Device Model Generalization (DMG) is a practical yet under-investigated research topic for on-device machine learning applications. It aims to improve the generalization ability of pre-trained models when deployed on resource-constrained devices, such as improving the performance of pre-trained cloud models on smart mobiles. While quite a lot of works have investigated the data distribution shift across clouds and devices, most of them focus on model fine-tuning on personalized data for individual devices to facilitate DMG. Despite their promising, these approaches require on-device re-training, which is practically infeasible due to the overfitting problem and high time delay when performing gradient calculation on real-time data. In this paper, we argue that the computational cost brought by fine-tuning can be rather unnecessary. We consequently present a novel perspective to improving DMG without increasing computational cost, i.e., device-specific parameter generation which directly maps data distribution to parameters. Specifically, we propose an efficient Device-cloUd collaborative parametErs generaTion framework DUET. DUET is deployed on a powerful cloud server that only requires the low cost of forwarding propagation and low time delay of data transmission between the device and the cloud. By doing so, DUET can rehearse the device-specific model weight realizations conditioned on the personalized real-time data for an individual device. Importantly, our DUET elegantly connects the cloud and device as a 'duet' collaboration, frees the DMG from fine-tuning, and enables a faster and more accurate DMG paradigm. We conduct an extensive experimental study of DUET on three public datasets, and the experimental results confirm our framework's effectiveness and generalisability for different DMG tasks.
Pretraining has been shown to scale well with compute, data size and data diversity. Multitask learning trains on a mixture of supervised datasets and produces improved performance compared to self-supervised pretraining. Until now, massively multitask learning required simultaneous access to all datasets in the mixture and heavy compute resources that are only available to well-resourced teams. In this paper, we propose ColD Fusion, a method that provides the benefits of multitask learning but leverages distributed computation and requires limited communication and no sharing of data. Consequentially, ColD Fusion can create a synergistic loop, where finetuned models can be recycled to continually improve the pretrained model they are based on. We show that ColD Fusion yields comparable benefits to multitask pretraining by producing a model that (a) attains strong performance on all of the datasets it was multitask trained on and (b) is a better starting point for finetuning on unseen datasets. We find ColD Fusion outperforms RoBERTa and even previous multitask models. Specifically, when training and testing on 35 diverse datasets, ColD Fusion-based model outperforms RoBERTa by 2.45 points in average without any changes to the architecture.
The problem of covariate-shift generalization has attracted intensive research attention. Previous stable learning algorithms employ sample reweighting schemes to decorrelate the covariates when there is no explicit domain information about training data. However, with finite samples, it is difficult to achieve the desirable weights that ensure perfect independence to get rid of the unstable variables. Besides, decorrelating within stable variables may bring about high variance of learned models because of the over-reduced effective sample size. A tremendous sample size is required for these algorithms to work. In this paper, with theoretical justification, we propose SVI (Sparse Variable Independence) for the covariate-shift generalization problem. We introduce sparsity constraint to compensate for the imperfectness of sample reweighting under the finite-sample setting in previous methods. Furthermore, we organically combine independence-based sample reweighting and sparsity-based variable selection in an iterative way to avoid decorrelating within stable variables, increasing the effective sample size to alleviate variance inflation. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the improvement of covariate-shift generalization performance brought by SVI.
Saliency detection is one of the most challenging problems in image analysis and computer vision. Many approaches propose different architectures based on the psychological and biological properties of the human visual attention system. However, there is still no abstract framework that summarizes the existing methods. In this paper, we offered a general framework for saliency models, which consists of five main steps: pre-processing, feature extraction, saliency map generation, saliency map combination, and post-processing. Also, we study different saliency models containing each level and compare their performance. This framework helps researchers to have a comprehensive view of studying new methods.
