Unsupervised Progressive Learning and the STAM Architecture
Authors: James Smith
Constantine Dovrolis
Venue:  (2020)
Keywords: continual learning
unsupervised learning
online learning

Abstract: We  first pose  the  Unsupervised  Progressive  Learning  (UPL)  problem:   learning salient representations from a non-stationary stream of unlabeled data in which the number of object classes increases with time.  If some limited labeled data is also available, those representations can be associated with specific classes, thus enabling classification tasks.  To solve the UPL problem, we propose an architecture that involves an online clustering module, called Self-Taught Associative Memory (STAM). Layered hierarchies of STAM modules learn based on a combination of online clustering, novelty detection, forgetting outliers, and storing only prototypical representations rather than specific examples. The goal of this paper is to introduce the UPL problem, describe the STAM architecture, and evaluate the latter in the UPL context. 

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UNSUPERVISED PROGRESSIVE LEARNING AND THE STAM ARCHITECTURE
Anonymous authors Paper under double-blind review
ABSTRACT
We first pose the Unsupervised Progressive Learning (UPL) problem: learning salient representations from a non-stationary stream of unlabeled data which the number of object classes increases with time. If some limited labeled data is also available, those representations can be associated with specific classes, thus enabling classification tasks. To solve the UPL problem, we propose an archi- tecture that involves an online clustering module, called Self-Taught Associative Memory (STAM). Layered hierarchies STAM modules learn based on a combi- nation of online clustering, novelty detection, forgetting outliers, and storing only prototypical representations rather than specific examples. The goal of this paper is introduce the UPL problem, describe the STAM architecture, and evaluate the latter in the UPL context.
INTRODUCTION
We start by posing a challenging problem, referred to as Unsupervised Progressive Learning (UPL) (see Figure 1). In the UPL problem, the agent observes sequence (or stream) of unlabeled data vectors {x1 with X₁ E R Each vector X₁ is associated with a class k(xz) and the vectors of class & follow distribution Fs. The class information, however, hidden from the agent. Occasionally, the agent may be given a small number of labeled examples of one or more classes. These examples are meant to associate "names" (i.e., class labels) with the learned representations enabling classification tasks in which the set of output classes stays constant ("persistent tasks") or increases (" ("expanding tasks").
We denote as L, the set of class labels the agent has seen up to time f. This set is gradually increasing, meaning that the agent progressively learns about more classes. In the UPL context, the goal is to learn in online manner salient representations of the unlabeled input stream so that the agent can, at any point in time t, classify a given set of test data based on the set of classes L; it knows about so far. We require online learner for pragmatic reasons: it would not be possible or desirable in practice to store and/or process all previously seen data and learn a new model offline every time there is change in T., The online nature of the problem constraints the solution space: methods that require multiple passes over the training data and/or randomly sampled minibatches are not applicable in the UPL context.
We assume that the distribution F' associated with class k may also change with time - but this is slow and gradual process that an online learner can track changes in Fg. Abrupt changes would require that the agent forgets what was previously learned about class k- we do not consider that possibility in this paper.
We do not add any further constraints on the structure of the data sequence. For instance, it is possi- ble that the learner first observes a labeled example class at time (and so k T.+) even though it has not seen any unlabeled examples of that class prior to t- this would require transfer-learning capability so that the learner can classify & based on representations has previously learned from other classes. Another interesting scenario is when the unlabeled data arrive in separated class phases, which are unknown to the agent, so that each phase includes data from only few new classes this is challenging task from the perspective of catastrophic forgetting because the learner should not forget previously learned classes for which it does not see any new examples. We consider such UPL scenarios in Section 3.

