Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training while preserving the privacy of raw data. A challenge in this framework is the fair and efficient valuation of data, which is crucial for incentivizing clients to contribute high-quality data in the FL task. In scenarios involving numerous data clients within FL, it is often the case that only a subset of clients and datasets are pertinent to a specific learning task, while others might have either a negative or negligible impact on the model training process. This paper introduces a novel privacy-preserving method for evaluating client contributions and selecting relevant datasets without a pre-specified training algorithm in an FL task. Our proposed approach FedBary, utilizes Wasserstein distance within the federated context, offering a new solution for data valuation in the FL framework. This method ensures transparent data valuation and efficient computation of the Wasserstein barycenter and reduces the dependence on validation datasets. Through extensive empirical experiments and theoretical analyses, we demonstrate the potential of this data valuation method as a promising avenue for FL research.
This paper studies how to recover parameters in diagonal Gaussian mixture models using tensors. High-order moments of the Gaussian mixture model are estimated from samples. They form incomplete symmetric tensors generated by hidden parameters in the model. We propose to use generating polynomials to compute incomplete symmetric tensor approximations. The obtained decomposition is utilized to recover parameters in the model. We prove that our recovered parameters are accurate when the estimated moments are accurate. Using high-order moments enables our algorithm to learn Gaussian mixtures with more components. For a given model dimension and order, we provide an upper bound of the number of components in the Gaussian mixture model that our algorithm can compute.
Factor importance measures the impact of each feature on output prediction accuracy. Many existing works focus on the model-based importance, but an important feature in one learning algorithm may hold little significance in another model. Hence, a factor importance measure ought to characterize the feature's predictive potential without relying on a specific prediction algorithm. Such algorithm-agnostic importance is termed as intrinsic importance in Williamson et al. (2023), but their estimator again requires model fitting. To bypass the modeling step, we present the equivalence between predictiveness potential and total Sobol' indices from global sensitivity analysis, and introduce a novel consistent estimator that can be directly estimated from noisy data. Integrating with forward selection and backward elimination gives rise to FIRST, Factor Importance Ranking and Selection using Total (Sobol') indices. Extensive simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of FIRST on regression and binary classification problems, and a clear advantage over the state-of-the-art methods.
This work evaluated several cutting-edge large-scale foundation models based on self-supervision or weak supervision, including SeamlessM4T, SeamlessM4T v2, and Whisper-large-v3, on three code-switched corpora. We found that self-supervised models can achieve performances close to the supervised model, indicating the effectiveness of multilingual self-supervised pre-training. We also observed that these models still have room for improvement as they kept making similar mistakes and had unsatisfactory performances on modeling intra-sentential code-switching. In addition, the validity of several variants of Whisper was explored, and we concluded that they remained effective in a code-switching scenario, and similar techniques for self-supervised models are worth studying to boost the performance of code-switched tasks.
Diffusion-based generative models have achieved remarkable success in various domains. It trains a shared model on denoising tasks that encompass different noise levels simultaneously, representing a form of multi-task learning (MTL). However, analyzing and improving diffusion models from an MTL perspective remains under-explored. In particular, MTL can sometimes lead to the well-known phenomenon of negative transfer, which results in the performance degradation of certain tasks due to conflicts between tasks. In this paper, we first aim to analyze diffusion training from an MTL standpoint, presenting two key observations: (O1) the task affinity between denoising tasks diminishes as the gap between noise levels widens, and (O2) negative transfer can arise even in diffusion training. Building upon these observations, we aim to enhance diffusion training by mitigating negative transfer. To achieve this, we propose leveraging existing MTL methods, but the presence of a huge number of denoising tasks makes this computationally expensive to calculate the necessary per-task loss or gradient. To address this challenge, we propose clustering the denoising tasks into small task clusters and applying MTL methods to them. Specifically, based on (O2), we employ interval clustering to enforce temporal proximity among denoising tasks within clusters. We show that interval clustering can be solved using dynamic programming, utilizing signal-to-noise ratio, timestep, and task affinity for clustering objectives. Through this, our approach addresses the issue of negative transfer in diffusion models by allowing for efficient computation of MTL methods. We validate the efficacy of proposed clustering and its integration with MTL methods through various experiments, demonstrating 1) improved generation quality and 2) faster training convergence of diffusion models.
Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have been extended for text-guided video editing, yielding impressive zero-shot video editing performance. Nonetheless, the generated videos usually show spatial irregularities and temporal inconsistencies as the temporal characteristics of videos have not been faithfully modeled. In this paper, we propose an elegant yet effective Temporal-Consistent Video Editing (TCVE) method to mitigate the temporal inconsistency challenge for robust text-guided video editing. In addition to the utilization of a pretrained T2I 2D Unet for spatial content manipulation, we establish a dedicated temporal Unet architecture to faithfully capture the temporal coherence of the input video sequences. Furthermore, to establish coherence and interrelation between the spatial-focused and temporal-focused components, a cohesive spatial-temporal modeling unit is formulated. This unit effectively interconnects the temporal Unet with the pretrained 2D Unet, thereby enhancing the temporal consistency of the generated videos while preserving the capacity for video content manipulation. Quantitative experimental results and visualization results demonstrate that TCVE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both video temporal consistency and video editing capability, surpassing existing benchmarks in the field.
Well-designed prompts can guide text-to-image models to generate amazing images. However, the performant prompts are often model-specific and misaligned with user input. Instead of laborious human engineering, we propose prompt adaptation, a general framework that automatically adapts original user input to model-preferred prompts. Specifically, we first perform supervised fine-tuning with a pretrained language model on a small collection of manually engineered prompts. Then we use reinforcement learning to explore better prompts. We define a reward function that encourages the policy to generate more aesthetically pleasing images while preserving the original user intentions. Experimental results on Stable Diffusion show that our method outperforms manual prompt engineering in terms of both automatic metrics and human preference ratings. Moreover, reinforcement learning further boosts performance, especially on out-of-domain prompts. The pretrained checkpoints are available at //aka.ms/promptist. The demo can be found at //aka.ms/promptist-demo.
Zero-shot Natural Language-Video Localization (NLVL) methods have exhibited promising results in training NLVL models exclusively with raw video data by dynamically generating video segments and pseudo-query annotations. However, existing pseudo-queries often lack grounding in the source video, resulting in unstructured and disjointed content. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of commonsense reasoning in zero-shot NLVL. Specifically, we present CORONET, a zero-shot NLVL framework that leverages commonsense to bridge the gap between videos and generated pseudo-queries via a commonsense enhancement module. CORONET employs Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) to encode commonsense information extracted from a knowledge graph, conditioned on the video, and cross-attention mechanisms to enhance the encoded video and pseudo-query representations prior to localization. Through empirical evaluations on two benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that CORONET surpasses both zero-shot and weakly supervised baselines, achieving improvements up to 32.13% across various recall thresholds and up to 6.33% in mIoU. These results underscore the significance of leveraging commonsense reasoning for zero-shot NLVL.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
Automatic KB completion for commonsense knowledge graphs (e.g., ATOMIC and ConceptNet) poses unique challenges compared to the much studied conventional knowledge bases (e.g., Freebase). Commonsense knowledge graphs use free-form text to represent nodes, resulting in orders of magnitude more nodes compared to conventional KBs (18x more nodes in ATOMIC compared to Freebase (FB15K-237)). Importantly, this implies significantly sparser graph structures - a major challenge for existing KB completion methods that assume densely connected graphs over a relatively smaller set of nodes. In this paper, we present novel KB completion models that can address these challenges by exploiting the structural and semantic context of nodes. Specifically, we investigate two key ideas: (1) learning from local graph structure, using graph convolutional networks and automatic graph densification and (2) transfer learning from pre-trained language models to knowledge graphs for enhanced contextual representation of knowledge. We describe our method to incorporate information from both these sources in a joint model and provide the first empirical results for KB completion on ATOMIC and evaluation with ranking metrics on ConceptNet. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of language model representations in boosting link prediction performance and the advantages of learning from local graph structure (+1.5 points in MRR for ConceptNet) when training on subgraphs for computational efficiency. Further analysis on model predictions shines light on the types of commonsense knowledge that language models capture well.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.