bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
An Information-Flow Perspective on Algorithmic Fairness
Authors: Teuber Samuel , Beckert Bernhard
Published: March 2024

This work presents insights gained by investigating the relationship between algorithmic fairness and the concept of secure information flow. The problem of enforcing secure information flow is well-studied in the context of information security: If secret information may "flow" through an algorithm or program in such a way that it can influence the program’s output, then that is considered insecure information flow as attackers could potentially observe (parts of) the secret.

There is a strong correspondence between secure information flow and algorithmic fairness: if protected attributes such as race, gender, or age are treated as secret program inputs, then secure information flow means that these "secret" attributes cannot influence the result of a program. While most research in algorithmic fairness evaluation concentrates on studying the impact of algorithms (often treating the algorithm as a black-box), the concepts derived from information flow can be used both for the analysis of disparate treatment as well as disparate impact w.r.t. a structural causal model.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between quantitative as well as qualitative information-flow properties and fairness. Moreover, based on this duality, we derive a new quantitative notion of fairness called fairness spread, which can be easily analyzed using quantitative information flow and which strongly relates to counterfactual fairness. We demonstrate that off-the-shelf tools for information-flow properties can be used in order to formally analyze a program's algorithmic fairness properties, including the new notion of fairness spread as well as established notions such as demographic parity.
Weisfeiler and Lehman Go Paths: Learning Topological Features via Path Complexes
Authors: Truong Quang , Chin Peter
Published: March 2024

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), despite achieving remarkable performance across different tasks, are theoretically bounded by the 1-Weisfeiler-Lehman test, resulting in limitations in terms of graph expressivity. Even though prior works on topological higher-order GNNs overcome that boundary, these models often depend on assumptions about sub-structures of graphs. Specifically, topological GNNs leverage the prevalence of cliques, cycles, and rings to enhance the message-passing procedure. Our study presents a novel perspective by focusing on simple paths within graphs during the topological message-passing process, thus liberating the model from restrictive inductive biases. We prove that by lifting graphs to path complexes, our model can generalize the existing works on topology while inheriting several theoretical results on simplicial complexes and regular cell complexes. Without making prior assumptions about graph sub-structures, our method outperforms earlier works in other topological domains and achieves state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks.
Data Disparity and Temporal Unavailability Aware Asynchronous Federated Learning for Predictive Maintenance on Transportation Fleets
Authors: Von Wahl Leonie , Heidenreich Niklas , Mitra Prasenjit , Nolting Michael , Tempelmeier Nicolas
Published: March 2024

Predictive maintenance has emerged as a critical application in modern transportation, leveraging sensor data to forecast potential damages proactively using machine learning. However, privacy concerns limit data sharing, making Federated learning an appealing approach to preserve data privacy. Nevertheless, challenges arise due to disparities in data distribution and temporal unavailability caused by individual usage patterns in transportation. In this paper, we present a novel asynchronous federated learning approach to address system heterogeneity and facilitate machine learning for predictive maintenance on transportation fleets. The approach introduces a novel data disparity aware aggregation scheme and a federated early stopping method for training. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we evaluate it on two independent real-world datasets from the transportation domain: 1) oil dilution prediction of car combustion engines and 2) remaining lifetime prediction of plane turbofan engines. Our experiments show that we reliably outperform five state-of-the-art baselines, including federated and classical machine learning models. Moreover, we show that our approach generalises to various prediction model architectures.
Towards Stability and Generalization Bounds in Decentralized Minibatch Stochastic Gradient Descent
Authors: Wang Jiahuan , Chen Hong
Published: March 2024

Decentralized Stochastic Gradient Descent (D-SGD) represents an efficient communication approach tailored for mastering insights from vast, distributed datasets. Inspired by parallel optimization paradigms, the incorporation of minibatch serves to diminish variance, consequently expediting the optimization process. Nevertheless, as per our current understanding, the existing literature has not thoroughly explored the learning theory foundation of Decentralized Minibatch Stochastic Gradient Descent (DM-SGD). In this paper, we try to address this theoretical gap by investigating the generalization properties of DM-SGD. We establish the sharper generalization bounds for the DM-SGD algorithm with replacement (without replacement) on (non)convex and (non)smooth cases. Moreover, our results consistently recover to the results of Centralized Stochastic Gradient Descent (C-SGD). In addition, we derive generalization analysis for Zero-Order (ZO) version of DM-SGD.
SURER: Structure-Adaptive Unified Graph Neural Network for Multi-View Clustering
Authors: Wang Jing , Feng Songhe , Lyu Gengyu , Yuan Jiazheng
Published: March 2024