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Unsupervised Representation Learning
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unlabeled classes Fan
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Associating Representations with Labels
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classify (9,3)
classify (0,
classify (9,1)
classsfy (9,
classiey (9,3)
classify (3,5)
classify classify classify (0,1...7) (0,t...9) (0,1) (4,9)
classify
Figure 1: In the UPL problem, the agent observes a stream of unlabeled data in which the number of classes far, without
increases with time. The agent has Icarn representations that distinguish the classes catastrophic forgetting and without the replay of previously seen data. If some limited labeled data also available, the agent can associate the learned representations with classes, enabling persistent and expanding classification tasks.
It is plausible that UPL represents how animals learn, at least in the case of perceptual learning (Goldstone, 1998): they observe their environment, which is predominantly "unlabeled", and so they learn to gradually distinguish between a growing number of different object categories even when they do have way yet to name them. Later, some of those classes may be associated with words (in the case of humans) (Ashby and Maddox, 2005), or more generally, with specific taste, odor, reward, fear, etc. (Watanabe el al., 2001).
1.1 UPL VERSUS SIMILAR LEARNING PARADIGMS
1. Unsupervised and self-supervised learning: There have been great strides recently in learn- ing data representations (Bengio et al., 2013) via clustering (Caron et al., 2018), generative mod- els (Jiang et al., 2017; Eslami et al., 2016; Kosiorek et al., 2018; 2019), and information theory (Hjelm et al., 2019; Ji al., 2019). While these methods can learn representations without data labels, they still require prior information about the number of classes present in given dataset (to set the number of cluster centroids or class outputs) and, in the continual learning case, they suffer from catastrophic forgetting unless
form of replay is used.
2. Few-shot learning (FSL) and Meta-learning: Such methods attempt to recognize object classes seen training set with only a single (or handful) of labeled examples (Fei-Fei et al., 2006; Snell et al., 2017; Finn et al., 2017; Ren et al., 2018). FSL requires labeled data to learn good rep- resentations. whereas UPL only requires labeled data to associate already learned representations with new classes.
Semi-supervised learning (SSL): SSL addresses scarcity of available labeled data for model training by leveraging large amounts of unlabeled training data to boost performance (Springenberg, 2015; Oliver el al., 2018; Miyato et al., 2018; Kingma al., 2014). SSL. requires both labeled and unlabeled data during the training process and in most cases it needs to store and process the labeled data repeatedly during the training process.
4: Continual learning (CL): Most CL methods rely on labeled data and knowledge of which tasks are learned or performed at any point in time(Hsu et al., 2018; Parisi et al., 2019; Kemker et al., 2018: van de Ven and Tolias, 2019; Lopez-Paz and Ranzato, 2017). Further, the most effec- tive CL mechanisms address catastrophic forgetting using stored examples or generative replay (Gepperth and Karaoguz, 2017; Shin el al., 2017).
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5. Transfer learning (TL): Such methods require pre-training on a large labeled dataset and so they are not applicable to UPL (Yosinski et al., 2014).
6. Progressive learning/networks: In (labeled) progressive learning, supervised classification model must be able to learn in an online manner without prior knowledge of the number of classes (Venkatesan and Er, 2016; Rusu et al., 2016). However, the existing approaches in this area require supervision when a new class appears, and they suffer from catastrophic forgetting if they do not see data from previous class for long periods of time.
2 STAM ARCHITECTURE AND LEARNING ALGORITHM
The learning approach that we pursue in this work is based on online clustering, novelty detec- tion, two separate short-term and long-term memories, and storing only prototypical representations rather than specific examples, In the following, we describe the STAM architecture as a sequence of its seven major components.
The notation summarized in Appendix A. The image preprocessing pipeline is minimal and is de- scribed in Appendix B. The reasons we decided to not pursue deep learning approach are discussed in Appendix C.
1. Hierarchy of increasing receptive fields: An input vector x, E R (an image in all subsequent examples) is analyzed through hierarchy of A layers. Instead of neurons or hidden-layer -ayer units, each layer consists of STAM units in its simplest form a STAM unit functions as an online clustering module. Each STAM processes one Pt X Pt patch (subvector) of the input at that layer. The patches are overlapping, with small stride (set to one pixel in our experiments), to accomplish translation invariance (similar to CNNs). The patch dimension it increases in higher layers the idea is that the first layer learns the smallest and most elementary patterns while the top layer learns the largest and most complex patterns.
2. Online clustering:
Every patch of each layer is clustered, in an online manner, to a set of centroids. These time- varying centroids form the prototypical patterns that the STAM architecture gradually learns at that layer. All STAM units of layer share the same set of centroids Ct(t) - again for translation invariance. Given the m m'th input patch X1,m at layer the nearest centroid of C selected for X1, is
Cij = arg min d(xi.m c)
(1)
cECi
where mm c) is the Euclidean distance between the patch X1.m and centroid c.2 The selected centroid is updated based on learning rate parameter a as follows:
Cij a X + (1 (11-a)) a)Ccj, 0<a<1
higher a value makes the learning process faster but less predictable. We do not use a decreasing value of a because the goal is to keep learning in a non-stationary environment rather than conver- gence to a stable centroid. If the centroid Cıj is selected by more than one patches of the same input, the centroid is updated based on the closest patch to that centroid.
An online clustering algorithm that is similar to our approach (and asymptotically equivalent to k- k-means) can be implemented with simple recurrent neural network of excitatory and inhibitory spiking neurons using strictly Hebbian learning, as shown recently (Pehlevan el al., 2017).
3. Novelty detection:
When input patch X1, m layer I is significantly different than all centroids at that layer (i.e., its distance to the nearest centroid a statistical outlier), a new centroid is created in Cj based on x..m We refer this event Novelty Detection (ND). This function is necessary so that the architecture can learn centroids associated with new classes after they appear in the unlabeled data stream.
To do so, we estimate in an online manner the distribution of the Euclidean distance between input patches and their nearest centroid (separately for each layer). We sample a randomly chosen patch from each input vector, only considering the last 1000 inputs. The novelty detection threshold at layer I is denoted by D, and it is defined as the 95- th percentile (6 = 0.95) of the distance distribution.
We drop the time index t from this point on but is still implicd that the centroids are dynamically learned over time.
We have also experimented with the I.1 distance metric with only minimal differences.
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E2
centroid update
time
new
new
*
STM hippocampus
(limited capacity)
*
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centroids increases when 2,3 first appear time f
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centroids
Figure 2: A hypothetical pool of STM and LTM centroids visualized at seven time instants. From la to fa. centroid is moved from STM to LTM after it has been selected / times. At time fa, unlabeled examples from classes '2' and '3' first appear, triggering novelty detection and centroids created in STM. These centroids are moved into LTM by La. From La ig. pool of LTM centroids remains the same because no new classes are seen. The pool of STM centroids keeps changing when we receive "outlier" inputs of previously seen classes. Those centroids are later replaced Seasst-Reeently policy) due the limited capacity of the STM pool.
Dual-memory organization: New centroids are stored temporarily in a Short- Memory (STM) of limited capacity A (separate for each layer). Every time centroid is selected as the nearest neighbor an input patch, it is updated based on (2). If an STM centroid Cı,j is selected $ij > 0 times, it is copied the Long-Term Memory (LTM) for that layer. We refer this event as memory consolidation. The LTM has (practically) unlimited capacity and the learning rate is much zero).
smaller (in our experiments,
This memory organization inspired by the Complementary Learning Systems framework (Kumaran al., 2016), where the STM role is played by the hippocampus and the LTM role by the cortex. This dual-memory scheme is necessary to distinguish between infrequently seen patterns that can be forgotten, and new patterns that are frequently seen after they first appear.
We initialize the pool of STM centroids at each layer using randomly sampled patches from the unlabeled stream (a single patch from each image maximize diversity).
When the STM pool of centroids at layer is full, the introduction of a new centroid (created through novelty detection) causes the removal of an earlier centroid. We use the Reast-Recently Used (LRU) policy to remove atypical centroids that have not been recently selected by any input. Figure illustrates this dual-memory organization.
5. Associating centroids with classes: Suppose that we have seen some labeled examples (t) from set classes L(t) up to time the UPL context, we only use such labeled examples to associate existing LTM centroids at time (learned strictly from unlabeled data) with the set of classes Lt)).
Given labeled example of class k. suppose that there is patch in that example for which the nearest centroid is c. That patch contributes the following association between centroid e and class k:
fx,c(k) -
where D, a normalization constant (calculated as the average distance between input patches and centroids).

