As future superhuman models become increasingly complex, accurately supervising their behavior may exceed human capabilities. Recent works have demonstrated that in such scenarios, weak models can effectively supervise strong models, a phenomenon known as weak-to-strong generalization. However, we find that naive weak-to-strong generalization fails under distribution shifts, often leading to worse performance of the strong model than its weak supervisors. To address this, we propose RAVEN, a robust weak-to-strong generalization framework that dynamically learns the optimal combinations of weak models in addition to parameters of the strong model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RAVEN on image classification, text classification, and preference alignment tasks. RAVEN outperforms alternative baselines by over 30% on out-of-distribution tasks while matching or surpassing existing methods on in-distribution tasks. Moreover, our results show that RAVEN assigns higher weights to more accurate weak models, demonstrating its ability to automatically identify trustworthy supervision.

While backpropagation (BP) has achieved widespread success in deep learning, it faces two prominent challenges: computational inefficiency and biological implausibility. In response to these challenges, local supervision, encompassing Local Learning (LL) and Forward Learning (FL), has emerged as a promising research direction. LL employs module-wise BP to achieve competitive results yet relies on module-wise auxiliary networks, which increase memory and parameter demands. Conversely, FL updates layer weights without BP and auxiliary networks but falls short of BP’s performance. This paper proposes a simple yet effective objective within a contrastive learning framework for local supervision without auxiliary networks. Given the insight that the existing contrastive learning framework for local supervision is susceptible to task-irrelevant information without auxiliary networks, we present DICTIONARY CONTRASTIVE LEARNING (DCL) that optimizes the similarity between local features and label embeddings. Our method using static label embeddings yields substantial performance improvements in the FL scenario, outperforming state-of-the-art FL approaches. Moreover, our method using adaptive label embeddings closely approaches the performance achieved by LL while achieving superior memory and parameter efficiency.

We propose Feature-aligned N-BEATS as a domain-generalized time series forecasting model. It is a nontrivial extension of N-BEATS with doubly residual stacking principle (Oreshkin et al. [45]) into a representation learning framework. In particular, it revolves around marginal feature probability measures induced by the intricate composition of residual and feature extracting operators of N-BEATS in each stack and aligns them stack-wise via an approximate of an optimal transport distance referred to as the Sinkhorn divergence. The training loss consists of an empirical risk minimization from multiple source domains, i.e., forecasting loss, and an alignment loss calculated with the Sinkhorn divergence, which allows the model to learn invariant features stack-wise across multiple source data sequences while retaining N-BEATS’s interpretable design and forecasting power. Comprehensive experimental evaluations with ablation studies are provided and the corresponding results demonstrate the proposed model’s forecasting and generalization capabilities.

Recent studies have substantiated that machine learning algorithms including convolutional neural networks often suffer from unreliable generalizations when there is a significant gap between the source and target data distributions. To mitigate this issue, a predetermined distribution shift has been addressed independently (e.g., single domain generalization, de-biasing). However, a distribution mismatch cannot be clearly estimated because the target distribution is unknown at training. Therefore, a conservative approach robust on unexpected diverse distributions is more desirable in practice. Our work starts from a motivation to allow adaptive inference once we know the target, since it is accessible only at testing. Instead of assuming and fixing the target distribution at training, our proposed approach allows adjusting the feature space the model refers to at every prediction, i.e., instance-wise adaptive inference. The extensive evaluation demonstrates our method is effective for generalization on diverse distributions.

Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve state-of-the-art in image classification, recent works address their unreliable predictions due to their excessive dependence on biased training data. Existing unbiased modeling postulates that the bias in the dataset is obvious to know, but it is actually unsuited for image datasets including countless sensory attributes. To mitigate this issue, we present a new scenario that does not necessitate a predefined bias. Under the observation that CNNs do have multi-variant and unbiased representations in the model, we propose a conservative framework that employs this internal information for unbiased learning. Specifically, this mechanism is implemented via hierarchical features captured along the multiple layers and orthogonal regularization. Extensive evaluations on public benchmarks demonstrate our method is effective for unbiased learning.11Source code: https://github.com/aandyjeon/UBNet