Standard supervised learning setting assumes that training data and test data come from the same distribution (domain). Domain generalization (DG) methods try to learn a model that when trained on data from multiple domains, would generalize to a new unseen domain. We extend DG to an even more challenging setting, where the label space of the unseen domain could also change. We introduce this problem as Zero-Shot Domain Generalization (to the best of our knowledge, the first such effort), where the model generalizes across new domains and also across new classes in those domains. We propose a simple strategy which effectively exploits semantic information of classes, to adapt existing DG methods to meet the demands of Zero-Shot Domain Generalization. We evaluate the proposed methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, F-MNIST and PACS datasets, establishing a strong baseline to foster interest in this new research direction.
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）
State of the art (SOTA) few-shot learning (FSL) methods suffer significant performance drop in the presence of domain differences between source and target datasets. The strong discrimination ability on the source dataset does not necessarily translate to high classification accuracy on the target dataset. In this work, we address this cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL) problem by boosting the generalization capability of the model. Specifically, we teach the model to capture broader variations of the feature distributions with a novel noise-enhanced supervised autoencoder (NSAE). NSAE tra…
Image geolocalization is the challenging task of predicting the geographic coordinates of origin for a given photo. It is an unsolved problem relying on the ability to combine visual clues with general knowledge about the world to make accurate predictions across geographies. We present $\href{https://huggingface.co/geolocal/StreetCLIP}{\text{StreetCLIP}}$, a robust, publicly available foundation model not only achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple open-domain image geolocalization benchmarks but also doing so in a zero-shot setting, outperforming supervised models trained on more…
We propose Recognition as Part Composition (RPC), an image encoding approach inspired by human cognition. It is based on the cognitive theory that humans recognize complex objects by components, and that they build a small compact vocabulary of concepts to represent each instance with. RPC encodes images by first decomposing them into salient parts, and then encoding each part as a mixture of a small number of prototypes, each representing a certain concept. We find that this type of learning inspired by human cognition can overcome hurdles faced by deep convolutional networks in low-shot gene…
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) are the most common histologic subtypes of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Histology is an essential tool for lung cancer diagnosis. Pathologists make classifications according to the dominant subtypes. Although morphology remains the standard for diagnosis, significant tool needs to be developed to elucidate the diagnosis. In our study, we utilize the pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) model to classify multiple label lung cancer on histologic slices (fr…
The estimation of the generalization error of classifiers often relies on a validation set. Such a set is hardly available in few-shot learning scenarios, a highly disregarded shortcoming in the field. In these scenarios, it is common to rely on features extracted from pre-trained neural networks combined with distance-based classifiers such as nearest class mean. In this work, we introduce a Gaussian model of the feature distribution. By estimating the parameters of this model, we are able to predict the generalization error on new classification tasks with few samples. We observe that accura…
Deep learning models perform best when tested on target (test) data domains whose distribution is similar to the set of source (train) domains. However, model generalization can be hindered when there is significant difference in the underlying statistics between the target and source domains. In this work, we adapt a domain generalization method based on a model-agnostic meta-learning framework to biomedical imaging. The method learns a domain-agnostic feature representation to improve generalization of models to the unseen test distribution. The method can be used for any imaging task, as it…
Humans can learn a new language task efficiently with only few examples, by leveraging their knowledge obtained when learning prior tasks. In this paper, we explore whether and how such cross-task generalization ability can be acquired, and further applied to build better few-shot learners across diverse NLP tasks. We introduce CrossFit, a problem setup for studying cross-task generalization ability, which standardizes seen/unseen task partitions, data access during different learning stages, and the evaluation protocols. To instantiate different seen/unseen task partitions in CrossFit and fac…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Tsinghua-Peking Center for Life Sciences（清华-北大生命科学联合中心）
It is an important yet challenging setting to continually learn new tasks from a few examples. Although numerous efforts have been devoted to either continual learning or few-shot learning, little work has considered this new setting of few-shot continual learning (FSCL), which needs to minimize the catastrophic forgetting to the old tasks and gradually improve the ability of few-shot generalization. In this paper, we provide a first systematic study on FSCL and present an effective solution with deep neural networks. Our solution is based on the observation that continual learning of a task s…
