An official website of the United States government
A major challenge to out-of-distribution generalization is reliance on spurious features -- patterns that are predictive of the class label in the training data distribution, but not causally related to the target. Standard methods for reducing the reliance on spurious features typically assume that we know what the spurious feature is, which is rarely true in the real world. Methods that attempt to alleviate this limitation are complex, hard to tune, and lead to a significant computational overhead compared to standard training. In this paper, we propose Automatic Feature Reweighting (AFR), an extremely simple and fast method for updating the model to reduce the reliance on spurious features. AFR retrains the last layer of a standard ERM-trained base model with a weighted loss that emphasizes the examples where the ERM model predicts poorly, automatically upweighting the minority group without group labels. With this simple procedure, we improve upon the best reported results among competing methods trained without spurious attributes on several vision and natural language classification benchmarks, using only a fraction of their compute.
more »
« less
Similarity Based Label Smoothing For Dialogue Generation
Generative neural conversational systems are typically trained by minimizing the entropy loss between the training “hard” targets and the predicted logits. Performance gains and improved generalization are often achieved by employing regularization techniques like label smoothing, which converts the training “hard” targets to soft targets. However, label smoothing enforces a data independent uniform distribution on the incorrect training targets, leading to a false assumption of equiprobability. In this paper, we propose and experiment with incorporating data-dependent word similarity-based weighing methods to transform the uniform distribution of the incorrect target probabilities in label smoothing to a more realistic distribution based on semantics. We introduce hyperparameters to control the incorrect target distribution and report significant performance gains over networks trained using standard label smoothing-based loss on two standard open-domain dialogue corpora.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2214070
- PAR ID:
- 10441742
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained with logistic and softmax losses have made significant advancement in visual recognition tasks in computer vision. When training data exhibit class imbalances, the class-wise reweighted version of logistic and softmax losses are often used to boost performance of the unweighted version. In this paper, motivated to explain the reweighting mechanism, we explicate the learning property of those two loss functions by analyzing the necessary condition (e.g., gradient equals to zero) after training CNNs to converge to a local minimum. The analysis immediately provides us explanations for understanding (1) quantitative effects of the class-wise reweighting mechanism: deterministic effectiveness for binary classification using logistic loss yet indeterministic for multi-class classification using softmax loss; (2) disadvantage of logistic loss for single-label multi-class classification via one-vs.-all approach, which is due to the averaging effect on predicted probabilities for the negative class (e.g., non-target classes) in the learning process. With the disadvantage and advantage of logistic loss disentangled, we thereafter propose a novel reweighted logistic loss for multi-class classification. Our simple yet effective formulation improves ordinary logistic loss by focusing on learning hard non-target classes (target vs. non-target class in one-vs.-all) and turned out to be competitive with softmax loss. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets to demonstrate its effectiveness.more » « less
-
Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to transfer knowledge from the well-trained source model and optimize it to adapt target data distribution. SFDA methods are suitable for medical image segmentation task due to its data-privacy protection and achieve promising performances. However, cross-domain distribution shift makes it difficult for the adapted model to provide accurate decisions on several hard instances and negatively affects model generalization. To overcome this limitation, a novel method `supportive negatives spectral augmentation' (SNSA) is presented in this work. Concretely, SNSA includes the instance selection mechanism to automatically discover a few hard samples for which source model produces incorrect predictions. And, active learning strategy is adopted to re-calibrate their predictive masks. Moreover, SNSA deploys the spectral augmentation between hard instances and others to encourage source model to gradually capture and adapt the attributions of target distribution. Considerable experimental studies demonstrate that annotating merely 4%~5% of negative instances from the target domain significantly improves segmentation performance over previous methods.more » « less
-
Solving the domain shift problem during inference is essential in medical imaging as most deep-learning based solutions suffer from it. In practice, domain shifts are tackled by performing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), where a model is adapted to an unlabeled target domain by leveraging the labelled source domain. In medical scenarios, the data comes with huge privacy concerns making it difficult to apply standard UDA techniques. Hence, a closer clinical setting is Source-Free UDA (SFUDA), where we have access to source trained model but not the source data during adaptation. Methods trying to solve SFUDA typically address the domain shift using pseudo-label based self-training techniques. However due to domain shift, these pseudo-labels are usually of high entropy and denoising them still does not make them perfect labels to supervise the model. Therefore, adapting the source model with noisy pseudo labels reduces its segmentation capability while addressing the domain shift. To this end, we propose a two-stage approach for source-free domain adaptive image segmentation: 1) Target-specific adaptation followed by 2) Task-specific adaptation. In the Stage-I, we focus on learning target-specific representation and generating high-quality pseudo labels by leveraging a proposed ensemble entropy minimization loss and selective voting strategy. In Stage II, we focus on improving segmentation performance by utilizing teacher-student self-training and augmentation-guided consistency loss, leveraging the pseudo labels obtained from Stage I. We evaluate our proposed method on both 2D fundus datasets and 3D MRI volumes across 7 different domain shifts where we achieve better performance than recent UDA and SF-UDA methods for medical image segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/Vibashan/tt-sfuda.more » « less
-
Label smoothing (LS) is an arising learning paradigm that uses the positively weighted average of both the hard training labels and uniformly distributed soft labels. It was shown that LS serves as a regularizer for training data with hard labels and therefore improves the generalization of the model. Later it was reported LS even helps with improving robustness when learning with noisy labels. However, we observed that the advantage of LS vanishes when we operate in a high label noise regime. Intuitively speaking, this is due to the increased entropy of ℙ(noisy label|X) when the noise rate is high, in which case, further applying LS tends to "over-smooth" the estimated posterior. We proceeded to discover that several learning-with-noisy-labels solutions in the literature instead relate more closely to negative/not label smoothing (NLS), which acts counter to LS and defines as using a negative weight to combine the hard and soft labels! We provide understandings for the properties of LS and NLS when learning with noisy labels. Among other established properties, we theoretically show NLS is considered more beneficial when the label noise rates are high. We provide extensive experimental results on multiple benchmarks to support our findings too.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
