Recent advances in unsupervised domain adaptation have achieved remarkable performance on semantic segmentation tasks. Despite such progress, existing works mainly focus on bridging the inter-domain gaps between the source and target domain, while only few of them noticed the intra-domain gaps within the target data. In this work, we propose a pixel-level intra-domain adaptation approach to reduce the intra-domain gaps within the target data. Compared with image-level methods, ours treats each pixel as an instance, which adapts the segmentation model at a more fine-grained level. Specifically, we first conduct the inter-domain adaptation between the source and target domain; Then, we separate the pixels in target images into the easy and hard subdomains; Finally, we propose a pixel-level adversarial training strategy to adapt a segmentation network from the easy to the hard subdomain. Moreover, we show that the segmentation accuracy can be further improved by incorporating a continuous indexing technique in the adversarial training. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method against existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Large-scale multi-label classification datasets are commonly, and perhaps inevitably, partially annotated. That is, only a small subset of labels are annotated per sample. Different methods for handling the missing labels induce different properties on the model and impact its accuracy. In this work, we analyze the partial labeling problem, then propose a solution based on two key ideas. First, un-annotated labels should be treated selectively according to two probability quantities: the class distribution in the overall dataset and the specific label likelihood for a given data sample. We propose to estimate the class distribution using a dedicated temporary model, and we show its improved efficiency over a naive estimation computed using the dataset's partial annotations. Second, during the training of the target model, we emphasize the contribution of annotated labels over originally un-annotated labels by using a dedicated asymmetric loss. With our novel approach, we achieve state-of-the-art results on OpenImages dataset (e.g. reaching 87.3 mAP on V6). In addition, experiments conducted on LVIS and simulated-COCO demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/Alibaba-MIIL/PartialLabelingCSL.
Extreme multi-label classification (XMLC) refers to the task of tagging instances with small subsets of relevant labels coming from an extremely large set of all possible labels. Recently, XMLC has been widely applied to diverse web applications such as automatic content labeling, online advertising, or recommendation systems. In such environments, label distribution is often highly imbalanced, consisting mostly of very rare tail labels, and relevant labels can be missing. As a remedy to these problems, the propensity model has been introduced and applied within several XMLC algorithms. In this work, we focus on the problem of optimal predictions under this model for probabilistic label trees, a popular approach for XMLC problems. We introduce an inference procedure, based on the $A^*$-search algorithm, that efficiently finds the optimal solution, assuming that all probabilities and propensities are known. We demonstrate the attractiveness of this approach in a wide empirical study on popular XMLC benchmark datasets.
Pre-trained encoder-decoder transformer architectures have become increasingly popular recently with the advent of T5 models. T5 has also become more favorable over other architectures like BERT due to the amount of data that it is pre-trained on, increased scale of model parameter sizes and easy applicability to a diverse set of tasks due to the generative nature of the model. While being able to generalize to a wide variety of tasks, it is not clear that encoder-decoder architectures are the most efficient for fine-tuning tasks that don't require auto-regressive decoding. In this work, we study fine-tuning pre-trained encoder-decoder models for tasks such as classification, multi-label classification, and structured prediction. We propose \textbf{EncT5}, a framework for these problems, and illustrate instantiations for these tasks. Our experiment results show that EncT5 has advantages over T5 such as efficiency and usability out performs BERT when evaluated on publicly available pre-trained checkpoints.
The deployment of Deep Learning (DL) models is still precluded in those contexts where the amount of supervised data is limited. To answer this issue, active learning strategies aim at minimizing the amount of labelled data required to train a DL model. Most active strategies are based on uncertain sample selection, and even often restricted to samples lying close to the decision boundary. These techniques are theoretically sound, but an understanding of the selected samples based on their content is not straightforward, further driving non-experts to consider DL as a black-box. For the first time, here we propose to take into consideration common domain-knowledge and enable non-expert users to train a model with fewer samples. In our Knowledge-driven Active Learning (KAL) framework, rule-based knowledge is converted into logic constraints and their violation is checked as a natural guide for sample selection. We show that even simple relationships among data and output classes offer a way to spot predictions for which the model need supervision. We empirically show that KAL (i) outperforms many active learning strategies, particularly in those contexts where domain knowledge is rich, (ii) it discovers data distribution lying far from the initial training data, (iii) it ensures domain experts that the provided knowledge is acquired by the model, (iv) it is suitable for regression and object recognition tasks unlike uncertainty-based strategies, and (v) its computational demand is low.
