In deep learning, rich supervised information is crucial for the generalization ability of deep models.

In deep learning, rich supervised information is crucial for the generalization ability of deep models.

Conformal prediction has recently emerged as a promising strategy for quantifying the uncertainty of a predictive model; these algorithms modify the model to output sets of labels that are guaranteed to contain the true label with high probability. However, existing conformal prediction algorithms have largely targeted classification and regression settings, where the structure of the prediction set has a simple form as a level set of the scoring function. However, for complex structured outputs such as text generation, these prediction sets might include a large number of labels and therefore be hard for users to interpret. In this paper, we propose a general framework for conformal prediction in the structured prediction setting, that modifies existing conformal prediction algorithms to output structured prediction sets that implicitly represent sets of labels. In addition, we demonstrate how our approach can be applied in domains where the prediction sets can be represented as a set of nodes in a directed acyclic graph; for instance, for hierarchical labels such as image classification, a prediction set might be a small subset of coarse labels implicitly representing the prediction set of all their more fine-descendants. We demonstrate how our algorithm can be used to construct prediction sets that satisfy a desired coverage guarantee in several domains.

Recent advances in instruction-tuned Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have imbued the models with the ability to generate high-level, image-grounded explanations with ease. While such capability is largely attributed to the rich world knowledge contained within the Large Language Models (LLMs), our work reveals their shortcomings in fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) across six different benchmark settings. Most recent state-of-the-art LVLMs like LLaVa-1.5, InstructBLIP and GPT-4V not only severely deteriorate in terms of classification performance, e.g., average drop of 65.58 in EM for Stanford Dogs for LLaVA-1.5, but also struggle to generate an accurate explanation with detailed attributes based on the concept that appears within an input image despite their capability to generate holistic image-level descriptions. In-depth analyses show that instruction-tuned LVLMs exhibit modality gap, showing discrepancy when given textual and visual inputs that correspond to the same concept, preventing the image modality from leveraging the rich parametric knowledge within the LLMs. In an effort to further the community's endeavor in this direction, we propose a multiple granularity attribute-centric evaluation benchmark, Finer, which aims to establish a ground to evaluate LVLMs' fine-grained visual comprehension ability and provide significantly improved explainability.

Deep learning has become the dominating approach for object detection. To achieve accurate fine-grained detection, one needs to employ a large enough model and a vast amount of data annotations. In this paper, we propose a commonsense knowledge inference module (CKIM) which leverages commonsense knowledge to assist a lightweight deep neural network base coarse-grained object detector to achieve accurate fine-grained detection. Specifically, we focus on a scenario where a single image contains objects of similar categories but varying sizes, and we establish a size-related commonsense knowledge inference module (CKIM) that maps the coarse-grained labels produced by the DL detector to size-related fine-grained labels. Considering that rule-based systems are one of the popular methods of knowledge representation and reasoning, our experiments explored two types of rule-based CKIMs, implemented using crisp-rule and fuzzy-rule approaches, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with baseline methods, our approach achieves accurate fine-grained detection with a reduced amount of annotated data and smaller model size. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/CKIM.

Learning fine-grained embeddings from coarse labels is a challenging task due to limited label granularity supervision, i.e., lacking the detailed distinctions required for fine-grained tasks. The task becomes even more demanding when attempting few-shot fine-grained recognition, which holds practical significance in various applications. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method that embeds visual embeddings into a hyperbolic space and enhances their discriminative ability with a hierarchical cosine margins manner. Specifically, the hyperbolic space offers distinct advantages, including the ability to capture hierarchical relationships and increased expressive power, which favors modeling fine-grained objects. Based on the hyperbolic space, we further enforce relatively large/small similarity margins between coarse/fine classes, respectively, yielding the so-called hierarchical cosine margins manner. While enforcing similarity margins in the regular Euclidean space has become popular for deep embedding learning, applying it to the hyperbolic space is non-trivial and validating the benefit for coarse-to-fine generalization is valuable. Extensive experiments conducted on five benchmark datasets showcase the effectiveness of our proposed method, yielding state-of-the-art results surpassing competing methods.

