Jian Liang 0002

dblp:19/2208-2 · DBLP profile ↗
← Back
30ranked-venue papers
3as first author
23since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 25 · 2 first-author · 20 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 9 · 1 first-author · 6 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 5 · 1 first-author · 4 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Unifying User Satisfaction and Creator Incentive: A Constrained Optimization Framework for Short-Video Recommendation
abstract
Short-video recommendation systems typically optimize for user satisfaction. However, allocating exposure to creators at critical growth stages incentivizes long-term content supply despite compromising immediate user engagement. Existing efforts concerning creator interests aim at either improving creator exposure fairness, matching creators with suitable audiences, or leveraging creator behavior to enhance user welfare. Directly maximizing the joint value of user satisfaction and creator incentive at recommendation time, however, remains largely unaddressed. This presents two challenges. First, the two objectives are heterogeneous in nature, making it non-trivial to formulate this joint optimization as a tractable problem. Second, optimizing creator incentive requires globally coordinated decisions across requests, making real-time serving infeasible. To address these challenges, we formulate the joint maximization as a constrained optimization problem that unifies the two heterogeneous objectives. We further derive an efficient online algorithm based on the primal-dual method, which decouples global incentive constraints into real-time decisions with theoretical guarantees. Experiments on a large-scale short-video platform demonstrate consistent improvements in joint user-creator value over existing baselines.
Xiaoru Qu, Dingyi Zhang, Zhangxi Yan, Hu Liu 0001, Jian Liang 0002, Kaiqiao Zhan
SIGIR7
2025 From Local Details to Global Context: Advancing Vision-Language Models with Attention-Based Selection
abstract
Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), e.g., CLIP, demonstrate impressive zero-shot capabilities on downstream tasks. Prior research highlights the crucial role of visual augmentation techniques, like random cropping, in alignment with fine-grained class descriptions generated by large language models (LLMs), significantly enhancing zero-shot performance by incorporating multi-view information. However, the inherent randomness of these augmentations can inevitably introduce background artifacts and cause models to overly focus on local details, compromising global semantic understanding. To address these issues, we propose an Attention-Based Selection (ABS) method from local details to global context, which applies attention-guided cropping in both raw images and feature space, supplement global semantic information through strategic feature selection. Additionally, we introduce a soft matching technique to effectively filter LLM descriptions for better alignment. ABS achieves state-of-the-art performance on out-of-distribution generalization and zero-shot classification tasks. Notably, ABS is training-free and even rivals few-shot and test-time adaptation methods.
Lincan Cai, Jingxuan Kang, Shuang Li 0008, Wenxuan Ma 0001, Binhui Xie, Zhida Qin, Jian Liang 0002
ICML7
2025 Learning Time-Aware Causal Representation for Model Generalization in Evolving Domains
abstract
Endowing deep models with the ability to generalize in dynamic scenarios is of vital significance for real-world deployment, given the continuous and complex changes in data distribution. Recently, evolving domain generalization (EDG) has emerged to address distribution shifts over time, aiming to capture evolving patterns for improved model generalization. However, existing EDG methods may suffer from spurious correlations by modeling only the dependence between data and targets across domains, creating a shortcut between task-irrelevant factors and the target, which hinders generalization. To this end, we design a time-aware structural causal model (SCM) that incorporates dynamic causal factors and the causal mechanism drifts, and propose Static-DYNamic Causal Representation Learning (SYNC), an approach that effectively learns time-aware causal representations. Specifically, it integrates specially designed information-theoretic objectives into a sequential VAE framework which captures evolving patterns, and produces the desired representations by preserving intra-class compactness of causal factors both across and within domains. Moreover, we theoretically show that our method can yield the optimal causal predictor for each time domain. Results on both synthetic and real-world datasets exhibit that SYNC can achieve superior temporal generalization performance.
