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Main Authors: Napoli, Andrea, White, Paul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04235
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author Napoli, Andrea
White, Paul
author_facet Napoli, Andrea
White, Paul
contents Domain shifts are ubiquitous in machine learning, and can substantially degrade a model's performance when deployed to real-world data. To address this, distribution alignment methods aim to learn feature representations which are invariant across domains, by minimising the discrepancy between the distributions. However, the discrepancy estimates can be extremely noisy when training via stochastic gradient descent (SGD), and shifts in the relative proportions of different subgroups can lead to domain misalignments; these can both stifle the benefits of the method. This paper proposes to improve these estimates by inducing diversity in each sampled minibatch. This simultaneously balances the data and reduces the variance of the gradients, thereby enhancing the model's generalisation ability. We describe two options for diversity-based data samplers, based on the k-determinantal point process (k-DPP) and the k-means++ algorithm, which can function as drop-in replacements for a standard random sampler. On a real-world domain shift task of bioacoustic event detection, we show that both options 1) yield minibatches which are more representative of the full dataset; 2) reduce the distance estimation error between distributions, for a given sample size; and 3) improve out-of-distribution accuracy for two distribution alignment algorithms, as well as standard ERM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_04235
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Distribution Alignment with Diversity-based Sampling
Napoli, Andrea
White, Paul
Machine Learning
Domain shifts are ubiquitous in machine learning, and can substantially degrade a model's performance when deployed to real-world data. To address this, distribution alignment methods aim to learn feature representations which are invariant across domains, by minimising the discrepancy between the distributions. However, the discrepancy estimates can be extremely noisy when training via stochastic gradient descent (SGD), and shifts in the relative proportions of different subgroups can lead to domain misalignments; these can both stifle the benefits of the method. This paper proposes to improve these estimates by inducing diversity in each sampled minibatch. This simultaneously balances the data and reduces the variance of the gradients, thereby enhancing the model's generalisation ability. We describe two options for diversity-based data samplers, based on the k-determinantal point process (k-DPP) and the k-means++ algorithm, which can function as drop-in replacements for a standard random sampler. On a real-world domain shift task of bioacoustic event detection, we show that both options 1) yield minibatches which are more representative of the full dataset; 2) reduce the distance estimation error between distributions, for a given sample size; and 3) improve out-of-distribution accuracy for two distribution alignment algorithms, as well as standard ERM.
title Improving Distribution Alignment with Diversity-based Sampling
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04235