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Layer Votes
G
G
Layer
Layer 2
Layer 3 '6'
vote:
vote:
6
Patch Votes (Sampled)
Figure 3: An example of the classification process. Every patch (at any layer) that selects a CIN centroid votes for the single class that has the highest association with. These patch votes are first aggregated at each layer. The final inference is the class with the highest vote across all layers.
The class-associaticn vector ge between centroid and any class k is computed aggregating all such associations, across all labeled examples in Xy:
Exex((M) fxx(kk)
ge(k) EverO (x. 1=.
Note that Σx (c))==1
6. Class informative centroids: If centroid is associated with only one class k (g) = 1), only labeled examples of that class select that centroid. At the other extreme, if centroid is equally likely to be selected by examples of any labeled class, (ge(k) As 1/ L(t)), the selection of that centroid does provide any significant information for the class of the corresponding input.
We identify the centroids that are Class INformative (CIN) as those that are associated with at least one class more than expected by chance. Specifically, a centroid CIN if
(k(k) kEL())
+7
[L(t]
where [L(e]] is the chance term and is an additional significance term.
7. Classification using a hierarchy of centroids: At test time, we are given an input x of class kxx) and infer its class as kxx). The classification task a "biased voting" process in which every patch of x, at any layer, votes for single class as long as that patch selects CIN centroid.
Specifically, if patch X1.m of layer 1 selects CIN centroid then that patch votes ut (k) maX (kk) for the class & that has the highest association with c, and zero for all other classes. i not CIN centroid, the vote of that patch is vm (k) 0 for all classes.
The vote of layer for class is the average vote across all patches in layer / (as illustrated in Figure 3):
u((k) EmEM, Vt,
(6)
[M]
where M, is the set patches in layer The final inference for input x is the class with the highest cumulative vote across all layers:
?x(x) = arg max
(k)
(7)
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Figure 4: Incremental UPL evaluation for MNIST (row-l), SVHN (row-2), and EMNIST (row-3). Per-class and average classification accuracy (left); number of LTM centroids over time (center): fraction CIN cen- troids over time (right). The task is expanding classification, i.e., recognize all classes seen so far.
EVALUATION
To evaluate the STAM architecture the UPL context, we consider two different scenarios: Incre- mental UPL and Uniform UPL. In the Incremental UPL case, small groups of classes appear in successive phases. In the following results, new classes are introduced two at a time in each phase, and they are only seen in that phase. STAMs must be able both recognize new classes when they are first seen in the stream, and to also remember all previously learned classes without catastrophic forgetting. In the Uniform UPL case, all classes appear with equal probability in the stream. The Uniform UPL scenario is more relevant when the distribution Fx of each class k may gradually change over time. The results for the Uniform scenario are presented in Appendix D.
The classification task that we focus on in the Incremental UPL case is expanding, meaning that in each phase we need to classify all classes seen far. Given a few labeled examples for the classes that have been present in the stream up to time t. the algorithm is asked to perform object classification on a 1000-image test dataset. The datasets we evaluate on are MNIST (Lecun al., 1998), EMNIST (balanced split with 47 classes) (Cohen el al., 2017), and SVHN (Netzer el al., 2011).
For each classification task, we average results over five trials (different unlabeled data streams). In each trial, we have a randomly sampled hold-out set of 1500 images. Then, we sample from the remaining data to form the unlabeled stream. We perform each classification task five times, using randomly sampled test inputs from the hold-out set. So, each result is the average of 25 classification evaluations.
We use a 3-layer STAM hicrarchy all hyperparameters values are reported in Appendix A. The robustness of the results vary these hyperparameter values is shown in Appendix E.
3.1 INCREMENTAL UPL
As we introduce new classes to the incremental UPL stream (see Figure 4), the architecture rec- ognizes previously leamed classes without any major degradation in classification accuracy (left column). The average accuracy per phase decreasing, which is due to the increasingly difficult expanding classification task. For EMNIST, we only show the average accuracy because there 47 total classes. In all datasets, we observe that layer-3 (corresponding to the largest receptive field) contains the highest fraction of CIN centroids (center column). The ability to recognize new classes

