Recently, prompt-based fine-tuning has garnered considerable interest as a core technique for few-shot text classification task. This approach reformulates the fine-tuning objective to align with the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective. Leveraging unlabeled data, prompt-based self-training has shown greater effectiveness in binary and three-class classification. However, prompt-based self-training for multi-class classification has not been adequately investigated, despite its significant applicability to real-world scenarios. Moreover, extending current methods to multi-class classification suffers from the verbalizer that extracts the predicted value of manually pre-defined single label word for each class from MLM predictions. Consequently, we introduce a novel, efficient verbalizer structure, named Mapping-free Automatic Verbalizer (MAV). Comprising two fully connected layers, MAV serves as a trainable verbalizer that automatically extracts the requisite word features for classification by capitalizing on all available information from MLM predictions. Experimental results on five multi-class classification datasets indicate MAV's superior self-training efficacy.
Multi-image super-resolution (MISR) allows to increase the spatial resolution of a low-resolution (LR) acquisition by combining multiple images carrying complementary information in the form of sub-pixel offsets in the scene sampling, and can be significantly more effective than its single-image counterpart. Its main difficulty lies in accurately registering and fusing the multi-image information. Currently studied settings, such as burst photography, typically involve assumptions of small geometric disparity between the LR images and rely on optical flow for image registration. We study a MISR method that can increase the resolution of sets of images acquired with arbitrary, and potentially wildly different, camera positions and orientations, generalizing the currently studied MISR settings. Our proposed model, called EpiMISR, moves away from optical flow and explicitly uses the epipolar geometry of the acquisition process, together with transformer-based processing of radiance feature fields to substantially improve over state-of-the-art MISR methods in presence of large disparities in the LR images.
We tackle the problem of Byzantine errors in distributed gradient descent within the Byzantine-resilient gradient coding framework. Our proposed solution can recover the exact full gradient in the presence of $s$ malicious workers with a data replication factor of only $s+1$. It generalizes previous solutions to any data assignment scheme that has a regular replication over all data samples. The scheme detects malicious workers through additional interactive communication and a small number of local computations at the main node, leveraging group-wise comparisons between workers with a provably optimal grouping strategy. The scheme requires at most $s$ interactive rounds that incur a total communication cost logarithmic in the number of data samples.
Model generalizability to unseen datasets, concerned with in-the-wild robustness, is less studied for indoor single-image depth prediction. We leverage gradient-based meta-learning for higher generalizability on zero-shot cross-dataset inference. Unlike the most-studied image classification in meta-learning, depth is pixel-level continuous range values, and mappings from each image to depth vary widely across environments. Thus no explicit task boundaries exist. We instead propose fine-grained task that treats each RGB-D pair as a task in our meta-optimization. We first show meta-learning on limited data induces much better prior (max +29.4\%). Using meta-learned weights as initialization for following supervised learning, without involving extra data or information, it consistently outperforms baselines without the method. Compared to most indoor-depth methods that only train/ test on a single dataset, we propose zero-shot cross-dataset protocols, closely evaluate robustness, and show consistently higher generalizability and accuracy by our meta-initialization. The work at the intersection of depth and meta-learning potentially drives both research streams to step closer to practical use.
Heterogeneous Bayesian decentralized data fusion captures the set of problems in which two robots must combine two probability density functions over non-equal, but overlapping sets of random variables. In the context of multi-robot dynamic systems, this enables robots to take a "divide and conquer" approach to reason and share data over complementary tasks instead of over the full joint state space. For example, in a target tracking application, this allows robots to track different subsets of targets and share data on only common targets. This paper presents a framework by which robots can each use a local factor graph to represent relevant partitions of a complex global joint probability distribution, thus allowing them to avoid reasoning over the entirety of a more complex model and saving communication as well as computation costs. From a theoretical point of view, this paper makes contributions by casting the heterogeneous decentralized fusion problem in terms of a factor graph, analyzing the challenges that arise due to dynamic filtering, and then developing a new conservative filtering algorithm that ensures statistical correctness. From a practical point of view, we show how this framework can be used to represent different multi-robot applications and then test it with simulations and hardware experiments to validate and demonstrate its statistical conservativeness, applicability, and robustness to real-world challenges.
We propose a trust-region stochastic sequential quadratic programming algorithm (TR-StoSQP) to solve nonlinear optimization problems with stochastic objectives and deterministic equality constraints. We consider a fully stochastic setting, where at each step a single sample is generated to estimate the objective gradient. The algorithm adaptively selects the trust-region radius and, compared to the existing line-search StoSQP schemes, allows us to utilize indefinite Hessian matrices (i.e., Hessians without modification) in SQP subproblems. As a trust-region method for constrained optimization, our algorithm must address an infeasibility issue -- the linearized equality constraints and trust-region constraints may lead to infeasible SQP subproblems. In this regard, we propose an adaptive relaxation technique to compute the trial step, consisting of a normal step and a tangential step. To control the lengths of these two steps while ensuring a scale-invariant property, we adaptively decompose the trust-region radius into two segments, based on the proportions of the rescaled feasibility and optimality residuals to the rescaled full KKT residual. The normal step has a closed form, while the tangential step is obtained by solving a trust-region subproblem, to which a solution ensuring the Cauchy reduction is sufficient for our study. We establish a global almost sure convergence guarantee for TR-StoSQP, and illustrate its empirical performance on both a subset of problems in the CUTEst test set and constrained logistic regression problems using data from the LIBSVM collection.
