Provable Sample-Efficient Transfer Learning Conditional Diffusion Models via Representation Learning
Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校工业工程与运筹学系）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University（北京大学数学科学学院）；Center for Statistical Science, Peking University（北京大学统计科学中心）
While conditional diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in various applications, they require abundant data to train from scratch, which is often infeasible in practice. To address this issue, transfer learning has emerged as an essential paradigm in small data regimes. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical underpinnings of transfer learning conditional diffusion models remain unexplored. In this paper, we take the first step towards understanding the sample efficiency of transfer learning conditional diffusion models through the lens of representation learning. Inspired by practical training procedures, we assume that there exists a low-dimensional representation of conditions shared across all tasks. Our analysis shows that with a well-learned representation from source tasks, the samplecomplexity of target tasks can be reduced substantially. In addition, we investigate the practical implications of our theoretical results in several real-world applications of conditional diffusion models. Numerical experiments are also conducted to verify our results.
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
Recent works in self-supervised learning have advanced the state-of-the-art by relying on the contrastive learning paradigm, which learns representations by pushing positive pairs, or similar examples from the same class, closer together while keeping negative pairs far apart. Despite the empirical successes, theoretical foundations are limited -- prior analyses assume conditional independence of the positive pairs given the same class label, but recent empirical applications use heavily correlated positive pairs (i.e., data augmentations of the same image). Our work analyzes contrastive learn…
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Self-supervised representation learning solves auxiliary prediction tasks (known as pretext tasks) without requiring labeled data to learn useful semantic representations. These pretext tasks are created solely using the input features, such as predicting a missing image patch, recovering the color channels of an image from context, or predicting missing words in text; yet predicting this \textit{known} information helps in learning representations effective for downstream prediction tasks. We posit a mechanism exploiting the statistical connections between certain {\em reconstruction-based} p…
There is general consensus that learning representations is useful for a variety of reasons, e.g. efficient use of labeled data (semi-supervised learning), transfer learning and understanding hidden structure of data. Popular techniques for representation learning include clustering, manifold learning, kernel-learning, autoencoders, Boltzmann machines, etc. To study the relative merits of these techniques, it's essential to formalize the definition and goals of representation learning, so that they are all become instances of the same definition. This paper introduces such a formal framework t…
An ideal learned representation should display transferability and robustness. Supervised contrastive learning (SupCon) is a promising method for training accurate models, but produces representations that do not capture these properties due to class collapse -- when all points in a class map to the same representation. Recent work suggests that "spreading out" these representations improves them, but the precise mechanism is poorly understood. We argue that creating spread alone is insufficient for better representations, since spread is invariant to permutations within classes. Instead, both…
Provable Benefits of Unsupervised Pre-training and Transfer Learning via Single-Index Models
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo, Canada（滑铁卢大学统计与精算科学系）；Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada（滑铁卢大学切尔顿计算机科学学院）；Department of Statistics, Harvard University, United States of America（哈佛大学统计系）
Deep learning provides a promising way to extract effective representations from raw data in an end-to-end fashion and has proven its effectiveness in various domains such as computer vision, natural language processing, etc. However, in domains such as content/product recommendation and risk management, where sequence of event data is the most used raw data form and experts derived features are more commonly used, deep learning models struggle to dominate the game. In this paper, we propose a symbolic testing framework that helps to answer the question of what kinds of expert-derived features…
AuditVotes: Elevating Provable Defense for GNNs with Efficient Augmentation and Conditional Smoothing
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Hong Kong Chu Hai College（香港 Chu Hai 学院）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Shanghai JiaoTong University（上海交通大学）；Hubei University（湖北大学）
Peking University（北京大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Beijing Institute of Big Data Research（北京大数据研究院）
Sim-to-real transfer trains RL agents in the simulated environments and then deploys them in the real world. Sim-to-real transfer has been widely used in practice because it is often cheaper, safer and much faster to collect samples in simulation than in the real world. Despite the empirical success of the sim-to-real transfer, its theoretical foundation is much less understood. In this paper, we study the sim-to-real transfer in continuous domain with partial observations, where the simulated environments and real-world environments are modeled by linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) systems. We s…
