Federated learning has attracted increasing attention with the emergence of distributed data. While extensive federated learning algorithms have been proposed for the non-convex distributed problem, the federated learning in practice still faces numerous challenges, such as the large training iterations to converge since the sizes of models and datasets keep increasing, and the lack of adaptivity by SGD-based model updates. Meanwhile, the study of adaptive methods in federated learning is scarce and existing works either lack a complete theoretical convergence guarantee or have slow sample complexity. In this paper, we propose an efficient adaptive algorithm (i.e., FAFED) based on the momentum-based variance reduced technique in cross-silo FL. We first explore how to design the adaptive algorithm in the FL setting. By providing a counter-example, we prove that a simple combination of FL and adaptive methods could lead to divergence. More importantly, we provide a convergence analysis for our method and prove that our algorithm is the first adaptive FL algorithm to reach the best-known samples $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ and $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ communication rounds to find an $\epsilon$-stationary point without large batches. The experimental results on the language modeling task and image classification task with heterogeneous data demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms.
Federated Learning offers a way to train deep neural networks in a distributed fashion. While this addresses limitations related to distributed data, it incurs a communication overhead as the model parameters or gradients need to be exchanged regularly during training. This can be an issue with large scale distribution of learning asks and negate the benefit of the respective resource distribution. In this paper, we we propose to utilise parallel Adapters for Federated Learning. Using various datasets, we show that Adapters can be applied with different Federated Learning techniques. We highlight that our approach can achieve similar inference performance compared to training the full model while reducing the communication overhead drastically. We further explore the applicability of Adapters in cross-silo and cross-device settings, as well as different non-IID data distributions.
Data scarcity and heterogeneity pose significant performance challenges for personalized federated learning, and these challenges are mainly reflected in overfitting and low precision in existing methods. To overcome these challenges, a multi-layer multi-fusion strategy framework is proposed in this paper, i.e., the server adopts the network layer parameters of each client upload model as the basic unit of fusion for information-sharing calculation. Then, a new fusion strategy combining personalized and generic is purposefully proposed, and the network layer number fusion threshold of each fusion strategy is designed according to the network layer function. Under this mechanism, the L2-Norm negative exponential similarity metric is employed to calculate the fusion weights of the corresponding feature extraction layer parameters for each client, thus improving the efficiency of heterogeneous data personalized collaboration. Meanwhile, the federated global optimal model approximation fusion strategy is adopted in the network full-connect layer, and this generic fusion strategy alleviates the overfitting introduced by forceful personalized. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods.
Testing black-box perceptual-control systems in simulation faces two difficulties. Firstly, perceptual inputs in simulation lack the fidelity of real-world sensor inputs. Secondly, for a reasonably accurate perception system, encountering a rare failure trajectory may require running infeasibly many simulations. This paper combines perception error models -- surrogates for a sensor-based detection system -- with state-dependent adaptive importance sampling. This allows us to efficiently assess the rare failure probabilities for real-world perceptual control systems within simulation. Our experiments with an autonomous braking system equipped with an RGB obstacle-detector show that our method can calculate accurate failure probabilities with an inexpensive number of simulations. Further, we show how choice of safety metric can influence the process of learning proposal distributions capable of reliably sampling high-probability failures.
In this paper, we provide an intuitive viewing to simplify the Siamese-based trackers by converting the tracking task to a classification. Under this viewing, we perform an in-depth analysis for them through visual simulations and real tracking examples, and find that the failure cases in some challenging situations can be regarded as the issue of missing decisive samples in offline training. Since the samples in the initial (first) frame contain rich sequence-specific information, we can regard them as the decisive samples to represent the whole sequence. To quickly adapt the base model to new scenes, a compact latent network is presented via fully using these decisive samples. Specifically, we present a statistics-based compact latent feature for fast adjustment by efficiently extracting the sequence-specific information. Furthermore, a new diverse sample mining strategy is designed for training to further improve the discrimination ability of the proposed compact latent network. Finally, a conditional updating strategy is proposed to efficiently update the basic models to handle scene variation during the tracking phase. To evaluate the generalization ability and effectiveness and of our method, we apply it to adjust three classical Siamese-based trackers, namely SiamRPN++, SiamFC, and SiamBAN. Extensive experimental results on six recent datasets demonstrate that all three adjusted trackers obtain the superior performance in terms of the accuracy, while having high running speed.
