Generating Synthetic Datasets by Interpolating along Generalized Geodesics
Data for pretraining machine learning models often consists of collections of
heterogeneous datasets. Although training on their union is reasonable in
agnostic settings, it might be suboptimal when the target domain -- where the
model will ultimately be used -- is known in advance. In that case, one would
ideally pretrain only on the dataset(s) most similar to the target one. Instead
of limiting this choice to those datasets already present in the pretraining
collection, here we explore extending this search to all datasets that can be
synthesized as `combinations' of them. We define such combinations as
multi-dataset interpolations, formalized through the notion of generalized
geodesics from optimal transport (OT) theory. We compute these geodesics using
a recent notion of distance between labeled datasets, and derive alternative
interpolation schemes based on it: using either barycentric projections or
optimal transport maps, the latter computed using recent neural OT methods.
These methods are scalable, efficient, and -- notably -- can be used to
interpolate even between datasets with distinct and unrelated label sets.
Through various experiments in transfer learning in computer vision, we
demonstrate this is a promising new approach for targeted on-demand dataset
synthesis.