Outlook Towards Deployable Continual Learning for Particle Accelerators

Particle Accelerators are high power complex machines. To ensure uninterrupted operation of these machines, thousands of pieces of equipment need to be synchronized, which requires addressing many challenges including design, optimization and control, anomaly detection and machine protection. With recent advancements, Machine Learning (ML) holds promise to assist in more advance prognostics, optimization, and control. While ML based solutions have been developed for several applications in particle accelerators, only few have reached deployment and even fewer to long term usage, due to particle accelerator data distribution drifts caused by changes in both measurable and non-measurable parameters. In this paper, we identify some of the key areas within particle accelerators where continual learning can allow maintenance of ML model performance with distribution drifts. Particularly, we first discuss existing applications of ML in particle accelerators, and their limitations due to distribution drift. Next, we review existing continual learning techniques and investigate their potential applications to address data distribution drifts in accelerators. By identifying the opportunities and challenges in applying continual learning, this paper seeks to open up the new field and inspire more research efforts towards deployable continual learning for particle accelerators.

A Comprehensive Survey of Mixture-of-Experts: Algorithms, Theory, and Applications

Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved astonishing successes in many domains, especially with the recent breakthroughs in the development of foundational large models. These large models, leveraging their extensive training data, provide versatile solutions for a wide range of downstream tasks. However, as modern datasets become increasingly diverse and complex, the development of large AI models faces two major challenges: (1) the enormous consumption of computational resources and deployment difficulties, and (2) the difficulty in fitting heterogeneous and complex data, which limits the usability of the models. Mixture of Experts (MoE) models has recently attracted much attention in addressing these challenges, by dynamically selecting and activating the most relevant sub-models to process input data. It has been shown that MoEs can significantly improve model performance and efficiency with fewer resources, particularly excelling in handling large-scale, multimodal data. Given the tremendous potential MoE has demonstrated across various domains, it is urgent to provide a comprehensive summary of recent advancements of MoEs in many important fields. Existing surveys on MoE have their limitations, e.g., being outdated or lacking discussion on certain key areas, and we aim to address these gaps. In this paper, we first introduce the basic design of MoE, including gating functions, expert networks, routing mechanisms, training strategies, and system design. We then explore the algorithm design of MoE in important machine learning paradigms such as continual learning, meta-learning, multi-task learning, and reinforcement learning. Additionally, we summarize theoretical studies aimed at understanding MoE and review its applications in computer vision and natural language processing. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions.

Marvel: Accelerating Safe Online Reinforcement Learning with Finetuned Offline Policy

The high costs and risks involved in extensive environment interactions hinder the practical application of current online safe reinforcement learning (RL) methods. While offline safe RL addresses this by learning policies from static datasets, the performance therein is usually limited due to reliance on data quality and challenges with out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Inspired by recent successes in offline-to-online (O2O) RL, it is crucial to explore whether offline safe RL can be leveraged to facilitate faster and safer online policy learning, a direction that has yet to be fully investigated. To fill this gap, we first demonstrate that naively applying existing O2O algorithms from standard RL would not work well in the safe RL setting due to two unique challenges: \emph{erroneous Q-estimations}, resulted from offline-online objective mismatch and offline cost sparsity, and \emph{Lagrangian mismatch}, resulted from difficulties in aligning Lagrange multipliers between offline and online policies. To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{Marvel}, a novel framework for O2O safe RL, comprising two key components that work in concert: \emph{Value Pre-Alignment} to align the Q-functions with the underlying truth before online learning, and \emph{Adaptive PID Control} to effectively adjust the Lagrange multipliers during online finetuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Marvel significantly outperforms existing baselines in both reward maximization and safety constraint satisfaction. By introducing the first policy-finetuning based framework for O2O safe RL, which is compatible with many offline and online safe RL methods, our work has the great potential to advance the field towards more efficient and practical safe RL solutions.

