In Federated Learning (FL), multiple clients collaboratively train a global model without sharing private data. In semantic segmentation, the Federated source Free Domain Adaptation (FFreeDA) setting is of particular interest, where clients undergo unsupervised training after supervised pretraining at the server side. While few recent works address FL for autonomous vehicles, intrinsic real-world challenges such as the presence of adverse weather conditions and the existence of different autonomous agents are still unexplored. To bridge this gap, we address both problems and introduce a new federated semantic segmentation setting where both car and drone clients co-exist and collaborate. Specifically, we propose a novel approach for this setting which exploits a batch-norm weather-aware strategy to dynamically adapt the model to the different weather conditions, while hyperbolic space prototypes are used to align the heterogeneous client representations. Finally, we introduce FLYAWARE, the first semantic segmentation dataset with adverse weather data for aerial vehicles.
Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly enhanced the data synthesis with 2D control. Yet, precise 3D control in street view generation, crucial for 3D perception tasks, remains elusive. Specifically, utilizing Bird's-Eye View (BEV) as the primary condition often leads to challenges in geometry control (e.g., height), affecting the representation of object shapes, occlusion patterns, and road surface elevations, all of which are essential to perception data synthesis, especially for 3D object detection tasks. In this paper, we introduce MagicDrive, a novel street view generation framework, offering diverse 3D geometry controls including camera poses, road maps, and 3D bounding boxes, together with textual descriptions, achieved through tailored encoding strategies. Besides, our design incorporates a cross-view attention module, ensuring consistency across multiple camera views. With MagicDrive, we achieve high-fidelity street-view image & video synthesis that captures nuanced 3D geometry and various scene descriptions, enhancing tasks like BEV segmentation and 3D object detection.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a transformative technology across diverse sectors, offering adaptable solutions to complex challenges in both military and civilian domains. Their expanding capabilities present a platform for further advancement by integrating cutting-edge computational tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. These advancements have significantly impacted various facets of human life, fostering an era of unparalleled efficiency and convenience. Large Language Models (LLMs), a key component of AI, exhibit remarkable learning and adaptation capabilities within deployed environments, demonstrating an evolving form of intelligence with the potential to approach human-level proficiency. This work explores the significant potential of integrating UAVs and LLMs to propel the development of autonomous systems. We comprehensively review LLM architectures, evaluating their suitability for UAV integration. Additionally, we summarize the state-of-the-art LLM-based UAV architectures and identify novel opportunities for LLM embedding within UAV frameworks. Notably, we focus on leveraging LLMs to refine data analysis and decision-making processes, specifically for enhanced spectral sensing and sharing in UAV applications. Furthermore, we investigate how LLM integration expands the scope of existing UAV applications, enabling autonomous data processing, improved decision-making, and faster response times in emergency scenarios like disaster response and network restoration. Finally, we highlight crucial areas for future research that are critical for facilitating the effective integration of LLMs and UAVs.
Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) are widely used for analysing clustered data. One well-established method of overcoming the integral in the marginal likelihood function for GLMMs is penalized quasi-likelihood (PQL) estimation, although to date there are few asymptotic distribution results relating to PQL estimation for GLMMs in the literature. In this paper, we establish large sample results for PQL estimators of the parameters and random effects in independent-cluster GLMMs, when both the number of clusters and the cluster sizes go to infinity. This is done under two distinct regimes: conditional on the random effects (essentially treating them as fixed effects) and unconditionally (treating the random effects as random). Under the conditional regime, we show the PQL estimators are asymptotically normal around the true fixed and random effects. Unconditionally, we prove that while the estimator of the fixed effects is asymptotically normally distributed, the correct asymptotic distribution of the so-called prediction gap of the random effects may in fact be a normal scale-mixture distribution under certain relative rates of growth. A simulation study is used to verify the finite sample performance of our theoretical results.
Decentralized Multi-agent Learning (DML) enables collaborative model training while preserving data privacy. However, inherent heterogeneity in agents' resources (computation, communication, and task size) may lead to substantial variations in training time. This heterogeneity creates a bottleneck, lengthening the overall training time due to straggler effects and potentially wasting spare resources of faster agents. To minimize training time in heterogeneous environments, we present a Communication-Efficient Training Workload Balancing for Decentralized Multi-Agent Learning (ComDML), which balances the workload among agents through a decentralized approach. Leveraging local-loss split training, ComDML enables parallel updates, where slower agents offload part of their workload to faster agents. To minimize the overall training time, ComDML optimizes the workload balancing by jointly considering the communication and computation capacities of agents, which hinges upon integer programming. A dynamic decentralized pairing scheduler is developed to efficiently pair agents and determine optimal offloading amounts. We prove that in ComDML, both slower and faster agents' models converge, for convex and non-convex functions. Furthermore, extensive experimental results on popular datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CINIC-10) and their non-I.I.D. variants, with large models such as ResNet-56 and ResNet-110, demonstrate that ComDML can significantly reduce the overall training time while maintaining model accuracy, compared to state-of-the-art methods. ComDML demonstrates robustness in heterogeneous environments, and privacy measures can be seamlessly integrated for enhanced data protection.
