Enabling On-Device Large Language Model Personalization with Self-Supervised Data Selection and Synthesis

After a large language model (LLM) is deployed on edge devices, it is desirable for these devices to learn from user-generated conversation data to generate user-specific and personalized responses in real-time. However, user-generated data usually contains sensitive and private information, and uploading such data to the cloud for annotation is not preferred if not prohibited. While it is possible to obtain annotation locally by directly asking users to provide preferred responses, such annotations have to be sparse to not affect user experience. In addition, the storage of edge devices is usually too limited to enable large-scale fine-tuning with full user-generated data. It remains an open question how to enable on-device LLM personalization, considering sparse annotation and limited on-device storage. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to select and store the most representative data online in a self-supervised way. Such data has a small memory footprint and allows infrequent requests of user annotations for further fine-tuning. To enhance fine-tuning quality, multiple semantically similar pairs of question texts and expected responses are generated using the LLM. Our experiments show that the proposed framework achieves the best user-specific content-generating capability (accuracy) and fine-tuning speed (performance) compared with vanilla baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first on-device LLM personalization framework.

AdapterFL: Adaptive Heterogeneous Federated Learning for Resource-constrained Mobile Computing Systems

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative learning of large-scale distributed clients without data sharing. However, due to the disparity of computing resources among massive mobile computing devices, the performance of traditional homogeneous model-based Federated Learning (FL) is seriously limited. On the one hand, to achieve model training in all the diverse clients, mobile computing systems can only use small low-performance models for collaborative learning. On the other hand, devices with high computing resources cannot train a high-performance large model with their insufficient raw data. To address the resource-constrained problem in mobile computing systems, we present a novel heterogeneous FL approach named AdapterFL, which uses a model reassemble strategy to facilitate collaborative training of massive heterogeneous mobile devices adaptively. Specifically, we select multiple candidate heterogeneous models based on the computing performance of massive mobile devices and then divide each heterogeneous model into two partitions. By reassembling the partitions, we can generate models with varied sizes that are combined by the partial parameters of the large model with the partial parameters of the small model. Using these reassembled models for FL training, we can train the partial parameters of the large model using low-performance devices. In this way, we can alleviate performance degradation in large models due to resource constraints. The experimental results show that AdapterFL can achieve up to 12\% accuracy improvement compared to the state-of-the-art heterogeneous federated learning methods in resource-constrained scenarios.

Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: Toward Efficient and Accurate Split Federated Learning

Due to its advantages in resource constraint scenarios, Split Federated Learning (SFL) is promising in AIoT systems. However, due to data heterogeneity and stragglers, SFL suffers from the challenges of low inference accuracy and low efficiency. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel SFL approach, named Sliding Split Federated Learning (S$^2$FL), which adopts an adaptive sliding model split strategy and a data balance-based training mechanism. By dynamically dispatching different model portions to AIoT devices according to their computing capability, S$^2$FL can alleviate the low training efficiency caused by stragglers. By combining features uploaded by devices with different data distributions to generate multiple larger batches with a uniform distribution for back-propagation, S$^2$FL can alleviate the performance degradation caused by data heterogeneity. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to conventional SFL, S$^2$FL can achieve up to 16.5\% inference accuracy improvement and 3.54X training acceleration.

AcademicGPT: Empowering Academic Research

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across various natural language processing tasks. Yet, many of these advanced LLMs are tailored for broad, general-purpose applications. In this technical report, we introduce AcademicGPT, designed specifically to empower academic research. AcademicGPT is a continual training model derived from LLaMA2-70B. Our training corpus mainly consists of academic papers, thesis, content from some academic domain, high-quality Chinese data and others. While it may not be extensive in data scale, AcademicGPT marks our initial venture into a domain-specific GPT tailored for research area. We evaluate AcademicGPT on several established public benchmarks such as MMLU and CEval, as well as on some specialized academic benchmarks like PubMedQA, SCIEval, and our newly-created ComputerScienceQA, to demonstrate its ability from general knowledge ability, to Chinese ability, and to academic ability. Building upon AcademicGPT's foundation model, we also developed several applications catered to the academic area, including General Academic Question Answering, AI-assisted Paper Reading, Paper Review, and AI-assisted Title and Abstract Generation.

WaveAttack: Asymmetric Frequency Obfuscation-based Backdoor Attacks Against Deep Neural Networks

Due to the popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, numerous backdoor attacks are designed by adversaries to mislead deep neural network predictions by manipulating training samples and training processes. Although backdoor attacks are effective in various real scenarios, they still suffer from the problems of both low fidelity of poisoned samples and non-negligible transfer in latent space, which make them easily detectable by existing backdoor detection algorithms. To overcome the weakness, this paper proposes a novel frequency-based backdoor attack method named WaveAttack, which obtains image high-frequency features through Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to generate backdoor triggers. Furthermore, we introduce an asymmetric frequency obfuscation method, which can add an adaptive residual in the training and inference stage to improve the impact of triggers and further enhance the effectiveness of WaveAttack. Comprehensive experimental results show that WaveAttack not only achieves higher stealthiness and effectiveness, but also outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) backdoor attack methods in the fidelity of images by up to 28.27\% improvement in PSNR, 1.61\% improvement in SSIM, and 70.59\% reduction in IS.