Deep Multi-view Graph Clustering (DMGC) aims to partition instances into different groups using the graph information extracted from multi-view data. The mainstream framework of DMGC methods applies graph neural networks to embed structure information into the view-specific representations and fuse them for the consensus representation. However, on one hand, we find that the graph learned in advance is not ideal for clustering as it is constructed by original multi-view data and localized connecting. On the other hand, most existing methods learn the consensus representation in a late fusion manner, which fails to propagate the structure relations across multiple views. Inspired by the observations, we propose a Structure-adaptive Unified gRaph nEural network for multi-view clusteRing (SURER), which can jointly learn a heterogeneous multi-view unified graph and robust graph neural networks for multi-view clustering. Specifically, we first design a graph structure learning module to refine the original view-specific attribute graphs, which removes false edges and discovers the potential connection. According to the view-specific refined attribute graphs, we integrate them into a unified heterogeneous graph by linking the representations of the same sample from different views. Furthermore, we use the unified heterogeneous graph as the input of the graph neural network to learn the consensus representation for each instance, effectively integrating complementary information from various views. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our method compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.
Considering Nonstationary within Multivariate Time Series with Variational Hierarchical Transformer for Forecasting
Authors: Wang Muyao , Chen Wenchao , Chen Bo
Published: March 2024

The forecasting of Multivariate Time Series (MTS) has long been an important but challenging task. Due to the non-stationary problem across long-distance time steps, previous studies primarily adopt stationarization method to attenuate the non-stationary problem of original series for better predictability. However, existed methods always adopt the stationarized series, which ignore the inherent non-stationarity, and have difficulty in modeling MTS with complex distributions due to the lack of stochasticity. To tackle these problems, we first develop a powerful hierarchical probabilistic generative module to consider the non-stationarity and stochastity characteristics within MTS, and then combine it with transformer for a well-defined variational generative dynamic model named Hierarchical Time series Variational Transformer (HTV-Trans), which recovers the intrinsic non-stationary information into temporal dependencies. Being an powerful probabilistic model, HTV-Trans is utilized to learn expressive representations of MTS and applied to the forecasting tasks. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets show the efficiency of HTV-Trans on MTS forecasting tasks.
AQ-DETR: Low-Bit Quantized Detection Transformer with Auxiliary Queries
Authors: Wang Runqi , Sun Huixin , Yang Linlin , Lin Shaohui , Liu Chuanjian , Gao Yan , Hu Yao , Zhang Baochang
Published: March 2024

DEtection TRansformer (DETR)-based models have achieved remarkable performance. However, they are accompanied by a large computation overhead cost, which significantly prevents their applications on resource-limited devices. Prior arts attempt to reduce the computational burden of DETR using low-bit quantization, while these methods sacrifice a severe significant performance on weight-activation-attention low-bit quantization. We observe that the number of matching queries and positive samples affect much on the representation capacity of queries in DETR, while quantifying queries of DETR further reduces its representational capacity, thus leading to a severe performance drop. We introduce a new quantization strategy based on Auxiliary Queries for DETR (AQ-DETR), aiming to enhance the capacity of quantized queries. In addition, a layer-by-layer distillation is proposed to reduce the quantization error between quantized attention and full-precision counterpart. Through our extensive experiments on large-scale open datasets, the performance of the 4-bit quantization of DETR and Deformable DETR models is comparable to full-precision counterparts.
Online Restless Multi-Armed Bandits with Long-Term Fairness Constraints
Authors: Wang Shufan , Xiong Guojun , Li Jian
Published: March 2024

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) have been widely used to model sequential decision making problems with constraints. The decision maker (DM) aims to maximize the expected total reward over an infinite horizon under an “instantaneous activation constraint” that at most B arms can be activated at any decision epoch, where the state of each arm evolves stochastically according to a Markov decision process (MDP). However, this basic model fails to provide any fairness guarantee among arms. In this paper, we introduce RMAB-F, a new RMAB model with “long-term fairness constraints”, where the objective now is to maximize the longterm reward while a minimum long-term activation fraction for each arm must be satisfied. For the online RMAB-F setting (i.e., the underlying MDPs associated with each arm are unknown to the DM), we develop a novel reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm named Fair-UCRL. We prove that Fair-UCRL ensures probabilistic sublinear bounds on both the reward regret and the fairness violation regret. Compared with off-the-shelf RL methods, our Fair-UCRL is much more computationally efficient since it contains a novel exploitation that leverages a low-complexity index policy for making decisions. Experimental results further demonstrate the effectiveness of our Fair-UCRL.
Wavelet Dynamic Selection Network for Inertial Sensor Signal Enhancement
Authors: Wang Yifeng , Zhao Yi
Published: March 2024

