FedEx: Expediting Federated Learning over Heterogeneous Mobile Devices by Overlapping and Participant Selection

Training latency is critical for the success of numerous intrigued applications ignited by federated learning (FL) over heterogeneous mobile devices. By revolutionarily overlapping local gradient transmission with continuous local computing, FL can remarkably reduce its training latency over homogeneous clients, yet encounter severe model staleness, model drifts, memory cost and straggler issues in heterogeneous environments. To unleash the full potential of overlapping, we propose, FedEx, a novel \underline{fed}erated learning approach to \underline{ex}pedite FL training over mobile devices under data, computing and wireless heterogeneity. FedEx redefines the overlapping procedure with staleness ceilings to constrain memory consumption and make overlapping compatible with participation selection (PS) designs. Then, FedEx characterizes the PS utility function by considering the latency reduced by overlapping, and provides a holistic PS solution to address the straggler issue. FedEx also introduces a simple but effective metric to trigger overlapping, in order to avoid model drifts. Experimental results show that compared with its peer designs, FedEx demonstrates substantial reductions in FL training latency over heterogeneous mobile devices with limited memory cost.

Towards General Computer Control: A Multimodal Agent for Red Dead Redemption II as a Case Study

Despite the success in specific tasks and scenarios, existing foundation agents, empowered by large models (LMs) and advanced tools, still cannot generalize to different scenarios, mainly due to dramatic differences in the observations and actions across scenarios. In this work, we propose the General Computer Control (GCC) setting: building foundation agents that can master any computer task by taking only screen images (and possibly audio) of the computer as input, and producing keyboard and mouse operations as output, similar to human-computer interaction. The main challenges of achieving GCC are: 1) the multimodal observations for decision-making, 2) the requirements of accurate control of keyboard and mouse, 3) the need for long-term memory and reasoning, and 4) the abilities of efficient exploration and self-improvement. To target GCC, we introduce Cradle, an agent framework with six main modules, including: 1) information gathering to extract multi-modality information, 2) self-reflection to rethink past experiences, 3) task inference to choose the best next task, 4) skill curation for generating and updating relevant skills for given tasks, 5) action planning to generate specific operations for keyboard and mouse control, and 6) memory for storage and retrieval of past experiences and known skills. To demonstrate the capabilities of generalization and self-improvement of Cradle, we deploy it in the complex AAA game Red Dead Redemption II, serving as a preliminary attempt towards GCC with a challenging target. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to enable LMM-based agents to follow the main storyline and finish real missions in complex AAA games, with minimal reliance on prior knowledge or resources. The project website is at https://baai-agents.github.io/Cradle/.

Outlier-Aware Training for Low-Bit Quantization of Structural Re-Parameterized Networks

Lightweight design of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) requires co-design efforts in the model architectures and compression techniques. As a novel design paradigm that separates training and inference, a structural re-parameterized (SR) network such as the representative RepVGG revitalizes the simple VGG-like network with a high accuracy comparable to advanced and often more complicated networks. However, the merging process in SR networks introduces outliers into weights, making their distribution distinct from conventional networks and thus heightening difficulties in quantization. To address this, we propose an operator-level improvement for training called Outlier Aware Batch Normalization (OABN). Additionally, to meet the demands of limited bitwidths while upkeeping the inference accuracy, we develop a clustering-based non-uniform quantization framework for Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) named ClusterQAT. Integrating OABN with ClusterQAT, the quantized performance of RepVGG is largely enhanced, particularly when the bitwidth falls below 8.

Mitigating Label Bias in Machine Learning: Fairness through Confident Learning

Discrimination can occur when the underlying unbiased labels are overwritten by an agent with potential bias, resulting in biased datasets that unfairly harm specific groups and cause classifiers to inherit these biases. In this paper, we demonstrate that despite only having access to the biased labels, it is possible to eliminate bias by filtering the fairest instances within the framework of confident learning. In the context of confident learning, low self-confidence usually indicates potential label errors; however, this is not always the case. Instances, particularly those from underrepresented groups, might exhibit low confidence scores for reasons other than labeling errors. To address this limitation, our approach employs truncation of the confidence score and extends the confidence interval of the probabilistic threshold. Additionally, we incorporate with co-teaching paradigm for providing a more robust and reliable selection of fair instances and effectively mitigating the adverse effects of biased labels. Through extensive experimentation and evaluation of various datasets, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in promoting fairness and reducing the impact of label bias in machine learning models.

