Federated Reconnaissance: Efficient, Distributed, Class-Incremental Learning

We describe federated reconnaissance, a class of learning problems in which distributed clients learn new concepts independently and communicate that knowledge efficiently. In particular, we propose an evaluation framework and methodological baseline for a system in which each client is expected to learn a growing set of classes and communicate knowledge of those classes efficiently with other clients, such that, after knowledge merging, the clients should be able to accurately discriminate between classes in the superset of classes observed by the set of clients. We compare a range of learning algorithms for this problem and find that prototypical networks are a strong approach in that they are robust to catastrophic forgetting while incorporating new information efficiently. Furthermore, we show that the online averaging of prototype vectors is effective for client model merging and requires only a small amount of communication overhead, memory, and update time per class with no gradient-based learning or hyperparameter tuning. Additionally, to put our results in context, we find that a simple, prototypical network with four convolutional layers significantly outperforms complex, state of the art continual learning algorithms, increasing the accuracy by over 22% after learning 600 Omniglot classes and over 33% after learning 20 mini-ImageNet classes incrementally. These results have important implications for federated reconnaissance and continual learning more generally by demonstrating that communicating feature vectors is an efficient, robust, and effective means for distributed, continual learning.

Meta-Learning Initializations for Image Segmentation

While meta-learning approaches that utilize neural network representations have made progress in few-shot image classification, reinforcement learning, and, more recently, image semantic segmentation, the training algorithms and model architectures have become increasingly specialized to the few-shot domain. A natural question that arises is how to develop learning systems that scale from few-shot to many-shot settings while yielding competitive performance in both. One scalable potential approach that does not require ensembling many models nor the computational costs of relation networks, is to meta-learn an initialization. In this work, we study first-order meta-learning of initializations for deep neural networks that must produce dense, structured predictions given an arbitrary amount of training data for a new task. Our primary contributions include (1), an extension and experimental analysis of first-order model agnostic meta-learning algorithms (including FOMAML and Reptile) to image segmentation, (2) a novel neural network architecture built for parameter efficiency and fast learning which we call EfficientLab, (3) a formalization of the generalization error of meta-learning algorithms, which we leverage to decrease error on unseen tasks, and (4) a small benchmark dataset, FP-k, for the empirical study of how meta-learning systems perform in both few- and many-shot settings. We show that meta-learned initializations for image segmentation provide value for both canonical few-shot learning problems and larger datasets, outperforming ImageNet-trained initializations for up to 400 densely labeled examples. We find that our network, with an empirically estimated optimal update procedure, yields state of the art results on the FSS-1000 dataset while only requiring one forward pass through a single model at evaluation time.