While machine learning (ML) models are becoming mainstream, especially in sensitive application areas, the risk of data leakage has become a growing concern. Attacks like membership inference (MIA) have shown that trained models can reveal sensitive data, jeopardizing confidentiality. While traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) dominate ML applications, neuromorphic architectures, specifically Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), are emerging as promising alternatives due to their low power consumption and event-driven processing, akin to biological neurons. Privacy in ANNs is well-studied; however, little work has explored the privacy-preserving properties of SNNs. This paper examines whether SNNs inherently offer better privacy. Using MIAs, we assess the privacy resilience of SNNs versus ANNs across diverse datasets. We analyze the impact of learning algorithms (surrogate gradient and evolutionary), frameworks (snnTorch, TENNLab, LAVA), and parameters on SNN privacy. Our findings show that SNNs consistently outperform ANNs in privacy preservation, with evolutionary algorithms offering additional resilience. For instance, on CIFAR-10, SNNs achieve an AUC of 0.59, significantly lower than ANNs' 0.82, and on CIFAR-100, SNNs maintain an AUC of 0.58 compared to ANNs' 0.88. Additionally, we explore the privacy-utility trade-off with Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD), finding that SNNs sustain less accuracy loss than ANNs under similar privacy constraints.
The recent success of large language models (LLMs) trained on static, pre-collected, general datasets has sparked numerous research directions and applications. One such direction addresses the non-trivial challenge of integrating pre-trained LLMs into dynamic data distributions, task structures, and user preferences. Pre-trained LLMs, when tailored for specific needs, often experience significant performance degradation in previous knowledge domains -- a phenomenon known as "catastrophic forgetting". While extensively studied in the continual learning (CL) community, it presents new manifestations in the realm of LLMs. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the current research progress on LLMs within the context of CL. This survey is structured into four main sections: we first describe an overview of continually learning LLMs, consisting of two directions of continuity: vertical continuity (or vertical continual learning), i.e., continual adaptation from general to specific capabilities, and horizontal continuity (or horizontal continual learning), i.e., continual adaptation across time and domains (Section 3). We then summarize three stages of learning LLMs in the context of modern CL: Continual Pre-Training (CPT), Domain-Adaptive Pre-training (DAP), and Continual Fine-Tuning (CFT) (Section 4). Then we provide an overview of evaluation protocols for continual learning with LLMs, along with the current available data sources (Section 5). Finally, we discuss intriguing questions pertaining to continual learning for LLMs (Section 6). The full list of papers examined in this survey is available at //github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/llm-continual-learning-survey.
Generative models, as an important family of statistical modeling, target learning the observed data distribution via generating new instances. Along with the rise of neural networks, deep generative models, such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) and generative adversarial network (GANs), have made tremendous progress in 2D image synthesis. Recently, researchers switch their attentions from the 2D space to the 3D space considering that 3D data better aligns with our physical world and hence enjoys great potential in practice. However, unlike a 2D image, which owns an efficient representation (i.e., pixel grid) by nature, representing 3D data could face far more challenges. Concretely, we would expect an ideal 3D representation to be capable enough to model shapes and appearances in details, and to be highly efficient so as to model high-resolution data with fast speed and low memory cost. However, existing 3D representations, such as point clouds, meshes, and recent neural fields, usually fail to meet the above requirements simultaneously. In this survey, we make a thorough review of the development of 3D generation, including 3D shape generation and 3D-aware image synthesis, from the perspectives of both algorithms and more importantly representations. We hope that our discussion could help the community track the evolution of this field and further spark some innovative ideas to advance this challenging task.
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) has been developed as a promising framework to leverage the resources of edge devices, enhance customers' privacy, comply with regulations, and reduce development costs. Although many methods and applications have been developed for FL, several critical challenges for practical FL systems remain unaddressed. This paper provides an outlook on FL development, categorized into five emerging directions of FL, namely algorithm foundation, personalization, hardware and security constraints, lifelong learning, and nonstandard data. Our unique perspectives are backed by practical observations from large-scale federated systems for edge devices.
As an effective strategy, data augmentation (DA) alleviates data scarcity scenarios where deep learning techniques may fail. It is widely applied in computer vision then introduced to natural language processing and achieves improvements in many tasks. One of the main focuses of the DA methods is to improve the diversity of training data, thereby helping the model to better generalize to unseen testing data. In this survey, we frame DA methods into three categories based on the diversity of augmented data, including paraphrasing, noising, and sampling. Our paper sets out to analyze DA methods in detail according to the above categories. Further, we also introduce their applications in NLP tasks as well as the challenges.
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.
Few sample learning (FSL) is significant and challenging in the field of machine learning. The capability of learning and generalizing from very few samples successfully is a noticeable demarcation separating artificial intelligence and human intelligence since humans can readily establish their cognition to novelty from just a single or a handful of examples whereas machine learning algorithms typically entail hundreds or thousands of supervised samples to guarantee generalization ability. Despite the long history dated back to the early 2000s and the widespread attention in recent years with booming deep learning technologies, little surveys or reviews for FSL are available until now. In this context, we extensively review 200+ papers of FSL spanning from the 2000s to 2019 and provide a timely and comprehensive survey for FSL. In this survey, we review the evolution history as well as the current progress on FSL, categorize FSL approaches into the generative model based and discriminative model based kinds in principle, and emphasize particularly on the meta learning based FSL approaches. We also summarize several recently emerging extensional topics of FSL and review the latest advances on these topics. Furthermore, we highlight the important FSL applications covering many research hotspots in computer vision, natural language processing, audio and speech, reinforcement learning and robotic, data analysis, etc. Finally, we conclude the survey with a discussion on promising trends in the hope of providing guidance and insights to follow-up researches.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have revolutionized the field of graph representation learning through effectively learned node embeddings, and achieved state-of-the-art results in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, current GNN methods are inherently flat and do not learn hierarchical representations of graphs---a limitation that is especially problematic for the task of graph classification, where the goal is to predict the label associated with an entire graph. Here we propose DiffPool, a differentiable graph pooling module that can generate hierarchical representations of graphs and can be combined with various graph neural network architectures in an end-to-end fashion. DiffPool learns a differentiable soft cluster assignment for nodes at each layer of a deep GNN, mapping nodes to a set of clusters, which then form the coarsened input for the next GNN layer. Our experimental results show that combining existing GNN methods with DiffPool yields an average improvement of 5-10% accuracy on graph classification benchmarks, compared to all existing pooling approaches, achieving a new state-of-the-art on four out of five benchmark data sets.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.