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Figure 5: Ablation study; A STAM architecture without LTM (left). STAM architecture in which the LTM centroids are adjusted with the same learning rate a as in STM (center), and a STAM architecture with removal of layers (right)
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Figure 6: The effect of vary- ing the amount of unlabeled data in the entire stream (left) and la- beled data per class (right).
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perhaps best visualized in the LTM centroid count (right column). During each phase the LTM count stabilizes until a sharp spike occurs at the start of the next phase when new classes are intro- duced. This reinforces the claim that the LTM pool of centroids (i) is stable when there are no new classes, and (ii) is able to recognize new classes via novelty detection when they appear. In the EM- NIST experiment, as the number of classes increases towards 47, we gradually see fewer "spikes" in the LTM centroids for the lower receptive fields, which is expected given the repetition of patterns at that small patch size. However, the highly CIN layer-3 continues to recognize new classes and create centroids, even when the last few classes are introduced.
3.2 ABLATIONS
Several ablations presented in Figure 5. On the left, we remove the LTM capabilities and only use STM centroids for classification. During the first two phases, there is little (if any) difference in classification accuracy. However, without the LTM mechanisms, patterns from classes that are no longer seen in the stream are for- gotten over time, and STAMs can only successfully classify classes that have been recently seen. We also investigate the importance of having static LTM centroids rather than dynamic centroids (center). Specifically, we replace the static LTM with a dynamic LTM in which the centroids are ad- justed with the same learning rate parameter as in The accuracy suffers drastically because the introduction of new classes "takes over" L.T centroids of previously learned classes, after the latter are removed from the stream. Similar to the removal of LTM, we do not see the effects of "forgetting" until phases 3-5. Note that the degradation due to a dynamic LTM is less severe than that from removing LTM completely. Finally, we look at the effects of removing layers from the STAM hierarchy (right). We see a small drop in accuracy after removing layer 3, and a large drop in accuracy after also removing layer 2. The importance of having deeper hierarchy would be more pronounced in datasets with higher-resolution images or videos, potentially showing multiple objects in the same frame. In such cases, CIN centroids can appear at any layer, starting from the lowest to the highest.
clear dropoff during phases 3-5. This suggests that,
3.3 EFFECT OF UNLABELED AND LABELED DATA
We next examine the effects of unlabeled and labeled data on the STAM architecture (Figure 6). As we vary the length of the unlabeled data stream (left), we see that STAMS can actually perform well even with much less unlabeled data. This suggests that the STAM architecture may be applicable even where the datastream is much shorter than in the experiments of this paper. A longer stream would be needed however if there are many classes and some of them are infrequent. The accuracy "saturation" " observed by increasing the unlabeled data from 20000 to 60000 can be explained based on the memory mechanism, which does not update centroids after they move to LTM. As showed in the ablation studies, this is necessary to avoid forgetting classes that no longer appear in the stream. The effect of varying the number of labeled examples per class (right) is much more pronounced.
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We that the STAM architecture can perform well above chance even in the extreme case of only a single (or small handful of) labeled examples per class.
RELATED WORK AND DISCUSSION
Even though clustering has been used successfully in the past as representation learning scheme (Coates et al., 2011; Coates and Ng. 2012), its effectiveness gradually drops as the input dimension- ality increases (Hinneburg al., 2000; Beyer el al., 1999). In the STAM architecture, issue by clustering smaller subvectors (patches) of the input data. If those subvectors are still of high dimensionality, another approach to reduce the intrinsic dimensionality of the imput data each layer by reconstructing that input using representations (selected centroids) from the previous layer we have experimented with this approach but not included it here because it is not required in the datasets and tasks we work with in this paper.
avoid this
This paper does not compare the performance of STAMs with other methods because, to the extent of our knowledge, none of the existing approaches in the literature are directly applicable to the UPL problem. In a follow-up study, we plan to adapt the most relevant approaches so that they can be applied in the UPL context. One of these approaches is Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning (iCaRL) (Rebuffi et al., 2017), which learns representations and classifiers from a progres- sive stream of labeled data and stores training examples for each class. In (Huang et al., 2019), the goal is to do unsupervised few-shot classification and the authors evaluate various methods in a similar manner to UPL but without learning from a non-stationary stream. FearNet (Kemker al., 201 88) replaces the storage of training examples with a generative model but still processes a labeled stream for both the classifier and generator. Bayesian Gradient Descent (BGD) (Zeno er al., 2018) is a method for preventing catastrophic forgetting when the learner is unaware of the task schedule and so it cannot take any special action when the input data distribution changes. A comparison of methods for continuous online sequence learning, including the Hierarchical Temporal Memory model, was conducted by Cui al. (Cui et al., 2016) those methods do not address the UPI. problem however.
We firmly believe that in order to mimic human intelligence, learning methods should be able to learn in a streaming manner and in the absence of supervision. Animals do not "save off" labeled examples to train in parallel with unlabeled data, they do not know how many classes exist in their environment, and they do not have to replay/dream periodically all their past experiences to avoid forgetting them. The proposed STAM architecture addresses the desiderata that is often associated with Lifelong Learning:
1. Online learning: STAMs constantly update their centroids with every example. There is no separate training stage, and there is no specific task for which the network optimizes the features learns. Any tasks that require classification will of course require one or few labeled examples so that the corresponding clusters that were formed previously are now associated with the name of class. However, STAMs do not need these labeled examples to learn efficient data representations.
Transfer learning: The hierarchical nature of the proposed architecture means that features learned (in an unsupervised manner) at lower-level STAMs can be reused in different tasks that higher-level STAMS perform.
3. Resistance to catastrophic forgetting: The introduction of new class or prototype will lead to the creation of new clusters at some STAMs in the hierarchy (e.g., layer-1 1 STAMs will learn new elementary visual features if we start feeding them natural images instead of MNIST examples while STAM at a higher-level would create a new cluster when it first starts seeing examples of scooters but without affecting the cluster associated with bicycles).
Expanding learning capacity: The learning capacity of a STAM architecture depends on two factors: the number of STAMs and the maximum number of centroids that each STAM can store in STM and LTM. The limited capacity constraint in the STM pool requires to forget recently created centroids that have not been recently updated with new examples. The unlimited capacity of the LTM pool of centroids, on the other hand, allows the system to gradually learn an unlimited number of classes, even if it does not examples of all classes learned earlier.
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5. No direct access to previous experience: A STAM only needs to store the centroids of the clusters it has learned so far. Those centroids correspond to prototypes, allowing the STAM to generalize. All previously exemplars are discarded.
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Chen Zeno, Itay Golan, Elad Hoffer, and Daniel Soudry. Task agnostic continual learning using online variational Bayes, 2018

