In this work, we investigate the problem of simultaneous blind demixing and super-resolution. Leveraging the subspace assumption regarding unknown point spread functions, this problem can be reformulated as a low-rank matrix demixing problem. We propose a convex recovery approach that utilizes the low-rank structure of each vectorized Hankel matrix associated with the target matrix. Our analysis reveals that for achieving exact recovery, the number of samples needs to satisfy the condition $n\gtrsim Ksr \log (sn)$. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the recovery capabilities and the computational efficiency of the convex method.
In the public projects problem, a group of decisionmakers aggregate their preferences to choose one alternative. Recent work on public projects has proposed the Quadratic Transfers Mechanism (QTM) and shown asymptotic welfare guarantees in some cases. We begin by giving new non-asymptotic Price of Anarchy guarantees for the QTM. We then incorporate an alternative philosophy toward group decisionmaking, aggregation of information about which is the best alternative. We propose a public projects mechanism based on the QTM that aggregates both preferences and predictions, modeled as forecasts of the projects' welfare impacts. When the predictions come from a prediction market or wagering mechanism, we show the entire mechanism is robust to manipulation and give Price of Anarchy guarantees, though under strong assumptions on the mechanism's knowledge. Our results focus primarily on the case of deciding between two alternatives, showing the Price of Anarchy tends to $1$ as natural measures of the "size" of the population grow large. In most cases, the mechanisms achieve a balanced budget as well.
In this work, we present novel protocols over rings for semi-honest secure three-party computation (3-PC) and malicious four-party computation (4-PC) with one corruption. Compared to state-of-the-art protocols in the same setting, our protocols require fewer low-latency and high-bandwidth links between the parties to achieve high throughput. Our protocols also reduce the computational complexity by requiring up to 50 percent fewer basic instructions per gate. Further, our protocols achieve the currently best-known communication complexity (3, resp. 5 elements per multiplication gate) with an optional preprocessing phase to reduce the communication complexity of the online phase to 2 (resp. 3) elements per multiplication gate. In homogeneous network settings, i.e. all links between the parties share similar network bandwidth and latency, our protocols achieve up to two times higher throughput than state-of-the-art protocols. In heterogeneous network settings, i.e. all links between the parties share different network bandwidth and latency, our protocols achieve even larger performance improvements. We implemented our protocols and multiple other state-of-the-art protocols (Replicated 3-PC, Astra, Fantastic Four, Tetrad) in a novel open-source C++ framework optimized for achieving high throughput. Five out of six implemented 3-PC and 4-PC protocols achieve more than one billion 32-bit multiplication or more than 32 billion AND gates per second using our implementation in a 25 Gbit/s LAN environment. This is the highest throughput achieved in 3-PC and 4-PC so far and between two and three orders of magnitude higher than the throughput MP-SPDZ achieves in the same settings.
Technological innovation plays a crucial role in driving economic growth and development. In this study, we investigate the extent to which technological innovation contributes to a more sustainable future and fosters entrepreneurship. To examine this, we focus on robotic process automation (RPA) highly relevant technology. We conducted a comprehensive analysis by examining the usage of RPA and its impact on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors. Our research involved gathering data from the 300 largest companies in terms of market capitalization. We assessed whether these companies used RPA and obtained their corresponding ESG ratings. To investigate the relationship between RPA and ESG, we employed a contingency table analysis, which involved categorizing the data based on ESG ratings. We further used Pearson's Chi-square Test of Independence to assess the impact of RPA on ESG. Our findings revealed a statistically significant association between RPA and ESG ratings, indicating their interconnection. The calculated value for Pearson's Chi-square Test of Independence was 6.54, with a corresponding p-value of 0.0381. This indicates that at a significance level of five percent, the RPA and ESG variables depend on each other. These results suggest that RPA, representative of modern technologies, likely influences the achievement of a sustainable future and the promotion of entrepreneurship. In conclusion, our study provides empirical evidence supporting the notion that technological innovations such as RPA have the potential to positively shape sustainability efforts and entrepreneurial endeavours.
In this work, we introduce SureFED, a novel framework for byzantine robust federated learning. Unlike many existing defense methods that rely on statistically robust quantities, making them vulnerable to stealthy and colluding attacks, SureFED establishes trust using the local information of benign clients. SureFED utilizes an uncertainty aware model evaluation and introspection to safeguard against poisoning attacks. In particular, each client independently trains a clean local model exclusively using its local dataset, acting as the reference point for evaluating model updates. SureFED leverages Bayesian models that provide model uncertainties and play a crucial role in the model evaluation process. Our framework exhibits robustness even when the majority of clients are compromised, remains agnostic to the number of malicious clients, and is well-suited for non-IID settings. We theoretically prove the robustness of our algorithm against data and model poisoning attacks in a decentralized linear regression setting. Proof-of Concept evaluations on benchmark image classification data demonstrate the superiority of SureFED over the state of the art defense methods under various colluding and non-colluding data and model poisoning attacks.
