• RUB
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  • Projects
  • Measuring the Data Efficiency of Deep Learning Methods
2018
2019


Main Idea

How would you measure the data efficiency --- performance as a function \\  of training set size --- of a learning algorithm? It seems natural to:

  • Vary the size of homogenous data and measure performance.
  • Next, ramp up the variability of the training data.

This is exactly what we do, with a simple set of challenges.

More Specifically

  • The performance of different hypotheses is
    compared on a classification task. The learning curves are plotted as a function of training set size.
  • Alternatively, alter the relationship between training and test set distributions; the task ranges from classification to transfer learning.

Experimental Protocol

Different challenges based on how the samples are placed in probe set P and target set S during testing.

The algorithm sees a symbol on the left (probe set), and find the same character from the right (target set). Extract features from each image and do nearest-neighbor classification.

The algorithm sees a symbol on the left (probe set), and find the same character from the right (target set). Extract features from each image and do nearest-neighbor classification.

  • Challenge 0: P and S samples are from the training set.
                
    Challenge 1: P and S samples are taken from new samples of characters that were trained on.
                
    Challenge 2: P and S samples belong to completely unseen characters.

Results

Classification: MNIST, with a varying number of samples per digit.

Average percentage of correctly classified samples on the test set from 100 runs.

MNIST.  Average percentage of correctly classified samples on the test set from 100 runs.

Transfer learning: We fix either the number of alphabets, or characters-per-alphabet, to be 8 and vary the other number from 4 to 12.

The average of all the runs, with 16 training samples per character.The average of all the runs, with 16 training samples per character.

Future Work

  • Invent more benchmarks for sample or data efficiency.
  • Compare a wider variety of methods on increasingly heterogeneous data.
  • Instead of comparisons: Define absolute measures of data


Publications

    2019

  • Measuring the Data Efficiency of Deep Learning Methods
    Hlynsson, H., Escalante-B., A., & Wiskott, L.
    In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications

The Institut für Neuroinformatik (INI) is a central research unit of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. We aim to understand the fundamental principles through which organisms generate behavior and cognition while linked to their environments through sensory systems and while acting in those environments through effector systems. Inspired by our insights into such natural cognitive systems, we seek new solutions to problems of information processing in artificial cognitive systems. We draw from a variety of disciplines that include experimental approaches from psychology and neurophysiology as well as theoretical approaches from physics, mathematics, electrical engineering and applied computer science, in particular machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision.

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