Revisiting the Temporal Modeling in Spatio-Temporal Predictive Learning under A Unified View

Spatio-temporal predictive learning plays a crucial role in self-supervised learning, with wide-ranging applications across a diverse range of fields. Previous approaches for temporal modeling fall into two categories: recurrent-based and recurrent-free methods. The former, while meticulously processing frames one by one, neglect short-term spatio-temporal information redundancies, leading to inefficiencies. The latter naively stack frames sequentially, overlooking the inherent temporal dependencies. In this paper, we re-examine the two dominant temporal modeling approaches within the realm of spatio-temporal predictive learning, offering a unified perspective. Building upon this analysis, we introduce USTEP (Unified Spatio-TEmporal Predictive learning), an innovative framework that reconciles the recurrent-based and recurrent-free methods by integrating both micro-temporal and macro-temporal scales. Extensive experiments on a wide range of spatio-temporal predictive learning demonstrate that USTEP achieves significant improvements over existing temporal modeling approaches, thereby establishing it as a robust solution for a wide range of spatio-temporal applications.

CONVERT:Contrastive Graph Clustering with Reliable Augmentation

Contrastive graph node clustering via learnable data augmentation is a hot research spot in the field of unsupervised graph learning. The existing methods learn the sampling distribution of a pre-defined augmentation to generate data-driven augmentations automatically. Although promising clustering performance has been achieved, we observe that these strategies still rely on pre-defined augmentations, the semantics of the augmented graph can easily drift. The reliability of the augmented view semantics for contrastive learning can not be guaranteed, thus limiting the model performance. To address these problems, we propose a novel CONtrastiVe Graph ClustEring network with Reliable AugmenTation (COVERT). Specifically, in our method, the data augmentations are processed by the proposed reversible perturb-recover network. It distills reliable semantic information by recovering the perturbed latent embeddings. Moreover, to further guarantee the reliability of semantics, a novel semantic loss is presented to constrain the network via quantifying the perturbation and recovery. Lastly, a label-matching mechanism is designed to guide the model by clustering information through aligning the semantic labels and the selected high-confidence clustering pseudo labels. Extensive experimental results on seven datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We release the code and appendix of CONVERT at https://github.com/xihongyang1999/CONVERT on GitHub.

Protect Federated Learning Against Backdoor Attacks via Data-Free Trigger Generation

As a distributed machine learning paradigm, Federated Learning (FL) enables large-scale clients to collaboratively train a model without sharing their raw data. However, due to the lack of data auditing for untrusted clients, FL is vulnerable to poisoning attacks, especially backdoor attacks. By using poisoned data for local training or directly changing the model parameters, attackers can easily inject backdoors into the model, which can trigger the model to make misclassification of targeted patterns in images. To address these issues, we propose a novel data-free trigger-generation-based defense approach based on the two characteristics of backdoor attacks: i) triggers are learned faster than normal knowledge, and ii) trigger patterns have a greater effect on image classification than normal class patterns. Our approach generates the images with newly learned knowledge by identifying the differences between the old and new global models, and filters trigger images by evaluating the effect of these generated images. By using these trigger images, our approach eliminates poisoned models to ensure the updated global model is benign. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can defend against almost all the existing types of backdoor attacks and outperform all the seven state-of-the-art defense methods with both IID and non-IID scenarios. Especially, our approach can successfully defend against the backdoor attack even when 80\% of the clients are malicious.

Reinforcement Graph Clustering with Unknown Cluster Number

Deep graph clustering, which aims to group nodes into disjoint clusters by neural networks in an unsupervised manner, has attracted great attention in recent years. Although the performance has been largely improved, the excellent performance of the existing methods heavily relies on an accurately predefined cluster number, which is not always available in the real-world scenario. To enable the deep graph clustering algorithms to work without the guidance of the predefined cluster number, we propose a new deep graph clustering method termed Reinforcement Graph Clustering (RGC). In our proposed method, cluster number determination and unsupervised representation learning are unified into a uniform framework by the reinforcement learning mechanism. Concretely, the discriminative node representations are first learned with the contrastive pretext task. Then, to capture the clustering state accurately with both local and global information in the graph, both node and cluster states are considered. Subsequently, at each state, the qualities of different cluster numbers are evaluated by the quality network, and the greedy action is executed to determine the cluster number. In order to conduct feedback actions, the clustering-oriented reward function is proposed to enhance the cohesion of the same clusters and separate the different clusters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. The source code of RGC is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/RGC and a collection (papers, codes and, datasets) of deep graph clustering is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Clustering on Github.

Why Deep Models Often cannot Beat Non-deep Counterparts on Molecular Property Prediction?

Molecular property prediction (MPP) is a crucial task in the drug discovery pipeline, which has recently gained considerable attention thanks to advances in deep neural networks. However, recent research has revealed that deep models struggle to beat traditional non-deep ones on MPP. In this study, we benchmark 12 representative models (3 non-deep models and 9 deep models) on 14 molecule datasets. Through the most comprehensive study to date, we make the following key observations: \textbf{(\romannumeral 1)} Deep models are generally unable to outperform non-deep ones; \textbf{(\romannumeral 2)} The failure of deep models on MPP cannot be solely attributed to the small size of molecular datasets. What matters is the irregular molecule data pattern; \textbf{(\romannumeral 3)} In particular, tree models using molecular fingerprints as inputs tend to perform better than other competitors. Furthermore, we conduct extensive empirical investigations into the unique patterns of molecule data and inductive biases of various models underlying these phenomena.