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A
STAM NOTATION AND HYPERPARAMETERS
Table 1: STAM Notation
Symbol
Description
X
input vector.
n
dimensionality of input data number of patches at layer (index: m ...MM) m input patch at layer
M
XLm
C
set of centroids at layer centroid at layer I
CLj
d(x,c)
distance between input vector and centroid index of nearest centroid for input
((x)
di
novelty detection distance threshold at layer I the of classes seen in the unlabeled data stream up to time the set of classes seen in the labeled data up to time
(t))
L(t)
k
index for representing a class association between centroid j at layer I and class k. average distance between patch and its nearest neighbor centroid at layer 1.
(k))
D.
(k)
vote of patch m at layer for class & vote of layer for class
(i(
k(x)
true class label of input
k(x)
inferred class label of input x
Table STAM Hyperparameters
Symbol
Default
Description
number of layers (index: 1 1...
0.1
centroid learning rate
B
0.95
percentile for novelty detection distance threshold used in definition of class informative centroids STM capacity
7
0.15
see below
0
30
number of updates for memory consolidation patch dimension
Pt
see below
Table 3: MNIST/EMNIST Architecture
Table 4: SVHN Architecture
A
A
Layer
Layer
(incremental)
(uniform)
(incremental)
(uniform)
8
400
2000
10
2000
10000
13
400
2000
14
2000
10000
3
20
400
2000
3
18
2000
10000
B IMAGE PREPROCESSING
Given that each STAM operates on individual image patches, we perform patch normalization rather than image normalization. We chose normalization operation that helps to identify similar patterns despite variations in the brightness and contrast: every patch is transformed to zero-mean, unit variance before clustering least for the datasets we consider this paper, grayscale images result in higher classification accuracy than color.
We have also experimented with ZCA whitening and Sobel filtering. ZCA whitening did not work well because it requires estimating transformation from entire image dataset (and so it is not compatible with the online nature the UPL problem). Sobel filtering did not work well because STAM clustering works better with filled shapes rather than the fine edges produced by Sobel filters.
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C WHY NOT USE DEEP LEARNING?
Given that deep neural networks have become the new orthodoxy in machine learning, we need to address the question: why not use deep learning approach solve the problem? Why to rely on online clustering instead?
1) With few exceptions, deep learning approaches have fixed architecture and capacity (measured in terms of their hidden unit parameters) and so they are not able to automatically grow as the network is presented with new classes tasks. Methods such Progressive Networks (Snell et al., 2017) allow the network to grow but only when instructed that new task/class is given and by pre-determined growth factor. The STAM architecture, on the other hand, grows by creating new centroids only when needed and by a growth factor that is determined in a self-supervised manner by the "degree of novelty" in the data.
2) Deep learning approaches require multiple passes over the training data, and thus they would need to either store and replay previously seen data or to learn generative model that synthesizes realistic data when needed. Especially in semi-supervee supervipe methods such as VAT (Miyato er al., 2018), it is critical that the limited given labeled data are processed repeatedly. In the STAM architecture, data is never stored both because that may be impractical and because the data distribution in the UPL context may gradually shift- storing old data can be misleading.
3) A neural network (deep or shallow) learns nonlinear embedding of the input data in low- dimensional continuous space in which it is more efficient, presumably, to perform classification, clustering, generative modeling, other tasks. This compression of the input dimensionality how- ever comes at a high cost: the latent features learned by a neural net are not interpretable, they may be derived from properties that unrelated to the causal/defining properties of the correspond- ing classes (Geirhos el al., 2019), and they can make the network susceptible to adversarial attacks. STAMs, on the other hand, use clustering to learn common patterns at hierarchy of increasing re- ceptive fields. These patterns can be easily interpreted by humans because they represent prototypes (common patterns) at each layer.
4) The embedding that a neural network learns is typically assumed to be time-invariant. This is problematic in the UPL context because the number of classes or tasks increases with time, without external supervision whenever that happens. It is not clear how to gradually adjust an embedding in an online manner without any external supervision when the classes/tasks change.
5) Learning in deep neural networks requires iterative nonconvex optimization processes, such as SGD, that can get stuck in local minima. Online clustering is much simpler computation in which we only need to compute a certain distance metric between the input vector and all existing centroids and then to update the nearest centroid based on the corresponding input.
D UNIFORM UPL
18237, sxiform UPL, labelal comples
MO3T,, Uiiifrm LPL, labeled cumples plases,
MREST, Unifore ITL, 19 Libeled exargles Cata)
Accuracy (8)
5999 Delfore US, the lobeled comples p-t-
1w0 psifow IFt, He laboled qumples P.G.
5001 Unffire 1P1, 290 Libeled exargles
ACCITSay (9)
Figure 7: Uniform UPL evaluation for MNIST (row-1) and SVHN (row-2). Per-class/average classification accuracy is given at the left; the number of LTM centroids over time is given the center; the fraction of CIN centroids over time given at the right.
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In order to examine if the STAM architecture can learn all classes simultameously. but without know- ing how many classes exist, we also evaluate the STAM architecture in a uniform UPL scenario (Figure 5). Note that LTM centroids converge to constant value, at least at the top layer, Each class is recognized at a different level of accuracy, depending on the similarity between that class and others.
E ADDITIONAL HYPERPARAMETER SWEEPS AND ABLATIONS
Sweep
Sweep
SVH, Increrental UPL, 188 labeled exasples 5 phases, classes per phase
SWHN
Incrasental UPL, 180 labeled exanples p.c.
phases,
new classes phese
00
y
y- 5:15
Lid00
20000
X000
43300
60033
12000
24002
20300
40000
5000
Unlabeled Irages Soen
Uniabelet Images Seen
(a)
(b)
Sweep
Sweep
SVIN, Increrental UPL, 180 labeled exaplees p.s. phases, new clases per phase
SVHN Incromental UPL, 108 labeled examples p.c.
phases, new classes par phase
100
Accurasy (S)
100
6-30
A-500
6-50
A-0000
00000
500000
2000
2099
Unlateled Images Seen
Unlabeled Irages
(d)
4 Sweep
Swaap
SVHN, Increnental UPL, 100 labeled exarples p.c.
5VHN, Incramental UPL, 189 labeled examples p.c.
Layer LTH Cantbrotis
phases, 2 new classes per phase
phases, 2 new classes per phase
0002
4-20
202
ACCuPAcy CS)
20200
1050
1000
10000
20000
20000
30660
50000
09500
.000
2060 Layer 3 LTH Cestroids
2000
400c
5000
unlabeled Inages Seen
(c)
(f)
Sweep
SVIN, Increvental UPL, labeled exapples p.c. phases, classes par phase
SVNN, Increnental UPL, labeled examples p.c. phases, classes per phase
Laper s LTN controlds
120
$-20
$-30
1-21
$-13
Unisbeles
Seen
Unlabeled Images Seen
(g)
(h)
Figure Hyperparameter sweeps for a, Y. 0, B, and
We examine the effects of STAM hyperparameters in Figure 8. (a) As we decrease the rate of a, we see a degradation in performance. This is likely due to the static nature of the LTM centroids with low a values, the LTM centroids will primarily represent the patch they were intialized as. (b) As we vary the rates of y, there is little difference in our final classification rates. This suggests that the maximum I1, (k) values are quite high, which may not be the case in other datasets besides SVHN. (c) We observe that STAM is robust to changes in e. (d.e) The STM size A has a major effect on the number of learned LTM centroids and classification accuracy. (e) The accuracy in
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phase-5 for different numbers of layer-3 LTM centroids (and correspnding A values). The accuracy shows diminishing returns after we have about 1000 LTM centroids at layer-3. (g.h) As 3 increases the number of LTM centroids increases (due to a lower rate of novelty detection); if 3 2 0.9 the classification accuracy is about the same.
F COMPARISON WITH AUTO-ENCODER APPROACH
Even though the goal of this paper is not to present an extensive comparison between STAM and deep-learning methods, in this section we perform limited such comparison with simple autoen- coder. Specifically, we train convolutional autoencoder (CAE) with the images from the unlabeled data stream. The number of training epochs and the batch size are both set 1, so that each un- labeled example is only used once. The encoder consists of three convolution layers with ReLU activations, embedding imputs into a 64-dimension latent space. The decoder consists of three trans- posed convolution layers with ReL.U activations. The final layer uses linear activations and the net- work is trained to optimize Euclidean reconstruction error. The representations at the 64-dimension latent space are used to perform K nearest- (KNN) classification. The CAE architecture, given in Figure 10, is trained using Adam optimization (Kingma and Ba, 2014) with learning rate of 1- and no decay.
The STAM architecture outperforms the CAE approach by large margin (Figure Incremental UPL, SVHN dataset). In follow-up work plan to develop more sophisticated deep learning approaches for solving the UPL problem and compare them with STAMs under different conditions.
SVHN, Incremental UPL, 100 labeled examples
5 phases, 2 new classes per phase
100
Accuracy (%)
$
staml
cae-5NN
10
cae-NN
12000
24000
35000
48608
60000
Unlabeled Inages Seen
Figure 9: STAM versus CAE-based baseline
G
MEMORY FOOTPRINT ANALYSIS
The memory requirement of the STAM model can be calculated as:
M Σ p ([C|+AA)
For the 3-layer SVHN architecture with [Ci] s 3000 LTM centroids in every layer and A 2000, the memory footprint is 5, 064, 000 pixels, equivalent to roughly 5000 grayscale SVHN digits. This memory requirement can be significantly reduced however. Figure 8(f) shows that the accuracy remains almost the same when A 500 and |Cr] ~ 1000. With these values the memory footprint reduces to about 950,000 pixels, equivalent to roughly 930 grayscale SVHN digits.
By comparison, the CAE architecture has 4, 683, 425 trainable parameters, which should be stored at floating-point precision. With four bytes per weight, then STAM model would require 1683425x1 R3 5% of the CAE's memory footprint. Future work can decrease the STAM memory requirement further by merging similar LTM centroids.
950000
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16


