Personalized Interpretation on Federated Learning: A Virtual Concepts approach

Tackling non-IID data is an open challenge in federated learning research. Existing FL methods, including robust FL and personalized FL, are designed to improve model performance without consideration of interpreting non-IID across clients. This paper aims to design a novel FL method to robust and interpret the non-IID data across clients. Specifically, we interpret each client's dataset as a mixture of conceptual vectors that each one represents an interpretable concept to end-users. These conceptual vectors could be pre-defined or refined in a human-in-the-loop process or be learnt via the optimization procedure of the federated learning system. In addition to the interpretability, the clarity of client-specific personalization could also be applied to enhance the robustness of the training process on FL system. The effectiveness of the proposed method have been validated on benchmark datasets.

Multi-Level Additive Modeling for Structured Non-IID Federated Learning

The primary challenge in Federated Learning (FL) is to model non-IID distributions across clients, whose fine-grained structure is important to improve knowledge sharing. For example, some knowledge is globally shared across all clients, some is only transferable within a subgroup of clients, and some are client-specific. To capture and exploit this structure, we train models organized in a multi-level structure, called ``Multi-level Additive Models (MAM)'', for better knowledge-sharing across heterogeneous clients and their personalization. In federated MAM (FeMAM), each client is assigned to at most one model per level and its personalized prediction sums up the outputs of models assigned to it across all levels. For the top level, FeMAM trains one global model shared by all clients as FedAvg. For every mid-level, it learns multiple models each assigned to a subgroup of clients, as clustered FL. Every bottom-level model is trained for one client only. In the training objective, each model aims to minimize the residual of the additive predictions by the other models assigned to each client. To approximate the arbitrary structure of non-IID across clients, FeMAM introduces more flexibility and adaptivity to FL by incrementally adding new models to the prediction of each client and reassigning another if necessary, automatically optimizing the knowledge-sharing structure. Extensive experiments show that FeMAM surpasses existing clustered FL and personalized FL methods in various non-IID settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/shutong043/FeMAM.

Personalized Adapter for Large Meteorology Model on Devices: Towards Weather Foundation Models

This paper demonstrates that pre-trained language models (PLMs) are strong foundation models for on-device meteorological variables modeling. We present LM-Weather, a generic approach to taming PLMs, that have learned massive sequential knowledge from the universe of natural language databases, to acquire an immediate capability to obtain highly customized models for heterogeneous meteorological data on devices while keeping high efficiency. Concretely, we introduce a lightweight personalized adapter into PLMs and endows it with weather pattern awareness. During communication between clients and the server, low-rank-based transmission is performed to effectively fuse the global knowledge among devices while maintaining high communication efficiency and ensuring privacy. Experiments on real-wold dataset show that LM-Weather outperforms the state-of-the-art results by a large margin across various tasks (e.g., forecasting and imputation at different scales). We provide extensive and in-depth analyses experiments, which verify that LM-Weather can (1) indeed leverage sequential knowledge from natural language to accurately handle meteorological sequence, (2) allows each devices obtain highly customized models under significant heterogeneity, and (3) generalize under data-limited and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios.

Federated Adaptation for Foundation Model-based Recommendations

With the recent success of large language models, particularly foundation models with generalization abilities, applying foundation models for recommendations becomes a new paradigm to improve existing recommendation systems. It becomes a new open challenge to enable the foundation model to capture user preference changes in a timely manner with reasonable communication and computation costs while preserving privacy. This paper proposes a novel federated adaptation mechanism to enhance the foundation model-based recommendation system in a privacy-preserving manner. Specifically, each client will learn a lightweight personalized adapter using its private data. The adapter then collaborates with pre-trained foundation models to provide recommendation service efficiently with fine-grained manners. Importantly, users' private behavioral data remains secure as it is not shared with the server. This data localization-based privacy preservation is embodied via the federated learning framework. The model can ensure that shared knowledge is incorporated into all adapters while simultaneously preserving each user's personal preferences. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate our method's superior performance. Implementation code is available to ease reproducibility.

What Hides behind Unfairness? Exploring Dynamics Fairness in Reinforcement Learning

In sequential decision-making problems involving sensitive attributes like race and gender, reinforcement learning (RL) agents must carefully consider long-term fairness while maximizing returns. Recent works have proposed many different types of fairness notions, but how unfairness arises in RL problems remains unclear. In this paper, we address this gap in the literature by investigating the sources of inequality through a causal lens. We first analyse the causal relationships governing the data generation process and decompose the effect of sensitive attributes on long-term well-being into distinct components. We then introduce a novel notion called dynamics fairness, which explicitly captures the inequality stemming from environmental dynamics, distinguishing it from those induced by decision-making or inherited from the past. This notion requires evaluating the expected changes in the next state and the reward induced by changing the value of the sensitive attribute while holding everything else constant. To quantitatively evaluate this counterfactual concept, we derive identification formulas that allow us to obtain reliable estimations from data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques in explaining, detecting, and reducing inequality in reinforcement learning.