We study the problem of meta-learning through the lens of online convex optimization, developing a meta-algorithm bridging the gap between popular gradient-based meta-learning and classical regularization-based multi-task transfer methods. Our method is the first to simultaneously satisfy good sample efficiency guarantees in the convex setting, with generalization bounds that improve with task-similarity, while also being computationally scalable to modern deep learning architectures and the many-task setting. Despite its simplicity, the algorithm matches, up to a constant factor, a lower boun…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
We study the problem of representational transfer in RL, where an agent first pretrains in a number of source tasks to discover a shared representation, which is subsequently used to learn a good policy in a \emph{target task}. We propose a new notion of task relatedness between source and target tasks, and develop a novel approach for representational transfer under this assumption. Concretely, we show that given generative access to source tasks, we can discover a representation, using which subsequent linear RL techniques quickly converge to a near-optimal policy in the target task. The sam…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, seeks to design algorithms that can utilize previous experience to rapidly learn new skills or adapt to new environments. Representation learning -- a key tool for performing meta-learning -- learns a data representation that can transfer knowledge across multiple tasks, which is essential in regimes where data is scarce. Despite a recent surge of interest in the practice of meta-learning, the theoretical underpinnings of meta-learning algorithms are lacking, especially in the context of learning transferable representations. In this paper, we focus on the …
Domain generalization aims at performing well on unseen test environments with data from a limited number of training environments. Despite a proliferation of proposal algorithms for this task, assessing their performance both theoretically and empirically is still very challenging. Distributional matching algorithms such as (Conditional) Domain Adversarial Networks [Ganin et al., 2016, Long et al., 2018] are popular and enjoy empirical success, but they lack formal guarantees. Other approaches such as Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) require a prohibitively large number of training environme…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；RIKEN AIP（理化学研究所人工智能研究中心）
The standard supervised learning paradigm works effectively when training data shares the same distribution as the upcoming testing samples. However, this stationary assumption is often violated in real-world applications, especially when testing data appear in an online fashion. In this paper, we formulate and investigate the problem of \emph{online label shift} (OLaS): the learner trains an initial model from the labeled offline data and then deploys it to an unlabeled online environment where the underlying label distribution changes over time but the label-conditional density does not. The…
On Provable Copyright Protection for Generative Models
Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences（哈佛大学工程与应用科学学院）；Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence（肯普纳自然与人工智能研究所）
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院数学与系统科学研究院）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Recently, generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) data with correlation shift has attracted great attentions. The correlation shift is caused by the spurious attributes that correlate to the class label, as the correlation between them may vary in training and test data. For such a problem, we show that given the class label, the models that are conditionally independent of spurious attributes are OOD generalizable. Based on this, a metric Conditional Spurious Variation (CSV) which controls the OOD generalization error, is proposed to measure such conditional independence. To improve the O…
NEC Laboratories Europe（NEC欧洲实验室）；UiT - The Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学）
The similarity of feature representations plays a pivotal role in the success of problems related to domain adaptation. Feature similarity includes both the invariance of marginal distributions and the closeness of conditional distributions given the desired response $y$ (e.g., class labels). Unfortunately, traditional methods always learn such features without fully taking into consideration the information in $y$, which in turn may lead to a mismatch of the conditional distributions or the mix-up of discriminative structures underlying data distributions. In this work, we introduce the recen…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically start tabula rasa, without any prior knowledge of the environment, and without any prior skills. This however often leads to low sample efficiency, requiring a large amount of interaction with the environment. This is especially true in a lifelong learning setting, in which the agent needs to continually extend its capabilities. In this paper, we examine how a pre-trained task-independent language model can make a goal-conditional RL agent more sample efficient. We do this by facilitating transfer learning between different related tasks. We exp…
Georgia Tech（佐治亚理工学院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；MPI-IS（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
