Knowledge distillation (KD) can enable collaborative learning among distributed clients that have different model architectures and do not share their local data and model parameters with others. Each client updates its local model using the average model output/feature of all client models as the target, known as federated KD. However, existing federated KD methods often do not perform well when clients' local models are trained with heterogeneous local datasets. In this paper, we propose Federated knowledge distillation enabled by Adversarial Learning (FedAL) to address the data heterogeneity among clients. First, to alleviate the local model output divergence across clients caused by data heterogeneity, the server acts as a discriminator to guide clients' local model training to achieve consensus model outputs among clients through a min-max game between clients and the discriminator. Moreover, catastrophic forgetting may happen during the clients' local training and global knowledge transfer due to clients' heterogeneous local data. Towards this challenge, we design the less-forgetting regularization for both local training and global knowledge transfer to guarantee clients' ability to transfer/learn knowledge to/from others. Experimental results show that FedAL and its variants achieve higher accuracy than other federated KD baselines.
Frontier exploration and reinforcement learning have historically been used to solve the problem of enabling many mobile robots to autonomously and cooperatively explore complex surroundings. These methods need to keep an internal global map for navigation, but they do not take into consideration the high costs of communication and information sharing between robots. This study offers CQLite, a novel distributed Q-learning technique designed to minimize data communication overhead between robots while achieving rapid convergence and thorough coverage in multi-robot exploration. The proposed CQLite method uses ad hoc map merging, and selectively shares updated Q-values at recently identified frontiers to significantly reduce communication costs. The theoretical analysis of CQLite's convergence and efficiency, together with extensive numerical verification on simulated indoor maps utilizing several robots, demonstrates the method's novelty. With over 2x reductions in computation and communication alongside improved mapping performance, CQLite outperformed cutting-edge multi-robot exploration techniques like Rapidly Exploring Random Trees and Deep Reinforcement Learning. Related codes are open-sourced at \url{//github.com/herolab-uga/cqlite}.
DTMM is a library designed for efficient deployment and execution of machine learning models on weak IoT devices such as microcontroller units (MCUs). The motivation for designing DTMM comes from the emerging field of tiny machine learning (TinyML), which explores extending the reach of machine learning to many low-end IoT devices to achieve ubiquitous intelligence. Due to the weak capability of embedded devices, it is necessary to compress models by pruning enough weights before deploying. Although pruning has been studied extensively on many computing platforms, two key issues with pruning methods are exacerbated on MCUs: models need to be deeply compressed without significantly compromising accuracy, and they should perform efficiently after pruning. Current solutions only achieve one of these objectives, but not both. In this paper, we find that pruned models have great potential for efficient deployment and execution on MCUs. Therefore, we propose DTMM with pruning unit selection, pre-execution pruning optimizations, runtime acceleration, and post-execution low-cost storage to fill the gap for efficient deployment and execution of pruned models. It can be integrated into commercial ML frameworks for practical deployment, and a prototype system has been developed. Extensive experiments on various models show promising gains compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained traction for enhancing user long-term experiences in recommender systems by effectively exploring users' interests. However, modern recommender systems exhibit distinct user behavioral patterns among tens of millions of items, which increases the difficulty of exploration. For example, user behaviors with different activity levels require varying intensity of exploration, while previous studies often overlook this aspect and apply a uniform exploration strategy to all users, which ultimately hurts user experiences in the long run. To address these challenges, we propose User-Oriented Exploration Policy (UOEP), a novel approach facilitating fine-grained exploration among user groups. We first construct a distributional critic which allows policy optimization under varying quantile levels of cumulative reward feedbacks from users, representing user groups with varying activity levels. Guided by this critic, we devise a population of distinct actors aimed at effective and fine-grained exploration within its respective user group. To simultaneously enhance diversity and stability during the exploration process, we further introduce a population-level diversity regularization term and a supervision module. Experimental results on public recommendation datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms all other baselines in terms of long-term performance, validating its user-oriented exploration effectiveness. Meanwhile, further analyses reveal our approach's benefits of improved performance for low-activity users as well as increased fairness among users.
Knowledge distillation is the process of transferring knowledge from a more powerful large model (teacher) to a simpler counterpart (student). Numerous current approaches involve the student imitating the knowledge of the teacher directly. However, redundancy still exists in the learned representations through these prevalent methods, which tend to learn each spatial location's features indiscriminately. To derive a more compact representation (concept feature) from the teacher, inspired by human cognition, we suggest an innovative method, termed Generative Denoise Distillation (GDD), where stochastic noises are added to the concept feature of the student to embed them into the generated instance feature from a shallow network. Then, the generated instance feature is aligned with the knowledge of the instance from the teacher. We extensively experiment with object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation to demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of our method. Notably, GDD achieves new state-of-the-art performance in the tasks mentioned above. We have achieved substantial improvements in semantic segmentation by enhancing PspNet and DeepLabV3, both of which are based on ResNet-18, resulting in mIoU scores of 74.67 and 77.69, respectively, surpassing their previous scores of 69.85 and 73.20 on the Cityscapes dataset of 20 categories. The source code is available at //github.com/ZhgLiu/GDD.
Centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) is widely employed to stabilize partially observable multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) by utilizing a centralized value function during training. However, existing methods typically assume that agents make decisions based on their local observations independently, which may not lead to a correlated joint policy with sufficient coordination. Inspired by the concept of correlated equilibrium, we propose to introduce a \textit{strategy modification} to provide a mechanism for agents to correlate their policies. Specifically, we present a novel framework, AgentMixer, which constructs the joint fully observable policy as a non-linear combination of individual partially observable policies. To enable decentralized execution, one can derive individual policies by imitating the joint policy. Unfortunately, such imitation learning can lead to \textit{asymmetric learning failure} caused by the mismatch between joint policy and individual policy information. To mitigate this issue, we jointly train the joint policy and individual policies and introduce \textit{Individual-Global-Consistency} to guarantee mode consistency between the centralized and decentralized policies. We then theoretically prove that AgentMixer converges to an $\epsilon$-approximate Correlated Equilibrium. The strong experimental performance on three MARL benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.
Transformer architectures have facilitated the development of large-scale and general-purpose sequence models for prediction tasks in natural language processing and computer vision, e.g., GPT-3 and Swin Transformer. Although originally designed for prediction problems, it is natural to inquire about their suitability for sequential decision-making and reinforcement learning problems, which are typically beset by long-standing issues involving sample efficiency, credit assignment, and partial observability. In recent years, sequence models, especially the Transformer, have attracted increasing interest in the RL communities, spawning numerous approaches with notable effectiveness and generalizability. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of recent works aimed at solving sequential decision-making tasks with sequence models such as the Transformer, by discussing the connection between sequential decision-making and sequence modeling, and categorizing them based on the way they utilize the Transformer. Moreover, this paper puts forth various potential avenues for future research intending to improve the effectiveness of large sequence models for sequential decision-making, encompassing theoretical foundations, network architectures, algorithms, and efficient training systems. As this article has been accepted by the Frontiers of Computer Science, here is an early version, and the most up-to-date version can be found at //journal.hep.com.cn/fcs/EN/10.1007/s11704-023-2689-5
Deep learning has shown great potential for modeling the physical dynamics of complex particle systems such as fluids (in Lagrangian descriptions). Existing approaches, however, require the supervision of consecutive particle properties, including positions and velocities. In this paper, we consider a partially observable scenario known as fluid dynamics grounding, that is, inferring the state transitions and interactions within the fluid particle systems from sequential visual observations of the fluid surface. We propose a differentiable two-stage network named NeuroFluid. Our approach consists of (i) a particle-driven neural renderer, which involves fluid physical properties into the volume rendering function, and (ii) a particle transition model optimized to reduce the differences between the rendered and the observed images. NeuroFluid provides the first solution to unsupervised learning of particle-based fluid dynamics by training these two models jointly. It is shown to reasonably estimate the underlying physics of fluids with different initial shapes, viscosity, and densities. It is a potential alternative approach to understanding complex fluid mechanics, such as turbulence, that are difficult to model using traditional methods of mathematical physics.
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.
There recently has been a surge of interest in developing a new class of deep learning (DL) architectures that integrate an explicit time dimension as a fundamental building block of learning and representation mechanisms. In turn, many recent results show that topological descriptors of the observed data, encoding information on the shape of the dataset in a topological space at different scales, that is, persistent homology of the data, may contain important complementary information, improving both performance and robustness of DL. As convergence of these two emerging ideas, we propose to enhance DL architectures with the most salient time-conditioned topological information of the data and introduce the concept of zigzag persistence into time-aware graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Zigzag persistence provides a systematic and mathematically rigorous framework to track the most important topological features of the observed data that tend to manifest themselves over time. To integrate the extracted time-conditioned topological descriptors into DL, we develop a new topological summary, zigzag persistence image, and derive its theoretical stability guarantees. We validate the new GCNs with a time-aware zigzag topological layer (Z-GCNETs), in application to traffic forecasting and Ethereum blockchain price prediction. Our results indicate that Z-GCNET outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods on 4 time series datasets.
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining. Empirically, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin, and achieves state-of-the-art results on 18 tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.