Concerned with user data privacy, this paper presents a new federated learning (FL) method that trains machine learning models on edge devices without accessing sensitive data. Traditional FL methods, although privacy-protective, fail to manage model heterogeneity and incur high communication costs due to their reliance on aggregation methods. To address this limitation, we propose a resource-aware FL method that aggregates local knowledge from edge models and distills it into robust global knowledge through knowledge distillation. This method allows efficient multi-model knowledge fusion and the deployment of resource-aware models while preserving model heterogeneity. Our method improves communication cost and performance in heterogeneous data and models compared to existing FL algorithms. Notably, it reduces the communication cost of ResNet-32 by up to 50\% and VGG-11 by up to 10$\times$ while delivering superior performance.
This paper provides a comprehensive error analysis of learning with vector-valued random features (RF). The theory is developed for RF ridge regression in a fully general infinite-dimensional input-output setting, but nonetheless applies to and improves existing finite-dimensional analyses. In contrast to comparable work in the literature, the approach proposed here relies on a direct analysis of the underlying risk functional and completely avoids the explicit RF ridge regression solution formula in terms of random matrices. This removes the need for concentration results in random matrix theory or their generalizations to random operators. The main results established in this paper include strong consistency of vector-valued RF estimators under model misspecification and minimax optimal convergence rates in the well-specified setting. The parameter complexity (number of random features) and sample complexity (number of labeled data) required to achieve such rates are comparable with Monte Carlo intuition and free from logarithmic factors.
We address the problem of evaluating the quality of self-supervised learning (SSL) models without access to supervised labels, while being agnostic to the architecture, learning algorithm or data manipulation used during training. We argue that representations can be evaluated through the lens of expressiveness and learnability. We propose to use the Intrinsic Dimension (ID) to assess expressiveness and introduce Cluster Learnability (CL) to assess learnability. CL is measured in terms of the performance of a KNN classifier trained to predict labels obtained by clustering the representations with K-means. We thus combine CL and ID into a single predictor -- CLID. Through a large-scale empirical study with a diverse family of SSL algorithms, we find that CLID better correlates with in-distribution model performance than other competing recent evaluation schemes. We also benchmark CLID on out-of-domain generalization, where CLID serves as a predictor of the transfer performance of SSL models on several visual classification tasks, yielding improvements with respect to the competing baselines.
Compositional generalisation (CG), in NLP and in machine learning more generally, has been assessed mostly using artificial datasets. It is important to develop benchmarks to assess CG also in real-world natural language tasks in order to understand the abilities and limitations of systems deployed in the wild. To this end, our GenBench Collaborative Benchmarking Task submission utilises the distribution-based compositionality assessment (DBCA) framework to split the Europarl translation corpus into a training and a test set in such a way that the test set requires compositional generalisation capacity. Specifically, the training and test sets have divergent distributions of dependency relations, testing NMT systems' capability of translating dependencies that they have not been trained on. This is a fully-automated procedure to create natural language compositionality benchmarks, making it simple and inexpensive to apply it further to other datasets and languages. The code and data for the experiments is available at //github.com/aalto-speech/dbca.
Despite the significant interest and progress in reinforcement learning (RL) problems with adversarial corruption, current works are either confined to the linear setting or lead to an undesired $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T}\zeta)$ regret bound, where $T$ is the number of rounds and $\zeta$ is the total amount of corruption. In this paper, we consider the contextual bandit with general function approximation and propose a computationally efficient algorithm to achieve a regret of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T}+\zeta)$. The proposed algorithm relies on the recently developed uncertainty-weighted least-squares regression from linear contextual bandit and a new weighted estimator of uncertainty for the general function class. In contrast to the existing analysis that heavily relies on the linear structure, we develop a novel technique to control the sum of weighted uncertainty, thus establishing the final regret bounds. We then generalize our algorithm to the episodic MDP setting and first achieve an additive dependence on the corruption level $\zeta$ in the scenario of general function approximation. Notably, our algorithms achieve regret bounds either nearly match the performance lower bound or improve the existing methods for all the corruption levels and in both known and unknown $\zeta$ cases.