It has been demonstrated that leading cruise control (LCC) can improve the operation of mixed-autonomy platoons by allowing connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) to make longitudinal control decisions based on the information provided by surrounding vehicles. However, LCC generally requires surrounding human-driven vehicles (HDVs) to share their real-time states, which can be used by adversaries to infer drivers' car-following behavior, potentially leading to financial losses or safety concerns. This paper aims to address such privacy concerns and protect the behavioral characteristics of HDVs by devising a parameter privacy-preserving approach for mixed-autonomy platoon control. First, we integrate a parameter privacy filter into LCC to protect sensitive car-following parameters. The privacy filter allows each vehicle to generate seemingly realistic pseudo states by distorting the true parameters to pseudo parameters, which can protect drivers' privacy in behavioral parameters without significantly influencing the control performance. Second, to enhance the practicality and reliability of the privacy filter within LCC, we first extend the current approach to accommodate continuous parameter spaces through a neural network estimator. Subsequently, we introduce an individual-level parameter privacy preservation constraint, focusing on the privacy level of each individual parameter pair, further enhancing the approach's reliability. Third, analysis of head-to-tail string stability reveals the potential impact of privacy filters in degrading mixed traffic flow performance. Simulation shows that this approach can effectively trade off privacy and control performance in LCC. We further demonstrate the benefit of such an approach in networked systems, i.e., by applying the privacy filter to a proceeding vehicle, one can also achieve a certain level of privacy for the following vehicle.
Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, i.e., small input perturbations can result in substantially different outputs of a neural network. Safety-critical environments require neural networks that are robust against input perturbations. However, training and formally verifying robust neural networks is challenging. We address this challenge by employing, for the first time, a end-to-end set-based training procedure that trains robust neural networks for formal verification. Our training procedure drastically simplifies the subsequent formal robustness verification of the trained neural network. While previous research has predominantly focused on augmenting neural network training with adversarial attacks, our approach leverages set-based computing to train neural networks with entire sets of perturbed inputs. Moreover, we demonstrate that our set-based training procedure effectively trains robust neural networks, which are easier to verify. In many cases, set-based trained neural networks outperform neural networks trained with state-of-the-art adversarial attacks.
With the recent emergence of mixed precision hardware, there has been a renewed interest in its use for solving numerical linear algebra problems fast and accurately. The solution of least squares (LS) problems $\min_x\|b-Ax\|_2$, where $A \in \mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$, arise in numerous application areas. Overdetermined standard least squares problems can be solved by using mixed precision within the iterative refinement method of Bj\"{o}rck, which transforms the least squares problem into an $(m+n)\times(m+n)$ ''augmented'' system. It has recently been shown that mixed precision GMRES-based iterative refinement can also be used, in an approach termed GMRES-LSIR. In practice, we often encounter types of least squares problems beyond standard least squares, including weighted least squares (WLS), $\min_x\|D^{1/2}(b-Ax)\|_2$, where $D^{1/2}$ is a diagonal matrix of weights. In this paper, we discuss a mixed precision FGMRES-WLSIR algorithm for solving WLS problems using two different preconditioners.
This paper investigates the spectrum sharing between a multiple-input single-output (MISO) secure communication system and a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar system in the presence of one suspicious eavesdropper. We jointly design the radar waveform and communication beamforming vector at the two systems, such that the interference between the base station (BS) and radar is reduced, and the detrimental radar interference to the communication system is enhanced to jam the eavesdropper, thereby increasing secure information transmission performance. In particular, by considering the imperfect channel state information (CSI) for the user and eavesdropper, we maximize the worst-case secrecy rate at the user, while ensuring the detection performance of radar system. To tackle this challenging problem, we propose a two-layer robust cooperative algorithm based on the S-lemma and semidefinite relaxation techniques. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves significant secrecy rate gains over the non-robust scheme. Furthermore, we illustrate the trade-off between secrecy rate and detection probability.
Social relations are often used to improve recommendation quality when user-item interaction data is sparse in recommender systems. Most existing social recommendation models exploit pairwise relations to mine potential user preferences. However, real-life interactions among users are very complicated and user relations can be high-order. Hypergraph provides a natural way to model complex high-order relations, while its potentials for improving social recommendation are under-explored. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose a multi-channel hypergraph convolutional network to enhance social recommendation by leveraging high-order user relations. Technically, each channel in the network encodes a hypergraph that depicts a common high-order user relation pattern via hypergraph convolution. By aggregating the embeddings learned through multiple channels, we obtain comprehensive user representations to generate recommendation results. However, the aggregation operation might also obscure the inherent characteristics of different types of high-order connectivity information. To compensate for the aggregating loss, we innovatively integrate self-supervised learning into the training of the hypergraph convolutional network to regain the connectivity information with hierarchical mutual information maximization. The experimental results on multiple real-world datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the SOTA methods, and the ablation study verifies the effectiveness of the multi-channel setting and the self-supervised task. The implementation of our model is available via //github.com/Coder-Yu/RecQ.