MBZUAI researchers will present 20 papers at the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Honolulu. Visiting Associate Professor Tongliang Liu leads with seven publications, followed by Kun Zhang with six. One paper investigates semi-supervised learning vs. model-based methods for noisy data annotation in deep neural networks. Why it matters: The research addresses the critical issue of data quality and accessibility in machine learning, particularly for organizations with limited resources for data annotation.
Michael Kampffmeyer from UiT The Arctic University of Norway presented a talk at MBZUAI on representation learning for deep clustering and few-shot learning. The talk covered deep clustering in multi-view settings and the influence of geometrical representation properties on few-shot classification performance. He specifically discussed embedding representations on the hypersphere and its connection to the hubness phenomenon. Why it matters: This highlights MBZUAI's role in hosting discussions on advanced machine learning topics like few-shot learning, which are crucial for addressing data scarcity challenges in the region and beyond.
This article discusses methods for handling label noise in deep learning, including extracting confident examples and modeling label noise. Tongliang Liu from the University of Sydney presented these approaches. The talk aimed to provide participants with a basic understanding of learning with noisy labels. Why it matters: As AI models are increasingly trained on large, noisy datasets, techniques for robust learning become crucial for reliable real-world performance.
This paper introduces Adaptive Entropy-aware Optimization (AEO), a new framework to tackle Multimodal Open-set Test-time Adaptation (MM-OSTTA). AEO uses Unknown-aware Adaptive Entropy Optimization (UAE) and Adaptive Modality Prediction Discrepancy Optimization (AMP) to distinguish unknown class samples during online adaptation by amplifying the entropy difference between known and unknown samples. The study establishes a new benchmark derived from existing datasets with five modalities and evaluates AEO's performance across various domain shift scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness in long-term and continual MM-OSTTA settings.
An associate professor of Statistics at the University of Toronto gave a talk on how ensemble learning stabilizes and improves the generalization performance of an individual interpolator. The talk focused on bagged linear interpolators and introduced the multiplier-bootstrap-based bagged least square estimator. The multiplier bootstrap encompasses the classical bootstrap with replacement as a special case, along with a Bernoulli bootstrap variant. Why it matters: While the talk occurred at MBZUAI, the content is about ensemble learning which is a core area for improving AI model performance, and is of general interest to the AI research community.
Researchers at MBZUAI introduce FissionFusion, a hierarchical model merging approach to improve medical image analysis performance. The method uses local and global aggregation of models based on hyperparameter configurations, along with a cyclical learning rate scheduler for efficient model generation. Experiments show FissionFusion outperforms standard model souping by approximately 6% on HAM10000 and CheXpert datasets and improves OOD performance.