We introduce a fairness-aware dataset for job recommendations in advertising, designed to foster research in algorithmic fairness within real-world scenarios. It was collected and prepared to comply with privacy standards and business confidentiality. An additional challenge is the lack of access to protected user attributes such as gender, for which we propose a solution to obtain a proxy estimate. Despite being anonymized and including a proxy for a sensitive attribute, our dataset preserves predictive power and maintains a realistic and challenging benchmark. This dataset addresses a significant gap in the availability of fairness-focused resources for high-impact domains like advertising -- the actual impact being having access or not to precious employment opportunities, where balancing fairness and utility is a common industrial challenge. We also explore various stages in the advertising process where unfairness can occur and introduce a method to compute a fair utility metric for the job recommendations in online systems case from a biased dataset. Experimental evaluations of bias mitigation techniques on the released dataset demonstrate potential improvements in fairness and the associated trade-offs with utility. The dataset is hosted at //huggingface.co/datasets/criteo/FairJob. Source code for the experiments is hosted at //github.com/criteo-research/FairJob-dataset/.
Recent research in federated large language models (LLMs) has primarily focused on enabling clients to fine-tune their locally deployed homogeneous LLMs collaboratively or on transferring knowledge from server-based LLMs to small language models (SLMs) at downstream clients. However, a significant gap remains in the simultaneous mutual enhancement of both the server's LLM and clients' SLMs. To bridge this gap, we propose FedMKT, a parameter-efficient federated mutual knowledge transfer framework for large and small language models. This framework is designed to adaptively transfer knowledge from the server's LLM to clients' SLMs while concurrently enriching the LLM with clients' unique domain insights. We facilitate token alignment using minimum edit distance (MinED) and then selective mutual knowledge transfer between client-side SLMs and a server-side LLM, aiming to collectively enhance their performance. Through extensive experiments across three distinct scenarios, we evaluate the effectiveness of FedMKT using various public LLMs and SLMs on a range of NLP text generation tasks. Empirical results demonstrate that FedMKT simultaneously boosts the performance of both LLMs and SLMs.
View materialization, index selection, and plan caching are well-known techniques for optimization of query processing in database systems. The essence of these tasks is to select and save a subset of the most useful candidates (views/indexes/plans) for reuse within given space/time budget constraints. In this paper, based on the View Selection Problem, we propose a unified view on these problems. We identify the root causes of the complexity of these selection problems and provide a detailed analysis of techniques to cope with them. Our survey provides a modern classification of selection algorithms known in the literature, including the latest ones based on Machine Learning. We provide a ground for the reuse of the selection techniques between different optimization scenarios and highlight challenges and promising directions in the field.
Model inference systems are essential for implementing end-to-end data analytics pipelines that deliver the benefits of machine learning models to users. Existing cloud-based model inference systems are costly, not easy to scale, and must be trusted in handling the models and user request data. Serverless computing presents a new opportunity, as it provides elasticity and fine-grained pricing. Our goal is to design a serverless model inference system that protects models and user request data from untrusted cloud providers. It offers high performance and low cost, while requiring no intrusive changes to the current serverless platforms. To realize our goal, we leverage trusted hardware. We identify and address three challenges in using trusted hardware for serverless model inference. These challenges arise from the high-level abstraction of serverless computing, the performance overhead of trusted hardware, and the characteristics of model inference workloads. We present SeSeMI, a secure, efficient, and cost-effective serverless model inference system. It adds three novel features non-intrusively to the existing serverless infrastructure and nothing else.The first feature is a key service that establishes secure channels between the user and the serverless instances, which also provides access control to models and users' data. The second is an enclave runtime that allows one enclave to process multiple concurrent requests. The final feature is a model packer that allows multiple models to be executed by one serverless instance. We build SeSeMI on top of Apache OpenWhisk, and conduct extensive experiments with three popular machine learning models. The results show that SeSeMI achieves low latency and low cost at scale for realistic workloads.
Vector quantization(VQ) is a hardware-friendly DNN compression method that can reduce the storage cost and weight-loading datawidth of hardware accelerators. However, conventional VQ techniques lead to significant accuracy loss because the important weights are not well preserved. To tackle this problem, a novel approach called MVQ is proposed, which aims at better approximating important weights with a limited number of codewords. At the algorithm level, our approach removes the less important weights through N:M pruning and then minimizes the vector clustering error between the remaining weights and codewords by the masked k-means algorithm. Only distances between the unpruned weights and the codewords are computed, which are then used to update the codewords. At the architecture level, our accelerator implements vector quantization on an EWS (Enhanced weight stationary) CNN accelerator and proposes a sparse systolic array design to maximize the benefits brought by masked vector quantization.\\ Our algorithm is validated on various models for image classification, object detection, and segmentation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that MVQ not only outperforms conventional vector quantization methods at comparable compression ratios but also reduces FLOPs. Under ASIC evaluation, our MVQ accelerator boosts energy efficiency by 2.3$\times$ and reduces the size of the systolic array by 55\% when compared with the base EWS accelerator. Compared to the previous sparse accelerators, MVQ achieves 1.73$\times$ higher energy efficiency.
