A central challenge in training one-shot learning models is the limited representativeness of the available shots of the data space. Particularly in the field of network neuroscience where the brain is represented as a graph, such models may lead to low performance when classifying brain states (e.g., typical vs. autistic). To cope with this, most of the existing works involve a data augmentation step to increase the size of the training set, its diversity and representativeness. Though effective, such augmentation methods are limited to generating samples with the same size as the input shots (e.g., generating brain connectivity matrices from a single shot matrix). To the best of our knowledge, the problem of generating brain multigraphs capturing multiple types of connectivity between pairs of nodes (i.e., anatomical regions) from a single brain graph remains unsolved. In this paper, we unprecedentedly propose a hybrid graph neural network (GNN) architecture, namely Multigraph Generator Network or briefly MultigraphGNet, comprising two subnetworks: (1) a many-to-one GNN which integrates an input population of brain multigraphs into a single template graph, namely a connectional brain temple (CBT), and (2) a reverse one-to-many U-Net network which takes the learned CBT in each training step and outputs the reconstructed input multigraph population. Both networks are trained in an end-to-end way using a cyclic loss. Experimental results demonstrate that our MultigraphGNet boosts the performance of an independent classifier when trained on the augmented brain multigraphs in comparison with training on a single CBT from each class. We hope that our framework can shed some light on the future research of multigraph augmentation from a single graph. Our MultigraphGNet source code is available at https://github.com/basiralab/MultigraphGNet.
Foundation Models (FMs) have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities including zero-shot learning, high fidelity data synthesis, and out of domain generalization. However, as we show in this paper, FMs still have poor out-of-the-box performance on expert tasks (e.g. retrieval of car manuals technical illustrations from language queries), data for which is either unseen or belonging to a long-tail part of the data distribution of the huge datasets used for FM pre-training. This underlines the necessity to explicitly evaluate and finetune FMs on such expert tasks, arguably ones that appear the most in practical real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a first of its kind FETA benchmark built around the task of teaching FMs to understand technical documentation, via learning to match their graphical illustrations to corresponding language descriptions. Our FETA benchmark focuses on text-to-image and image-to-text retrieval in public car manuals and sales catalogue brochures. FETA is equipped with a procedure for completely automatic annotation extraction (code would be released upon acceptance), allowing easy extension of FETA to more documentation types and application domains in the future. Our automatic annotation leads to an automated performance metric shown to be consistent with metrics computed on human-curated annotations (also released). We provide multiple baselines and analysis of popular FMs on FETA leading to several interesting findings that we believe would be very valuable to the FM community, paving the way towards real-world application of FMs for practical expert tasks currently 'overlooked' by standard benchmarks focusing on common objects.
The past few years have witnessed the burst of drone-based applications where computer vision plays an essential role. However, most public drone-based vision datasets focus on detection and tracking. On the other hand, the performance of most existing image super-resolution methods is sensitive to the dataset, specifically, the degradation model between high-resolution and low-resolution images. In this thesis, we propose the first image super-resolution dataset for drone vision. Image pairs are captured by two cameras on the drone with different focal lengths. We collect data at different altitudes and then propose pre-processing steps to align image pairs. Extensive empirical studies show domain gaps exist among images captured at different altitudes. Meanwhile, the performance of pretrained image super-resolution networks also suffers a drop on our dataset and varies among altitudes. Finally, we propose two methods to build a robust image super-resolution network at different altitudes. The first feeds altitude information into the network through altitude-aware layers. The second uses one-shot learning to quickly adapt the super-resolution model to unknown altitudes. Our results reveal that the proposed methods can efficiently improve the performance of super-resolution networks at varying altitudes.
