LLM Processes: Numerical Predictive Distributions Conditioned on Natural Language

Machine learning practitioners often face significant challenges in formally integrating their prior knowledge and beliefs into predictive models, limiting the potential for nuanced and context-aware analyses. Moreover, the expertise needed to integrate this prior knowledge into probabilistic modeling typically limits the application of these models to specialists. Our goal is to build a regression model that can process numerical data and make probabilistic predictions at arbitrary locations, guided by natural language text which describes a user's prior knowledge. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a useful starting point for designing such a tool since they 1) provide an interface where users can incorporate expert insights in natural language and 2) provide an opportunity for leveraging latent problem-relevant knowledge encoded in LLMs that users may not have themselves. We start by exploring strategies for eliciting explicit, coherent numerical predictive distributions from LLMs. We examine these joint predictive distributions, which we call LLM Processes, over arbitrarily-many quantities in settings such as forecasting, multi-dimensional regression, black-box optimization, and image modeling. We investigate the practical details of prompting to elicit coherent predictive distributions, and demonstrate their effectiveness at regression. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to usefully incorporate text into numerical predictions, improving predictive performance and giving quantitative structure that reflects qualitative descriptions. This lets us begin to explore the rich, grounded hypothesis space that LLMs implicitly encode.

On the Efficacy of Differentially Private Few-shot Image Classification

There has been significant recent progress in training differentially private (DP) models which achieve accuracy that approaches the best non-private models. These DP models are typically pretrained on large public datasets and then fine-tuned on downstream datasets that are (i) relatively large, and (ii) similar in distribution to the pretraining data. However, in many applications including personalization, it is crucial to perform well in the few-shot setting, as obtaining large amounts of labeled data may be problematic; and on images from a wide variety of domains for use in various specialist settings. To understand under which conditions few-shot DP can be effective, we perform an exhaustive set of experiments that reveals how the accuracy and vulnerability to attack of few-shot DP image classification models are affected as the number of shots per class, privacy level, model architecture, dataset, and subset of learnable parameters in the model vary. We show that to achieve DP accuracy on par with non-private models, the shots per class must be increased as the privacy level increases by as much as 32$\times$ for CIFAR-100 at $\epsilon=1$. We also find that few-shot non-private models are highly susceptible to membership inference attacks. DP provides clear mitigation against the attacks, but a small $\epsilon$ is required to effectively prevent them. Finally, we evaluate DP federated learning systems and establish state-of-the-art performance on the challenging FLAIR federated learning benchmark.

Adversarial Attacks are a Surprisingly Strong Baseline for Poisoning Few-Shot Meta-Learners

This paper examines the robustness of deployed few-shot meta-learning systems when they are fed an imperceptibly perturbed few-shot dataset. We attack amortized meta-learners, which allows us to craft colluding sets of inputs that are tailored to fool the system's learning algorithm when used as training data. Jointly crafted adversarial inputs might be expected to synergistically manipulate a classifier, allowing for very strong data-poisoning attacks that would be hard to detect. We show that in a white box setting, these attacks are very successful and can cause the target model's predictions to become worse than chance. However, in opposition to the well-known transferability of adversarial examples in general, the colluding sets do not transfer well to different classifiers. We explore two hypotheses to explain this: 'overfitting' by the attack, and mismatch between the model on which the attack is generated and that to which the attack is transferred. Regardless of the mitigation strategies suggested by these hypotheses, the colluding inputs transfer no better than adversarial inputs that are generated independently in the usual way.

Contextual Squeeze-and-Excitation for Efficient Few-Shot Image Classification

Recent years have seen a growth in user-centric applications that require effective knowledge transfer across tasks in the low-data regime. An example is personalization, where a pretrained system is adapted by learning on small amounts of labeled data belonging to a specific user. This setting requires high accuracy under low computational complexity, therefore the Pareto frontier of accuracy vs.~adaptation cost plays a crucial role. In this paper we push this Pareto frontier in the few-shot image classification setting with two key contributions: (i) a new adaptive block called Contextual Squeeze-and-Excitation (CaSE) that adjusts a pretrained neural network on a new task to significantly improve performance with a single forward pass of the user data (context), and (ii) a hybrid training protocol based on Coordinate-Descent called UpperCaSE that exploits meta-trained CaSE blocks and fine-tuning routines for efficient adaptation. UpperCaSE achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy relative to meta-learners on the 26 datasets of VTAB+MD and on a challenging real-world personalization benchmark (ORBIT), narrowing the gap with leading fine-tuning methods with the benefit of orders of magnitude lower adaptation cost.

FiT: Parameter Efficient Few-shot Transfer Learning for Personalized and Federated Image Classification

Modern deep learning systems are increasingly deployed in situations such as personalization and federated learning where it is necessary to support i) learning on small amounts of data, and ii) communication efficient distributed training protocols. In this work we develop FiLM Transfer (FiT) which fulfills these requirements in the image classification setting. FiT uses an automatically configured Naive Bayes classifier on top of a fixed backbone that has been pretrained on large image datasets. Parameter efficient FiLM layers are used to modulate the backbone, shaping the representation for the downstream task. The network is trained via an episodic fine-tuning protocol. The approach is parameter efficient which is key for enabling few-shot learning, inexpensive model updates for personalization, and communication efficient federated learning. We experiment with FiT on a wide range of downstream datasets and show that it achieves better classification accuracy than the state-of-the-art Big Transfer (BiT) algorithm at low-shot and on the challenging VTAB-1k benchmark, with fewer than 1% of the updateable parameters. Finally, we demonstrate the parameter efficiency of FiT in distributed low-shot applications including model personalization and federated learning where model update size is an important performance metric.

