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Title: SOSELETO: A Unified Approach to Transfer Learning and Training with Noisy Labels

Paper content:
We present SOSELETO (SOurce SELEction for Target Optimization), a new method for exploiting a source dataset to solve a classification problem on a target dataset.
SOSELETO is based on the following simple intuition: some source examples are more informative than others for the target problem.
To capture this intuition, source samples are each given weights; these weights are solved for jointly with the source and target classification problems via a bilevel optimization scheme.
The target therefore gets to choose the source samples which are most informative for its own classification task.
Furthermore, the bilevel nature of the optimization acts as a kind of regularization on the target, mitigating overfitting.
SOSELETO may be applied to both classic transfer learning, as well as the problem of training on datasets with noisy labels; we show state of the art results on both of these problems.
Deep learning has made possible many remarkable successes, leading to state of the art algorithms in computer vision, speech and audio, and natural language processing.
A key ingredient in this success has been the availability of large datasets.
While such datasets are common in certain settings, in other scenarios this is not true.
Examples of the latter include "specialist" scenarios, for instance a dataset which is entirely composed of different species of tree; and medical imaging, in which datasets on the order of hundreds to a thousand are common.A natural question is then how one may apply the techniques of deep learning within these relatively data-poor regimes.
A standard approach involves the concept of transfer learning: one uses knowledge gleaned from the source (data-rich regime), and transfers it over to the target (data-poor regime).
One of the most common versions of this approach involves a two-stage technique.
In the first stage, a network is trained on the source classification task; in the second stage, this network is adapted to the target classification task.
There are two variants for this second stage.
In feature extraction (e.g. ), only the parameters of the last layer (i.e. the classifier) are allowed to adapt to the target classification task; whereas in fine-tuning (e.g. BID12 ), the parameters of all of the network layers (i.e. both the features/representation and the classifier) are allowed to adapt.
The idea is that by pre-training the network on the source data, a useful feature representation may be learned, which may then be recycled -either partially or completely -for the target regime.
This two-stage approach has been quite popular, and works reasonably well on a variety of applications.Despite this success, we claim that the two-stage approach misses an essential insight: some source examples are more informative than others for the target classification problem.
For example, if the source is a large set of natural images and the target consists exclusively of cars, then we might expect that source images of cars, trucks, and motorcycles might be more relevant for the target task than, say, spoons.
However, this example is merely illustrative; in practice, the source and target datasets may have no overlapping classes at all.
As a result, we don't know a priori which source examples will be important.
Thus, we propose to learn this source filtering as part of an end-to-end training process.The resulting algorithm is SOSELETO: SOurce SELEction for Target Optimization.
Each training sample in the source dataset is given a weight, corresponding to how important it is.
The shared source/target representation is then optimized by means of a bilevel optimization.
In the interior level, the source minimizes its classification loss with respect to the representation parameters, for fixed values of the sample weights.
In the exterior level, the target minimizes its classification loss with respect to both the source sample weights and its own classification layer.
The sample weights implicitly control the representation through the interior level.
The target therefore gets to choose the source samples which are most informative for its own classification task.
Furthermore, the bilevel nature of the optimization acts as a kind of regularization on the target, mitigating overfitting, as the target does not directly control the representation parameters.
Finally, note that the entire processtraining of the shared representation, target classifier, and source weights -happens simultaneously.We pause here to note that the general philosophy behind SOSELETO is related to the literature on instance reweighting for domain adaptation, see for example BID32 .
However, there is a crucial difference between SOSELETO and this literature, which is related to the difference between domain adaptation and more general transfer learning.
Domain adaptation is concerned with the situation in which there is either full overlap between the source and target label sets; or in some more recent work BID43 , partial but significant overlap.
Transfer learning, by contrast, refers to the more general situation in which there may be zero overlap between label sets, or possibly very minimal overlap.
(For example, if the source consists of natural images and the target of medical images.)
The instance reweighting literature is concerned with domain adaptation; the techniques are therefore relevant to the case in which source and target have the same labels.
SOSELETO is quite different: it makes no such assumptions, and is therefore a more general approach which can be applied to both "pure" transfer learning, in which there is no overlap between source and target label sets, as well as domain adaptation.
(Note also a further distinction with domain adaptation: the target is often -though not always -taken to be unlabelled in domain adaptation. This is not the case for our setting of transfer learning.)Above, we have illustrated how SOSELETO may be applied to the problem of transfer learning.
However, the same algorithm can be applied to the problem of training with noisy labels.
Concretely, we assume that there is a large noisy dataset, as well as a much smaller clean dataset; the latter can be constructed cheaply through careful hand-labelling, given its small size.
Then if we take the source to be the large noisy dataset, and the target to the small clean dataset, SOSELETO can be applied to the problem.
The algorithm will assign high weights to samples with correct labels and low weights to those with incorrect labels, thereby implicitly denoising the source, and allowing for an accurate classifier to be trained.The remainder of the paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 presents related work.
Section 3 presents the SOSELETO algorithm, deriving descent equations as well as convergence properties of the bilevel optimization.
Section 4 presents results of experiments on both transfer learning as well as training with noisy labels.
Section 5 concludes.
We have presented SOSELETO, a technique for exploiting a source dataset to learn a target classification task.
This exploitation takes the form of joint training through bilevel optimization, in which the source loss is weighted by sample, and is optimized with respect to the network parameters; while the target loss is optimized with respect to these weights and its own classifier.
We have derived an efficient algorithm for performing this bilevel optimization, through joint descent in the network parameters and the source weights, and have analyzed the algorithm's convergence properties.
We have empirically shown the effectiveness of the algorithm on both learning with label noise, as well as transfer learning problems.
An interesting direction for future research involves incorporating an additional domain alignment term into SOSELETO, in the case where the source and target dataset have overlapping labels.
We note that SOSELETO is architecture-agnostic, and thus may be easily deployed.
Furthermore, although we have focused on classification tasks, the technique is general and may be applied to other learning tasks within computer vision; this is an important direction for future research.

assistant: text: Learning with limited training data by exploiting "helpful" instances from a rich data source.