Stochastic Deep Networks with Linear Competing Units for Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning

1 INTRODUCTION . When we train machine learning models on problems with limited amounts of training data , we can not usually get good predictive performance ( Lai , 2019 ; Sculley et al. , 2015 ) . This comes in contrast to the human ability to quickly derive information from a range of different tasks , and then adapt to a new task with limited available new examples ( Kühl et al. , 2020 ; Castro et al. , 2008 ) . In essence , this capability of the mind of learning how to learn ( Black et al. , 2006 ) has inspired researchers to investigate the concept of Meta-Learning ( ML ) ( Lake et al. , 2017 ; Vilalta & Drissi , 2002 ; Wang et al. , 2016 ; Zoph & Le , 2017 ; Flennerhag et al. , 2020 ; Lake et al. , 2015 ; HutsebautBuysse et al. , 2019 ) . There is a large variety of deep learning methods for ML ( Finn et al. , 2019 ; Baik et al. , 2020 ; Andrychowicz et al. , 2016 ) . Specifically , Finn et al . ( 2017 ) presented the Model-Agnostic MetaLearning ( MAML ) algorithm that enables tuning the parameters of a trained network to quickly learn a new task with only a few gradient updates . To get away with the entailed second-order computations , which are expensive , several researchers proposed appropriate first-order approximations for MAML ; such works are the First-Order MAML ( FOMAML ) of Finn et al . ( 2017 ) and the Reptile algorithm of Nichol et al . ( 2018 ) . Recently , several researchers have also considered Bayesian inference-driven methods for deep learning ML , extending upon older works built for conventional machine learning approaches ( Yoon et al. , 2018 ; Finn et al. , 2018 ; Ravi & Beatson , 2019 ; Patacchiola et al. , 2020 ; Zou & Lu , 2020 ; Grant et al. , 2018 ; Chen et al. , 2020 ) . This work proposes a different regard toward improving generalization capacity for deep networks in the context of ML . Specifically , our proposed approach relies on the following main concepts : • The concept of sparse learned representations . For the first time in the literature of deep network-driven ML , we employ a mechanism that inherently learns to extract sparse data representations . This consists in replacing standard unit nonlinearities ( e.g. , ReLU ) with a unit competition mechanism . Specifically , ( linear ) units are organized into blocks . Presented with some input , the units within a block engage in a competition process with only one winner . The outputs of all units except for the winner are zeroed out ; the output of the winner retains its computed value ( local winner takes-all , LWTA , architecture ) . • The concept of stochastic representations . We establish a stochastic formulation for the previously described competition process . Specifically , we postulate that , within a block of competing units , winner is selected via sampling from an appropriate Categorical posterior . The corresponding winning probability of each unit is proportional to its linear computation ( thus depending on the layer input ) . Via this competition process , we yield stochastic representations from network layers , that is representations that may change each time we present to the network layer exactly the same input . Based on the results from existing approaches , we posit that the proposed treatment of the ML problem , which combines learned representation sparsity and stochasticity , will be extremely beneficial to the deep learning community . We dub our approach Stochastic LWTA for ML ( StochLWTA-ML ) . We perform a variational Bayes treatment of the proposed model . We opt for a full Bayesian treatment , by also handling network weights as latent variables . That is , we elect to impose an appropriate prior over the network weights and fit approximate ( variational ) posteriors . We evaluate our approach on a number of standard benchmarks in the field , namely Omniglot ( Lake et al. , 2017 ) , Mini-Imagenet ( Vinyals et al. , 2016 ) and CIFAR-100 ( Krizhevsky , 2009 ) . We show that our approach offers a variety of advantages over the current state-of-the-art methods , namely : ( i ) incurring reduced predictive error rate compared to the currently state-of-the-art methods in the field ; ( ii ) obtaining this performance with networks that comprise one order of magnitude less trainable parameters , and therefore give rise to better computational efficiency and imposed memory footprint . The remainder of this paper is organized as follows : In Section 2 , we briefly review related work . Section 3 introduces our approach and provides the related training and prediction algorithms . In Section 4 , we perform a thorough experimental evaluation of StochLWTA-ML , and compare our findings to the current state-of-the-art . In the final Section 5 , we end up with the conclusions of our work , and suggest lines of further research . 