Autonomous agents are able to draw on a wide variety of potential sources of task knowledge; however current approaches invariably focus on only one or two. Here we investigate the challenges and impact of exploiting diverse knowledge sources to learn online, in one-shot, new tasks for a simulated office mobile robot. The resulting agent, developed in the Soar cognitive architecture, uses the following sources of domain and task knowledge: interaction with the environment, task execution and search knowledge, human natural language instruction, and responses retrieved from a large language model (GPT-3). We explore the distinct contributions of these knowledge sources and evaluate the performance of different combinations in terms of learning correct task knowledge and human workload. Results show that an agent's online integration of diverse knowledge sources improves one-shot task learning overall, reducing human feedback needed for rapid and reliable task learning.
Fingerprint evidence plays an important role in a criminal investigation for the identification of individuals. Although various techniques have been proposed for fingerprint classification and feature extraction, automated fingerprint identification of fingerprints is still in its earliest stage. The performance of traditional \textit{Automatic Fingerprint Identification System} (AFIS) depends on the presence of valid minutiae points and still requires human expert assistance in feature extraction and identification stages. Based on this motivation, we propose a Fingerprint Identification approach based on Generative adversarial network and One-shot learning techniques (FIGO). Our solution contains two components: fingerprint enhancement tier and fingerprint identification tier. First, we propose a Pix2Pix model to transform low-quality fingerprint images to a higher level of fingerprint images pixel by pixel directly in the fingerprint enhancement tier. With the proposed enhancement algorithm, the fingerprint identification model's performance is significantly improved. Furthermore, we develop another existing solution based on Gabor filters as a benchmark to compare with the proposed model by observing the fingerprint device's recognition accuracy. Experimental results show that our proposed Pix2pix model has better support than the baseline approach for fingerprint identification. Second, we construct a fully automated fingerprint feature extraction model using a one-shot learning approach to differentiate each fingerprint from the others in the fingerprint identification process. Two twin convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with shared weights and parameters are used to obtain the feature vectors in this process. Using the proposed method, we demonstrate that it is possible to learn necessary information from only one training sample with high accuracy.
The discovery of place cells and other spatially modulated neurons in the hippocampal complex of rodents has been crucial to elucidating the neural basis of spatial cognition. More recently, the replay of neural sequences encoding previously experienced trajectories has been observed during consummatory behavior potentially with implications for quick memory consolidation and behavioral planning. Several promising models for robotic navigation and reinforcement learning have been proposed based on these and previous findings. Most of these models, however, use carefully engineered neural networks and are tested in simple environments. In this paper, we develop a self-organized model incorporating place cells and replay, and demonstrate its utility for rapid one-shot learning in non-trivial environments with obstacles.
This paper is concerned with learning transferable contact models for aerial manipulation tasks. We investigate a contact-based approach for enabling unmanned aerial vehicles with cable-suspended passive grippers to compute the attach points on novel payloads for aerial transportation. This is the first time that the problem of autonomously generating contact points for such tasks has been investigated. Our approach builds on the underpinning idea that we can learn a probability density of contacts over objects' surfaces from a single demonstration. We enhance this formulation for encoding aerial transportation tasks while maintaining the one-shot learning paradigm without handcrafting task-dependent features or employing ad-hoc heuristics; the only prior is extrapolated directly from a single demonstration. Our models only rely on the geometrical properties of the payloads computed from a point cloud, and they are robust to partial views. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated in simulation, in which one or three quadropters are requested to transport previously unseen payloads along a desired trajectory. The contact points and the quadroptors configurations are computed on-the-fly for each test by our apporach and compared with a baseline method, a modified grasp learning algorithm from the literature. Empirical experiments show that the contacts generated by our approach yield a better controllability of the payload for a transportation task. We conclude this paper with a discussion on the strengths and limitations of the presented idea, and our suggested future research directions.
