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Current state-of-the-art deep learning based face recognition (FR) models require a large number of face identities for central training. However, due to the growing privacy awareness, it is prohibited to access the face images on user devices to continually improve face recognition models. Federated Learning (FL) is a technique to address the privacy issue, which can collaboratively optimize the model without sharing the data between clients. In this work, we propose a FL based framework called FedFR to improve the generic face representation in a privacy-aware manner. Besides, the framework jointly optimizes personalized models for the corresponding clients via the proposed Decoupled Feature Customization module. The client-specific personalized model can serve the need of optimized face recognition experience for registered identities at the local device. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore the personalized face recognition in FL setup. The proposed framework is validated to be superior to previous approaches on several generic and personalized face recognition benchmarks with diverse FL scenarios. The source codes and our proposed personalized FR benchmark under FL setup are available at https://github.com/jackie840129/FedFR.

AAAI 2022

FedFR: Joint Optimization Federated Framework for Generic and Personalized Face Recognition

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

technical paper

The goal of Approximate Query Processing (AQP) is to provide very fast but "accurate enough" results for costly aggregate queries thereby improving user experience in interactive exploration of large datasets. Recently proposed Machine-Learning-based AQP techniques can provide very low latency as query execution only involves model inference as compared to traditional query processing on database clusters. However, with increase in the number of filtering predicates (WHERE clauses), the approximation error significantly increases for these methods. Analysts often use queries with a large number of predicates for insights discovery. Thus, maintaining low approximation error is important to prevent analysts from drawing misleading conclusions. In this paper, we propose ELECTRA, a predicate-aware AQP system that can answer analytics-style queries with a large number of predicates with much smaller approximation errors. ELECTRA uses a conditional generative model that learns the conditional distribution of the data and at run-time generates a small (â‰ˆ 1000 rows) but representative sample, on which the query is executed to compute the approximate result. Our evaluations with four different baselines on three real-world datasets show that ELECTRA provides lower AQP error for large number of predicates compared to baselines.

Conditional Generative Model Based Predicate-Aware Query Approximation

Recent advances in deep learning have enabled optimization of deep reactive policies (DRPs) for continuous MDP planning by encoding a parametric policy as a deep neural network and exploiting automatic differentiation in an end-to-end model-based gradient descent framework. This approach has proven effective for optimizing DRPs in nonlinear continuous MDPs, but it requires a large number of sampled trajectories to learn effectively and can suffer from high variance in solution quality. In this work, we revisit the overall model-based DRP objective and instead take a minorization-maximization perspective to iteratively optimize the DRP w.r.t. a locally tight lower-bounded objective. This novel formulation of DRP learning as iterative lower bound optimization (ILBO) is particularly appealing because (i) each step is structurally easier to optimize than the overall objective, (ii) it guarantees a monotonically improving objective under certain theoretical conditions, and (iii) it reuses samples between iterations thus lowering sample complexity. Empirical evaluation confirms that ILBO is significantly more sample-efficient than the state-of-the-art DRP planner and consistently produces better solution quality with lower variance. We additionally demonstrate that ILBO generalizes well to new problem instances (i.e., different initial states) without requiring retraining.

Sample-Efficient Iterative Lower Bound Optimization of Deep Reactive Policies for Planning in Continuous MDPs

Multiple modalities can provide rich semantic information; and exploiting such information will normally lead to better performance compared with the single-modality counterpart.
 However, it is not easy to devise an effective cross-modal fusion structure due to the variations of feature dimensions and semantics, especially when the inputs even come from different sensors, as in the field of audio-visual learning. In this work, we propose SepFusion, a novel framework that can smoothly produce optimal fusion structures for visual-sound separation. The framework is composed of two components, namely the model generator and the evaluator. To construct the generator, we devise a lightweight architecture space that can adapt to different input modalities. In this way, we can easily obtain audio-visual fusion structures according to our demands. For the evaluator, we adopt the idea of neural architecture search to select superior networks effectively. This automatic process can significantly save human efforts while achieving competitive performances. Moreover, since our SepFusion provides a series of strong models, we can utilize the model family for broader applications, such as further promoting performance via model assembly, or providing suitable architectures for the separation of certain instrument classes. These potential applications further enhance the competitiveness of our approach.

