Domain-Adaptive Few-Shot Learning

Existing few-shot learning (FSL) methods make the implicit assumption that the few target class samples are from the same domain as the source class samples. However, in practice this assumption is often invalid -- the target classes could come from a different domain. This poses an additional challenge of domain adaptation (DA) with few training samples. In this paper, the problem of domain-adaptive few-shot learning (DA-FSL) is tackled, which requires solving FSL and DA in a unified framework. To this end, we propose a novel domain-adversarial prototypical network (DAPN) model. It is designed to address a specific challenge in DA-FSL: the DA objective means that the source and target data distributions need to be aligned, typically through a shared domain-adaptive feature embedding space; but the FSL objective dictates that the target domain per class distribution must be different from that of any source domain class, meaning aligning the distributions across domains may harm the FSL performance. How to achieve global domain distribution alignment whilst maintaining source/target per-class discriminativeness thus becomes the key. Our solution is to explicitly enhance the source/target per-class separation before domain-adaptive feature embedding learning in the DAPN, in order to alleviate the negative effect of domain alignment on FSL. Extensive experiments show that our DAPN outperforms the state-of-the-art FSL and DA models, as well as their na\"ive combinations. The code is available at https://github.com/dingmyu/DAPN.

Domain Adaptive Ensemble Learning

The problem of generalizing deep neural networks from multiple source domains to a target one is studied under two settings: When unlabeled target data is available, it is a multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) problem, otherwise a domain generalization (DG) problem. We propose a unified framework termed domain adaptive ensemble learning (DAEL) to address both problems. A DAEL model is composed of a CNN feature extractor shared across domains and multiple classifier heads each trained to specialize in a particular source domain. Each such classifier is an expert to its own domain and a non-expert to others. DAEL aims to learn these experts collaboratively so that when forming an ensemble, they can leverage complementary information from each other to be more effective for an unseen target domain. To this end, each source domain is used in turn as a pseudo-target-domain with its own expert providing supervision signal to the ensemble of non-experts learned from the other sources. For unlabeled target data under the UDA setting where real expert does not exist, DAEL uses pseudo-label to supervise the ensemble learning. Extensive experiments on three multi-source UDA datasets and two DG datasets show that DAEL improves the state-of-the-art on both problems, often by significant margins. The code is released at \url{https://github.com/KaiyangZhou/Dassl.pytorch}.

Deep Domain-Adversarial Image Generation for Domain Generalisation

Machine learning models typically suffer from the domain shift problem when trained on a source dataset and evaluated on a target dataset of different distribution. To overcome this problem, domain generalisation (DG) methods aim to leverage data from multiple source domains so that a trained model can generalise to unseen domains. In this paper, we propose a novel DG approach based on \emph{Deep Domain-Adversarial Image Generation} (DDAIG). Specifically, DDAIG consists of three components, namely a label classifier, a domain classifier and a domain transformation network (DoTNet). The goal for DoTNet is to map the source training data to unseen domains. This is achieved by having a learning objective formulated to ensure that the generated data can be correctly classified by the label classifier while fooling the domain classifier. By augmenting the source training data with the generated unseen domain data, we can make the label classifier more robust to unknown domain changes. Extensive experiments on four DG datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Incremental Few-Shot Object Detection

Most existing object detection methods rely on the availability of abundant labelled training samples per class and offline model training in a batch mode. These requirements substantially limit their scalability to open-ended accommodation of novel classes with limited labelled training data. We present a study aiming to go beyond these limitations by considering the Incremental Few-Shot Detection (iFSD) problem setting, where new classes must be registered incrementally (without revisiting base classes) and with few examples. To this end we propose OpeN-ended Centre nEt (ONCE), a detector designed for incrementally learning to detect novel class objects with few examples. This is achieved by an elegant adaptation of the CentreNet detector to the few-shot learning scenario, and meta-learning a class-specific code generator model for registering novel classes. ONCE fully respects the incremental learning paradigm, with novel class registration requiring only a single forward pass of few-shot training samples, and no access to base classes -- thus making it suitable for deployment on embedded devices. Extensive experiments conducted on both the standard object detection and fashion landmark detection tasks show the feasibility of iFSD for the first time, opening an interesting and very important line of research.

Meta-Learning across Meta-Tasks for Few-Shot Learning

Existing meta-learning based few-shot learning (FSL) methods typically adopt an episodic training strategy whereby each episode contains a meta-task. Across episodes, these tasks are sampled randomly and their relationships are ignored. In this paper, we argue that the inter-meta-task relationships should be exploited and those tasks are sampled strategically to assist in meta-learning. Specifically, we consider the relationships defined over two types of meta-task pairs and propose different strategies to exploit them. (1) Two meta-tasks with disjoint sets of classes: this pair is interesting because it is reminiscent of the relationship between the source seen classes and target unseen classes, featured with domain gap caused by class differences. A novel learning objective termed meta-domain adaptation (MDA) is proposed to make the meta-learned model more robust to the domain gap. (2) Two meta-tasks with identical sets of classes: this pair is useful because it can be employed to learn models that are robust against poorly sampled few-shots. To that end, a novel meta-knowledge distillation (MKD) objective is formulated. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both MDA and MKD significantly boost the performance of a variety of FSL methods, resulting in new state-of-the-art on three benchmarks.