Because it is not feasible to collect training data for every language, there is a growing interest in cross-lingual transfer learning. In this paper, we systematically explore zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning on reading comprehension tasks with a language representation model pre-trained on multi-lingual corpus. The experimental results show that with pre-trained language representation zero-shot learning is feasible, and translating the source data into the target language is not necessary and even degrades the performance. We further explore what does the model learn in zero-shot s…
Multilingual contextual embeddings have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning, where multilingual BERT is fine-tuned on one source language and evaluated on a different target language. However, published results for mBERT zero-shot accuracy vary as much as 17 points on the MLDoc classification task across four papers. We show that the standard practice of using English dev accuracy for model selection in the zero-shot setting makes it difficult to obtain reproducible results on the MLDoc and XNLI tasks. English dev accuracy is often uncorrelate…
Developing mechanisms that flexibly adapt dialog systems to unseen tasks and domains is a major challenge in dialog research. Neural models implicitly memorize task-specific dialog policies from the training data. We posit that this implicit memorization has precluded zero-shot transfer learning. To this end, we leverage the schema-guided paradigm, wherein the task-specific dialog policy is explicitly provided to the model. We introduce the Schema Attention Model (SAM) and improved schema representations for the STAR corpus. SAM obtains significant improvement in zero-shot settings, with a +22…
One-shot learning is proposed to make a pretrained classifier workable on a new dataset based on one labeled samples from each pattern. However, few of researchers consider whether the dataset itself supports one-shot learning. In this paper, we propose a set of definitions to explain what kind of datasets can support one-shot learning and propose the concept "absolute generalization". Based on these definitions, we proposed a method to build an absolutely generalizable classifier. The proposed method concatenates two samples as a new single sample, and converts a classification problem to an …
Google（谷歌）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
Few-shot dataset generalization is a challenging variant of the well-studied few-shot classification problem where a diverse training set of several datasets is given, for the purpose of training an adaptable model that can then learn classes from new datasets using only a few examples. To this end, we propose to utilize the diverse training set to construct a universal template: a partial model that can define a wide array of dataset-specialized models, by plugging in appropriate components. For each new few-shot classification problem, our approach therefore only requires inferring a small n…
University of Colorado, Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；Facebook Reality Labs（Facebook现实实验室）
Although there has been significant research in egocentric action recognition, most methods and tasks, including EPIC-KITCHENS, suppose a fixed set of action classes. Fixed-set classification is useful for benchmarking methods, but is often unrealistic in practical settings due to the compositionality of actions, resulting in a functionally infinite-cardinality label set. In this work, we explore generalization with an open set of classes by unifying two popular approaches: few- and zero-shot generalization (the latter which we reframe as cross-modal few-shot generalization). We propose a new …
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
How can we teach a robot to predict what will happen next for an activity it has never seen before? We address this problem of zero-shot anticipation by presenting a hierarchical model that generalizes instructional knowledge from large-scale text-corpora and transfers the knowledge to the visual domain. Given a portion of an instructional video, our model predicts coherent and plausible actions multiple steps into the future, all in rich natural language. To demonstrate the anticipation capabilities of our model, we introduce the Tasty Videos dataset, a collection of 2511 recipes for zero-sho…
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health（哈佛陈曾熙公共卫生学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Self-supervised models trained with a contrastive loss such as CLIP have shown to be very powerful in zero-shot classification settings. However, to be used as a zero-shot classifier these models require the user to provide new captions over a fixed set of labels at test time. In many settings, it is hard or impossible to know if a new query caption is compatible with the source captions used to train the model. We address these limitations by framing the zero-shot classification task as an outlier detection problem and develop a conformal prediction procedure to assess when a given test capti…
Universidad Nacional de Córdoba（科尔多瓦国立大学）；CONICET（阿根廷国家科学技术研究委员会）
Zero-shot classification (ZSC) is the task of learning predictors for classes not seen during training. Although the different methods in the literature are evaluated using the same class splits, little is known about their stability under different class partitions. In this work we show experimentally that ZSC performance exhibits strong variability under changing training setups. We propose the use ensemble learning as an attempt to mitigate this phenomena.