2 RELATED WORK . 2.1 LWTA LAYERS IN DEEP LEARNING . LWTA layers are not new in the field of deep learning ; see , e.g. , Srivastava et al . ( 2013 ) . Although not much work has been pursued along these lines , the recent works of Panousis et al . ( 2019 ; 2021 ) and Voskou et al . ( 2021 ) have spurred some fresh interest in the field . These works have presented alternative implementations of the basic concepts of LWTA units in the context of diverse deep network architectures . Specifically , Panousis et al . ( 2019 ) propose a stochastic LWTA formulation which is founded upon the Indian Buffet process ( IBP ) prior , borrowed from nonparametric statistics ; they use this architecture to effect data-driven network compression . In their follow-up paper ( Panousis et al. , 2021 ) , they exploit the same technique to train adversarially-robust deep networks . On the other hand , Voskou et al . ( 2021 ) consider a different incarnation of stochastic LWTA architectures , which relies on sampling the winner from a Categorical posterior , driven from the layer input . This layer architecture is used to replace dense ReLU layers in Transformer networks ; it is then shown to yield important benefits in a Sign-Language Translation benchmark . This paper is different from the previous works in various ways : ( i ) stochasticity does not stem from utilization of the IBP ; we rather adopt an approach similar to Voskou et al . ( 2021 ) ; ( ii ) we do not use the proposed architecture as a replacement for a specific type of layer in a greater network architecture ( Transformer ) that remains largely unchanged ; instead , we build completely new networks using these layers ; ( iii ) we perform a full Bayesian treatment , by treating network weights as random variables ; we do not employ this construction as a means of compressing the weights at prediction time , contrary to Panousis et al . ( 2019 ) , Voskou et al . ( 2021 ) ; instead , we perform weight sampling at prediction time as a means of improving accuracy ; and ( iv ) for the first time , we examine how these principles perform in the context of deep network-driven ML . Note that , apart from LWTA architectures , other data-driven sparsity models have also been proposed recently , e.g . Lee et al . ( 2018 ) , Kessler et al . ( 2021 ) . However , none of these have been developed or evaluated in the context of an ML setting . 2.2 MODEL-AGNOSTIC META-LEARNING . ML ( Schmidhuber , 1987 ) , also referred to as learning to learn ( Thrun & Pratt , 1998 ) , has the goal of obtaining machine learning models that can learn new tasks with limited availability of data , and via only a few gradient steps , by capitalizing upon information stemming from previously learned tasks . In this context , Finn et al . ( 2017 ) suggested a model-agnostic algorithm for ML , that can be applied to any model trained via gradient descent . The introduced MAML algorithm initializes model parameters in a way that can be quickly adapted to several types of new tasks . Let us consider a model with parameters θ and a parametric form fθ . When the model is adapting to an unseen task Ti , sampled from the distribution over tasks P ( T ) , MAML initially runs few steps of inner-loop gradient descent that yields the task-specific parameter set θ′i = θ − α∇θLTi ( fθ ) ( 1 ) where α is the step size hyperparameter and LTi denotes the loss on the task Ti . Subsequently , training proceeds to optimize the function fθ′i with respect to the model parameters θ . Assuming that the batch of tasks has size M , we can define the targeted meta-objective as : Lmeta ( θ ) = M∑ i=1 LTi ( fθ′i ) = M∑ i=1 LTi ( fθ−α∇θLTi ( fθ ) ) . ( 2 ) Optimization of this meta-objective over θ yields the outer-loop update : θ ← θ − β∇θ M∑ i=1 LTi ( fθ′i ) ( 3 ) where β stands for the outer-loop learning rate . Finally , as MAML involves expensive computations stemming from the second-order updates of Eqs . ( 2 ) and ( 3 ) , Finn et al . ( 2017 ) developed a first-order approximation that reduces the outer-loop update ( 3 ) to : θ ← θ − β M∑ i=1 ∇θ′iLTi ( fθ′i ) ( 4 ) In other words , FOMAML computes the gradients with respect to the updated parameter values θ′i , but omits the gradients of θ′i with respect to θ . In a different fashion , the Reptile algorithm of Nichol et al . ( 2018 ) disposes the costly secondorder updates of MAML by : ( i ) applying some inner-loop gradient descent steps using ( 1 ) ; and ( ii ) suggesting a new outer-loop that simply subtracts the parameters , θ , from the updates θ′i ( instead of computing derivatives ) : θ ← θ + β ( θ′i − θ ) . ( 5 ) 3 PROPOSED APPROACH . 