Memory Efficient Meta-Learning with Large Images

Meta learning approaches to few-shot classification are computationally efficient at test time requiring just a few optimization steps or single forward pass to learn a new task, but they remain highly memory-intensive to train. This limitation arises because a task's entire support set, which can contain up to 1000 images, must be processed before an optimization step can be taken. Harnessing the performance gains offered by large images thus requires either parallelizing the meta-learner across multiple GPUs, which may not be available, or trade-offs between task and image size when memory constraints apply. We improve on both options by proposing LITE, a general and memory efficient episodic training scheme that enables meta-training on large tasks composed of large images on a single GPU. We achieve this by observing that the gradients for a task can be decomposed into a sum of gradients over the task's training images. This enables us to perform a forward pass on a task's entire training set but realize significant memory savings by back-propagating only a random subset of these images which we show is an unbiased approximation of the full gradient. We use LITE to train meta-learners and demonstrate new state-of-the-art accuracy on the real-world ORBIT benchmark and 3 of the 4 parts of the challenging VTAB+MD benchmark relative to leading meta-learners. LITE also enables meta-learners to be competitive with transfer learning approaches but at a fraction of the test-time computational cost, thus serving as a counterpoint to the recent narrative that transfer learning is all you need for few-shot classification.

ORBIT: A Real-World Few-Shot Dataset for Teachable Object Recognition

Object recognition has made great advances in the last decade, but predominately still relies on many high-quality training examples per object category. In contrast, learning new objects from only a few examples could enable many impactful applications from robotics to user personalization. Most few-shot learning research, however, has been driven by benchmark datasets that lack the high variation that these applications will face when deployed in the real-world. To close this gap, we present the ORBIT dataset and benchmark, grounded in a real-world application of teachable object recognizers for people who are blind/low vision. The dataset contains 3,822 videos of 486 objects recorded by people who are blind/low-vision on their mobile phones, and the benchmark reflects a realistic, highly challenging recognition problem, providing a rich playground to drive research in robustness to few-shot, high-variation conditions. We set the first state-of-the-art on the benchmark and show that there is massive scope for further innovation, holding the potential to impact a broad range of real-world vision applications including tools for the blind/low-vision community. The dataset is available at https://bit.ly/2OyElCj and the code to run the benchmark at https://bit.ly/39YgiUW.

TaskNorm: Rethinking Batch Normalization for Meta-Learning

Modern meta-learning approaches for image classification rely on increasingly deep networks to achieve state-of-the-art performance, making batch normalization an essential component of meta-learning pipelines. However, the hierarchical nature of the meta-learning setting presents several challenges that can render conventional batch normalization ineffective, giving rise to the need to rethink normalization in this setting. We evaluate a range of approaches to batch normalization for meta-learning scenarios, and develop a novel approach that we call TaskNorm. Experiments on fourteen datasets demonstrate that the choice of batch normalization has a dramatic effect on both classification accuracy and training time for both gradient based and gradient-free meta-learning approaches. Importantly, TaskNorm is found to consistently improve performance. Finally, we provide a set of best practices for normalization that will allow fair comparison of meta-learning algorithms.

Fast and Flexible Multi-Task Classification Using Conditional Neural Adaptive Processes

The goal of this paper is to design image classification systems that, after an initial multi-task training phase, can automatically adapt to new tasks encountered at test time. We introduce a conditional neural process based approach to the multi-task classification setting for this purpose, and establish connections to the meta-learning and few-shot learning literature. The resulting approach, called CNAPs, comprises a classifier whose parameters are modulated by an adaptation network that takes the current task's dataset as input. We demonstrate that CNAPs achieves state-of-the-art results on the challenging Meta-Dataset benchmark indicating high-quality transfer-learning. We show that the approach is robust, avoiding both over-fitting in low-shot regimes and under-fitting in high-shot regimes. Timing experiments reveal that CNAPs is computationally efficient at test-time as it does not involve gradient based adaptation. Finally, we show that trained models are immediately deployable to continual learning and active learning where they can outperform existing approaches that do not leverage transfer learning.

Decision-Theoretic Meta-Learning: Versatile and Efficient Amortization of Few-Shot Learning

This paper develops a general framework for data efficient and versatile deep learning. The new framework comprises three elements: 1) Discriminative probabilistic models from multi-task learning that leverage shared statistical information across tasks. 2) A novel Bayesian decision theoretic approach to meta-learning probabilistic inference across many tasks. 3) A fast, flexible, and simple to train amortization network that can automatically generalize and extrapolate to a wide range of settings. The VERSA algorithm, a particular instance of the framework, is evaluated on a suite of supervised few-shot learning tasks. VERSA achieves state-of-the-art performance in one-shot learning on Omniglot and miniImagenet, and produces compelling results on a one-shot ShapeNet view reconstruction challenge.