Automatic Clustering for Unsupervised Risk Diagnosis of Vehicle Driving for Smart Road

Early risk diagnosis and driving anomaly detection from vehicle stream are of great benefits in a range of advanced solutions towards Smart Road and crash prevention, although there are intrinsic challenges, especially lack of ground truth, definition of multiple risk exposures. This study proposes a domain-specific automatic clustering (termed Autocluster) to self-learn the optimal models for unsupervised risk assessment, which integrates key steps of risk clustering into an auto-optimisable pipeline, including feature and algorithm selection, hyperparameter auto-tuning. Firstly, based on surrogate conflict measures, indicator-guided feature extraction is conducted to construct temporal-spatial and kinematical risk features. Then we develop an elimination-based model reliance importance (EMRI) method to unsupervised-select the useful features. Secondly, we propose balanced Silhouette Index (bSI) to evaluate the internal quality of imbalanced clustering. A loss function is designed that considers the clustering performance in terms of internal quality, inter-cluster variation, and model stability. Thirdly, based on Bayesian optimisation, the algorithm selection and hyperparameter auto-tuning are self-learned to generate the best clustering partitions. Various algorithms are comprehensively investigated. Herein, NGSIM vehicle trajectory data is used for test-bedding. Findings show that Autocluster is reliable and promising to diagnose multiple distinct risk exposures inherent to generalised driving behaviour. Besides, we also delve into risk clustering, such as, algorithms heterogeneity, Silhouette analysis, hierarchical clustering flows, etc. Meanwhile, the Autocluster is also a method for unsupervised multi-risk data labelling and indicator threshold calibration. Furthermore, Autocluster is useful to tackle the challenges in imbalanced clustering without ground truth or priori knowledge

Neural Network Compression Via Sparse Optimization

The compression of deep neural networks (DNNs) to reduce inference cost becomes increasingly important to meet realistic deployment requirements of various applications. There have been a significant amount of work regarding network compression, while most of them are heuristic rule-based or typically not friendly to be incorporated into varying scenarios. On the other hand, sparse optimization yielding sparse solutions naturally fits the compression requirement, but due to the limited study of sparse optimization in stochastic learning, its extension and application onto model compression is rarely well explored. In this work, we propose a model compression framework based on the recent progress on sparse stochastic optimization. Compared to existing model compression techniques, our method is effective and requires fewer extra engineering efforts to incorporate with varying applications, and has been numerically demonstrated on benchmark compression tasks. Particularly, we achieve up to 7.2 and 2.9 times FLOPs reduction with the same level of evaluation accuracy on VGG16 for CIFAR10 and ResNet50 for ImageNet compared to the baseline heavy models, respectively.

A Simple Spectral Failure Mode for Graph Convolutional Networks

We present a simple generative model in which spectral graph embedding for subsequent inference succeeds whereas unsupervised graph convolutional networks (GCN) fail. The geometrical insight is that the GCN is unable to look beyond the first non-informative spectral dimension.

Solving Stochastic Compositional Optimization is Nearly as Easy as Solving Stochastic Optimization

Stochastic compositional optimization generalizes classic (non-compositional) stochastic optimization to the minimization of compositions of functions. Each composition may introduce an additional expectation. The series of expectations may be nested. Stochastic compositional optimization is gaining popularity in applications such as reinforcement learning and meta learning. This paper presents a new Stochastically Corrected Stochastic Compositional gradient method (SCSC). SCSC runs in a single-time scale with a single loop, uses a fixed batch size, and guarantees to converge at the same rate as the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method for non-compositional stochastic optimization. This is achieved by making a careful improvement to a popular stochastic compositional gradient method. It is easy to apply SGD-improvement techniques to accelerate SCSC. This helps SCSC achieve state-of-the-art performance for stochastic compositional optimization. In particular, we apply Adam to SCSC, and the exhibited rate of convergence matches that of the original Adam on non-compositional stochastic optimization. We test SCSC using the portfolio management and model-agnostic meta-learning tasks.

