Sayna Ebrahimi
Sayna Ebrahimi joined Google Cloud AI Research as a research scientist in November 2021. Her research focuses on tackling real-world large-scale multimodal data distributions while maximizing adaptation and generalization. She also develops label-efficient algorithms which reduce human effort while facilitate transfer of information through unsupervised and semi-supervised models. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley advised by Trevor Darrell. At Berkeley, her research was at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning with specialization in continual learning and domain adaptation.
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ASPEST: Bridging the Gap Between Active Learning and Selective Prediction
Somesh Jha
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) (2024)
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Selective prediction aims to learn a reliable model that abstains from making predictions when uncertain. These predictions can then be deferred to humans for further evaluation. As an everlasting challenge for machine learning, in many real-world scenarios, the distribution of test data is different from the training data. This results in more inaccurate predictions, and often increased dependence on humans, which can be difficult and expensive. Active learning aims to lower the overall labeling effort, and hence human dependence, by querying the most informative examples. Selective prediction and active learning have been approached from different angles, with the connection between them missing. In this work, we introduce a new learning paradigm, active selective prediction, which aims to query more informative samples from the shifted target domain while increasing accuracy and coverage. For this new paradigm, we propose a simple yet effective approach, ASPEST, that utilizes ensembles of model snapshots with self-training with their aggregated outputs as pseudo labels. Extensive experiments on numerous image, text and structured datasets, which suffer from domain shifts, demonstrate that ASPEST can significantly outperform prior work on selective prediction and active learning (e.g. on the MNIST→SVHN benchmark with the labeling budget of 100, ASPEST improves the AUACC metric from 79.36% to 88.84%) and achieves more optimal utilization of humans in the loop.
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Multimodal large-scale pretraining has shown impressive performance gains for unstructured data including language, image, audio, and video. Yet, the scenario prominent in real-world applications is the existence of combination of structured (including tabular and time-series) and unstructured data in conjunction, and it has been understudied.
Towards this end, we propose LANISTR, a novel attention-based framework to learn from LANguage, Image, and STRuctured data. We introduce a new multimodal fusion module with a similarity-based multimodal masking loss that enables LANISTR to learn cross-modal relations from large-scale multimodal data with missing modalities during training and test time. On two publicly available MIMIC-IV and Amazon Product Review datasets, LANISTR achieves absolute improvements of 6.47% (AUROC) and 8.35% (accuracy), respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art multimodal models, while showing superior generalization capabilities.
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Adaptation with Self-Evaluation to Improve Selective Prediction in LLMs
Somesh Jha
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP (2023)
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Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown great advances in a variety of tasks, including natural language understanding and generation. However, their use in high-stakes
decision-making scenarios is still limited due to the potential for errors. Selective prediction
is a technique that can be used to improve the reliability of the LLMs by allowing them to abstain from making predictions when they are unsure of the answer. In this work, we propose a novel framework for adaptation with self-evaluation to improve the selective prediction performance of LLMs. Our framework is based on the idea of using parameter-efficient tuning to adapt the LLM to the specific task at hand while improving its ability to perform self-evaluation. We evaluate our method on a variety of question-answering (QA) datasets and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art selective prediction methods. For example, on the CoQA benchmark, our method improves the AUACC from 91.23% to 92.63% and improves the AUROC from 74.61% to 80.25%.
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For visual document understanding (VDU), self-supervised pretraining has been shown to successfully generate transferable representations, yet, effective adaptation of such representations to distribution shifts at test-time remains to be an unexplored area. We propose DocTTA, a novel test-time adaptation method for documents, that does source-free domain adaptation using unlabeled target document data. DocTTA leverages cross-modality self-supervised learning via masked visual language modeling, as well as pseudo labeling to adapt models learned on a source domain to an unlabeled target domain at test time. We introduce new benchmarks using existing public datasets for various VDU tasks, including entity recognition, key-value extraction, and document visual question answering. DocTTA shows significant improvements on these compared to the source model performance, up to 1.89% in (F1 score), 3.43% (F1 score), and 17.68% (ANLS score), respectively.
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DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning
Han Zhang
Xiaoqi Ren
Jennifer Dy
ECCV 2022
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Continual learning aims to enable a single model to learn a sequence of tasks without catastrophic forgetting. Top-performing methods usually require a rehearsal buffer to store past pristine examples for experience replay, which, however, limits their practical value due to privacy and memory constraints. In this work, we present a simple yet effective framework, DualPrompt, which learns a tiny set of parameters, called prompts, to properly instruct a pre-trained model to learn tasks arriving sequentially without buffering past examples. DualPrompt presents a novel approach to attach complementary prompts to the pre-trained backbone, and then formulates the objective as learning task-invariant and task-specific "instructions". With extensive experimental validation, DualPrompt consistently sets state-of-the-art performance under the challenging class-incremental setting. In particular, DualPrompt outperforms recent advanced continual learning methods with relatively large buffer sizes. We also introduce a more challenging benchmark, Split ImageNet-R, to help generalize rehearsal-free continual learning research. Source code is available at https://github.com/google-research/l2p.
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