EventAid: Benchmarking Event-aided Image/Video Enhancement Algorithms with Real-captured Hybrid Dataset

Event cameras are emerging imaging technology that offers advantages over conventional frame-based imaging sensors in dynamic range and sensing speed. Complementing the rich texture and color perception of traditional image frames, the hybrid camera system of event and frame-based cameras enables high-performance imaging. With the assistance of event cameras, high-quality image/video enhancement methods make it possible to break the limits of traditional frame-based cameras, especially exposure time, resolution, dynamic range, and frame rate limits. This paper focuses on five event-aided image and video enhancement tasks (i.e., event-based video reconstruction, event-aided high frame rate video reconstruction, image deblurring, image super-resolution, and high dynamic range image reconstruction), provides an analysis of the effects of different event properties, a real-captured and ground truth labeled benchmark dataset, a unified benchmarking of state-of-the-art methods, and an evaluation for two mainstream event simulators. In detail, this paper collects a real-captured evaluation dataset EventAid for five event-aided image/video enhancement tasks, by using "Event-RGB" multi-camera hybrid system, taking into account scene diversity and spatiotemporal synchronization. We further perform quantitative and visual comparisons for state-of-the-art algorithms, provide a controlled experiment to analyze the performance limit of event-aided image deblurring methods, and discuss open problems to inspire future research.

Hundred-Kilobyte Lookup Tables for Efficient Single-Image Super-Resolution

Conventional super-resolution (SR) schemes make heavy use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which involve intensive multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations, and require specialized hardware such as graphics processing units. This contradicts the regime of edge AI that often runs on devices strained by power, computing, and storage resources. Such a challenge has motivated a series of lookup table (LUT)-based SR schemes that employ simple LUT readout and largely elude CNN computation. Nonetheless, the multi-megabyte LUTs in existing methods still prohibit on-chip storage and necessitate off-chip memory transport. This work tackles this storage hurdle and innovates hundred-kilobyte LUT (HKLUT) models amenable to on-chip cache. Utilizing an asymmetric two-branch multistage network coupled with a suite of specialized kernel patterns, HKLUT demonstrates an uncompromising performance and superior hardware efficiency over existing LUT schemes.

Improving Large-scale Deep Biasing with Phoneme Features and Text-only Data in Streaming Transducer

Deep biasing for the Transducer can improve the recognition performance of rare words or contextual entities, which is essential in practical applications, especially for streaming Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, deep biasing with large-scale rare words remains challenging, as the performance drops significantly when more distractors exist and there are words with similar grapheme sequences in the bias list. In this paper, we combine the phoneme and textual information of rare words in Transducers to distinguish words with similar pronunciation or spelling. Moreover, the introduction of training with text-only data containing more rare words benefits large-scale deep biasing. The experiments on the LibriSpeech corpus demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on rare word error rate for different scales and levels of bias lists.

Simple Cycle Reservoirs are Universal

Reservoir computation models form a subclass of recurrent neural networks with fixed non-trainable input and dynamic coupling weights. Only the static readout from the state space (reservoir) is trainable, thus avoiding the known problems with propagation of gradient information backwards through time. Reservoir models have been successfully applied in a variety of tasks and were shown to be universal approximators of time-invariant fading memory dynamic filters under various settings. Simple cycle reservoirs (SCR) have been suggested as severely restricted reservoir architecture, with equal weight ring connectivity of the reservoir units and input-to-reservoir weights of binary nature with the same absolute value. Such architectures are well suited for hardware implementations without performance degradation in many practical tasks. In this contribution, we rigorously study the expressive power of SCR in the complex domain and show that they are capable of universal approximation of any unrestricted linear reservoir system (with continuous readout) and hence any time-invariant fading memory filter over uniformly bounded input streams.

Text-only Domain Adaptation using Unified Speech-Text Representation in Transducer

Domain adaptation using text-only corpus is challenging in end-to-end(E2E) speech recognition. Adaptation by synthesizing audio from text through TTS is resource-consuming. We present a method to learn Unified Speech-Text Representation in Conformer Transducer(USTR-CT) to enable fast domain adaptation using the text-only corpus. Different from the previous textogram method, an extra text encoder is introduced in our work to learn text representation and is removed during inference, so there is no modification for online deployment. To improve the efficiency of adaptation, single-step and multi-step adaptations are also explored. The experiments on adapting LibriSpeech to SPGISpeech show the proposed method reduces the word error rate(WER) by relatively 44% on the target domain, which is better than those of TTS method and textogram method. Also, it is shown the proposed method can be combined with internal language model estimation(ILME) to further improve the performance.

DyBit: Dynamic Bit-Precision Numbers for Efficient Quantized Neural Network Inference

To accelerate the inference of deep neural networks (DNNs), quantization with low-bitwidth numbers is actively researched. A prominent challenge is to quantize the DNN models into low-bitwidth numbers without significant accuracy degradation, especially at very low bitwidths (< 8 bits). This work targets an adaptive data representation with variable-length encoding called DyBit. DyBit can dynamically adjust the precision and range of separate bit-field to be adapted to the DNN weights/activations distribution. We also propose a hardware-aware quantization framework with a mixed-precision accelerator to trade-off the inference accuracy and speedup. Experimental results demonstrate that the inference accuracy via DyBit is 1.997% higher than the state-of-the-art at 4-bit quantization, and the proposed framework can achieve up to 8.1x speedup compared with the original model.