Instance-level image classification tasks have traditionally relied on single-instance labels to train models, e.g., few-shot learning and transfer learning. However, set-level coarse-grained labels that capture relationships among instances can provide richer information in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel approach to enhance instance-level image classification by leveraging set-level labels. We provide a theoretical analysis of the proposed method, including recognition conditions for fast excess risk rate, shedding light on the theoretical foundations of our approach. We conducted experiments on two distinct categories of datasets: natural image datasets and histopathology image datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing improved classification performance compared to traditional single-instance label-based methods. Notably, our algorithm achieves 13% improvement in classification accuracy compared to the strongest baseline on the histopathology image classification benchmarks. Importantly, our experimental findings align with the theoretical analysis, reinforcing the robustness and reliability of our proposed method. This work bridges the gap between instance-level and set-level image classification, offering a promising avenue for advancing the capabilities of image classification models with set-level coarse-grained labels.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) frequently suffers from the problem of insufficient labeled data, particularly in fine-grained NER scenarios. Although $K$-shot learning techniques can be applied, their performance tends to saturate when the number of annotations exceeds several tens of labels. To overcome this problem, we utilize existing coarse-grained datasets that offer a large number of annotations. A straightforward approach to address this problem is pre-finetuning, which employs coarse-grained data for representation learning. However, it cannot directly utilize the relationships between fine-grained and coarse-grained entities, although a fine-grained entity type is likely to be a subcategory of a coarse-grained entity type. We propose a fine-grained NER model with a Fine-to-Coarse(F2C) mapping matrix to leverage the hierarchical structure explicitly. In addition, we present an inconsistency filtering method to eliminate coarse-grained entities that are inconsistent with fine-grained entity types to avoid performance degradation. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms both $K$-shot learning and supervised learning methods when dealing with a small number of fine-grained annotations.

Novel category discovery aims at adapting models trained on known categories to novel categories. Previous works only focus on the scenario where known and novel categories are of the same granularity. In this paper, we investigate a new practical scenario called Fine-grained Category Discovery under Coarse-grained supervision (FCDC). FCDC aims at discovering fine-grained categories with only coarse-grained labeled data, which can adapt models to categories of different granularity from known ones and reduce significant labeling cost. It is also a challenging task since supervised training on coarse-grained categories tends to focus on inter-class distance (distance between coarse-grained classes) but ignore intra-class distance (distance between fine-grained sub-classes) which is essential for separating fine-grained categories. Considering most current methods cannot transfer knowledge from coarse-grained level to fine-grained level, we propose a hierarchical weighted self-contrastive network by building a novel weighted self-contrastive module and combining it with supervised learning in a hierarchical manner. Extensive experiments on public datasets show both effectiveness and efficiency of our model over compared methods. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Lackel/Hierarchical_Weighted_SCL.

Weakly-supervised learning is a paradigm for alleviating the scarcity of labeled data by leveraging lower-quality but larger-scale supervision signals. While existing work mainly focuses on utilizing a certain type of weak supervision, we present a probabilistic framework, learning from indirect observations, for learning from a wide range of weak supervision in real-world problems, e.g., noisy labels, complementary labels and coarse-grained labels. We propose a general method based on the maximum likelihood principle, which has desirable theoretical properties and can be straightforwardly implemented for deep neural networks. Concretely, a discriminative model for the true target is used for modeling the indirect observation, which is a random variable entirely depending on the true target stochastically or deterministically. Then, maximizing the likelihood given indirect observations leads to an estimator of the true target implicitly. Comprehensive experiments for two novel problem settings --- learning from multiclass label proportions and learning from coarse-grained labels, illustrate practical usefulness of our method and demonstrate how to integrate various sources of weak supervision.