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Se-Young Yun

Publications and source records attributed to Se-Young Yun.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

FedRN: Exploiting k-Reliable Neighbors Towards Robust Federated Learning

Robustness is becoming another important challenge of federated learning in that the data collection process in each client is naturally accompanied by noisy labels. However, it is far more complex and challenging owing to varying levels of data heterogeneity and noise over clients, which exacerbates the client-to-client performance discrepancy. In this work, we propose a robust federated learning method called FedRN, which exploits k-reliable neighbors with high data expertise or similarity. Our method helps mitigate the gap between low- and high-performance clients by training only with a selected set of clean examples, identified by their ensembled mixture models. We demonstrate the superiority of FedRN via extensive evaluations on three real-world or synthetic benchmark datasets. Compared with existing robust training methods, the results show that FedRN significantly improves the test accuracy in the presence of noisy labels.

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ReFine: Re-randomization before Fine-tuning for Cross-domain Few-shot Learning

Cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL), where there are few target samples under extreme differences between source and target domains, has recently attracted huge attention. Recent studies on CD-FSL generally focus on transfer learning based approaches, where a neural network is pre-trained on popular labeled source domain datasets and then transferred to target domain data. Although the labeled datasets may provide suitable initial parameters for the target data, the domain difference between the source and target might hinder fine-tuning on the target domain. This paper proposes a simple yet powerful method that re-randomizes the parameters fitted on the source domain before adapting to the target data. The re-randomization resets source-specific parameters of the source pre-trained model and thus facilitates fine-tuning on the target domain, improving few-shot performance.

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Benchmark Dataset for Precipitation Forecasting by Post-Processing the Numerical Weather Prediction

Precipitation forecasting is an important scientific challenge that has wide-reaching impacts on society. Historically, this challenge has been tackled using numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, grounded on physics-based simulations. Recently, many works have proposed an alternative approach, using end-to-end deep learning (DL) models to replace physics-based NWP models. While these DL methods show improved performance and computational efficiency, they exhibit limitations in long-term forecasting and lack the explainability. In this work, we present a hybrid NWP-DL workflow to fill the gap between standalone NWP and DL approaches. Under this workflow, the outputs of NWP models are fed into a deep neural network, which post-processes the data to yield a refined precipitation forecast. The deep model is trained with supervision, using Automatic Weather Station (AWS) observations as ground-truth labels. This can achieve the best of both worlds, and can even benefit from future improvements in NWP technology. To facilitate study in this direction, we present a novel dataset focused on the Korean Peninsula, termed KoMet (Korea Meteorological Dataset), comprised of NWP outputs and AWS observations. For the NWP model, the Global Data Assimilation and Prediction Systems-Korea Integrated Model (GDAPS-KIM) is utilized. We provide analysis on a comprehensive set of baseline methods aimed at addressing the challenges of KoMet, including the sparsity of AWS observations and class imbalance. To lower the barrier to entry and encourage further study, we also provide an extensive open-source Python package for data processing and model development. Our benchmark data and code are available at https://github.com/osilab-kaist/KoMet-Benchmark-Dataset.

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How to Fine-tune Models with Few Samples: Update, Data Augmentation, and Test-time Augmentation

Most of the recent few-shot learning (FSL) algorithms are based on transfer learning, where a model is pre-trained using a large amount of source data, and the pre-trained model is fine-tuned using a small amount of target data. In transfer learning-based FSL, sophisticated pre-training methods have been widely studied for universal representation. Therefore, it has become more important to utilize the universal representation for downstream tasks, but there are few studies on fine-tuning in FSL. In this paper, we focus on how to transfer pre-trained models to few-shot downstream tasks from the three perspectives: update, data augmentation, and test-time augmentation. First, we compare the two popular update methods, full fine-tuning (i.e., updating the entire network, FT) and linear probing (i.e., updating only a linear classifier, LP). We find that LP is better than FT with extremely few samples, whereas FT outperforms LP as training samples increase. Next, we show that data augmentation cannot guarantee few-shot performance improvement and investigate the effectiveness of data augmentation based on the intensity of augmentation. Finally, we adopt augmentation to both a support set for update (i.e., data augmentation) as well as a query set for prediction (i.e., test-time augmentation), considering support-query distribution shifts, and improve few-shot performance. The code is available at https://github.com/kimyuji/updating_FSL.

