We study the problem of learning multi-index models in high-dimensions using a two-layer neural network trained with the mean-field Langevin algorithm. Under mild distributional assumptions on the data, we characterize the effective dimension $d_{\mathrm{eff}}$ that controls both sample and computational complexity by utilizing the adaptivity of neural networks to latent low-dimensional structures. When the data exhibit such a structure, $d_{\mathrm{eff}}$ can be significantly smaller than the ambient dimension. We prove that the sample complexity grows almost linearly with $d_{\mathrm{eff}}$, bypassing the limitations of the information and generative exponents that appeared in recent analyses of gradient-based feature learning. On the other hand, the computational complexity may inevitably grow exponentially with $d_{\mathrm{eff}}$ in the worst-case scenario. Motivated by improving computational complexity, we take the first steps towards polynomial time convergence of the mean-field Langevin algorithm by investigating a setting where the weights are constrained to be on a compact manifold with positive Ricci curvature, such as the hypersphere. There, we study assumptions under which polynomial time convergence is achievable, whereas similar assumptions in the Euclidean setting lead to exponential time complexity.
We address the problem of cluster identity estimation in a hierarchical federated learning setting in which users work toward learning different tasks. To overcome the challenge of task heterogeneity, users need to be grouped in a way such that users with the same task are in the same group, conducting training together, while sharing the weights of feature extraction layers with the other groups. Toward that end, we propose a one-shot clustering algorithm that can effectively identify and group users based on their data similarity. This enables more efficient collaboration and sharing of a common layer representation within the federated learning system. Our proposed algorithm not only enhances the clustering process, but also overcomes challenges related to privacy concerns, communication overhead, and the need for prior knowledge about learning models or loss function behaviors. We validate our proposed algorithm using various datasets such as CIFAR-10 and Fashion MNIST, and show that it outperforms the baseline in terms of accuracy and variance reduction.
This letter introduces a machine-learning approach to learning the semantic dynamics of correlated systems with different control rules and dynamics. By leveraging the Koopman operator in an autoencoder (AE) framework, the system's state evolution is linearized in the latent space using a dynamic semantic Koopman (DSK) model, capturing the baseline semantic dynamics. Signal temporal logic (STL) is incorporated through a logical semantic Koopman (LSK) model to encode system-specific control rules. These models form the proposed logical Koopman AE framework that reduces communication costs while improving state prediction accuracy and control performance, showing a 91.65% reduction in communication samples and significant performance gains in simulation.
Distribution shifts between training and test data are inevitable over the lifecycle of a deployed model, leading to performance decay. Adapting a model on test samples can help mitigate this drop in performance. However, most test-time adaptation methods have focused on synthetic corruption shifts, leaving a variety of distribution shifts underexplored. In this paper, we focus on distribution shifts that evolve gradually over time, which are common in the wild but challenging for existing methods, as we show. To address this, we propose STAD, a probabilistic state-space model that adapts a deployed model to temporal distribution shifts by learning the time-varying dynamics in the last set of hidden features. Without requiring labels, our model infers time-evolving class prototypes that act as a dynamic classification head. Through experiments on real-world temporal distribution shifts, we show that our method excels in handling small batch sizes and label shift.
The emergence of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is significantly transforming various fields like autonomous vehicle networks. However, real-world multi-agent systems typically contain multiple roles, and the scale of these systems dynamically fluctuates. Consequently, in order to achieve zero-shot scalable collaboration, it is essential that strategies for different roles can be updated flexibly according to the scales, which is still a challenge for current MARL frameworks. To address this, we propose a novel MARL framework named Scalable and Heterogeneous Proximal Policy Optimization (SHPPO), integrating heterogeneity into parameter-shared PPO-based MARL networks. We first leverage a latent network to learn strategy patterns for each agent adaptively. Second, we introduce a heterogeneous layer to be inserted into decision-making networks, whose parameters are specifically generated by the learned latent variables. Our approach is scalable as all the parameters are shared except for the heterogeneous layer, and gains both inter-individual and temporal heterogeneity, allowing SHPPO to adapt effectively to varying scales. SHPPO exhibits superior performance in classic MARL environments like Starcraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) and Google Research Football (GRF), showcasing enhanced zero-shot scalability, and offering insights into the learned latent variables' impact on team performance by visualization.
