Meta learning has demonstrated tremendous success in few-shot learning with limited supervised data. In those settings, the meta model is usually overparameterized. While the conventional statistical learning theory suggests that overparameterized models tend to overfit, empirical evidence reveals that overparameterized meta learning methods still work well -- a phenomenon often called "benign overfitting." To understand this phenomenon, we focus on the meta learning settings with a challenging bilevel structure that we term the gradient-based meta learning, and analyze its generalization performance under an overparameterized meta linear regression model. While our analysis uses the relatively tractable linear models, our theory contributes to understanding the delicate interplay among data heterogeneity, model adaptation and benign overfitting in gradient-based meta learning tasks. We corroborate our theoretical claims through numerical simulations.
Data collected by IoT devices are often private and have a large diversity across users. Therefore, learning requires pre-training a model with available representative data samples, deploying the pre-trained model on IoT devices, and adapting the deployed model on the device with local data. Such an on-device adaption for deep learning empowered applications demands data and memory efficiency. However, existing gradient-based meta learning schemes fail to support memory-efficient adaptation. To this end, we propose p-Meta, a new meta learning method that enforces structure-wise partial parameter updates while ensuring fast generalization to unseen tasks. Evaluations on few-shot image classification and reinforcement learning tasks show that p-Meta not only improves the accuracy but also substantially reduces the peak dynamic memory by a factor of 2.5 on average compared to state-of-the-art few-shot adaptation methods.
Robust and generalized tool manipulation requires an understanding of the properties and affordances of different tools. We investigate whether linguistic information about a tool (e.g., its geometry, common uses) can help control policies adapt faster to new tools for a given task. We obtain diverse descriptions of various tools in natural language and use pre-trained language models to generate their feature representations. We then perform language-conditioned meta-learning to learn policies that can efficiently adapt to new tools given their corresponding text descriptions. Our results demonstrate that combining linguistic information and meta-learning significantly accelerates tool learning in several manipulation tasks including pushing, lifting, sweeping, and hammering.
Wi-Fi in the enterprise - characterized by overlapping Wi-Fi cells - constitutes the design challenge for next-generation networks. Standardization for recently started IEEE 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) Working Groups has focused on significant medium access control layer changes that emphasize the role of the access point (AP) in radio resource management (RRM) for coordinating channel access due to the high collision probability with the distributed coordination function (DCF), especially in dense overlapping Wi-Fi networks. This paper proposes a novel multi-AP coordination system architecture aided by a centralized AP controller (APC). Meanwhile, a deep reinforcement learning channel access (DLCA) protocol is developed to replace the binary exponential backoff mechanism in DCF to enhance the network throughput by enabling the coordination of APs. First-Order Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning further enhances the network throughput. Subsequently, we also put forward a new greedy algorithm to maintain proportional fairness (PF) among multiple APs. Via the simulation, the performance of DLCA protocol in dense overlapping Wi-Fi networks is verified to have strong stability and outperform baselines such as Shared Transmission Opportunity (SH-TXOP) and Request-to-Send/Clear-to-Send (RTS/CTS) in terms of the network throughput by 10% and 3% as well as the network utility considering proportional fairness by 28.3% and 13.8%, respectively.
While other areas of machine learning have seen more and more automation, designing a high-performing recommender system still requires a high level of human effort. Furthermore, recent work has shown that modern recommender system algorithms do not always improve over well-tuned baselines. A natural follow-up question is, "how do we choose the right algorithm for a new dataset and performance metric?" In this work, we start by giving the first large-scale study of recommender system approaches by comparing 18 algorithms and 100 sets of hyperparameters across 85 datasets and 315 metrics. We find that the best algorithms and hyperparameters are highly dependent on the dataset and performance metric, however, there are also strong correlations between the performance of each algorithm and various meta-features of the datasets. Motivated by these findings, we create RecZilla, a meta-learning approach to recommender systems that uses a model to predict the best algorithm and hyperparameters for new, unseen datasets. By using far more meta-training data than prior work, RecZilla is able to substantially reduce the level of human involvement when faced with a new recommender system application. We not only release our code and pretrained RecZilla models, but also all of our raw experimental results, so that practitioners can train a RecZilla model for their desired performance metric: https://github.com/naszilla/reczilla.
