Small data challenges have emerged in many learning problems, since the success of deep neural networks often relies on the availability of a huge amount of labeled data that is expensive to collect. To address it, many efforts have been made on training complex models with small data in an unsupervised and semi-supervised fashion. In this paper, we will review the recent progresses on these two major categories of methods. A wide spectrum of small data models will be categorized in a big picture, where we will show how they interplay with each other to motivate explorations of new ideas. We will review the criteria of learning the transformation equivariant, disentangled, self-supervised and semi-supervised representations, which underpin the foundations of recent developments. Many instantiations of unsupervised and semi-supervised generative models have been developed on the basis of these criteria, greatly expanding the territory of existing autoencoders, generative adversarial nets (GANs) and other deep networks by exploring the distribution of unlabeled data for more powerful representations. While we focus on the unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, we will also provide a broader review of other emerging topics, from unsupervised and semi-supervised domain adaptation to the fundamental roles of transformation equivariance and invariance in training a wide spectrum of deep networks. It is impossible for us to write an exclusive encyclopedia to include all related works. Instead, we aim at exploring the main ideas, principles and methods in this area to reveal where we are heading on the journey towards addressing the small data challenges in this big data era.
There exist other variants of unsupervised domain adaptation methods based on the adversarial or non-adversarial training. For example, Domain Confusion @cite_71 proposes an objective under which the two untied representations are trained to map onto a uniform distribution by viewing two domains identically. CoGAN @cite_91 trains two GANs that generate the source and target images respectively. The domain-invariance is achieved by tying high-level parameters of the two GANs and a classifier is trained based on the output of the discriminator.
@cite_91 @cite_71
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Unsupervised domain adaptation tries to adapt a classifier trained on a labeled source domain to a related but unlabeled target domain. Methods based on adversarial learning try to learn a representation that is at the same time discriminative for the labels yet incapable of discriminating the domains. We propose a very simple and efficient method based on this approach which only aligns predicted class probabilities across domains. Experiments show that this strikingly simple adversarial domain adaptation method is robust to overfitting and achieves state-of-the-art results on datasets for image classification. Collecting well-annotated image datasets to train modern machine learning algorithms is prohibitively expensive for many tasks. One appealing alternative is rendering synthetic data where ground-truth annotations are generated automatically. Unfortunately, models trained purely on rendered images often fail to generalize to real images. To address this shortcoming, prior work introduced unsupervised domain adaptation algorithms that attempt to map representations between the two domains or learn to extract features that are domain-invariant. In this work, we present a new approach that learns, in an unsupervised manner, a transformation in the pixel space from one domain to the other. Our generative adversarial network (GAN)-based method adapts source-domain images to appear as if drawn from the target domain. Our approach not only produces plausible samples, but also outperforms the state-of-the-art on a number of unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios by large margins. Finally, we demonstrate that the adaptation process generalizes to object classes unseen during training. Collecting well-annotated image datasets to train modern machine learning algorithms is prohibitively expensive for many tasks. One appealing alternative is rendering synthetic data where ground-truth annotations are generated automatically. Unfortunately, models trained purely on rendered images fail to generalize to real images. To address this shortcoming, prior work introduced unsupervised domain adaptation algorithms that have tried to either map representations between the two domains, or learn to extract features that are domain-invariant. In this work, we approach the problem in a new light by learning in an unsupervised manner a transformation in the pixel space from one domain to the other. Our generative adversarial network (GAN)-based method adapts source-domain images to appear as if drawn from the target domain. Our approach not only produces plausible samples, but also outperforms the state-of-the-art on a number of unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios by large margins. Finally, we demonstrate that the adaptation process generalizes to object classes unseen during training. The effectiveness of generative adversarial approaches in producing images according to a specific style or visual domain has recently opened new directions to solve the unsupervised domain adaptation problem. It has been shown that source labeled images can be modified to mimic target samples making it possible to train directly a classifier in the target domain, despite the original lack of annotated data. Inverse mappings from the target to the source domain have also been evaluated but only passing through adapted feature spaces, thus without new image generation. In this paper we propose to better exploit the potential of generative adversarial networks for adaptation by introducing a novel symmetric mapping among domains. We jointly optimize bi-directional image transformations combining them with target self-labeling. Moreover we define a new class consistency loss that aligns the generators in the two directions imposing to conserve the class identity of an image passing through both domain mappings. A detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of the reconstructed images confirm the power of our approach. By integrating the two domain specific classifiers obtained with our bi-directional network we exceed previous state-of-the-art unsupervised adaptation results on four different benchmark datasets.