Vector averaging remains one of the most popular sentence embedding methods in spite of its obvious disregard for syntactic structure. While more complex sequential or convolutional networks potentially yield superior classification performance, the improvements in classification accuracy are typically mediocre compared to the simple vector averaging. As an efficient alternative, we propose the use of discrete cosine transform (DCT) to compress word sequences in an order-preserving manner. The lower order DCT coefficients represent the overall feature patterns in sentences, which results in suitable embeddings for tasks that could benefit from syntactic features. Our results in semantic probing tasks demonstrate that DCT embeddings indeed preserve more syntactic information compared with vector averaging. With practically equivalent complexity, the model yields better overall performance in downstream classification tasks that correlate with syntactic features, which illustrates the capacity of DCT to preserve word order information.
Adversarial attacks against machine learning models have threatened various real-world applications such as spam filtering and sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, learning to DIScriminate Perturbations (DISP), to identify and adjust malicious perturbations, thereby blocking adversarial attacks for text classification models. To identify adversarial attacks, a perturbation discriminator validates how likely a token in the text is perturbed and provides a set of potential perturbations. For each potential perturbation, an embedding estimator learns to restore the embedding of the original word based on the context and a replacement token is chosen based on approximate kNN search. DISP can block adversarial attacks for any NLP model without modifying the model structure or training procedure. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that DISP significantly outperforms baseline methods in blocking adversarial attacks for text classification. In addition, in-depth analysis shows the robustness of DISP across different situations.
Edge sensing with micro-power pulse-Doppler radars is an emergent domain in monitoring and surveillance with several smart city applications. Existing solutions for the clutter versus multi-source radar classification task are limited in terms of either accuracy or efficiency, and in some cases, struggle with a trade-off between false alarms and recall of sources. We find that this problem can be resolved by learning the classifier across multiple time-scales. We propose a multi-scale, cascaded recurrent neural network architecture, MSC-RNN, comprised of an efficient multi-instance learning (MIL) Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for clutter discrimination at a lower tier, and a more complex RNN classifier for source classification at the upper tier. By controlling the invocation of the upper RNN with the help of the lower tier conditionally, MSC-RNN achieves an overall accuracy of 0.972. Our approach holistically improves the accuracy and per-class recalls over ML models suitable for radar inferencing. Notably, we outperform cross-domain handcrafted feature engineering with time-domain deep feature learning, while also being up to $\sim$3$\times$ more efficient than a competitive solution.
Using deep learning models to diagnose cancer from histology data presents several challenges. Cancer grading and localization of regions of interest (ROIs) in these images normally relies on both image- and pixel-level labels, the latter requiring a costly annotation process. Deep weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) methods provide different strategies for low-cost training of deep learning models. Using only image-class annotations, these methods can be trained to classify an image, and yield class activation maps (CAMs) for ROI localization. This paper provides a review of state-of-art DL methods for WSOL. We propose a taxonomy where these methods are divided into bottom-up and top-down methods according to the information flow in models. Although the latter have seen limited progress, recent bottom-up methods are currently driving much progress with deep WSOL methods. Early works focused on designing different spatial pooling functions. However, these methods reached limited localization accuracy, and unveiled a major limitation -- the under-activation of CAMs which leads to high false negative localization. Subsequent works aimed to alleviate this issue and recover complete object. Representative methods from our taxonomy are evaluated and compared in terms of classification and localization accuracy on two challenging histology datasets. Overall, the results indicate poor localization performance, particularly for generic methods that were initially designed to process natural images. Methods designed to address the challenges of histology data yielded good results. However, all methods suffer from high false positive/negative localization. Four key challenges are identified for the application of deep WSOL methods in histology -- under/over activation of CAMs, sensitivity to thresholding, and model selection.
