"contrastive-equivariant" versions that encourage preservation of input transformations without supervised access to the transformation parameters.

We further encourage the generator to adversarially learn from the self-supervised discriminator by generating augmentation-predictable real and not fake data.

Equivariant representation learning aims to capture variations induced by input transformations in the representation space, whereas invariant representation learning encodes semantic information by disregarding such transformations. Recent studies have shown that jointly learning both types of representations is often beneficial for downstream tasks, typically by employing separate projection heads. However, this design overlooks information shared between invariant and equivariant learning, which leads to redundant feature learning and inefficient use of model capacity. To address this, we introduce Soft Task-Aware Routing (STAR), a routing strategy for projection heads that models them as experts. STAR induces the experts to specialize in capturing either shared or task-specific information, thereby reducing redundant feature learning. We validate this effect by observing lower canonical correlations between invariant and equivariant embeddings. Experimental results show consistent improvements across diverse transfer learning tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/YonseiML/star.

Data Augmentation (DA) has become an essential tool to improve robustness and generalization of modern machine learning. However, when deciding on DA strategies it is critical to choose parameters carefully, and this can be a daunting task which is traditionally left to trial-and-error or expensive optimization based on validation performance. In this paper, we counter these limitations by proposing a novel framework for optimizing DA. In particular, we take a probabilistic view of DA, which leads to the interpretation of augmentation parameters as model (hyper)-parameters, and the optimization of the marginal likelihood with respect to these parameters as a Bayesian model selection problem. Due to its intractability, we derive a tractable Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO), which allows us to optimize augmentation parameters jointly with model parameters. We provide extensive theoretical results on variational approximation quality, generalization guarantees, invariance properties, and connections to empirical Bayes. Through experiments on computer vision tasks, we show that our approach improves calibration and yields robust performance over fixed or no augmentation. Our work provides a rigorous foundation for optimizing DA through Bayesian principles with significant potential for robust machine learning.

Training generative adversarial networks (GANs) with limited data is challenging because the discriminator is prone to overfitting. Previously proposed differentiable augmentation demonstrates improved data efficiency of training GANs. However, the augmentation implicitly introduces undesired invariance to augmentation for the discriminator since it ignores the change of semantics in the label space caused by data transformation, which may limit the representation learning ability of the discriminator and ultimately affect the generative modeling performance of the generator. To mitigate the negative impact of invariance while inheriting the benefits of data augmentation, we propose a novel augmentation-aware self-supervised discriminator that predicts the augmentation parameter of the augmented data. Particularly, the prediction targets of real data and generated data are required to be distinguished since they are different during training. We further encourage the generator to adversarially learn from the self-supervised discriminator by generating augmentation-predictable real and not fake data. This formulation connects the learning objective of the generator and the arithmetic $-$ harmonic mean divergence under certain assumptions. We compare our method with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods using the class-conditional BigGAN and unconditional StyleGAN2 architectures on data-limited CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, FFHQ, LSUN-Cat, and five low-shot datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements of our method over SOTA methods in training data-efficient GANs.

Self-supervised representation learning (SSRL) methods have shown great success in computer vision. In recent studies, augmentation-based contrastive learning methods have been proposed for learning representations that are invariant or equivariant to pre-defined data augmentation operations. However, invariant or equivariant features favor only specific downstream tasks depending on the augmentations chosen. They may result in poor performance when the learned representation does not match task requirements. Here, we consider an active observer that can manipulate views of an object and has knowledge of the action(s) that generated each view. We introduce Contrastive Invariant and Predictive Equivariant Representation learning (CIPER). CIPER comprises both invariant and equivariant learning objectives using one shared encoder and two different output heads on top of the encoder. One output head is a projection head with a state-of-the-art contrastive objective to encourage invariance to augmentations. The other is a prediction head estimating the augmentation parameters, capturing equivariant features. Both heads are discarded after training and only the encoder is used for downstream tasks. We evaluate our method on static image tasks and time-augmented image datasets. Our results show that CIPER outperforms a baseline contrastive method on various tasks. Interestingly, CIPER encourages the formation of hierarchically structured representations where different views of an object become systematically organized in the latent representation space.

It is no secret amongst deep learning researchers that finding the optimal data augmentation strategy during training can mean the difference between state-of-the-art performance and a run-of-the-mill result. To that end, the community has seen many efforts to automate the process of finding the perfect augmentation procedure for any task at hand. Unfortunately, even recent cutting-edge methods bring massive computational overhead, requiring as many as 100 full model trainings to settle on an ideal configuration. We show how to achieve equivalent performance using just 6 trainings with Random Unidimensional Augmentation. Source code is available at https://github.com/fastestimator/RUA/tree/v1.0

Metrics tab: allows for easily choosing the metrics that will be used during training. In this case, Toggle widgets were used again with a vertical alignment. Additional metrics will be added with future updates. Train tab: This tab again allows the option to review the training parameters as well as the option to use the learning rate finder in order to find the best learning rate for training. Once this has been determined the learning rate and cycle length can be set. Currently, Visual_UI uses the 1 Cycle policy as proposed by Leslie Smith and discussed in this paper. In particular, this policy gives very fast results when training complex models. This policy is explained extremely well in this post.