I am trying to understand the concept of fine-tuning and few-shot learning.
I understand the need for fine-tuning. It is essentially tuning a pre-trained model to a specific downstream task. However, recently I have seen a plethora of blog posts stating zero-shot learning, one-shot learning and few-shot learning.
How are they different from fine-tuning? It appears to me that few-shot learning is a specialization of fine-tuning. What am I missing here?
Can anyone please help me?
Fine tuning - When you already have a model trained to perform the task you want but on a different dataset, you initialise using the pre-trained weights and train it on target (usually smaller) dataset (usually with a smaller learning rate).
Few shot learning - When you want to train a model on any task using very few samples. e.g., you have a model trained on different but related task and you (optionally) modify it and train for target task using small number of examples.
For example:
Fine tuning - Training a model for intent classification and then fine tuning it on a different dataset.
Few shot learning - Training a language model on large text dataset and modifying it (usually last (few) layer) to classify intents by training on small labelled dataset.
There could be many more ways to do few shot learning. For 1 more example, training a model to classify images where some classes have very small (or 0 for zero shot and 1 for one shot) number of training samples. Here in inference, classifying these rare classes (rare in training) correctly becomes the aim of few shot learning.
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I'm learning transfer learning with some pre-trained models (vgg16, vgg19,…), and I wonder why I need to load pre-trained weight to train my own dataset.
I can understand if the classes in my dataset are included in the dataset that the pre-trained model is trained with. For example, VGG model was trained with 1000 classes in Imagenet dataset, and my model is to classify cat-dog, which are also in the Imagenet dataset. But here the classes in my dataset are not in this dataset. So how the pre-trained weight can help?
You don't have to use a pretrained network in order to train a model for your task. However, in practice using a pretrained network and retraining it to your task/dataset is usually faster and often you end up with better models yielding higher accuracy. This is especially the case if you do not have a lot of training data.
Why faster?
It turns out that (relatively) independent of the dataset and target classes, the first couple of layers converge to similar results. This is due to the fact that low level layers usually act as edge, corner and other simple structure detectors. Check out this example that visualizes the structures that filters of different layers "react" to. Having already trained the lower layers, adapting the higher level layers to your use case is much faster.
Why more accurate?
This question is harder to answer. IMHO it is due to the fact that pretrained models that you use as basis for transfer learning were trained on massive datasets. This means that the knowledge acquired flows into your retrained network and will help you to find a better local minimum of your loss function.
If you are in the compfortable situation that you have a lot of training data you should probably train a model from scratch as the pretained model might "point you in the wrong direction".
In this master thesis you can find a bunch of tasks (small datasets, medium datasets, small semantical gap, large semantical gap) where 3 methods are compared : fine tuning, features extraction + SVM, from scratch. Fine tuning a model pretrained on Imagenet is almost always a better choice.
Does it overfit if I build a machine learning model where it use the output from another machine learning model while both models are trained on the same data?
Basically I was wondering if I can use the KNN prediction result as an input for a deep neural network model while both of the models are trained on the very same data.
Nesting machine learning models is possible. For example, neuronal networks can be seen as multiple nested perceptrons (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron).
However you are right - nesting machine learning models increase the VC-dimension (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC_dimension) of your complete machine learning system and thus the risk of overfitting.
In practice cross-validation is often used in order to reduce the risk of overfitting.
Edit:
#MatiasValdenegro +1 for pointing towards a point I do not specify very clearly in my answer. Pure cross-validation can indeed only be used in order to detect overfitting.
However when we training certain machine learning systems like neuronal networks, it is possible to use some sort of cross-validation in order to reduce the risk of overfitting. In order to do so, we simply discard e.g. 10% of the training data for training. Then after each training round, the trained machine learning system is evaluated on the discarded training data. Once the trained neuronal network is getting worse on the discarded part, the training algorithm stops. This is for example done by the python pybrain (http://pybrain.org/) library.
I have recently been looking into incorporating the machine learning release for iOS developers with my app. Since this is my first time ever using anything ML related I was very lost when I started reading the different model descriptions that Apple has made available. They have the same purpose/description, the only difference being the actual file size. What is the difference between these models and how would you know which one is best fit ?
The models Apple makes available are just for simple demo purposes. Most of the time, these models are not sufficient for use in your own app.
