The covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) is one of the most successful methods for solving continuous black-box optimization problems. A practically useful aspect of the CMA-ES is that it can be used without hyperparameter tuning. However, the hyperparameter settings still have a considerable impact on performance, especially for difficult tasks, such as solving multimodal or noisy problems. This study comprehensively explores the impact of learning rate on the CMA-ES performance and demonstrates the necessity of a small learning rate by considering ordinary differential equations. Thereafter, it discusses the setting of an ideal learning rate. Based on these discussions, we develop a novel learning rate adaptation mechanism for the CMA-ES that maintains a constant signal-to-noise ratio. Additionally, we investigate the behavior of the CMA-ES with the proposed learning rate adaptation mechanism through numerical experiments, and compare the results with those obtained for the CMA-ES with a fixed learning rate and with population size adaptation. The results show that the CMA-ES with the proposed learning rate adaptation works well for multimodal and/or noisy problems without extremely expensive learning rate tuning.
The study of non-collapsing measurements was initiated by Aaronson, Bouland, Fitzsimons, and Lee, who showed that BQP, when equipped with the ability to perform non-collapsing measurements (denoted as PDQP), contains both BQP and SZK, yet still requires $\Omega (N^{1/4})$ queries to find an element in an unsorted list. By formulating an alternative equivalent model of PDQP, we prove the positive weighted adversary method, obtaining a variety of new lower bounds and establishing a trade-off between queries and non-collapsing measurements. The method allows us to examine the well-studied majority and element distinctness problems, while also tightening the bound for the search problem to $\Theta (N^{1/3})$. Additionally, we explore related settings, obtaining tight bounds in BQP with the ability to copy arbitrary states (called CBQP) and PDQP with non-adaptive queries.
Recent RGB-guided depth super-resolution methods have achieved impressive performance under the assumption of fixed and known degradation (e.g., bicubic downsampling). However, in real-world scenarios, captured depth data often suffer from unconventional and unknown degradation due to sensor limitations and complex imaging environments (e.g., low reflective surfaces, varying illumination). Consequently, the performance of these methods significantly declines when real-world degradation deviate from their assumptions. In this paper, we propose the Degradation Oriented and Regularized Network (DORNet), a novel framework designed to adaptively address unknown degradation in real-world scenes through implicit degradation representations. Our approach begins with the development of a self-supervised degradation learning strategy, which models the degradation representations of low-resolution depth data using routing selection-based degradation regularization. To facilitate effective RGB-D fusion, we further introduce a degradation-oriented feature transformation module that selectively propagates RGB content into the depth data based on the learned degradation priors. Extensive experimental results on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our DORNet in handling unknown degradation, outperforming existing methods. The code is available at //github.com/yanzq95/DORNet.
Content moderation on a global scale must navigate a complex array of local cultural distinctions, which can hinder effective enforcement. While global policies aim for consistency and broad applicability, they often miss the subtleties of regional language interpretation, cultural beliefs, and local legislation. This work introduces a flexible framework that enhances foundation language models with cultural knowledge. Our approach involves fine-tuning encoder-decoder models on media-diet data to capture cultural nuances, and applies a continued training regime to effectively integrate these models into a content moderation pipeline. We evaluate this framework in a case study of an online podcast platform with content spanning various regions. The results show that our culturally adapted models improve the accuracy of local violation detection and offer explanations that align more closely with regional cultural norms. Our findings reinforce the need for an adaptable content moderation approach that remains flexible in response to the diverse cultural landscapes it operates in and represents a step towards a more equitable and culturally sensitive framework for content moderation, demonstrating what is achievable in this domain.
We introduce Dynamic Dropout, a novel regularization technique designed to enhance the training efficiency of Transformer models by dynamically adjusting the dropout rate based on training epochs or validation loss improvements. This approach addresses the challenge of balancing regularization and model capacity, which is crucial for achieving fast convergence and high performance. Our method involves modifying the GPT model to accept a variable dropout rate and updating dropout layers during training using schedules such as linear decay, exponential decay, and validation loss-based adjustments. Extensive experiments on the Shakespeare\_char dataset demonstrate that Dynamic Dropout significantly accelerates training and improves inference efficiency compared to a baseline model with a fixed dropout rate. The validation loss-based adjustment schedule provided the best overall performance, highlighting the potential of Dynamic Dropout as a valuable technique for training large-scale Transformer models.
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets; GFNs) are a family of energy-based generative methods for combinatorial objects, capable of generating diverse and high-utility samples. However, consistently biasing GFNs towards producing high-utility samples is non-trivial. In this work, we leverage connections between GFNs and reinforcement learning (RL) and propose to combine the GFN policy with an action-value estimate, $Q$, to create greedier sampling policies which can be controlled by a mixing parameter. We show that several variants of the proposed method, QGFN, are able to improve on the number of high-reward samples generated in a variety of tasks without sacrificing diversity.
Amplification by subsampling is one of the main primitives in machine learning with differential privacy (DP): Training a model on random batches instead of complete datasets results in stronger privacy. This is traditionally formalized via mechanism-agnostic subsampling guarantees that express the privacy parameters of a subsampled mechanism as a function of the original mechanism's privacy parameters. We propose the first general framework for deriving mechanism-specific guarantees, which leverage additional information beyond these parameters to more tightly characterize the subsampled mechanism's privacy. Such guarantees are of particular importance for privacy accounting, i.e., tracking privacy over multiple iterations. Overall, our framework based on conditional optimal transport lets us derive existing and novel guarantees for approximate DP, accounting with R\'enyi DP, and accounting with dominating pairs in a unified, principled manner. As an application, we analyze how subsampling affects the privacy of groups of multiple users. Our tight mechanism-specific bounds outperform tight mechanism-agnostic bounds and classic group privacy results.
Despite the recent progress in deep learning, most approaches still go for a silo-like solution, focusing on learning each task in isolation: training a separate neural network for each individual task. Many real-world problems, however, call for a multi-modal approach and, therefore, for multi-tasking models. Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to leverage useful information across tasks to improve the generalization capability of a model. This thesis is concerned with multi-task learning in the context of computer vision. First, we review existing approaches for MTL. Next, we propose several methods that tackle important aspects of multi-task learning. The proposed methods are evaluated on various benchmarks. The results show several advances in the state-of-the-art of multi-task learning. Finally, we discuss several possibilities for future work.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.