Robust Long-Tailed Learning via Label-Aware Bounded CVaR

Data in the real-world classification problems are always imbalanced or long-tailed, wherein the majority classes have the most of the samples that dominate the model training. In such setting, the naive model tends to have poor performance on the minority classes. Previously, a variety of loss modifications have been proposed to address the long-tailed leaning problem, while these methods either treat the samples in the same class indiscriminatingly or lack a theoretical guarantee. In this paper, we propose two novel approaches based on CVaR (Conditional Value at Risk) to improve the performance of long-tailed learning with a solid theoretical ground. Specifically, we firstly introduce a Label-Aware Bounded CVaR (LAB-CVaR) loss to overcome the pessimistic result of the original CVaR, and further design the optimal weight bounds for LAB-CVaR theoretically. Based on LAB-CVaR, we additionally propose a LAB-CVaR with logit adjustment (LAB-CVaR-logit) loss to stabilize the optimization process, where we also offer the theoretical support. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets with long-tailed label distributions verify the superiority of our proposed methods.

On the Generalization of Multi-modal Contrastive Learning

Multi-modal contrastive learning (MMCL) has recently garnered considerable interest due to its superior performance in visual tasks, achieved by embedding multi-modal data, such as visual-language pairs. However, there still lack theoretical understandings of how MMCL extracts useful visual representation from multi-modal pairs, and particularly, how MMCL outperforms previous approaches like self-supervised contrastive learning (SSCL). In this paper, by drawing an intrinsic connection between MMCL and asymmetric matrix factorization, we establish the first generalization guarantees of MMCL for visual downstream tasks. Based on this framework, we further unify MMCL and SSCL by showing that MMCL implicitly performs SSCL with (pseudo) positive pairs induced by text pairs. Through this unified perspective, we characterize the advantage of MMCL by showing that text pairs induce more semantically consistent and diverse positive pairs, which, according to our analysis, provably benefit downstream generalization. Inspired by this finding, we propose CLIP-guided resampling methods to significantly improve the downstream performance of SSCL on ImageNet by leveraging multi-modal information. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/CLIP-Help-SimCLR.

Rethinking Weak Supervision in Helping Contrastive Learning

Contrastive learning has shown outstanding performances in both supervised and unsupervised learning, and has recently been introduced to solve weakly supervised learning problems such as semi-supervised learning and noisy label learning. Despite the empirical evidence showing that semi-supervised labels improve the representations of contrastive learning, it remains unknown if noisy supervised information can be directly used in training instead of after manual denoising. Therefore, to explore the mechanical differences between semi-supervised and noisy-labeled information in helping contrastive learning, we establish a unified theoretical framework of contrastive learning under weak supervision. Specifically, we investigate the most intuitive paradigm of jointly training supervised and unsupervised contrastive losses. By translating the weakly supervised information into a similarity graph under the framework of spectral clustering based on the posterior probability of weak labels, we establish the downstream classification error bound. We prove that semi-supervised labels improve the downstream error bound whereas noisy labels have limited effects under such a paradigm. Our theoretical findings here provide new insights for the community to rethink the role of weak supervision in helping contrastive learning.

CFA: Class-wise Calibrated Fair Adversarial Training

Adversarial training has been widely acknowledged as the most effective method to improve the adversarial robustness against adversarial examples for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). So far, most existing works focus on enhancing the overall model robustness, treating each class equally in both the training and testing phases. Although revealing the disparity in robustness among classes, few works try to make adversarial training fair at the class level without sacrificing overall robustness. In this paper, we are the first to theoretically and empirically investigate the preference of different classes for adversarial configurations, including perturbation margin, regularization, and weight averaging. Motivated by this, we further propose a \textbf{C}lass-wise calibrated \textbf{F}air \textbf{A}dversarial training framework, named CFA, which customizes specific training configurations for each class automatically. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed CFA can improve both overall robustness and fairness notably over other state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/PKU-ML/CFA}.

Generalist: Decoupling Natural and Robust Generalization

Deep neural networks obtained by standard training have been constantly plagued by adversarial examples. Although adversarial training demonstrates its capability to defend against adversarial examples, unfortunately, it leads to an inevitable drop in the natural generalization. To address the issue, we decouple the natural generalization and the robust generalization from joint training and formulate different training strategies for each one. Specifically, instead of minimizing a global loss on the expectation over these two generalization errors, we propose a bi-expert framework called \emph{Generalist} where we simultaneously train base learners with task-aware strategies so that they can specialize in their own fields. The parameters of base learners are collected and combined to form a global learner at intervals during the training process. The global learner is then distributed to the base learners as initialized parameters for continued training. Theoretically, we prove that the risks of Generalist will get lower once the base learners are well trained. Extensive experiments verify the applicability of Generalist to achieve high accuracy on natural examples while maintaining considerable robustness to adversarial ones. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/Generalist.