Many real-world applications reveal difficulties in learning classifiers from imbalanced data. The rising big data era has been witnessing more classification tasks with large-scale but extremely imbalance and low-quality datasets. Most of existing learning methods suffer from poor performance or low computation efficiency under such a scenario. To tackle this problem, we conduct deep investigations into the nature of class imbalance, which reveals that not only the disproportion between classes, but also other difficulties embedded in the nature of data, especially, noises and class overlapping, prevent us from learning effective classifiers. Taking those factors into consideration, we propose a novel framework for imbalance classification that aims to generate a strong ensemble by self-paced harmonizing data hardness via under-sampling. Extensive experiments have shown that this new framework, while being very computationally efficient, can lead to robust performance even under highly overlapping classes and extremely skewed distribution. Note that, our methods can be easily adapted to most of existing learning methods (e.g., C4.5, SVM, GBDT and Neural Network) to boost their performance on imbalanced data.
Due to their inherent capability in semantic alignment of aspects and their context words, attention mechanism and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely applied for aspect-based sentiment classification. However, these models lack a mechanism to account for relevant syntactical constraints and long-range word dependencies, and hence may mistakenly recognize syntactically irrelevant contextual words as clues for judging aspect sentiment. To tackle this problem, we propose to build a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) over the dependency tree of a sentence to exploit syntactical information and word dependencies. Based on it, a novel aspect-specific sentiment classification framework is raised. Experiments on three benchmarking collections illustrate that our proposed model has comparable effectiveness to a range of state-of-the-art models, and further demonstrate that both syntactical information and long-range word dependencies are properly captured by the graph convolution structure.
This study compares the effectiveness and robustness of multi-class categorization of Amazon product data using transfer learning on pre-trained contextualized language models. Specifically, we fine-tuned BERT and XLNet, two bidirectional models that have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many natural language tasks and benchmarks, including text classification. While existing classification studies and benchmarks focus on binary targets, with the exception of ordinal ranking tasks, here we examine the robustness of such models as the number of classes grows from 1 to 20. Our experiments demonstrate an approximately linear decrease in performance metrics (i.e., precision, recall, $F_1$ score, and accuracy) with the number of class labels. BERT consistently outperforms XLNet using identical hyperparameters on the entire range of class label quantities for categorizing products based on their textual descriptions. BERT is also more affordable than XLNet in terms of the computational cost (i.e., time and memory) required for training. In all cases studied, the performance degradation rates were estimated to be 1% per additional class label.
To explore underlying complementary information from multiple views, in this paper, we propose a novel Latent Multi-view Semi-Supervised Classification (LMSSC) method. Unlike most existing multi-view semi-supervised classification methods that learn the graph using original features, our method seeks an underlying latent representation and performs graph learning and label propagation based on the learned latent representation. With the complementarity of multiple views, the latent representation could depict the data more comprehensively than every single view individually, accordingly making the graph more accurate and robust as well. Finally, LMSSC integrates latent representation learning, graph construction, and label propagation into a unified framework, which makes each subtask optimized. Experimental results on real-world benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Distribution mismatches between the data seen at training and at application time remain a major challenge in all application areas of machine learning. We study this problem in the context of machine listening (Task 1b of the DCASE 2019 Challenge). We propose a novel approach to learn domain-invariant classifiers in an end-to-end fashion by enforcing equal hidden layer representations for domain-parallel samples, i.e. time-aligned recordings from different recording devices. No classification labels are needed for our domain adaptation (DA) method, which makes the data collection process cheaper.
Acoustic scene classification and related tasks have been dominated by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Top-performing CNNs use mainly audio spectograms as input and borrow their architectural design primarily from computer vision. A recent study has shown that restricting the receptive field (RF) of CNNs in appropriate ways is crucial for their performance, robustness and generalization in audio tasks. One side effect of restricting the RF of CNNs is that more frequency information is lost. In this paper, we perform a systematic investigation of different RF configuration for various CNN architectures on the DCASE 2019 Task 1.A dataset. Second, we introduce Frequency Aware CNNs to compensate for the lack of frequency information caused by the restricted RF, and experimentally determine if and in what RF ranges they yield additional improvement. The result of these investigations are several well-performing submissions to different tasks in the DCASE 2019 Challenge.
