Gaurav Aggarwal

K J Joseph, Sujoy Paul, Gaurav Aggarwal et al.

Humans possess an innate ability to identify and differentiate instances that they are not familiar with, by leveraging and adapting the knowledge that they have acquired so far. Importantly, they achieve this without deteriorating the performance on their earlier learning. Inspired by this, we identify and formulate a new, pragmatic problem setting of NCDwF: Novel Class Discovery without Forgetting, which tasks a machine learning model to incrementally discover novel categories of instances from unlabeled data, while maintaining its performance on the previously seen categories. We propose 1) a method to generate pseudo-latent representations which act as a proxy for (no longer available) labeled data, thereby alleviating forgetting, 2) a mutual-information based regularizer which enhances unsupervised discovery of novel classes, and 3) a simple Known Class Identifier which aids generalized inference when the testing data contains instances form both seen and unseen categories. We introduce experimental protocols based on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1000 to measure the trade-off between knowledge retention and novel class discovery. Our extensive evaluations reveal that existing models catastrophically forget previously seen categories while identifying novel categories, while our method is able to effectively balance between the competing objectives. We hope our work will attract further research into this newly identified pragmatic problem setting.

K J Joseph, Sujoy Paul, Gaurav Aggarwal et al.

Novel Class Discovery (NCD) is a learning paradigm, where a machine learning model is tasked to semantically group instances from unlabeled data, by utilizing labeled instances from a disjoint set of classes. In this work, we first characterize existing NCD approaches into single-stage and two-stage methods based on whether they require access to labeled and unlabeled data together while discovering new classes. Next, we devise a simple yet powerful loss function that enforces separability in the latent space using cues from multi-dimensional scaling, which we refer to as Spacing Loss. Our proposed formulation can either operate as a standalone method or can be plugged into existing methods to enhance them. We validate the efficacy of Spacing Loss with thorough experimental evaluation across multiple settings on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets.

Ashwin Vaswani, Gaurav Aggarwal, Praneeth Netrapalli et al.

This paper considers the problem of Hierarchical Multi-Label Classification (HMC), where (i) several labels can be present for each example, and (ii) labels are related via a domain-specific hierarchy tree. Guided by the intuition that all mistakes are not equal, we present Comprehensive Hierarchy Aware Multi-label Predictions (CHAMP), a framework that penalizes a misprediction depending on its severity as per the hierarchy tree. While there have been works that apply such an idea to single-label classification, to the best of our knowledge, there are limited such works for multilabel classification focusing on the severity of mistakes. The key reason is that there is no clear way of quantifying the severity of a misprediction a priori in the multilabel setting. In this work, we propose a simple but effective metric to quantify the severity of a mistake in HMC, naturally leading to CHAMP. Extensive experiments on six public HMC datasets across modalities (image, audio, and text) demonstrate that incorporating hierarchical information leads to substantial gains as CHAMP improves both AUPRC (2.6% median percentage improvement) and hierarchical metrics (2.85% median percentage improvement), over stand-alone hierarchical or multilabel classification methods. Compared to standard multilabel baselines, CHAMP provides improved AUPRC in both robustness (8.87% mean percentage improvement ) and less data regimes. Further, our method provides a framework to enhance existing multilabel classification algorithms with better mistakes (18.1% mean percentage increment).

Soumyabrata Pal, Prateek Varshney, Prateek Jain et al.

Personalization of machine learning (ML) predictions for individual users/domains/enterprises is critical for practical recommendation systems. Standard personalization approaches involve learning a user/domain specific embedding that is fed into a fixed global model which can be limiting. On the other hand, personalizing/fine-tuning model itself for each user/domain -- a.k.a meta-learning -- has high storage/infrastructure cost. Moreover, rigorous theoretical studies of scalable personalization approaches have been very limited. To address the above issues, we propose a novel meta-learning style approach that models network weights as a sum of low-rank and sparse components. This captures common information from multiple individuals/users together in the low-rank part while sparse part captures user-specific idiosyncrasies. We then study the framework in the linear setting, where the problem reduces to that of estimating the sum of a rank-$r$ and a $k$-column sparse matrix using a small number of linear measurements. We propose a computationally efficient alternating minimization method with iterative hard thresholding -- AMHT-LRS -- to learn the low-rank and sparse part. Theoretically, for the realizable Gaussian data setting, we show that AMHT-LRS solves the problem efficiently with nearly optimal sample complexity. Finally, a significant challenge in personalization is ensuring privacy of each user's sensitive data. We alleviate this problem by proposing a differentially private variant of our method that also is equipped with strong generalization guarantees.

