Wireless federated learning (WFL) suffers from heterogeneity prevailing in the data distributions, computing powers, and channel conditions of participating devices. This paper presents a new Federated Learning with Adjusted leaRning ratE (FLARE) framework to mitigate the impact of the heterogeneity. The key idea is to allow the participating devices to adjust their individual learning rates and local training iterations, adapting to their instantaneous computing powers. The convergence upper bound of FLARE is established rigorously under a general setting with non-convex models in the presence of non-i.i.d. datasets and imbalanced computing powers. By minimizing the upper bound, we further optimize the scheduling of FLARE to exploit the channel heterogeneity. A nested problem structure is revealed to facilitate iteratively allocating the bandwidth with binary search and selecting devices with a new greedy method. A linear problem structure is also identified and a low-complexity linear programming scheduling policy is designed when training models have large Lipschitz constants. Experiments demonstrate that FLARE consistently outperforms the baselines in test accuracy, and converges much faster with the proposed scheduling policy.
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) heavily rely on a variety of well-designed benchmarks, which provide environmental platforms and consistent criteria to evaluate existing and novel algorithms. Specifically, in multi-agent RL (MARL), a plethora of benchmarks based on cooperative games have spurred the development of algorithms that improve the scalability of cooperative multi-agent systems. However, for the competitive setting, a lightweight and open-sourced benchmark with challenging gaming dynamics and visual inputs has not yet been established. In this work, we present FightLadder, a real-time fighting game platform, to empower competitive MARL research. Along with the platform, we provide implementations of state-of-the-art MARL algorithms for competitive games, as well as a set of evaluation metrics to characterize the performance and exploitability of agents. We demonstrate the feasibility of this platform by training a general agent that consistently defeats 12 built-in characters in single-player mode, and expose the difficulty of training a non-exploitable agent without human knowledge and demonstrations in two-player mode. FightLadder provides meticulously designed environments to address critical challenges in competitive MARL research, aiming to catalyze a new era of discovery and advancement in the field. Videos and code at //sites.google.com/view/fightladder/home.
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative machine learning across distributed data owners, but data heterogeneity poses a challenge for model calibration. While prior work focused on improving accuracy for non-iid data, calibration remains under-explored. This study reveals existing FL aggregation approaches lead to sub-optimal calibration, and theoretical analysis shows despite constraining variance in clients' label distributions, global calibration error is still asymptotically lower bounded. To address this, we propose a novel Federated Calibration (FedCal) approach, emphasizing both local and global calibration. It leverages client-specific scalers for local calibration to effectively correct output misalignment without sacrificing prediction accuracy. These scalers are then aggregated via weight averaging to generate a global scaler, minimizing the global calibration error. Extensive experiments demonstrate FedCal significantly outperforms the best-performing baseline, reducing global calibration error by 47.66% on average.
Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a collaborative approach that allows multiple clients to jointly learn a machine learning model without sharing their private data. The concern about privacy leakage, albeit demonstrated under specific conditions, has triggered numerous follow-up research in designing powerful attacking methods and effective defending mechanisms aiming to thwart these attacking methods. Nevertheless, privacy-preserving mechanisms employed in these defending methods invariably lead to compromised model performances due to a fixed obfuscation applied to private data or gradients. In this article, we, therefore, propose a novel adaptive obfuscation mechanism, coined FedAdOb, to protect private data without yielding original model performances. Technically, FedAdOb utilizes passport-based adaptive obfuscation to ensure data privacy in both horizontal and vertical federated learning settings. The privacy-preserving capabilities of FedAdOb, specifically with regard to private features and labels, are theoretically proven through Theorems 1 and 2. Furthermore, extensive experimental evaluations conducted on various datasets and network architectures demonstrate the effectiveness of FedAdOb by manifesting its superior trade-off between privacy preservation and model performance, surpassing existing methods.
Neuro-symbolic reinforcement learning (NS-RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for explainable decision-making, characterized by the interpretability of symbolic policies. NS-RL entails structured state representations for tasks with visual observations, but previous methods are unable to refine the structured states with rewards due to a lack of efficiency. Accessibility also remains to be an issue, as extensive domain knowledge is required to interpret symbolic policies. In this paper, we present a framework for learning structured states and symbolic policies jointly, whose key idea is to distill vision foundation models into a scalable perception module and refine it during policy learning. Moreover, we design a pipeline to generate language explanations for policies and decisions using large language models. In experiments on nine Atari tasks, we verify the efficacy of our approach, and we also present explanations for policies and decisions.