SepFusion: Finding Optimal Fusion Structures for Visual Sound Separation

Many data applications have certain invariant constraints due to practical needs. Data curators who employ differential privacy need to respect such constraints on the sanitized data product as a primary utility requirement. Invariants challenge the formulation, implementation, and interpretation of privacy guarantees. 

We propose subspace differential privacy, to honestly characterize the dependence of the sanitized output on confidential aspects of the data. We discuss two design frameworks that convert well-known differentially private mechanisms, such as the Gaussian and the Laplace mechanisms, to subspace differentially private ones that respect the invariants specified by the curator. For linear queries, we discuss the design of near-optimal mechanisms that minimize the mean squared error. Subspace differentially private mechanisms rid the need for post-processing due to invariants, preserve transparency and statistical intelligibility of the output, and can be suitable for distributed implementation. We showcase the proposed mechanisms on the 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance demonstration data, and a spatio-temporal dataset of mobile access point connections on a large university campus.

Subspace Differential Privacy

Identifying breakdowns in ongoing dialogues helps to improve communication effectiveness. Most prior work on this topic relies on human annotated data and data augmentation to learn a classification model. While quality labeled dialogue data requires human annotation and is usually expensive to obtain, unlabeled data is easier to collect from various sources. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised teacher-student learning framework to tackle this task. We introduce two teachers which are trained on labeled data and perturbed labeled data respectively. We leverage unlabeled data to improve classification in student training where we employ two teachers to refine the labeling of unlabeled data through teacher-student learning in a bootstrapping manner. Through our proposed training approach, the student can achieve improvements over single-teacher performance. Experimental results on the Dialogue Breakdown Detection Challenge dataset DBDC5 and Learning to Identify Follow-Up Questions dataset LIF show that our approach outperforms all previous published approaches as well as other supervised and semi-supervised baseline methods.

A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach with Two Teachers to Improve Breakdown Identification in Dialogues

It is an essential product requirement of Yahoo Mail to distinguish between personal and machine-generated emails. The old production classifier in Yahoo Mail was based on a simple logistic regression model. That model was trained by aggregating features at the SMTP address level. We propose building deep learning models at the message level. We train four individual CNN models: (1) a content model with subject and content as input, (2) a sender model with sender email address and name as input, (3) an action model by analyzing email recipients' action patterns and generating target labels based on senders' opening/deleting behaviors and (4) a salutation model by utilizing senders' "explicit salutation" signal as positive labels. Next, we train a final full model after exploring different combinations of the above four models. Experimental results on editorial data show that our full model improves the adjusted-recall from 70.5% to 78.8% and the precision from 94.7% to 96.0% compared to the old production model. Also, our full model significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art BERT model at this task. Our new model has been deployed to the current production system (Yahoo Mail 6).

Classifying Emails into Human vs Machine Category

Federated learning (FL) and split learning (SL) are two popular distributed machine learning approaches. Both follow a model-to-data scenario; clients train and test machine learning models without sharing raw data. SL provides better model privacy than FL due to the machine learning model architecture split between clients and the server. Moreover, the split model makes SL a better option for resource-constrained environments. However, SL performs slower than FL due to the relay-based training across multiple clients. In this regard, this paper presents a novel approach, named splitfed learning (SFL), that amalgamates the two approaches eliminating their inherent drawbacks, along with a refined architectural configuration incorporating differential privacy and PixelDP to enhance data privacy and model robustness. Our analysis and empirical results demonstrate that (pure) SFL provides similar test accuracy and communication efficiency as SL while significantly decreasing its computation time per global epoch than in SL for multiple clients. Furthermore, as in SL, its communication efficiency over FL improves with the number of clients. Besides, the performance of SFL with privacy and robustness measures is further evaluated under extended experimental settings.