Unlearning Trojans in Large Language Models: A Comparison Between Natural Language and Source Code

This work investigates the application of Machine Unlearning (MU) for mitigating the impact of trojans embedded in conventional large language models of natural language (Text-LLMs) and large language models of code (Code-LLMs) We propose a novel unlearning approach, LYA, that leverages both gradient ascent and elastic weight consolidation, a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) based regularization technique, to unlearn trojans from poisoned models. We compare the effectiveness of LYA against conventional techniques like fine-tuning, retraining, and vanilla gradient ascent. The subject models we investigate are BERT and CodeBERT, for sentiment analysis and code defect detection tasks, respectively. Our findings demonstrate that the combination of gradient ascent and FIM-based regularization, as done in LYA, outperforms existing methods in removing the trojan's influence from the poisoned model, while preserving its original functionality. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that compares and contrasts MU of trojans in LLMs, in the NL and Coding domain.

Theory on Mixture-of-Experts in Continual Learning

Continual learning (CL) has garnered significant attention because of its ability to adapt to new tasks that arrive over time. Catastrophic forgetting (of old tasks) has been identified as a major issue in CL, as the model adapts to new tasks. The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model has recently been shown to effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting in CL, by employing a gating network to sparsify and distribute diverse tasks among multiple experts. However, there is a lack of theoretical analysis of MoE and its impact on the learning performance in CL. This paper provides the first theoretical results to characterize the impact of MoE in CL via the lens of overparameterized linear regression tasks. We establish the benefit of MoE over a single expert by proving that the MoE model can diversify its experts to specialize in different tasks, while its router learns to select the right expert for each task and balance the loads across all experts. Our study further suggests an intriguing fact that the MoE in CL needs to terminate the update of the gating network after sufficient training rounds to attain system convergence, which is not needed in the existing MoE studies that do not consider the continual task arrival. Furthermore, we provide explicit expressions for the expected forgetting and overall generalization error to characterize the benefit of MoE in the learning performance in CL. Interestingly, adding more experts requires additional rounds before convergence, which may not enhance the learning performance. Finally, we conduct experiments on both synthetic and real datasets to extend these insights from linear models to deep neural networks (DNNs), which also shed light on the practical algorithm design for MoE in CL.

OLLIE: Imitation Learning from Offline Pretraining to Online Finetuning

In this paper, we study offline-to-online Imitation Learning (IL) that pretrains an imitation policy from static demonstration data, followed by fast finetuning with minimal environmental interaction. We find the na\"ive combination of existing offline IL and online IL methods tends to behave poorly in this context, because the initial discriminator (often used in online IL) operates randomly and discordantly against the policy initialization, leading to misguided policy optimization and $\textit{unlearning}$ of pretraining knowledge. To overcome this challenge, we propose a principled offline-to-online IL method, named $\texttt{OLLIE}$, that simultaneously learns a near-expert policy initialization along with an $\textit{aligned discriminator initialization}$, which can be seamlessly integrated into online IL, achieving smooth and fast finetuning. Empirically, $\texttt{OLLIE}$ consistently and significantly outperforms the baseline methods in $\textbf{20}$ challenging tasks, from continuous control to vision-based domains, in terms of performance, demonstration efficiency, and convergence speed. This work may serve as a foundation for further exploration of pretraining and finetuning in the context of IL.

How to Leverage Diverse Demonstrations in Offline Imitation Learning

Offline Imitation Learning (IL) with imperfect demonstrations has garnered increasing attention owing to the scarcity of expert data in many real-world domains. A fundamental problem in this scenario is how to extract positive behaviors from noisy data. In general, current approaches to the problem select data building on state-action similarity to given expert demonstrations, neglecting precious information in (potentially abundant) $\textit{diverse}$ state-actions that deviate from expert ones. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective data selection method that identifies positive behaviors based on their resultant states -- a more informative criterion enabling explicit utilization of dynamics information and effective extraction of both expert and beneficial diverse behaviors. Further, we devise a lightweight behavior cloning algorithm capable of leveraging the expert and selected data correctly. In the experiments, we evaluate our method on a suite of complex and high-dimensional offline IL benchmarks, including continuous-control and vision-based tasks. The results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods on $\textbf{20/21}$ benchmarks, typically by $\textbf{2-5x}$, while maintaining a comparable runtime to Behavior Cloning ($\texttt{BC}$).