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Jiangnan University（江南大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；CSIRO’s Data61（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61）
Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) aims to transfer classification capability from seen to unseen classes. Recent methods have proved that generalization and specialization are two essential abilities to achieve good performance in ZSL. However, focusing on only one of the abilities may result in models that are either too general with degraded classification ability or too specialized to generalize to unseen classes. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end network, termed as BGSNet, which equips and balances generalization and specialization abilities at the instance and dataset level. Specifically, BG…
Prevalent techniques in zero-shot learning do not generalize well to other related problem scenarios. Here, we present a unified approach for conventional zero-shot, generalized zero-shot and few-shot learning problems. Our approach is based on a novel Class Adapting Principal Directions (CAPD) concept that allows multiple embeddings of image features into a semantic space. Given an image, our method produces one principal direction for each seen class. Then, it learns how to combine these directions to obtain the principal direction for each unseen class such that the CAPD of the test image i…
Zero-shot learning transfers knowledge from seen classes to novel unseen classes to reduce human labor of labelling data for building new classifiers. Much effort on zero-shot learning however has focused on the standard multi-class setting, the more challenging multi-label zero-shot problem has received limited attention. In this paper we propose a transfer-aware embedding projection approach to tackle multi-label zero-shot learning. The approach projects the label embedding vectors into a low-dimensional space to induce better inter-label relationships and explicitly facilitate information t…
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Focusing on discriminative zero-shot learning, in this work we introduce a novel mechanism that dynamically augments during training the set of seen classes to produce additional fictitious classes. These fictitious classes diminish the model's tendency to fixate during training on attribute correlations that appear in the training set but will not appear in newly exposed classes. The proposed model is tested within the two formulations of the zero-shot learning framework; namely, generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) and classical zero-shot learning (CZSL). Our model improves the state-of-the…
Deep learning, even if it is very successful nowadays, traditionally needs very large amounts of labeled data to perform excellent on the classification task. In an attempt to solve this problem, the one-shot learning paradigm, which makes use of just one labeled sample per class and prior knowledge, becomes increasingly important. In this paper, we propose a new one-shot learning method, dubbed MoVAE (Mixture of Variational AutoEncoders), to perform classification. Complementary to prior studies, MoVAE represents a shift of paradigm in comparison with the usual one-shot learning methods, as i…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown impressive performance on domains with visual inputs, in particular various games. However, the agent is usually trained on a fixed environment, e.g. a fixed number of levels. A growing mass of evidence suggests that these trained models fail to generalize to even slight variations of the environments they were trained on. This paper advances the hypothesis that the lack of generalization is partly due to the input representation, and explores how rotation, cropping and translation could increase generality. We show that a cropped, translated and rot…
Euclidean geometry is among the earliest forms of mathematical thinking. While the geometric primitives underlying its constructions, such as perfect lines and circles, do not often occur in the natural world, humans rarely struggle to perceive and reason with them. Will computer vision models trained on natural images show the same sensitivity to Euclidean geometry? Here we explore these questions by studying few-shot generalization in the universe of Euclidean geometry constructions. We introduce Geoclidean, a domain-specific language for Euclidean geometry, and use it to generate two datase…
We address the problem of learning fine-grained cross-modal representations. We propose an instance-based deep metric learning approach in joint visual and textual space. The key novelty of this paper is that it shows that using per-image semantic supervision leads to substantial improvement in zero-shot performance over using class-only supervision. On top of that, we provide a probabilistic justification for a metric rescaling approach that solves a very common problem in the generalized zero-shot learning setting, i.e., classifying test images from unseen classes as one of the classes seen …
In this paper we propose a non-metric ranking-based representation of semantic similarity that allows natural aggregation of semantic information from multiple heterogeneous sources. We apply the ranking-based representation to zero-shot learning problems, and present deterministic and probabilistic zero-shot classifiers which can be built from pre-trained classifiers without retraining. We demonstrate their the advantages on two large real-world image datasets. In particular, we show that aggregating different sources of semantic information, including crowd-sourcing, leads to more accurate c…
Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；Systems Research Institute Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院系统研究所）
One of important areas of machine learning research is zero-shot learning. It is applied when properly labeled training data set is not available. A number of zero-shot algorithms have been proposed and experimented with. However, none of them seems to be the "overall winner". In situations like this, it may be possible to develop a meta-classifier that would combine "best aspects" of individual classifiers and outperform all of them. In this context, the goal of this contribution is twofold. First, multiple state-of-the-art zero-shot learning methods are compared for standard benchmark datase…
Zero-shot learning is the problem of predicting instances over classes not seen during training. One approach to zero-shot learning is providing auxiliary class information to the model. Prior work along this vein have largely used expensive per-instance annotation or singular class-level descriptions, but per-instance descriptions are hard to scale and single class descriptions may not be rich enough. Furthermore, these works have used natural-language descriptions exclusively, simple bi-encoders models, and modality or task-specific methods. These approaches have several limitations: text su…
