skip to main content


Title: Dynamic Augmentation Data Selection for Few-shot Text Classification
Data augmentation has been a popular method for fine-tuning pre-trained language models to increase model robustness and performance. With augmentation data coming from modifying gold train data (in-sample augmentation) or being harvested from general domain unlabeled data (out-of-sample augmentation), the quality of such data is the key to successful fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a dynamic data selection method to select effective augmentation data from different augmentation sources according to the model’s learning stage, by identifying a set of augmentation samples that optimally facilitates the learning process of the most current model. The method firstly filters out augmentation samples with noisy pseudo labels through a curriculum learning strategy, then estimates the effectiveness of reserved augmentation data by its influence scores on the current model at every update, allowing the data selection process tightly tailored to model parameters. And the two-stage augmentation strategy considers in-sample augmentation and out-of-sample augmentation in different learning stages. Experiments with both kinds of augmentation data on a variety of sentence classification tasks show that our method outperforms strong baselines, proving the effectiveness of our method. Analysis confirms the dynamic nature of the data effectiveness and the importance of model learning stages in utilization of augmentation data.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1749940 2212174
NSF-PAR ID:
10430112
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Better understanding of the dose-toxicity relationship is critical for safe dose escalation to improve local control in late-stage cervical cancer radiotherapy. In this study, we introduced a convolutional neural network (CNN) model to analyze rectum dose distribution and predict rectum toxicity. Forty-two cervical cancer patients treated with combined external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) and brachytherapy (BT) were retrospectively collected, including twelve toxicity patients and thirty non-toxicity patients. We adopted a transfer learning strategy to overcome the limited patient data issue. A 16-layers CNN developed by the visual geometry group (VGG-16) of the University of Oxford was pre-trained on a large-scale natural image database, ImageNet, and fine-tuned with patient rectum surface dose maps (RSDMs), which were accumulated EBRT + BT doses on the unfolded rectum surface. We used the adaptive synthetic sampling approach and the data augmentation method to address the two challenges, data imbalance and data scarcity. The gradient-weighted class activation maps (Grad-CAM) were also generated to highlight the discriminative regions on the RSDM along with the prediction model. We compare different CNN coefficients fine-tuning strategies, and compare the predictive performance using the traditional dose volume parameters, e.g. D 0.1/1/2cc, and the texture features extracted from the RSDM. Satisfactory prediction performance was achieved with the proposed scheme, and we found that the mean Grad-CAM over the toxicity patient group has geometric consistence of distribution with the statistical analysis result, which indicates possible rectum toxicity location. The evaluation results have demonstrated the feasibility of building a CNN-based rectum dose-toxicity prediction model with transfer learning for cervical cancer radiotherapy. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    Automatic machine learning (AML) is a family of techniques to automate the process of training predictive models, aiming to both improve performance and make machine learning more accessible. While many recent works have focused on aspects of the machine learning pipeline like model selection, hyperparameter tuning, and feature selection, relatively few works have focused on automatic data augmentation. Automatic data augmentation involves finding new features relevant to the user's predictive task with minimal "human-in-the-loop" involvement. We present ARDA, an end-to-end system that takes as input a dataset and a data repository, and outputs an augmented data set such that training a predictive model on this augmented dataset results in improved performance. Our system has two distinct components: (1) a framework to search and join data with the input data, based on various attributes of the input, and (2) an efficient feature selection algorithm that prunes out noisy or irrelevant features from the resulting join. We perform an extensive empirical evaluation of different system components and benchmark our feature selection algorithm on real-world datasets. 