The performance of differentially private machine learning can be boosted significantly by leveraging the transfer learning capabilities of non-private models pretrained on large public datasets. We critically review this approach. We primarily question whether the use of large Web-scraped datasets should be viewed as differential-privacy-preserving. We caution that publicizing these models pretrained on Web data as "private" could lead to harm and erode the public's trust in differential privacy as a meaningful definition of privacy. Beyond the privacy considerations of using public data, we further question the utility of this paradigm. We scrutinize whether existing machine learning benchmarks are appropriate for measuring the ability of pretrained models to generalize to sensitive domains, which may be poorly represented in public Web data. Finally, we notice that pretraining has been especially impactful for the largest available models -- models sufficiently large to prohibit end users running them on their own devices. Thus, deploying such models today could be a net loss for privacy, as it would require (private) data to be outsourced to a more compute-powerful third party. We conclude by discussing potential paths forward for the field of private learning, as public pretraining becomes more popular and powerful.
While spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising neurally-inspired model of computation, they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We present the first study that draws inspiration from neural homeostasis to design a threshold-adapting leaky integrate-and-fire (TA-LIF) neuron model and utilize TA-LIF neurons to construct the adversarially robust homeostatic SNNs (HoSNNs) for improved robustness. The TA-LIF model incorporates a self-stabilizing dynamic thresholding mechanism, offering a local feedback control solution to the minimization of each neuron's membrane potential error caused by adversarial disturbance. Theoretical analysis demonstrates favorable dynamic properties of TA-LIF neurons in terms of the bounded-input bounded-output stability and suppressed time growth of membrane potential error, underscoring their superior robustness compared with the standard LIF neurons. When trained with weak FGSM attacks (attack budget = 2/255) and tested with much stronger PGD attacks (attack budget = 8/255), our HoSNNs significantly improve model accuracy on several datasets: from 30.54% to 74.91% on FashionMNIST, from 0.44% to 35.06% on SVHN, from 0.56% to 42.63% on CIFAR10, from 0.04% to 16.66% on CIFAR100, over the conventional LIF-based SNNs.
Foundation models, now powering most of the exciting applications in deep learning, are almost universally based on the Transformer architecture and its core attention module. Many subquadratic-time architectures such as linear attention, gated convolution and recurrent models, and structured state space models (SSMs) have been developed to address Transformers' computational inefficiency on long sequences, but they have not performed as well as attention on important modalities such as language. We identify that a key weakness of such models is their inability to perform content-based reasoning, and make several improvements. First, simply letting the SSM parameters be functions of the input addresses their weakness with discrete modalities, allowing the model to selectively propagate or forget information along the sequence length dimension depending on the current token. Second, even though this change prevents the use of efficient convolutions, we design a hardware-aware parallel algorithm in recurrent mode. We integrate these selective SSMs into a simplified end-to-end neural network architecture without attention or even MLP blocks (Mamba). Mamba enjoys fast inference (5$\times$ higher throughput than Transformers) and linear scaling in sequence length, and its performance improves on real data up to million-length sequences. As a general sequence model backbone, Mamba achieves state-of-the-art performance across several modalities such as language, audio, and genomics. On language modeling, our Mamba-3B model outperforms Transformers of the same size and matches Transformers twice its size, both in pretraining and downstream evaluation.
In a federated learning (FL) system, decentralized data owners (clients) could upload their locally trained models to a central server, to jointly train a global model. Malicious clients may plant backdoors into the global model through uploading poisoned local models, causing misclassification to a target class when encountering attacker-defined triggers. Existing backdoor defenses show inconsistent performance under different system and adversarial settings, especially when the malicious updates are made statistically close to the benign ones. In this paper, we first reveal the fact that planting subsequent backdoors with the same target label could significantly help to maintain the accuracy of previously planted backdoors, and then propose a novel proactive backdoor detection mechanism for FL named BackdoorIndicator, which has the server inject indicator tasks into the global model leveraging out-of-distribution (OOD) data, and then utilizing the fact that any backdoor samples are OOD samples with respect to benign samples, the server, who is completely agnostic of the potential backdoor types and target labels, can accurately detect the presence of backdoors in uploaded models, via evaluating the indicator tasks. We perform systematic and extensive empirical studies to demonstrate the consistently superior performance and practicality of BackdoorIndicator over baseline defenses, across a wide range of system and adversarial settings.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
Deep learning has shown great potential for modeling the physical dynamics of complex particle systems such as fluids (in Lagrangian descriptions). Existing approaches, however, require the supervision of consecutive particle properties, including positions and velocities. In this paper, we consider a partially observable scenario known as fluid dynamics grounding, that is, inferring the state transitions and interactions within the fluid particle systems from sequential visual observations of the fluid surface. We propose a differentiable two-stage network named NeuroFluid. Our approach consists of (i) a particle-driven neural renderer, which involves fluid physical properties into the volume rendering function, and (ii) a particle transition model optimized to reduce the differences between the rendered and the observed images. NeuroFluid provides the first solution to unsupervised learning of particle-based fluid dynamics by training these two models jointly. It is shown to reasonably estimate the underlying physics of fluids with different initial shapes, viscosity, and densities. It is a potential alternative approach to understanding complex fluid mechanics, such as turbulence, that are difficult to model using traditional methods of mathematical physics.