Privacy-preserving computational geometry is the research area on the intersection of the domains of secure multi-party computation (SMC) and computational geometry. As an important field, the privacy-preserving geometric intersection (PGI) problem is when each of the multiple parties has a private geometric graph and seeks to determine whether their graphs intersect or not without revealing their private information. In this study, through representing Alice's (Bob's) private geometric graph G_A (G_B) as the set of numbered grids S_A (S_B), an efficient privacy-preserving quantum two-party geometric intersection (PQGI) protocol is proposed. In the protocol, the oracle operation O_A (O_B) is firstly utilized to encode the private elements of S_A=(a_0, a_1, ..., a_(M-1)) (S_B=(b_0, b_1, ..., b_(N-1))) into the quantum states, and then the oracle operation O_f is applied to obtain a new quantum state which includes the XOR results between each element of S_A and S_B. Finally, the quantum counting is introduced to get the amount (t) of the states |a_i+b_j> equaling to |0>, and the intersection result can be obtained by judging t>0 or not. Compared with classical PGI protocols, our proposed protocol not only has higher security, but also holds lower communication complexity.
Semantic communication (SC) aims to communicate reliably with minimal data transfer while simultaneously providing seamless connectivity to heterogeneous services and users. In this paper, a novel emergent SC (ESC) system framework is proposed and is composed of a signaling game for emergent language design and a neuro-symbolic (NeSy) artificial intelligence (AI) approach for causal reasoning. In order to design the language, the signaling game is solved using an alternating maximization between the communicating node's utilities. The emergent language helps create a context-aware transmit vocabulary (minimal semantic representation) and aids the reasoning process (enabling generalization to unseen scenarios) by splitting complex messages into simpler reasoning tasks for the receiver. The causal description at the transmitter is then modeled (a neural component) as a posterior distribution of the relevant attributes present in the data. Using the reconstructed causal state, the receiver evaluates a set of logical formulas (symbolic part) to execute its task. The nodes NeSy reasoning components are implemented by the recently proposed AI tool called Generative Flow Networks, and they are optimized for higher semantic reliability. The ESC system is designed to enhance the novel metrics of semantic information, reliability, distortion and similarity that are designed using rigorous algebraic properties from category theory thereby generalizing the metrics beyond Shannon's notion of uncertainty. Simulation results validate the ability of ESC to communicate efficiently (with reduced bits) and achieve better semantic reliability than conventional wireless and state-of-the-art systems that do not exploit causal reasoning capabilities.
The GraphBLAS community has demonstrated the power of linear algebra-leveraged graph algorithms, such as matrix-vector products for breadth-first search (BFS) traversals. This paper investigates the algebraic conditions needed for such computations when working with directed hypergraphs, represented by incidence arrays with entries from an arbitrary value set with binary addition and multiplication operations. Our results show the one-step BFS traversal is equivalent to requiring specific algebraic properties of those operations. Assuming identity elements 0, 1 for operations, we show that the two operations must be zero-sum-free, zero-divisor-free, and 0 must be an annihilator under multiplication. Additionally, associativity and commutativity are shown to be necessary and sufficient for independence of the one-step BFS computation from several arbitrary conventions. These results aid in application and algorithm development by determining the efficacy of a value set in computations.
Modern learning-based visual feature extraction networks perform well in intra-domain localization, however, their performance significantly declines when image pairs are captured across long-term visual domain variations, such as different seasonal and daytime variations. In this paper, our first contribution is a benchmark to investigate the performance impact of long-term variations on visual localization. We conduct a thorough analysis of the performance of current state-of-the-art feature extraction networks under various domain changes and find a significant performance gap between intra- and cross-domain localization. We investigate different methods to close this gap by improving the supervision of modern feature extractor networks. We propose a novel data-centric method, Implicit Cross-Domain Correspondences (iCDC). iCDC represents the same environment with multiple Neural Radiance Fields, each fitting the scene under individual visual domains. It utilizes the underlying 3D representations to generate accurate correspondences across different long-term visual conditions. Our proposed method enhances cross-domain localization performance, significantly reducing the performance gap. When evaluated on popular long-term localization benchmarks, our trained networks consistently outperform existing methods. This work serves as a substantial stride toward more robust visual localization pipelines for long-term deployments, and opens up research avenues in the development of long-term invariant descriptors.
