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Federated learning is a contemporary machine learning paradigm where locally trained models are distilled into a global model. Due to the intrinsic permutation invariance of neural networks, Probabilistic Federated Neural Matching (PFNM) employs a Bayesian nonparametric framework in the generation process of local neurons, and then creates a linear sum assignment formulation in each alternative optimization iteration. But according to our theoretical analysis, the optimization iteration in PFNM omits global information from existing. In this study, we propose a novel approach that overcomes this flaw by introducing a Kullback-Leibler  divergence penalty at each iteration.
The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by experiments on both image classification and semantic segmentation tasks.

AAAI 2023

Bayesian Federated Neural Matching that Completes Full Information

permutation invariance

federated learning

neural network

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

poster

Universal domain adaptation (UniDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain without requiring the same label sets of both domains. The existence of domain and category shift makes the task challenging and requires us to distinguish “known” samples (i.e., samples whose labels exist in both domains) and “unknown” samples (i.e., samples whose labels exist in only one domain) in both domains before reducing the domain gap. In this paper, we consider the problem from the point of view of distribution matching which we only need to align two distributions partially. A novel approach, dubbed mini-batch Prototypical Partial Optimal Transport (m-PPOT), is proposed to conduct partial distribution alignment for UniDA. In training phase, besides minimizing m-PPOT, we also leverage the transport plan of m-PPOT to reweight source prototypes and target samples, and design reweighted entropy loss and reweighted cross-entropy loss to distinguish “known” and “unknown” samples. Experiments on four benchmarks show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art UniDA methods.

Prototypical Partial Optimal Transport for Universal Domain Adaptation

Recently, webly supervised learning (WSL) has been studied to leverage numerous and accessible data from the Internet. Most existing methods focus on learning noise-robust models from web images while neglecting the performance drop caused by the differences between web domain and real-world domain. However, only by tackling the performance gap above can we fully exploit the practical value of web datasets. To this end, we propose a Few-shot guided Prototypical (FoPro) representation learning method, which only needs a few labeled examples from reality and can significantly improve the performance in the real-world domain. Specifically, we initialize each class center with few-shot real-world data as the ``realistic" prototype. Then, the intra-class distance between web instances and ``realistic" prototypes is narrowed by contrastive learning. Finally, we measure image-prototype distance with a learnable metric. Prototypes are polished by adjacent high-quality web images and involved in removing distant out-of-distribution samples. In experiments, FoPro is trained on web datasets with a few real-world examples guided and evaluated on real-world datasets. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three fine-grained datasets and two large-scale datasets. Compared with existing WSL methods under the same few-shot settings, FoPro still excels in real-world generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/yuleiqin/fopro.

FoPro: Few-Shot Guided Robust Webly-Supervised Prototypical Learning

The matrix-based R\'enyi's entropy allows us to directly quantify information measures from given data, without explicit estimation of the underlying probability distribution. This intriguing property makes it widely applied in statistical inference and machine learning tasks. However, this information theoretical quantity is not robust against noise in the data, and is computationally prohibitive in large-scale applications. To address these issues, we propose a novel measure of information, termed low-rank matrix-based R\'enyi's entropy, based on low-rank representations of infinitely divisible kernel matrices. The proposed entropy functional inherits the specialty of of the original definition to directly quantify information from data, but enjoys additional advantages including robustness and effective calculation. Specifically, our low-rank variant is more sensitive to informative perturbations induced by changes in underlying distributions, while being insensitive to uninformative ones caused by noises. Moreover, low-rank R\'enyi's entropy can be efficiently approximated by random projection and Lanczos iteration techniques, reducing the overall complexity from $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n^2 s)$ or even $\mathcal{O}(ns^2)$, where $n$ is the number of data samples and $s \ll n$. We conduct large-scale experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of this new information measure, demonstrating superior results compared to matrix-based R\'enyi's entropy in terms of both performance and computational efficiency.

Robust and Fast Measure of Information via Low-rank Representation

In party-approval multiwinner elections the goal is to allocate the seats of a fixed-size committee to parties based on the approval ballots of the voters over the parties. In particular, each voter can approve multiple parties and each party can be assigned multiple seats. Two central requirements in this setting are proportional representation and strategyproofness. Intuitively, proportional representation requires that every sufficiently large group of voters with similar preferences is represented in the committee. Strategyproofness demands that no voter can benefit by misreporting her true preferences. We show that these two axioms are incompatible for anonymous party-approval multiwinner voting rules, thus proving a far-reaching impossibility theorem. The proof of this result is obtained by formulating the problem in propositional logic and then letting a SAT solver show that the formula is unsatisfiable. Additionally, we demonstrate how to circumvent this impossibility by considering a weakening of strategyproofness which requires that only voters who do not approve any elected party cannot manipulate. While most common voting rules fail even this weak notion of strategyproofness, we characterize Chamberlin-Courant approval voting within the class of Thiele rules based on this strategyproofness notion.

Strategyproofness and Proportionality in Party-Approval Multiwinner Elections

Modeling an unknown dynamical system is crucial in order to predict the future behavior of the system. A standard approach is training recurrent models on measurement data. While these models typically provide exact short-term predictions, accumulating errors yield deteriorated long-term behavior. In contrast, models with reliable long-term predictions can often be obtained, either by training a robust but less detailed model, or by leveraging physics-based simulations. In both cases, inaccuracies in the models yield a lack of short-time details. Thus, different models with contrastive properties on different time horizons are available. This observation immediately raises the question: Can we obtain predictions that combine the best of both worlds? Inspired by sensor fusion tasks, we interpret the problem in the frequency domain and leverage classical methods from signal processing, in particular complementary filters. This filtering technique combines two signals by applying a high-pass filter to one signal, and low-pass filtering the other. Essentially, the high-pass filter extracts high-frequencies, whereas the low-pass filter extracts low frequencies. Applying this concept to dynamics model learning enables the construction of models that yield accurate long- and short-term predictions. Here, we propose two methods, one being purely learning-based and the other one being a hybrid model that requires an additional physics-based simulator.

Combining Slow and Fast: Complementary Filtering for Dynamics Learning

As it is cumbersome and expensive to acquire a huge amount of data for training neural dialog models, data augmentation is proposed to effectively utilize existing training samples.
However, current data augmentation techniques on the dialog generation task mostly augment all cases in the training dataset without considering the intrinsic attributes between different cases.
We argue that not all cases are beneficial for augmentation task, and the cases suitable for augmentation should obey the following two attributes: 
(1) low-quality (the dialog model cannot generate a high-quality response for the case),
(2) representative (the case should represent the property of the whole dataset).
Herein, we explore this idea by proposing a Selective Data Augmentation framework (SDA) for the response generation task.
SDA employs a dual adversarial network to select the lowest quality and most representative data points for augmentation in one stage. 
Extensive experiments conducted on two publicly available datasets, i.e., DailyDialog and OpenSubtitles, show that our framework can improve the response generation performance with respect to various metrics

Learning towards Selective Data Augmentation for Dialogue Generation

In this work, we present a new computer vision task named video object of interest segmentation (VOIS). Given a video and a target image of interest, our objective is to simultaneously segment and track all objects in the video that are relevant to the target image. This problem combines the traditional video object segmentation task with an additional image indicating the content that users are concerned with. Since no existing dataset is perfectly suitable for this new task, we specifically construct a large-scale dataset called LiveVideos, which contains 2418 pairs of target images and live videos with instance-level annotations. In addition, we propose a transformer-based method for this task. We revisit Swin Transformer and design a dual-path structure to fuse video and image features. Then, a transformer decoder is employed to generate object proposals for segmentation and tracking from the fused features. Extensive experiments on LiveVideos dataset show the superiority of our proposed method.

Video Object of Interest Segmentation

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims at identifying unseen compositions composed of previously seen attributes and objects during the test phase. In real images, the visual appearances of attributes and objects (primitive concepts) generally interact with each other. Namely, the visual appearances of an attribute may change when composed with different objects, and vice versa. But previous works overlook this important property. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective approach with leveraging sub-class discrimination. Specifically, we define the primitive concepts in different compositions as sub-classes, and then maintain the sub-class discrimination to address the above challenge. More specifically, inspired by the observation that the composed recognition models could account for the differences across sub-classes, we first propose to impose the embedding alignment between the composed and disentangled recognition to incorporate sub-class discrimination at the feature level. Then we develop the prototype modulator networks to adjust the class prototypes w.r.t. the composition information, which can enhance sub-class discrimination at the classifier level. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging benchmark datasets, and the considerable performance improvement over state-of-the-art approaches is achieved, which indicates the effectiveness of our method.

Leveraging Sub-Class Discimination for Compositional Zero-shot Learning

We study the problem of best arm identification in a federated learning multi-armed bandit setup with a central server and multiple clients. Each client is associated with a multi-armed bandit in which each arm yields {\em i.i.d.}\ rewards following a Gaussian distribution with an unknown mean and known variance. The set of arms is assumed to be the same at all the  clients. We define two notions of best arm---local and global. The local best arm at a client is the arm with the largest mean among the arms local to the client, whereas the global best arm is the arm with the largest  average mean across all the clients. We assume that each client can only observe the rewards from its local arms  and thereby estimate its local best arm. The clients communicate with a central server on  uplinks that entail a cost of $C\ge0$ units per usage per uplink. The global best arm is estimated at the server. The goal is to identify the local best arms and the global best arm with minimal total cost, defined as the sum of the total number of arm selections at all the clients and the total communication cost, subject to an upper bound on the error probability. We propose a novel algorithm {\sc FedElim}  that is based on successive elimination and communicates only in exponential time steps, and obtain a high probability  instance-dependent upper bound on its total cost. The key takeaway from our paper is that for any $C\geq 0$ and error probabilities sufficiently small, the total number of arm selections (resp.\ the total cost) under {\sc FedElim} is at most~$2$   (resp.~$3$) times the maximum total number of arm selections under its variant that communicates in every time step. Additionally, we show that the latter is optimal in expectation up to a constant factor, thereby demonstrating that communication is almost cost-free in {\sc FedElim}. We numerically validate the efficacy of  {\sc FedElim} on two synthetic datasets and the MovieLens dataset.

Almost Cost-Free Communication in Federated Best Arm Identification

Deep networks should be robust to rare events if they are to be successfully deployed in high-stakes real-world applications. Here we study the capability of deep networks to recognize objects in unusual poses. We create a synthetic dataset of images of objects in unusual orientations, and evaluate the robustness of a collection of 38 recent and competitive deep networks for image classification. We show that classifying these images is still a challenge for all networks tested, with an average accuracy drop of 29.5% compared to when the objects are presented
upright. This brittleness is largely unaffected by various design choices, such as training losses, architectures, dataset modalities, and data-augmentation schemes. However, networks trained on very large datasets substantially outperform others, with the best network tested—Noisy Student trained on JFT-300M—showing a relatively small accuracy drop of only 14.5% on unusual poses. Nevertheless, a visual inspection of the failures of Noisy Student reveals a remaining gap in robustness with humans. Furthermore, combining multiple object transformations—3D-rotations and scaling—further degrades the performance of all networks. Our results provide another measurement of the robustness of deep networks to consider when using them in the real world. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/amro-kamal/ObjectPose.

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Bayesian Federated Neural Matching that Completes Full Information

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Prototypical Partial Optimal Transport for Universal Domain Adaptation

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