Sleep posture is linked to several health conditions such as nocturnal cramps and more serious musculoskeletal issues. However, in-clinic sleep assessments are often limited to vital signs (e.g. brain waves). Wearable sensors with embedded inertial measurement units have been used for sleep posture classification; nonetheless, previous works consider only few (commonly four) postures, which are inadequate for advanced clinical assessments. Moreover, posture learning algorithms typically require longitudinal data collection to function reliably, and often operate on raw inertial sensor readings unfamiliar to clinicians. This paper proposes a new framework for sleep posture classification based on a minimal set of joint angle measurements. The proposed framework is validated on a rich set of twelve postures in two experimental pipelines: computer animation to obtain synthetic postural data, and human participant pilot study using custom-made miniature wearable sensors. Through fusing raw geo-inertial sensor measurements to compute a filtered estimate of relative segment orientations across the wrist and ankle joints, the body posture can be characterised in a way comprehensible to medical experts. The proposed sleep posture learning framework offers plug-and-play posture classification by capitalising on a novel kinematic data augmentation method that requires only one training example per posture. Additionally, a new metric together with data visualisations are employed to extract meaningful insights from the postures dataset, demonstrate the added value of the data augmentation method, and explain the classification performance. The proposed framework attained promising overall accuracy as high as 100% on synthetic data and 92.7% on real data, on par with state of the art data-hungry algorithms available in the literature.
Memory is a key component of biological neural systems that enables the retention of information over a huge range of temporal scales, ranging from hundreds of milliseconds up to years. While Hebbian plasticity is believed to play a pivotal role in biological memory, it has so far been analyzed mostly in the context of pattern completion and unsupervised learning. Here, we propose that Hebbian plasticity is fundamental for computations in biological neural systems. We introduce a novel spiking neural network architecture that is enriched by Hebbian synaptic plasticity. We show that Hebbian enrichment renders spiking neural networks surprisingly versatile in terms of their computational as well as learning capabilities. It improves their abilities for out-of-distribution generalization, one-shot learning, cross-modal generative association, language processing, and reward-based learning. As spiking neural networks are the basis for energy-efficient neuromorphic hardware, this also suggests that powerful cognitive neuromorphic systems can be build based on this principle.
Learning a new concept from one example is a superior function of the human brain and it is drawing attention in the field of machine learning as a one-shot learning task. In this paper, we propose one of the simplest methods for this task with a nonparametric weight imprinting, named Direct ONE-shot learning (DONE). DONE adds new classes to a pretrained deep neural network (DNN) classifier with neither training optimization nor pretrained-DNN modification. DONE is inspired by Hebbian theory and directly uses the neural activity input of the final dense layer obtained from data that belongs to the new additional class as the synaptic weight with a newly-provided-output neuron for the new class, transforming all statistical properties of the neural activity into those of synaptic weight by quantile normalization. DONE requires just one inference for learning a new concept and its procedure is simple, deterministic, not requiring parameter tuning and hyperparameters. DONE overcomes a severe problem of existing weight imprinting methods that DNN-dependently interfere with the classification of original-class images. The performance of DONE depends entirely on the pretrained DNN model used as a backbone model, and we confirmed that DONE with current well-trained backbone models perform at a decent accuracy.
One-shot fine-grained visual recognition often suffers from the problem of having few training examples for new fine-grained classes. To alleviate this problem, off-the-shelf image generation techniques based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can potentially create additional training images. However, these GAN-generated images are often not helpful for actually improving the accuracy of one-shot fine-grained recognition. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning framework to combine generated images with original images, so that the resulting "hybrid" training images improve one-shot learning. Specifically, the generic image generator is updated by a few training instances of novel classes, and a Meta Image Reinforcing Network (MetaIRNet) is proposed to conduct one-shot fine-grained recognition as well as image reinforcement. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvement over baselines on one-shot fine-grained image classification benchmarks. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the reinforced images have more diversity compared to the original and GAN-generated images.
