Few-shot learning amounts to learning representations and acquiring knowledge such that novel tasks may be solved with both supervision and data being limited. Improved performance is possible by transductive inference, where the entire test set is available concurrently, and semi-supervised learning, where more unlabeled data is available. These problems are closely related because there is little or no adaptation of the representation in novel tasks. Focusing on these two settings, we introduce a new algorithm that leverages the manifold structure of the labeled and unlabeled data distribution to predict pseudo-labels, while balancing over classes and using the loss value distribution of a limited-capacity classifier to select the cleanest labels, iterately improving the quality of pseudo-labels. Our solution sets new state of the art on four benchmark datasets, namely \emph{mini}ImageNet, \emph{tiered}ImageNet, CUB and CIFAR-FS, while being robust over feature space pre-processing and the quantity of available data.

Unsupervised learning is where only the input data is present and no corresponding output variable is there. Unsupervised learning has a lot of potential ranging anywhere from fraud detection to stock trading. Clustering: A clustering problem is where you want to discover the inherent groupings in the data, such as grouping customers by purchasing behavior. Association: An association rule learning problem is where you want to discover rules that describe a large portion of your data. Association rules mining are used to identify new and interesting insights between different objects in a set, frequent pattern in transactional data or any sort of relational database.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is to learn classification models that make predictions for unlabeled data on a target domain, given labeled data on a source domain whose distribution diverges from the target one. Mainstream UDA methods strive to learn domain-aligned features such that classifiers trained on the source features can be readily applied to the target ones. Although impressive results have been achieved, these methods have a potential risk of damaging the intrinsic data structures of target discrimination, raising an issue of generalization particularly for UDA tasks in an inductive setting. To address this issue, we are motivated by a UDA assumption of structural similarity across domains, and propose to directly uncover the intrinsic target discrimination via constrained clustering, where we constrain the clustering solutions using structural source regularization that hinges on the very same assumption. Technically, we propose a hybrid model of Structurally Regularized Deep Clustering, which integrates the regularized discriminative clustering of target data with a generative one, and we thus term our method as SRDC++. Our hybrid model is based on a deep clustering framework that minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the distribution of network prediction and an auxiliary one, where we impose structural regularization by learning domain-shared classifier and cluster centroids. By enriching the structural similarity assumption, we are able to extend SRDC++ for a pixel-level UDA task of semantic segmentation. We conduct extensive experiments on seven UDA benchmarks of image classification and semantic segmentation. With no explicit feature alignment, our proposed SRDC++ outperforms all the existing methods under both the inductive and transductive settings. We make our implementation codes publicly available at https://github.com/huitangtang/SRDCPP.

Graph-based semi-supervised node classification (GraphSSC) has wide applications, ranging from networking and security to data mining and machine learning, etc. However, existing centralized GraphSSC methods are impractical to solve many real-world graph-based problems, as collecting the entire graph and labeling a reasonable number of labels is time-consuming and costly, and data privacy may be also violated. Federated learning (FL) is an emerging learning paradigm that enables collaborative learning among multiple clients, which can mitigate the issue of label scarcity and protect data privacy as well. Therefore, performing GraphSSC under the FL setting is a promising solution to solve real-world graph-based problems. However, existing FL methods 1) perform poorly when data across clients are non-IID, 2) cannot handle data with new label domains, and 3) cannot leverage unlabeled data, while all these issues naturally happen in real-world graph-based problems. To address the above issues, we propose the first FL framework, namely GraphFL, for semi-supervised node classification on graphs. Our framework is motivated by meta-learning methods. Specifically, we propose two GraphFL methods to respectively address the non-IID issue in graph data and handle the tasks with new label domains. Furthermore, we design a self-training method to leverage unlabeled graph data. We adopt representative graph neural networks as GraphSSC methods and evaluate GraphFL on multiple graph datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that GraphFL significantly outperforms the compared FL baseline and GraphFL with self-training can obtain better performance.