Zhuo He, Shuang Li 0008, Wenze Song, Longhui Yuan, Jian Liang 0002, Han Li 0005, Kun Gai
ICML5
2024 Subjective Topic meets LLMs: Unleashing Comprehensive, Reflective and Creative Thinking through the Negation of Negation
abstract
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit powerful reasoning capacity, as evidenced by prior studies focusing on objective topics that with unique standard answer such as arithmetic and commonsense reasoning.However, the reasoning to definite answers emphasizes more on logical thinking, and falls short in effectively reflecting the comprehensive, reflective, and creative thinking that is also critical for the overall reasoning prowess of LLMs.In light of this, we build a dataset SJTP comprising diverse SubJective ToPics with free responses, as well as three evaluation indicators to fully explore LLM's reasoning ability.We observe that a sole emphasis on logical thinking falls short in effectively tackling subjective challenges.Therefore, we introduce a framework grounded in the principle of the Negation of Negation (NeoN) to unleash the potential comprehensive, reflective, and creative thinking abilities of LLMs.Comprehensive experiments on SJTP demonstrate the efficacy of NeoN, and the enhanced performance on various objective reasoning tasks unequivocally underscores the benefits of stimulating LLM's subjective thinking in augmenting overall reasoning capabilities.
Fangrui Lv, Kaixiong Gong, Jian Liang 0002, Xinyu Pang, Changshui Zhang
EMNLP3
2024 CLAP: Collaborative Adaptation for Patchwork Learning
abstract
In this paper, we investigate a new practical learning scenario, where the data distributed in different sources/clients are typically generated with various modalities. Existing research on learning from multi-source data mostly assume that each client owns the data of all modalities, which may largely limit its practicability. In light of the expensiveness and sparsity of multimodal data, we propose patchwork learning to jointly learn from fragmented multimodal data in distributed clients. Considering the concerns on data privacy, patchwork learning aims to impute incomplete multimodal data for diverse downstream tasks without accessing the raw data directly. Local clients could miss different modality combinations. Due to the statistical heterogeneity induced by non-i.i.d. data, the imputation is more challenging since the learned dependencies fail to adapt to the imputation of other clients. In this paper, we provide a novel imputation framework to tackle modality combination heterogeneity and statistical heterogeneity simultaneously, called ``collaborative adaptation''. In particular, for two observed modality combinations from two clients, we learn the transformations between their maximal intersection and other modalities by proposing a novel ELBO. We improve the worst-performing required transformations through a Pareto min-max optimization framework. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to existing related methods on benchmark data sets and a real-world clinical data set.
Sen Cui, Abudukelimu Wuerkaixi, Weishen Pan, Jian Liang 0002, Changshui Zhang, Fei Wang 0001
ICLR4
2024 Exploring Structured Semantic Priors Underlying Diffusion Score for Test-time Adaptation
abstract
Capitalizing on the complementary advantages of generative and discriminative models has always been a compelling vision in machine learning, backed by a growing body of research. This work discloses the hidden semantic structure within score-based generative models, unveiling their potential as effective discriminative priors. Inspired by our theoretical findings, we propose DUSA to exploit the structured semantic priors underlying diffusion score to facilitate the test-time adaptation of image classifiers or dense predictors. Notably, DUSA extracts knowledge from a single timestep of denoising diffusion, lifting the curse of Monte Carlo-based likelihood estimation over timesteps. We demonstrate the efficacy of our DUSA in adapting a wide variety of competitive pre-trained discriminative models on diverse test-time scenarios. Additionally, a thorough ablation study is conducted to dissect the pivotal elements in DUSA. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/BIT-DA/DUSA.