With the rapid increase in the size and volume of cloud services and data centers, architectures with multiple job dispatchers are quickly becoming the norm. Load balancing is a key element of such systems. Nevertheless, current solutions to load balancing in such systems admit a paradoxical behavior in which more accurate information regarding server queue lengths degrades performance due to herding and detrimental incast effects. Indeed, both in theory and in practice, there is a common doubt regarding the value of information in the context of multi-dispatcher load balancing. As a result, both researchers and system designers resort to more straightforward solutions, such as the power-of-two-choices to avoid worst-case scenarios, potentially sacrificing overall resource utilization and system performance. A principal focus of our investigation concerns the value of information about queue lengths in the multi-dispatcher setting. We argue that, at its core, load balancing with multiple dispatchers is a distributed computing task. In that light, we propose a new job dispatching approach, called Tidal Water Filling, which addresses the distributed nature of the system. Specifically, by incorporating the existence of other dispatchers into the decision-making process, our protocols outperform previous solutions in many scenarios. In particular, when the dispatchers have complete and accurate information regarding the server queues, our policies significantly outperform all existing solutions.
To enable the pre-trained models to be fine-tuned with local data on edge devices without sharing data with the cloud, we design an efficient split fine-tuning (SFT) framework for edge and cloud collaborative learning. We propose three novel techniques in this framework. First, we propose a matrix decomposition-based method to compress the intermediate output of a neural network to reduce the communication volume between the edge device and the cloud server. Second, we eliminate particular links in the model without affecting the convergence performance in fine-tuning. Third, we implement our system atop PyTorch to allow users to easily extend their existing training scripts to enjoy the efficient edge and cloud collaborative learning. Experiments results on 9 NLP datasets show that our framework can reduce the communication traffic by 96 times with little impact on the model accuracy.
Designing and generating new data under targeted properties has been attracting various critical applications such as molecule design, image editing and speech synthesis. Traditional hand-crafted approaches heavily rely on expertise experience and intensive human efforts, yet still suffer from the insufficiency of scientific knowledge and low throughput to support effective and efficient data generation. Recently, the advancement of deep learning induces expressive methods that can learn the underlying representation and properties of data. Such capability provides new opportunities in figuring out the mutual relationship between the structural patterns and functional properties of the data and leveraging such relationship to generate structural data given the desired properties. This article provides a systematic review of this promising research area, commonly known as controllable deep data generation. Firstly, the potential challenges are raised and preliminaries are provided. Then the controllable deep data generation is formally defined, a taxonomy on various techniques is proposed and the evaluation metrics in this specific domain are summarized. After that, exciting applications of controllable deep data generation are introduced and existing works are experimentally analyzed and compared. Finally, the promising future directions of controllable deep data generation are highlighted and five potential challenges are identified.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensuring the reliability and safety of machine learning systems. For instance, in autonomous driving, we would like the driving system to issue an alert and hand over the control to humans when it detects unusual scenes or objects that it has never seen before and cannot make a safe decision. This problem first emerged in 2017 and since then has received increasing attention from the research community, leading to a plethora of methods developed, ranging from classification-based to density-based to distance-based ones. Meanwhile, several other problems are closely related to OOD detection in terms of motivation and methodology. These include anomaly detection (AD), novelty detection (ND), open set recognition (OSR), and outlier detection (OD). Despite having different definitions and problem settings, these problems often confuse readers and practitioners, and as a result, some existing studies misuse terms. In this survey, we first present a generic framework called generalized OOD detection, which encompasses the five aforementioned problems, i.e., AD, ND, OSR, OOD detection, and OD. Under our framework, these five problems can be seen as special cases or sub-tasks, and are easier to distinguish. Then, we conduct a thorough review of each of the five areas by summarizing their recent technical developments. We conclude this survey with open challenges and potential research directions.
Classic machine learning methods are built on the $i.i.d.$ assumption that training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. However, in real scenarios, the $i.i.d.$ assumption can hardly be satisfied, rendering the sharp drop of classic machine learning algorithms' performances under distributional shifts, which indicates the significance of investigating the Out-of-Distribution generalization problem. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem addresses the challenging setting where the testing distribution is unknown and different from the training. This paper serves as the first effort to systematically and comprehensively discuss the OOD generalization problem, from the definition, methodology, evaluation to the implications and future directions. Firstly, we provide the formal definition of the OOD generalization problem. Secondly, existing methods are categorized into three parts based on their positions in the whole learning pipeline, namely unsupervised representation learning, supervised model learning and optimization, and typical methods for each category are discussed in detail. We then demonstrate the theoretical connections of different categories, and introduce the commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize the whole literature and raise some future directions for OOD generalization problem. The summary of OOD generalization methods reviewed in this survey can be found at //out-of-distribution-generalization.com.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.