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The StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenges+ : Learning of Multi-Stage Tasks and Environmental Factors without Precise Reward Functions

In this paper, we propose a novel benchmark called the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenges+, where agents learn to perform multi-stage tasks and to use environmental factors without precise reward functions. The previous challenges (SMAC) recognized as a standard benchmark of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning are mainly concerned with ensuring that all agents cooperatively eliminate approaching adversaries only through fine manipulation with obvious reward functions. This challenge, on the other hand, is interested in the exploration capability of MARL algorithms to efficiently learn implicit multi-stage tasks and environmental factors as well as micro-control. This study covers both offensive and defensive scenarios. In the offensive scenarios, agents must learn to first find opponents and then eliminate them. The defensive scenarios require agents to use topographic features. For example, agents need to position themselves behind protective structures to make it harder for enemies to attack. We investigate MARL algorithms under SMAC+ and observe that recent approaches work well in similar settings to the previous challenges, but misbehave in offensive scenarios. Additionally, we observe that an enhanced exploration approach has a positive effect on performance but is not able to completely solve all scenarios. This study proposes new directions for future research.

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Risk Perspective Exploration in Distributional Reinforcement Learning

Distributional reinforcement learning demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in continuous and discrete control settings with the features of variance and risk, which can be used to explore. However, the exploration method employing the risk property is hard to find, although numerous exploration methods in Distributional RL employ the variance of return distribution per action. In this paper, we present risk scheduling approaches that explore risk levels and optimistic behaviors from a risk perspective. We demonstrate the performance enhancement of the DMIX algorithm using risk scheduling in a multi-agent setting with comprehensive experiments.

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Revisiting Architecture-aware Knowledge Distillation: Smaller Models and Faster Search

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has recently emerged as a popular method for compressing neural networks. In recent studies, generalized distillation methods that find parameters and architectures of student models at the same time have been proposed. Still, this search method requires a lot of computation to search for architectures and has the disadvantage of considering only convolutional blocks in their search space. This paper introduces a new algorithm, coined as Trust Region Aware architecture search to Distill knowledge Effectively (TRADE), that rapidly finds effective student architectures from several state-of-the-art architectures using trust region Bayesian optimization approach. Experimental results show our proposed TRADE algorithm consistently outperforms both the conventional NAS approach and pre-defined architecture under KD training.

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Demystifying the Base and Novel Performances for Few-shot Class-incremental Learning

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) has addressed challenging real-world scenarios where unseen novel classes continually arrive with few samples. In these scenarios, it is required to develop a model that recognizes the novel classes without forgetting prior knowledge. In other words, FSCIL aims to maintain the base performance and improve the novel performance simultaneously. However, there is little study to investigate the two performances separately. In this paper, we first decompose the entire model into four types of parameters and demonstrate that the tendency of the two performances varies greatly with the updated parameters when the novel classes appear. Based on the analysis, we propose a simple method for FSCIL, coined as NoNPC, which uses normalized prototype classifiers without further training for incremental novel classes. It is shown that our straightforward method has comparable performance with the sophisticated state-of-the-art algorithms.

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Neural Processes with Stochastic Attention: Paying more attention to the context dataset

Neural processes (NPs) aim to stochastically complete unseen data points based on a given context dataset. NPs essentially leverage a given dataset as a context representation to derive a suitable identifier for a novel task. To improve the prediction accuracy, many variants of NPs have investigated context embedding approaches that generally design novel network architectures and aggregation functions satisfying permutation invariant. In this work, we propose a stochastic attention mechanism for NPs to capture appropriate context information. From the perspective of information theory, we demonstrate that the proposed method encourages context embedding to be differentiated from a target dataset, allowing NPs to consider features in a target dataset and context embedding independently. We observe that the proposed method can appropriately capture context embedding even under noisy data sets and restricted task distributions, where typical NPs suffer from a lack of context embeddings. We empirically show that our approach substantially outperforms conventional NPs in various domains through 1D regression, predator-prey model, and image completion. Moreover, the proposed method is also validated by MovieLens-10k dataset, a real-world problem.