3.1 ARCHITECTURE . Let us denote as x ∈ RI an input vector presented to a dense ReLU layer of a conventional deep neural network , with corresponding weights matrix W ∈ RI×O . The output of the layer is the vector y ∈ RO and is fed to the subsequent layer . In our approach , a ReLU unit is replaced by J competing linear units , organized in one block ; in the following , we denote with R the number of blocks in a layer . The input x is now presented to each block through weights that are organized into a three-dimensional matrix W ∈ RI×R×J . Then , the j-th competing unit within r-th block computes the sum ∑I i=1 ( wi , r , j ) · xi . Competition means that , of the J units in the block , one unit ( the ” winner ” ) will present its linear computation to the next layer ; the rest will present zero values . Traditionally in the literature , the winner unit is selected to be the unit with greatest linear computation . Recently , stochastic competition principles have been considered , e.g . Panousis et al . ( 2019 ; 2021 ) , Voskou et al . ( 2021 ) . Let us denote as y ∈ RR·J the output of an LWTA layer ; this is composed of R subvectors yr ∈ RJ and is sparse , since all units except for one , in each block , yield zero values . Let us introduce the discrete latent indicator vector ξ ∈ one hot ( J ) R to denote the winner units in the R blocks that constitute a considered stochastic LWTA layer . This vector comprises R component subvectors , where each component entails one non-zero value at the index position that corresponds to the winner unit of the respective LWTA block . On this basis , the output y of the stochastic LWTA layer ’ s ( r · j ) -th component yr , j is defined as : yr , j = ξr , j I∑ i=1 ( wi , r , j ) · xi ∈ R ( 6 ) where we denote as ξr , j the j-th component of ξr , and ξr ∈ one hot ( J ) holds the r-th subvector of ξ . In Eq . ( 6 ) , we postulate that the latent winner indicator variables are drawn from a Categorical distribution which is proportional to the intermediate linear computation that each unit performs . Therefore , the stronger the linearity the higher the chance of the unit winning the stochastic competition within its block . In detail , we postulate that , a posteriori , the winner distributions yield : q ( ξr ) = Categorical ( ξr|softmax ( I∑ i=1 [ wi , r , j ] J j=1 · xi ) ) ( 7 ) where [ wi , r , j ] Jj=1 denotes the vector concatenation of the set { wi , r , j } Jj=1 . A graphical illustration of the proposed stochastic architecture is provided in Fig . 1 . As a network composed of such ( StochLWTA ) layers entails latent variables ξ , we need to perform a Bayesian network treatment to perform effective parameter training . We opt for a ( approximate ) stochastic gradient variational Bayes treatment ( Kingma & Welling , 2014 ) , for scalability purposes . This means that the used objective function takes the form of an evidence lower-bound ( ELBO ) objective , as we describe next . In our work , we take one step further : we also elect to infer a posterior density over the network weightsW , as opposed to obtaining point-estimates . This results in a second source of stochasticity for our approach , which may further increase its generalization capacity under uncertain conditions arising from limited training data availability . Note that the use of these posteriors is totally different from Panousis et al . ( 2019 ) and Voskou et al . ( 2021 ) : therein , posterior variance is used for compressing posterior mean bit-precision ; then , predictions are performed using only the compressed posterior mean . Instead , in our work we sample multiple times from the trained weight posterior and perform model averaging ( in a Bayesian sense ) , as a means of increasing generalization capacity . We postulate : q ( vec ( W ) ) = N ( vec ( W ) |µ , diag ( σ2 ) ) ( 8 ) where ψ ≜ { µ , σ2 } are the means and variances of the Gaussian weight posteriors , respectively .

Summary: In this paper, the authors proposed to replace the classical activation units in MAML with stochastic local winner-takes-all (LWTA) units. The authors argued the biologically motivated LWTA units would lead to better performance in the few-shot setting where the support set in the target task is small, in which case the embedding representation of the target task would be noisy. The authors framed their proposal in the Bayesian setting, and proposed algorithms to estimate the distribution parameters.