Computation and Communication Efficient Lightweighting Vertical Federated Learning

The exploration of computational and communication efficiency within Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a prominent and crucial field of study. While most existing efforts to enhance these efficiencies have focused on Horizontal FL, the distinct processes and model structures of Vertical FL preclude the direct application of Horizontal FL-based techniques. In response, we introduce the concept of Lightweight Vertical Federated Learning (LVFL), targeting both computational and communication efficiencies. This approach involves separate lightweighting strategies for the feature model, to improve computational efficiency, and for feature embedding, to enhance communication efficiency. Moreover, we establish a convergence bound for our LVFL algorithm, which accounts for both communication and computational lightweighting ratios. Our evaluation of the algorithm on a image classification dataset reveals that LVFL significantly alleviates computational and communication demands while preserving robust learning performance. This work effectively addresses the gaps in communication and computational efficiency within Vertical FL.

PCToolkit: A Unified Plug-and-Play Prompt Compression Toolkit of Large Language Models

Prompt compression is an innovative method for efficiently condensing input prompts while preserving essential information. To facilitate quick-start services, user-friendly interfaces, and compatibility with common datasets and metrics, we present the Prompt Compression Toolkit (PCToolkit). This toolkit is a unified plug-and-play solution for compressing prompts in Large Language Models (LLMs), featuring cutting-edge prompt compressors, diverse datasets, and metrics for comprehensive performance evaluation. PCToolkit boasts a modular design, allowing for easy integration of new datasets and metrics through portable and user-friendly interfaces. In this paper, we outline the key components and functionalities of PCToolkit. We conducted evaluations of the compressors within PCToolkit across various natural language tasks, including reconstruction, summarization, mathematical problem-solving, question answering, few-shot learning, synthetic tasks, code completion, boolean expressions, multiple choice questions, and lies recognition.

Space Group Informed Transformer for Crystalline Materials Generation

We introduce CrystalFormer, a transformer-based autoregressive model specifically designed for space group-controlled generation of crystalline materials. The space group symmetry significantly simplifies the crystal space, which is crucial for data and compute efficient generative modeling of crystalline materials. Leveraging the prominent discrete and sequential nature of the Wyckoff positions, CrystalFormer learns to generate crystals by directly predicting the species and locations of symmetry-inequivalent atoms in the unit cell. Our results demonstrate that CrystalFormer matches state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks for both validity, novelty, and stability of the generated crystalline materials. Our analysis also shows that CrystalFormer ingests sensible solid-state chemistry information from data for generative modeling. The CrystalFormer unifies symmetry-based structure search and generative pre-training in the realm of crystalline materials. The simplicity, generality, and flexibility of CrystalFormer position it as a promising architecture to be the foundational model of the entire crystalline materials space, heralding a new era in materials modeling and discovery.

View-decoupled Transformer for Person Re-identification under Aerial-ground Camera Network

Existing person re-identification methods have achieved remarkable advances in appearance-based identity association across homogeneous cameras, such as ground-ground matching. However, as a more practical scenario, aerial-ground person re-identification (AGPReID) among heterogeneous cameras has received minimal attention. To alleviate the disruption of discriminative identity representation by dramatic view discrepancy as the most significant challenge in AGPReID, the view-decoupled transformer (VDT) is proposed as a simple yet effective framework. Two major components are designed in VDT to decouple view-related and view-unrelated features, namely hierarchical subtractive separation and orthogonal loss, where the former separates these two features inside the VDT, and the latter constrains these two to be independent. In addition, we contribute a large-scale AGPReID dataset called CARGO, consisting of five/eight aerial/ground cameras, 5,000 identities, and 108,563 images. Experiments on two datasets show that VDT is a feasible and effective solution for AGPReID, surpassing the previous method on mAP/Rank1 by up to 5.0%/2.7% on CARGO and 3.7%/5.2% on AG-ReID, keeping the same magnitude of computational complexity. Our project is available at https://github.com/LinlyAC/VDT-AGPReID

The Whole is Better than the Sum: Using Aggregated Demonstrations in In-Context Learning for Sequential Recommendation

Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent performance on various NLP tasks. To use LLMs as strong sequential recommenders, we explore the in-context learning approach to sequential recommendation. We investigate the effects of instruction format, task consistency, demonstration selection, and number of demonstrations. As increasing the number of demonstrations in ICL does not improve accuracy despite using a long prompt, we propose a novel method called LLMSRec-Syn that incorporates multiple demonstration users into one aggregated demonstration. Our experiments on three recommendation datasets show that LLMSRec-Syn outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based sequential recommendation methods. In some cases, LLMSRec-Syn can perform on par with or even better than supervised learning methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/demoleiwang/LLMSRec_Syn.

Taming Cross-Domain Representation Variance in Federated Prototype Learning with Heterogeneous Data Domains

Federated learning (FL) allows collaborative machine learning training without sharing private data. While most FL methods assume identical data domains across clients, real-world scenarios often involve heterogeneous data domains. Federated Prototype Learning (FedPL) addresses this issue, using mean feature vectors as prototypes to enhance model generalization. However, existing FedPL methods create the same number of prototypes for each client, leading to cross-domain performance gaps and disparities for clients with varied data distributions. To mitigate cross-domain feature representation variance, we introduce FedPLVM, which establishes variance-aware dual-level prototypes clustering and employs a novel $\alpha$-sparsity prototype loss. The dual-level prototypes clustering strategy creates local clustered prototypes based on private data features, then performs global prototypes clustering to reduce communication complexity and preserve local data privacy. The $\alpha$-sparsity prototype loss aligns samples from underrepresented domains, enhancing intra-class similarity and reducing inter-class similarity. Evaluations on Digit-5, Office-10, and DomainNet datasets demonstrate our method's superiority over existing approaches.