In lifelong learning, tasks (or classes) to be learned arrive sequentially over time in arbitrary order. During training, knowledge from previous tasks can be captured and transferred to subsequent ones to improve sample efficiency. We consider the setting where all target tasks can be represented in the span of a small number of unknown linear or nonlinear features of the input data. We propose a lifelong learning algorithm that maintains and refines the internal feature representation. We prove that for any desired accuracy on all tasks, the dimension of the representation remains close to t…
Covariate-Elaborated Robust Partial Information Transfer with Conditional Spike-and-Slab Prior
Department of Statistics and Data Science, Fudan University（复旦大学统计与数据科学系）；Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学生物统计学、流行病学与信息学系）；Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣芭芭拉分校统计学与应用概率系）
Brown University（布朗大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Transfer learning (TL) enables the transfer of knowledge gained in learning to perform one task (source) to a related but different task (target), hence addressing the expense of data acquisition and labeling, potential computational power limitations, and dataset distribution mismatches. We propose a new TL framework for task-specific learning (functional regression in partial differential equations (PDEs)) under conditional shift based on the deep operator network (DeepONet). Task-specific operator learning is accomplished by fine-tuning task-specific layers of the target DeepONet using a hy…
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Given independent samples generated from the joint distribution $p(\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y},\mathbf{z})$, we study the problem of Conditional Independence (CI-Testing), i.e., whether the joint equals the CI distribution $p^{CI}(\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y},\mathbf{z})= p(\mathbf{z}) p(\mathbf{y}|\mathbf{z})p(\mathbf{x}|\mathbf{z})$ or not. We cast this problem under the purview of the proposed, provable meta-algorithm, "Mimic and Classify", which is realized in two-steps: (a) Mimic the CI distribution close enough to recover the support, and (b) Classify to distinguish the joint and the CI distribution.…
School of Mathematical Sciences, Zhejiang University, China（浙江大学数学科学学院）；Division of Biostatistics and Health Data Science, University of Minnesota, USA（明尼苏达大学生物统计与健康数据科学系）；Department of Statistics and Data Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore（新加坡国立大学统计与数据科学系）；Department of Statistics, University of California, Davis, USA（加州大学戴维斯分校统计系）
Many machine learning methods have been recently developed to circumvent the high computational cost of the gradient-based topology optimization. These methods typically require extensive and costly datasets for training, have a difficult time generalizing to unseen boundary and loading conditions and to new domains, and do not take into consideration topological constraints of the predictions, which produces predictions with inconsistent topologies. We present a deep learning method based on generative adversarial networks for generative design exploration. The proposed method combines the ge…
Neural processes (NPs) are models for transfer learning with properties reminiscent of Gaussian Processes (GPs). They are adept at modelling data consisting of few observations of many related functions on the same input space and are trained by minimizing a variational objective, which is computationally much less expensive than the Bayesian updating required by GPs. So far, most studies of NPs have focused on low-dimensional datasets which are not representative of realistic transfer learning tasks. Drug discovery is one application area that is characterized by datasets consisting of many c…
Multi-Task Learning (MTL) networks have emerged as a promising method for transferring learned knowledge across different tasks. However, MTL must deal with challenges such as: overfitting to low resource tasks, catastrophic forgetting, and negative task transfer, or learning interference. Often, in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a separate model per task is needed to obtain the best performance. However, many fine-tuning approaches are both parameter inefficient, i.e., potentially involving one new model per task, and highly susceptible to losing knowledge acquired during pretraining. We …
Domain-Adapted Diffusion Models for Conditional Independence Testing
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Riken AIP（理化学研究所人工智能研究中心）；The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI（综合研究大学院大学）；The Institute of Statistical Mathematics（统计数学研究所）；Hunan Normal University（湖南师范大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Hasso Plattner Institute（哈索·普拉特纳研究所）
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shen Zhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Huawei Noah's Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA), which aims to learn models in a partially labeled target domain with the assistance of the fully labeled source domain, attracts increasing attention in recent years. To explicitly leverage the labeled data in both domains, we naturally introduce a conditional GAN framework to transfer images without changing the semantics in SSDA. However, we identify a label-domination problem in such an approach. In fact, the generator tends to overlook the input source image and only memorizes prototypes of each class, which results in unsatisfactory adaptation per…
