Meta Learning involves training models on a variety of tasks so that they can learn how to learn. The model is exposed to different tasks during training, enabling it to generalize and adapt quickly to new, unseen tasks.

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Prompt-based Domain Discrimination for Multi-source Time Series Domain Adaptation

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Time series domain adaptation stands as a pivotal and intricate challenge with diverse applications, including but not limited to human activity recognition, sleep stage classification, and machine fault diagnosis. Despite the numerous domain adaptation techniques proposed to tackle this complex problem, their primary focus has been on the common representations of time series data. This concentration might inadvertently lead to the oversight of valuable domain-specific information originating from different source domains. To bridge this gap, we introduce POND, a novel prompt-based deep learning model designed explicitly for multi-source time series domain adaptation. POND is tailored to address significant challenges, notably: 1) The unavailability of a quantitative relationship between meta-data information and time series distributions, and 2) The dearth of exploration into extracting domain specific meta-data information. In this paper, we present an instance-level prompt generator and afidelity loss mechanism to facilitate the faithful learning of meta-data information. Additionally, we propose a domain discrimination technique to discern domain-specific meta-data information from multiple source domains. Our approach involves a simple yet effective meta-learning algorithm to optimize the objective efficiently. Furthermore, we augment the model’s performance by incorporating the Mixture of Expert (MoE) technique. The efficacy and robustness of our proposed POND model are extensively validated through experiments across 50 scenarios encompassing five datasets, which demonstrates that our proposed POND model outperforms the state-of the-art methods by up to 66% on the F1-score.

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Hierarchical Gaussian Mixture based Task Generative Model for Robust Meta-Learning

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Meta-learning enables quick adaptation of machine learning models to new tasks with limited data. While tasks could come from varying distributions in reality, most of the existing meta-learning methods consider both training and testing tasks as from the same uni-component distribution, overlooking two critical needs of a practical solution: (1) the various sources of tasks may compose a multi-component mixture distribution, and (2) novel tasks may come from a distribution that is unseen during meta-training. In this paper, we demonstrate these two challenges can be solved jointly by modeling the density of task instances. We develop a meta training framework underlain by a novel Hierarchical Gaussian Mixture based Task Generative Model (HTGM). HTGM extends the widely used empirical process of sampling tasks to a theoretical model, which learns task embeddings, fits the mixture distribution of tasks, and enables density-based scoring of novel tasks. The framework is agnostic to the encoder and scales well with large backbone networks. The model parameters are learned end-to-end by maximum likelihood estimation via an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets indicate the effectiveness of our method for both sample classification and novel task detection.

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Domain Generalization Guided by Gradient Signal to Noise Ratio of Parameters

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Overfitting to the source domain is a common issue in gradient-based training of deep neural networks. To compensate for the over-parameterized models, numerous regularization techniques have been introduced such as those based on dropout. While these methods achieve significant improvements on classical benchmarks such as ImageNet, their performance diminishes with the introduction of domain shift in the test set i.e. when the unseen data comes from a significantly different distribution. In this paper, we move away from the classical approach of Bernoulli sampled dropout mask construction and propose to base the selection on gradient-signal-to-noise ratio (GSNR) of network’s parameters. Specifically, at each training step, parameters with high GSNR will be discarded. Furthermore, we alleviate the burden of manually searching for the optimal dropout ratio by leveraging a meta-learning approach. We evaluate our method on standard domain generalization benchmarks and achieve competitive results on classification and face anti-spoofing problems.

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On Novel Object Recognition: A Unified Framework for Discriminability and Adaptability

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The rich and accessible labeled data fueled the revolutionary successes of deep learning in object recognition. However, recognizing objects of novel classes with limited supervision information provided, i.e., Novel Object Recognition (NOR), remains a challenging task. We identify in this paper two key factors for the success of NOR that previous approaches fail to simultaneously guarantee. The first is producing discriminative feature representations for images of novel classes, and the second is generating a flexible classifier readily adapted to novel classes provided with limited supervision signals. To secure both key factors, we propose a framework which decouples a deep classification model into a feature extraction module and a classification module. We learn the former to ensure feature discriminability with a standard multi-class classification task by fully utilizing the competing information among all classes within a training set, and learn the latter to secure adaptability by training a meta-learner network which generates classifier weights whenever provided with minimal supervision information of target classes. Extensive experiments on common benchmark datasets in the settings of both zero-shot and few-shot learning demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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Rethinking Zero-Shot Learning: A Conditional Visual Classification Perspective

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Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize instances of unseen classes solely based on the semantic descriptions of the classes. Existing algorithms usually formulate it as a semantic-visual correspondence problem, by learning mappings from one feature space to the other. Despite being reasonable, previous approaches essentially discard the highly precious discriminative power of visual features in an implicit way, and thus produce undesirable results. We instead reformulate ZSL as a conditioned visual classification problem, i.e., classifying visual features based on the classifiers learned from the semantic descriptions. With this reformulation, we develop algorithms targeting various ZSL settings: For the conventional setting, we propose to train a deep neural network that directly generates visual feature classifiers from the semantic attributes with an episode-based training scheme; For the generalized setting, we concatenate the learned highly discriminative classifiers for seen classes and the generated classifiers for unseen classes to classify visual features of all classes; For the transductive setting, we exploit unlabeled data to effectively calibrate the classifier generator using a novel learning-without-forgetting self-training mechanism and guide the process by a robust generalized cross-entropy loss. Extensive experiments show that our proposed algorithms significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods by large margins on most benchmark datasets in all the ZSL settings.

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