Dr Cuong Nguyen

We introduce a new and rigorously-formulated PAC-Bayes meta-learning algorithm that solves few-shot learning. Our proposed method extends the PAC-Bayes framework from a single-task setting to the meta-learning multiple-task setting to upper-bound the error evaluated on any, even unseen, tasks and samples. We also propose a generative-based approach to estimate the posterior of task-specific model parameters more expressively compared to the usual assumption based on a multivariate normal distribution with a diagonal covariance matrix. We show that the models trained with our proposed meta-learning algorithm are well-calibrated and accurate, with state-of-the-art calibration errors while still being competitive on classification results on few-shot classification (mini-ImageNet and tiered-ImageNet) and regression (multi-modal task-distribution regression) benchmarks.

Deep learning faces a formidable challenge when handling noisy labels, as models tend to overfit samples affected by label noise. This challenge is further compounded by the presence of instance-dependent noise (IDN), a realistic form of label noise arising from ambiguous sample information. To address IDN, Label Noise Learning (LNL) incorporates a sample selection stage to differentiate clean and noisy-label samples. This stage uses an arbitrary criterion and a pre-defined curriculum that initially selects most samples as noisy and gradually decreases this selection rate during training. Such curriculum is sub-optimal since it does not consider the actual label noise rate in the training set. This paper addresses this issue with a new noise-rate estimation method that is easily integrated with most state-of-the-art (SOTA) LNL methods to produce a more effective curriculum. Synthetic and real-world benchmarks’ results demonstrate that integrating our approach with SOTA LNL methods improves accuracy in most cases. (Code is available at https://github.com/arpit2412/NoiseRateLearning. Supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through grant EP/Y018036/1 and the Australian Research Council (ARC) through grant FT190100525.)

A new approach to optical fiber sensing is proposed and demonstrated that allows for specific measurement even in the presence of strong noise from undesired environmental perturbations. A deep neural network model is trained to statistically learn the relation of the complex optical interference output from a multimode optical fiber (MMF) with respect to a measurand of interest while discriminating the noise. This technique negates the need to carefully shield against, or compensate for, undesired perturbations, as is often the case for traditional optical fiber sensors. This is achieved entirely in software without any fiber postprocessing fabrication steps or specific packaging required, such as fiber Bragg gratings or specialized coatings. The technique is highly generalizable, whereby the model can be trained to identify any measurand of interest within any noisy environment provided the measurand affects the optical path length of the MMF's guided modes. We demonstrate the approach using a sapphire crystal optical fiber for temperature sensing under strong noise induced by mechanical vibrations, showing the power of the technique not only to extract sensing information buried in strong noise but to also enable sensing using traditionally challenging exotic materials. (C) 2021 Chinese Laser Press

Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 27-30 July 2021 We propose probabilistic task modelling -- a generative probabilistic model for collections of tasks used in meta-learning. The proposed model combines variational auto-encoding and latent Dirichlet allocation to model each task as a mixture of Gaussian distribution in an embedding space. Such modelling provides an explicit representation of a task through its task-theme mixture. We present an efficient approximation inference technique based on variational inference method for empirical Bayes parameter estimation. We perform empirical evaluations to validate the task uncertainty and task distance produced by the proposed method through correlation diagrams of the prediction accuracy on testing tasks. We also carry out experiments of task selection in meta-learning to demonstrate how the task relatedness inferred from the proposed model help to facilitate meta-learning algorithms.

Meta-training has been empirically demonstrated to be the most effective pre-training method for few-shot learning of medical image classifiers (i.e., classifiers modeled with small training sets). However, the effectiveness of meta-training relies on the availability of a reasonable number of hand-designed classification tasks, which are costly to obtain, and consequently rarely available. In this paper, we propose a new method to unsupervisedly design a large number of classification tasks to meta-train medical image classifiers. We evaluate our method on a breast dynamically contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) data set that has been used to benchmark few-shot training methods of medical image classifiers. Our results show that the proposed unsupervised task design to meta-train medical image classifiers builds a pre-trained model that, after fine-tuning, produces better classification results than other unsupervised and supervised pre-training methods, and competitive results with respect to meta-training that relies on hand-designed classification tasks.

IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2020, pp. 3090-3100 We introduce a new, rigorously-formulated Bayesian meta-learning algorithm that learns a probability distribution of model parameter prior for few-shot learning. The proposed algorithm employs a gradient-based variational inference to infer the posterior of model parameters to a new task. Our algorithm can be applied to any model architecture and can be implemented in various machine learning paradigms, including regression and classification. We show that the models trained with our proposed meta-learning algorithm are well calibrated and accurate, with state-of-the-art calibration and classification results on two few-shot classification benchmarks (Omniglot and Mini-ImageNet), and competitive results in a multi-modal task-distribution regression.

Medical image analysis models are not guaranteed to generalize beyond the image and task distributions used for training. This transfer-learning problem has been intensively investigated by the field, where several solutions have been proposed, such as pretraining using computer vision datasets, unsupervised pretraining using pseudo-labels produced by clustering techniques, self-supervised pretraining using contrastive learning with data augmentation, or pretraining based on image reconstruction. Despite fairly successful in practice, such transfer-learning approaches cannot offer the theoretical guarantees enabled by meta learning (ML) approaches which explicitly optimize an objective function that can improve the transferability of a learnt model to new image and task distributions. In this chapter, we present and discuss our recently proposed meta learning algorithms that can transfer learned models between different training and testing image and task distributions, where our main contribution lies in the way we design and sample classification and segmentation tasks to train medical image analysis models.