Motivated by extreme multi-label classification applications, we consider training deep learning models over sparse data in multi-GPU servers. The variance in the number of non-zero features across training batches and the intrinsic GPU heterogeneity combine to limit accuracy and increase the time to convergence. We address these challenges with Adaptive SGD, an adaptive elastic model averaging stochastic gradient descent algorithm for heterogeneous multi-GPUs that is characterized by dynamic scheduling, adaptive batch size scaling, and normalized model merging. Instead of statically partitioning batches to GPUs, batches are routed based on the relative processing speed. Batch size scaling assigns larger batches to the faster GPUs and smaller batches to the slower ones, with the goal to arrive at a steady state in which all the GPUs perform the same number of model updates. Normalized model merging computes optimal weights for every GPU based on the assigned batches such that the combined model achieves better accuracy. We show experimentally that Adaptive SGD outperforms four state-of-the-art solutions in time-to-accuracy and is scalable with the number of GPUs.
Contrastive learning has demonstrated promising performance in image and text domains either in a self-supervised or a supervised manner. In this work, we extend the supervised contrastive learning framework to clinical risk prediction problems based on longitudinal electronic health records (EHR). We propose a general supervised contrastive loss $\mathcal{L}_{\text{Contrastive Cross Entropy} } + \lambda \mathcal{L}_{\text{Supervised Contrastive Regularizer}}$ for learning both binary classification (e.g. in-hospital mortality prediction) and multi-label classification (e.g. phenotyping) in a unified framework. Our supervised contrastive loss practices the key idea of contrastive learning, namely, pulling similar samples closer and pushing dissimilar ones apart from each other, simultaneously by its two components: $\mathcal{L}_{\text{Contrastive Cross Entropy} }$ tries to contrast samples with learned anchors which represent positive and negative clusters, and $\mathcal{L}_{\text{Supervised Contrastive Regularizer}}$ tries to contrast samples with each other according to their supervised labels. We propose two versions of the above supervised contrastive loss and our experiments on real-world EHR data demonstrate that our proposed loss functions show benefits in improving the performance of strong baselines and even state-of-the-art models on benchmarking tasks for clinical risk predictions. Our loss functions work well with extremely imbalanced data which are common for clinical risk prediction problems. Our loss functions can be easily used to replace (binary or multi-label) cross-entropy loss adopted in existing clinical predictive models. The Pytorch code is released at \url{https://github.com/calvin-zcx/SCEHR}.
The simultaneous recognition of multiple objects in one image remains a challenging task, spanning multiple events in the recognition field such as various object scales, inconsistent appearances, and confused inter-class relationships. Recent research efforts mainly resort to the statistic label co-occurrences and linguistic word embedding to enhance the unclear semantics. Different from these researches, in this paper, we propose a novel Transformer-based Dual Relation learning framework, constructing complementary relationships by exploring two aspects of correlation, i.e., structural relation graph and semantic relation graph. The structural relation graph aims to capture long-range correlations from object context, by developing a cross-scale transformer-based architecture. The semantic graph dynamically models the semantic meanings of image objects with explicit semantic-aware constraints. In addition, we also incorporate the learnt structural relationship into the semantic graph, constructing a joint relation graph for robust representations. With the collaborative learning of these two effective relation graphs, our approach achieves new state-of-the-art on two popular multi-label recognition benchmarks, i.e., MS-COCO and VOC 2007 dataset.
ECG heartbeat classification plays a vital role in diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmia. The goal of the Physionet/CinC 2021 challenge was to accurately classify clinical diagnosis based on 12, 6, 4, 3 or 2-lead ECG recordings in order to aid doctors in the diagnoses of different heart conditions. Transformers have had great success in the field of natural language processing in the past years. Our team, CinCSEM, proposes to draw the parallel between text and periodic time series signals by viewing the repeated period as words and the whole signal as a sequence of such words. In this way, the attention mechanisms of the transformers can be applied to periodic time series signals. In our implementation, we follow the Transformer Encoder architecture, which combines several encoder layers followed by a dense layer with linear or sigmoid activation for generative pre-training or classification, respectively. The use case presented here is multi-label classification of heartbeat abnormalities of ECG recordings shared by the challenge. Our best entry, not exceeding the challenge's hardware limitations, achieved a score of 0.12, 0.07, 0.10, 0.10 and 0.07 on 12-lead, 6-lead, 4-lead, 3-lead and 2-lead test set respectively. Unfortunately, our team was unable to be ranked because of a missing pre-print.
