Safeguarding privacy in sensitive training data is paramount, particularly in the context of generative modeling. This is done through either differentially private stochastic gradient descent, or with a differentially private metric for training models or generators. In this paper, we introduce a novel differentially private generative modeling approach based on parameter-free gradient flows in the space of probability measures. The proposed algorithm is a new discretized flow which operates through a particle scheme, utilizing drift derived from the sliced Wasserstein distance and computed in a private manner. Our experiments show that compared to a generator-based model, our proposed model can generate higher-fidelity data at a low privacy budget, offering a viable alternative to generator-based approaches.
Federated learning (FL) is widely employed for collaborative training on decentralized data but faces challenges like data, system, and model heterogeneity. This prompted the emergency of model-heterogeneous personalized federated learning (MHPFL). However, concerns persist regarding data and model privacy, model performance, communication, and computational costs in current MHPFL methods. To tackle these concerns, we propose a novel model-heterogeneous personalized Federated learning algorithm (FedMoE) with the Mixture of Experts (MoE), renowned for enhancing large language models (LLMs). It assigns a shared homogeneous small feature extractor and a local gating network for each client's local heterogeneous large model. (1) During local training, the local heterogeneous model's feature extractor acts as a local expert for personalized feature (representation) extraction, while the shared homogeneous small feature extractor serves as a global expert for generalized feature extraction. The local gating network produces personalized weights for extracted representations from both experts on each data sample. The three models form a local heterogeneous MoE. The weighted mixed representation fuses global generalized and local personalized features and is processed by the local heterogeneous large model's header with personalized prediction information for output. The MoE and prediction header are updated synchronously. (2) The trained local homogeneous small feature extractors are sent to the server for cross-client information fusion via aggregation. Briefly, FedMoE first enhances local model personalization at a fine-grained data level while supporting model heterogeneity.
The potential harms of the under-representation of minorities in training data, particularly in multi-modal settings, is a well-recognized concern. While there has been extensive effort in detecting such under-representation, resolution has remained a challenge. With recent advancements in generative AI, large language models and foundation models have emerged as versatile tools across various domains. In this paper, we propose Chameleon, a system that efficiently utilizes these tools to augment a data set with a minimal addition of synthetically generated tuples, in order to enhance the coverage of the under-represented groups. Our system follows a rejection sampling approach to ensure the generated tuples have a high quality and follow the underlying distribution. In order to minimize the rejection chance of the generated tuples, we propose multiple strategies for providing a guide for the foundation model. Our experiment results, in addition to confirming the efficiency of our proposed algorithms, illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, as the unfairness of the model in a downstream task significantly dropped after data repair using Chameleon.
Shielding is a popular technique for achieving safe reinforcement learning (RL). However, classical shielding approaches come with quite restrictive assumptions making them difficult to deploy in complex environments, particularly those with continuous state or action spaces. In this paper we extend the more versatile approximate model-based shielding (AMBS) framework to the continuous setting. In particular we use Safety Gym as our test-bed, allowing for a more direct comparison of AMBS with popular constrained RL algorithms. We also provide strong probabilistic safety guarantees for the continuous setting. In addition, we propose two novel penalty techniques that directly modify the policy gradient, which empirically provide more stable convergence in our experiments.
Continual learning (CL) is the research field that aims to build machine learning models that can accumulate knowledge continuously over different tasks without retraining from scratch. Previous studies have shown that pre-training graph neural networks (GNN) may lead to negative transfer (Hu et al., 2020) after fine-tuning, a setting which is closely related to CL. Thus, we focus on studying GNN in the continual graph learning (CGL) setting. We propose the first continual graph learning benchmark for spatio-temporal graphs and use it to benchmark well-known CGL methods in this novel setting. The benchmark is based on the N-UCLA and NTU-RGB+D datasets for skeleton-based action recognition. Beyond benchmarking for standard performance metrics, we study the class and task-order sensitivity of CGL methods, i.e., the impact of learning order on each class/task's performance, and the architectural sensitivity of CGL methods with backbone GNN at various widths and depths. We reveal that task-order robust methods can still be class-order sensitive and observe results that contradict previous empirical observations on architectural sensitivity in CL.
Stress is prevalent in many aspects of everyday life including work, healthcare, and social interactions. Many works have studied handcrafted features from various bio-signals that are indicators of stress. Recently, deep learning models have also been proposed to detect stress. Typically, stress models are trained and validated on the same dataset, often involving one stressful scenario. However, it is not practical to collect stress data for every scenario. So, it is crucial to study the generalizability of these models and determine to what extent they can be used in other scenarios. In this paper, we explore the generalization capabilities of Electrocardiogram (ECG)-based deep learning models and models based on handcrafted ECG features, i.e., Heart Rate Variability (HRV) features. To this end, we train three HRV models and two deep learning models that use ECG signals as input. We use ECG signals from two popular stress datasets - WESAD and SWELL-KW - differing in terms of stressors and recording devices. First, we evaluate the models using leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation using training and validation samples from the same dataset. Next, we perform a cross-dataset validation of the models, that is, LOSO models trained on the WESAD dataset are validated using SWELL-KW samples and vice versa. While deep learning models achieve the best results on the same dataset, models based on HRV features considerably outperform them on data from a different dataset. This trend is observed for all the models on both datasets. Therefore, HRV models are a better choice for stress recognition in applications that are different from the dataset scenario. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to compare the cross-dataset generalizability between ECG-based deep learning models and HRV models.
The number of Language Models (LMs) dedicated to processing scientific text is on the rise. Keeping pace with the rapid growth of scientific LMs (SciLMs) has become a daunting task for researchers. To date, no comprehensive surveys on SciLMs have been undertaken, leaving this issue unaddressed. Given the constant stream of new SciLMs, appraising the state-of-the-art and how they compare to each other remain largely unknown. This work fills that gap and provides a comprehensive review of SciLMs, including an extensive analysis of their effectiveness across different domains, tasks and datasets, and a discussion on the challenges that lie ahead.
Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing the generalization capabilities of a model, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data over regularizing the objective to limiting the amount data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation (C1) and a taxonomy for existing works (C2), this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims to achieve a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners (C3). Derived from the taxonomy, we divided more than 100 methods into 12 different groupings and provide state-of-the-art references expounding which methods are highly promising (C4). Finally, research perspectives that may constitute a building block for future work are given (C5).
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has been a frequent topic of research due to many practical applications. However, many of the current solutions are still not robust in real-world situations, commonly depending on many constraints. This paper presents a robust and efficient ALPR system based on the state-of-the-art YOLO object detection. The Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are trained and fine-tuned for each ALPR stage so that they are robust under different conditions (e.g., variations in camera, lighting, and background). Specially for character segmentation and recognition, we design a two-stage approach employing simple data augmentation tricks such as inverted License Plates (LPs) and flipped characters. The resulting ALPR approach achieved impressive results in two datasets. First, in the SSIG dataset, composed of 2,000 frames from 101 vehicle videos, our system achieved a recognition rate of 93.53% and 47 Frames Per Second (FPS), performing better than both Sighthound and OpenALPR commercial systems (89.80% and 93.03%, respectively) and considerably outperforming previous results (81.80%). Second, targeting a more realistic scenario, we introduce a larger public dataset, called UFPR-ALPR dataset, designed to ALPR. This dataset contains 150 videos and 4,500 frames captured when both camera and vehicles are moving and also contains different types of vehicles (cars, motorcycles, buses and trucks). In our proposed dataset, the trial versions of commercial systems achieved recognition rates below 70%. On the other hand, our system performed better, with recognition rate of 78.33% and 35 FPS.