Reviews:
[{"review_id": "rJeFX8M7cS", "reviewer": "AnonReviewer2", "summary": "", "questions": "", "limitations": "", "rating": 8, "confidence": null, "soundness": null, "presentation": null, "contribution": null, "strengths": "", "weaknesses": "", "quality": null, "clarity": null, "significance": null, "originality": null, "strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "was_revised": false, "final_justification": "", "rebuttal": "", "claims_and_evidence": "", "methods_and_evaluation_criteria": "", "theoretical_claims": "", "experimental_designs_or_analyses": "", "relation_to_broader_scientific_literature": "", "essential_references_not_discussed": "", "other_strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "other_comments_or_suggestions": "", "questions_for_authors": "", "summary_of_paper": "", "summary_of_recommendation": "", "technical_quality": "", "clarity_of_presentation": "", "potential_impact": "", "robotics_focus": "", "quality_of_limitations": "", "questions_for_rebuttal": "", "reasons_to_accept": "", "reasons_to_reject": "", "questions_to_authors": "", "main_review": "", "summary_of_the_paper": "", "summary_of_the_review": "", "strength_and_weaknesses": "", "limitations_and_societal_impact": "", "review_text": "The paper presents a new problem formulation in the broader area of lifelong learning.\nSpecifically, the Unsupervised Progressive Learning (UPL) problem, requires a learner to consume a stream of data, where each data point is associated with a class, but only very few labels are provided. Similar to continuous learning the learner can only access current and not access previous data in the stream. The paper clearly describes how this setup is different to commonly other learning setups studied, including continual learning. \n\nTo solve this problem the paper proposes a deep-learning-free approach based on clustering and novelty detection.\n\nStrength:\n-\tI think the problem formulation is very realistic and interesting and I am not aware of it being explored previously\n-\tThe newly proposed architecture STAM is also interesting.\n-\tThe paper evaluates STAM on UPL on three datasets, MNIST, EMNIST, SVHN\n-\tThe paper ablates several aspects of the model evaluates the effect of hyper parameters.\n\nWeaknesses:\n1.\tThe paper misses to include baselines, both, w.r.t. the proposed method, as well as for the learning problem. \n1.1.\tThe paper argues that deep learning cannot work, I am wondering, why don’t include standard baselines, e.g. auto-encoder based with a prototype stored whenever a labeled example is seen. (For single pass continual learning, see e.g. [B], although that work is supervised)\n1.2.\tHebbian learning inspired algorithms might similarly form a valuable baseline\n2.\tThe UPL problem makes sense to me, however, the experimental setup could be improved. Specifically, the paper uses the entire dataset to find hyperparameters. This is highly concerning as this basically means the entire dataset has been seen multiple times before the final pass over the dataset (the one with the best hyperparameters) is performed. This is basically a contradiction to the setup of UPL, which assumes all data is seen only once.\n3.\tRelated Work:\n3.1.\t[A] seems to study a similar setup and proposes an approach which should also be applicable in this work.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nConclusion:\nThe paper’s contribution is a new learning setup (UPL) and an approach (STAM). While it remains unclear if STAM can generalize to realistic images, the idea of UPL is very interesting and speaks for accepting the paper, although there are several weaknesses the authors should address.\nIt would also be great if the authors plan to release the exact experimental setup (i.e. which images are sampled in which order and which ones are labeled) so future work can compare to this work.\n\n\n\nReference:\n[A] Continuous Online Sequence Learning with an Unsupervised Neural Network Model\nYuwei Cui, Subutai Ahmad and Jeff Hawkins; Neural Computation, 2016\n[B] Gradient episodic memory for continual learning, D Lopez-Paz, MA Ranzato ; NeurIPS, 2017\n\n\n==== Post rebuttal comment:\nThanks for the clarifications and additional experiments;\nI do think the the paper should be accepted and increased my score.\n\nRegarding 2) I was thinking more of using a small part of the dataset to do hyper parameter selection, see e.g. \nEfficient Lifelong Learning with A-GEM\nA Chaudhry, MA Ranzato, M Rohrbach, M Elhoseiny\nInternational Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)\n\n\n", "extra_scores": {"experience_assessment": "I have published one or two papers in this area.", "review_assessment:_checking_correctness_of_experiments": "I assessed the sensibility of the experiments.", "review_assessment:_thoroughness_in_paper_reading": "I read the paper thoroughly.", "review_assessment:_checking_correctness_of_derivations_and_theory": "N/A"}, "extra_text": {}}, {"review_id": "BygbC5qqtr", "reviewer": "AnonReviewer1", "summary": "", "questions": "", "limitations": "", "rating": 3, "confidence": null, "soundness": null, "presentation": null, "contribution": null, "strengths": "", "weaknesses": "", "quality": null, "clarity": null, "significance": null, "originality": null, "strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "was_revised": false, "final_justification": "", "rebuttal": "", "claims_and_evidence": "", "methods_and_evaluation_criteria": "", "theoretical_claims": "", "experimental_designs_or_analyses": "", "relation_to_broader_scientific_literature": "", "essential_references_not_discussed": "", "other_strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "other_comments_or_suggestions": "", "questions_for_authors": "", "summary_of_paper": "", "summary_of_recommendation": "", "technical_quality": "", "clarity_of_presentation": "", "potential_impact": "", "robotics_focus": "", "quality_of_limitations": "", "questions_for_rebuttal": "", "reasons_to_accept": "", "reasons_to_reject": "", "questions_to_authors": "", "main_review": "", "summary_of_the_paper": "", "summary_of_the_review": "", "strength_and_weaknesses": "", "limitations_and_societal_impact": "", "review_text": "This paper proposes a method called Self-Taught Associative Memory (STAM) for Unsupervised Progressive Learning (UPL) , i.e., learning salient representation from streams of mostly unlabeled data with occasional class labels, where the number of class increases over time. The motivation of this paper is quite interesting in that the authors try to mimic how animals learn. The surrounding environments of animals are considered to be unlabeled, and animals gradually learn to distinguish between objects without explicit information. The model shed light on the problem of catastrophic forgetting by introducing dual-memory organization. To be specific, Short-Term Memory contains a set of centroids associated with the unlabeled data, whereas Long-Term Memory stores the prototypical centroids, which are frequently seen patterns. In addition, the model utilizes novelty detection technique to introduce new centroids to each layer of the model, and it prepares the newly created centroids to be associated with new classes. \nOverall, the paper reads well and it is self-explanatory with clear notations and hyperparameters. Each step of the architecture is well-formulated mathematically and the necessity of the step in the model is explained clearly. The problem proposed, Unsupervised Progressive Learning (UPL) problem, is novel.