In the resource-constrained IoT-edge computing environment, Split Federated (SplitFed) learning is implemented to enhance training efficiency. This method involves each terminal device dividing its full DNN model at a designated layer into a device-side model and a server-side model, then offloading the latter to the edge server. However, existing research overlooks four critical issues as follows: (1) the heterogeneity of end devices' resource capacities and the sizes of their local data samples impact training efficiency; (2) the influence of the edge server's computation and network resource allocation on training efficiency; (3) the data leakage risk associated with the offloaded server-side sub-model; (4) the privacy drawbacks of current centralized algorithms. Consequently, proactively identifying the optimal cut layer and server resource requirements for each end device to minimize training latency while adhering to data leakage risk rate constraint remains a challenging issue. To address these problems, this paper first formulates the latency and data leakage risk of training DNN models using Split Federated learning. Next, we frame the Split Federated learning problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming challenge. To tackle this, we propose a decentralized Proactive Model Offloading and Resource Allocation (DP-MORA) scheme, empowering each end device to determine its cut layer and resource requirements based on its local multidimensional training configuration, without knowledge of other devices' configurations. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the DP-MORA scheme effectively reduces DNN model training latency, enhances training efficiency, and complies with data leakage risk constraints compared to several baseline algorithms across various experimental settings.
Contrastive loss has been increasingly used in learning representations from multiple modalities. In the limit, the nature of the contrastive loss encourages modalities to exactly match each other in the latent space. Yet it remains an open question how the modality alignment affects the downstream task performance. In this paper, based on an information-theoretic argument, we first prove that exact modality alignment is sub-optimal in general for downstream prediction tasks. Hence we advocate that the key of better performance lies in meaningful latent modality structures instead of perfect modality alignment. To this end, we propose three general approaches to construct latent modality structures. Specifically, we design 1) a deep feature separation loss for intra-modality regularization; 2) a Brownian-bridge loss for inter-modality regularization; and 3) a geometric consistency loss for both intra- and inter-modality regularization. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular multi-modal representation learning frameworks: the CLIP-based two-tower model and the ALBEF-based fusion model. We test our model on a variety of tasks including zero/few-shot image classification, image-text retrieval, visual question answering, visual reasoning, and visual entailment. Our method achieves consistent improvements over existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed approach on latent modality structure regularization.
While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has fueled multiple high-profile successes in machine learning, it is held back from more widespread adoption by its often poor data efficiency and the limited generality of the policies it produces. A promising approach for alleviating these limitations is to cast the development of better RL algorithms as a machine learning problem itself in a process called meta-RL. Meta-RL is most commonly studied in a problem setting where, given a distribution of tasks, the goal is to learn a policy that is capable of adapting to any new task from the task distribution with as little data as possible. In this survey, we describe the meta-RL problem setting in detail as well as its major variations. We discuss how, at a high level, meta-RL research can be clustered based on the presence of a task distribution and the learning budget available for each individual task. Using these clusters, we then survey meta-RL algorithms and applications. We conclude by presenting the open problems on the path to making meta-RL part of the standard toolbox for a deep RL practitioner.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
Deep learning has been the mainstream technique in natural language processing (NLP) area. However, the techniques require many labeled data and are less generalizable across domains. Meta-learning is an arising field in machine learning studying approaches to learn better learning algorithms. Approaches aim at improving algorithms in various aspects, including data efficiency and generalizability. Efficacy of approaches has been shown in many NLP tasks, but there is no systematic survey of these approaches in NLP, which hinders more researchers from joining the field. Our goal with this survey paper is to offer researchers pointers to relevant meta-learning works in NLP and attract more attention from the NLP community to drive future innovation. This paper first introduces the general concepts of meta-learning and the common approaches. Then we summarize task construction settings and application of meta-learning for various NLP problems and review the development of meta-learning in NLP community.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a successful method for unsupervised graph representation learning. Most graph CL methods first perform stochastic augmentation on the input graph to obtain two graph views and maximize the agreement of representations in the two views. Despite the prosperous development of graph CL methods, the design of graph augmentation schemes -- a crucial component in CL -- remains rarely explored. We argue that the data augmentation schemes should preserve intrinsic structures and attributes of graphs, which will force the model to learn representations that are insensitive to perturbation on unimportant nodes and edges. However, most existing methods adopt uniform data augmentation schemes, like uniformly dropping edges and uniformly shuffling features, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel graph contrastive representation learning method with adaptive augmentation that incorporates various priors for topological and semantic aspects of the graph. Specifically, on the topology level, we design augmentation schemes based on node centrality measures to highlight important connective structures. On the node attribute level, we corrupt node features by adding more noise to unimportant node features, to enforce the model to recognize underlying semantic information. We perform extensive experiments of node classification on a variety of real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines and even surpasses some supervised counterparts, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive framework with adaptive augmentation.