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FedBABU: Towards Enhanced Representation for Federated Image Classification

Federated learning has evolved to improve a single global model under data heterogeneity (as a curse) or to develop multiple personalized models using data heterogeneity (as a blessing). However, little research has considered both directions simultaneously. In this paper, we first investigate the relationship between them by analyzing Federated Averaging at the client level and determine that a better federated global model performance does not constantly improve personalization. To elucidate the cause of this personalization performance degradation problem, we decompose the entire network into the body (extractor), which is related to universality, and the head (classifier), which is related to personalization. We then point out that this problem stems from training the head. Based on this observation, we propose a novel federated learning algorithm, coined FedBABU, which only updates the body of the model during federated training (i.e., the head is randomly initialized and never updated), and the head is fine-tuned for personalization during the evaluation process. Extensive experiments show consistent performance improvements and an efficient personalization of FedBABU. The code is available at https://github.com/jhoon-oh/FedBABU.

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Test Score Algorithms for Budgeted Stochastic Utility Maximization

Motivated by recent developments in designing algorithms based on individual item scores for solving utility maximization problems, we study the framework of using test scores, defined as a statistic of observed individual item performance data, for solving the budgeted stochastic utility maximization problem. We extend an existing scoring mechanism, namely the replication test scores, to incorporate heterogeneous item costs as well as item values. We show that a natural greedy algorithm that selects items solely based on their replication test scores outputs solutions within a constant factor of the optimum for a broad class of utility functions. Our algorithms and approximation guarantees assume that test scores are noisy estimates of certain expected values with respect to marginal distributions of individual item values, thus making our algorithms practical and extending previous work that assumes noiseless estimates. Moreover, we show how our algorithm can be adapted to the setting where items arrive in a streaming fashion while maintaining the same approximation guarantee. We present numerical results, using synthetic data and data sets from the Academia.StackExchange Q&A forum, which show that our test score algorithm can achieve competitiveness, and in some cases better performance than a benchmark algorithm that requires access to a value oracle to evaluate function values.

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FINE Samples for Learning with Noisy Labels

Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) become frail when the datasets contain noisy (incorrect) class labels. Robust techniques in the presence of noisy labels can be categorized into two folds: developing noise-robust functions or using noise-cleansing methods by detecting the noisy data. Recently, noise-cleansing methods have been considered as the most competitive noisy-label learning algorithms. Despite their success, their noisy label detectors are often based on heuristics more than a theory, requiring a robust classifier to predict the noisy data with loss values. In this paper, we propose a novel detector for filtering label noise. Unlike most existing methods, we focus on each data's latent representation dynamics and measure the alignment between the latent distribution and each representation using the eigendecomposition of the data gram matrix. Our framework, coined as filtering noisy instances via their eigenvectors (FINE), provides a robust detector with derivative-free simple methods having theoretical guarantees. Under our framework, we propose three applications of the FINE: sample-selection approach, semi-supervised learning approach, and collaboration with noise-robust loss functions. Experimental results show that the proposed methods consistently outperform corresponding baselines for all three applications on various benchmark datasets.

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TornadoAggregate: Accurate and Scalable Federated Learning via the Ring-Based Architecture

Federated learning has emerged as a new paradigm of collaborative machine learning; however, many prior studies have used global aggregation along a star topology without much consideration of the communication scalability or the diurnal property relied on clients' local time variety. In contrast, ring architecture can resolve the scalability issue and even satisfy the diurnal property by iterating nodes without an aggregation. Nevertheless, such ring-based algorithms can inherently suffer from the high-variance problem. To this end, we propose a novel algorithm called TornadoAggregate that improves both accuracy and scalability by facilitating the ring architecture. In particular, to improve the accuracy, we reformulate the loss minimization into a variance reduction problem and establish three principles to reduce variance: Ring-Aware Grouping, Small Ring, and Ring Chaining. Experimental results show that TornadoAggregate improved the test accuracy by up to 26.7% and achieved near-linear scalability.

