Decentralized optimization is gaining increased traction due to its widespread applications in large-scale machine learning and multi-agent systems. The same mechanism that enables its success, i.e., information sharing among participating agents, however, also leads to the disclosure of individual agents' private information, which is unacceptable when sensitive data are involved. As differential privacy is becoming a de facto standard for privacy preservation, recently results have emerged integrating differential privacy with distributed optimization. However, directly incorporating differential privacy design in existing distributed optimization approaches significantly compromises optimization accuracy. In this paper, we propose to redesign and tailor gradient methods for differentially-private distributed optimization, and propose two differential-privacy oriented gradient methods that can ensure both rigorous epsilon-differential privacy and optimality. The first algorithm is based on static-consensus based gradient methods, and the second algorithm is based on dynamic-consensus (gradient-tracking) based distributed optimization methods and, hence, is applicable to general directed interaction graph topologies. Both algorithms can simultaneously ensure almost sure convergence to an optimal solution and a finite privacy budget, even when the number of iterations goes to infinity. To our knowledge, this is the first time that both goals are achieved simultaneously. Numerical simulations using a distributed estimation problem and experimental results on a benchmark dataset confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
Addressing the large distribution gap between training and testing data has long been a challenge in machine learning, giving rise to fields such as transfer learning and domain adaptation. Recently, Continuous Domain Adaptation (CDA) has emerged as an effective technique, closing this gap by utilizing a series of intermediate domains. This paper contributes a novel CDA method, W-MPOT, which rigorously addresses the domain ordering and error accumulation problems overlooked by previous studies. Specifically, we construct a transfer curriculum over the source and intermediate domains based on Wasserstein distance, motivated by theoretical analysis of CDA. Then we transfer the source model to the target domain through multiple valid paths in the curriculum using a modified version of continuous optimal transport. A bidirectional path consistency constraint is introduced to mitigate the impact of accumulated mapping errors during continuous transfer. We extensively evaluate W-MPOT on multiple datasets, achieving up to 54.1\% accuracy improvement on multi-session Alzheimer MR image classification and 94.7\% MSE reduction on battery capacity estimation.
The rigid gang task model is based on the idea of executing multiple threads simultaneously on a fixed number of processors to increase efficiency and performance. Although there is extensive literature on global rigid gang scheduling, partitioned approaches have several practical advantages (e.g., task isolation and reduced scheduling overheads). In this paper, we propose a new partitioned scheduling strategy for rigid gang tasks, named strict partitioning. The method creates disjoint partitions of tasks and processors to avoid inter-partition interference. Moreover, it tries to assign tasks with similar volumes (i.e., parallelisms) to the same partition so that the intra-partition interference can be reduced. Within each partition, the tasks can be scheduled using any type of scheduler, which allows the use of a less pessimistic schedulability test. Extensive synthetic experiments and a case study based on Edge TPU benchmarks show that strict partitioning achieves better schedulability performance than state-of-the-art global gang schedulability analyses for both preemptive and non-preemptive rigid gang task sets.
Long-term trajectory forecasting is an important and challenging problem in the fields of computer vision, machine learning, and robotics. One fundamental difficulty stands in the evolution of the trajectory that becomes more and more uncertain and unpredictable as the time horizon grows, subsequently increasing the complexity of the problem. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we propose Di-Long, a new method that employs the distillation of a short-term trajectory model forecaster that guides a student network for long-term trajectory prediction during the training process. Given a total sequence length that comprehends the allowed observation for the student network and the complementary target sequence, we let the student and the teacher solve two different related tasks defined over the same full trajectory: the student observes a short sequence and predicts a long trajectory, whereas the teacher observes a longer sequence and predicts the remaining short target trajectory. The teacher's task is less uncertain, and we use its accurate predictions to guide the student through our knowledge distillation framework, reducing long-term future uncertainty. Our experiments show that our proposed Di-Long method is effective for long-term forecasting and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Intersection Drone Dataset (inD) and the Stanford Drone Dataset (SDD).
Multimodal machine learning with missing modalities is an increasingly relevant challenge arising in various applications such as healthcare. This paper extends the current research into missing modalities to the low-data regime, i.e., a downstream task has both missing modalities and limited sample size issues. This problem setting is particularly challenging and also practical as it is often expensive to get full-modality data and sufficient annotated training samples. We propose to use retrieval-augmented in-context learning to address these two crucial issues by unleashing the potential of a transformer's in-context learning ability. Diverging from existing methods, which primarily belong to the parametric paradigm and often require sufficient training samples, our work exploits the value of the available full-modality data, offering a novel perspective on resolving the challenge. The proposed data-dependent framework exhibits a higher degree of sample efficiency and is empirically demonstrated to enhance the classification model's performance on both full- and missing-modality data in the low-data regime across various multimodal learning tasks. When only 1% of the training data are available, our proposed method demonstrates an average improvement of 6.1% over a recent strong baseline across various datasets and missing states. Notably, our method also reduces the performance gap between full-modality and missing-modality data compared with the baseline.
In the context of an increasing popularity of data-driven models to represent dynamical systems, many machine learning-based implementations of the Koopman operator have recently been proposed. However, the vast majority of those works are limited to deterministic predictions, while the knowledge of uncertainty is critical in fields like meteorology and climatology. In this work, we investigate the training of ensembles of models to produce stochastic outputs. We show through experiments on real remote sensing image time series that ensembles of independently trained models are highly overconfident and that using a training criterion that explicitly encourages the members to produce predictions with high inter-model variances greatly improves the uncertainty quantification of the ensembles.
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.
Time series anomaly detection has applications in a wide range of research fields and applications, including manufacturing and healthcare. The presence of anomalies can indicate novel or unexpected events, such as production faults, system defects, or heart fluttering, and is therefore of particular interest. The large size and complex patterns of time series have led researchers to develop specialised deep learning models for detecting anomalous patterns. This survey focuses on providing structured and comprehensive state-of-the-art time series anomaly detection models through the use of deep learning. It providing a taxonomy based on the factors that divide anomaly detection models into different categories. Aside from describing the basic anomaly detection technique for each category, the advantages and limitations are also discussed. Furthermore, this study includes examples of deep anomaly detection in time series across various application domains in recent years. It finally summarises open issues in research and challenges faced while adopting deep anomaly detection models.
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.
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.
Exploration-exploitation is a powerful and practical tool in multi-agent learning (MAL), however, its effects are far from understood. To make progress in this direction, we study a smooth analogue of Q-learning. We start by showing that our learning model has strong theoretical justification as an optimal model for studying exploration-exploitation. Specifically, we prove that smooth Q-learning has bounded regret in arbitrary games for a cost model that explicitly captures the balance between game and exploration costs and that it always converges to the set of quantal-response equilibria (QRE), the standard solution concept for games under bounded rationality, in weighted potential games with heterogeneous learning agents. In our main task, we then turn to measure the effect of exploration in collective system performance. We characterize the geometry of the QRE surface in low-dimensional MAL systems and link our findings with catastrophe (bifurcation) theory. In particular, as the exploration hyperparameter evolves over-time, the system undergoes phase transitions where the number and stability of equilibria can change radically given an infinitesimal change to the exploration parameter. Based on this, we provide a formal theoretical treatment of how tuning the exploration parameter can provably lead to equilibrium selection with both positive as well as negative (and potentially unbounded) effects to system performance.