\nOn the other hand, there are shortcomings of the paper, one being the model evaluation on dataset such as MNIST, SVHN, and EMNIST. The dimensional size of the dataset and the number of classes are small which is not convincing to evaluate the performance of the model. In addition, each layer of the model is independent from other layers (no connections between units at different layers), keeping the updated representation of patches to itself. This fact would hinder the model from understanding complex representation. Furthermore, there is a concern on the use of L2 distance metric for the similarity between the patch and patterns (centroids). L2 is not meaningful in high dimensional spaces.\nThis paper is a good start in tackling the Unsupervised Progressive Learning problem, but some weaknesses are present in the nature of the model architecture as mentioned above. However, the approach taken appears to be ad hoc. It is difficult to imagine the method can work for more complex situations. Even for the small datasets used in the paper, the learning require 10’s of thousands of training example. This does not mimic animal learning at all. Also, the accuracy of the model on EMNIST with 47 classes is around 65% which makes me doubt the application of the model on real world.\n-\tShed some light on the problem of catastrophic forgetting and continual learning without supervision\n-\tThe model architecture is well defined, but has some weaknesses in the methodology\n-\tInteresting motivation of trying to mimic how animals learn in an environment\n", "extra_scores": {"experience_assessment": "I have read many papers in this area.", "review_assessment:_checking_correctness_of_derivations_and_theory": "I assessed the sensibility of the derivations and theory.", "review_assessment:_checking_correctness_of_experiments": "I assessed the sensibility of the experiments.", "review_assessment:_thoroughness_in_paper_reading": "I read the paper at least twice and used my best judgement in assessing the paper."}, "extra_text": {}}, {"review_id": "BJlTWgj6tS", "reviewer": "AnonReviewer3", "summary": "", "questions": "", "limitations": "", "rating": 8, "confidence": null, "soundness": null, "presentation": null, "contribution": null, "strengths": "", "weaknesses": "", "quality": null, "clarity": null, "significance": null, "originality": null, "strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "was_revised": false, "final_justification": "", "rebuttal": "", "claims_and_evidence": "", "methods_and_evaluation_criteria": "", "theoretical_claims": "", "experimental_designs_or_analyses": "", "relation_to_broader_scientific_literature": "", "essential_references_not_discussed": "", "other_strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "other_comments_or_suggestions": "", "questions_for_authors": "", "summary_of_paper": "", "summary_of_recommendation": "", "technical_quality": "", "clarity_of_presentation": "", "potential_impact": "", "robotics_focus": "", "quality_of_limitations": "", "questions_for_rebuttal": "", "reasons_to_accept": "", "reasons_to_reject": "", "questions_to_authors": "", "main_review": "", "summary_of_the_paper": "", "summary_of_the_review": "", "strength_and_weaknesses": "", "limitations_and_societal_impact": "", "review_text": "This paper sets up a new problem based on a continuous stream of potentially partially labelled data, which the authors call the Unsupervised Progressive Learning problem. The paper also introduces a new model designed to approach this problem, called the STAM architecture, with many concepts applied in a novel way. The STAM architecture is tested on example problems from the UPL problem.\n\nI find this paper to approach a problem that is not well studied in the literature, and it is well-written and easy to read. I am not aware of previous works that tackle this specific problem setup. Many previous works seem to slowly be converging to tackling this kind of problem, but this is the first work that directly tackles this realistic problem. It would be good if the authors made the benchmark (/how they are generated) public.\n\nThe STAM architecture is an interesting way of tackling image classification, and it is refreshing to see a technique not dependent on neural networks. The experiments in the paper are extremely detailed, with good figures and ablation studies.\n\nI am recommending this paper be accepted. But I have one main question about this work: what is the memory cost of the STAM architecture? Many 1000s of LTM centroids are stored, what is the memory cost of this? Is this memory cost greater than the cost of just storing all the labelled inputs that have been seen? I would imagine that just replaying these stored labelled inputs (or just training a NN on these stored inputs) would provide extremely high accuracies for the datasets considered in this paper.\n\nI understand that STAM has potential beyond just replaying memory for potentially larger datasets; the authors also make the point that they do not believe that the brain works by replaying memory. However, I would then like to see one (or both) of the following tests: a run with much fewer LTM centroids (with the corresponding memory cost detailed explicitly), and/or a dataset where it is clear that the memory cost incurred by the STAM architecture is a better use of memory than just storing previous data.\n\nI would also argue that the brain *does* replay memory in some manner in order to learn. But that is a debate for another time!\n\nBy fixing the LTM centroids that are learnt on previous data, the method is essentially freezing previous knowledge and then learning new knowledge by increasing model capacity. It would be interesting (as future work / other papers) to see an adopted version of eg Progressive Neural Networks and how that compares on the same benchmarks.\n\nI would also be interested to see, as future work, the uncertainty estimates of this new architecture and its robustness to adversarial examples.\n\nFinally, a couple of minor points:\n- Figure 4 is small and hard to read, particularly the left column.\n- The authors find (in Appendix E) that increasing the \\Delta hyperparameter leads to a growing number of LTM centroids. I wonder if that is still the case if \\theta is also increased along with \\Delta?\n- Typos: last line of Section 3.2: 'lowst'; a few places where \\citet{} and \\citep{} are incorrect.", "extra_scores": {"experience_assessment": "I have published one or two papers in this area.", "review_assessment:_thoroughness_in_paper_reading": "I read the paper at least twice and used my best judgement in assessing the paper.", "review_assessment:_checking_correctness_of_experiments": "I assessed the sensibility of the experiments.", "review_assessment:_checking_correctness_of_derivations_and_theory": "I assessed the sensibility of the derivations and theory."}, "extra_text": {}}]

