Federated Domain Adaptation (FDA) describes the federated learning (FL) setting where source clients and a server work collaboratively to improve the performance of a target client where limited data is available. The domain shift between the source and target domains, coupled with limited data of the target client, makes FDA a challenging problem, e.g., common techniques such as federated averaging and fine-tuning fail due to domain shift and data scarcity. To theoretically understand the problem, we introduce new metrics that characterize the FDA setting and a theoretical framework with novel theorems for analyzing the performance of server aggregation rules. Further, we propose a novel lightweight aggregation rule, Federated Gradient Projection ($\texttt{FedGP}$), which significantly improves the target performance with domain shift and data scarcity. Moreover, our theory suggests an $\textit{auto-weighting scheme}$ that finds the optimal combinations of the source and target gradients. This scheme improves both $\texttt{FedGP}$ and a simpler heuristic aggregation rule. Extensive experiments verify the theoretical insights and illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in practice.
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged as a promising deep learning framework for approximating numerical solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs). However, conventional PINNs, relying on multilayer perceptrons (MLP), neglect the crucial temporal dependencies inherent in practical physics systems and thus fail to propagate the initial condition constraints globally and accurately capture the true solutions under various scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel Transformer-based framework, termed PINNsFormer, designed to address this limitation. PINNsFormer can accurately approximate PDE solutions by utilizing multi-head attention mechanisms to capture temporal dependencies. PINNsFormer transforms point-wise inputs into pseudo sequences and replaces point-wise PINNs loss with a sequential loss. Additionally, it incorporates a novel activation function, Wavelet, which anticipates Fourier decomposition through deep neural networks. Empirical results demonstrate that PINNsFormer achieves superior generalization ability and accuracy across various scenarios, including PINNs failure modes and high-dimensional PDEs. Moreover, PINNsFormer offers flexibility in integrating existing learning schemes for PINNs, further enhancing its performance.
Federated learning (FL) has attracted widespread attention because it supports the joint training of models by multiple participants without moving private dataset. However, there are still many security issues in FL that deserve discussion. In this paper, we consider three major issues: 1) how to ensure that the training process can be publicly audited by any third party; 2) how to avoid the influence of malicious participants on training; 3) how to ensure that private gradients and models are not leaked to third parties. Many solutions have been proposed to address these issues, while solving the above three problems simultaneously is seldom considered. In this paper, we propose a publicly auditable and privacy-preserving federated learning scheme that is resistant to malicious participants uploading gradients with wrong directions and enables anyone to audit and verify the correctness of the training process. In particular, we design a robust aggregation algorithm capable of detecting gradients with wrong directions from malicious participants. Then, we design a random vector generation algorithm and combine it with zero sharing and blockchain technologies to make the joint training process publicly auditable, meaning anyone can verify the correctness of the training. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments, and the experimental results show that the model generated by the protocol is comparable in accuracy to the original FL approach while keeping security advantages.
Data Shapley provides a principled approach to data valuation and plays a crucial role in data-centric machine learning (ML) research. Data selection is considered a standard application of Data Shapley. However, its data selection performance has shown to be inconsistent across settings in the literature. This study aims to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon. We introduce a hypothesis testing framework and show that Data Shapley's performance can be no better than random selection without specific constraints on utility functions. We identify a class of utility functions, monotonically transformed modular functions, within which Data Shapley optimally selects data. Based on this insight, we propose a heuristic for predicting Data Shapley's effectiveness in data selection tasks. Our experiments corroborate these findings, adding new insights into when Data Shapley may or may not succeed.