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging, privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm, drawing tremendous attention in both academia and industry. A unique characteristic of FL is heterogeneity, which resides in the various hardware specifications and dynamic states across the participating devices. Theoretically, heterogeneity can exert a huge influence on the FL training process, e.g., causing a device unavailable for training or unable to upload its model updates. Unfortunately, these impacts have never been systematically studied and quantified in existing FL literature. In this paper, we carry out the first empirical study to characterize the impacts of heterogeneity in FL. We collect large-scale data from 136k smartphones that can faithfully reflect heterogeneity in real-world settings. We also build a heterogeneity-aware FL platform that complies with the standard FL protocol but with heterogeneity in consideration. Based on the data and the platform, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the performance of state-of-the-art FL algorithms under heterogeneity-aware and heterogeneity-unaware settings. Results show that heterogeneity causes non-trivial performance degradation in FL, including up to 9.2% accuracy drop, 2.32x lengthened training time, and undermined fairness. Furthermore, we analyze potential impact factors and find that device failure and participant bias are two potential factors for performance degradation. Our study provides insightful implications for FL practitioners. On the one hand, our findings suggest that FL algorithm designers consider necessary heterogeneity during the evaluation. On the other hand, our findings urge system providers to design specific mechanisms to mitigate the impacts of heterogeneity.
There has been appreciable progress in unsupervised network representation learning (UNRL) approaches over graphs recently with flexible random-walk approaches, new optimization objectives and deep architectures. However, there is no common ground for systematic comparison of embeddings to understand their behavior for different graphs and tasks. In this paper we theoretically group different approaches under a unifying framework and empirically investigate the effectiveness of different network representation methods. In particular, we argue that most of the UNRL approaches either explicitly or implicit model and exploit context information of a node. Consequently, we propose a framework that casts a variety of approaches -- random walk based, matrix factorization and deep learning based -- into a unified context-based optimization function. We systematically group the methods based on their similarities and differences. We study the differences among these methods in detail which we later use to explain their performance differences (on downstream tasks). We conduct a large-scale empirical study considering 9 popular and recent UNRL techniques and 11 real-world datasets with varying structural properties and two common tasks -- node classification and link prediction. We find that there is no single method that is a clear winner and that the choice of a suitable method is dictated by certain properties of the embedding methods, task and structural properties of the underlying graph. In addition we also report the common pitfalls in evaluation of UNRL methods and come up with suggestions for experimental design and interpretation of results.
Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.
Meta-learning extracts the common knowledge acquired from learning different tasks and uses it for unseen tasks. It demonstrates a clear advantage on tasks that have insufficient training data, e.g., few-shot learning. In most meta-learning methods, tasks are implicitly related via the shared model or optimizer. In this paper, we show that a meta-learner that explicitly relates tasks on a graph describing the relations of their output dimensions (e.g., classes) can significantly improve the performance of few-shot learning. This type of graph is usually free or cheap to obtain but has rarely been explored in previous works. We study the prototype based few-shot classification, in which a prototype is generated for each class, such that the nearest neighbor search between the prototypes produces an accurate classification. We introduce "Gated Propagation Network (GPN)", which learns to propagate messages between prototypes of different classes on the graph, so that learning the prototype of each class benefits from the data of other related classes. In GPN, an attention mechanism is used for the aggregation of messages from neighboring classes, and a gate is deployed to choose between the aggregated messages and the message from the class itself. GPN is trained on a sequence of tasks from many-shot to few-shot generated by subgraph sampling. During training, it is able to reuse and update previously achieved prototypes from the memory in a life-long learning cycle. In experiments, we change the training-test discrepancy and test task generation settings for thorough evaluations. GPN outperforms recent meta-learning methods on two benchmark datasets in all studied cases.