wct
Is Meta-Learning Out? Rethinking Unsupervised Few-Shot Classification with Limited Entropy
Guan, Yunchuan, Liu, Yu, Zhou, Ke, Shen, Zhiqi, Hwang, Jenq-Neng, Belongie, Serge, Li, Lei
Meta-learning is a powerful paradigm for tackling few-shot tasks. However, recent studies indicate that models trained with the whole-class training strategy can achieve comparable performance to those trained with meta-learning in few-shot classification tasks. To demonstrate the value of meta-learning, we establish an entropy-limited supervised setting for fair comparisons. Through both theoretical analysis and experimental validation, we establish that meta-learning has a tighter generalization bound compared to whole-class training. We unravel that meta-learning is more efficient with limited entropy and is more robust to label noise and heterogeneous tasks, making it well-suited for unsupervised tasks. Based on these insights, We propose MINO, a meta-learning framework designed to enhance unsupervised performance. MINO utilizes the adaptive clustering algorithm DBSCAN with a dynamic head for unsupervised task construction and a stability-based meta-scaler for robustness against label noise. Extensive experiments confirm its effectiveness in multiple unsupervised few-shot and zero-shot tasks.
Co-training for Low Resource Scientific Natural Language Inference
Sadat, Mobashir, Caragea, Cornelia
Scientific Natural Language Inference (NLI) is the task of predicting the semantic relation between a pair of sentences extracted from research articles. The automatic annotation method based on distant supervision for the training set of SciNLI (Sadat and Caragea, 2022b), the first and most popular dataset for this task, results in label noise which inevitably degenerates the performance of classifiers. In this paper, we propose a novel co-training method that assigns weights based on the training dynamics of the classifiers to the distantly supervised labels, reflective of the manner they are used in the subsequent training epochs. That is, unlike the existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) approaches, we consider the historical behavior of the classifiers to evaluate the quality of the automatically annotated labels. Furthermore, by assigning importance weights instead of filtering out examples based on an arbitrary threshold on the predicted confidence, we maximize the usage of automatically labeled data, while ensuring that the noisy labels have a minimal impact on model training. The proposed method obtains an improvement of 1.5% in Macro F1 over the distant supervision baseline, and substantial improvements over several other strong SSL baselines. We make our code and data available on Github.
Using AI to Connect Patients To Clinical Trials
Last March, Deep Lens partnered with a top global CRO, Worldwide Clinical Trials (WCT), to accelerate confident diagnoses of cancer and streamline oncology trial recruitment, timelines, and workflows. Using Viper, WCT is working to find the most suitable patients for cancer trials at the time of their diagnoses. By working with Deep Lens on clinical trial recruitment, WCT can reach upstream from the oncologist to the pathologist, enabling identification of eligible patients at the time of their diagnosis -- much sooner than current methods. Going straight to the source can fast-track trial enrollment and potentially shorten the duration of the trial.