Tackling semi-supervised learning problems with graph-based methods have become a trend in recent years since graphs can represent all kinds of data and provide a suitable framework for studying continuum limits, e.g., of differential operators. A popular strategy here is $p$-Laplacian learning, which poses a smoothness condition on the sought inference function on the set of unlabeled data. For $p<\infty$ continuum limits of this approach were studied using tools from $\Gamma$-convergence. For the case $p=\infty$, which is referred to as Lipschitz learning, continuum limits of the related infinity-Laplacian equation were studied using the concept of viscosity solutions. In this work, we prove continuum limits of Lipschitz learning using $\Gamma$-convergence. In particular, we define a sequence of functionals which approximate the largest local Lipschitz constant of a graph function and prove $\Gamma$-convergence in the $L^\infty$-topology to the supremum norm of the gradient as the graph becomes denser. Furthermore, we show compactness of the functionals which implies convergence of minimizers. In our analysis we allow a varying set of labeled data which converges to a general closed set in the Hausdorff distance. We apply our results to nonlinear ground states and, as a by-product, prove convergence of graph distance functions to geodesic distance functions.

As the volume of cyberattacks grows, security analysts are always on their heels to provide a shield. To address this issue, developers are showing interest in using Machine Learning (ML) to automate threat-hunting. As a sub-field of machine learning, unsupervised learning is making a footprint in detecting malicious content. Resisting cybersecurity challenges with machine learning is not a new thing. Researchers have been working on it since the late 1980s.

We propose two generic methods for improving semi-supervised learning (SSL). The first integrates weight perturbation (WP) into existing "consistency regularization" (CR) based methods. We implement WP by leveraging variational Bayesian inference (VBI). The second method proposes a novel consistency loss called "maximum uncertainty regularization" (MUR). While most consistency losses act on perturbations in the vicinity of each data point, MUR actively searches for "virtual" points situated beyond this region that cause the most uncertain class predictions. This allows MUR to impose smoothness on a wider area in the input-output manifold. Our experiments show clear improvements in classification errors of various CR based methods when they are combined with VBI or MUR or both.

In a world filled with technology and artificial intelligence, it is becoming increasingly harder to distinguish between what is real and what is fake. Look at these two pictures below. Can you tell which one is a real-life photograph and which one is created by artificial intelligence? The crazy thing is that both of these images are actually fake, created by NVIDIA's new hyperrealistic face generator, which uses an algorithmic architecture called a generative adversarial network (GANs). Researching more into GANs and their applications in today's society, I found that they can be used everywhere, from text to image generation to even predicting the next frame in a video!

Active learning is widely used to reduce labeling effort and training time by repeatedly querying only the most beneficial samples from unlabeled data. In real-world problems where data cannot be stored indefinitely due to limited storage or privacy issues, the query selection and the model update should be performed as soon as a new data sample is observed. Various online active learning methods have been studied to deal with these challenges; however, there are difficulties in selecting representative query samples and updating the model efficiently. In this study, we propose Message Passing Adaptive Resonance Theory (MPART) for online active semi-supervised learning. The proposed model learns the distribution and topology of the input data online. It then infers the class of unlabeled data and selects informative and representative samples through message passing between nodes on the topological graph. MPART queries the beneficial samples on-the-fly in stream-based selective sampling scenarios, and continuously improve the classification model using both labeled and unlabeled data. We evaluate our model on visual (MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10) and audio (NSynth) datasets with comparable query selection strategies and frequencies, showing that MPART significantly outperforms the competitive models in online active learning environments.

The R Project for Statistical Computing provides an excellent platform to tackle data processing, data manipulation, modeling, and presentation. The capabilities of this language, its freedom of use, and a very active community of users makes R one of the best tools to learn and implement unsupervised learning. If you are new to R or want to learn about unsupervised learning, this book is for you. Packed with critical information, this book will guide you through a conceptual explanation and practical examples programmed directly into the R console. Starting from the beginning, this book introduces you to unsupervised learning and provides a high-level introduction to the topic.