Author rebuttal:

Meta-review: 


The paper presents a semi-supervised data streaming approach. The proposed architecture is made of a layer-wise k-means structure (more specifically a epsilon-means approach, where the epsilon is adaptively defined from the distortion percentile). Each layer is associated a scope (patch dimensions); each patch of the image is associated its nearest cluster center (or a new cluster is created if needed); new cluster centers are adjusted to fit the examples (Short Term Memory); clusters that have been visited sufficiently many time are frozen (Long Term Memory). Each cluster is associated a label distribution from the labelled examples. The label for each new image is obtained by a vote of the clusters and layers.

Some reviews raise some issues about the robustness of the approach, and its sensitivity w.r.t. hyper-parameters. Some claims ("the distribution associated to a class may change with time") are not experimentally confirmed; it seems that in such a case, the LTM size might grow along time; a forgetting mechanism would then be needed to enforce the tractability of classification. 

Some claims (the mechanism is related to how animal learn) are debatable, as noted by Rev#1; see hippocampal replay.

The area chair thinks that a main issue with the paper is that the Unsupervised Progressive Learning is considered to be a new setting ("none of the existing approaches in the literature are directly applicable to the UPL problem"), preventing the authors from comparing their results with baselines.

However, after a short bibliographic search, some related approaches exist under another name:
* Incremental Semi-supervised Learning on Streaming Data, Pattern Recognition 88, Li et al., 2018;
* Incremental Semi-Supervised Learning from Streams for Object Classification, Chiotellis et al., 2018;
* Online data stream classification with incremental semi-supervised learning, Loo et al., 2015.

The above approaches seem able to at least accommodate the Uniform UPL scenario. I therefore encourage the authors to consider some of the above as baselines and provide a comparative validation of STAM.
Decision: Reject