We propose AIM, a novel algorithm for differentially private synthetic data generation. \aim is a workload-adaptive algorithm, within the paradigm of algorithms that first selects a set of queries, then privately measures those queries, and finally generates synthetic data from the noisy measurements. It uses a set of innovative features to iteratively select the most useful measurements, reflecting both their relevance to the workload and their value in approximating the input data. We also provide analytic expressions to bound per-query error with high probability, which can be used to construct confidence intervals and inform users about the accuracy of generated data. We show empirically that AIM consistently outperforms a wide variety of existing mechanisms across a variety of experimental settings.
In this perspective paper we study the effect of non independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data on federated online learning to rank (FOLTR) and chart directions for future work in this new and largely unexplored research area of Information Retrieval. In the FOLTR process, clients join a federation to jointly create an effective ranker from the implicit click signal originating in each client, without the need to share data (documents, queries, clicks). A well-known factor that affects the performance of federated learning systems, and that poses serious challenges to these approaches, is the fact that there may be some type of bias in the way the data is distributed across clients. While FOLTR systems are on their own rights a type of federated learning system, the presence and effect of non-IID data in FOLTR has not been studied. To this aim, we first enumerate possible data distribution settings that may showcase data bias across clients and thus give rise to the non-IID problem. Then, we study the impact of each of these settings on the performance of the current state-of-the-art FOLTR approach, the Federated Pairwise Differentiable Gradient Descent (FPDGD), and we highlight which data distributions may pose a problem for FOLTR methods. We also explore how common approaches proposed in the federated learning literature address non-IID issues in FOLTR. This allows us to unveil new research gaps that, we argue, future research in FOLTR should consider. This is an important contribution to the current state of the field of FOLTR because, for FOLTR systems to be deployed, the factors affecting their performance, including the impact of non-IID data, need to thoroughly be understood.
Differential privacy is a mathematical concept that provides an information-theoretic security guarantee. While differential privacy has emerged as a de facto standard for guaranteeing privacy in data sharing, the known mechanisms to achieve it come with some serious limitations. Utility guarantees are usually provided only for a fixed, a priori specified set of queries. Moreover, there are no utility guarantees for more complex - but very common - machine learning tasks such as clustering or classification. In this paper we overcome some of these limitations. Working with metric privacy, a powerful generalization of differential privacy, we develop a polynomial-time algorithm that creates a private measure from a data set. This private measure allows us to efficiently construct private synthetic data that are accurate for a wide range of statistical analysis tools. Moreover, we prove an asymptotically sharp min-max result for private measures and synthetic data for general compact metric spaces. A key ingredient in our construction is a new superregular random walk, whose joint distribution of steps is as regular as that of independent random variables, yet which deviates from the origin logarithmicaly slowly.
Privacy protection is an essential issue in personalized news recommendation, and federated learning can potentially mitigate the privacy concern by training personalized news recommendation models over decentralized user data.For a theoretical privacy guarantee, differential privacy is necessary. However, applying differential privacy to federated recommendation training and serving conventionally suffers from the unsatisfactory trade-off between privacy and utility due to the high-dimensional characteristics of model gradients and hidden representations. In addition, there is no formal privacy guarantee for both training and serving in federated recommendation. In this paper, we propose a unified federated news recommendation method for effective and privacy-preserving model training and online serving with differential privacy guarantees. We first clarify the notion of differential privacy over users' behavior data for both model training and online serving in the federated recommendation scenario. Next, we propose a privacy-preserving online serving mechanism under this definition with differentially private user interest decomposition. More specifically, it decomposes the high-dimensional and privacy-sensitive user embedding into a combination of public basic vectors and adds noise to the combination coefficients. In this way, it can avoid the dimension curse and improve the utility by reducing the required noise intensity for differential privacy. Besides, we design a federated recommendation model training method with differential privacy, which can avoid the dimension-dependent noise for large models via label permutation and differentially private attention modules. Experiments on real-world news recommendation datasets validate the effectiveness of our method in achieving a good trade-off between privacy protection and utility for federated news recommendations.
In this work, we study the transfer learning problem under high-dimensional generalized linear models (GLMs), which aim to improve the fit on target data by borrowing information from useful source data. Given which sources to transfer, we propose a transfer learning algorithm on GLM, and derive its $\ell_1/\ell_2$-estimation error bounds as well as a bound for a prediction error measure. The theoretical analysis shows that when the target and source are sufficiently close to each other, these bounds could be improved over those of the classical penalized estimator using only target data under mild conditions. When we don't know which sources to transfer, an algorithm-free transferable source detection approach is introduced to detect informative sources. The detection consistency is proved under the high-dimensional GLM transfer learning setting. We also propose an algorithm to construct confidence intervals of each coefficient component, and the corresponding theories are provided. Extensive simulations and a real-data experiment verify the effectiveness of our algorithms. We implement the proposed GLM transfer learning algorithms in a new R package glmtrans, which is available on CRAN.
To simulate noisy boson sampling approximating it by only the lower-order multi-boson interferences (e.g., by a smaller number of interfering bosons and classical particles) is very popular idea. I show that the output data from any such classical simulations can be efficiently distinguished from that of the quantum device they try to simulate, even with finite noise in the latter. The distinguishing datasets can be the experimental estimates of some large probabilities, a wide class of such is presented. This is a sequel of \textit{Quantum} \textbf{5}, 423 (2021), where I present more accessible account of the main result enhanced by additional insight on the contribution from the higher-order multi-boson interferences in presence of noise.
