Yang Shu

Yang Shu, Xingzhuo Guo, Jialong Wu et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, where the model needs to handle distribution shifts from training, is a major challenge of machine learning. Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) models have shown impressive zero-shot ability, but the further adaptation of CLIP on downstream tasks undesirably degrades OOD performances. This paper aims at generalizing CLIP to out-of-distribution test data on downstream tasks. We propose CLIPood, a fine-tuning method that can adapt CLIP models to OOD situations where both domain shifts and open classes may occur on the unseen test data. To exploit the semantic relations between classes from the text modality, CLIPood introduces a new training objective, margin metric softmax (MMS), with class adaptive margins for fine-tuning. To incorporate both pre-trained zero-shot model and fine-tuned task-adaptive model, CLIPood leverages a new optimization strategy, Beta moving average (BMA), to maintain a temporal ensemble weighted by Beta distribution. Experiments on diverse datasets with different OOD scenarios show that CLIPood consistently outperforms existing generalization techniques.

Yang Shu, Zhangjie Cao, Ziyang Zhang et al.

Transfer learning aims to leverage knowledge from pre-trained models to benefit the target task. Prior transfer learning work mainly transfers from a single model. However, with the emergence of deep models pre-trained from different resources, model hubs consisting of diverse models with various architectures, pre-trained datasets and learning paradigms are available. Directly applying single-model transfer learning methods to each model wastes the abundant knowledge of the model hub and suffers from high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a Hub-Pathway framework to enable knowledge transfer from a model hub. The framework generates data-dependent pathway weights, based on which we assign the pathway routes at the input level to decide which pre-trained models are activated and passed through, and then set the pathway aggregation at the output level to aggregate the knowledge from different models to make predictions. The proposed framework can be trained end-to-end with the target task-specific loss, where it learns to explore better pathway configurations and exploit the knowledge in pre-trained models for each target datum. We utilize a noisy pathway generator and design an exploration loss to further explore different pathways throughout the model hub. To fully exploit the knowledge in pre-trained models, each model is further trained by specific data that activate it, which ensures its performance and enhances knowledge transfer. Experiment results on computer vision and reinforcement learning tasks demonstrate that the proposed Hub-Pathway framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance for model hub transfer learning.

Junguang Jiang, Yang Shu, Jianmin Wang et al.

The success of deep learning algorithms generally depends on large-scale data, while humans appear to have inherent ability of knowledge transfer, by recognizing and applying relevant knowledge from previous learning experiences when encountering and solving unseen tasks. Such an ability to acquire and reuse knowledge is known as transferability in deep learning. It has formed the long-term quest towards making deep learning as data-efficient as human learning, and has been motivating fruitful design of more powerful deep learning algorithms. We present this survey to connect different isolated areas in deep learning with their relation to transferability, and to provide a unified and complete view to investigating transferability through the whole lifecycle of deep learning. The survey elaborates the fundamental goals and challenges in parallel with the core principles and methods, covering recent cornerstones in deep architectures, pre-training, task adaptation and domain adaptation. This highlights unanswered questions on the appropriate objectives for learning transferable knowledge and for adapting the knowledge to new tasks and domains, avoiding catastrophic forgetting and negative transfer. Finally, we implement a benchmark and an open-source library, enabling a fair evaluation of deep learning methods in terms of transferability.

Tengxue Zhang, Yang Shu, Xinyang Chen et al.

Pre-trained model assessment for transfer learning aims to identify the optimal candidate for the downstream tasks from a model hub, without the need of time-consuming fine-tuning. Existing advanced works mainly focus on analyzing the intrinsic characteristics of the entire features extracted by each pre-trained model or how well such features fit the target labels. This paper proposes a novel perspective for pre-trained model assessment through the Distribution of Spectral Components (DISCO). Through singular value decomposition of features extracted from pre-trained models, we investigate different spectral components and observe that they possess distinct transferability, contributing diversely to the fine-tuning performance. Inspired by this, we propose an assessment method based on the distribution of spectral components which measures the proportions of their corresponding singular values. Pre-trained models with features concentrating on more transferable components are regarded as better choices for transfer learning. We further leverage the labels of downstream data to better estimate the transferability of each spectral component and derive the final assessment criterion. Our proposed method is flexible and can be applied to both classification and regression tasks. We conducted comprehensive experiments across three benchmarks and two tasks including image classification and object detection, demonstrating that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in choosing proper pre-trained models from the model hub for transfer learning.

Yang Shu, Zhangjie Cao, Jinghan Gao et al.

Few-shot learning aims to fast adapt a deep model from a few examples. While pre-training and meta-training can create deep models powerful for few-shot generalization, we find that pre-training and meta-training focuses respectively on cross-domain transferability and cross-task transferability, which restricts their data efficiency in the entangled settings of domain shift and task shift. We thus propose the Omni-Training framework to seamlessly bridge pre-training and meta-training for data-efficient few-shot learning. Our first contribution is a tri-flow Omni-Net architecture. Besides the joint representation flow, Omni-Net introduces two parallel flows for pre-training and meta-training, responsible for improving domain transferability and task transferability respectively. Omni-Net further coordinates the parallel flows by routing their representations via the joint-flow, enabling knowledge transfer across flows. Our second contribution is the Omni-Loss, which introduces a self-distillation strategy separately on the pre-training and meta-training objectives for boosting knowledge transfer throughout different training stages. Omni-Training is a general framework to accommodate many existing algorithms. Evaluations justify that our single framework consistently and clearly outperforms the individual state-of-the-art methods on both cross-task and cross-domain settings in a variety of classification, regression and reinforcement learning problems.