Bilevel optimization have gained growing interests, with numerous applications found in meta learning, minimax games, reinforcement learning, and nested composition optimization. This paper studies the problem of distributed bilevel optimization over a network where agents can only communicate with neighbors, including examples from multi-task, multi-agent learning and federated learning. In this paper, we propose a gossip-based distributed bilevel learning algorithm that allows networked agents to solve both the inner and outer optimization problems in a single timescale and share information via network propagation. We show that our algorithm enjoys the $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{K \epsilon^2})$ per-agent sample complexity for general nonconvex bilevel optimization and $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{K \epsilon})$ for strongly convex objective, achieving a speedup that scales linearly with the network size. The sample complexities are optimal in both $\epsilon$ and $K$. We test our algorithm on the examples of hyperparameter tuning and decentralized reinforcement learning. Simulated experiments confirmed that our algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art training efficiency and test accuracy.
Given a graph learning task, such as link prediction, on a new graph, how can we select the best method as well as its hyperparameters (collectively called a model) without having to train or evaluate any model on the new graph? Model selection for graph learning has been largely ad hoc. A typical approach has been to apply popular methods to new datasets, but this is often suboptimal. On the other hand, systematically comparing models on the new graph quickly becomes too costly, or even impractical. In this work, we develop the first meta-learning approach for evaluation-free graph learning model selection, called MetaGL, which utilizes the prior performances of existing methods on various benchmark graph datasets to automatically select an effective model for the new graph, without any model training or evaluations. To quantify similarities across a wide variety of graphs, we introduce specialized meta-graph features that capture the structural characteristics of a graph. Then we design G-M network, which represents the relations among graphs and models, and develop a graph-based meta-learner operating on this G-M network, which estimates the relevance of each model to different graphs. Extensive experiments show that using MetaGL to select a model for the new graph greatly outperforms several existing meta-learning techniques tailored for graph learning model selection (up to 47% better), while being extremely fast at test time (~1 sec).
Despite the superior empirical success of deep meta-learning, theoretical understanding of overparameterized meta-learning is still limited. This paper studies the generalization of a widely used meta-learning approach, Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML), which aims to find a good initialization for fast adaptation to new tasks. Under a mixed linear regression model, we analyze the generalization properties of MAML trained with SGD in the overparameterized regime. We provide both upper and lower bounds for the excess risk of MAML, which captures how SGD dynamics affect these generalization bounds. With such sharp characterizations, we further explore how various learning parameters impact the generalization capability of overparameterized MAML, including explicitly identifying typical data and task distributions that can achieve diminishing generalization error with overparameterization, and characterizing the impact of adaptation learning rate on both excess risk and the early stopping time. Our theoretical findings are further validated by experiments.
Many neural network-based out-of-distribution (OoD) detection methods have been proposed. However, they require many training data for each target task. We propose a simple yet effective meta-learning method to detect OoD with small in-distribution data in a target task. With the proposed method, the OoD detection is performed by density estimation in a latent space. A neural network shared among all tasks is used to flexibly map instances in the original space to the latent space. The neural network is meta-learned such that the expected OoD detection performance is improved by using various tasks that are different from the target tasks. This meta-learning procedure enables us to obtain appropriate representations in the latent space for OoD detection. For density estimation, we use a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with full covariance for each class. We can adapt the GMM parameters to in-distribution data in each task in a closed form by maximizing the likelihood. Since the closed form solution is differentiable, we can meta-learn the neural network efficiently with a stochastic gradient descent method by incorporating the solution into the meta-learning objective function. In experiments using six datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance than existing meta-learning and OoD detection methods.
To accelerate learning process with few samples, meta-learning resorts to prior knowledge from previous tasks. However, the inconsistent task distribution and heterogeneity is hard to be handled through a global sharing model initialization. In this paper, based on gradient-based meta-learning, we propose an ensemble embedded meta-learning algorithm (EEML) that explicitly utilizes multi-model-ensemble to organize prior knowledge into diverse specific experts. We rely on a task embedding cluster mechanism to deliver diverse tasks to matching experts in training process and instruct how experts collaborate in test phase. As a result, the multi experts can focus on their own area of expertise and cooperate in upcoming task to solve the task heterogeneity. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms recent state-of-the-arts easily in few-shot learning problem, which validates the importance of differentiation and cooperation.
