In the real world, object categories usually have a hierarchical granularity tree. Nowadays, most researchers focus on recognizing categories in a specific granularity, \emph{e.g.,} basic-level or sub(ordinate)-level. Compared with basic-level categories, the sub-level categories provide more valuable information, but its training annotations are harder to acquire. Therefore, an attractive problem is how to transfer the knowledge learned from basic-level annotations to sub-level recognition. In this paper, we introduce a new task, named Hierarchical Granularity Transfer Learning (HGTL), to recognize sub-level categories with basic-level annotations and semantic descriptions for hierarchical categories.

We describe an approach to learning from long-tailed, imbalanced datasets that are prevalent in real-world settings. Here, the challenge is to learn accurate "few-shot'' models for classes in the tail of the class distribution, for which little data is available. We cast this problem as transfer learning, where knowledge from the data-rich classes in the head of the distribution is transferred to the data-poor classes in the tail. Our key insights are as follows. First, we propose to transfer meta-knowledge about learning-to-learn from the head classes.

The focus in machine learning has branched beyond training classifiers on a single task to investigating how previously acquired knowledge in a source domain can be leveraged to facilitate learning in a related target domain, known as inductive transfer learning. Three active lines of research have independently explored transfer learning using neural networks. In weight transfer, a model trained on the source domain is used as an initialization point for a network to be trained on the target domain. In deep metric learning, the source domain is used to construct an embedding that captures class structure in both the source and target domains. In few-shot learning, the focus is on generalizing well in the target domain based on a limited number of labeled examples.

Key to multitask learning is exploiting the relationships between different tasks in order to improve prediction performance. Most previous methods have focused on the case where tasks relations can be modeled as linear operators and regularization approaches can be used successfully. However, in practice assuming the tasks to be linearly related is often restrictive, and allowing for nonlinear structures is a challenge. In this paper, we tackle this issue by casting the problem within the framework of structured prediction. Our main contribution is a novel algorithm for learning multiple tasks which are related by a system of nonlinear equations that their joint outputs need to satisfy. We show that our algorithm can be efficiently implemented and study its generalization properties, proving universal consistency and learning rates. Our theoretical analysis highlights the benefits of non-linear multitask learning over learning the tasks independently. Encouraging experimental results show the benefits of the proposed method in practice.

The focus in machine learning has branched beyond training classifiers on a single task to investigating how previously acquired knowledge in a source domain can be leveraged to facilitate learning in a related target domain, known as inductive transfer learning. Three active lines of research have independently explored transfer learning using neural networks. In weight transfer, a model trained on the source domain is used as an initialization point for a network to be trained on the target domain. In deep metric learning, the source domain is used to construct an embedding that captures class structure in both the source and target domains. In few-shot learning, the focus is on generalizing well in the target domain based on a limited number of labeled examples. We compare state-of-the-art methods from these three paradigms and also explore hybrid adapted-embedding methods that use limited target-domain data to fine tune embeddings constructed from sourcedomain data. We conduct a systematic comparison of methods in a variety of domains, varying the number of labeled instances available in the target domain (k), as well as the number of target-domain classes. We reach three principal conclusions: (1) Deep embeddings are far superior, compared to weight transfer, as a starting point for inter-domain transfer or model re-use (2) Our hybrid methods robustly outperform every few-shot learning and every deep metric learning method previously proposed, with a mean error reduction of 34% over state-of-the-art.

We show that, in this setting, the L TL problem can be reformulated as a Least Squares (LS) problem and we exploit a novel meta-algorithm to efficiently solve it.

We consider the Hypothesis Transfer Learning (HTL) problem where one incorporates a hypothesis trained on the source domain into the learning procedure of the target domain. Existing theoretical analysis either only studies specific algorithms or only presents upper bounds on the generalization error but not on the excess risk. In this paper, we propose a unified algorithm-dependent framework for HTL through a novel notion of transformation function, which characterizes the relation between the source and the target domains. We conduct a general risk analysis of this framework and in particular, we show for the first time, if two domains are related, HTL enjoys faster convergence rates of excess risks for Kernel Smoothing and Kernel Ridge Regression than those of the classical non-transfer learning settings. Experiments on real world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

We describe an approach to learning from long-tailed, imbalanced datasets that are prevalent in real-world settings. Here, the challenge is to learn accurate "fewshot" models for classes in the tail of the class distribution, for which little data is available. We cast this problem as transfer learning, where knowledge from the data-rich classes in the head of the distribution is transferred to the data-poor classes in the tail. Our key insights are as follows. First, we propose to transfer meta-knowledge about learning-to-learn from the head classes.

Precision medicine aims for personalized prognosis and therapeutics by utilizing recent genome-scale high-throughput profiling techniques, including next-generation sequencing (NGS). However, translating NGS data faces several challenges. First, NGS count data are often overdispersed, requiring appropriate modeling. Second, compared to the number of involved molecules and system complexity, the number of available samples for studying complex disease, such as cancer, is often limited, especially considering disease heterogeneity. The key question is whether we may integrate available data from all different sources or domains to achieve reproducible disease prognosis based on NGS count data. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian Multi-Domain Learning (BMDL) model that derives domain-dependent latent representations of overdispersed count data based on hierarchical negative binomial factorization for accurate cancer subtyping even if the number of samples for a specific cancer type is small. Experimental results from both our simulated and NGS datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) demonstrate the promising potential of BMDL for effective multi-domain learning without "negative transfer" effects often seen in existing multi-task learning and transfer learning methods.

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