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Poster
How Well Do Unsupervised Learning Algorithms Model Human Real-time and Life-long Learning?
Chengxu Zhuang · Ziyu Xiang · Yoon Bai · Xiaoxuan Jia · Nicholas Turk-Browne · Kenneth Norman · James J DiCarlo · Dan Yamins

Tue Nov 29 09:00 AM -- 11:00 AM (PST) @ Hall J #1026
in Poster Session 1 »

Humans learn from visual inputs at multiple timescales, both rapidly and flexibly acquiring visual knowledge over short periods, and robustly accumulating online learning progress over longer periods. Modeling these powerful learning capabilities is an important problem for computational visual cognitive science, and models that could replicate them would be of substantial utility in real-world computer vision settings. In this work, we establish benchmarks for both real-time and life-long continual visual learning. Our real-time learning benchmark measures a model's ability to match the rapid visual behavior changes of real humans over the course of minutes and hours, given a stream of visual inputs. Our life-long learning benchmark evaluates the performance of models in a purely online learning curriculum obtained directly from child visual experience over the course of years of development. We evaluate a spectrum of recent deep self-supervised visual learning algorithms on both benchmarks, finding that none of them perfectly match human performance, though some algorithms perform substantially better than others. Interestingly, algorithms embodying recent trends in self-supervised learning -- including BYOL, SwAV and MAE -- are substantially worse on our benchmarks than an earlier generation of self-supervised algorithms such as SimCLR and MoCo-v2. We present analysis indicating that the failure of these newer algorithms is primarily due to their inability to handle the kind of sparse low-diversity datastreams that naturally arise in the real world, and that actively leveraging memory through negative sampling -- a mechanism eschewed by these newer algorithms -- appears useful for facilitating learning in such low-diversity environments. We also illustrate a complementarity between the short and long timescales in the two benchmarks, showing how requiring a single learning algorithm to be locally context-sensitive enough to match real-time learning changes while stable enough to avoid catastrophic forgetting over the long term induces a trade-off that human-like algorithms may have to straddle. Taken together, our benchmarks establish a quantitative way to directly compare learning between neural networks models and human learners, show how choices in the mechanism by which such algorithms handle sample comparison and memory strongly impact their ability to match human learning abilities, and expose an open problem space for identifying more flexible and robust visual self-supervision algorithms.

Keywords: Unsupervised Learning · human visual learning · human-like curriculum · life-long visual learning · real-time visual learning
[ Paper]  [ Poster]  [ OpenReview] 

Author Information

Chengxu Zhuang (MIT)
Ziyu Xiang (Stanford University)
Yoon Bai (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Xiaoxuan Jia (Tsinghua University)
Nicholas Turk-Browne (Yale University)
Kenneth Norman
James J DiCarlo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Prof. DiCarlo received his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and his M.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1998, and did his postdoctoral training in primate visual neurophysiology at Baylor College of Medicine. He joined the MIT faculty in 2002. He is a Sloan Fellow, a Pew Scholar, and a McKnight Scholar. His lab’s research goal is a computational understanding of the brain mechanisms that underlie object recognition. They use large-scale neurophysiology, brain imaging, optogenetic methods, and high-throughput computational simulations to understand how the primate ventral visual stream is able to untangle object identity from other latent image variables such as object position, scale, and pose. They have shown that populations of neurons at the highest cortical visual processing stage (IT) rapidly convey explicit representations of object identity, and that this ability is reshaped by natural visual experience. They have also shown how visual recognition tests can be used to discover new, high-performing bio-inspired algorithms. This understanding may inspire new machine vision systems, new neural prosthetics, and a foundation for understanding how high-level visual representation is altered in conditions such as agnosia, autism and dyslexia.

Dan Yamins

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