Although deep learning-based segmentation models have achieved impressive performance on public benchmarks, generalizing well to unseen environments remains a major challenge. To improve the model's generalization ability to the new domain during evaluation, the test-time training (TTT) is a challenging paradigm that adapts the source-pretrained model in an online fashion. Early efforts on TTT mainly focus on the image classification task. Directly extending these methods to semantic segmentation easily experiences unstable adaption due to segmentation's inherent characteristics, such as extreme class imbalance and complex decision spaces. To stabilize the adaptation process, we introduce contrastive loss (CL), known for its capability to learn robust and generalized representations. Nevertheless, the traditional CL operates in the representation space and cannot directly enhance predictions. In this paper, we resolve this limitation by adapting the CL to the output space, employing a high temperature, and simplifying the formulation, resulting in a straightforward yet effective loss function called Output Contrastive Loss (OCL). Our comprehensive experiments validate the efficacy of our approach across diverse evaluation scenarios. Notably, our method excels even when applied to models initially pre-trained using domain adaptation methods on test domain data, showcasing its resilience and adaptability.\footnote{Code and more information could be found at~ \url{//github.com/dazhangyu123/OCL}}
The Internet of Things (IoT) has facilitated many applications utilizing edge-based machine learning (ML) methods to analyze locally collected data. Unfortunately, popular ML algorithms often require intensive computations beyond the capabilities of today's IoT devices. Brain-inspired hyperdimensional computing (HDC) has been introduced to address this issue. However, existing HDCs use static encoders, requiring extremely high dimensionality and hundreds of training iterations to achieve reasonable accuracy. This results in a huge efficiency loss, severely impeding the application of HDCs in IoT systems. We observed that a main cause is that the encoding module of existing HDCs lacks the capability to utilize and adapt to information learned during training. In contrast, neurons in human brains dynamically regenerate all the time and provide more useful functionalities when learning new information. While the goal of HDC is to exploit the high-dimensionality of randomly generated base hypervectors to represent the information as a pattern of neural activity, it remains challenging for existing HDCs to support a similar behavior as brain neural regeneration. In this work, we present dynamic HDC learning frameworks that identify and regenerate undesired dimensions to provide adequate accuracy with significantly lowered dimensionalities, thereby accelerating both the training and inference.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning paradigm that enables collaborative model training across dispersed nodes without having to force individual nodes to share data. However, its broad adoption is hindered by the high communication costs of transmitting a large number of model parameters. This paper presents EvoFed, a novel approach that integrates Evolutionary Strategies (ES) with FL to address these challenges. EvoFed employs a concept of 'fitness-based information sharing', deviating significantly from the conventional model-based FL. Rather than exchanging the actual updated model parameters, each node transmits a distance-based similarity measure between the locally updated model and each member of the noise-perturbed model population. Each node, as well as the server, generates an identical population set of perturbed models in a completely synchronized fashion using the same random seeds. With properly chosen noise variance and population size, perturbed models can be combined to closely reflect the actual model updated using the local dataset, allowing the transmitted similarity measures (or fitness values) to carry nearly the complete information about the model parameters. As the population size is typically much smaller than the number of model parameters, the savings in communication load is large. The server aggregates these fitness values and is able to update the global model. This global fitness vector is then disseminated back to the nodes, each of which applies the same update to be synchronized to the global model. Our analysis shows that EvoFed converges, and our experimental results validate that at the cost of increased local processing loads, EvoFed achieves performance comparable to FedAvg while reducing overall communication requirements drastically in various practical settings.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received considerable attention on graph-structured data learning for a wide variety of tasks. The well-designed propagation mechanism which has been demonstrated effective is the most fundamental part of GNNs. Although most of GNNs basically follow a message passing manner, litter effort has been made to discover and analyze their essential relations. In this paper, we establish a surprising connection between different propagation mechanisms with a unified optimization problem, showing that despite the proliferation of various GNNs, in fact, their proposed propagation mechanisms are the optimal solution optimizing a feature fitting function over a wide class of graph kernels with a graph regularization term. Our proposed unified optimization framework, summarizing the commonalities between several of the most representative GNNs, not only provides a macroscopic view on surveying the relations between different GNNs, but also further opens up new opportunities for flexibly designing new GNNs. With the proposed framework, we discover that existing works usually utilize naive graph convolutional kernels for feature fitting function, and we further develop two novel objective functions considering adjustable graph kernels showing low-pass or high-pass filtering capabilities respectively. Moreover, we provide the convergence proofs and expressive power comparisons for the proposed models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that the proposed GNNs not only outperform the state-of-the-art methods but also have good ability to alleviate over-smoothing, and further verify the feasibility for designing GNNs with our unified optimization framework.
This paper surveys the machine learning literature and presents machine learning as optimization models. Such models can benefit from the advancement of numerical optimization techniques which have already played a distinctive role in several machine learning settings. Particularly, mathematical optimization models are presented for commonly used machine learning approaches for regression, classification, clustering, and deep neural networks as well new emerging applications in machine teaching and empirical model learning. The strengths and the shortcomings of these models are discussed and potential research directions are highlighted.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.