Fine-tuning a deep network trained with the standard cross-entropy loss is a strong baseline for few-shot learning. When fine-tuned transductively, this outperforms the current state-of-the-art on standard datasets such as Mini-ImageNet, Tiered-ImageNet, CIFAR-FS and FC-100 with the same hyper-parameters. The simplicity of this approach enables us to demonstrate the first few-shot learning results on the ImageNet-21k dataset. We find that using a large number of meta-training classes results in high few-shot accuracies even for a large number of few-shot classes. We do not advocate our approach as the solution for few-shot learning, but simply use the results to highlight limitations of current benchmarks and few-shot protocols. We perform extensive studies on benchmark datasets to propose a metric that quantifies the "hardness" of a few-shot episode. This metric can be used to report the performance of few-shot algorithms in a more systematic way.
This work focuses on a specific classification problem, where the information about a sample is not readily available, but has to be acquired for a cost, and there is a per-sample budget. Inspired by real-world use-cases, we analyze average and hard variations of a directly specified budget. We postulate the problem in its explicit formulation and then convert it into an equivalent MDP, that can be solved with deep reinforcement learning. Also, we evaluate a real-world inspired setting with sparse training dataset with missing features. The presented method performs robustly well in all settings across several distinct datasets, outperforming other prior-art algorithms. The method is flexible, as showcased with all mentioned modifications and can be improved with any domain independent advancement in RL.
Clinical notes in electronic health records contain highly heterogeneous writing styles, including non-standard terminology or abbreviations. Using these notes in predictive modeling has traditionally required preprocessing (e.g. taking frequent terms or topic modeling) that removes much of the richness of the source data. We propose a pretrained hierarchical recurrent neural network model that parses minimally processed clinical notes in an intuitive fashion, and show that it improves performance for discharge diagnosis classification tasks on the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III) dataset, compared to models that treat the notes as an unordered collection of terms or that conduct no pretraining. We also apply an attribution technique to examples to identify the words that the model uses to make its prediction, and show the importance of the words' nearby context.
Self-supervised bidirectional transformer models such as BERT have led to dramatic improvements in a wide variety of textual classification tasks. The modern digital world is increasingly multimodal, however, and textual information is often accompanied by other modalities such as images. We introduce a supervised multimodal bitransformer model that fuses information from text and image encoders, and obtain state-of-the-art performance on various multimodal classification benchmark tasks, outperforming strong baselines, including on hard test sets specifically designed to measure multimodal performance.
Task-oriented dialog systems need to know when a query falls outside their range of supported intents, but current text classification corpora only define label sets that cover every example. We introduce a new dataset that includes queries that are out-of-scope---i.e., queries that do not fall into any of the system's supported intents. This poses a new challenge because models cannot assume that every query at inference time belongs to a system-supported intent class. Our dataset also covers 150 intent classes over 10 domains, capturing the breadth that a production task-oriented agent must handle. We evaluate a range of benchmark classifiers on our dataset along with several different out-of-scope identification schemes. We find that while the classifiers perform well on in-scope intent classification, they struggle to identify out-of-scope queries. Our dataset and evaluation fill an important gap in the field, offering a way of more rigorously and realistically benchmarking text classification in task-driven dialog systems.
