Massih-Réza Amini

Aurelien Gauffre, Julien Horvat, Massih-Reza Amini

Self-training methods have proven to be effective in exploiting abundant unlabeled data in semi-supervised learning, particularly when labeled data is scarce. While many of these approaches rely on a cross-entropy loss function (CE), recent advances have shown that the supervised contrastive loss function (SupCon) can be more effective. Additionally, unsupervised contrastive learning approaches have also been shown to capture high quality data representations in the unsupervised setting. To benefit from these advantages in a semi-supervised setting, we propose a general framework to enhance self-training methods, which replaces all instances of CE losses with a unique contrastive loss. By using class prototypes, which are a set of class-wise trainable parameters, we recover the probability distributions of the CE setting and show a theoretical equivalence with it. Our framework, when applied to popular self-training methods, results in significant performance improvements across three different datasets with a limited number of labeled data. Additionally, we demonstrate further improvements in convergence speed, transfer ability, and hyperparameter stability. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/AurelienGauffre/semisupcon/}.

Alexandre Audibert, Aurélien Gauffre, Massih-Reza Amini

Multi-label classification, which involves assigning multiple labels to a single input, has emerged as a key area in both research and industry due to its wide-ranging applications. Designing effective loss functions is crucial for optimizing deep neural networks for this task, as they significantly influence model performance and efficiency. Traditional loss functions, which often maximize likelihood under the assumption of label independence, may struggle to capture complex label relationships. Recent research has turned to supervised contrastive learning, a method that aims to create a structured representation space by bringing similar instances closer together and pushing dissimilar ones apart. Although contrastive learning offers a promising approach, applying it to multi-label classification presents unique challenges, particularly in managing label interactions and data structure. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth study of contrastive learning loss for multi-label classification across diverse settings. These include datasets with both small and large numbers of labels, datasets with varying amounts of training data, and applications in both computer vision and natural language processing. Our empirical results indicate that the promising outcomes of contrastive learning are attributable not only to the consideration of label interactions but also to the robust optimization scheme of the contrastive loss. Furthermore, while the supervised contrastive loss function faces challenges with datasets containing a small number of labels and ranking-based metrics, it demonstrates excellent performance, particularly in terms of Macro-F1, on datasets with a large number of labels.

Alexandre Audibert, Aurélien Gauffre, Massih-Reza Amini

Learning an effective representation in multi-label text classification (MLTC) is a significant challenge in NLP. This challenge arises from the inherent complexity of the task, which is shaped by two key factors: the intricate connections between labels and the widespread long-tailed distribution of the data. To overcome this issue, one potential approach involves integrating supervised contrastive learning with classical supervised loss functions. Although contrastive learning has shown remarkable performance in multi-class classification, its impact in the multi-label framework has not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth study of supervised contrastive learning and its influence on representation in MLTC context. We emphasize the importance of considering long-tailed data distributions to build a robust representation space, which effectively addresses two critical challenges associated with contrastive learning that we identify: the "lack of positives" and the "attraction-repulsion imbalance". Building on this insight, we introduce a novel contrastive loss function for MLTC. It attains Micro-F1 scores that either match or surpass those obtained with other frequently employed loss functions, and demonstrates a significant improvement in Macro-F1 scores across three multi-label datasets.

Aleksandra Malkova, Loic Pauletto, Christophe Villien et al.

In this paper, we present a Neural Network (NN) model based on Neural Architecture Search (NAS) and self-learning for received signal strength (RSS) map reconstruction out of sparse single-snapshot input measurements, in the case where data-augmentation by side deterministic simulations cannot be performed. The approach first finds an optimal NN architecture and simultaneously train the deduced model over some ground-truth measurements of a given (RSS) map. These ground-truth measurements along with the predictions of the model over a set of randomly chosen points are then used to train a second NN model having the same architecture. Experimental results show that signal predictions of this second model outperforms non-learning based interpolation state-of-the-art techniques and NN models with no architecture search on five large-scale maps of RSS measurements.

Philippe Mulhem, Lorraine Goeuriot, Massih-Reza Amini et al.

We describe here an experimental framework and the results obtained on microblogs retrieval. We study the contribution one popular approach, i.e., words embeddings, and investigate the impact of the training set on the learned embedding. We focus on query expansion for the retrieval of tweets on the CLEF CMC 2016 corpus. Our results show that using embeddings trained on a corpus in the same domain as the indexed documents did not necessarily lead to better retrieval results.

Cédric Lopez, Ioannis Partalas, Georgios Balikas et al.

The paper describes the CAp 2017 challenge. The challenge concerns the problem of Named Entity Recognition (NER) for tweets written in French. We first present the data preparation steps we followed for constructing the dataset released in the framework of the challenge. We begin by demonstrating why NER for tweets is a challenging problem especially when the number of entities increases. We detail the annotation process and the necessary decisions we made. We provide statistics on the inter-annotator agreement, and we conclude the data description part with examples and statistics for the data. We, then, describe the participation in the challenge, where 8 teams participated, with a focus on the methods employed by the challenge participants and the scores achieved in terms of F$_1$ measure. Importantly, the constructed dataset comprising $\sim$6,000 tweets annotated for 13 types of entities, which to the best of our knowledge is the first such dataset in French, is publicly available at \url{http://cap2017.imag.fr/competition.html} .

Bikash Joshi, Massih-Reza Amini, Ioannis Partalas et al.

We address the problem of multi-class classification in the case where the number of classes is very large. We propose a double sampling strategy on top of a multi-class to binary reduction strategy, which transforms the original multi-class problem into a binary classification problem over pairs of examples. The aim of the sampling strategy is to overcome the curse of long-tailed class distributions exhibited in majority of large-scale multi-class classification problems and to reduce the number of pairs of examples in the expanded data. We show that this strategy does not alter the consistency of the empirical risk minimization principle defined over the double sample reduction. Experiments are carried out on DMOZ and Wikipedia collections with 10,000 to 100,000 classes where we show the efficiency of the proposed approach in terms of training and prediction time, memory consumption, and predictive performance with respect to state-of-the-art approaches.

Georgios Balikas, Massih-Reza Amini

We investigate the integration of word embeddings as classification features in the setting of large scale text classification. Such representations have been used in a plethora of tasks, however their application in classification scenarios with thousands of classes has not been extensively researched, partially due to hardware limitations. In this work, we examine efficient composition functions to obtain document-level from word-level embeddings and we subsequently investigate their combination with the traditional one-hot-encoding representations. By presenting empirical evidence on large, multi-class, multi-label classification problems, we demonstrate the efficiency and the performance benefits of this combination.

Ioannis Partalas, Aris Kosmopoulos, Nicolas Baskiotis et al.

LSHTC is a series of challenges which aims to assess the performance of classification systems in large-scale classification in a a large number of classes (up to hundreds of thousands). This paper describes the dataset that have been released along the LSHTC series. The paper details the construction of the datsets and the design of the tracks as well as the evaluation measures that we implemented and a quick overview of the results. All of these datasets are available online and runs may still be submitted on the online server of the challenges.