ContraNorm: A Contrastive Learning Perspective on Oversmoothing and Beyond

Oversmoothing is a common phenomenon in a wide range of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers, where performance worsens as the number of layers increases. Instead of characterizing oversmoothing from the view of complete collapse in which representations converge to a single point, we dive into a more general perspective of dimensional collapse in which representations lie in a narrow cone. Accordingly, inspired by the effectiveness of contrastive learning in preventing dimensional collapse, we propose a novel normalization layer called ContraNorm. Intuitively, ContraNorm implicitly shatters representations in the embedding space, leading to a more uniform distribution and a slighter dimensional collapse. On the theoretical analysis, we prove that ContraNorm can alleviate both complete collapse and dimensional collapse under certain conditions. Our proposed normalization layer can be easily integrated into GNNs and Transformers with negligible parameter overhead. Experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ContraNorm. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/ContraNorm.

A Message Passing Perspective on Learning Dynamics of Contrastive Learning

In recent years, contrastive learning achieves impressive results on self-supervised visual representation learning, but there still lacks a rigorous understanding of its learning dynamics. In this paper, we show that if we cast a contrastive objective equivalently into the feature space, then its learning dynamics admits an interpretable form. Specifically, we show that its gradient descent corresponds to a specific message passing scheme on the corresponding augmentation graph. Based on this perspective, we theoretically characterize how contrastive learning gradually learns discriminative features with the alignment update and the uniformity update. Meanwhile, this perspective also establishes an intriguing connection between contrastive learning and Message Passing Graph Neural Networks (MP-GNNs). This connection not only provides a unified understanding of many techniques independently developed in each community, but also enables us to borrow techniques from MP-GNNs to design new contrastive learning variants, such as graph attention, graph rewiring, jumpy knowledge techniques, etc. We believe that our message passing perspective not only provides a new theoretical understanding of contrastive learning dynamics, but also bridges the two seemingly independent areas together, which could inspire more interleaving studies to benefit from each other. The code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/Message-Passing-Contrastive-Learning.

Towards Memory- and Time-Efficient Backpropagation for Training Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising energy-efficient models for neuromorphic computing. For training the non-differentiable SNN models, the backpropagation through time (BPTT) with surrogate gradients (SG) method has achieved high performance. However, this method suffers from considerable memory cost and training time during training. In this paper, we propose the Spatial Learning Through Time (SLTT) method that can achieve high performance while greatly improving training efficiency compared with BPTT. First, we show that the backpropagation of SNNs through the temporal domain contributes just a little to the final calculated gradients. Thus, we propose to ignore the unimportant routes in the computational graph during backpropagation. The proposed method reduces the number of scalar multiplications and achieves a small memory occupation that is independent of the total time steps. Furthermore, we propose a variant of SLTT, called SLTT-K, that allows backpropagation only at K time steps, then the required number of scalar multiplications is further reduced and is independent of the total time steps. Experiments on both static and neuromorphic datasets demonstrate superior training efficiency and performance of our SLTT. In particular, our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on ImageNet, while the memory cost and training time are reduced by more than 70% and 50%, respectively, compared with BPTT.

Towards a Unified Theoretical Understanding of Non-contrastive Learning via Rank Differential Mechanism

Recently, a variety of methods under the name of non-contrastive learning (like BYOL, SimSiam, SwAV, DINO) show that when equipped with some asymmetric architectural designs, aligning positive pairs alone is sufficient to attain good performance in self-supervised visual learning. Despite some understandings of some specific modules (like the predictor in BYOL), there is yet no unified theoretical understanding of how these seemingly different asymmetric designs can all avoid feature collapse, particularly considering methods that also work without the predictor (like DINO). In this work, we propose a unified theoretical understanding for existing variants of non-contrastive learning. Our theory named Rank Differential Mechanism (RDM) shows that all these asymmetric designs create a consistent rank difference in their dual-branch output features. This rank difference will provably lead to an improvement of effective dimensionality and alleviate either complete or dimensional feature collapse. Different from previous theories, our RDM theory is applicable to different asymmetric designs (with and without the predictor), and thus can serve as a unified understanding of existing non-contrastive learning methods. Besides, our RDM theory also provides practical guidelines for designing many new non-contrastive variants. We show that these variants indeed achieve comparable performance to existing methods on benchmark datasets, and some of them even outperform the baselines. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/PKU-ML/Rank-Differential-Mechanism}.

Rethinking the Effect of Data Augmentation in Adversarial Contrastive Learning

Recent works have shown that self-supervised learning can achieve remarkable robustness when integrated with adversarial training (AT). However, the robustness gap between supervised AT (sup-AT) and self-supervised AT (self-AT) remains significant. Motivated by this observation, we revisit existing self-AT methods and discover an inherent dilemma that affects self-AT robustness: either strong or weak data augmentations are harmful to self-AT, and a medium strength is insufficient to bridge the gap. To resolve this dilemma, we propose a simple remedy named DYNACL (Dynamic Adversarial Contrastive Learning). In particular, we propose an augmentation schedule that gradually anneals from a strong augmentation to a weak one to benefit from both extreme cases. Besides, we adopt a fast post-processing stage for adapting it to downstream tasks. Through extensive experiments, we show that DYNACL can improve state-of-the-art self-AT robustness by 8.84% under Auto-Attack on the CIFAR-10 dataset, and can even outperform vanilla supervised adversarial training for the first time. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/PKU-ML/DYNACL}.