Lifelong on-device learning is a key challenge for machine intelligence, and this requires learning from few, often single, samples. Memory augmented neural network has been proposed to achieve the goal, but the memory module has to be stored in an off-chip memory due to its size. Therefore the practical use has been heavily limited. Previous works on emerging memory-based implementation have difficulties in scaling up because different modules with various structures are difficult to integrate on the same chip and the small sense margin of the content addressable memory for the memory module heavily limited the degree of mismatch calculation. In this work, we implement the entire memory augmented neural network architecture in a fully integrated memristive crossbar platform and achieve an accuracy that closely matches standard software on digital hardware for the Omniglot dataset. The successful demonstration is supported by implementing new functions in crossbars in addition to widely reported matrix multiplications. For example, the locality-sensitive hashing operation is implemented in crossbar arrays by exploiting the intrinsic stochasticity of memristor devices. Besides, the content-addressable memory module is realized in crossbars, which also supports the degree of mismatches. Simulations based on experimentally validated models show such an implementation can be efficiently scaled up for one-shot learning on the Mini-ImageNet dataset. The successful demonstration paves the way for practical on-device lifelong learning and opens possibilities for novel attention-based algorithms not possible in conventional hardware.
Humans have the capability, aided by the expressive compositionality of their language, to learn quickly by demonstration. They are able to describe unseen task-performing procedures and generalize their execution to other contexts. In this work, we introduce DescribeWorld, an environment designed to test this sort of generalization skill in grounded agents, where tasks are linguistically and procedurally composed of elementary concepts. The agent observes a single task demonstration in a Minecraft-like grid world, and is then asked to carry out the same task in a new map. To enable such a level of generalization, we propose a neural agent infused with hierarchical latent language--both at the level of task inference and subtask planning. Our agent first generates a textual description of the demonstrated unseen task, then leverages this description to replicate it. Through multiple evaluation scenarios and a suite of generalization tests, we find that agents that perform text-based inference are better equipped for the challenge under a random split of tasks.
We address the problem of devising the means for a robot to rapidly and safely learn insertion skills with just a few human interventions and without hand-crafted rewards or demonstrations. Our InsertionNet version 2.0 provides an improved technique to robustly cope with a wide range of use-cases featuring different shapes, colors, initial poses, etc. In particular, we present a regression-based method based on multimodal input from stereo perception and force, augmented with contrastive learning for the efficient learning of valuable features. In addition, we introduce a one-shot learning technique for insertion, which relies on a relation network scheme to better exploit the collected data and to support multi-step insertion tasks. Our method improves on the results obtained with the original InsertionNet, achieving an almost perfect score (above 97.5$\%$ on 200 trials) in 16 real-life insertion tasks while minimizing the execution time and contact during insertion. We further demonstrate our method's ability to tackle a real-life 3-step insertion task and perfectly solve an unseen insertion task without learning.
Being able to learn from small amounts of data is a key characteristic of human intelligence, but exactly {\em how} small? In this paper, we introduce a novel experimental paradigm that allows us to examine classification in an extremely data-scarce setting, asking whether humans can learn more categories than they have exemplars (i.e., can humans do "less-than-one shot" learning?). An experiment conducted using this paradigm reveals that people are capable of learning in such settings, and provides several insights into underlying mechanisms. First, people can accurately infer and represent high-dimensional feature spaces from very little data. Second, having inferred the relevant spaces, people use a form of prototype-based categorization (as opposed to exemplar-based) to make categorical inferences. Finally, systematic, machine-learnable patterns in responses indicate that people may have efficient inductive biases for dealing with this class of data-scarce problems.
Large Language Models have been successful in a wide variety of Natural Language Processing tasks by capturing the compositionality of the text representations. In spite of their great success, these vector representations fail to capture meaning of idiomatic multi-word expressions (MWEs). In this paper, we focus on the detection of idiomatic expressions by using binary classification. We use a dataset consisting of the literal and idiomatic usage of MWEs in English and Portuguese. Thereafter, we perform the classification in two different settings: zero shot and one shot, to determine if a given sentence contains an idiom or not. N shot classification for this task is defined by N number of common idioms between the training and testing sets. In this paper, we train multiple Large Language Models in both the settings and achieve an F1 score (macro) of 0.73 for the zero shot setting and an F1 score (macro) of 0.85 for the one shot setting. An implementation of our work can be found at https://github.com/ashwinpathak20/Idiomaticity_Detection_Using_Few_Shot_Learning.