A neural artistic style transformation (NST) model can modify the appearance of a simple image by adding the style of a famous image. Even though the transformed images do not look precisely like artworks by the same artist of the respective style images, the generated images are appealing. Generally, a trained NST model specialises in a style, and a single image represents that style. However, generating an image under a new style is a tedious process, which includes full model training. In this paper, we present two methods that step toward the style image independent neural style transfer m…
POSTECH（浦项科技大学）；OpenAI；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）
We study how to leverage off-the-shelf visual and linguistic data to cope with out-of-vocabulary answers in visual question answering task. Existing large-scale visual datasets with annotations such as image class labels, bounding boxes and region descriptions are good sources for learning rich and diverse visual concepts. However, it is not straightforward how the visual concepts can be captured and transferred to visual question answering models due to missing link between question dependent answering models and visual data without question. We tackle this problem in two steps: 1) learning a…
As a vital problem in classification-oriented transfer, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has attracted widespread attention in recent years. Previous UDA methods assume the marginal distributions of different domains are shifted while ignoring the discriminant information in the label distributions. This leads to classification performance degeneration in real applications. In this work, we focus on the conditional distribution shift problem which is of great concern to current conditional invariant models. We aim to seek a kernel covariance embedding for conditional distribution which rem…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Qian Xuesen Laboratory of Space Technology, China Academy of Space Technology（中国空间技术研究院钱学森空间技术实验室）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Transfer learning aims to learn robust classifiers for the target domain by leveraging knowledge from a source domain. Since the source and the target domains are usually from different distributions, existing methods mainly focus on adapting the cross-domain marginal or conditional distributions. However, in real applications, the marginal and conditional distributions usually have different contributions to the domain discrepancy. Existing methods fail to quantitatively evaluate the different importance of these two distributions, which will result in unsatisfactory transfer performance. In …
Statistical independence and conditional independence are two fundamental concepts in statistics and machine learning. Copula Entropy is a mathematical concept defined by Ma and Sun for multivariate statistical independence measuring and testing, and also proved to be closely related to conditional independence (or transfer entropy). As the unified framework for measuring both independence and causality, CE has been applied to solve several related statistical or machine learning problems, including association discovery, structure learning, variable selection, and causal discovery. The nonpar…
Zalando Research（扎兰多研究院）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Transfer operators such as the Perron--Frobenius or Koopman operator play an important role in the global analysis of complex dynamical systems. The eigenfunctions of these operators can be used to detect metastable sets, to project the dynamics onto the dominant slow processes, or to separate superimposed signals. We extend transfer operator theory to reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and show that these operators are related to Hilbert space representations of conditional distributions, known as conditional mean embeddings in the machine learning community. Moreover, numerical methods to com…
Domain-Guided Conditional Diffusion Model for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Zhejiang Laboratory（之江实验室）
As a fundamental problem in machine learning, dataset shift induces a paradigm to learn and transfer knowledge under changing environment. Previous methods assume the changes are induced by covariate, which is less practical for complex real-world data. We consider the Generalized Label Shift (GLS), which provides an interpretable insight into the learning and transfer of desirable knowledge. Current GLS methods: 1) are not well-connected with the statistical learning theory; 2) usually assume the shifting conditional distributions will be matched with an implicit transformation, but its expli…
Transfer learning across heterogeneous data distributions (a.k.a. domains) and distinct tasks is a more general and challenging problem than conventional transfer learning, where either domains or tasks are assumed to be the same. While neural network based feature transfer is widely used in transfer learning applications, finding the optimal transfer strategy still requires time-consuming experiments and domain knowledge. We propose a transferability metric called Optimal Transport based Conditional Entropy (OTCE), to analytically predict the transfer performance for supervised classification…
Given the ever-increasing computational costs of modern machine learning models, we need to find new ways to reuse such expert models and thus tap into the resources that have been invested in their creation. Recent work suggests that the power of these massive models is captured by the representations they learn. Therefore, we seek a model that can relate between different existing representations and propose to solve this task with a conditionally invertible network. This network demonstrates its capability by (i) providing generic transfer between diverse domains, (ii) enabling controlled c…
