FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning over Heterogeneous Devices

The heterogeneity across devices usually hinders the optimization convergence and generalization performance of federated learning (FL) when the aggregation of devices' knowledge occurs in the gradient space. For example, devices may differ in terms of data distribution, network latency, input/output space, and/or model architecture, which can easily lead to the misalignment of their local gradients. To improve the tolerance to heterogeneity, we propose a novel federated prototype learning (FedProto) framework in which the devices and server communicate the class prototypes instead of the gradients. FedProto aggregates the local prototypes collected from different devices, and then sends the global prototypes back to all devices to regularize the training of local models. The training on each device aims to minimize the classification error on the local data while keeping the resulting local prototypes sufficiently close to the corresponding global ones. Through experiments, we propose a benchmark setting tailored for heterogeneous FL, with FedProto outperforming several recent FL approaches on multiple datasets.

A Low-Complexity ADMM-based Massive MIMO Detectors via Deep Neural Networks

An alternate direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based detectors can achieve good performance in both small and large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, due to the difficulty of choosing the optimal penalty parameters, their performance is limited. This paper presents a deep neural network (DNN)-based massive MIMO detection method which can overcome the above limitation. It exploits the unfolding technique and learns to estimate the penalty parameters. Additionally, a computationally cheaper detector is also proposed. The proposed methods can handle the higher-order modulation signals. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performances of the proposed methods compared with the existing works.

Isometric Propagation Network for Generalized Zero-shot Learning

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to classify images of an unseen class only based on a few attributes describing that class but no access to any training sample. A popular strategy is to learn a mapping between the semantic space of class attributes and the visual space of images based on the seen classes and their data. Thus, an unseen class image can be ideally mapped to its corresponding class attributes. The key challenge is how to align the representations in the two spaces. For most ZSL settings, the attributes for each seen/unseen class are only represented by a vector while the seen-class data provide much more information. Thus, the imbalanced supervision from the semantic and the visual space can make the learned mapping easily overfitting to the seen classes. To resolve this problem, we propose Isometric Propagation Network (IPN), which learns to strengthen the relation between classes within each space and align the class dependency in the two spaces. Specifically, IPN learns to propagate the class representations on an auto-generated graph within each space. In contrast to only aligning the resulted static representation, we regularize the two dynamic propagation procedures to be isometric in terms of the two graphs' edge weights per step by minimizing a consistency loss between them. IPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on three popular ZSL benchmarks. To evaluate the generalization capability of IPN, we further build two larger benchmarks with more diverse unseen classes and demonstrate the advantages of IPN on them.

PICA: A Pixel Correlation-based Attentional Black-box Adversarial Attack

The studies on black-box adversarial attacks have become increasingly prevalent due to the intractable acquisition of the structural knowledge of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, the performance of emerging attacks is negatively impacted when fooling DNNs tailored for high-resolution images. One of the explanations is that these methods usually focus on attacking the entire image, regardless of its spatial semantic information, and thereby encounter the notorious curse of dimensionality. To this end, we propose a pixel correlation-based attentional black-box adversarial attack, termed as PICA. Firstly, we take only one of every two neighboring pixels in the salient region as the target by leveraging the attentional mechanism and pixel correlation of images, such that the dimension of the black-box attack reduces. After that, a general multiobjective evolutionary algorithm is employed to traverse the reduced pixels and generate perturbations that are imperceptible by the human vision. Extensive experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed PICA on the ImageNet dataset. More importantly, PICA is computationally more efficient to generate high-resolution adversarial examples compared with the existing black-box attacks.

Attention-Guided Black-box Adversarial Attacks with Large-Scale Multiobjective Evolutionary Optimization

Fooling deep neural networks (DNNs) with the black-box optimization has become a popular adversarial attack fashion, as the structural prior knowledge of DNNs is always unknown. Nevertheless, recent black-box adversarial attacks may struggle to balance their attack ability and visual quality of the generated adversarial examples (AEs) in tackling high-resolution images. In this paper, we propose an attention-guided black-box adversarial attack based on the large-scale multiobjective evolutionary optimization, termed as LMOA. By considering the spatial semantic information of images, we firstly take advantage of the attention map to determine the perturbed pixels. Instead of attacking the entire image, reducing the perturbed pixels with the attention mechanism can help to avoid the notorious curse of dimensionality and thereby improves the performance of attacking. Secondly, a large-scale multiobjective evolutionary algorithm is employed to traverse the reduced pixels in the salient region. Benefiting from its characteristics, the generated AEs have the potential to fool target DNNs while being imperceptible by the human vision. Extensive experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed LMOA on the ImageNet dataset. More importantly, it is more competitive to generate high-resolution AEs with better visual quality compared with the existing black-box adversarial attacks.