Deep Reinforcement Learning has demonstrated the potential of neural networks tuned with gradient descent for solving complex tasks in well-delimited environments. However, these neural systems are slow learners producing specialized agents with no mechanism to continue learning beyond their training curriculum. On the contrary, biological synaptic plasticity is persistent and manifold, and has been hypothesized to play a key role in executive functions such as working memory and cognitive flexibility, potentially supporting more efficient and generic learning abilities. Inspired by this, we propose to build networks with dynamic weights, able to continually perform self-reflexive modification as a function of their current synaptic state and action-reward feedback, rather than a fixed network configuration. The resulting model, MetODS (for Meta-Optimized Dynamical Synapses) is a broadly applicable meta-reinforcement learning system able to learn efficient and powerful control rules in the agent policy space. A single layer with dynamic synapses can perform one-shot learning, generalizes navigation principles to unseen environments and manifests a strong ability to learn adaptive motor policies.
One-shot learning has become an important research topic in the last decade with many real-world applications. The goal of one-shot learning is to classify unlabeled instances when there is only one labeled example per class. Conventional problem setting of one-shot learning mainly focuses on the data that is already in feature space (such as images). However, the data instances in real-world applications are often more complex and feature vectors may not be available. In this paper, we study the problem of one-shot learning on attributed sequences, where each instance is composed of a set of attributes (e.g., user profile) and a sequence of categorical items (e.g., clickstream). This problem is important for a variety of real-world applications ranging from fraud prevention to network intrusion detection. This problem is more challenging than conventional one-shot learning since there are dependencies between attributes and sequences. We design a deep learning framework OLAS to tackle this problem. The proposed OLAS utilizes a twin network to generalize the features from pairwise attributed sequence examples. Empirical results on real-world datasets demonstrate the proposed OLAS can outperform the state-of-the-art methods under a rich variety of parameter settings.
Learning light-weight yet expressive deep networks in both image synthesis and image recognition remains a challenging problem. Inspired by a more recent observation that it is the data-specificity that makes the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) in the Transformer model so powerful, this paper proposes to extend the widely adopted light-weight Squeeze-Excitation (SE) module to be spatially-adaptive to reinforce its data specificity, as a convolutional alternative of the MHSA, while retaining the efficiency of SE and the inductive basis of convolution. It presents two designs of spatially-adaptive squeeze-excitation (SASE) modules for image synthesis and image recognition respectively. For image synthesis tasks, the proposed SASE is tested in both low-shot and one-shot learning tasks. It shows better performance than prior arts. For image recognition tasks, the proposed SASE is used as a drop-in replacement for convolution layers in ResNets and achieves much better accuracy than the vanilla ResNets, and slightly better than the MHSA counterparts such as the Swin-Transformer and Pyramid-Transformer in the ImageNet-1000 dataset, with significantly smaller models.
Tracking visual objects from a single initial exemplar in the testing phase has been broadly cast as a one-/few-shot problem, i.e., one-shot learning for initial adaptation and few-shot learning for online adaptation. The recent few-shot online adaptation methods incorporate the prior knowledge from large amounts of annotated training data via complex meta-learning optimization in the offline phase. This helps the online deep trackers to achieve fast adaptation and reduce overfitting risk in tracking. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective recursive least-squares estimator-aided online learning approach for few-shot online adaptation without requiring offline training. It allows an in-built memory retention mechanism for the model to remember the knowledge about the object seen before, and thus the seen data can be safely removed from training. This also bears certain similarities to the emerging continual learning field in preventing catastrophic forgetting. This mechanism enables us to unveil the power of modern online deep trackers without incurring too much extra computational cost. We evaluate our approach based on two networks in the online learning families for tracking, i.e., multi-layer perceptrons in RT-MDNet and convolutional neural networks in DiMP. The consistent improvements on several challenging tracking benchmarks demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency.