United States

Federated learning has attracted increasing attention with the emergence of distributed data. While extensive federated learning algorithms have been proposed for the non-convex distributed problem, the federated learning in practice still faces numerous challenges, such as the large training iterations to converge since the sizes of models and datasets keep increasing, and the lack of adaptivity by SGD-based model updates. Meanwhile, the study of adaptive methods in federated learning is scarce and existing works either lack a complete theoretical convergence guarantee or have slow sample complexity. In this paper, we propose an efficient adaptive algorithm (i.e., FAFED) based on the momentum-based variance reduced technique in cross-silo FL. We first explore how to design the adaptive algorithm in the FL setting. By providing a counter-example, we prove that a simple combination of FL and adaptive methods could lead to divergence. More importantly, we provide a convergence analysis for our method and prove that our algorithm is the first adaptive FL algorithm to reach the best-known samples $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ and $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ communication rounds to find an $\epsilon$-stationary point without large batches. The experimental results on the language modeling task and image classification task with heterogeneous data demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms.

AAAI 2023

Faster Adaptive Federated Learning

adaptive optimization method

stochastic nonconvex optimization

federated learning

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

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have a radically different architecture with significantly less inductive bias than Convolutional Neural Networks. Along with the improvement in performance, security and robustness of ViTs are also of great importance to study. In contrast to many recent works that exploit the robustness of ViTs against adversarial examples, this paper investigates a representative causative attack, i.e., backdoor. We first examine the vulnerability of ViTs against various backdoor attacks and find that ViTs are also quite vulnerable to existing  attacks. However, we observe that the clean-data accuracy and backdoor attack success rate of ViTs respond distinctively to patch transformations before the positional encoding. Then, based on this finding, we propose an effective method for ViTs to defend both patch-based and blending-based trigger backdoor attacks via patch processing.
The performances are evaluated on several benchmark datasets, including CIFAR10, GTSRB, and TinyImageNet, which show the proposedds defense is very successful in mitigating backdoor attacks for ViTs. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first defensive strategy that utilizes a unique characteristic of ViTs against backdoor attacks.

Defending Backdoor Attacks on Vision Transformer via Patch Processing

Recently, researchers have applied the word-character lattice framework to integrated word information, which has become very popular for Chinese named entity recognition (NER).  However, prior approaches fuse word information by different variants of encoders such as Lattice LSTM or Flat-Lattice Transformer, but are still not data-efficient indeed to fully grasp the depth interaction of cross-granularity and important word information from the lexicon. In this paper, we go
beyond the typical lattice structure and propose a novel Multi-Granularity Contrastive Learning (MGCL) framework, that aims to optimize the inter-granularity distribution distance and emphasize the critical matched words in the lexicon.  By
carefully combining cross-granularity contrastive learning and bi-granularity contrastive learning, the network can explicitly leverage lexicon information at the data level based on the lattice structure, and further provide better representations of across-granularity, thus significantly improving model performance. Experiments on four Chinese NER datasets show that MGCL obtains state-of-the-art results while considering model efficiency.

MCL: Multi-Granularity Contrastive Learning Framework for Chinese NER

Applications abound in which optimization problems must be repeatedly solved, each time with new (but similar) data. Analytic optimization algorithms can be hand-designed to provably solve these problems in an iterative fashion. On one hand, data-driven algorithms can "learn to optimize" (L2O)  with much fewer iterations and   similar cost per iteration as general-purpose optimization algorithms. On the other hand, unfortunately, many L2O algorithms lack converge guarantees. To fuse the advantages of these approaches, we present a Safe-L2O framework. Safe-L2O updates incorporate a safeguard to guarantee convergence for convex problems with proximal and/or gradient oracles. The safeguard is simple and computationally cheap to implement, and it is activated only when the data-driven L2O updates would perform poorly or appear to diverge. This yields the numerical benefits of employing machine learning   to create rapid L2O algorithms while still guaranteeing convergence. Our numerical examples show convergence of Safe-L2O algorithms, even when the provided data is not from the distribution of training data.

Safeguarded Learned Convex Optimization

Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNs) are prominent approaches to node classification tasks on heterogeneous graphs. Despite the superior performance, insights about the predictions made from HGNs are obscure to humans. Existing explainability techniques are mainly proposed for GNNs on homogeneous graphs. They focus on highlighting salient graph objects to the predictions whereas the problem of how these objects affect the predictions remains unsolved. Given heterogeneous graphs with complex structures and rich semantics, it is imperative that salient objects can be accompanied with their influence paths to the predictions, unveiling the reasoning process of HGNs. In this paper, we develop xPath, a new framework that provides fine-grained explanations for black-box HGNs specifying a cause node with its influence path to the target node. In xPath, we differentiate the influence of a node on the prediction w.r.t. every individual influence path, and measure the influence by perturbing graph structure via a novel graph rewiring algorithm. Furthermore, we introduce a greedy search algorithm to find the most influential fine-grained explanations efficiently. Empirical results on various HGNs and heterogeneous graphs show that xPath yields faithful explanations efficiently, outperforming the adaptations of advanced GNN explanation approaches.