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Comparing Kullback-Leibler Divergence and Mean Squared Error Loss in Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation (KD), transferring knowledge from a cumbersome teacher model to a lightweight student model, has been investigated to design efficient neural architectures. Generally, the objective function of KD is the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss between the softened probability distributions of the teacher model and the student model with the temperature scaling hyperparameter tau. Despite its widespread use, few studies have discussed the influence of such softening on generalization. Here, we theoretically show that the KL divergence loss focuses on the logit matching when tau increases and the label matching when tau goes to 0 and empirically show that the logit matching is positively correlated to performance improvement in general. From this observation, we consider an intuitive KD loss function, the mean squared error (MSE) between the logit vectors, so that the student model can directly learn the logit of the teacher model. The MSE loss outperforms the KL divergence loss, explained by the difference in the penultimate layer representations between the two losses. Furthermore, we show that sequential distillation can improve performance and that KD, particularly when using the KL divergence loss with small tau, mitigates the label noise. The code to reproduce the experiments is publicly available online at https://github.com/jhoon-oh/kd_data/.

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BOIL: Towards Representation Change for Few-shot Learning

Model Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is one of the most representative of gradient-based meta-learning algorithms. MAML learns new tasks with a few data samples using inner updates from a meta-initialization point and learns the meta-initialization parameters with outer updates. It has recently been hypothesized that representation reuse, which makes little change in efficient representations, is the dominant factor in the performance of the meta-initialized model through MAML in contrast to representation change, which causes a significant change in representations. In this study, we investigate the necessity of representation change for the ultimate goal of few-shot learning, which is solving domain-agnostic tasks. To this aim, we propose a novel meta-learning algorithm, called BOIL (Body Only update in Inner Loop), which updates only the body (extractor) of the model and freezes the head (classifier) during inner loop updates. BOIL leverages representation change rather than representation reuse. This is because feature vectors (representations) have to move quickly to their corresponding frozen head vectors. We visualize this property using cosine similarity, CKA, and empirical results without the head. BOIL empirically shows significant performance improvement over MAML, particularly on cross-domain tasks. The results imply that representation change in gradient-based meta-learning approaches is a critical component.

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MixCo: Mix-up Contrastive Learning for Visual Representation

Contrastive learning has shown remarkable results in recent self-supervised approaches for visual representation. By learning to contrast positive pairs' representation from the corresponding negatives pairs, one can train good visual representations without human annotations. This paper proposes Mix-up Contrast (MixCo), which extends the contrastive learning concept to semi-positives encoded from the mix-up of positive and negative images. MixCo aims to learn the relative similarity of representations, reflecting how much the mixed images have the original positives. We validate the efficacy of MixCo when applied to the recent self-supervised learning algorithms under the standard linear evaluation protocol on TinyImageNet, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100. In the experiments, MixCo consistently improves test accuracy. Remarkably, the improvement is more significant when the learning capacity (e.g., model size) is limited, suggesting that MixCo might be more useful in real-world scenarios. The code is available at: https://github.com/Lee-Gihun/MixCo-Mixup-Contrast.

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Regret in Online Recommendation Systems

This paper proposes a theoretical analysis of recommendation systems in an online setting, where items are sequentially recommended to users over time. In each round, a user, randomly picked from a population of $m$ users, requests a recommendation. The decision-maker observes the user and selects an item from a catalogue of $n$ items. Importantly, an item cannot be recommended twice to the same user. The probabilities that a user likes each item are unknown. The performance of the recommendation algorithm is captured through its regret, considering as a reference an Oracle algorithm aware of these probabilities. We investigate various structural assumptions on these probabilities: we derive for each structure regret lower bounds, and devise algorithms achieving these limits. Interestingly, our analysis reveals the relative weights of the different components of regret: the component due to the constraint of not presenting the same item twice to the same user, that due to learning the chances users like items, and finally that arising when learning the underlying structure.

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SIPA: A Simple Framework for Efficient Networks

With the success of deep learning in various fields and the advent of numerous Internet of Things (IoT) devices, it is essential to lighten models suitable for low-power devices. In keeping with this trend, MicroNet Challenge, which is the challenge to build efficient models from the view of both storage and computation, was hosted at NeurIPS 2019. To develop efficient models through this challenge, we propose a framework, coined as SIPA, consisting of four stages: Searching, Improving, Pruning, and Accelerating. With the proposed framework, our team, OSI AI, compressed 334x the parameter storage and 357x the math operation compared to WideResNet-28-10 and took 4th place in the CIFAR-100 track at MicroNet Challenge 2019 with the top 10% highly efficient computation. Our source code is available from https://github.com/Lee-Gihun/MicroNet_OSI-AI.

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