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We explore the effect of auxiliary labels in improving the classification accuracy of wearable sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) systems, which are primarily trained with the supervision of the activity labels (e.g. running, walking, jumping). Supplemental meta-data are often available during the data collection process such as body positions of the wearable sensors, subjects' demographic information (e.g. gender, age), and the type of wearable used (e.g. smartphone, smart-watch). This information, while not directly related to the activity classification task, can nonetheless provide auxiliary supervision and has the potential to significantly improve the HAR accuracy by providing extra guidance on how to handle the introduced sample heterogeneity from the change in domains (i.e positions, persons, or sensors), especially in the presence of limited activity labels. However, integrating such meta-data information in the classification pipeline is non-trivial - (i) the complex interaction between the activity and domain label space is hard to capture with a simple multi-task and/or adversarial learning setup, (ii) meta-data and activity labels might not be simultaneously available for all collected samples. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework Conditional Domain Embeddings (CoDEm). From the available unlabeled raw samples and their domain meta-data, we first learn a set of domain embeddings using a contrastive learning methodology to handle inter-domain variability and inter-domain similarity. To classify the activities, CoDEm then learns the label embeddings in a contrastive fashion, conditioned on domain embeddings with a novel attention mechanism, enforcing the model to learn the complex domain-activity relationships. We extensively evaluate CoDEm in three benchmark datasets against a number of multi-task and adversarial learning baselines and achieve state-of-the-art performance in each avenue.
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Surrogate- and invariance-boosted contrastive learning for data-scarce applications in science
Abstract Deep learning techniques have been increasingly applied to the natural sciences, e.g., for property prediction and optimization or material discovery. A fundamental ingredient of such approaches is the vast quantity of labeled data needed to train the model. This poses severe challenges in data-scarce settings where obtaining labels requires substantial computational or labor resources. Noting that problems in natural sciences often benefit from easily obtainable auxiliary information sources, we introduce surrogate- and invariance-boosted contrastive learning (SIB-CL), a deep learning framework which incorporates three inexpensive and easily obtainable auxiliary information sources to overcome data scarcity. Specifically, these are: abundant unlabeled data, prior knowledge of symmetries or invariances, and surrogate data obtained at near-zero cost. We demonstrate SIB-CL’s effectiveness and generality on various scientific problems, e.g., predicting the density-of-states of 2D photonic crystals and solving the 3D time-independent Schrödinger equation. SIB-CL consistently results in orders of magnitude reduction in the number of labels needed to achieve the same network accuracies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2019786
- PAR ID:
- 10376790
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31915-y
