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1. Semi-supervised Multi-source Domain Adaptation in Wearable Activity Recognition

   https://doi.org/10.1109/DCOSS54816.2022.00017  

   Chakma, Avijoy; Faridee, Abu Zaher; Rao, Raghuveer; Roy, Nirmalya (May 2022, 2022 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS))

   The scarcity of labeled data has traditionally been the primary hindrance in building scalable supervised deep learning models that can retain adequate performance in the presence of various heterogeneities in sample distributions. Domain adaptation tries to address this issue by adapting features learned from a smaller set of labeled samples to that of the incoming unlabeled samples. The traditional domain adaptation approaches normally consider only a single source of labeled samples, but in real world use cases, labeled samples can originate from multiple-sources – providing motivation for multi-source domain adaptation (MSDA). Several MSDA approaches have been investigated for wearable sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) in recent times, but their performance improvement compared to single source counterpart remained marginal. To remedy this performance gap that, we explore multiple avenues to align the conditional distributions in addition to the usual alignment of marginal ones. In our investigation, we extend an existing multi-source domain adaptation approach under semi-supervised settings. We assume the availability of partially labeled target domain data and further explore the pseudo labeling usage with a goal to achieve a performance similar to the former. In our experiments on three publicly available datasets, we find that a limited labeled target domain data and pseudo label data boost the performance over the unsupervised approach by 10-35% and 2-6%, respectively, in various domain adaptation scenarios. 

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2. Cost-Effective Multitask Active Learning in Wearable Sensor Systems

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s25051522  

   Arefeen, Asiful; Ghasemzadeh, Hassan (March 2025, Sensors)

   Multitask learning models provide benefits by reducing model complexity and improving accuracy by concurrently learning multiple tasks with shared representations. Leveraging inductive knowledge transfer, these models mitigate the risk of overfitting on any specific task, leading to enhanced overall performance. However, supervised multitask learning models, like many neural networks, require substantial amounts of labeled data. Given the cost associated with data labeling, there is a need for an efficient label acquisition mechanism, known as multitask active learning (MTAL). In wearable sensor systems, success of MTAL largely hinges on its query strategies because active learning in such settings involves interaction with end-users (e.g., patients) for annotation. However, these strategies have not been studied in mobile health settings and wearable systems to date. While strategies like one-sided sampling, alternating sampling, and rank-combination-based sampling have been proposed in the past, their applicability in mobile sensor settings—a domain constrained by label deficit—remains largely unexplored. This study investigates the MTAL querying approaches and addresses crucial questions related to the choice of sampling methods and the effectiveness of multitask learning in mobile health applications. Utilizing two datasets on activity recognition and emotion classification, our findings reveal that rank-based sampling outperforms other techniques, particularly in tasks with high correlation. However, sole reliance on informativeness for sample selection may introduce biases into models. To address this issue, we also propose a Clustered Stratified Sampling (CSS) method in tandem with the multitask active learning query process. CSS identifies clustered mini-batches of samples, optimizing budget utilization and maximizing performance. When employed alongside rank-based query selection, our proposed CSS algorithm demonstrates up to 9% improvement in accuracy over traditional querying approaches for a 2000-query budget. 

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3. Minimax Lower Bounds for Transfer Learning with Linear and One-hidden layer Neural Networks

   M. M. Kalan, Z. Fabian (January 2020, Neural Information Processing Systems (NeuRIPS 2020))

   null (Ed.)

   Transfer learning has emerged as a powerful technique for improving the performance of machine learning models on new domains where labeled training data may be scarce. In this approach a model trained for a source task, where plenty of labeled training data is available, is used as a starting point for training a model on a related target task with only few labeled training data. Despite recent empirical success of transfer learning approaches, the benefits and fundamental limits of transfer learning are poorly understood. In this paper we develop a statistical minimax framework to characterize the fundamental limits of transfer learning in the context of regression with linear and one-hidden layer neural network models. Specifically, we derive a lower-bound for the target generalization error achievable by any algorithm as a function of the number of labeled source and target data as well as appropriate notions of similarity between the source and target tasks. Our lower bound provides new insights into the benefits and limitations of transfer learning. We further corroborate our theoretical finding with various experiments. 

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4. Fair Few-Shot Learning with Auxiliary Sets

   https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA230556  

   Wang, Song; Ma, Jing; Cheng, Lu; Li, Jundong (September 2023, 26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Recently, there has been a growing interest in developing machine learning (ML) models that can promote fairness, i.e., eliminating biased predictions towards certain populations (e.g., individuals from a specific demographic group). Most existing works learn such models based on well-designed fairness constraints in optimization. Nevertheless, in many practical ML tasks, only very few labeled data samples can be collected, which can lead to inferior fairness performance. This is because existing fairness constraints are designed to restrict the prediction disparity among different sensitive groups, but with few samples, it becomes difficult to accurately measure the disparity, thus rendering ineffective fairness optimization. In this paper, we define the fairness-aware learning task with limited training samples as the fair few-shot learning problem. To deal with this problem, we devise a novel framework that accumulates fairness-aware knowledge across different meta-training tasks and then generalizes the learned knowledge to meta-test tasks. To compensate for insufficient training samples, we propose an essential strategy to select and leverage an auxiliary set for each meta-test task. These auxiliary sets contain several labeled training samples that can enhance the model performance regarding fairness in meta-test tasks, thereby allowing for the transfer of learned useful fairness-oriented knowledge to meta-test tasks. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets to validate the superiority of our framework against the state-of-the-art baselines. 

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5. The Label Complexity of Active Learning from Observational Data

   Yan, S; Chaudhuri, K; Javidi, T (January 2019, Advances in neural information processing systems)

   Counterfactual learning from observational data involves learning a classifier on an entire population based on data that is observed conditioned on a selection policy. This work considers this problem in an active setting, where the learner additionally has access to unlabeled examples and can choose to get a subset of these labeled by an oracle. Prior work on this problem uses disagreement-based active learning, along with an importance weighted loss estimator to account for counterfactuals, which leads to a high label complexity. We show how to instead incorporate a more efficient counterfactual risk minimizer into the active learning algorithm. This requires us to modify both the counterfactual risk to make it amenable to active learning, as well as the active learning process to make it amenable to the risk. We provably demonstrate that the result of this is an algorithm which is statistically consistent as well as more label-efficient than prior work. 

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