SplitFed: When Federated Learning Meets Split Learning

We introduce VAST, the Valence-Assessing Semantics Test, a novel intrinsic evaluation task for contextualized word embeddings (CWEs). Despite the widespread use of contextualizing language models (LMs), researchers have no intrinsic evaluation task for understanding the semantic quality of CWEs and their unique properties as related to contextualization, the change in the vector representation of a word based on surrounding words; tokenization, the breaking of uncommon words into subcomponents; and LM-specific geometry learned during training. VAST uses valence, the association of a word with pleasantness, to measure the correspondence of word-level LM semantics with widely used human judgments, and examines the effects of contextualization, tokenization, and LM-specific geometry. Because prior research has found that CWEs from OpenAI's 2019 English-language causal LM GPT-2 perform poorly on other intrinsic evaluations, we select GPT-2 as our primary subject, and include results showing that VAST is useful for 7 other LMs, and can be used in 7 languages. GPT-2 results show that the semantics of a word are more similar to the semantics of context in layers closer to model output, such that VAST scores diverge between our contextual settings, ranging from Pearson's rho of .55 to .77 in layer 11. We also show that multiply tokenized words are not semantically encoded until layer 8, where they achieve Pearson's rho of .46, indicating the presence of an encoding process for multiply tokenized words which differs from that of singly tokenized words, for which rho is highest in layer 0. We find that a few neurons with values having greater magnitude than the rest mask word-level semantics in GPT-2's top layer, but that word-level semantics can be recovered by nullifying non-semantic principal components: Pearson's rho in the top layer improves from .32 to .76. Downstream POS tagging and sentence classification experiments indicate that the GPT-2 uses these principal components for non-semantic purposes, such as to represent sentence-level syntax relevant to next-word prediction. After isolating semantics, we show the utility of VAST for understanding LM semantics via improvements over related work on four word similarity tasks, with a score of .50 on SimLex-999, better than the previous best of .45 for GPT-2. Finally, we show that 8 of 10 WEAT bias tests, which compare differences in word embedding associations between groups of words, exhibit more stereotype-congruent biases after isolating semantics, indicating that non-semantic structures in LMs also mask social biases.

VAST: The Valence-Assessing Semantics Test for Contextualizing Language Models

Recent developments in predictive modeling using marked temporal point processes (MTPPs) have enabled an accurate characterization of several real-world applications involving continuous-time event sequences (CTESs). However, the retrieval problem of such sequences remains largely unaddressed in literature. To tackle this, we propose NEUROSEQRET which learns to retrieve and rank a relevant set of continuous-time event sequences for a given query sequence, from a large corpus of sequences. More specifically, NEUROSEQRET first applies a trainable unwarping function on the query sequence, which makes it comparable with corpus sequences, especially when a relevant query-corpus pair has individually different attributes. Next, it feeds the unwarped query sequence and the corpus sequence into MTPP guided neural relevance models. We develop two variants of the relevance model which offer a tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency. We also propose an optimization framework to learn binary sequence embeddings from the relevance scores, suitable for the locality-sensitive hashing leading to a significant speedup in returning top-K results for a given query sequence. Our experiments with several datasets show the significant accuracy boost of NEUROSEQRET beyond several baselines, as well as the efficacy of our hashing mechanism.

Learning Temporal Point Processes for Efficient Retrieval of Continuous Time Event Sequences

Zero/few-shot transfer to unseen services is a critical challenge in task-oriented dialogue research. The Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset introduced a paradigm for enabling models to support any service in zero-shot through schemas, which describe service APIs to models in natural language. We explore the robustness of dialogue systems to linguistic variations in schemas by designing SGD-X - a benchmark extending SGD with semantically similar yet stylistically diverse variants for every schema. We observe that two top state tracking models fail to generalize well across schema variants, measured by joint goal accuracy and a novel metric for measuring schema sensitivity. Additionally, we present a simple model-agnostic data augmentation method to improve schema robustness.

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