Due to the widespread availability of data, machine learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly being implemented in distributed topologies, wherein various nodes collaborate to train ML models via the coordination of a central server. However, distributed learning approaches face significant vulnerabilities, primarily stemming from two potential threats. Firstly, the presence of Byzantine nodes poses a risk of corrupting the learning process by transmitting inaccurate information to the server. Secondly, a curious server may compromise the privacy of individual nodes, sometimes reconstructing the entirety of the nodes' data. Homomorphic encryption (HE) has emerged as a leading security measure to preserve privacy in distributed learning under non-Byzantine scenarios. However, the extensive computational demands of HE, particularly for high-dimensional ML models, have deterred attempts to design purely homomorphic operators for non-linear robust aggregators. This paper introduces SABLE, the first homomorphic and Byzantine robust distributed learning algorithm. SABLE leverages HTS, a novel and efficient homomorphic operator implementing the prominent coordinate-wise trimmed mean robust aggregator. Designing HTS enables us to implement HMED, a novel homomorphic median aggregator. Extensive experiments on standard ML tasks demonstrate that SABLE achieves practical execution times while maintaining an ML accuracy comparable to its non-private counterpart.
In reinforcement learning (RL), different rewards can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the task efficiently. Choosing a good reward function is hence an extremely important yet challenging problem. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach to using rewards for learning. We introduce max-reward RL, where an agent optimizes the maximum rather than the cumulative reward. Unlike earlier works, our approach works for deterministic and stochastic environments and can be easily combined with state-of-the-art RL algorithms. In the experiments, we study the performance of max-reward RL algorithms in two goal-reaching environments from Gymnasium-Robotics and demonstrate its benefits over standard RL. The code is publicly available.
Existing algorithms for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) can incentivize responses at odds with preferences because they are based on models that assume independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA). The perverse incentives induced by IIA hinder innovations on query formats and learning algorithms.
Feature attribution methods (FAs), such as gradients and attention, are widely employed approaches to derive the importance of all input features to the model predictions. Existing work in natural language processing has mostly focused on developing and testing FAs for encoder-only language models (LMs) in classification tasks. However, it is unknown if it is faithful to use these FAs for decoder-only models on text generation, due to the inherent differences between model architectures and task settings respectively. Moreover, previous work has demonstrated that there is no `one-wins-all' FA across models and tasks. This makes the selection of a FA computationally expensive for large LMs since input importance derivation often requires multiple forward and backward passes including gradient computations that might be prohibitive even with access to large compute. To address these issues, we present a model-agnostic FA for generative LMs called Recursive Attribution Generator (ReAGent). Our method updates the token importance distribution in a recursive manner. For each update, we compute the difference in the probability distribution over the vocabulary for predicting the next token between using the original input and using a modified version where a part of the input is replaced with RoBERTa predictions. Our intuition is that replacing an important token in the context should have resulted in a larger change in the model's confidence in predicting the token than replacing an unimportant token. Our method can be universally applied to any generative LM without accessing internal model weights or additional training and fine-tuning, as most other FAs require. We extensively compare the faithfulness of ReAGent with seven popular FAs across six decoder-only LMs of various sizes. The results show that our method consistently provides more faithful token importance distributions.
Data sonification-mapping data variables to auditory variables, such as pitch or volume-is used for data accessibility, scientific exploration, and data-driven art (e.g., museum exhibitions) among others. While a substantial amount of research has been made on effective and intuitive sonification design, software support is not commensurate, limiting researchers from fully exploring its capabilities. We contribute Erie, a declarative grammar for data sonification, that enables abstractly expressing auditory mappings. Erie supports specifying extensible tone designs (e.g., periodic wave, sampling, frequency/amplitude modulation synthesizers), various encoding channels, auditory legends, and composition options like sequencing and overlaying. Using standard Web Audio and Web Speech APIs, we provide an Erie compiler for web environments. We demonstrate the expressiveness and feasibility of Erie by replicating research prototypes presented by prior work and provide a sonification design gallery. We discuss future steps to extend Erie toward other audio computing environments and support interactive data sonification.
Deep learning-based algorithms have seen a massive popularity in different areas of remote sensing image analysis over the past decade. Recently, transformers-based architectures, originally introduced in natural language processing, have pervaded computer vision field where the self-attention mechanism has been utilized as a replacement to the popular convolution operator for capturing long-range dependencies. Inspired by recent advances in computer vision, remote sensing community has also witnessed an increased exploration of vision transformers for a diverse set of tasks. Although a number of surveys have focused on transformers in computer vision in general, to the best of our knowledge we are the first to present a systematic review of recent advances based on transformers in remote sensing. Our survey covers more than 60 recent transformers-based methods for different remote sensing problems in sub-areas of remote sensing: very high-resolution (VHR), hyperspectral (HSI) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. We conclude the survey by discussing different challenges and open issues of transformers in remote sensing. Additionally, we intend to frequently update and maintain the latest transformers in remote sensing papers with their respective code at: //github.com/VIROBO-15/Transformer-in-Remote-Sensing
Causal Machine Learning (CausalML) is an umbrella term for machine learning methods that formalize the data-generation process as a structural causal model (SCM). This allows one to reason about the effects of changes to this process (i.e., interventions) and what would have happened in hindsight (i.e., counterfactuals). We categorize work in \causalml into five groups according to the problems they tackle: (1) causal supervised learning, (2) causal generative modeling, (3) causal explanations, (4) causal fairness, (5) causal reinforcement learning. For each category, we systematically compare its methods and point out open problems. Further, we review modality-specific applications in computer vision, natural language processing, and graph representation learning. Finally, we provide an overview of causal benchmarks and a critical discussion of the state of this nascent field, including recommendations for future work.