Nearest neighbor is a popular class of classification methods with many desirable properties. For a large data set which cannot be loaded into the memory of a single machine due to computation, communication, privacy, or ownership limitations, we consider the divide and conquer scheme: the entire data set is divided into small subsamples, on which nearest neighbor predictions are made, and then a final decision is reached by aggregating the predictions on subsamples by majority voting. We name this method the big Nearest Neighbor (bigNN) classifier, and provide its rates of convergence under minimal assumptions, in terms of both the excess risk and the classification instability, which are proven to be the same rates as the oracle nearest neighbor classifier and cannot be improved. To significantly reduce the prediction time that is required for achieving the optimal rate, we also consider the pre-training acceleration technique applied to the bigNN method, with proven convergence rate. We find that in the distributed setting, the optimal choice of the neighbor $k$ should scale with both the total sample size and the number of partitions, and there is a theoretical upper limit for the latter. Numerical studies have verified the theoretical findings.
This paper studies the problem of cross-network node classification to overcome the insufficiency of labeled data in a single network. It aims to leverage the label information in a partially labeled source network to assist node classification in a completely unlabeled or partially labeled target network. Existing methods for single network learning cannot solve this problem due to the domain shift across networks. Some multi-network learning methods heavily rely on the existence of cross-network connections, thus are inapplicable for this problem. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel \textcolor{black}{graph} transfer learning framework AdaGCN by leveraging the techniques of adversarial domain adaptation and graph convolution. It consists of two components: a semi-supervised learning component and an adversarial domain adaptation component. The former aims to learn class discriminative node representations with given label information of the source and target networks, while the latter contributes to mitigating the distribution divergence between the source and target domains to facilitate knowledge transfer. Extensive empirical evaluations on real-world datasets show that AdaGCN can successfully transfer class information with a low label rate on the source network and a substantial divergence between the source and target domains. The source code for reproducing the experimental results is available at https://github.com/daiquanyu/AdaGCN.
The increasing use of multiple sensors, which produce a large amount of multi-dimensional data, requires efficient representation and classification methods. In this paper, we present a new method for multi-dimensional data classification that relies on two premises: 1) multi-dimensional data are usually represented by tensors, since this brings benefits from multilinear algebra and established tensor factorization methods; and 2) multilinear data can be described by a subspace of a vector space. The subspace representation has been employed for pattern-set recognition, and its tensor representation counterpart is also available in the literature. However, traditional methods do not use discriminative information of the tensors, degrading the classification accuracy. In this case, generalized difference subspace (GDS) provides an enhanced subspace representation by reducing data redundancy and revealing discriminative structures. Since GDS does not handle tensor data, we propose a new projection called n-mode GDS, which efficiently handles tensor data. We also introduce the n-mode Fisher score as a class separability index and an improved metric based on the geodesic distance for tensor data similarity. The experimental results on gesture and action recognition show that the proposed method outperforms methods commonly used in the literature without relying on pre-trained models or transfer learning.
This study proposes a Neural Attentive Bag-of-Entities model, which is a neural network model that performs text classification using entities in a knowledge base. Entities provide unambiguous and relevant semantic signals that are beneficial for capturing semantics in texts. We combine simple high-recall entity detection based on a dictionary, to detect entities in a document, with a novel neural attention mechanism that enables the model to focus on a small number of unambiguous and relevant entities. We tested the effectiveness of our model using two standard text classification datasets (i.e., the 20 Newsgroups and R8 datasets) and a popular factoid question answering dataset based on a trivia quiz game. As a result, our model achieved state-of-the-art results on all datasets. The source code of the proposed model is available online at https://github.com/wikipedia2vec/wikipedia2vec.
Despite impressive performance on many text classification tasks, deep neural networks tend to learn frequent superficial patterns that are specific to the training data and do not always generalize well. In this work, we observe this limitation with respect to the task of native language identification. We find that standard text classifiers which perform well on the test set end up learning topical features which are confounds of the prediction task (e.g., if the input text mentions Sweden, the classifier predicts that the author's native language is Swedish). We propose a method that represents the latent topical confounds and a model which "unlearns" confounding features by predicting both the label of the input text and the confound; but we train the two predictors adversarially in an alternating fashion to learn a text representation that predicts the correct label but is less prone to using information about the confound. We show that this model generalizes better and learns features that are indicative of the writing style rather than the content.