Modern reinforcement learning (RL) often faces an enormous state-action space. Existing analytical results are typically for settings with a small number of state-actions, or simple models such as linearly modeled Q-functions. To derive statistically efficient RL policies handling large state-action spaces, with more general Q-functions, some recent works have considered nonlinear function approximation using kernel ridge regression. In this work, we derive sample complexities for kernel based Q-learning when a generative model exists. We propose a nonparametric Q-learning algorithm which finds an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in an arbitrarily large scale discounted MDP. The sample complexity of the proposed algorithm is order optimal with respect to $\epsilon$ and the complexity of the kernel (in terms of its information gain). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result showing a finite sample complexity under such a general model.
Federated learning (FL) has been proposed to protect data privacy and virtually assemble the isolated data silos by cooperatively training models among organizations without breaching privacy and security. However, FL faces heterogeneity from various aspects, including data space, statistical, and system heterogeneity. For example, collaborative organizations without conflict of interest often come from different areas and have heterogeneous data from different feature spaces. Participants may also want to train heterogeneous personalized local models due to non-IID and imbalanced data distribution and various resource-constrained devices. Therefore, heterogeneous FL is proposed to address the problem of heterogeneity in FL. In this survey, we comprehensively investigate the domain of heterogeneous FL in terms of data space, statistical, system, and model heterogeneity. We first give an overview of FL, including its definition and categorization. Then, We propose a precise taxonomy of heterogeneous FL settings for each type of heterogeneity according to the problem setting and learning objective. We also investigate the transfer learning methodologies to tackle the heterogeneity in FL. We further present the applications of heterogeneous FL. Finally, we highlight the challenges and opportunities and envision promising future research directions toward new framework design and trustworthy approaches.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Federated learning enables multiple parties to collaboratively train a machine learning model without communicating their local data. A key challenge in federated learning is to handle the heterogeneity of local data distribution across parties. Although many studies have been proposed to address this challenge, we find that they fail to achieve high performance in image datasets with deep learning models. In this paper, we propose MOON: model-contrastive federated learning. MOON is a simple and effective federated learning framework. The key idea of MOON is to utilize the similarity between model representations to correct the local training of individual parties, i.e., conducting contrastive learning in model-level. Our extensive experiments show that MOON significantly outperforms the other state-of-the-art federated learning algorithms on various image classification tasks.
While recent studies on semi-supervised learning have shown remarkable progress in leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data, most of them presume a basic setting of the model is randomly initialized. In this work, we consider semi-supervised learning and transfer learning jointly, leading to a more practical and competitive paradigm that can utilize both powerful pre-trained models from source domain as well as labeled/unlabeled data in the target domain. To better exploit the value of both pre-trained weights and unlabeled target examples, we introduce adaptive consistency regularization that consists of two complementary components: Adaptive Knowledge Consistency (AKC) on the examples between the source and target model, and Adaptive Representation Consistency (ARC) on the target model between labeled and unlabeled examples. Examples involved in the consistency regularization are adaptively selected according to their potential contributions to the target task. We conduct extensive experiments on several popular benchmarks including CUB-200-2011, MIT Indoor-67, MURA, by fine-tuning the ImageNet pre-trained ResNet-50 model. Results show that our proposed adaptive consistency regularization outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning techniques such as Pseudo Label, Mean Teacher, and MixMatch. Moreover, our algorithm is orthogonal to existing methods and thus able to gain additional improvements on top of MixMatch and FixMatch. Our code is available at //github.com/SHI-Labs/Semi-Supervised-Transfer-Learning.
Attributed graph clustering is challenging as it requires joint modelling of graph structures and node attributes. Recent progress on graph convolutional networks has proved that graph convolution is effective in combining structural and content information, and several recent methods based on it have achieved promising clustering performance on some real attributed networks. However, there is limited understanding of how graph convolution affects clustering performance and how to properly use it to optimize performance for different graphs. Existing methods essentially use graph convolution of a fixed and low order that only takes into account neighbours within a few hops of each node, which underutilizes node relations and ignores the diversity of graphs. In this paper, we propose an adaptive graph convolution method for attributed graph clustering that exploits high-order graph convolution to capture global cluster structure and adaptively selects the appropriate order for different graphs. We establish the validity of our method by theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on benchmark datasets. Empirical results show that our method compares favourably with state-of-the-art methods.