As attitude and motion sensing components, inertial sensors are widely used in various portable devices, covering consumer electronics, sports health, aerospace, etc. But the severe intrinsic errors of inertial sensors heavily restrain their function implementation, especially the advanced functionality, including motion trajectory recovery and motion semantic recognition, which attracts considerable attention. As a mainstream signal processing method, wavelet is hailed as the mathematical microscope of signal due to the plentiful and diverse wavelet basis functions. However, complicated noise types and application scenarios of inertial sensors make selecting wavelet basis perplexing. To this end, we propose a wavelet dynamic selection network (WDSNet), which intelligently selects the appropriate wavelet basis for variable inertial signals. In addition, existing deep learning architectures excel at extracting features from input data but neglect to learn the characteristics of target categories, which is essential to enhance the category awareness capability, thereby improving the selection of wavelet basis. Therefore, we propose a category representation mechanism (CRM), which enables the network to extract and represent category features without increasing trainable parameters. Furthermore, CRM transforms the common fully connected network into category representations, which provide closer supervision to the feature extractor than the far and trivial one-hot classification labels. We call this process of imposing interpretability on a network and using it to supervise the feature extractor the feature supervision mechanism, and its effectiveness is demonstrated experimentally and theoretically in this paper. The enhanced inertial signal can perform impracticable tasks with regard to the original signal, such as trajectory reconstruction. Both quantitative and visual results show that WDSNet outperforms the existing methods. Remarkably, WDSNet, as a weakly-supervised method, achieves the state-of-the-art performance of all the compared fully-supervised methods.
Critic-Guided Decision Transformer for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Wang Yuanfu , Yang Chao , Wen Ying , Liu Yu , Qiao Yu
Published: March 2024

Recent advancements in offline reinforcement learning (RL) have underscored the capabilities of Return-Conditioned Supervised Learning (RCSL), a paradigm that learns the action distribution based on target returns for each state in a supervised manner. However, prevailing RCSL methods largely focus on deterministic trajectory modeling, disregarding stochastic state transitions and the diversity of future trajectory distributions. A fundamental challenge arises from the inconsistency between the sampled returns within individual trajectories and the expected returns across multiple trajectories. Fortunately, value-based methods offer a solution by leveraging a value function to approximate the expected returns, thereby addressing the inconsistency effectively. Building upon these insights, we propose a novel approach, termed the Critic-Guided Decision Transformer (CGDT), which combines the predictability of long-term returns from value-based methods with the trajectory modeling capability of the Decision Transformer. By incorporating a learned value function, known as the critic, CGDT ensures a direct alignment between the specified target returns and the expected returns of actions. This integration bridges the gap between the deterministic nature of RCSL and the probabilistic characteristics of value-based methods. Empirical evaluations on stochastic environments and D4RL benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of CGDT over traditional RCSL methods. These results highlight the potential of CGDT to advance the state of the art in offline RL and extend the applicability of RCSL to a wide range of RL tasks.
DRF: Improving Certified Robustness via Distributional Robustness Framework
Authors: Wang Zekai , Zhou Zhengyu , Liu Weiwei
Published: March 2024

Randomized smoothing (RS) has provided state-of-the-art (SOTA) certified robustness against adversarial perturbations for large neural networks. Among studies in this field, methods based on adversarial training (AT) achieve remarkably robust performance by applying adversarial examples to construct the smoothed classifier. These AT-based RS methods typically seek a pointwise adversary that generates the worst-case adversarial examples by perturbing each input independently. However, there are unexplored benefits to considering such adversarial robustness across the entire data distribution. To this end, we provide a novel framework called DRF, which connects AT-based RS methods with distributional robustness (DR), and show that these methods are special cases of their counterparts in our framework. Due to the advantages conferred by DR, our framework can control the trade-off between the clean accuracy and certified robustness of smoothed classifiers to a significant extent. Our experiments demonstrate that DRF can substantially improve the certified robustness of AT-based RS.
BVT-IMA: Binary Vision Transformer with Information-Modified Attention
Authors: Wang Zhenyu , Luo Hao , Xie Xuemei , Wang Fan , Shi Guangming
Published: March 2024

As a compression method that can significantly reduce the cost of calculations and memories, model binarization has been extensively studied in convolutional neural networks. However, the recently popular vision transformer models pose new challenges to such a technique, in which the binarized models suffer from serious performance drops. In this paper, an attention shifting is observed in the binary multi-head self-attention module, which can influence the information fusion between tokens and thus hurts the model performance. From the perspective of information theory, we find a correlation between attention scores and the information quantity, further indicating that a reason for such a phenomenon may be the loss of the information quantity induced by constant moduli of binarized tokens. Finally, we reveal the information quantity hidden in the attention maps of binary vision transformers and propose a simple approach to modify the attention values with look-up information tables so that improve the model performance. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100/TinyImageNet/ImageNet-1k demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed information-modified attention on binary vision transformers.
Communication Efficient Distributed Newton Method over Unreliable Networks
Authors: Wen Ming , Liu Chengchang , Xu Yuedong
Published: March 2024