AdarGCN: Adaptive Aggregation GCN for Few-Shot Learning

Existing few-shot learning (FSL) methods assume that there exist sufficient training samples from source classes for knowledge transfer to target classes with few training samples. However, this assumption is often invalid, especially when it comes to fine-grained recognition. In this work, we define a new FSL setting termed few-shot fewshot learning (FSFSL), under which both the source and target classes have limited training samples. To overcome the source class data scarcity problem, a natural option is to crawl images from the web with class names as search keywords. However, the crawled images are inevitably corrupted by large amount of noise (irrelevant images) and thus may harm the performance. To address this problem, we propose a graph convolutional network (GCN)-based label denoising (LDN) method to remove the irrelevant images. Further, with the cleaned web images as well as the original clean training images, we propose a GCN-based FSL method. For both the LDN and FSL tasks, a novel adaptive aggregation GCN (AdarGCN) model is proposed, which differs from existing GCN models in that adaptive aggregation is performed based on a multi-head multi-level aggregation module. With AdarGCN, how much and how far information carried by each graph node is propagated in the graph structure can be determined automatically, therefore alleviating the effects of both noisy and outlying training samples. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of our AdarGCN under both the new FSFSL and the conventional FSL settings.

Sketch Less for More: On-the-Fly Fine-Grained Sketch Based Image Retrieval

Fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) addresses the problem of retrieving a particular photo instance given a user's query sketch. Its widespread applicability is however hindered by the fact that drawing a sketch takes time, and most people struggle to draw a complete and faithful sketch. In this paper, we reformulate the conventional FG-SBIR framework to tackle these challenges, with the ultimate goal of retrieving the target photo with the least number of strokes possible. We further propose an on-the-fly design that starts retrieving as soon as the user starts drawing. To accomplish this, we devise a reinforcement learning-based cross-modal retrieval framework that directly optimizes rank of the ground-truth photo over a complete sketch drawing episode. Additionally, we introduce a novel reward scheme that circumvents the problems related to irrelevant sketch strokes, and thus provides us with a more consistent rank list during the retrieval. We achieve superior early-retrieval efficiency over state-of-the-art methods and alternative baselines on two publicly available fine-grained sketch retrieval datasets.

Fine-Grained Instance-Level Sketch-Based Video Retrieval

Existing sketch-analysis work studies sketches depicting static objects or scenes. In this work, we propose a novel cross-modal retrieval problem of fine-grained instance-level sketch-based video retrieval (FG-SBVR), where a sketch sequence is used as a query to retrieve a specific target video instance. Compared with sketch-based still image retrieval, and coarse-grained category-level video retrieval, this is more challenging as both visual appearance and motion need to be simultaneously matched at a fine-grained level. We contribute the first FG-SBVR dataset with rich annotations. We then introduce a novel multi-stream multi-modality deep network to perform FG-SBVR under both strong and weakly supervised settings. The key component of the network is a relation module, designed to prevent model over-fitting given scarce training data. We show that this model significantly outperforms a number of existing state-of-the-art models designed for video analysis.

Towards Byzantine-resilient Learning in Decentralized Systems

With the proliferation of IoT and edge computing, decentralized learning is becoming more promising. When designing a distributed learning system, one major challenge to consider is Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT). Past works have researched Byzantine-resilient solutions for centralized distributed learning. However, there are currently no satisfactory solutions with strong efficiency and security in decentralized systems. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, Mozi, to achieve BFT in decentralized learning systems. Specifically, Mozi provides a uniform Byzantine-resilient aggregation rule for benign nodes to select the useful parameter updates and filter out the malicious ones in each training iteration. It guarantees that each benign node in a decentralized system can train a correct model under very strong Byzantine attacks with an arbitrary number of faulty nodes. We perform the theoretical analysis to prove the uniform convergence of our proposed algorithm. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the high security and efficiency of Mozi compared to all existing solutions.

Few-Shot Learning as Domain Adaptation: Algorithm and Analysis

To recognize the unseen classes with only few samples, few-shot learning (FSL) uses prior knowledge learned from the seen classes. A major challenge for FSL is that the distribution of the unseen classes is different from that of those seen, resulting in poor generalization even when a model is meta-trained on the seen classes. This class-difference-caused distribution shift can be considered as a special case of domain shift. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a domain adaptation prototypical network with attention (DAPNA) to explicitly tackle such a domain shift problem in a meta-learning framework. Specifically, armed with a set transformer based attention module, we construct each episode with two sub-episodes without class overlap on the seen classes to simulate the domain shift between the seen and unseen classes. To align the feature distributions of the two sub-episodes with limited training samples, a feature transfer network is employed together with a margin disparity discrepancy (MDD) loss. Importantly, theoretical analysis is provided to give the learning bound of our DAPNA. Extensive experiments show that our DAPNA outperforms the state-of-the-art FSL alternatives, often by significant margins.