Auto-Train-Once: Controller Network Guided Automatic Network Pruning from Scratch

Current techniques for deep neural network (DNN) pruning often involve intricate multi-step processes that require domain-specific expertise, making their widespread adoption challenging. To address the limitation, the Only-Train-Once (OTO) and OTOv2 are proposed to eliminate the need for additional fine-tuning steps by directly training and compressing a general DNN from scratch. Nevertheless, the static design of optimizers (in OTO) can lead to convergence issues of local optima. In this paper, we proposed the Auto-Train-Once (ATO), an innovative network pruning algorithm designed to automatically reduce the computational and storage costs of DNNs. During the model training phase, our approach not only trains the target model but also leverages a controller network as an architecture generator to guide the learning of target model weights. Furthermore, we developed a novel stochastic gradient algorithm that enhances the coordination between model training and controller network training, thereby improving pruning performance. We provide a comprehensive convergence analysis as well as extensive experiments, and the results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across various model architectures (including ResNet18, ResNet34, ResNet50, ResNet56, and MobileNetv2) on standard benchmark datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet).

A Unified and General Framework for Continual Learning

Continual Learning (CL) focuses on learning from dynamic and changing data distributions while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Various methods have been developed to address the challenge of catastrophic forgetting, including regularization-based, Bayesian-based, and memory-replay-based techniques. However, these methods lack a unified framework and common terminology for describing their approaches. This research aims to bridge this gap by introducing a comprehensive and overarching framework that encompasses and reconciles these existing methodologies. Notably, this new framework is capable of encompassing established CL approaches as special instances within a unified and general optimization objective. An intriguing finding is that despite their diverse origins, these methods share common mathematical structures. This observation highlights the compatibility of these seemingly distinct techniques, revealing their interconnectedness through a shared underlying optimization objective. Moreover, the proposed general framework introduces an innovative concept called refresh learning, specifically designed to enhance the CL performance. This novel approach draws inspiration from neuroscience, where the human brain often sheds outdated information to improve the retention of crucial knowledge and facilitate the acquisition of new information. In essence, refresh learning operates by initially unlearning current data and subsequently relearning it. It serves as a versatile plug-in that seamlessly integrates with existing CL methods, offering an adaptable and effective enhancement to the learning process. Extensive experiments on CL benchmarks and theoretical analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed refresh learning. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/joey-wang123/CL-refresh-learning}.

Enhancing Weakly Supervised 3D Medical Image Segmentation through Probabilistic-aware Learning

3D medical image segmentation is a challenging task with crucial implications for disease diagnosis and treatment planning. Recent advances in deep learning have significantly enhanced fully supervised medical image segmentation. However, this approach heavily relies on labor-intensive and time-consuming fully annotated ground-truth labels, particularly for 3D volumes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel probabilistic-aware weakly supervised learning pipeline, specifically designed for 3D medical imaging. Our pipeline integrates three innovative components: a probability-based pseudo-label generation technique for synthesizing dense segmentation masks from sparse annotations, a Probabilistic Multi-head Self-Attention network for robust feature extraction within our Probabilistic Transformer Network, and a Probability-informed Segmentation Loss Function to enhance training with annotation confidence. Demonstrating significant advances, our approach not only rivals the performance of fully supervised methods but also surpasses existing weakly supervised methods in CT and MRI datasets, achieving up to 18.1% improvement in Dice scores for certain organs. The code is available at https://github.com/runminjiang/PW4MedSeg.

Seeing Unseen: Discover Novel Biomedical Concepts via Geometry-Constrained Probabilistic Modeling

Machine learning holds tremendous promise for transforming the fundamental practice of scientific discovery by virtue of its data-driven nature. With the ever-increasing stream of research data collection, it would be appealing to autonomously explore patterns and insights from observational data for discovering novel classes of phenotypes and concepts. However, in the biomedical domain, there are several challenges inherently presented in the cumulated data which hamper the progress of novel class discovery. The non-i.i.d. data distribution accompanied by the severe imbalance among different groups of classes essentially leads to ambiguous and biased semantic representations. In this work, we present a geometry-constrained probabilistic modeling treatment to resolve the identified issues. First, we propose to parameterize the approximated posterior of instance embedding as a marginal von MisesFisher distribution to account for the interference of distributional latent bias. Then, we incorporate a suite of critical geometric properties to impose proper constraints on the layout of constructed embedding space, which in turn minimizes the uncontrollable risk for unknown class learning and structuring. Furthermore, a spectral graph-theoretic method is devised to estimate the number of potential novel classes. It inherits two intriguing merits compared to existent approaches, namely high computational efficiency and flexibility for taxonomy-adaptive estimation. Extensive experiments across various biomedical scenarios substantiate the effectiveness and general applicability of our method.

Your Vision-Language Model Itself Is a Strong Filter: Towards High-Quality Instruction Tuning with Data Selection

Data selection in instruction tuning emerges as a pivotal process for acquiring high-quality data and training instruction-following large language models (LLMs), but it is still a new and unexplored research area for vision-language models (VLMs). Existing data selection approaches on LLMs either rely on single unreliable scores, or use downstream tasks for selection, which is time-consuming and can lead to potential over-fitting on the chosen evaluation datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel dataset selection method, Self-Filter, that utilizes the VLM itself as a filter. This approach is inspired by the observation that VLMs benefit from training with the most challenging instructions. Self-Filter operates in two stages. In the first stage, we devise a scoring network to evaluate the difficulty of training instructions, which is co-trained with the VLM. In the second stage, we use the trained score net to measure the difficulty of each instruction, select the most challenging samples, and penalize similar samples to encourage diversity. Comprehensive experiments on LLaVA and MiniGPT-4 show that Self-Filter can reach better results compared to full data settings with merely about 15% samples, and can achieve superior performance against competitive baselines.

