning general representation through two-branch momentum-based adaptive contrastive learning with the energy distributions, which handles the high-dimensional features and spatial dependencies of handwriting; (iii) personalized fine-tuning: calibrating the learned knowledge using a small amount of labeled data from downstream tasks; and (iv) practical application: identifying individual handwriting from scrambled, missing, or forged data efficiently and conveniently. Considering the practicality, we construct EN-HA, a novel dataset that simulates data forgery and severe damage in real applications. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets including our EN-HA, and the results prove the robustness and efficiency of SherlockNet.

On the Causal Sufficiency and Necessity of Multi-Modal Representation Learning

An effective paradigm of multi-modal learning (MML) is to learn unified representations among modalities. From a causal perspective, constraining the consistency between different modalities can mine causal representations that convey primary events. However, such simple consistency may face the risk of learning insufficient or unnecessary information: a necessary but insufficient cause is invariant across modalities but may not have the required accuracy; a sufficient but unnecessary cause tends to adapt well to specific modalities but may be hard to adapt to new data. To address this issue, in this paper, we aim to learn representations that are both causal sufficient and necessary, i.e., Causal Complete Cause ($C^3$), for MML. Firstly, we define the concept of $C^3$ for MML, which reflects the probability of being causal sufficiency and necessity. We also propose the identifiability and measurement of $C^3$, i.e., $C^3$ risk, to ensure calculating the learned representations' $C^3$ scores in practice. Then, we theoretically prove the effectiveness of $C^3$ risk by establishing the performance guarantee of MML with a tight generalization bound. Based on these theoretical results, we propose a plug-and-play method, namely Causal Complete Cause Regularization ($C^3$R), to learn causal complete representations by constraining the $C^3$ risk bound. Extensive experiments conducted on various benchmark datasets empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of $C^3$R.

Explicitly Modeling Generality into Self-Supervised Learning

The goal of generality in machine learning is to achieve excellent performance on various unseen tasks and domains. Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) has been regarded as an effective method to achieve this goal. It can learn high-quality representations from unlabeled data and achieve promising empirical performance on multiple downstream tasks. Existing SSL methods mainly constrain generality from two aspects: (i) large-scale training data, and (ii) learning task-level shared knowledge. However, these methods lack explicit modeling of the SSL generality in the learning objective, and the theoretical understanding of SSL's generality remains limited. This may cause SSL models to overfit in data-scarce situations and generalize poorly in the real world, making it difficult to achieve true generality. To address these issues, we provide a theoretical definition of generality in SSL and define a $\sigma$-measurement to help quantify it. Based on this insight, we explicitly model generality into self-supervised learning and further propose a novel SSL framework, called GeSSL. It introduces a self-motivated target based on $\sigma$-measurement, which enables the model to find the optimal update direction towards generality. Extensive theoretical and empirical evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed GeSSL.

Meta-Auxiliary Learning for Micro-Expression Recognition

Micro-expressions (MEs) are involuntary movements revealing people's hidden feelings, which has attracted numerous interests for its objectivity in emotion detection. However, despite its wide applications in various scenarios, micro-expression recognition (MER) remains a challenging problem in real life due to three reasons, including (i) data-level: lack of data and imbalanced classes, (ii) feature-level: subtle, rapid changing, and complex features of MEs, and (iii) decision-making-level: impact of individual differences. To address these issues, we propose a dual-branch meta-auxiliary learning method, called LightmanNet, for fast and robust micro-expression recognition. Specifically, LightmanNet learns general MER knowledge from limited data through a dual-branch bi-level optimization process: (i) In the first level, it obtains task-specific MER knowledge by learning in two branches, where the first branch is for learning MER features via primary MER tasks, while the other branch is for guiding the model obtain discriminative features via auxiliary tasks, i.e., image alignment between micro-expressions and macro-expressions since their resemblance in both spatial and temporal behavioral patterns. The two branches of learning jointly constrain the model of learning meaningful task-specific MER knowledge while avoiding learning noise or superficial connections between MEs and emotions that may damage its generalization ability. (ii) In the second level, LightmanNet further refines the learned task-specific knowledge, improving model generalization and efficiency. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior robustness and efficiency of LightmanNet.

