Mazumder, Pratik

Deep learning models are known to suffer from the problem of bias, and researchers have been exploring methods to address this issue. However, most of these methods require prior knowledge of the bias and are not always practical. In this paper, we focus on a more practical setting with no prior information about the bias. Generally, in this setting, there are a large number of bias-aligned samples that cause the model to produce biased predictions and a few bias-conflicting samples that do not conform to the bias. If the training data is limited, the influence of the bias-aligned samples may become even stronger on the model predictions, and we experimentally demonstrate that existing debiasing techniques suffer severely in such cases. In this paper, we examine the effects of unknown bias in small dataset regimes and present a novel approach to mitigate this issue. The proposed approach directly addresses the issue of the extremely low occurrence of bias-conflicting samples in limited data settings through the synthesis of hybrid samples that can be used to reduce the effect of bias. We perform extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets and experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in addressing any unknown bias in the presence of limited data. Specifically, our approach outperforms the vanilla, LfF, LDD, and DebiAN debiasing methods by absolute margins of 10.39%, 9.08%, 8.07%, and 9.67% when only 10% of the Corrupted CIFAR-10 Type 1 dataset is available with a bias-conflicting sample ratio of 0.05.

In the task incremental learning problem, deep learning models suffer from catastrophic forgetting of previously seen classes/tasks as they are trained on new classes/tasks. This problem becomes even harder when some of the test classes do not belong to the training class set, i.e., the task incremental generalized zero-shot learning problem. We propose a novel approach to address the task incremental learning problem for both the non zero-shot and zero-shot settings. Our proposed approach, called Rectification-based Knowledge Retention (RKR), applies weight rectifications and affine transformations for adapting the model to any task. During testing, our approach can use the task label information (task-aware) to quickly adapt the network to that task. We also extend our approach to make it task-agnostic so that it can work even when the task label information is not available during testing. Specifically, given a continuum of test data, our approach predicts the task and quickly adapts the network to the predicted task. We experimentally show that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmark datasets for both non zero-shot and zero-shot task incremental learning.