Machine Learning models are deployed across a wide range of industries, performing a wide range of tasks. Tracking these models and ensuring they behave appropriately is becoming increasingly difficult as the number of deployed models increases. There are also new regulatory burdens for ML systems which affect human lives, requiring a link between a model and its training data in high-risk situations. Current ML monitoring systems often provide provenance and experiment tracking as a layer on top of an ML library, allowing room for imperfect tracking and skew between the tracked object and the metadata. In this paper we introduce Tribuo, a Java ML library that integrates model training, inference, strong type-safety, runtime checking, and automatic provenance recording into a single framework. All Tribuo's models and evaluations record the full processing pipeline for input data, along with the training algorithms, hyperparameters and data transformation steps automatically. The provenance lives inside the model object and can be persisted separately using common markup formats. Tribuo implements many popular ML algorithms for classification, regression, clustering, multi-label classification and anomaly detection, along with interfaces to XGBoost, TensorFlow and ONNX Runtime. Tribuo's source code is available at https://github.com/oracle/tribuo under an Apache 2.0 license with documentation and tutorials available at https://tribuo.org.
Sound event detection (SED) has gained increasing attention with its wide application in surveillance, video indexing, etc. Existing models in SED mainly generate frame-level prediction, converting it into a sequence multi-label classification problem. A critical issue with the frame-based model is that it pursues the best frame-level prediction rather than the best event-level prediction. Besides, it needs post-processing and cannot be trained in an end-to-end way. This paper firstly presents the one-dimensional Detection Transformer (1D-DETR), inspired by Detection Transformer for image object detection. Furthermore, given the characteristics of SED, the audio query branch and a one-to-many matching strategy for fine-tuning the model are added to 1D-DETR to form Sound Event Detection Transformer (SEDT). To our knowledge, SEDT is the first event-based and end-to-end SED model. Experiments are conducted on the URBAN-SED dataset and the DCASE2019 Task4 dataset, and both show that SEDT can achieve competitive performance.
Diabetes is a global raising pandemic. Diabetes patients are at risk of developing foot ulcer that usually leads to limb amputation. In order to develop a self monitoring mobile application, in this work, we propose a novel deep subspace analysis pipeline for semi-supervised diabetic foot ulcer mulit-label classification. To avoid any chance of over-fitting, unlike recent state of the art deep semi-supervised methods, the proposed pipeline dose not include any data augmentation. Whereas, after extracting deep features, in order to make the representation shift invariant, we employ variety of data augmentation methods on each image and generate an image-sets, which is then mapped into a linear subspace. Moreover, the proposed pipeline reduces the cost of retraining when more new unlabelled data become available. Thus, the first stage of the pipeline employs the concept of transfer learning for feature extraction purpose through modifying and retraining a deep convolutional network architect known as Xception. Then, the output of a mid-layer is extracted to generate an image set representer of any given image with help of data augmentation methods. At this stage, each image is transferred to a linear subspace which is a point on a Grassmann Manifold topological space. Hence, to perform analyse them, the geometry of such manifold must be considered. As such, each labelled image is represented as a vector of distances to number of unlabelled images using geodesic distance on Grassmann manifold. Finally, Random Forest is trained for multi-label classification of diabetic foot ulcer images. The method is then evaluated on the blind test set provided by DFU2021 competition, and the result considerable improvement compared to using classical transfer learning with data augmentation.
Reviewing contracts is a time-consuming procedure that incurs large expenses to companies and social inequality to those who cannot afford it. In this work, we propose "document-level natural language inference (NLI) for contracts", a novel, real-world application of NLI that addresses such problems. In this task, a system is given a set of hypotheses (such as "Some obligations of Agreement may survive termination.") and a contract, and it is asked to classify whether each hypothesis is "entailed by", "contradicting to" or "not mentioned by" (neutral to) the contract as well as identifying "evidence" for the decision as spans in the contract. We annotated and release the largest corpus to date consisting of 607 annotated contracts. We then show that existing models fail badly on our task and introduce a strong baseline, which (1) models evidence identification as multi-label classification over spans instead of trying to predict start and end tokens, and (2) employs more sophisticated context segmentation for dealing with long documents. We also show that linguistic characteristics of contracts, such as negations by exceptions, are contributing to the difficulty of this task and that there is much room for improvement.
Laws and their interpretations, legal arguments and agreements\ are typically expressed in writing, leading to the production of vast corpora of legal text. Their analysis, which is at the center of legal practice, becomes increasingly elaborate as these collections grow in size. Natural language understanding (NLU) technologies can be a valuable tool to support legal practitioners in these endeavors. Their usefulness, however, largely depends on whether current state-of-the-art models can generalize across various tasks in the legal domain. To answer this currently open question, we introduce the Legal General Language Understanding Evaluation (LexGLUE) benchmark, a collection of datasets for evaluating model performance across a diverse set of legal NLU tasks in a standardized way. We also provide an evaluation and analysis of several generic and legal-oriented models demonstrating that the latter consistently offer performance improvements across multiple tasks.
