Test-time adaptation updates pretrained models on the fly to handle distribution shifts in test data. While existing research has focused on stable optimization during adaptation, less attention has been given to enhancing model representations for adaptation capability. To address this gap, we propose Test-Time Ensemble (TTE) grounded in the intriguing property of linear mode connectivity. TTE leverages ensemble strategies during adaptation: 1) adaptively averaging the parameter weights of assorted test-time adapted models and 2) incorporating dropout to further promote representation diversity. These strategies encapsulate model diversity into a single model, avoiding computational burden associated with managing multiple models. Besides, we propose a robust knowledge distillation scheme to prevent model collapse, ensuring stable optimization and preserving the ensemble benefits during adaptation. Notably, TTE integrates seamlessly with existing TTA approaches, advancing their adaptation capabilities. In extensive experiments, integration with TTE consistently outperformed baseline models across various challenging scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness and general applicability.

Neural networks are often prone to bias toward spurious correlations inherent in a dataset, thus failing to generalize unbiased test criteria. A key challenge to resolving the issue is the significant lack of bias-conflicting training data (i. e., samples without spurious correlations). In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation approach termed Bias-Adversarial augmentation (BiasAdv) that supplements bias-conflicting samples with adversarial images. Our key idea is that an adversarial attack on a biased model that makes decisions based on spurious correlations may generate syn-thetic bias-conflicting samples, which can then be used as augmented training data for learning a debiased model. Specifically, we formulate an optimization problem for gen-erating adversarial images that attack the predictions of an auxiliary biased model without ruining the predictions of the desired debiased model. Despite its simplicity, we find that BiasAdv can generate surprisingly useful synthetic bias-conflicting samples, allowing the debiased model to learn generalizable representations. Furthermore, BiasAdv does not require any bias annotations or prior knowledge of the bias type, which enables its broad applicability to existing debiasing methods to improve their performances. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of BiasAdv, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four popular benchmark datasets across various bias domains.

Deep learning algorithms require large amounts of labeled data for effective performance, but the presence of noisy labels often significantly degrade their performance. Although recent studies on designing a robust objective function to label noise, known as the robust loss method, have shown promising results for learning with noisy labels, they suffer from the issue of underfitting not only noisy samples but also clean ones, leading to suboptimal model performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel learning framework that selectively suppresses noisy samples while avoiding underfitting clean data. Our framework incorporates label confidence as a measure of label noise, enabling the network model to prioritize the training of samples deemed to be noise-free. The label confidence is based on the robust loss methods, and we provide theoretical evidence that our method can reach the optimal point of the robust loss, subject to certain conditions. Furthermore, the proposed method is generalizable and can be combined with existing robust loss methods, making it suitable for a wide range of applications of learning with noisy labels. We evaluate our approach on both synthetic and real-world datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in achieving outstanding classification performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Deep neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting in continual learning, where they tend to lose information about previously learned tasks when optimizing a new incoming task. Recent strategies isolate the important parameters for previous tasks to retain old knowledge while learning the new task. However, using the fixed old knowledge might act as an obstacle to capturing novel representations. To overcome this limitation, we propose a framework that evolves the previously allocated parameters by absorbing the knowledge of the new task. The approach performs under two different networks. The base network learns knowledge of sequential tasks, and the sparsity-inducing hyper-network generates parameters for each time step for evolving old knowledge. The generated parameters transform old parameters of the base network to reflect the new knowledge. We design the hypernetwork to generate sparse parameters conditional to the task-specific information and the structural information of the base network. We evaluate the proposed approach on class-incremental and task-incremental learning scenarios for image classification and video action recognition tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed method consistently outperforms a large variety of continual learning approaches for those scenarios by evolving old knowledge.

Deep networks consume a large amount of memory by their nature. A natural question arises can we reduce that memory requirement whilst maintaining performance. In particular, in this work we address the problem of memory efficient learning for multiple tasks. To this end, we propose a novel network architecture producing multiple networks of different configurations, termed deep virtual networks (DVNs), for different tasks. Each DVN is specialized for a single task and structured hierarchically. The hierarchical structure, which contains multiple levels of hierarchy corresponding to different numbers of parameters, enables multiple inference for different memory budgets. The building block of a deep virtual network is based on a disjoint collection of parameters of a network, which we call a unit. The lowest level of hierarchy in a deep virtual network is a unit, and higher levels of hierarchy contain lower levels' units and other additional units. Given a budget on the number of parameters, a different level of a deep virtual network can be chosen to perform the task. A unit can be shared by different DVNs, allowing multiple DVNs in a single network. In addition, shared units provide assistance to the target task with additional knowledge learned from another tasks. This cooperative configuration of DVNs makes it possible to handle different tasks in a memory-aware manner. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches for multiple tasks. Notably, ours is more efficient than others as it allows memory-aware inference for all tasks.

In this work, we consider the problem of instance-wise dynamic network model selection for multi-task learning. To this end, we propose an efficient approach to exploit a compact but accurate model in a backbone architecture for each instance of all tasks. The proposed method consists of an estimator and a selector. The estimator is based on a backbone architecture and structured hierarchically. It can produce multiple different network models of different configurations in a hierarchical structure. The selector chooses a model dynamically from a pool of candidate models given an input instance. The selector is a relatively small-size network consisting of a few layers, which estimates a probability distribution over the candidate models when an input instance of a task is given. Both estimator and selector are jointly trained in a unified learning framework in conjunction with a sampling-based learning strategy, without additional computation steps. We demonstrate the proposed approach for several image classification tasks compared to existing approaches performing model selection or learning multiple tasks. Experimental results show that our approach gives not only outstanding performance compared to other competitors but also the versatility to perform instance-wise model selection for multiple tasks.

Recently, there have been increasing demands to construct compact deep architectures to remove unnecessary redundancy and to improve the inference speed. While many recent works focus on reducing the redundancy by eliminating unneeded weight parameters, it is not possible to apply a single deep network for multiple devices with different resources. When a new device or circumstantial condition requires a new deep architecture, it is necessary to construct and train a new network from scratch. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning framework, called a nested sparse network, which exploits an n-in-1-type nested structure in a neural network. A nested sparse network consists of multiple levels of networks with a different sparsity ratio associated with each level, and higher level networks share parameters with lower level networks to enable stable nested learning. The proposed framework realizes a resource-aware versatile architecture as the same network can meet diverse resource requirements, i.e., anytime property. Moreover, the proposed nested network can learn different forms of knowledge in its internal networks at different levels, enabling multiple tasks using a single network, such as coarse-to-fine hierarchical classification. In order to train the proposed nested network, we propose efficient weight connection learning and channel and layer scheduling strategies. We evaluate our network in multiple tasks, including adaptive deep compression, knowledge distillation, and learning class hierarchy, and demonstrate that nested sparse networks perform competitively, but more efficiently, compared to existing methods.