Fog computing brings about a transformative shift in data management, presenting unprecedented opportunities for enhanced performance and reduced latency. However, one of the key aspects of fog computing revolves around ensuring efficient power and reliability management. To address this challenge, we have introduced a novel model that proposes a non-cooperative game theory-based strategy to strike a balance between power consumption and reliability in decision-making processes. Our proposed model capitalizes on the Cold Primary/Backup strategy (CPB) to guarantee reliability target by re-executing tasks to different nodes when a fault occurs, while also leveraging Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) to reduce power consumption during task execution and maximizing overall efficiency. Non-cooperative game theory plays a pivotal role in our model, as it facilitates the development of strategies and solutions that uphold reliability while reducing power consumption. By treating the trade-off between power and reliability as a non-cooperative game, our proposed method yields significant energy savings, with up to a 35% reduction in energy consumption, 41% decrease in wait time, and 31% shorter completion time compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Our findings underscore the value of game theory in optimizing power and reliability within fog computing environments, demonstrating its potential for driving substantial improvements
Recently, there has been growing interest in the capability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to process high-resolution images. A common approach currently involves dynamically cropping the original high-resolution image into smaller sub-images, which are then fed into a vision encoder that was pre-trained on lower-resolution images. However, this cropping approach often truncates objects and connected areas in the original image, causing semantic breaks. To address this limitation, we introduce HyViLM, designed to process images of any resolution while retaining the overall context during encoding. Specifically, we: (i) Design a new visual encoder called Hybrid Encoder that not only encodes individual sub-images but also interacts with detailed global visual features, significantly improving the model's ability to encode high-resolution images. (ii) Propose an optimal feature fusion strategy for the dynamic cropping approach, effectively leveraging information from different layers of the vision encoder. Compared with the state-of-the-art MLLMs under the same setting, our HyViLM outperforms existing MLLMs in nine out of ten tasks. Specifically, HyViLM achieves a 9.6% improvement in performance on the TextVQA task and a 6.9% enhancement on the DocVQA task.
Existing multi-modal learning methods on fundus and OCT images mostly require both modalities to be available and strictly paired for training and testing, which appears less practical in clinical scenarios. To expand the scope of clinical applications, we formulate a novel setting, "OCT-enhanced disease recognition from fundus images", that allows for the use of unpaired multi-modal data during the training phase and relies on the widespread fundus photographs for testing. To benchmark this setting, we present the first large multi-modal multi-class dataset for eye disease diagnosis, MultiEYE, and propose an OCT-assisted Conceptual Distillation Approach (OCT-CoDA), which employs semantically rich concepts to extract disease-related knowledge from OCT images and leverage them into the fundus model. Specifically, we regard the image-concept relation as a link to distill useful knowledge from the OCT teacher model to the fundus student model, which considerably improves the diagnostic performance based on fundus images and formulates the cross-modal knowledge transfer into an explainable process. Through extensive experiments on the multi-disease classification task, our proposed OCT-CoDA demonstrates remarkable results and interpretability, showing great potential for clinical application. Our dataset and code are available at //github.com/xmed-lab/MultiEYE.
Current collaborative perception methods often rely on fully annotated datasets, which can be expensive to obtain in practical situations. To reduce annotation costs, some works adopt sparsely supervised learning techniques and generate pseudo labels for the missing instances. However, these methods fail to achieve an optimal confidence threshold that harmonizes the quality and quantity of pseudo labels. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end Collaborative perception Dual Teacher-Student framework (CoDTS), which employs adaptive complementary learning to produce both high-quality and high-quantity pseudo labels. Specifically, the Main Foreground Mining (MFM) module generates high-quality pseudo labels based on the prediction of the static teacher. Subsequently, the Supplement Foreground Mining (SFM) module ensures a balance between the quality and quantity of pseudo labels by adaptively identifying missing instances based on the prediction of the dynamic teacher. Additionally, the Neighbor Anchor Sampling (NAS) module is incorporated to enhance the representation of pseudo labels. To promote the adaptive complementary learning, we implement a staged training strategy that trains the student and dynamic teacher in a mutually beneficial manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the CoDTS effectively ensures an optimal balance of pseudo labels in both quality and quantity, establishing a new state-of-the-art in sparsely supervised collaborative perception.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Sentiment analysis is a widely studied NLP task where the goal is to determine opinions, emotions, and evaluations of users towards a product, an entity or a service that they are reviewing. One of the biggest challenges for sentiment analysis is that it is highly language dependent. Word embeddings, sentiment lexicons, and even annotated data are language specific. Further, optimizing models for each language is very time consuming and labor intensive especially for recurrent neural network models. From a resource perspective, it is very challenging to collect data for different languages. In this paper, we look for an answer to the following research question: can a sentiment analysis model trained on a language be reused for sentiment analysis in other languages, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Dutch, where the data is more limited? Our goal is to build a single model in the language with the largest dataset available for the task, and reuse it for languages that have limited resources. For this purpose, we train a sentiment analysis model using recurrent neural networks with reviews in English. We then translate reviews in other languages and reuse this model to evaluate the sentiments. Experimental results show that our robust approach of single model trained on English reviews statistically significantly outperforms the baselines in several different languages.