Distributed optimization in resource constrained devices demands both communication efficiency and fast convergence rates. Newton-type methods are getting preferable due to their superior convergence rates compared to the first-order methods. In this paper, we study a new problem in regard to the second-order distributed optimization over unreliable networks. The working devices are power-limited or operate in unfavorable wireless channels, experiencing packet losses during their uplink transmission to the server. Our scenario is very common in real-world and leads to instability of classical distributed optimization methods especially the second-order methods because of their sensitivity to the imprecision of local Hessian matrices. To achieve robustness to high packet loss, communication efficiency and fast convergence rates, we propose a novel distributed second-order method, called RED-New (Packet loss Resilient Distributed Approximate Newton). Each iteration of RED-New comprises two rounds of light-weight and lossy transmissions, in which the server aggregates the local information with a new developed scaling strategy. We prove the linear-quadratic convergence rate of RED-New. Experimental results demonstrate its advantage over first-order and second-order baselines, and its tolerance to packet loss rate ranging from 5% to 40%.
Distilling Reliable Knowledge for Instance-Dependent Partial Label Learning
Authors: Wu Dong-Dong , Wang Deng-Bao , Zhang Min-Ling
Published: March 2024

Partial label learning (PLL) refers to the classification task where each training instance is ambiguously annotated with a set of candidate labels. Despite substantial advancements in tackling this challenge, limited attention has been devoted to a more specific and realistic setting, denoted as instance-dependent partial label learning (IDPLL). Within this contex, the assignment of partial labels depends on the distinct features of individual instances, rather than being random. In this paper, we initiate an exploration into a self-distillation framework for this problem, driven by the proven effectiveness and stability of this framework. Nonetheless, a crucial shortfall is identified: the foundational assumption central to IDPLL, involving what we term as partial label knowledge stipulating that candidate labels should exhibit superior confidence compared to non-candidates, is not fully upheld within the distillation process. To address this challenge, we introduce DIRK, a novel distillation approach that leverages a rectification process to DIstill Reliable Knowledge, while concurrently preserves informative fine-grained label confidence. In addition, to harness the rectified confidence to its fullest potential, we propose a knowledge-based representation refinement module, seamlessly integrated into the DIRK framework. This module effectively transmits the essence of similarity knowledge from the label space to the feature space, thereby amplifying representation learning and subsequently engendering marked improvements in model performance. Experiments and analysis on multiple datasets validate the rationality and superiority of our proposed approach.
OCEAN-MBRL: Offline Conservative Exploration for Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Wu Fan , Zhang Rui , Yi Qi , Gao Yunkai , Guo Jiaming , Peng Shaohui , Lan Siming , Han Husheng , Pan Yansong , Yuan Kaizhao , Jin Pengwei , Chen Ruizhi , Chen Yunji , Li Ling
Published: March 2024

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have emerged as a promising paradigm for offline RL.
These algorithms usually learn a dynamics model from a static dataset of transitions, use the model to generate synthetic trajectories, and perform conservative policy optimization within these trajectories.
However, our observations indicate that policy optimization methods used in these model-based offline RL algorithms are not effective at exploring the learned model and induce biased exploration, which ultimately impairs the performance of the algorithm.
To address this issue, we propose Offline Conservative ExplorAtioN (OCEAN), a novel rollout approach to model-based offline RL.
In our method, we incorporate additional exploration techniques and introduce three conservative constraints based on uncertainty estimation to mitigate the potential impact of significant dynamic errors resulting from exploratory transitions.
Our work is a plug-in method and can be combined with classical model-based RL algorithms, such as MOPO, COMBO, and RAMBO.
Experiment results of our method on the D4RL MuJoCo benchmark show that OCEAN significantly improves the performance of existing algorithms.
H-ensemble: An Information Theoretic Approach to Reliable Few-Shot Multi-Source-Free Transfer
Authors: Wu Yanru , Wang Jianning , Wang Weida , Li Yang
Published: March 2024