Mingjia Li 0003, Shuang Li 0008, Tongrui Su, Longhui Yuan, Jian Liang 0002, Wei Li 0111
NeurIPS5
2024 Weight Diffusion for Future: Learn to Generalize in Non-Stationary Environments
abstract
Enabling deep models to generalize in non-stationary environments is vital for real-world machine learning, as data distributions are often found to continually change. Recently, evolving domain generalization (EDG) has emerged to tackle the domain generalization in a time-varying system, where the domain gradually evolves over time in an underlying continuous structure. Nevertheless, it typically assumes multiple source domains simultaneously ready. It still remains an open problem to address EDG in the domain-incremental setting, where source domains are non-static and arrive sequentially to mimic the evolution of training domains. To this end, we propose Weight Diffusion (W-Diff), a novel framework that utilizes the conditional diffusion model in the parameter space to learn the evolving pattern of classifiers during the domain-incremental training process. Specifically, the diffusion model is conditioned on the classifier weights of different historical domain (regarded as a reference point) and the prototypes of current domain, to learn the evolution from the reference point to the classifier weights of current domain (regarded as the anchor point). In addition, a domain-shared feature encoder is learned by enforcing prediction consistency among multiple classifiers, so as to mitigate the overfitting problem and restrict the evolving pattern to be reflected in the classifier as much as possible. During inference, we adopt the ensemble manner based on a great number of target domain-customized classifiers, which are cheaply obtained via the conditional diffusion model, for robust prediction. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show the superior generalization performance of W-Diff on unseen domains in the future.
Mixue Xie, Shuang Li 0008, Binhui Xie, Chi Harold Liu, Jian Liang 0002, Zixun Sun, Chengwei Zhu
NeurIPS5
2023 Improving Generalization with Domain Convex Game
abstract
Domain generalization (DG) tends to alleviate the poor generalization capability of deep neural networks by learning model with multiple source domains. A classical solution to DG is domain augmentation, the common belief of which is that diversifying source domains will be conducive to the out-of-distribution generalization. However, these claims are understood intuitively, rather than mathematically. Our explorations empirically reveal that the correlation between model generalization and the diversity of domains may be not strictly positive, which limits the effectiveness of domain augmentation. This work therefore aim to guarantee and further enhance the validity of this strand. To this end, we propose a new perspective on DG that recasts it as a convex game between domains. We first encourage each diversified domain to enhance model generalization by elaborately designing a regularization term based on supermodularity. Meanwhile, a sample filter is constructed to eliminate low-quality samples, thereby avoiding the impact of potentially harmful information. Our framework presents a new avenue for the formal analysis of DG, heuristic analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness.11Code is available at “https://github.com/BIT-DA/DCG”.
Fangrui Lv, Jian Liang 0002, Shuang Li 0008, Di Liu 0029
CVPR2
2023 Meta Graph Learning for Long-tail Recommendation
abstract
Highly skewed long-tail item distribution commonly hurts model performance on tail items in recommendation systems, especially for graph-based recommendation models. We propose a novel idea to learn relations among items as an auxiliary graph to enhance the graph-based representation learning and make recommendations collectively in a coupled framework. This raises two challenges, 1) the long-tail downstream information may also bias the auxiliary graph learning, and 2) the learned auxiliary graph may cause negative transfer to the original user-item bipartite graph. We innovatively propose a novel Meta Graph Learning framework for long-tail recommendation (MGL) for solving both challenges. The meta-learning strategy is introduced to the learning of an edge generator, which is first tuned to reconstruct a debiased item co-occurrence matrix, and then virtually evaluated on generating item relations for recommendation. Moreover, we propose a popularity-aware contrastive learning strategy to prevent negative transfer by aligning the confident head item representations with those of the learned auxiliary graph. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms strong baselines for tail items without compromising the overall performance.
Chunyu Wei, Jian Liang 0002, Di Liu 0029, Zehui Dai, Mang Li, Fei Wang 0001
KDD2
2023 Meta-Reweighted Regularization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
abstract
Unsupervised domain adaptation enables knowledge transfer from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain by reducing the cross-domain distribution discrepancy, and the adversarial learning based paradigm has achieved remarkable success. On top of this, recent works seeks to further regularize the classification decision boundary via self-training to learn target adaptive classifier with pseudo-labeled target samples. However, since pseudo labels are inevitably noisy, most of prior methods focus on manually designing elaborate target selection algorithms or optimization objectives. Different from them, we propose a meta-learning based target-reweighting regularization algorithm called MetaReg. Specifically, MetaReg is motivated by the intuition that an ideal target classifier trained on correct target pseudo labels should make small classification errors on target-like source samples. Therefore, we explicitly define a meta reweighting problem that aims to find optimal weights for different samples by minimizing the classification loss on a class-balanced set consisting of source samples that are most similar to target ones. The optimization problem is solved efficiently with a simplified approximation technique. As a result, the automatically learned optimal weights are utilized to reweight pseudo-labeled target samples and regularize the model learning. Comprehensive experiments verify that MetaReg outperforms the non-regularized UDA counterparts with state-of-the-art performance.
Shuang Li 0008, Wenxuan Ma 0001, Chi Harold Liu, Jian Liang 0002, Guoren Wang
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.5
2022 Dynamic Hypergraph Learning for Collaborative Filtering
abstract
Hypergraph-based collaborative filtering for recommendations has emerged as an important research topic due to its ability to model complex relations among users and items. However, most existing methods typically construct the hypergraph structures using heuristics (e.g., motifs and jump connections) based on existing graphs (e.g., user-item bipartite graphs and social networks). From a learning perspective, we argue that the fixed heuristic topology of hypergraph may become a limitation and thus potentially compromise the recommendation performance. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel dynamic hypergraph learning framework for collaborative filtering (DHLCF), which learns hypergraph structures and makes recommendations collectively in a unified framework. In the hypergraph learning process, we solve two main challenges, i.e., 1) optimization issue and 2) regularization issue. Firstly, we propose a differentiable hypergraph learner to adaptively learn the optimized hypergraph structures dynamically for the hypergraph convolutions during the training process. Secondly, to better regularize dynamic hypergraph learning, we introduce a novel hypergraph learning objective, which forces the learned hypergraphs to retain the original graph topology. Extensive experiments on public datasets from different domains are provided to show that our proposed model significantly outperforms strong baselines.
Chunyu Wei, Jian Liang 0002, Di Liu 0029
CIKM2
2022 Causality Inspired Representation Learning for Domain Generalization
abstract
Domain generalization (DG) is essentially an out-of-distribution problem, aiming to generalize the knowledge learned from multiple source domains to an unseen target domain. The mainstream is to leverage statistical models to model the dependence between data and labels, intending to learn representations independent of domain. Nevertheless, the statistical models are superficial descriptions of reality since they are only required to model dependence instead of the intrinsic causal mechanism. When the dependence changes with the target distribution, the statistic models may fail to generalize. In this regard, we introduce a general structural causal model to formalize the DG problem. Specifically, we assume that each input is constructed from a mix of causal factors (whose relationship with the label is invariant across domains) and non-causal factors (category-independent), and only the former cause the classification judgments. Our goal is to extract the causal factors from inputs and then reconstruct the invariant causal mechanisms. However, the theoretical idea is far from practical of DG since the required causal/non-causal factors are unobserved. We highlight that ideal causal factors should meet three basic properties: separated from the non-causal ones, jointly independent, and causally sufficient for the classification. Based on that, we propose a Causality Inspired Representation Learning (CIRL) algorithm that enforces the representations to satisfy the above properties and then uses them to simulate the causal factors, which yields improved generalization ability. Extensive experimental results on several widely used datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach.11Code is available at “https://github.com/BIT-DA/CIRL”.
Fangrui Lv, Jian Liang 0002, Shuang Li 0008, Bin Zang, Chi Harold Liu, Di Liu 0029
CVPR2
2022 ACE: A Coarse-to-Fine Learning Framework for Reliable Representation Learning Against Label Noise
abstract
The prosperity of deep neural networks in various computer vision applications heavily depends on large-scale high-quality annotated datasets. However, inaccurate annotations are often inevitable when building hand-labeled datasets, which can lead to imperfectly supervision problems. Most existing methods to address these problems mainly use noisy labels to learn latent representations, which may be corrupted when the noise rate is high, thus limiting the predictions for clean test data set. In this paper, we propose a flexible coarse-to-fine representation learning framework to improve the quality of latent representations by exploiting the reliable geometry information from raw features. This framework includes: (i) an anchored representation learner, which is a coarse mechanism for learning reasonable feature-similarity to avoid feature corruption, (ii) a confident representation learner, which is used to learn confident data pairs, and (iii) an exploratory representation learner, which is proposed for learning from feasible unconfident pairs and performing label refurbishment. Comprehensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method, especially when the noise level is high and the task is relatively difficult.
Chenbin Zhang, Xiangli Yang, Jian Liang 0002, Irwin King, Zenglin Xu
IJCNN3
2022 Collaboration Equilibrium in Federated Learning
abstract
Federated learning (FL) refers to the paradigm of learning models over a collaborative research network involving multiple clients without sacrificing privacy. Recently, there have been rising concerns on the distributional discrepancies across different clients, which could even cause counterproductive consequences when collaborating with others. While it is not necessarily that collaborating with all clients will achieve the best performance, in this paper, we study a rational collaboration called "collaboration equilibrium'' (CE), where smaller collaboration coalitions are formed. Each client collaborates with certain members who maximally improve the model learning and isolates the others who make little contribution. We propose the concept of benefit graph which describes how each client can benefit from collaborating with other clients and advance a Pareto optimization approach to identify the optimal collaborators. Then we theoretically prove that we can reach a CE from the benefit graph through an iterative graph operation. Our framework provides a new way of setting up collaborations in a research network. Experiments on both synthetic and real world data sets are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Sen Cui, Jian Liang 0002, Weishen Pan, Kun Chen 0002, Changshui Zhang, Fei Wang 0001
KDD2
2022 Synergy-of-Experts: Collaborate to Improve Adversarial Robustness
abstract
Learning adversarially robust models require invariant predictions to a small neighborhood of its natural inputs, often encountering insufficient model capacity. There is research showing that learning multiple sub-models in an ensemble could mitigate this insufficiency, further improving the generalization and the robustness. However, the ensemble's voting-based strategy excludes the possibility that the true predictions remain with the minority. Therefore, this paper further improves the ensemble through a collaboration scheme---Synergy-of-Experts (SoE). Compared with the voting-based strategy, the SoE enables the possibility of correct predictions even if there exists a single correct sub-model. In SoE, every sub-model fits its specific vulnerability area and reserves the rest of the sub-models to fit other vulnerability areas, which effectively optimizes the utilization of the model capacity. Empirical experiments verify that SoE outperforms various ensemble methods against white-box and transfer-based adversarial attacks.
Sen Cui, Jingfeng Zhang, Jian Liang 0002, Bo Han 0003, Masashi Sugiyama, Changshui Zhang
NeurIPS3
2022 Adversarial Filtering Modeling on Long-term User Behavior Sequences for Click-Through Rate Prediction
abstract
Rich user behavior information is of great importance for capturing and understanding user interest in click-through rate (CTR) prediction. To improve the richness, collecting long-term behaviors becomes a typical approach in academy and industry but at the cost of increasing online storage and latency. Recently, researchers have proposed several approaches to shorten long-term behavior sequence and then model user interests. These approaches reduce online cost efficiently but do not well handle the noisy information in long-term user behavior, which may deteriorate the performance of CTR prediction significantly. To obtain better cost/performance trade-off, we propose a novel Adversarial Filtering Model (ADFM) to model long-term user behavior. ADFM uses a hierarchical aggregation representation to compress raw behavior sequence and then learns to remove useless behavior information with an adversarial filtering mechanism. The selected user behaviors are fed into interest extraction module for CTR prediction. Experimental results on public datasets and industrial dataset demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art models.
Jian Liang 0002, Xialong Liu, Yu Zhang 0206
SIGIR2
2022 Model-Protected Multi-Task Learning
abstract
Multi-task learning (MTL) refers to the paradigm of learning multiple related tasks together. In contrast, in single-task learning (STL) each individual task is learned independently. MTL often leads to better trained models because they can leverage the commonalities among related tasks. However, because MTL algorithms can "leak" information from different models across different tasks, MTL poses a potential security risk. Specifically, an adversary may participate in the MTL process through one task and thereby acquire the model information for another task. The previously proposed privacy-preserving MTL methods protect data instances rather than models, and some of them may underperform in comparison with STL methods. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving MTL framework to prevent information from each model leaking to other models based on a perturbation of the covariance matrix of the model matrix. We study two popular MTL approaches for instantiation, namely, learning the low-rank and group-sparse patterns of the model matrix. Our algorithms can be guaranteed not to underperform compared with STL methods. We build our methods based upon tools for differential privacy, and privacy guarantees, utility bounds are provided, and heterogeneous privacy budgets are considered. The experiments demonstrate that our algorithms outperform the baseline methods constructed by existing privacy-preserving MTL methods on the proposed model-protection problem.
Jian Liang 0002, Xiaoqian Jiang, Changshui Zhang, Fei Wang 0001
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.1
2021 Bi-Classifier Determinacy Maximization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
abstract
Unsupervised domain adaptation challenges the problem of transferring knowledge from a well-labelled source domain to an unlabelled target domain. Recently, adversarial learning with bi-classifier has been proven effective in pushing cross-domain distributions close. Prior approaches typically leverage the disagreement between bi-classifier to learn transferable representations, however, they often neglect the classifier determinacy in the target domain, which could result in a lack of feature discriminability. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method, namely Bi-Classifier Determinacy Maximization (BCDM), to tackle this problem. Motivated by the observation that target samples cannot always be separated distinctly by the decision boundary, here in the proposed BCDM, we design a novel classifier determinacy disparity (CDD) metric, which formulates classifier discrepancy as the class relevance of distinct target predictions and implicitly introduces constraint on the target feature discriminability. To this end, the BCDM can generate discriminative representations by encouraging target predictive outputs to be consistent and determined, meanwhile, preserve the diversity of predictions in an adversarial manner. Furthermore, the properties of CDD as well as the theoretical guarantees of BCDM's generalization bound are both elaborated. Extensive experiments show that BCDM compares favorably against the existing state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods.
Shuang Li 0008, Fangrui Lv, Binhui Xie, Chi Harold Liu, Jian Liang 0002, Chen Qin
AAAI5
2021 Semantic Concentration for Domain Adaptation
abstract
Domain adaptation (DA) paves the way for label annotation and dataset bias issues by the knowledge transfer from a label-rich source domain to a related but unlabeled target domain. A mainstream of DA methods is to align the feature distributions of the two domains. However, the majority of them focus on the entire image features where irrelevant semantic information, e.g., the messy background, is inevitably embedded. Enforcing feature alignments in such case will negatively influence the correct matching of objects and consequently lead to the semantically negative transfer due to the confusion of irrelevant semantics. To tackle this issue, we propose Semantic Concentration for Domain Adaptation (SCDA), which encourages the model to concentrate on the most principal features via the pair-wise adversarial alignment of prediction distributions. Specifically, we train the classifier to class-wisely maximize the prediction distribution divergence of each sample pair, which enables the model to find the region with large differences among the same class of samples. Meanwhile, the feature extractor attempts to minimize that discrepancy, which suppresses the features of dissimilar regions among the same class of samples and accentuates the features of principal parts. As a general method, SCDA can be easily integrated into various DA methods as a regularizer to further boost their performance. Extensive experiments on the cross-domain benchmarks show the efficacy of SCDA.
Shuang Li 0008, Mixue Xie, Fangrui Lv, Chi Harold Liu, Jian Liang 0002, Chen Qin, Wei Li 0111
ICCV5
2021 Policy-Driven Attack: Learning to Query for Hard-label Black-box Adversarial Examples
Ziang Yan, Yiwen Guo, Jian Liang 0002, Changshui Zhang
ICLR3
2021 Addressing Algorithmic Disparity and Performance Inconsistency in Federated Learning
abstract
Federated learning (FL) has gain growing interests for its capability of learning from distributed data sources collectively without the need of accessing the raw data samples across different sources. So far FL research has mostly focused on improving the performance, how the algorithmic disparity will be impacted for the model learned from FL and the impact of algorithmic disparity on the utility inconsistency are largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose an FL framework to jointly consider performance consistency and algorithmic fairness across different local clients (data sources). We derive our framework from a constrained multi-objective optimization perspective, in which we learn a model satisfying fairness constraints on all clients with consistent performance. Specifically, we treat the algorithm prediction loss at each local client as an objective and maximize the worst-performing client with fairness constraints through optimizing a surrogate maximum function with all objectives involved. A gradient-based procedure is employed to achieve the Pareto optimality of this optimization problem. Theoretical analysis is provided to prove that our method can converge to a Pareto solution that achieves the min-max performance with fairness constraints on all clients. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority that our approach over baselines and its effectiveness in achieving both fairness and consistency across all local clients.
Sen Cui, Weishen Pan, Jian Liang 0002, Changshui Zhang, Fei Wang 0001
NeurIPS3
2021 Pareto Domain Adaptation
abstract
Domain adaptation (DA) attempts to transfer the knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain that follows different distribution from the source. To achieve this, DA methods include a source classification objective to extract the source knowledge and a domain alignment objective to diminish the domain shift, ensuring knowledge transfer. Typically, former DA methods adopt some weight hyper-parameters to linearly combine the training objectives to form an overall objective. However, the gradient directions of these objectives may conflict with each other due to domain shift. Under such circumstances, the linear optimization scheme might decrease the overall objective value at the expense of damaging one of the training objectives, leading to restricted solutions. In this paper, we rethink the optimization scheme for DA from a gradient-based perspective. We propose a Pareto Domain Adaptation (ParetoDA) approach to control the overall optimization direction, aiming to cooperatively optimize all training objectives. Specifically, to reach a desirable solution on the target domain, we design a surrogate loss mimicking target classification. To improve target-prediction accuracy to support the mimicking, we propose a target-prediction refining mechanism which exploits domain labels via Bayes’ theorem. On the other hand, since prior knowledge of weighting schemes for objectives is often unavailable to guide optimization to approach the optimal solution on the target domain, we propose a dynamic preference mechanism to dynamically guide our cooperative optimization by the gradient of the surrogate loss on a held-out unlabeled target dataset. Our theoretical analyses show that the held-out data can guide but will not be over-fitted by the optimization. Extensive experiments on image classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of ParetoDA
Fangrui Lv, Jian Liang 0002, Kaixiong Gong, Shuang Li 0008, Chi Harold Liu, Han Li 0005, Di Liu 0029, Guoren Wang
NeurIPS2
2021 Robust Few-Shot Learning for User-Provided Data
abstract
Few-shot learning (FSL) focuses on distilling transferrable knowledge from existing experience to cope with novel concepts for which the labeled data are scarce. A typical assumption in FSL is that the training examples of novel classes are all clean with no outlier interference. In many realistic applications where examples are provided by users, however, data are potentially noisy or unreadable. In this context, we introduce a novel research topic, robust FSL (RFSL), where we aim to address two types of outliers within user-provided data: the representation outlier (RO) and the label outlier (LO). Moreover, we introduce a metric for estimating robustness and use it to investigate the performance of several advanced methods to FSL when faced with user-provided outliers. In addition, we propose robust attentive profile networks (RapNets) to achieve outlier suppression. The results of a comprehensive evaluation of benchmark data sets demonstrate the shortcomings of current FSL methods and the superiority of the proposed RapNets when dealing with RFSL problems, establishing a benchmark for follow-up studies.
Jiang Lu, Sheng Jin 0007, Jian Liang 0002, Changshui Zhang
IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst.3
2020 Two Sides of the Same Coin: White-box and Black-box Attacks for Transfer Learning
abstract
Transfer learning has become a common practice for training deep learning models with limited labeled data in a target domain. On the other hand, deep models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Though transfer learning has been widely applied, its effect on model robustness is unclear. To figure out this problem, we conduct extensive empirical evaluations to show that fine-tuning effectively enhances model robustness under white-box FGSM attacks. We also propose a black-box attack method for transfer learning models which attacks the target model with the adversarial examples produced by its source model. To systematically measure the effect of both white-box and black-box attacks, we propose a new metric to evaluate how transferable are the adversarial examples produced by a source model to a target model. Empirical results show that the adversarial examples are more transferable when fine-tuning is used than they are when the two networks are trained independently.
Yangqiu Song, Jian Liang 0002, Qiang Yang 0001
KDD3
2020 Relation-Guided Representation Learning
Zhao Kang 0001, Xiao Lu 0004, Jian Liang 0002, Zenglin Xu
Neural Networks3
2019 Selection Bias Explorations and Debias Methods for Natural Language Sentence Matching Datasets
abstract
Natural Language Sentence Matching (NLSM) has gained substantial attention from both academics and the industry, and rich public datasets contribute a lot to this process.However, biased datasets can also hurt the generalization performance of trained models and give untrustworthy evaluation results.For many NLSM datasets, the providers select some pairs of sentences into the datasets, and this sampling procedure can easily bring unintended pattern, i.e., selection bias.One example is the QuoraQP dataset, where some content-independent naïve features are unreasonably predictive.Such features are the reflection of the selection bias and termed as the "leakage features."In this paper, we investigate the problem of selection bias on six NLSM datasets and find that four out of them are significantly biased.We further propose a training and evaluation framework to alleviate the bias.Experimental results on QuoraQP suggest that the proposed framework can improve the generalization ability of trained models, and give more trustworthy evaluation results for real-world adoptions.
Jian Liang 0002, Shiyu Chang, Mo Yu, Conghui Zhu, Tiejun Zhao
ACL (1)3
2019 Additive Adversarial Learning for Unbiased Authentication
abstract
Authentication is a task aiming to confirm the truth between data instances and personal identities. Typical authentication applications include face recognition, person re-identification, authentication based on mobile devices and so on. The recently-emerging data-driven authentication process may encounter undesired biases, i.e., the models are often trained in one domain (e.g., for people wearing spring outfits) while required to apply in other domains (e.g., they change the clothes to summer outfits). To address this issue, we propose a novel two-stage method that disentangles the class/identity from domain-differences, and we consider multiple types of domain-difference. In the first stage, we learn disentangled representations by a one-versus-rest disentangle learning (OVRDL) mechanism. In the second stage, we improve the disentanglement by an additive adversarial learning (AAL) mechanism. Moreover, we discuss the necessity to avoid a learning dilemma due to disentangling causally related types of domain-difference. Comprehensive evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.
Jian Liang 0002, Yuren Cao, Chenbin Zhang, Shiyu Chang, Zenglin Xu
CVPR1
2018 Robust finite mixture regression for heterogeneous targets
Jian Liang 0002, Kun Chen 0002, Ming Lin 0002, Changshui Zhang, Fei Wang 0001
Data Min. Knowl. Discov.1
2017 An RNN Architecture with Dynamic Temporal Matching for Personalized Predictions of Parkinson's Disease
abstract
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic disease that develops over years and varies dramatically in its clinical manifestations. A preferred strategy to resolve this heterogeneity and thus enable better prognosis and targeted therapies is to segment out more homogeneous patient sub-populations. However, it is challenging to evaluate the clinical similarities among patients because of the longitudinality and temporality of their records. To address this issue, we propose a deep model that directly learns patient similarity from longitudinal and multi-modal patient records with an Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architecture, which learns the similarity between two longitudinal patient record sequences through dynamically matching temporal patterns in patient sequences. Evaluations on real world patient records demonstrate the promising utility and efficacy of the proposed architecture in personalized predictions.
Chao Che, Cao Xiao, Jian Liang 0002, Bo Jin 0001, Jiayu Zho, Fei Wang 0001
SDM3
2016 DeepFish: Accurate underwater live fish recognition with a deep architecture
Hongwei Qin, Xiu Li 0001, Jian Liang 0002, YiGang Peng, Changshui Zhang
Neurocomputing3