Towards Fine-grained Explainability for Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network

Existing image stitching approaches based on global or local homography estimation are not free from the parallax problem and suffer from undesired artifacts. In this paper, instead of relying on the homography-based warp, we propose a novel deep image stitching framework exploiting the pixel-wise warp field to handle the large-parallax problem. The proposed deep image stitching framework consists of a Pixel-wise Warping Module (PWM) and a Stitched Image Generating Module (SIGMo). For PWM, we obtain pixel-wise warp in a similar manner as estimating an optical flow (OF).
In the stitching scenario, the input images usually include non-overlap (NOV) regions of which warp cannot be directly estimated, unlike the overlap (OV) regions. To help the PWM predict a reasonable warp on the NOV region, we impose two geometrical constraints: an epipolar loss and a line-preservation loss. With the obtained warp field, we relocate the pixels of the target image using forward warping. Finally, the SIGMo is trained by the proposed multi-branch training framework to generate a stitched image from a reference image and a warped target image. For training and evaluating the proposed framework, we build and publish a novel dataset including image pairs with corresponding pixel-wise ground truth warp and stitched result images. We show that the results of the proposed framework are quantitatively and qualitatively superior to those of the conventional methods.

Pixel-wise Warping for Deep Image Stitching

Early-exiting dynamic neural networks (EDNN), as one type of dynamic neural networks, has been widely studied recently. A typical EDNN has multiple prediction heads at different layers of the network backbone. During inference, the model will exit at either the last prediction head or an intermediate prediction head where the prediction confidence is higher than a predefined threshold. To optimize the model, these prediction heads together with the network backbone are trained on every batch of training data. This brings a train-test mismatch problem that all the prediction heads are optimized on all types of data in training phase while the deeper heads will only see difficult inputs in testing phase. Treating training and testing inputs differently at the two phases will cause the mismatch between training and testing data distributions. To mitigate this problem, we formulate an EDNN as an additive model inspired by gradient boosting, and propose multiple training techniques to optimize the model effectively. We name our method BoostNet. Our experiments show it achieves the state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR100 and ImageNet datasets in both anytime and budgeted-batch prediction modes.

Boosted Dynamic Neural Networks

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection can be used in deep learning-based applications to reject outlier samples from being unreliably classified by deep neural networks. Learning to classify between OOD and in-distribution samples is difficult because data comprising the former is extremely diverse. It has been observed that an auxiliary OOD dataset is most effective in training a ``rejection'' network when its samples are semantically similar to in-distribution images. We first deduce that OOD images are perceived by a deep neural network to be semantically similar to in-distribution samples when they share a common background, as deep networks are observed to incorrectly classify such images with high confidence. We then propose a simple yet effective Key In-distribution feature Replacement BY inpainting (KIRBY) procedure that constructs a surrogate OOD dataset by replacing class-discriminative features of in-distribution samples with marginal background features. The procedure can be implemented using off-the-shelf vision algorithms, where each step within the algorithm is shown to make the surrogate data increasingly similar to in-distribution data. Design choices in each step are studied extensively, and an exhaustive comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrates KIRBY's competitiveness on various benchmarks.

Key Feature Replacement of In-Distribution Samples for Out-of-Distribution Detection

User Satisfaction Estimation is an important task and increasingly being applied in goal-oriented dialogue systems to estimate whether the user is satisfied with the service. It is observed that whether the user’s needs are met often triggers various sentiments, which can be pertinent to the successful estimation of user satisfaction, and vice versa. Thus, User Satisfaction Estimation (USE) and Sentiment Analysis (SA) should be treated as a joint, collaborative effort, considering the strong connections between the sentiment states of speakers and the user satisfaction. Existing joint learning frameworks mainly unify the two highly pertinent tasks over cascade or shared-bottom implementations, however they fail to distinguish task-specific and common features, which will produce sub-optimal utterance representations for downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Speaker Turn-Aware Multi-Task Adversarial Network (STMAN) for dialogue-level USE and utterance-level SA. Specifically, we first introduce a multi-task adversarial strategy which trains a task discriminator to make utterance representation more task-specific, and then utilize a speaker-turn aware multi-task interaction strategy to extract the common features which are complementary to each task. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world service dialogue datasets show that our model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.

A Speaker Turn-Aware Multi-Task Adversarial Network for Joint User Satisfaction Estimation and Sentiment Analysis

As deep neural networks can easily overfit noisy labels, robust training in the presence of noisy labels is becoming an important challenge in modern deep learning. While existing methods address this problem in various directions, they still produce unpredictable sub-optimal results since they rely on the posterior information estimated by the feature extractor corrupted by noisy labels. Lipschitz regularization successfully alleviates this problem by training a robust feature extractor, but it requires longer training time and expensive computations. Motivated by this, we propose a simple yet effective method, called ALASCA, which efficiently provides a robust feature extractor under label noise. ALASCA integrates two key ingredients: (1) adaptive label smoothing based on our theoretical analysis that label smoothing implicitly induces Lipschitz regularization, and (2) auxiliary classifiers that enable practical application of intermediate Lipschitz regularization with negligible computations. We conduct wide-ranging experiments for ALASCA and combine our proposed method with previous noise-robust methods on several synthetic and real-world datasets. Experimental results show that our framework consistently improves the robustness of feature extractors and the performance of existing baselines with efficiency.

A Gift from Label Smoothing: Robust Training with Adaptive Label Smoothing via Auxiliary Classifier under Label Noise

Overparameterized deep neural networks have redundant neurons that do not contribute to the network's accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a novel channel regeneration technique that reinvigorates these redundant channels by re-initializing its batch normalization scaling factor gamma. This re-initialization of BN gamma promotes regular weight updates during training. Furthermore, we show that channel regeneration encourages the channels to contribute equally to the learned representation and further boosts the generalization accuracy. We apply our technique at regular intervals of the training cycle to improve channel utilization. The solutions proposed in previous works either raise the total computational cost or increase the model complexity. Integrating the proposed channel regeneration technique into the training methodology of efficient architectures requires minimal effort and comes at no additional cost in size or memory. Extensive experiments on several image classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of applying the channel regeneration technique to compact architectures. 

Faster Adaptive Federated Learning

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Defending Backdoor Attacks on Vision Transformer via Patch Processing

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