Improving Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering by Learning Intermediate Supervision Signals

Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to find the answer entities that are multiple hops away in the Knowledge Base (KB) from the entities in the question. A major challenge is the lack of supervision signals at intermediate steps. Therefore, multi-hop KBQA algorithms can only receive the feedback from the final answer, which makes the learning unstable or ineffective. To address this challenge, we propose a novel teacher-student approach for the multi-hop KBQA task. In our approach, the student network aims to find the correct answer to the query, while the teacher network tries to learn intermediate supervision signals for improving the reasoning capacity of the student network. The major novelty lies in the design of the teacher network, where we utilize both forward and backward reasoning to enhance the learning of intermediate entity distributions. By considering bidirectional reasoning, the teacher network can produce more reliable intermediate supervision signals, which can alleviate the issue of spurious reasoning. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach on the KBQA task.

SemiNLL: A Framework of Noisy-Label Learning by Semi-Supervised Learning

Deep learning with noisy labels is a challenging task. Recent prominent methods that build on a specific sample selection (SS) strategy and a specific semi-supervised learning (SSL) model achieved state-of-the-art performance. Intuitively, better performance could be achieved if stronger SS strategies and SSL models are employed. Following this intuition, one might easily derive various effective noisy-label learning methods using different combinations of SS strategies and SSL models, which is, however, reinventing the wheel in essence. To prevent this problem, we propose SemiNLL, a versatile framework that combines SS strategies and SSL models in an end-to-end manner. Our framework can absorb various SS strategies and SSL backbones, utilizing their power to achieve promising performance. We also instantiate our framework with different combinations, which set the new state of the art on benchmark-simulated and real-world datasets with noisy labels.

Confusable Learning for Large-class Few-Shot Classification

Few-shot image classification is challenging due to the lack of ample samples in each class. Such a challenge becomes even tougher when the number of classes is very large, i.e., the large-class few-shot scenario. In this novel scenario, existing approaches do not perform well because they ignore confusable classes, namely similar classes that are difficult to distinguish from each other. These classes carry more information. In this paper, we propose a biased learning paradigm called Confusable Learning, which focuses more on confusable classes. Our method can be applied to mainstream meta-learning algorithms. Specifically, our method maintains a dynamically updating confusion matrix, which analyzes confusable classes in the dataset. Such a confusion matrix helps meta learners to emphasize on confusable classes. Comprehensive experiments on Omniglot, Fungi, and ImageNet demonstrate the efficacy of our method over state-of-the-art baselines.

A BERT-based Dual Embedding Model for Chinese Idiom Prediction

Chinese idioms are special fixed phrases usually derived from ancient stories, whose meanings are oftentimes highly idiomatic and non-compositional. The Chinese idiom prediction task is to select the correct idiom from a set of candidate idioms given a context with a blank. We propose a BERT-based dual embedding model to encode the contextual words as well as to learn dual embeddings of the idioms. Specifically, we first match the embedding of each candidate idiom with the hidden representation corresponding to the blank in the context. We then match the embedding of each candidate idiom with the hidden representations of all the tokens in the context thorough context pooling. We further propose to use two separate idiom embeddings for the two kinds of matching. Experiments on a recently released Chinese idiom cloze test dataset show that our proposed method performs better than the existing state of the art. Ablation experiments also show that both context pooling and dual embedding contribute to the improvement of performance.

Cooperative Heterogeneous Deep Reinforcement Learning

Numerous deep reinforcement learning agents have been proposed, and each of them has its strengths and flaws. In this work, we present a Cooperative Heterogeneous Deep Reinforcement Learning (CHDRL) framework that can learn a policy by integrating the advantages of heterogeneous agents. Specifically, we propose a cooperative learning framework that classifies heterogeneous agents into two classes: global agents and local agents. Global agents are off-policy agents that can utilize experiences from the other agents. Local agents are either on-policy agents or population-based evolutionary algorithms (EAs) agents that can explore the local area effectively. We employ global agents, which are sample-efficient, to guide the learning of local agents so that local agents can benefit from sample-efficient agents and simultaneously maintain their advantages, e.g., stability. Global agents also benefit from effective local searches. Experimental studies on a range of continuous control tasks from the Mujoco benchmark show that CHDRL achieves better performance compared with state-of-the-art baselines.