Client-supervised Federated Learning: Towards One-model-for-all Personalization

Personalized Federated Learning (PerFL) is a new machine learning paradigm that delivers personalized models for diverse clients under federated learning settings. Most PerFL methods require extra learning processes on a client to adapt a globally shared model to the client-specific personalized model using its own local data. However, the model adaptation process in PerFL is still an open challenge in the stage of model deployment and test time. This work tackles the challenge by proposing a novel federated learning framework to learn only one robust global model to achieve competitive performance to those personalized models on unseen/test clients in the FL system. Specifically, we design a new Client-Supervised Federated Learning (FedCS) to unravel clients' bias on instances' latent representations so that the global model can learn both client-specific and client-agnostic knowledge. Experimental study shows that the FedCS can learn a robust FL global model for the changing data distributions of unseen/test clients. The FedCS's global model can be directly deployed to the test clients while achieving comparable performance to other personalized FL methods that require model adaptation.

Dual-Personalizing Adapter for Federated Foundation Models

Recently, foundation models, particularly large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated an impressive ability to adapt to various tasks by fine-tuning large amounts of instruction data. Notably, federated foundation models emerge as a privacy preservation method to fine-tune models collaboratively under federated learning (FL) settings by leveraging many distributed datasets with non-IID data. To alleviate communication and computation overhead, parameter-efficient methods are introduced for efficiency, and some research adapted personalization methods to federated foundation models for better user preferences alignment. However, a critical gap in existing research is the neglect of test-time distribution shifts in real-world applications. Therefore, to bridge this gap, we propose a new setting, termed test-time personalization, which not only concentrates on the targeted local task but also extends to other tasks that exhibit test-time distribution shifts. To address challenges in this new setting, we explore a simple yet effective solution to learn a comprehensive foundation model. Specifically, a dual-personalizing adapter architecture (FedDPA) is proposed, comprising a global adapter and a local adapter for addressing test-time distribution shifts and personalization, respectively. Additionally, we introduce an instance-wise dynamic weighting mechanism to optimize the balance between the global and local adapters, enhancing overall performance. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been evaluated on benchmark datasets across different NLP tasks.

Foundation Models for Weather and Climate Data Understanding: A Comprehensive Survey

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to rapidly evolve, the realm of Earth and atmospheric sciences is increasingly adopting data-driven models, powered by progressive developments in deep learning (DL). Specifically, DL techniques are extensively utilized to decode the chaotic and nonlinear aspects of Earth systems, and to address climate challenges via understanding weather and climate data. Cutting-edge performance on specific tasks within narrower spatio-temporal scales has been achieved recently through DL. The rise of large models, specifically large language models (LLMs), has enabled fine-tuning processes that yield remarkable outcomes across various downstream tasks, thereby propelling the advancement of general AI. However, we are still navigating the initial stages of crafting general AI for weather and climate. In this survey, we offer an exhaustive, timely overview of state-of-the-art AI methodologies specifically engineered for weather and climate data, with a special focus on time series and text data. Our primary coverage encompasses four critical aspects: types of weather and climate data, principal model architectures, model scopes and applications, and datasets for weather and climate. Furthermore, in relation to the creation and application of foundation models for weather and climate data understanding, we delve into the field's prevailing challenges, offer crucial insights, and propose detailed avenues for future research. This comprehensive approach equips practitioners with the requisite knowledge to make substantial progress in this domain. Our survey encapsulates the most recent breakthroughs in research on large, data-driven models for weather and climate data understanding, emphasizing robust foundations, current advancements, practical applications, crucial resources, and prospective research opportunities.

Thread of Thought Unraveling Chaotic Contexts

Large Language Models (LLMs) have ushered in a transformative era in the field of natural language processing, excelling in tasks related to text comprehension and generation. Nevertheless, they encounter difficulties when confronted with chaotic contexts (e.g., distractors rather than long irrelevant context), leading to the inadvertent omission of certain details within the chaotic context. In response to these challenges, we introduce the "Thread of Thought" (ThoT) strategy, which draws inspiration from human cognitive processes. ThoT systematically segments and analyzes extended contexts while adeptly selecting pertinent information. This strategy serves as a versatile "plug-and-play" module, seamlessly integrating with various LLMs and prompting techniques. In the experiments, we utilize the PopQA and EntityQ datasets, as well as a Multi-Turn Conversation Response dataset (MTCR) we collected, to illustrate that ThoT significantly improves reasoning performance compared to other prompting techniques.

Curriculum Reinforcement Learning via Morphology-Environment Co-Evolution

Throughout long history, natural species have learned to survive by evolving their physical structures adaptive to the environment changes. In contrast, current reinforcement learning (RL) studies mainly focus on training an agent with a fixed morphology (e.g., skeletal structure and joint attributes) in a fixed environment, which can hardly generalize to changing environments or new tasks. In this paper, we optimize an RL agent and its morphology through ``morphology-environment co-evolution (MECE)'', in which the morphology keeps being updated to adapt to the changing environment, while the environment is modified progressively to bring new challenges and stimulate the improvement of the morphology. This leads to a curriculum to train generalizable RL, whose morphology and policy are optimized for different environments. Instead of hand-crafting the curriculum, we train two policies to automatically change the morphology and the environment. To this end, (1) we develop two novel and effective rewards for the two policies, which are solely based on the learning dynamics of the RL agent; (2) we design a scheduler to automatically determine when to change the environment and the morphology. In experiments on two classes of tasks, the morphology and RL policies trained via MECE exhibit significantly better generalization performance in unseen test environments than SOTA morphology optimization methods. Our ablation studies on the two MECE policies further show that the co-evolution between the morphology and environment is the key to the success.