There recently has been a surge of interest in developing a new class of deep learning (DL) architectures that integrate an explicit time dimension as a fundamental building block of learning and representation mechanisms. In turn, many recent results show that topological descriptors of the observed data, encoding information on the shape of the dataset in a topological space at different scales, that is, persistent homology of the data, may contain important complementary information, improving both performance and robustness of DL. As convergence of these two emerging ideas, we propose to enhance DL architectures with the most salient time-conditioned topological information of the data and introduce the concept of zigzag persistence into time-aware graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Zigzag persistence provides a systematic and mathematically rigorous framework to track the most important topological features of the observed data that tend to manifest themselves over time. To integrate the extracted time-conditioned topological descriptors into DL, we develop a new topological summary, zigzag persistence image, and derive its theoretical stability guarantees. We validate the new GCNs with a time-aware zigzag topological layer (Z-GCNETs), in application to traffic forecasting and Ethereum blockchain price prediction. Our results indicate that Z-GCNET outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods on 4 time series datasets.
Self-supervised learning methods are gaining increasing traction in computer vision due to their recent success in reducing the gap with supervised learning. In natural language processing (NLP) self-supervised learning and transformers are already the methods of choice. The recent literature suggests that the transformers are becoming increasingly popular also in computer vision. So far, the vision transformers have been shown to work well when pretrained either using a large scale supervised data or with some kind of co-supervision, e.g. in terms of teacher network. These supervised pretrained vision transformers achieve very good results in downstream tasks with minimal changes. In this work we investigate the merits of self-supervised learning for pretraining image/vision transformers and then using them for downstream classification tasks. We propose Self-supervised vIsion Transformers (SiT) and discuss several self-supervised training mechanisms to obtain a pretext model. The architectural flexibility of SiT allows us to use it as an autoencoder and work with multiple self-supervised tasks seamlessly. We show that a pretrained SiT can be finetuned for a downstream classification task on small scale datasets, consisting of a few thousand images rather than several millions. The proposed approach is evaluated on standard datasets using common protocols. The results demonstrate the strength of the transformers and their suitability for self-supervised learning. We outperformed existing self-supervised learning methods by large margin. We also observed that SiT is good for few shot learning and also showed that it is learning useful representation by simply training a linear classifier on top of the learned features from SiT. Pretraining, finetuning, and evaluation codes will be available under: //github.com/Sara-Ahmed/SiT.
Graph representation learning resurges as a trending research subject owing to the widespread use of deep learning for Euclidean data, which inspire various creative designs of neural networks in the non-Euclidean domain, particularly graphs. With the success of these graph neural networks (GNN) in the static setting, we approach further practical scenarios where the graph dynamically evolves. Existing approaches typically resort to node embeddings and use a recurrent neural network (RNN, broadly speaking) to regulate the embeddings and learn the temporal dynamics. These methods require the knowledge of a node in the full time span (including both training and testing) and are less applicable to the frequent change of the node set. In some extreme scenarios, the node sets at different time steps may completely differ. To resolve this challenge, we propose EvolveGCN, which adapts the graph convolutional network (GCN) model along the temporal dimension without resorting to node embeddings. The proposed approach captures the dynamism of the graph sequence through using an RNN to evolve the GCN parameters. Two architectures are considered for the parameter evolution. We evaluate the proposed approach on tasks including link prediction, edge classification, and node classification. The experimental results indicate a generally higher performance of EvolveGCN compared with related approaches. The code is available at \url{//github.com/IBM/EvolveGCN}.
The design of deep graph models still remains to be investigated and the crucial part is how to explore and exploit the knowledge from different hops of neighbors in an efficient way. In this paper, we propose a novel RNN-like deep graph neural network architecture by incorporating AdaBoost into the computation of network; and the proposed graph convolutional network called AdaGCN~(AdaBoosting Graph Convolutional Network) has the ability to efficiently extract knowledge from high-order neighbors and integrate knowledge from different hops of neighbors into the network in an AdaBoost way. We also present the architectural difference between AdaGCN and existing graph convolutional methods to show the benefits of our proposal. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art prediction performance and the computational advantage of our approach AdaGCN.