Sujoy Paul, Ansh Khurana, Gaurav Aggarwal

We consider the novel problem of unsupervised domain adaptation of source models, without access to the source data for semantic segmentation. Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to adapt a model learned on the labeled source data, to a new unlabeled target dataset. Existing methods assume that the source data is available along with the target data during adaptation. However, in practical scenarios, we may only have access to the source model and the unlabeled target data, but not the labeled source, due to reasons such as privacy, storage, etc. In this work, we propose a self-training approach to extract the knowledge from the source model. To compensate for the distribution shift from source to target, we first update only the normalization parameters of the network with the unlabeled target data. Then we employ confidence-filtered pseudo labeling and enforce consistencies against certain transformations. Despite being very simple and intuitive, our framework is able to achieve significant performance gains compared to directly applying the source model on the target data as reflected in our extensive experiments and ablation studies. In fact, the performance is just a few points away from the recent state-of-the-art methods which use source data for adaptation. We further demonstrate the generalisability of the proposed approach for fully test-time adaptation setting, where we do not need any target training data and adapt only during test-time.

Ansh Khurana, Sujoy Paul, Piyush Rai et al.

In Test-time Adaptation (TTA), given a source model, the goal is to adapt it to make better predictions for test instances from a different distribution than the source. Crucially, TTA assumes no access to the source data or even any additional labeled/unlabeled samples from the target distribution to finetune the source model. In this work, we consider TTA in a more pragmatic setting which we refer to as SITA (Single Image Test-time Adaptation). Here, when making a prediction, the model has access only to the given single test instance, rather than a batch of instances, as typically been considered in the literature. This is motivated by the realistic scenarios where inference is needed on-demand instead of delaying for an incoming batch or the inference is happening on an edge device (like mobile phone) where there is no scope for batching. The entire adaptation process in SITA should be extremely fast as it happens at inference time. To address this, we propose a novel approach AugBN that requires only a single forward pass. It can be used on any off-the-shelf trained model to test single instances for both classification and segmentation tasks. AugBN estimates normalization statistics of the unseen test distribution from the given test image using only one forward pass with label-preserving transformations. Since AugBN does not involve any back-propagation, it is significantly faster compared to recent test time adaptation methods. We further extend AugBN to make the algorithm hyperparameter-free. Rigorous experimentation show that our simple algorithm is able to achieve significant performance gains for a variety of datasets, tasks, and network architectures.

Anirban Santara, Claudio Gentile, Gaurav Aggarwal et al.

Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this problem within the generalized linear setting, and design and analyze upper confidence algorithms for it. Our analysis delivers tight regret bounds which, when specialized to vanilla cascading bandits, results in sharper guarantees than previously available in the literature. We evaluate our algorithms on a number of real-world datasets, and show significantly improved empirical performance as compared to known cascading bandit baselines.

Arpita Biswas, Gaurav Aggarwal, Pradeep Varakantham et al.

In many public health settings, it is important for patients to adhere to health programs, such as taking medications and periodic health checks. Unfortunately, beneficiaries may gradually disengage from such programs, which is detrimental to their health. A concrete example of gradual disengagement has been observed by an organization that carries out a free automated call-based program for spreading preventive care information among pregnant women. Many women stop picking up calls after being enrolled for a few months. To avoid such disengagements, it is important to provide timely interventions. Such interventions are often expensive and can be provided to only a small fraction of the beneficiaries. We model this scenario as a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem, where each beneficiary is assumed to transition from one state to another depending on the intervention. Moreover, since the transition probabilities are unknown a priori, we propose a Whittle index based Q-Learning mechanism and show that it converges to the optimal solution. Our method improves over existing learning-based methods for RMABs on multiple benchmarks from literature and also on the maternal healthcare dataset.