We propose a novel interpretable deep neural network for text classification, called ProtoryNet, based on a new concept of prototype trajectories. Motivated by the prototype theory in modern linguistics, ProtoryNet makes a prediction by finding the most similar prototype for each sentence in a text sequence and feeding an RNN backbone with the proximity of each sentence to the corresponding active prototype. The RNN backbone then captures the temporal pattern of the prototypes, which we refer to as prototype trajectories. Prototype trajectories enable intuitive and fine-grained interpretation of the reasoning process of the RNN model, in resemblance to how humans analyze texts. We also design a prototype pruning procedure to reduce the total number of prototypes used by the model for better interpretability. Experiments on multiple public data sets show that ProtoryNet is more accurate than the baseline prototype-based deep neural net and reduces the performance gap compared to state-of-the-art black-box models. In addition, after prototype pruning, the resulting ProtoryNet models only need less than or around 20 prototypes for all datasets, which significantly benefits interpretability. Furthermore, we report a survey result indicating that human users find ProtoryNet more intuitive and easier to understand than other prototype-based methods.
Self-supervised sentence representation learning is the task of constructing an embedding space for sentences without relying on human annotation efforts. One straightforward approach is to finetune a pretrained language model (PLM) with a representation learning method such as contrastive learning. While this approach achieves impressive performance on larger PLMs, the performance rapidly degrades as the number of parameters decreases. In this paper, we propose a framework called Self-supervised Cross-View Training (SCT) to narrow the performance gap between large and small PLMs. To evaluate the effectiveness of SCT, we compare it to 5 baseline and state-of-the-art competitors on seven Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks using 5 PLMs with the number of parameters ranging from 4M to 340M. The experimental results show that STC outperforms the competitors for PLMs with less than 100M parameters in 18 of 21 cases.
In the context of the long-tail scenario, models exhibit a strong demand for high-quality data. Data-centric approaches aim to enhance both the quantity and quality of data to improve model performance. Among these approaches, information augmentation has been progressively introduced as a crucial category. It achieves a balance in model performance by augmenting the richness and quantity of samples in the tail classes. However, there is currently a lack of research into the underlying mechanisms explaining the effectiveness of information augmentation methods. Consequently, the utilization of information augmentation in long-tail recognition tasks relies heavily on empirical and intricate fine-tuning. This work makes two primary contributions. Firstly, we approach the problem from the perspectives of feature diversity and distribution shift, introducing the concept of Feature Diversity Gain (FDG) to elucidate why information augmentation is effective. We find that the performance of information augmentation can be explained by FDG, and its performance peaks when FDG achieves an appropriate balance. Experimental results demonstrate that by using FDG to select augmented data, we can further enhance model performance without the need for any modifications to the model's architecture. Thus, data-centric approaches hold significant potential in the field of long-tail recognition, beyond the development of new model structures. Furthermore, we systematically introduce the core components and fundamental tasks of a data-centric long-tail learning framework for the first time. These core components guide the implementation and deployment of the system, while the corresponding fundamental tasks refine and expand the research area.
Federated optimization studies the problem of collaborative function optimization among multiple clients (e.g. mobile devices or organizations) under the coordination of a central server. Since the data is collected separately by each client and always remains decentralized, federated optimization preserves data privacy and allows for large-scale computing, which makes it a promising decentralized machine learning paradigm. Though it is often deployed for tasks that are online in nature, e.g., next-word prediction on keyboard apps, most works formulate it as an offline problem. The few exceptions that consider federated bandit optimization are limited to very simplistic function classes, e.g., linear, generalized linear, or non-parametric function class with bounded RKHS norm, which severely hinders its practical usage. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, named Fed-GO-UCB, for federated bandit optimization with generic non-linear objective function. Under some mild conditions, we rigorously prove that Fed-GO-UCB is able to achieve sub-linear rate for both cumulative regret and communication cost. At the heart of our theoretical analysis are distributed regression oracle and individual confidence set construction, which can be of independent interests. Empirical evaluations also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
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.
In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of ``labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
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.