Multi-source transfer learning is an effective solution to data scarcity by utilizing multiple source tasks for the learning of the target task. However, access to source data and model details is limited in the era of commercial models, giving rise to the setting of multi-source-free (MSF) transfer learning that aims to leverage source domain knowledge without such access. As a newly defined problem paradigm, MSF transfer learning remains largely underexplored and not clearly formulated. In this work, we adopt an information theoretic perspective on it and propose a framework named H-ensemble, which dynamically learns the optimal linear combination, or ensemble, of source models for the target task, using a generalization of maximal correlation regression. The ensemble weights are optimized by maximizing an information theoretic metric for transferability. Compared to previous works, H-ensemble is characterized by: 1) its adaptability to a novel and realistic MSF setting for few-shot target tasks, 2) theoretical reliability, 3) a lightweight structure easy to interpret and adapt. Our method is empirically validated by ablation studies, along with extensive comparative analysis with other task ensemble and transfer learning methods. We show that the H-ensemble can successfully learn the optimal task ensemble, as well as outperform prior arts.
A Separation and Alignment Framework for Black-Box Domain Adaptation
Authors: Xia Mingxuan , Zhao Junbo , Lyu Gengyu , Huang Zenan , Hu Tianlei , Chen Gang , Wang Haobo
Published: March 2024

Black-box domain adaptation (BDA) targets to learn a classifier on an unsupervised target domain while assuming only access to black-box predictors trained from unseen source data. Although a few BDA approaches have demonstrated promise by manipulating the transferred labels, they largely overlook the rich underlying structure in the target domain. To address this problem, we introduce a novel separation and alignment framework for BDA. Firstly, we locate those well-adapted samples via loss ranking and a flexible confidence-thresholding procedure. Then, we introduce a novel graph contrastive learning objective that aligns under-adapted samples to their local neighbors and well-adapted samples. Lastly, the adaptation is finally achieved by a nearest-centroid-augmented objective that exploits the clustering effect in the feature space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms best baselines on benchmark datasets, e.g. improving the averaged per-class accuracy by 4.1% on the VisDA dataset. The source code is available at: https://github.com/MingxuanXia/SEAL.
BiPFT: Binary Pre-trained Foundation Transformer with Low-Rank Estimation of Binarization Residual Polynomials
Authors: Xing Xingrun , Du Li , Wang Xinyuan , Zeng Xianlin , Wang Yequan , Zhang Zheng , Zhang Jiajun
Published: March 2024

Pretrained foundation models offer substantial benefits for a wide range of downstream tasks, which can be one of the most potential techniques to access artificial general intelligence. However, scaling up foundation transformers for maximal task-agnostic knowledge has brought about computational challenges, especially on resource-limited devices such as mobiles. This work proposes the first Binary Pretrained Foundation Transformer (BiPFT) for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, which remarkably saves 56 times operations and 28 times memory. In contrast to previous task-specific binary transformers, BiPFT exhibits a substantial enhancement in the learning capabilities of binary neural networks (BNNs), promoting BNNs into the era of pre-training. Benefiting from extensive pretraining data, we further propose a data-driven binarization method. Specifically, we first analyze the binarization error in self-attention operations and derive the polynomials of binarization error. To simulate full-precision self-attention, we define binarization error as binarization residual polynomials, and then introduce low-rank estimators to model these polynomials. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of BiPFTs, surpassing task-specific baseline by 15.4% average performance on the GLUE benchmark. BiPFT also demonstrates improved robustness to hyperparameter changes, improved optimization efficiency, and reduced reliance on downstream distillation, which consequently generalize on various NLU tasks and simplify the downstream pipeline of BNNs. Our code and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/Xingrun-Xing/BiPFT.
FairWASP: Fast and Optimal Fair Wasserstein Pre-processing
Authors: Xiong Zikai , Dalmasso Niccolò , Mishler Alan , Potluru Vamsi K. , Balch Tucker , Veloso Manuela
Published: March 2024

Recent years have seen a surge of machine learning approaches aimed at reducing disparities in model outputs across different subgroups. In many settings, training data may be used in multiple downstream applications by different users, which means it may be most effective to intervene on the training data itself. In this work, we present FairWASP, a novel pre-processing approach designed to reduce disparities in classification datasets without modifying the original data. FairWASP returns sample-level weights such that the reweighted dataset minimizes the Wasserstein distance to the original dataset while satisfying (an empirical version of) demographic parity, a popular fairness criterion. We show theoretically that integer weights are optimal, which means our method can be equivalently understood as duplicating or eliminating samples. FairWASP can therefore be used to construct datasets which can be fed into any classification method, not just methods which accept sample weights. Our work is based on reformulating the pre-processing task as a large-scale mixed-integer program (MIP), for which we propose a highly efficient algorithm based on the cutting plane method. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed optimization algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art commercial solvers in solving both the MIP and its linear program relaxation. Further experiments highlight the competitive performance of FairWASP in reducing disparities while preserving accuracy in downstream classification settings.
Enhancing Ensemble Clustering with Adaptive High-Order Topological Weights
Authors: Xu Jiaxuan , Li Taiyong , Duan Lei
Published: March 2024