With the increasing adoption of NLP models in real-world products, it becomes more and more important to protect these models from privacy leakage. Because private information in language data is sparse, previous research formalized a Selective-Differential-Privacy (SDP) notion to provide protection for sensitive tokens detected by policy functions, and prove its effectiveness on RNN-based models. But the previous mechanism requires separating the private and public model parameters and thus cannot be applied on large attention-based models. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective just-fine-tune-twice privacy mechanism to first fine-tune on in-domain redacted data and then on in-domain private data, to achieve SDP for large Transformer-based language models. We also design explicit and contextual policy functions to provide protections at different levels. Experiments show that our models achieve strong performance while staying robust to the canary insertion attack. We further show that even under low-resource settings with a small amount of in-domain data, SDP can still improve the model utility. We will release the code, data and models to facilitate future research.
The conjoining of dynamical systems and deep learning has become a topic of great interest. In particular, neural differential equations (NDEs) demonstrate that neural networks and differential equation are two sides of the same coin. Traditional parameterised differential equations are a special case. Many popular neural network architectures, such as residual networks and recurrent networks, are discretisations. NDEs are suitable for tackling generative problems, dynamical systems, and time series (particularly in physics, finance, ...) and are thus of interest to both modern machine learning and traditional mathematical modelling. NDEs offer high-capacity function approximation, strong priors on model space, the ability to handle irregular data, memory efficiency, and a wealth of available theory on both sides. This doctoral thesis provides an in-depth survey of the field. Topics include: neural ordinary differential equations (e.g. for hybrid neural/mechanistic modelling of physical systems); neural controlled differential equations (e.g. for learning functions of irregular time series); and neural stochastic differential equations (e.g. to produce generative models capable of representing complex stochastic dynamics, or sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions). Further topics include: numerical methods for NDEs (e.g. reversible differential equations solvers, backpropagation through differential equations, Brownian reconstruction); symbolic regression for dynamical systems (e.g. via regularised evolution); and deep implicit models (e.g. deep equilibrium models, differentiable optimisation). We anticipate this thesis will be of interest to anyone interested in the marriage of deep learning with dynamical systems, and hope it will provide a useful reference for the current state of the art.
Sequential recommendation as an emerging topic has attracted increasing attention due to its important practical significance. Models based on deep learning and attention mechanism have achieved good performance in sequential recommendation. Recently, the generative models based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) have shown the unique advantage in collaborative filtering. In particular, the sequential VAE model as a recurrent version of VAE can effectively capture temporal dependencies among items in user sequence and perform sequential recommendation. However, VAE-based models suffer from a common limitation that the representational ability of the obtained approximate posterior distribution is limited, resulting in lower quality of generated samples. This is especially true for generating sequences. To solve the above problem, in this work, we propose a novel method called Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder (ACVAE) for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we first introduce the adversarial training for sequence generation under the Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB) framework, which enables our model to generate high-quality latent variables. Then, we employ the contrastive loss. The latent variables will be able to learn more personalized and salient characteristics by minimizing the contrastive loss. Besides, when encoding the sequence, we apply a recurrent and convolutional structure to capture global and local relationships in the sequence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed ACVAE model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
Properly handling missing data is a fundamental challenge in recommendation. Most present works perform negative sampling from unobserved data to supply the training of recommender models with negative signals. Nevertheless, existing negative sampling strategies, either static or adaptive ones, are insufficient to yield high-quality negative samples --- both informative to model training and reflective of user real needs. In this work, we hypothesize that item knowledge graph (KG), which provides rich relations among items and KG entities, could be useful to infer informative and factual negative samples. Towards this end, we develop a new negative sampling model, Knowledge Graph Policy Network (KGPolicy), which works as a reinforcement learning agent to explore high-quality negatives. Specifically, by conducting our designed exploration operations, it navigates from the target positive interaction, adaptively receives knowledge-aware negative signals, and ultimately yields a potential negative item to train the recommender. We tested on a matrix factorization (MF) model equipped with KGPolicy, and it achieves significant improvements over both state-of-the-art sampling methods like DNS and IRGAN, and KG-enhanced recommender models like KGAT. Further analyses from different angles provide insights of knowledge-aware sampling. We release the codes and datasets at //github.com/xiangwang1223/kgpolicy.
State-of-the-art recommendation algorithms -- especially the collaborative filtering (CF) based approaches with shallow or deep models -- usually work with various unstructured information sources for recommendation, such as textual reviews, visual images, and various implicit or explicit feedbacks. Though structured knowledge bases were considered in content-based approaches, they have been largely neglected recently due to the availability of vast amount of data, and the learning power of many complex models. However, structured knowledge bases exhibit unique advantages in personalized recommendation systems. When the explicit knowledge about users and items is considered for recommendation, the system could provide highly customized recommendations based on users' historical behaviors. A great challenge for using knowledge bases for recommendation is how to integrated large-scale structured and unstructured data, while taking advantage of collaborative filtering for highly accurate performance. Recent achievements on knowledge base embedding sheds light on this problem, which makes it possible to learn user and item representations while preserving the structure of their relationship with external knowledge. In this work, we propose to reason over knowledge base embeddings for personalized recommendation. Specifically, we propose a knowledge base representation learning approach to embed heterogeneous entities for recommendation. Experimental results on real-world dataset verified the superior performance of our approach compared with state-of-the-art baselines.