Although Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) utilizes edge servers (ESs) to alleviate communication burdens, its model performance will be degraded by non-IID data and limited communication resources. Current works often assume that data is uniformly distributed, which however contradicts the heterogeneity of IoT. Solutions of additional model training to check the data distribution inevitably increases computational costs and the risk of privacy leakage. The challenges in solving these issues are how to reduce the impact of non-IID data without involving raw data and how to rationalize the communication resource allocation for addressing straggler problem. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel optimization method based on coaLition formation gamE and grAdient Projection, called LEAP. Specifically, we combine edge data distribution with coalition formation game innovatively to adjust the correlations between clients and ESs dynamically, which ensures optimal correlations. We further capture the client heterogeneity to achieve the rational bandwidth allocation from coalition perception and determine the optimal transmission power within specified delay constraints at client level. Experimental results on four real datasets show that LEAP is able to achieve 20.62% improvement in model accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, LEAP effectively reduce transmission energy consumption by at least about 2.24 times.
Image-level regression is an important task in Earth observation, where visual domain and label shifts are a core challenge hampering generalization. However, cross-domain regression with remote sensing data remains understudied due to the absence of suited datasets. We introduce a new dataset with aerial and satellite imagery in five countries with three forest-related regression tasks. To match real-world applicative interests, we compare methods through a restrictive setup where no prior on the target domain is available during training, and models are adapted with limited information during testing. Building on the assumption that ordered relationships generalize better, we propose manifold diffusion for regression as a strong baseline for transduction in low-data regimes. Our comparison highlights the comparative advantages of inductive and transductive methods in cross-domain regression.
The Pretrained Foundation Models (PFMs) are regarded as the foundation for various downstream tasks with different data modalities. A pretrained foundation model, such as BERT, GPT-3, MAE, DALLE-E, and ChatGPT, is trained on large-scale data which provides a reasonable parameter initialization for a wide range of downstream applications. The idea of pretraining behind PFMs plays an important role in the application of large models. Different from previous methods that apply convolution and recurrent modules for feature extractions, the generative pre-training (GPT) method applies Transformer as the feature extractor and is trained on large datasets with an autoregressive paradigm. Similarly, the BERT apples transformers to train on large datasets as a contextual language model. Recently, the ChatGPT shows promising success on large language models, which applies an autoregressive language model with zero shot or few show prompting. With the extraordinary success of PFMs, AI has made waves in a variety of fields over the past few years. Considerable methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics have been proposed in the literature, the need is raising for an updated survey. This study provides a comprehensive review of recent research advancements, current and future challenges, and opportunities for PFMs in text, image, graph, as well as other data modalities. We first review the basic components and existing pretraining in natural language processing, computer vision, and graph learning. We then discuss other advanced PFMs for other data modalities and unified PFMs considering the data quality and quantity. Besides, we discuss relevant research about the fundamentals of the PFM, including model efficiency and compression, security, and privacy. Finally, we lay out key implications, future research directions, challenges, and open problems.
As an effective strategy, data augmentation (DA) alleviates data scarcity scenarios where deep learning techniques may fail. It is widely applied in computer vision then introduced to natural language processing and achieves improvements in many tasks. One of the main focuses of the DA methods is to improve the diversity of training data, thereby helping the model to better generalize to unseen testing data. In this survey, we frame DA methods into three categories based on the diversity of augmented data, including paraphrasing, noising, and sampling. Our paper sets out to analyze DA methods in detail according to the above categories. Further, we also introduce their applications in NLP tasks as well as the challenges.
Deep Learning (DL) is vulnerable to out-of-distribution and adversarial examples resulting in incorrect outputs. To make DL more robust, several posthoc anomaly detection techniques to detect (and discard) these anomalous samples have been proposed in the recent past. This survey tries to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of the research on anomaly detection for DL based applications. We provide a taxonomy for existing techniques based on their underlying assumptions and adopted approaches. We discuss various techniques in each of the categories and provide the relative strengths and weaknesses of the approaches. Our goal in this survey is to provide an easier yet better understanding of the techniques belonging to different categories in which research has been done on this topic. Finally, we highlight the unsolved research challenges while applying anomaly detection techniques in DL systems and present some high-impact future research directions.
State-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benefits a lot from multi-task learning (MTL), which learns multiple related tasks simultaneously to obtain shared or mutually related representations for different tasks. The most widely-used MTL CNN structure is based on an empirical or heuristic split on a specific layer (e.g., the last convolutional layer) to minimize different task-specific losses. However, this heuristic sharing/splitting strategy may be harmful to the final performance of one or multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN structure for MTL, which enables automatic feature fusing at every layer. Specifically, we first concatenate features from different tasks according to their channel dimension, and then formulate the feature fusing problem as discriminative dimensionality reduction. We show that this discriminative dimensionality reduction can be done by 1x1 Convolution, Batch Normalization, and Weight Decay in one CNN, which we refer to as Neural Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction (NDDR). We perform ablation analysis in details for different configurations in training the network. The experiments carried out on different network structures and different task sets demonstrate the promising performance and desirable generalizability of our proposed method.