We introduce a framework for calibrating machine learning models so that their predictions satisfy explicit, finite-sample statistical guarantees. Our calibration algorithms work with any underlying model and (unknown) data-generating distribution and do not require model refitting. The framework addresses, among other examples, false discovery rate control in multi-label classification, intersection-over-union control in instance segmentation, and the simultaneous control of the type-1 error of outlier detection and confidence set coverage in classification or regression. Our main insight is to reframe the risk-control problem as multiple hypothesis testing, enabling techniques and mathematical arguments different from those in the previous literature. We use the framework to provide new calibration methods for several core machine learning tasks, with detailed worked examples in computer vision and tabular medical data.
There are many ways machine learning and big data analytics are used in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, including predictions, risk management, diagnostics, and prevention. This study focuses on predicting COVID-19 patient shielding -- identifying and protecting patients who are clinically extremely vulnerable from coronavirus. This study focuses on techniques used for the multi-label classification of medical text. Using the information published by the United Kingdom NHS and the World Health Organisation, we present a novel approach to predicting COVID-19 patient shielding as a multi-label classification problem. We use publicly available, de-identified ICU medical text data for our experiments. The labels are derived from the published COVID-19 patient shielding data. We present an extensive comparison across 12 multi-label classifiers from the simple binary relevance to neural networks and the most recent transformers. To the best of our knowledge this is the first comprehensive study, where such a range of multi-label classifiers for medical text are considered. We highlight the benefits of various approaches, and argue that, for the task at hand, both predictive accuracy and processing time are essential.
We propose a novel Riemannian method for solving the Extreme multi-label classification problem that exploits the geometric structure of the sparse low-dimensional local embedding models. A constrained optimization problem is formulated as an optimization problem on matrix manifold and solved using a Riemannian optimization method. The proposed approach is tested on several real world large scale multi-label datasets and its usefulness is demonstrated through numerical experiments. The numerical experiments suggest that the proposed method is fastest to train and has least model size among the embedding-based methods. An outline of the proof of convergence for the proposed Riemannian optimization method is also stated.
A deep hashing model typically has two main learning objectives: to make the learned binary hash codes discriminative and to minimize a quantization error. With further constraints such as bit balance and code orthogonality, it is not uncommon for existing models to employ a large number (>4) of losses. This leads to difficulties in model training and subsequently impedes their effectiveness. In this work, we propose a novel deep hashing model with only a single learning objective. Specifically, we show that maximizing the cosine similarity between the continuous codes and their corresponding binary orthogonal codes can ensure both hash code discriminativeness and quantization error minimization. Further, with this learning objective, code balancing can be achieved by simply using a Batch Normalization (BN) layer and multi-label classification is also straightforward with label smoothing. The result is an one-loss deep hashing model that removes all the hassles of tuning the weights of various losses. Importantly, extensive experiments show that our model is highly effective, outperforming the state-of-the-art multi-loss hashing models on three large-scale instance retrieval benchmarks, often by significant margins. Code is available at https://github.com/kamwoh/orthohash
Estimating out-of-distribution (OOD) uncertainty is a central challenge for safely deploying machine learning models in the open-world environment. Improved methods for OOD detection in multi-class classification have emerged, while OOD detection methods for multi-label classification remain underexplored and use rudimentary techniques. We propose JointEnergy, a simple and effective method, which estimates the OOD indicator scores by aggregating energy scores from multiple labels. We show that JointEnergy can be mathematically interpreted from a joint likelihood perspective. Our results show consistent improvement over previous methods that are based on the maximum-valued scores, which fail to capture joint information from multiple labels. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three common multi-label classification benchmarks, including MS-COCO, PASCAL-VOC, and NUS-WIDE. We show that JointEnergy can reduce the FPR95 by up to 10.05% compared to the previous best baseline, establishing state-of-the-art performance.
In this paper we show that a simple, data dependent way of setting the initial vector can be used to substantially speed up the training of linear one-versus-all (OVA) classifiers in extreme multi-label classification (XMC). We discuss the problem of choosing the initial weights from the perspective of three goals. We want to start in a region of weight space a) with low loss value, b) that is favourable for second-order optimization, and c) where the conjugate-gradient (CG) calculations can be performed quickly. For margin losses, such an initialization is achieved by selecting the initial vector such that it separates the mean of all positive (relevant for a label) instances from the mean of all negatives -- two quantities that can be calculated quickly for the highly imbalanced binary problems occurring in XMC. We demonstrate a speedup of $\approx 3\times$ for training with squared hinge loss on a variety of XMC datasets. This comes in part from the reduced number of iterations that need to be performed due to starting closer to the solution, and in part from an implicit negative mining effect that allows to ignore easy negatives in the CG step. Because of the convex nature of the optimization problem, the speedup is achieved without any degradation in classification accuracy.