Ensemble clustering learns more accurate consensus results from a set of weak base clustering results. This technique is more challenging than other clustering algorithms due to the base clustering result set's randomness and the inaccessibility of data features. Existing ensemble clustering methods rely on the Co-association (CA) matrix quality but lack the capability to handle missing connections in base clustering. Inspired by the neighborhood high-order and topological similarity theories, this paper proposes a topological ensemble model based on high-order information. Specifically, this paper compensates for missing connections by mining neighborhood high-order connection information in the CA matrix and learning optimal connections with adaptive weights. Afterward, the learned excellent connections are embedded into topology learning to capture the topology of the base clustering. Finally, we incorporate adaptive high-order connection representation and topology learning into a unified learning framework. To our knowledge, this is the first ensemble clustering work based on topological similarity and high-order connectivity relations. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code of the proposed approach is available at https://github.com/ltyong/awec.
LSTKC: Long Short-Term Knowledge Consolidation for Lifelong Person Re-identification
Authors: Xu Kunlun , Zou Xu , Zhou Jiahuan
Published: March 2024

Lifelong person re-identification (LReID) aims to train a unified model from diverse data sources step by step. The severe domain gaps between different training steps result in catastrophic forgetting in LReID, and existing methods mainly rely on data replay and knowledge distillation techniques to handle this issue. However, the former solution needs to store historical exemplars which inevitably impedes data privacy. The existing knowledge distillation-based models usually retain all the knowledge of the learned old models without any selections, which will inevitably include erroneous and detrimental knowledge that severely impacts the learning performance of the new model. To address these issues, we propose an exemplar-free LReID method named LongShort Term Knowledge Consolidation (LSTKC) that contains a Rectification-based Short-Term Knowledge Transfer module (R-STKT) and an Estimation-based Long-Term Knowledge Consolidation module (E-LTKC). For each learning iteration within one training step, R-STKT aims to filter and rectify the erroneous knowledge contained in the old model and transfer the rectified knowledge to facilitate the short-term learning of the new model. Meanwhile, once one training step is finished, E-LTKC proposes to further consolidate the learned long-term knowledge via adaptively fusing the parameters of models from different steps. Consequently, experimental results show that our LSTKC exceeds the state-of-the-art methods by 6.3%/9.4% and 7.9%/4.5%, 6.4%/8.0% and 9.0%/5.5% average mAP/R@1 on seen and unseen domains under two different training orders of the challenging LReID benchmark respectively.
Federated Causality Learning with Explainable Adaptive Optimization
Authors: Yang Dezhi , He Xintong , Wang Jun , Yu Guoxian , Domeniconi Carlotta , Zhang Jinglin
Published: March 2024

Discovering the causality from observational data is a crucial task in various scientific domains. With increasing awareness of privacy, data are not allowed to be exposed, and it is very hard to learn causal graphs from dispersed data, since these data may have different distributions. In this paper, we propose a federated causal discovery strategy (FedCausal) to learn the unified global causal graph from decentralized heterogeneous data. We design a global optimization formula to naturally aggregate the causal graphs from client data and constrain the acyclicity of the global graph without exposing local data. Unlike other federated causal learning algorithms, FedCausal unifies the local and global optimizations into a complete directed acyclic graph (DAG) learning process with a flexible optimization objective. We prove that this optimization objective has a high interpretability and can adaptively handle homogeneous and heterogeneous data. Experimental results on synthetic and real datasets show that FedCausal can effectively deal with non-independently and identically distributed (non-iid) data and has a superior performance.
Harnessing the Power of SVD: An SVA Module for Enhanced Signal Classification
Authors: Zhai Lei , Yang Shuyuan , Li Yitong , Feng Zhixi , Chang Zhihao , Gao Quanwei
Published: March 2024

Deep learning methods have achieved outstanding performance in various signal tasks. However, due to degraded signals in real electromagnetic environment, it is crucial to seek methods that can improve the representation of signal features. In this paper, a Singular Value decomposition-based Attention, SVA is proposed to explore structure of signal data for adaptively enhancing intrinsic feature. Using a deep neural network as a base model, SVA performs feature semantic subspace learning through a decomposition layer and combines it with an attention layer to achieve adaptive enhancement of signal features. Moreover, we consider the gradient explosion problem brought by SVA and optimize SVA to improve the stability of training. Extensive experimental results demon-strate that applying SVA to a generalized classification model can significantly improve its ability in representations, making its recognition performance competitive with, or even better than, the state-of-the-art task-specific models.
Learning Cluster-Wise Anchors for Multi-View Clustering
Authors: Zhang Chao , Jia Xiuyi , Li Zechao , Chen Chunlin , Li Huaxiong
Published: March 2024

