Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach that maintains data privacy by training on decentralized data sources. Similar to centralized machine learning, FL is also susceptible to backdoor attacks. Most backdoor attacks in FL assume a predefined target class and require control over a large number of clients or knowledge of benign clients' information. Furthermore, they are not imperceptible and are easily detected by human inspection due to clear artifacts left on the poison data. To overcome these challenges, we propose Venomancer, an effective backdoor attack that is imperceptible and allows target-on-demand. Specifically, imperceptibility is achieved by using a visual loss function to make the poison data visually indistinguishable from the original data. Target-on-demand property allows the attacker to choose arbitrary target classes via conditional adversarial training. Additionally, experiments showed that the method is robust against state-of-the-art defenses such as Norm Clipping, Weak DP, Krum, and Multi-Krum. The source code is available at //anonymous.4open.science/r/Venomancer-3426.
Multimodal machine learning is a vibrant multi-disciplinary research field that aims to design computer agents with intelligent capabilities such as understanding, reasoning, and learning through integrating multiple communicative modalities, including linguistic, acoustic, visual, tactile, and physiological messages. With the recent interest in video understanding, embodied autonomous agents, text-to-image generation, and multisensor fusion in application domains such as healthcare and robotics, multimodal machine learning has brought unique computational and theoretical challenges to the machine learning community given the heterogeneity of data sources and the interconnections often found between modalities. However, the breadth of progress in multimodal research has made it difficult to identify the common themes and open questions in the field. By synthesizing a broad range of application domains and theoretical frameworks from both historical and recent perspectives, this paper is designed to provide an overview of the computational and theoretical foundations of multimodal machine learning. We start by defining two key principles of modality heterogeneity and interconnections that have driven subsequent innovations, and propose a taxonomy of 6 core technical challenges: representation, alignment, reasoning, generation, transference, and quantification covering historical and recent trends. Recent technical achievements will be presented through the lens of this taxonomy, allowing researchers to understand the similarities and differences across new approaches. We end by motivating several open problems for future research as identified by our taxonomy.
Causal Machine Learning (CausalML) is an umbrella term for machine learning methods that formalize the data-generation process as a structural causal model (SCM). This allows one to reason about the effects of changes to this process (i.e., interventions) and what would have happened in hindsight (i.e., counterfactuals). We categorize work in \causalml into five groups according to the problems they tackle: (1) causal supervised learning, (2) causal generative modeling, (3) causal explanations, (4) causal fairness, (5) causal reinforcement learning. For each category, we systematically compare its methods and point out open problems. Further, we review modality-specific applications in computer vision, natural language processing, and graph representation learning. Finally, we provide an overview of causal benchmarks and a critical discussion of the state of this nascent field, including recommendations for future work.
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.
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.
Meta-learning has gained wide popularity as a training framework that is more data-efficient than traditional machine learning methods. However, its generalization ability in complex task distributions, such as multimodal tasks, has not been thoroughly studied. Recently, some studies on multimodality-based meta-learning have emerged. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the multimodality-based meta-learning landscape in terms of the methodologies and applications. We first formalize the definition of meta-learning and multimodality, along with the research challenges in this growing field, such as how to enrich the input in few-shot or zero-shot scenarios and how to generalize the models to new tasks. We then propose a new taxonomy to systematically discuss typical meta-learning algorithms combined with multimodal tasks. We investigate the contributions of related papers and summarize them by our taxonomy. Finally, we propose potential research directions for this promising field.
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.
The notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with standard probability and probabilistic predictions. Yet, due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications and related issues such as safety requirements, new problems and challenges have recently been identified by machine learning scholars, and these problems may call for new methodological developments. In particular, this includes the importance of distinguishing between (at least) two different types of uncertainty, often refereed to as aleatoric and epistemic. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the topic of uncertainty in machine learning as well as an overview of hitherto attempts at handling uncertainty in general and formalizing this distinction in particular.
Existing few-shot learning (FSL) methods assume that there exist sufficient training samples from source classes for knowledge transfer to target classes with few training samples. However, this assumption is often invalid, especially when it comes to fine-grained recognition. In this work, we define a new FSL setting termed few-shot fewshot learning (FSFSL), under which both the source and target classes have limited training samples. To overcome the source class data scarcity problem, a natural option is to crawl images from the web with class names as search keywords. However, the crawled images are inevitably corrupted by large amount of noise (irrelevant images) and thus may harm the performance. To address this problem, we propose a graph convolutional network (GCN)-based label denoising (LDN) method to remove the irrelevant images. Further, with the cleaned web images as well as the original clean training images, we propose a GCN-based FSL method. For both the LDN and FSL tasks, a novel adaptive aggregation GCN (AdarGCN) model is proposed, which differs from existing GCN models in that adaptive aggregation is performed based on a multi-head multi-level aggregation module. With AdarGCN, how much and how far information carried by each graph node is propagated in the graph structure can be determined automatically, therefore alleviating the effects of both noisy and outlying training samples. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of our AdarGCN under both the new FSFSL and the conventional FSL settings.
Graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) is an important learning problem where the goal is to assign labels to initially unlabeled nodes in a graph. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently been shown to be effective for graph-based SSL problems. GCNs inherently assume existence of pairwise relationships in the graph-structured data. However, in many real-world problems, relationships go beyond pairwise connections and hence are more complex. Hypergraphs provide a natural modeling tool to capture such complex relationships. In this work, we explore the use of GCNs for hypergraph-based SSL. In particular, we propose HyperGCN, an SSL method which uses a layer-wise propagation rule for convolutional neural networks operating directly on hypergraphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first principled adaptation of GCNs to hypergraphs. HyperGCN is able to encode both the hypergraph structure and hypernode features in an effective manner. Through detailed experimentation, we demonstrate HyperGCN's effectiveness at hypergraph-based SSL.