Many networking tasks now employ deep learning (DL) to solve complex prediction and system optimization problems. However, current design philosophy of DL-based algorithms entails intensive engineering overhead due to the manual design of deep neural networks (DNNs) for different networking tasks. Besides, DNNs tend to achieve poor generalization performance on unseen data distributions/environments. Motivated by the recent success of large language models (LLMs), for the first time, this work studies the LLM adaptation for networking to explore a more sustainable design philosophy. With the massive pre-trained knowledge and powerful inference ability, LLM can serve as the foundation model, and is expected to achieve "one model for all" with even better performance and stronger generalization for various tasks. In this paper, we present NetLLM, the first LLM adaptation framework that efficiently adapts LLMs to solve networking problems. NetLLM addresses many practical challenges in LLM adaptation, from how to process task-specific information with LLMs, to how to improve the efficiency of answer generation and acquiring domain knowledge for networking. Across three networking-related use cases - viewport prediction (VP), adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) and cluster job scheduling (CJS), we demonstrate the effectiveness of NetLLM in LLM adaptation for networking, and showcase that the adapted LLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.
Federated learning (FL) has been gaining attention for its ability to share knowledge while maintaining user data, protecting privacy, increasing learning efficiency, and reducing communication overhead. Decentralized FL (DFL) is a decentralized network architecture that eliminates the need for a central server in contrast to centralized FL (CFL). DFL enables direct communication between clients, resulting in significant savings in communication resources. In this paper, a comprehensive survey and profound perspective are provided for DFL. First, a review of the methodology, challenges, and variants of CFL is conducted, laying the background of DFL. Then, a systematic and detailed perspective on DFL is introduced, including iteration order, communication protocols, network topologies, paradigm proposals, and temporal variability. Next, based on the definition of DFL, several extended variants and categorizations are proposed with state-of-the-art (SOTA) technologies. Lastly, in addition to summarizing the current challenges in the DFL, some possible solutions and future research directions are also discussed.
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.
Federated Learning aims to learn machine learning models from multiple decentralized edge devices (e.g. mobiles) or servers without sacrificing local data privacy. Recent Natural Language Processing techniques rely on deep learning and large pre-trained language models. However, both big deep neural and language models are trained with huge amounts of data which often lies on the server side. Since text data is widely originated from end users, in this work, we look into recent NLP models and techniques which use federated learning as the learning framework. Our survey discusses major challenges in federated natural language processing, including the algorithm challenges, system challenges as well as the privacy issues. We also provide a critical review of the existing Federated NLP evaluation methods and tools. Finally, we highlight the current research gaps and future directions.
Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires quickly finding informative task-relevant experiences in both meta-training and adaptation. To address this challenge, we explicitly model an exploration policy learning problem for meta-RL, which is separated from exploitation policy learning, and introduce a novel empowerment-driven exploration objective, which aims to maximize information gain for task identification. We derive a corresponding intrinsic reward and develop a new off-policy meta-RL framework, which efficiently learns separate context-aware exploration and exploitation policies by sharing the knowledge of task inference. Experimental evaluation shows that our meta-RL method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on various sparse-reward MuJoCo locomotion tasks and more complex sparse-reward Meta-World tasks.
This paper describes a general framework for learning Higher-Order Network Embeddings (HONE) from graph data based on network motifs. The HONE framework is highly expressive and flexible with many interchangeable components. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of learning higher-order network representations. In all cases, HONE outperforms recent embedding methods that are unable to capture higher-order structures with a mean relative gain in AUC of $19\%$ (and up to $75\%$ gain) across a wide variety of networks and embedding methods.
State-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benefits a lot from multi-task learning (MTL), which learns multiple related tasks simultaneously to obtain shared or mutually related representations for different tasks. The most widely-used MTL CNN structure is based on an empirical or heuristic split on a specific layer (e.g., the last convolutional layer) to minimize different task-specific losses. However, this heuristic sharing/splitting strategy may be harmful to the final performance of one or multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN structure for MTL, which enables automatic feature fusing at every layer. Specifically, we first concatenate features from different tasks according to their channel dimension, and then formulate the feature fusing problem as discriminative dimensionality reduction. We show that this discriminative dimensionality reduction can be done by 1x1 Convolution, Batch Normalization, and Weight Decay in one CNN, which we refer to as Neural Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction (NDDR). We perform ablation analysis in details for different configurations in training the network. The experiments carried out on different network structures and different task sets demonstrate the promising performance and desirable generalizability of our proposed method.