Recurrent Exposure Generation for Low-Light Face Detection

Face detection from low-light images is challenging due to limited photos and inevitable noise, which, to make the task even harder, are often spatially unevenly distributed. A natural solution is to borrow the idea from multi-exposure, which captures multiple shots to obtain well-exposed images under challenging conditions. High-quality implementation/approximation of multi-exposure from a single image is however nontrivial. Fortunately, as shown in this paper, neither is such high-quality necessary since our task is face detection rather than image enhancement. Specifically, we propose a novel Recurrent Exposure Generation (REG) module and couple it seamlessly with a Multi-Exposure Detection (MED) module, and thus significantly improve face detection performance by effectively inhibiting non-uniform illumination and noise issues. REG produces progressively and efficiently intermediate images corresponding to various exposure settings, and such pseudo-exposures are then fused by MED to detect faces across different lighting conditions. The proposed method, named REGDet, is the first `detection-with-enhancement' framework for low-light face detection. It not only encourages rich interaction and feature fusion across different illumination levels, but also enables effective end-to-end learning of the REG component to be better tailored for face detection. Moreover, as clearly shown in our experiments, REG can be flexibly coupled with different face detectors without extra low/normal-light image pairs for training. We tested REGDet on the DARK FACE low-light face benchmark with thorough ablation study, where REGDet outperforms previous state-of-the-arts by a significant margin, with only negligible extra parameters.

VAFL: a Method of Vertical Asynchronous Federated Learning

Horizontal Federated learning (FL) handles multi-client data that share the same set of features, and vertical FL trains a better predictor that combine all the features from different clients. This paper targets solving vertical FL in an asynchronous fashion, and develops a simple FL method. The new method allows each client to run stochastic gradient algorithms without coordination with other clients, so it is suitable for intermittent connectivity of clients. This method further uses a new technique of perturbed local embedding to ensure data privacy and improve communication efficiency. Theoretically, we present the convergence rate and privacy level of our method for strongly convex, nonconvex and even nonsmooth objectives separately. Empirically, we apply our method to FL on various image and healthcare datasets. The results compare favorably to centralized and synchronous FL methods.

Communication-Efficient Robust Federated Learning Over Heterogeneous Datasets

This work investigates fault-resilient federated learning when the data samples are non-uniformly distributed across workers, and the number of faulty workers is unknown to the central server. In the presence of adversarially faulty workers who may strategically corrupt datasets, the local messages exchanged (e.g., local gradients and/or local model parameters) can be unreliable, and thus the vanilla stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is not guaranteed to converge. Recently developed algorithms improve upon vanilla SGD by providing robustness to faulty workers at the price of slowing down convergence. To remedy this limitation, the present work introduces a fault-resilient proximal gradient (FRPG) algorithm that relies on Nesterov's acceleration technique. To reduce the communication overhead of FRPG, a local (L) FRPG algorithm is also developed to allow for intermittent server-workers parameter exchanges. For strongly convex loss functions, FRPG and LFRPG have provably faster convergence rates than a benchmark robust stochastic aggregation algorithm. Moreover, LFRPG converges faster than FRPG while using the same communication rounds. Numerical tests performed on various real datasets confirm the accelerated convergence of FRPG and LFRPG over the robust stochastic aggregation benchmark and competing alternatives.

Orthant Based Proximal Stochastic Gradient Method for $\ell_1$-Regularized Optimization

Sparsity-inducing regularization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning applications, ranging from feature selection to model compression. In this paper, we present a novel stochastic method -- Orthant Based Proximal Stochastic Gradient Method (OBProx-SG) -- to solve perhaps the most popular instance, i.e., the l1-regularized problem. The OBProx-SG method contains two steps: (i) a proximal stochastic gradient step to predict a support cover of the solution; and (ii) an orthant step to aggressively enhance the sparsity level via orthant face projection. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, e.g., Prox-SG, RDA and Prox-SVRG, the OBProx-SG not only converges to the global optimal solutions (in convex scenario) or the stationary points (in non-convex scenario), but also promotes the sparsity of the solutions substantially. Particularly, on a large number of convex problems, OBProx-SG outperforms the existing methods comprehensively in the aspect of sparsity exploration and objective values. Moreover, the experiments on non-convex deep neural networks, e.g., MobileNetV1 and ResNet18, further demonstrate its superiority by achieving the solutions of much higher sparsity without sacrificing generalization accuracy.

LASG: Lazily Aggregated Stochastic Gradients for Communication-Efficient Distributed Learning

This paper targets solving distributed machine learning problems such as federated learning in a communication-efficient fashion. A class of new stochastic gradient descent (SGD) approaches have been developed, which can be viewed as the stochastic generalization to the recently developed lazily aggregated gradient (LAG) method --- justifying the name LASG. LAG adaptively predicts the contribution of each round of communication and chooses only the significant ones to perform. It saves communication while also maintains the rate of convergence. However, LAG only works with deterministic gradients, and applying it to stochastic gradients yields poor performance. The key components of LASG are a set of new rules tailored for stochastic gradients that can be implemented either to save download, upload, or both. The new algorithms adaptively choose between fresh and stale stochastic gradients and have convergence rates comparable to the original SGD. LASG achieves impressive empirical performance --- it typically saves total communication by an order of magnitude.