Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

We propose Prototypical Networks for the problem of few-shot classification, where a classifier must generalize to new classes not seen in the training set, given only a small number of examples of each new class. Prototypical Networks learn a metric space in which classification can be performed by computing distances to prototype representations of each class. Compared to recent approaches for few-shot learning, they reflect a simpler inductive bias that is beneficial in this limited-data regime, and achieve excellent results. We provide an analysis showing that some simple design decisions can yield substantial improvements over recent approaches involving complicated architectural choices and meta-learning. We further extend Prototypical Networks to zero-shot learning and achieve state-of-the-art results on the CU-Birds dataset.

Neural networks have become ubiquitous in automatic speech recognition systems. While neural networks are typically used as acoustic models in more complex systems, recent studies have explored end-to-end speech recognition systems based on neural networks, which can be trained to directly predict text from input acoustic features. Although such systems are conceptually elegant and simpler than traditional systems, it is less obvious how to interpret the trained models. In this work, we analyze the speech representations learned by a deep end-to-end model that is based on convolutional and recurrent layers, and trained with a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss. We use a pre-trained model to generate frame-level features which are given to a classifier that is trained on frame classification into phones. We evaluate representations from different layers of the deep model and compare their quality for predicting phone labels. Our experiments shed light on important aspects of the end-to-end model such as layer depth, model complexity, and other design choices.

Learning meaningful representations that maintain the content necessary for a particular task while filtering away detrimental variations is a problem of great interest in machine learning. In this paper, we tackle the problem of learning representations invariant to a specific factor or trait of data. The representation learning process is formulated as an adversarial minimax game. We analyze the optimal equilibrium of such a game and find that it amounts to maximizing the uncertainty of inferring the detrimental factor given the representation while maximizing the certainty of making task-specific predictions. On three benchmark tasks, namely fair and bias-free classification, language-independent generation, and lighting-independent image classification, we show that the proposed framework induces an invariant representation, and leads to better generalization evidenced by the improved performance.

Recently proposed adversarial classification methods have shown promising results for cost sensitive and multivariate losses. In contrast with empirical risk minimization (ERM) methods, which use convex surrogate losses to approximate the desired non-convex target loss function, adversarial methods minimize non-convex losses by treating the properties of the training data as being uncertain and worst case within a minimax game. Despite this difference in formulation, we recast adversarial classification under zero-one loss as an ERM method with a novel prescribed loss function. We demonstrate a number of theoretical and practical advantages over the very closely related hinge loss ERM methods. This establishes adversarial classification under the zero-one loss as a method that fills the long standing gap in multiclass hinge loss classification, simultaneously guaranteeing Fisher consistency and universal consistency, while also providing dual parameter sparsity and high accuracy predictions in practice.

We study regression and classification in a setting where the learning algorithm is allowed to access only a limited number of attributes per example, known as the limited attribute observation model. In this well-studied model, we provide the first lower bounds giving a limit on the precision attainable by any algorithm for several variants of regression, notably linear regression with the absolute loss and the squared loss, as well as for classification with the hinge loss. We complement these lower bounds with a general purpose algorithm that gives an upper bound on the achievable precision limit in the setting of learning with missing data.

In this paper we establish a duality between boosting and SVM, and use this to derive a novel discriminant dimensionality reduction algorithm. In particular, using the multiclass formulation of boosting and SVM we note that both use a combination of mapping and linear classification to maximize the multiclass margin. In SVM this is implemented using a pre-defined mapping (induced by the kernel) and optimizing the linear classifiers. In boosting the linear classifiers are pre-defined and the mapping (predictor) is learned through combination of weak learners. We argue that the intermediate mapping, e.g.

Can we learn a binary classifier from only positive data, without any negative data or unlabeled data? We show that if one can equip positive data with confidence (positive-confidence), one can successfully learn a binary classifier, which we name positive-confidence (Pconf) classification. Our work is related to one-class classification which is aimed at describing the positive class by clustering-related methods, but one-class classification does not have the ability to tune hyper-parameters and their aim is not on discriminating positive and negative classes. For the Pconf classification problem, we provide a simple empirical risk minimization framework that is model-independent and optimization-independent. We theoretically establish the consistency and an estimation error bound, and demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method for training deep neural networks through experiments.

We study the sample complexity of semi-supervised learning (SSL) and introduce new assumptions based on the mismatch between a mixture model learned from unlabeled data and the true mixture model induced by the (unknown) class conditional distributions. Under these assumptions, we establish an $\Omega(K\log K)$ labeled sample complexity bound without imposing parametric assumptions, where $K$ is the number of classes. Our results suggest that even in nonparametric settings it is possible to learn a near-optimal classifier using only a few labeled samples. Unlike previous theoretical work which focuses on binary classification, we consider general multiclass classification ($K> 2$), which requires solving a difficult permutation learning problem. This permutation defines a classifier whose classification error is controlled by the Wasserstein distance between mixing measures, and we provide finite-sample results characterizing the behaviour of the excess risk of this classifier. Finally, we describe three algorithms for computing these estimators based on a connection to bipartite graph matching, and perform experiments to illustrate the superiority of the MLE over the majority vote estimator.

The recent advances in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have shown extremely good results for video human action classification, however, action detection is still a challenging problem. The current action detection approaches follow a complex pipeline which involves multiple tasks such as tube proposals, optical flow, and tube classification. In this work, we present a more elegant solution for action detection based on the recently developed capsule network. We propose a 3D capsule network for videos, called VideoCapsuleNet: a unified network for action detection which can jointly perform pixel-wise action segmentation along with action classification. The proposed network is a generalization of capsule network from 2D to 3D, which takes a sequence of video frames as input.