DNA: Denoised Neighborhood Aggregation for Fine-grained Category Discovery

Wenbin An, Feng Tian, Wenkai Shi, Yan Chen, Qinghua Zheng, QianYing Wang, Ping Chen


Abstract
Discovering fine-grained categories from coarsely labeled data is a practical and challenging task, which can bridge the gap between the demand for fine-grained analysis and the high annotation cost. Previous works mainly focus on instance-level discrimination to learn low-level features, but ignore semantic similarities between data, which may prevent these models learning compact cluster representations. In this paper, we propose Denoised Neighborhood Aggregation (DNA), a self-supervised framework that encodes semantic structures of data into the embedding space. Specifically, we retrieve k-nearest neighbors of a query as its positive keys to capture semantic similarities between data and then aggregate information from the neighbors to learn compact cluster representations, which can make fine-grained categories more separatable. However, the retrieved neighbors can be noisy and contain many false-positive keys, which can degrade the quality of learned embeddings. To cope with this challenge, we propose three principles to filter out these false neighbors for better representation learning. Furthermore, we theoretically justify that the learning objective of our framework is equivalent to a clustering loss, which can capture semantic similarities between data to form compact fine-grained clusters. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method can retrieve more accurate neighbors (21.31% accuracy improvement) and outperform state-of-the-art models by a large margin (average 9.96% improvement on three metrics). Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Lackel/DNA.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.756
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12292–12302
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.756
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.756
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenbin An, Feng Tian, Wenkai Shi, Yan Chen, Qinghua Zheng, QianYing Wang, and Ping Chen. 2023. DNA: Denoised Neighborhood Aggregation for Fine-grained Category Discovery. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12292–12302, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DNA: Denoised Neighborhood Aggregation for Fine-grained Category Discovery (An et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.756.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.756.mp4