ODIN: Disentangled Reward Mitigates Hacking in RLHF

In this work, we study the issue of reward hacking on the response length, a challenge emerging in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) on LLMs. A well-formatted, verbose but less helpful response from the LLMs can often deceive LLMs or even human evaluators to achieve high scores. The same issue also holds for some reward models in RL. To address the challenges in both training and evaluation, we establish a more reliable evaluation protocol for comparing different training configurations, which inspects the trade-off between LLM evaluation score and response length obtained by varying training hyperparameters. Based on this evaluation, we conduct large-scale studies, where the results shed insights into the efficacy of hyperparameters and tricks used in RL on mitigating length bias. We further propose to improve the reward model by jointly training two linear heads on shared feature representations to predict the rewards, one trained to correlate with length, and the other trained to decorrelate with length and therefore focus more on the actual content. We then discard the length head in RL to prevent reward hacking on length. Experiments demonstrate that our approach almost eliminates the reward correlation with length, and improves the obtained policy by a significant margin.

Compressing Image-to-Image Translation GANs Using Local Density Structures on Their Learned Manifold

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown remarkable success in modeling complex data distributions for image-to-image translation. Still, their high computational demands prohibit their deployment in practical scenarios like edge devices. Existing GAN compression methods mainly rely on knowledge distillation or convolutional classifiers' pruning techniques. Thus, they neglect the critical characteristic of GANs: their local density structure over their learned manifold. Accordingly, we approach GAN compression from a new perspective by explicitly encouraging the pruned model to preserve the density structure of the original parameter-heavy model on its learned manifold. We facilitate this objective for the pruned model by partitioning the learned manifold of the original generator into local neighborhoods around its generated samples. Then, we propose a novel pruning objective to regularize the pruned model to preserve the local density structure over each neighborhood, resembling the kernel density estimation method. Also, we develop a collaborative pruning scheme in which the discriminator and generator are pruned by two pruning agents. We design the agents to capture interactions between the generator and discriminator by exchanging their peer's feedback when determining corresponding models' architectures. Thanks to such a design, our pruning method can efficiently find performant sub-networks and can maintain the balance between the generator and discriminator more effectively compared to baselines during pruning, thereby showing more stable pruning dynamics. Our experiments on image translation GAN models, Pix2Pix and CycleGAN, with various benchmark datasets and architectures demonstrate our method's effectiveness.

Federated Continual Novel Class Learning

In a privacy-focused era, Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising machine learning technique. However, most existing FL studies assume that the data distribution remains nearly fixed over time, while real-world scenarios often involve dynamic and continual changes. To equip FL systems with continual model evolution capabilities, we focus on an important problem called Federated Continual Novel Class Learning (FedCN) in this work. The biggest challenge in FedCN is to merge and align novel classes that are discovered and learned by different clients without compromising privacy. To address this, we propose a Global Alignment Learning (GAL) framework that can accurately estimate the global novel class number and provide effective guidance for local training from a global perspective, all while maintaining privacy protection. Specifically, GAL first locates high-density regions in the representation space through a bi-level clustering mechanism to estimate the novel class number, with which the global prototypes corresponding to novel classes can be constructed. Then, GAL uses a novel semantic weighted loss to capture all possible correlations between these prototypes and the training data for mitigating the impact of pseudo-label noise and data heterogeneity. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate GAL's superior performance over state-of-the-art novel class discovery methods. In particular, GAL achieves significant improvements in novel-class performance, increasing the accuracy by 5.1% to 10.6% in the case of one novel class learning stage and by 7.8% to 17.9% in the case of two novel class learning stages, without sacrificing known-class performance. Moreover, GAL is shown to be effective in equipping a variety of different mainstream FL algorithms with novel class discovery and learning capability, highlighting its potential for many real-world applications.

On the Role of Server Momentum in Federated Learning

Federated Averaging (FedAvg) is known to experience convergence issues when encountering significant clients system heterogeneity and data heterogeneity. Server momentum has been proposed as an effective mitigation. However, existing server momentum works are restrictive in the momentum formulation, do not properly schedule hyperparameters and focus only on system homogeneous settings, which leaves the role of server momentum still an under-explored problem. In this paper, we propose a general framework for server momentum, that (a) covers a large class of momentum schemes that are unexplored in federated learning (FL), (b) enables a popular stagewise hyperparameter scheduler, (c) allows heterogeneous and asynchronous local computing. We provide rigorous convergence analysis for the proposed framework. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that thoroughly analyzes the performances of server momentum with a hyperparameter scheduler and system heterogeneity. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Predicting Scores of Various Aesthetic Attribute Sets by Learning from Overall Score Labels

Now many mobile phones embed deep-learning models for evaluation or guidance on photography. These models cannot provide detailed results like human pose scores or scene color scores because of the rare of corresponding aesthetic attribute data. However, the annotation of image aesthetic attribute scores requires experienced artists and professional photographers, which hinders the collection of large-scale fully-annotated datasets. In this paper, we propose to replace image attribute labels with feature extractors. First, a novel aesthetic attribute evaluation framework based on attribute features is proposed to predict attribute scores and overall scores. We call it the F2S (attribute features to attribute scores) model. We use networks from different tasks to provide attribute features to our F2S models. Then, we define an aesthetic attribute contribution to describe the role of aesthetic attributes throughout an image and use it with the attribute scores and the overall scores to train our F2S model. Sufficient experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate that our F2S model achieves comparable performance with those trained on the datasets with fully-annotated aesthetic attribute score labels. Our method makes it feasible to learn meaningful attribute scores for various aesthetic attribute sets in different types of images with only overall aesthetic scores.