Given a finite set of sample points, meta-learning algorithms aim to learn an optimal adaptation strategy for new, unseen tasks. Often, this data can be ambiguous as it might belong to different tasks concurrently. This is particularly the case in meta-regression tasks. In such cases, the estimated adaptation strategy is subject to high variance due to the limited amount of support data for each task, which often leads to sub-optimal generalization performance. In this work, we address the problem of variance reduction in gradient-based meta-learning and formalize the class of problems prone to this, a condition we refer to as \emph{task overlap}. Specifically, we propose a novel approach that reduces the variance of the gradient estimate by weighing each support point individually by the variance of its posterior over the parameters. To estimate the posterior, we utilize the Laplace approximation, which allows us to express the variance in terms of the curvature of the loss landscape of our meta-learner. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and highlight the importance of variance reduction in meta-learning.
With the development and application of deep learning in signal detection tasks, the vulnerability of neural networks to adversarial attacks has also become a security threat to signal detection networks. This paper defines a signal adversarial examples generation model for signal detection network from the perspective of adding perturbations to the signal. The model uses the inequality relationship of L2-norm between time domain and time-frequency domain to constrain the energy of signal perturbations. Building upon this model, we propose a method for generating signal adversarial examples utilizing gradient-based attacks and Short-Time Fourier Transform. The experimental results show that under the constraint of signal perturbation energy ratio less than 3%, our adversarial attack resulted in a 28.1% reduction in the mean Average Precision (mAP), a 24.7% reduction in recall, and a 30.4% reduction in precision of the signal detection network. Compared to random noise perturbation of equivalent intensity, our adversarial attack demonstrates a significant attack effect.
Considering the instance-level discriminative ability, contrastive learning methods, including MoCo and SimCLR, have been adapted from the original image representation learning task to solve the self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition task. These methods usually use multiple data streams (i.e., joint, motion, and bone) for ensemble learning, meanwhile, how to construct a discriminative feature space within a single stream and effectively aggregate the information from multiple streams remains an open problem. To this end, this paper first applies a new contrastive learning method called BYOL to learn from skeleton data, and then formulate SkeletonBYOL as a simple yet effective baseline for self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. Inspired by SkeletonBYOL, this paper further presents a Cross-Model and Cross-Stream (CMCS) framework. This framework combines Cross-Model Adversarial Learning (CMAL) and Cross-Stream Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Specifically, CMAL learns single-stream representation by cross-model adversarial loss to obtain more discriminative features. To aggregate and interact with multi-stream information, CSCL is designed by generating similarity pseudo label of ensemble learning as supervision and guiding feature generation for individual streams. Extensive experiments on three datasets verify the complementary properties between CMAL and CSCL and also verify that the proposed method can achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods using various evaluation protocols.
In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of ``labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
Approaches based on deep neural networks have achieved striking performance when testing data and training data share similar distribution, but can significantly fail otherwise. Therefore, eliminating the impact of distribution shifts between training and testing data is crucial for building performance-promising deep models. Conventional methods assume either the known heterogeneity of training data (e.g. domain labels) or the approximately equal capacities of different domains. In this paper, we consider a more challenging case where neither of the above assumptions holds. We propose to address this problem by removing the dependencies between features via learning weights for training samples, which helps deep models get rid of spurious correlations and, in turn, concentrate more on the true connection between discriminative features and labels. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on multiple distribution generalization benchmarks compared with state-of-the-art counterparts. Through extensive experiments on distribution generalization benchmarks including PACS, VLCS, MNIST-M, and NICO, we show the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art counterparts.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.