Due to its effectiveness and efficiency, anchor based multi-view clustering (MVC) has recently attracted much attention. Most existing approaches try to adaptively learn anchors to construct an anchor graph for clustering. However, they generally focus on improving the diversity among anchors by using orthogonal constraint and ignore the underlying semantic relations, which may make the anchors not representative and discriminative enough. To address this problem, we propose an adaptive Cluster-wise Anchor learning based MVC method, CAMVC for short. We first make an anchor cluster assumption that supposes the prior cluster structure of target anchors by pre-defining a consensus cluster indicator matrix. Based on the prior knowledge, an explicit cluster structure of latent anchors is enforced by learning diverse cluster centroids, which can explore both inter-cluster diversity and intra-cluster consistency of anchors, and improve the subspace representation discrimination. Extensive results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method compared with some state-of-the-art MVC approaches.
Targeted Activation Penalties Help CNNs Ignore Spurious Signals
Authors: Zhang Dekai , Williams Matt , Toni Francesca
Published: March 2024

Neural networks (NNs) can learn to rely on spurious signals in the training data, leading to poor generalisation. Recent methods tackle this problem by training NNs with additional ground-truth annotations of such signals. These methods may, however, let spurious signals re-emerge in deep convolutional NNs (CNNs). We propose Targeted Activation Penalty (TAP), a new method tackling the same problem by penalising activations to control the re-emergence of spurious signals in deep CNNs, while also lowering training times and memory usage. In addition, ground-truth annotations can be expensive to obtain. We show that TAP still works well with annotations generated by pre-trained models as effective substitutes of ground-truth annotations. We demonstrate the power of TAP against two state-of-the-art baselines on the MNIST benchmark and on two clinical image datasets, using four different CNN architectures.
Robust Test-Time Adaptation for Zero-Shot Prompt Tuning
Authors: Zhang Ding-Chu , Zhou Zhi , Li Yu-Feng
Published: March 2024

CLIP has demonstrated remarkable generalization across diverse downstream tasks. By aligning images and texts in a shared feature space, they enable zero-shot classification via hand-crafted prompts. However, recent studies have shown that hand-crafted prompts may be unsuitable in practical applications. Specifically, choosing an appropriate prompt for a given task requires accurate data and knowledge, which may not be obtainable in practical situations. An inappropriate prompt can result in poor performance. Moreover, if there is no training data, tuning prompts arbitrarily through unlabeled test data may lead to serious performance degradation when giving hand-crafted prompts. Our study reveals that the aforementioned problems are mainly due to the biases in testing data (Data Bias) and pre-trained CLIP model (Model Bias). The Data Bias makes it challenging to choose an appropriate prompt, while Model Bias renders some predictions inaccurate and biased, which leads to error accumulation. To address these biases, we propose robust test-time Adaptation for zeroshot Prompt tuning (ADAPROMPT). Specifically, we ensemble multiple prompts to avoid the worst-case results and dynamically tune prompts to adapt to Data Bias during testing. Furthermore, we adopt a confidence-aware buffer to store balanced and confident unlabeled test data to tune prompts in order to overcome Model Bias. Our extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that ADAPROMPT alleviates model bias, adapts to data bias and mostly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods at a small time cost. Moreover, our experimental results reveal that ADAPROMPT hardly encounters any performance degradation on these datasets.
Reviewing the Forgotten Classes for Domain Adaptation of Black-Box Predictors
Authors: Zhang Shaojie , Shen Chun , Lü Shuai , Zhang Zeyu
Published: March 2024

For addressing the data privacy and portability issues of domain adaptation, Domain Adaptation of Black-box Predictors (DABP) aims to adapt a black-box source model to an unlabeled target domain without accessing both the source-domain data and details of the source model. Although existing DABP approaches based on knowledge distillation (KD) have achieved promising results, we experimentally find that these methods all have the minority class forgetting issue, which refers that the trained model completely forgets some minority classes. To address this issue, we propose a method called Reviewing the Forgotten Classes (RFC), which including two main modules. Firstly, we propose a simple but effective component called selection training (ST). ST selects classes that the model tends to forget according to the learning status of the model and obtains clean samples of the selected classes with the small-loss criterion for enhanced training. ST is orthogonal to previous methods and can effectively alleviate their minority class forgetting issue. Secondly, we find that neighborhood clustering (NC) can help the model learn more balanced than KD so that further alleviate the minority class forgetting issue. However, NC is based on the fact that target features from the source model already form some semantic structure, while DABP is unable to obtain the source model. Thus, we use KD and ST to warm up the target model to form a certain semantic structure. Overall, our method inherits the merits of both ST and NC, and achieves state of the art on three DABP benchmarks.
Learning Multi-Task Sparse Representation Based on Fisher Information
Authors: Zhang Yayu , Qian Yuhua , Ma Guoshuai , Zheng Keyin , Liu Guoqing , Zhang Qingfu
Published: March 2024