Few-shot segmentation aims to segment unseen-class objects given only a handful of densely labeled samples. Prototype learning, where the support feature yields a singleor several prototypes by averaging global and local object information, has been widely used in FSS. However, utilizing only prototype vectors may be insufficient to represent the features for all training data. To extract abundant features and make more precise predictions, we propose a Multi-Similarity and Attention Network (MSANet) including two novel modules, a multi-similarity module and an attention module. The multi-similarity module exploits multiple feature-maps of support images and query images to estimate accurate semantic relationships. The attention module instructs the network to concentrate on class-relevant information. The network is tested on standard FSS datasets, PASCAL-5i 1-shot, PASCAL-5i 5-shot, COCO-20i 1-shot, and COCO-20i 5-shot. The MSANet with the backbone of ResNet-101 achieves the state-of-the-art performance for all 4-benchmark datasets with mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 69.13%, 73.99%, 51.09%, 56.80%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/AIVResearch/MSANet
Personalized federated learning considers learning models unique to each client in a heterogeneous network. The resulting client-specific models have been purported to improve metrics such as accuracy, fairness, and robustness in federated networks. However, despite a plethora of work in this area, it remains unclear: (1) which personalization techniques are most effective in various settings, and (2) how important personalization truly is for realistic federated applications. To better answer these questions, we propose Motley, a benchmark for personalized federated learning. Motley consists of a suite of cross-device and cross-silo federated datasets from varied problem domains, as well as thorough evaluation metrics for better understanding the possible impacts of personalization. We establish baselines on the benchmark by comparing a number of representative personalized federated learning methods. These initial results highlight strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches, and raise several open questions for the community. Motley aims to provide a reproducible means with which to advance developments in personalized and heterogeneity-aware federated learning, as well as the related areas of transfer learning, meta-learning, and multi-task learning.
Iterative methods are ubiquitous in large-scale scientific computing applications, and a number of approaches based on meta-learning have been recently proposed to accelerate them. However, a systematic study of these approaches and how they differ from meta-learning is lacking. In this paper, we propose a framework to analyze such learning-based acceleration approaches, where one can immediately identify a departure from classical meta-learning. We show that this departure may lead to arbitrary deterioration of model performance. Based on our analysis, we introduce a novel training method for learning-based acceleration of iterative methods. Furthermore, we theoretically prove that the proposed method improves upon the existing methods, and demonstrate its significant advantage and versatility through various numerical applications.
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 by combining ideas from transfer learning (fixed pretrained backbones and fine-tuned FiLM adapter layers) and meta-learning (automatically configured Naive Bayes classifiers and episodic training) to yield parameter efficient models with superior classification accuracy at low-shot. The resulting parameter efficiency 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 leading Big Transfer (BiT) algorithm at low-shot and achieves state-of-the art accuracy on the challenging VTAB-1k benchmark, with fewer than 1% of the updateable parameters. Finally, we demonstrate the parameter efficiency and superior accuracy of FiT in distributed low-shot applications including model personalization and federated learning where model update size is an important performance metric.
The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), defined as $\Theta_\theta^f(x_1, x_2) = \left[\partial f(\theta, x_1)\big/\partial \theta\right] \left[\partial f(\theta, x_2)\big/\partial \theta\right]^T$ where $\left[\partial f(\theta, \cdot)\big/\partial \theta\right]$ is a neural network (NN) Jacobian, has emerged as a central object of study in deep learning. In the infinite width limit, the NTK can sometimes be computed analytically and is useful for understanding training and generalization of NN architectures. At finite widths, the NTK is also used to better initialize NNs, compare the conditioning across models, perform architecture search, and do meta-learning. Unfortunately, the finite width NTK is notoriously expensive to compute, which severely limits its practical utility. We perform the first in-depth analysis of the compute and memory requirements for NTK computation in finite width networks. Leveraging the structure of neural networks, we further propose two novel algorithms that change the exponent of the compute and memory requirements of the finite width NTK, dramatically improving efficiency. Our algorithms can be applied in a black box fashion to any differentiable function, including those implementing neural networks. We open-source our implementations within the Neural Tangents package (arXiv:1912.02803) at https://github.com/google/neural-tangents.
