Cross-device federated learning (FL) is a technique that trains a model on data distributed across typically millions of edge devices without data leaving the devices. SGD is the standard client optimizer for on device training in cross-device FL, favored for its memory and computational efficiency. However, in centralized training of neural language models, adaptive optimizers are preferred as they offer improved stability and performance. In light of this, we ask if language models can be modified such that they can be efficiently trained with SGD client optimizers and answer this affirmatively. We propose a scale-invariant Coupled Input Forget Gate (SI CIFG) recurrent network by modifying the sigmoid and tanh activations in the recurrent cell and show that this new model converges faster and achieves better utility than the standard CIFG recurrent model in cross-device FL in large scale experiments. We further show that the proposed scale invariant modification also helps in federated learning of larger transformer models. Finally, we demonstrate the scale invariant modification is also compatible with other non-adaptive algorithms. Particularly, our results suggest an improved privacy utility trade-off in federated learning with differential privacy.
Rehearsal approaches in class incremental learning (CIL) suffer from decision boundary overfitting to new classes, which is mainly caused by two factors: insufficiency of old classes data for knowledge distillation and imbalanced data learning between the learned and new classes because of the limited storage memory. In this work, we present a simple but effective approach to tackle these two factors. First, we employ a re-sampling strategy and Mixup K}nowledge D}istillation (Re-MKD) to improve the performances of KD, which would greatly alleviate the overfitting problem. Specifically, we combine mixup and re-sampling strategies to synthesize adequate data used in KD training that are more consistent with the latent distribution between the learned and new classes. Second, we propose a novel incremental influence balance (IIB) method for CIL to tackle the classification of imbalanced data by extending the influence balance method into the CIL setting, which re-weights samples by their influences to create a proper decision boundary. With these two improvements, we present the effective decision boundary learning algorithm (EDBL) which improves the performance of KD and deals with the imbalanced data learning simultaneously. Experiments show that the proposed EDBL achieves state-of-the-art performances on several CIL benchmarks.
Generative Zero-shot learning (ZSL) learns a generator to synthesize visual samples for unseen classes, which is an effective way to advance ZSL. However, existing generative methods rely on the conditions of Gaussian noise and the predefined semantic prototype, which limit the generator only optimized on specific seen classes rather than characterizing each visual instance, resulting in poor generalizations (\textit{e.g.}, overfitting to seen classes). To address this issue, we propose a novel Visual-Augmented Dynamic Semantic prototype method (termed VADS) to boost the generator to learn accurate semantic-visual mapping by fully exploiting the visual-augmented knowledge into semantic conditions. In detail, VADS consists of two modules: (1) Visual-aware Domain Knowledge Learning module (VDKL) learns the local bias and global prior of the visual features (referred to as domain visual knowledge), which replace pure Gaussian noise to provide richer prior noise information; (2) Vision-Oriented Semantic Updation module (VOSU) updates the semantic prototype according to the visual representations of the samples. Ultimately, we concatenate their output as a dynamic semantic prototype, which serves as the condition of the generator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our VADS achieves superior CZSL and GZSL performances on three prominent datasets and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods with averaging increases by 6.4\%, 5.9\% and 4.2\% on SUN, CUB and AWA2, respectively.
Imputation methods for dealing with incomplete data typically assume that the missingness mechanism is at random (MAR). These methods can also be applied to missing not at random (MNAR) situations, where the user specifies some adjustment parameters that describe the degree of departure from MAR. The effect of different pre-chosen values is then studied on the inferences. This paper proposes a novel imputation method, the Random Indicator (RI) method, which, in contrast to the current methodology, estimates these adjustment parameters from the data. For an incomplete variable $X$, the RI method assumes that the observed part of $X$ is normal and the probability for $X$ to be missing follows a logistic function. The idea is to estimate the adjustment parameters by generating a pseudo response indicator from this logistic function. Our method iteratively draws imputations for $X$ and the realization of the response indicator $R$, to which we refer as $\dot{R}$, for $X$. By cross-classifying $X$ by $R$ and $\dot{R}$, we obtain various properties on the distribution of the missing data. These properties form the basis for estimating the degree of departure from MAR. Our numerical simulations show that the RI method performs very well across a variety of situations. We show how the method can be used in a real life data set. The RI method is automatic and opens up new ways to tackle the problem of MNAR data.
Parameterized quantum circuits as machine learning models are typically well described by their representation as a partial Fourier series of the input features, with frequencies uniquely determined by the feature map's generator Hamiltonians. Ordinarily, these data-encoding generators are chosen in advance, fixing the space of functions that can be represented. In this work we consider a generalization of quantum models to include a set of trainable parameters in the generator, leading to a trainable frequency (TF) quantum model. We numerically demonstrate how TF models can learn generators with desirable properties for solving the task at hand, including non-regularly spaced frequencies in their spectra and flexible spectral richness. Finally, we showcase the real-world effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating an improved accuracy in solving the Navier-Stokes equations using a TF model with only a single parameter added to each encoding operation. Since TF models encompass conventional fixed frequency models, they may offer a sensible default choice for variational quantum machine learning.
Neural networks are trained by minimizing a loss function that defines the discrepancy between the predicted model output and the target value. The selection of the loss function is crucial to achieve task-specific behaviour and highly influences the capability of the model. A variety of loss functions have been proposed for a wide range of tasks affecting training and model performance. For classification tasks, the cross entropy is the de-facto standard and usually the first choice. Here, we try to experimentally challenge the well-known loss functions, including cross entropy (CE) loss, by utilizing the genetic programming (GP) approach, a population-based evolutionary algorithm. GP constructs loss functions from a set of operators and leaf nodes and these functions are repeatedly recombined and mutated to find an optimal structure. Experiments were carried out on different small-sized datasets CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Fashion-MNIST using an Inception model. The 5 best functions found were evaluated for different model architectures on a set of standard datasets ranging from 2 to 102 classes and very different sizes. One function, denoted as Next Generation Loss (NGL), clearly stood out showing same or better performance for all tested datasets compared to CE. To evaluate the NGL function on a large-scale dataset, we tested its performance on the Imagenet-1k dataset where it showed improved top-1 accuracy compared to models trained with identical settings and other losses. Finally, the NGL was trained on a segmentation downstream task for Pascal VOC 2012 and COCO-Stuff164k datasets improving the underlying model performance.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives.
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.
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.
We advocate the use of implicit fields for learning generative models of shapes and introduce an implicit field decoder for shape generation, aimed at improving the visual quality of the generated shapes. An implicit field assigns a value to each point in 3D space, so that a shape can be extracted as an iso-surface. Our implicit field decoder is trained to perform this assignment by means of a binary classifier. Specifically, it takes a point coordinate, along with a feature vector encoding a shape, and outputs a value which indicates whether the point is outside the shape or not. By replacing conventional decoders by our decoder for representation learning and generative modeling of shapes, we demonstrate superior results for tasks such as shape autoencoding, generation, interpolation, and single-view 3D reconstruction, particularly in terms of visual quality.