Multi-task learning deals with multiple related tasks simultaneously by sharing knowledge. In a typical deep multi-task learning model, all tasks use the same feature space and share the latent knowledge. If the tasks are weakly correlated or some features are negatively correlated, sharing all knowledge often leads to negative knowledge transfer among. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a Fisher sparse multi-task learning method. It can obtain a sparse sharing representation for each task. In such a way, tasks share features on a sparse subspace. Our method can ensure that the knowledge transferred among tasks is beneficial. Specifically, we first propose a sparse deep multi-task learning model, and then introduce Fisher sparse module into traditional deep multi-task learning to learn the sparse variables of task. By alternately updating the neural network parameters and sparse variables, a sparse sharing representation can be learned for each task. In addition, in order to reduce the computational overhead, an heuristic method is used to estimate the Fisher information of neural network parameters. Experimental results show that, comparing with other methods, our proposed method can improve the performance for all tasks, and has high sparsity in multi-task learning.
Dynamic Reactive Spiking Graph Neural Network
Authors: Zhao Han , Yang Xu , Deng Cheng , Yan Junchi
Published: March 2024

Spiking Graph Neural Networks are emerging tools for analyzing graph data along with low energy consumption and certain biological fidelity. Existing methods directly integrate same-reactive spiking neurons into graph neural networks for processing propagated graphs. However, such same-reactive neurons are not biological-functionality enough compared to the brain's dynamic-reactive ones, limiting the model's expression. Meanwhile, insufficient long-range neighbor information can be excavated with the few-step propagated graph, restricting discrimination of graph spiking embeddings. Inspired by the dynamic cognition in the brain, we propose a Dynamic Reactive Spiking Graph Neural Network that can enhance model's expressive ability in higher biological fidelity. Specifically, we design dynamic reactive spiking neurons to process spiking graph inputs, which have unique optimizable thresholds to spontaneously explore dynamic reactive states between neurons. Moreover, discriminative graph positional spikes are learned and integrated adaptively into spiking outputs through our neurons, thereby exploring long-range neighbors more thoroughly. Finally, with the dynamic reactive mechanism and learnable positional integration, we can obtain a powerful and highly bio-fidelity model with low energy consumption. Experiments on various domain-related datasets can demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. Our code is available at https://github.com/hzhao98/DRSGNN.
Embedded Feature Selection on Graph-Based Multi-View Clustering
Authors: Zhao Wenhui , Li Guangfei , Yang Haizhou , Gao Quanxue , Wang Qianqian
Published: March 2024

Recently, anchor graph-based multi-view clustering has been proven to be highly efficient for large-scale data processing. However, most existing anchor graph-based clustering methods necessitate post-processing to obtain clustering labels and are unable to effectively utilize the information within anchor graphs. To solve these problems, we propose an Embedded Feature Selection on Graph-Based Multi-View Clustering (EFSGMC) approach to improve the clustering performance. Our method decomposes anchor graphs, taking advantage of memory efficiency, to obtain clustering labels in a single step without the need for post-processing. Furthermore, we introduce the l2,p-norm for graph-based feature selection, which selects the most relevant data for efficient graph factorization. Lastly, we employ the tensor Schatten p-norm as a tensor rank approximation function to capture the complementary information between different views, ensuring similarity between cluster assignment matrices. Experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
CcDPM: A Continuous Conditional Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Inverse Design
Authors: Zhao Yanxuan , Zhang Peng , Sun Guopeng , Yang Zhigong , Chen Jianqiang , Wang Yueqing
Published: March 2024

Engineering design methods aim to generate new designs that meet desired performance requirements. Past work has directly introduced conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) into this field and achieved promising results in single-point design problems(one performance requirement under one working condition). However, these methods assume that the performance requirements are distributed in categorical space, which is not reasonable in these scenarios. Although Continuous conditional GANs (CcGANs) introduce Vicinal Risk Minimization (VRM) to reduce the performance loss caused by this assumption, they still face the following challenges: 1) CcGANs can not handle multi-point design problems (multiple performance requirements under multiple working conditions). 2) Their training process is time-consuming due to the high computational complexity of the vicinal loss. To address these issues, A Continuous conditional Diffusion Probabilistic Model (CcDPM) is proposed, which the first time introduces the diffusion model into the engineering design area and VRM into the diffusion model. CcDPM adopts a novel sampling method called multi-point design sampling to deal with multi-point design problems. Moreover, the k-d tree is used in the training process of CcDPM to shorten the calculation time of vicinal loss and speed up the training process by 2-300 times in our experiments. Experiments on a synthetic problem and three real-world design problems demonstrate that CcDPM outperforms the state-of-the-art GAN models.