Given a new dataset D and a low compute budget, how should we choose a pre-trained model to fine-tune to D, and set the fine-tuning hyperparameters without risking overfitting, particularly if D is small? Here, we extend automated machine learning (AutoML) to best make these choices. Our domain-independent meta-learning approach learns a zero-shot surrogate model which, at test time, allows to select the right deep learning (DL) pipeline (including the pre-trained model and fine-tuning hyperparameters) for a new dataset D given only trivial meta-features describing D such as image resolution or the number of classes. To train this zero-shot model, we collect performance data for many DL pipelines on a large collection of datasets and meta-train on this data to minimize a pairwise ranking objective. We evaluate our approach under the strict time limit of the vision track of the ChaLearn AutoDL challenge benchmark, clearly outperforming all challenge contenders.
Although deep neural networks are capable of achieving performance superior to humans on various tasks, they are notorious for requiring large amounts of data and computing resources, restricting their success to domains where such resources are available. Metalearning methods can address this problem by transferring knowledge from related tasks, thus reducing the amount of data and computing resources needed to learn new tasks. We organize the MetaDL competition series, which provide opportunities for research groups all over the world to create and experimentally assess new meta-(deep)learning solutions for real problems. In this paper, authored collaboratively between the competition organizers and the top-ranked participants, we describe the design of the competition, the datasets, the best experimental results, as well as the top-ranked methods in the NeurIPS 2021 challenge, which attracted 15 active teams who made it to the final phase (by outperforming the baseline), making over 100 code submissions during the feedback phase. The solutions of the top participants have been open-sourced. The lessons learned include that learning good representations is essential for effective transfer learning.
In order to support the study of recent advances in recommender systems, this paper presents an extended recommendation library consisting of eight packages for up-to-date topics and architectures. First of all, from a data perspective, we consider three important topics related to data issues (i.e., sparsity, bias and distribution shift), and develop five packages accordingly: meta-learning, data augmentation, debiasing, fairness and cross-domain recommendation. Furthermore, from a model perspective, we develop two benchmarking packages for Transformer-based and graph neural network (GNN)-based models, respectively. All the packages (consisting of 65 new models) are developed based on a popular recommendation framework RecBole, ensuring that both the implementation and interface are unified. For each package, we provide complete implementations from data loading, experimental setup, evaluation and algorithm implementation. This library provides a valuable resource to facilitate the up-to-date research in recommender systems. The project is released at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/RecBole2.0.
Inspired by the concept of preconditioning, we propose a novel method to increase adaptation speed for gradient-based meta-learning methods without incurring extra parameters. We demonstrate that recasting the optimization problem to a non-linear least-squares formulation provides a principled way to actively enforce a $\textit{well-conditioned}$ parameter space for meta-learning models based on the concepts of the condition number and local curvature. Our comprehensive evaluations show that the proposed method significantly outperforms its unconstrained counterpart especially during initial adaptation steps, while achieving comparable or better overall results on several few-shot classification tasks -- creating the possibility of dynamically choosing the number of adaptation steps at inference time.
We present a novel meta-learning approach for 6D pose estimation on unknown objects. In contrast to ``instance-level" and ``category-level" pose estimation methods, our algorithm learns object representation in a category-agnostic way, which endows it with strong generalization capabilities across object categories. Specifically, we employ a neural process-based meta-learning approach to train an encoder to capture texture and geometry of an object in a latent representation, based on very few RGB-D images and ground-truth keypoints. The latent representation is then used by a simultaneously meta-trained decoder to predict the 6D pose of the object in new images. Furthermore, we propose a novel geometry-aware decoder for the keypoint prediction using a Graph Neural Network (GNN), which explicitly takes geometric constraints specific to each object into consideration. To evaluate our algorithm, extensive experiments are conducted on the \linemod dataset, and on our new fully-annotated synthetic datasets generated from Multiple Categories in Multiple Scenes (MCMS). Experimental results demonstrate that our model performs well on unseen objects with very different shapes and appearances. Remarkably, our model also shows robust performance on occluded scenes although trained fully on data without occlusion. To our knowledge, this is the first work exploring \textbf{cross-category level} 6D pose estimation.