    more » « less
  3. Purpose Recent work has demonstrated the possibility of selectively sintering polymer powders with radio frequency (RF) radiation as a means of rapid, volumetric additive manufacturing. Although RF radiation can be used as a volumetric energy source, non-uniform heating resulting from the sample geometry and electrode configuration can lead to adverse effects in RF-treated samples. This paper aims to address these heating uniformity issues by implementing a computational design strategy for doped polymer powder beds to improve the RF heating uniformity. Design/methodology/approach Two approaches for improving the RF heating uniformity are presented with the goal of developing an RF-assisted additive manufacturing process. Both techniques use COMSOL Multiphysics® to predict the temperature rise during simulated RF exposure for different geometries. The effectiveness of each approach is evaluated by calculating the uniformity index, which provides an objective metric for comparing the heating uniformity between simulations. The first method implements an iterative heuristic tuning strategy to functionally grade the electrical conductivity within the sample. The second method involves reorienting the electrodes during the heating stage such that the electric field is applied in two directions. Findings Both approaches are shown to improve the heating uniformity and predicted part geometry for several test cases when applied independently. However, the greatest improvement in heating uniformity is demonstrated by combining the approaches and using multiple electrode orientations while functionally grading the samples. Originality/value This work presents an innovative approach for overcoming RF heating uniformity issues to improve the resulting part geometry in an RF-assisted, volumetric additive manufacturing method. 
    more » « less
  4. Abstract Text augmentation is an effective technique in alleviating overfitting in NLP tasks. In existing methods, text augmentation and downstream tasks are mostly performed separately. As a result, the augmented texts may not be optimal to train the downstream model. To address this problem, we propose a three-level optimization framework to perform text augmentation and the downstream task end-to- end. The augmentation model is trained in a way tailored to the downstream task. Our framework consists of three learning stages. A text summarization model is trained to perform data augmentation at the first stage. Each summarization example is associated with a weight to account for its domain difference with the text classification data. At the second stage, we use the model trained at the first stage to perform text augmentation and train a text classification model on the augmented texts. At the third stage, we evaluate the text classification model trained at the second stage and update weights of summarization examples by minimizing the validation loss. These three stages are performed end-to-end. We evaluate our method on several text classification datasets where the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/Sai-Ashish/End-to-End-Text-Augmentation. 
    more » « less
  5. Skolnick, Jeffrey (Ed.)
    Systematically discovering protein-ligand interactions across the entire human and pathogen genomes is critical in chemical genomics, protein function prediction, drug discovery, and many other areas. However, more than 90% of gene families remain “dark”—i.e., their small-molecule ligands are undiscovered due to experimental limitations or human/historical biases. Existing computational approaches typically fail when the dark protein differs from those with known ligands. To address this challenge, we have developed a deep learning framework, called PortalCG, which consists of four novel components: (i) a 3-dimensional ligand binding site enhanced sequence pre-training strategy to encode the evolutionary links between ligand-binding sites across gene families; (ii) an end-to-end pretraining-fine-tuning strategy to reduce the impact of inaccuracy of predicted structures on function predictions by recognizing the sequence-structure-function paradigm; (iii) a new out-of-cluster meta-learning algorithm that extracts and accumulates information learned from predicting ligands of distinct gene families (meta-data) and applies the meta-data to a dark gene family; and (iv) a stress model selection step, using different gene families in the test data from those in the training and development data sets to facilitate model deployment in a real-world scenario. In extensive and rigorous benchmark experiments, PortalCG considerably outperformed state-of-the-art techniques of machine learning and protein-ligand docking when applied to dark gene families, and demonstrated its generalization power for target identifications and compound screenings under out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Furthermore, in an external validation for the multi-target compound screening, the performance of PortalCG surpassed the rational design from medicinal chemists. Our results also suggest that a differentiable sequence-structure-function deep learning framework, where protein structural information serves as an intermediate layer, could be superior to conventional methodology where predicted protein structures were used for the compound screening. We applied PortalCG to two case studies to exemplify its potential in drug discovery: designing selective dual-antagonists of dopamine receptors for the treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD), and illuminating the understudied human genome for target diseases that do not yet have effective and safe therapeutics. Our results suggested that PortalCG is a viable solution to the OOD problem in exploring understudied regions of protein functional space. 
    more » « less