The models on Apple's download page are trained for a very specific purpose: image classification on the ImageNet dataset. This means they can take an image and tell you what the "main" object is in the image, but only if it's one of the 1,000 categories from the ImageNet dataset.
Usually, this is not what you want to do in your own apps. If your app wants to do image classification, typically you want to train a model on your own categories (like food or cars or whatever). In that case you can take something like Inception-v3 (the original, not the Core ML version) and re-train it on your own data. That gives you a new model, which you then need to convert to Core ML again.
If your app wants to do something other than image classification, you can use these pretrained models as "feature extractors" in a larger neural network structure. But again this involves training your own model (usually from scratch) and then converting the result to Core ML.
So only in a very specific use case -- image classification using the 1,000 ImageNet categories -- are these Apple-provided models useful to your app.
If you do want to use any of these models, the difference between them is speed vs. accuracy. The smaller models are fastest but also least accurate. (In my opinion, VGG16 shouldn't be used on mobile. It's just too big and it's no more accurate than Inception or even MobileNet.)
SqueezeNets are fully convolutional and use Fire modules which have a squeeze layer of 1x1 convolutions which vastly decreases parameters as it can restrict the number of input channels each layer. This makes SqueezeNets extremely low latency, in addition to the fact they don't have dense layers.
MobileNets utilise depth-wise separable convolutions, very similar to inception towers in inception. These also reduce the number of a parameters and hence latency. MobileNets also have useful model-shrinking parameters than you can call before training to make it exact size you want. The Keras implementation can use ImageNet pre-trained weights too.
The other models are very deep, large models. The reduced number of parameters / style of convolution is not used for low latency but just for the ability to train very deep models, essentially. ResNet introduced residual connections between layers which were originally believed to be key in training very deep models. These aren't seen in the previously mentioned low latency models.
So far, I have read some highly cited metric learning papers. The general idea of such papers is to learn a mapping such that mapped data points with same label lie close to each other and far from samples of other classes. To evaluate such techniques they report the accuracy of the KNN classifier on the generated embedding. So my question is if we have a labelled dataset and we are interested in increasing the accuracy of classification task, why do not we learn a classifier on the original datapoints. I mean instead of finding a new embedding which suites KNN classifier, we can learn a classifier that fits the (not embedded) datapoints. Based on what I have read so far the classification accuracy of such classifiers is much better than metric learning approaches. Is there a study that shows metric learning+KNN performs better than fitting a (good) classifier at least on some datasets?
Metric learning models CAN BE classifiers. So I will answer the question that why do we need metric learning for classification.
Let me give you an example. When you have a dataset of millions of classes and some classes have only limited examples, let's say less than 5. If you use classifiers such as SVMs or normal CNNs, you will find it impossible to train because those classifiers (discriminative models) will totally ignore the classes of few examples.
But for the metric learning models, it is not a problem since they are based on generative models.
By the way, the large number of classes is a challenge for discriminative models itself.
The real-life challenge inspires us to explore more better models.
As #Tengerye mentioned, you can use models trained using metric learning for classification. KNN is the simplest approach but you can take the embeddings of your data and train another classifier, be it KNN, SVM, Neural Network, etc. The use of metric learning, in this case, would be to change the original input space to another one which would be easier for a classifier to handle.
Apart from discriminative models being hard to train when data is unbalanced, or even worse, have very few examples per class, they cannot be easily extended for new classes.
Take for example facial recognition, if facial recognition models are trained as classification models, these models would only work for the faces it has seen and wouldn't work for any new face. Of course, you could add images for the faces you wish to add and retrain the model or fine-tune the model if possible, but this is highly impractical. On the other hand, facial recognition models trained using metric learning can generate embeddings for new faces, which can be easily added to the KNN and your system then can identify the new person given his/her image.
I have a neural network that performs a classification task, and it works fairly well when the training set is large enough.
However, I'm looking for a way to train the NN with one labelled example at a time.
That is, I intercept data, one example at a time, and I need to update my NN weights. I'm not allowed to store the data for future, batch training purposes.
I have a feed-forward NN built(following Stanford's ML course on Coursera) in octave. I can run back-prop on the NN using each new example, but that approach unreliably converges, and takes a significant amount of time.
Are there any other more efficient algorithms for online learning out there in the context of Neural Networks?
I noticed Matlab's adapt() function seems to do just this. The documentation doesn't specify what it's doing behind the scene. Is it just one iteration of back-prop?