This work presents a new method for enhancing communication efficiency in stochastic Federated Learning that trains over-parameterized random networks. In this setting, a binary mask is optimized instead of the model weights, which are kept fixed. The mask characterizes a sparse sub-network that is able to generalize as good as a smaller target network. Importantly, sparse binary masks are exchanged rather than the floating point weights in traditional federated learning, reducing communication cost to at most 1 bit per parameter (Bpp). We show that previous state of the art stochastic methods fail to find sparse networks that can reduce the communication and storage overhead using consistent loss objectives. To address this, we propose adding a regularization term to local objectives that acts as a proxy of the transmitted masks entropy, therefore encouraging sparser solutions by eliminating redundant features across sub-networks. Extensive empirical experiments demonstrate significant improvements in communication and memory efficiency of up to five magnitudes compared to the literature, with minimal performance degradation in validation accuracy in some instances
In this work, we proposed a new dynamic distributed planning approach that is able to take into account the changes that the agent introduces on his set of actions to be planned in order to take into account the changes that occur in his environment. Our approach fits into the context of distributed planning for distributed plans where each agent can produce its own plans. According to our approach the generation of the plans is based on the satisfaction of the constraints by the use of the genetic algorithms. Our approach is to generate, a new plan by each agent, whenever there is a change in its set of actions to plan. This in order to take into account the new actions introduced in its new plan. In this new plan, the agent takes, each time, as a new action set to plan all the old un-executed actions of the old plan and the new actions engendered by the changes and as a new initial state; the state in which the set of actions of the agent undergoes a change. In our work, we used a concrete case to illustrate and demonstrate the utility of our approach.
With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at //github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.
In this paper, we focus on the self-supervised learning of visual correspondence using unlabeled videos in the wild. Our method simultaneously considers intra- and inter-video representation associations for reliable correspondence estimation. The intra-video learning transforms the image contents across frames within a single video via the frame pair-wise affinity. To obtain the discriminative representation for instance-level separation, we go beyond the intra-video analysis and construct the inter-video affinity to facilitate the contrastive transformation across different videos. By forcing the transformation consistency between intra- and inter-video levels, the fine-grained correspondence associations are well preserved and the instance-level feature discrimination is effectively reinforced. Our simple framework outperforms the recent self-supervised correspondence methods on a range of visual tasks including video object tracking (VOT), video object segmentation (VOS), pose keypoint tracking, etc. It is worth mentioning that our method also surpasses the fully-supervised affinity representation (e.g., ResNet) and performs competitively against the recent fully-supervised algorithms designed for the specific tasks (e.g., VOT and VOS).
Recent work pre-training Transformers with self-supervised objectives on large text corpora has shown great success when fine-tuned on downstream NLP tasks including text summarization. However, pre-training objectives tailored for abstractive text summarization have not been explored. Furthermore there is a lack of systematic evaluation across diverse domains. In this work, we propose pre-training large Transformer-based encoder-decoder models on massive text corpora with a new self-supervised objective. In PEGASUS, important sentences are removed/masked from an input document and are generated together as one output sequence from the remaining sentences, similar to an extractive summary. We evaluated our best PEGASUS model on 12 downstream summarization tasks spanning news, science, stories, instructions, emails, patents, and legislative bills. Experiments demonstrate it achieves state-of-the-art performance on all 12 downstream datasets measured by ROUGE scores. Our model also shows surprising performance on low-resource summarization, surpassing previous state-of-the-art results on 6 datasets with only 1000 examples. Finally we validated our results using human evaluation and show that our model summaries achieve human performance on multiple datasets.
Verifiability is one of the core editing principles in Wikipedia, where editors are encouraged to provide citations for the added statements. Statements can be any arbitrary piece of text, ranging from a sentence up to a paragraph. However, in many cases, citations are either outdated, missing, or link to non-existing references (e.g. dead URL, moved content etc.). In total, 20\% of the cases such citations refer to news articles and represent the second most cited source. Even in cases where citations are provided, there are no explicit indicators for the span of a citation for a given piece of text. In addition to issues related with the verifiability principle, many Wikipedia entity pages are incomplete, with relevant information that is already available in online news sources missing. Even for the already existing citations, there is often a delay between the news publication time and the reference time. In this thesis, we address the aforementioned issues and propose automated approaches that enforce the verifiability principle in Wikipedia, and suggest relevant and missing news references for further enriching Wikipedia entity pages.