ChatGraph: Chat with Your Graphs

Graph analysis is fundamental in real-world applications. Traditional approaches rely on SPARQL-like languages or clicking-and-dragging interfaces to interact with graph data. However, these methods either require users to possess high programming skills or support only a limited range of graph analysis functionalities. To address the limitations, we propose a large language model (LLM)-based framework called ChatGraph. With ChatGraph, users can interact with graphs through natural language, making it easier to use and more flexible than traditional approaches. The core of ChatGraph lies in generating chains of graph analysis APIs based on the understanding of the texts and graphs inputted in the user prompts. To achieve this, ChatGraph consists of three main modules: an API retrieval module that searches for relevant APIs, a graph-aware LLM module that enables the LLM to comprehend graphs, and an API chain-oriented finetuning module that guides the LLM in generating API chains.

DedustNet: A Frequency-dominated Swin Transformer-based Wavelet Network for Agricultural Dust Removal

While dust significantly affects the environmental perception of automated agricultural machines, the existing deep learning-based methods for dust removal require further research and improvement in this area to improve the performance and reliability of automated agricultural machines in agriculture. We propose an end-to-end trainable learning network (DedustNet) to solve the real-world agricultural dust removal task. To our knowledge, DedustNet is the first time Swin Transformer-based units have been used in wavelet networks for agricultural image dusting. Specifically, we present the frequency-dominated block (DWTFormer block and IDWTFormer block) by adding a spatial features aggregation scheme (SFAS) to the Swin Transformer and combining it with the wavelet transform, the DWTFormer block and IDWTFormer block, alleviating the limitation of the global receptive field of Swin Transformer when dealing with complex dusty backgrounds. Furthermore, We propose a cross-level information fusion module to fuse different levels of features and effectively capture global and long-range feature relationships. In addition, we present a dilated convolution module to capture contextual information guided by wavelet transform at multiple scales, which combines the advantages of wavelet transform and dilated convolution. Our algorithm leverages deep learning techniques to effectively remove dust from images while preserving the original structural and textural features. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, DedustNet achieves superior performance and more reliable results in agricultural image dedusting, providing strong support for the application of agricultural machinery in dusty environments. Additionally, the impressive performance on real-world hazy datasets and application tests highlights DedustNet superior generalization ability and computer vision-related application performance.

WaveletFormerNet: A Transformer-based Wavelet Network for Real-world Non-homogeneous and Dense Fog Removal

Although deep convolutional neural networks have achieved remarkable success in removing synthetic fog, it is essential to be able to process images taken in complex foggy conditions, such as dense or non-homogeneous fog, in the real world. However, the haze distribution in the real world is complex, and downsampling can lead to color distortion or loss of detail in the output results as the resolution of a feature map or image resolution decreases. In addition to the challenges of obtaining sufficient training data, overfitting can also arise in deep learning techniques for foggy image processing, which can limit the generalization abilities of the model, posing challenges for its practical applications in real-world scenarios. Considering these issues, this paper proposes a Transformer-based wavelet network (WaveletFormerNet) for real-world foggy image recovery. We embed the discrete wavelet transform into the Vision Transformer by proposing the WaveletFormer and IWaveletFormer blocks, aiming to alleviate texture detail loss and color distortion in the image due to downsampling. We introduce parallel convolution in the Transformer block, which allows for the capture of multi-frequency information in a lightweight mechanism. Additionally, we have implemented a feature aggregation module (FAM) to maintain image resolution and enhance the feature extraction capacity of our model, further contributing to its impressive performance in real-world foggy image recovery tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our WaveletFormerNet performs better than state-of-the-art methods, as shown through quantitative and qualitative evaluations of minor model complexity. Additionally, our satisfactory results on real-world dust removal and application tests showcase the superior generalization ability and improved performance of WaveletFormerNet in computer vision-related applications.