TTI-Chicago（丰田工业大学芝加哥分校）；Vaitl Inc.（Vaitl公司）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；ByteDance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）
We present a novel problem setting in zero-shot learning, zero-shot object recognition and detection in the context. Contrary to the traditional zero-shot learning methods, which simply infers unseen categories by transferring knowledge from the objects belonging to semantically similar seen categories, we aim to understand the identity of the novel objects in an image surrounded by the known objects using the inter-object relation prior. Specifically, we leverage the visual context and the geometric relationships between all pairs of objects in a single image, and capture the information usef…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Zero-shot action recognition is the task of classifying action categories that are not available in the training set. In this setting, the standard evaluation protocol is to use existing action recognition datasets(e.g. UCF101) and randomly split the classes into seen and unseen. However, most recent work builds on representations pre-trained on the Kinetics dataset, where classes largely overlap with classes in the zero-shot evaluation datasets. As a result, classes which are supposed to be unseen, are present during supervised pre-training, invalidating the condition of the zero-shot setting…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；Caltech（加州理工学院）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）
Pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have shown promising zero-shot generalization in many downstream tasks with properly designed text prompts. Instead of relying on hand-engineered prompts, recent works learn prompts using the training data from downstream tasks. While effective, training on domain-specific data reduces a model's generalization capability to unseen new domains. In this work, we propose test-time prompt tuning (TPT), a method that can learn adaptive prompts on the fly with a single test sample. For image classification, TPT optimizes the prompt by minimizing the en…
Zero-shot capability has been considered as a new revolution of deep learning, letting machines work on tasks without curated training data. As a good start and the only existing outcome of zero-shot image captioning (IC), ZeroCap abandons supervised training and sequentially searches every word in the caption using the knowledge of large-scale pretrained models. Though effective, its autoregressive generation and gradient-directed searching mechanism limit the diversity of captions and inference speed, respectively. Moreover, ZeroCap does not consider the controllability issue of zero-shot IC…
In this paper we propose a novel Temporal Attentive Relation Network (TARN) for the problems of few-shot and zero-shot action recognition. At the heart of our network is a meta-learning approach that learns to compare representations of variable temporal length, that is, either two videos of different length (in the case of few-shot action recognition) or a video and a semantic representation such as word vector (in the case of zero-shot action recognition). By contrast to other works in few-shot and zero-shot action recognition, we a) utilise attention mechanisms so as to perform temporal ali…
New York University（纽约大学）；Google（谷歌）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；Baylor College of Medicine（贝勒医学院）；Rice University（莱斯大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Canadian Institute for Advanced Research（加拿大高等研究院）
Despite impressive progress in deep learning, generalizing far beyond the training distribution is an important open challenge. In this work, we consider few-shot classification, and aim to shed light on what makes some novel classes easier to learn than others, and what types of learned representations generalize better. To this end, we define a new paradigm in terms of attributes -- simple building blocks of which concepts are formed -- as a means of quantifying the degree of relatedness of different concepts. Our empirical analysis reveals that supervised learning generalizes poorly to new …
APRIL-GAN: A Zero-/Few-Shot Anomaly Classification and Segmentation Method for CVPR 2023 VAND Workshop Challenge Tracks 1&2: 1st Place on Zero-shot AD and 4th Place on Few-shot AD
Variational Convertor-Encoder (VCE) converts an image to various styles; we present this novel architecture for the problem of one-shot generalization and its transfer to new tasks not seen before without additional training. We also improve the performance of variational auto-encoder (VAE) to filter those blurred points using a novel algorithm proposed by us, namely large margin VAE (LMVAE). Two samples with the same property are input to the encoder, and then a convertor is required to processes one of them from the noisy outputs of the encoder; finally, the noise represents a variety of tra…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
Generalization has been a long-standing challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). Visual RL, in particular, can be easily distracted by irrelevant factors in high-dimensional observation space. In this work, we consider robust policy learning which targets zero-shot generalization to unseen visual environments with large distributional shift. We propose SECANT, a novel self-expert cloning technique that leverages image augmentation in two stages to decouple robust representation learning from policy optimization. Specifically, an expert policy is first trained by RL from scratch with weak aug…
Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad（印度理工学院海得拉巴分校）
In this work, we present a novel meta-learning algorithm, i.e. TTNet, that regresses model parameters for novel tasks for which no ground truth is available (zero-shot tasks). In order to adapt to novel zero-shot tasks, our meta-learner learns from the model parameters of known tasks (with ground truth) and the correlation of known tasks to zero-shot tasks. Such intuition finds its foothold in cognitive science, where a subject (human baby) can adapt to a novel-concept (depth understanding) by correlating it with old concepts (hand movement or self-motion), without receiving explicit supervisi…
Existing semantic segmentation models heavily rely on dense pixel-wise annotations. To reduce the annotation pressure, we focus on a challenging task named zero-shot semantic segmentation, which aims to segment unseen objects with zero annotations. This task can be accomplished by transferring knowledge across categories via semantic word embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel context-aware feature generation method for zero-shot segmentation named CaGNet. In particular, with the observation that a pixel-wise feature highly depends on its contextual information, we insert a contextual m…