Gradient-Aware Logit Adjustment Loss for Long-tailed Classifier

In the real-world setting, data often follows a long-tailed distribution, where head classes contain significantly more training samples than tail classes. Consequently, models trained on such data tend to be biased toward head classes. The medium of this bias is imbalanced gradients, which include not only the ratio of scale between positive and negative gradients but also imbalanced gradients from different negative classes. Therefore, we propose the Gradient-Aware Logit Adjustment (GALA) loss, which adjusts the logits based on accumulated gradients to balance the optimization process. Additionally, We find that most of the solutions to long-tailed problems are still biased towards head classes in the end, and we propose a simple and post hoc prediction re-balancing strategy to further mitigate the basis toward head class. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple popular long-tailed recognition benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of these two designs. Our approach achieves top-1 accuracy of 48.5\%, 41.4\%, and 73.3\% on CIFAR100-LT, Places-LT, and iNaturalist, outperforming the state-of-the-art method GCL by a significant margin of 3.62\%, 0.76\% and 1.2\%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/lt-project-repository/lt-project.

Adaptive Hybrid Masking Strategy for Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition Against Model Inversion Attack

The utilization of personal sensitive data in training face recognition (FR) models poses significant privacy concerns, as adversaries can employ model inversion attacks (MIA) to infer the original training data. Existing defense methods, such as data augmentation and differential privacy, have been employed to mitigate this issue. However, these methods often fail to strike an optimal balance between privacy and accuracy. To address this limitation, this paper introduces an adaptive hybrid masking algorithm against MIA. Specifically, face images are masked in the frequency domain using an adaptive MixUp strategy. Unlike the traditional MixUp algorithm, which is predominantly used for data augmentation, our modified approach incorporates frequency domain mixing. Previous studies have shown that increasing the number of images mixed in MixUp can enhance privacy preservation but at the expense of reduced face recognition accuracy. To overcome this trade-off, we develop an enhanced adaptive MixUp strategy based on reinforcement learning, which enables us to mix a larger number of images while maintaining satisfactory recognition accuracy. To optimize privacy protection, we propose maximizing the reward function (i.e., the loss function of the FR system) during the training of the strategy network. While the loss function of the FR network is minimized in the phase of training the FR network. The strategy network and the face recognition network can be viewed as antagonistic entities in the training process, ultimately reaching a more balanced trade-off. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed hybrid masking scheme outperforms existing defense algorithms in terms of privacy preservation and recognition accuracy against MIA.

Analyzing and Reducing Catastrophic Forgetting in Parameter Efficient Tuning

Existing research has shown that large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable performance in language understanding and generation. However, when LLMs are continuously fine-tuned on complex and diverse domain-specific downstream tasks, the inference performance on historical tasks decreases dramatically, which is known as a catastrophic forgetting problem. A trade-off needs to be kept between learning plasticity and memory stability. Plenty of existing works have explored strategies like memory replay, regularization and parameter isolation, but little is known about the geometric connection of various adjacent minima in the continual LLMs fine-tuning scenarios. In this work, we investigate the geometric connections of different minima through the lens of mode connectivity, which means different minima can be connected by a low-loss valley. Through extensive experiments, we uncover the mode connectivity phenomenon in the LLMs continual learning scenario and find that it can strike a balance between plasticity and stability. Building upon these findings, we propose a simple yet effective method called Interpolation-based LoRA (I-LoRA), which constructs a dual-memory experience replay framework based on LoRA parameter interpolations. Extensive experiments and analysis on eight domain-specific CL benchmarks demonstrate that I-LoRA consistently show significant improvement over the previous state-of-the-art approaches with up to $11\%$ performance gains, providing a strong baseline and insights for future research on the large language model continual learning problem. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/which47/LLMCL}.

All in a Single Image: Large Multimodal Models are In-Image Learners

This paper introduces a new in-context learning (ICL) mechanism called In-Image Learning (I$^2$L) that combines demonstration examples, visual cues, and instructions into a single image to enhance the capabilities of GPT-4V. Unlike previous approaches that rely on converting images to text or incorporating visual input into language models, I$^2$L consolidates all information into one image and primarily leverages image processing, understanding, and reasoning abilities. This has several advantages: it avoids inaccurate textual descriptions of complex images, provides flexibility in positioning demonstration examples, reduces the input burden, and avoids exceeding input limits by eliminating the need for multiple images and lengthy text. To further combine the strengths of different ICL methods, we introduce an automatic strategy to select the appropriate ICL method for a data example in a given task. We conducted experiments on MathVista and Hallusionbench to test the effectiveness of I$^2$L in complex multimodal reasoning tasks and mitigating language hallucination and visual illusion. Additionally, we explored the impact of image resolution, the number of demonstration examples, and their positions on the effectiveness of I$^2$L. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/AGI-Edgerunners/IIL.