Intriguing Properties of Positional Encoding in Time Series Forecasting

Transformer-based methods have made significant progress in time series forecasting (TSF). They primarily handle two types of tokens, i.e., temporal tokens that contain all variables of the same timestamp, and variable tokens that contain all input time points for a specific variable. Transformer-based methods rely on positional encoding (PE) to mark tokens' positions, facilitating the model to perceive the correlation between tokens. However, in TSF, research on PE remains insufficient. To address this gap, we conduct experiments and uncover intriguing properties of existing PEs in TSF: (i) The positional information injected by PEs diminishes as the network depth increases; (ii) Enhancing positional information in deep networks is advantageous for improving the model's performance; (iii) PE based on the similarity between tokens can improve the model's performance. Motivated by these findings, we introduce two new PEs: Temporal Position Encoding (T-PE) for temporal tokens and Variable Positional Encoding (V-PE) for variable tokens. Both T-PE and V-PE incorporate geometric PE based on tokens' positions and semantic PE based on the similarity between tokens but using different calculations. To leverage both the PEs, we design a Transformer-based dual-branch framework named T2B-PE. It first calculates temporal tokens' correlation and variable tokens' correlation respectively and then fuses the dual-branch features through the gated unit. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior robustness and effectiveness of T2B-PE. The code is available at: \href{https://github.com/jlu-phyComputer/T2B-PE}{https://github.com/jlu-phyComputer/T2B-PE}.

Hacking Task Confounder in Meta-Learning

Meta-learning enables rapid generalization to new tasks by learning meta-knowledge from a variety of tasks. It is intuitively assumed that the more tasks a model learns in one training batch, the richer knowledge it acquires, leading to better generalization performance. However, contrary to this intuition, our experiments reveal an unexpected result: adding more tasks within a single batch actually degrades the generalization performance. To explain this unexpected phenomenon, we conduct a Structural Causal Model (SCM) for causal analysis. Our investigation uncovers the presence of spurious correlations between task-specific causal factors and labels in meta-learning. Furthermore, the confounding factors differ across different batches. We refer to these confounding factors as ``Task Confounders". Based on this insight, we propose a plug-and-play Meta-learning Causal Representation Learner (MetaCRL) to eliminate task confounders. It encodes decoupled causal factors from multiple tasks and utilizes an invariant-based bi-level optimization mechanism to ensure their causality for meta-learning. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that our work achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

Unleash Model Potential: Bootstrapped Meta Self-supervised Learning

The long-term goal of machine learning is to learn general visual representations from a small amount of data without supervision, mimicking three advantages of human cognition: i) no need for labels, ii) robustness to data scarcity, and iii) learning from experience. Self-supervised learning and meta-learning are two promising techniques to achieve this goal, but they both only partially capture the advantages and fail to address all the problems. Self-supervised learning struggles to overcome the drawbacks of data scarcity, while ignoring prior knowledge that can facilitate learning and generalization. Meta-learning relies on supervised information and suffers from a bottleneck of insufficient learning. To address these issues, we propose a novel Bootstrapped Meta Self-Supervised Learning (BMSSL) framework that aims to simulate the human learning process. We first analyze the close relationship between meta-learning and self-supervised learning. Based on this insight, we reconstruct tasks to leverage the strengths of both paradigms, achieving advantages i and ii. Moreover, we employ a bi-level optimization framework that alternates between solving specific tasks with a learned ability (first level) and improving this ability (second level), attaining advantage iii. To fully harness its power, we introduce a bootstrapped target based on meta-gradient to make the model its own teacher. We validate the effectiveness of our approach with comprehensive theoretical and empirical study.

Towards the Sparseness of Projection Head in Self-Supervised Learning

In recent years, self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising approach for extracting valuable representations from unlabeled data. One successful SSL method is contrastive learning, which aims to bring positive examples closer while pushing negative examples apart. Many current contrastive learning approaches utilize a parameterized projection head. Through a combination of empirical analysis and theoretical investigation, we provide insights into the internal mechanisms of the projection head and its relationship with the phenomenon of dimensional collapse. Our findings demonstrate that the projection head enhances the quality of representations by performing contrastive loss in a projected subspace. Therefore, we propose an assumption that only a subset of features is necessary when minimizing the contrastive loss of a mini-batch of data. Theoretical analysis further suggests that a sparse projection head can enhance generalization, leading us to introduce SparseHead - a regularization term that effectively constrains the sparsity of the projection head, and can be seamlessly integrated with any self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of SparseHead, demonstrating its ability to improve the performance of existing contrastive methods.

CSSL-RHA: Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Robust Handwriting Authentication

Handwriting authentication is a valuable tool used in various fields, such as fraud prevention and cultural heritage protection. However, it remains a challenging task due to the complex features, severe damage, and lack of supervision. In this paper, we propose a novel Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning framework for Robust Handwriting Authentication (CSSL-RHA) to address these issues. It can dynamically learn complex yet important features and accurately predict writer identities. Specifically, to remove the negative effects of imperfections and redundancy, we design an information-theoretic filter for pre-processing and propose a novel adaptive matching scheme to represent images as patches of local regions dominated by more important features. Through online optimization at inference time, the most informative patch embeddings are identified as the "most important" elements. Furthermore, we employ contrastive self-supervised training with a momentum-based paradigm to learn more general statistical structures of handwritten data without supervision. We conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets and our manually annotated dataset EN-HA, which demonstrate the superiority of our CSSL-RHA compared to baselines. Additionally, we show that our proposed model can still effectively achieve authentication even under abnormal circumstances, such as data falsification and corruption.