FedMultimodal: A Benchmark For Multimodal Federated Learning

Over the past few years, Federated Learning (FL) has become an emerging machine learning technique to tackle data privacy challenges through collaborative training. In the Federated Learning algorithm, the clients submit a locally trained model, and the server aggregates these parameters until convergence. Despite significant efforts that have been made to FL in fields like computer vision, audio, and natural language processing, the FL applications utilizing multimodal data streams remain largely unexplored. It is known that multimodal learning has broad real-world applications in emotion recognition, healthcare, multimedia, and social media, while user privacy persists as a critical concern. Specifically, there are no existing FL benchmarks targeting multimodal applications or related tasks. In order to facilitate the research in multimodal FL, we introduce FedMultimodal, the first FL benchmark for multimodal learning covering five representative multimodal applications from ten commonly used datasets with a total of eight unique modalities. FedMultimodal offers a systematic FL pipeline, enabling end-to-end modeling framework ranging from data partition and feature extraction to FL benchmark algorithms and model evaluation. Unlike existing FL benchmarks, FedMultimodal provides a standardized approach to assess the robustness of FL against three common data corruptions in real-life multimodal applications: missing modalities, missing labels, and erroneous labels. We hope that FedMultimodal can accelerate numerous future research directions, including designing multimodal FL algorithms toward extreme data heterogeneity, robustness multimodal FL, and efficient multimodal FL. The datasets and benchmark results can be accessed at: https://github.com/usc-sail/fed-multimodal.

GPT-FL: Generative Pre-trained Model-Assisted Federated Learning

In this work, we propose GPT-FL, a generative pre-trained model-assisted federated learning (FL) framework. At its core, GPT-FL leverages generative pre-trained models to generate diversified synthetic data. These generated data are used to train a downstream model on the server, which is then fine-tuned with private client data under the standard FL framework. We show that GPT-FL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art FL methods in terms of model test accuracy, communication efficiency, and client sampling efficiency. Through comprehensive ablation analysis, we discover that the downstream model generated by synthetic data plays a crucial role in controlling the direction of gradient diversity during FL training, which enhances convergence speed and contributes to the notable accuracy boost observed with GPT-FL. Also, regardless of whether the target data falls within or outside the domain of the pre-trained generative model, GPT-FL consistently achieves significant performance gains, surpassing the results obtained by models trained solely with FL or synthetic data.

ImpressionGPT: An Iterative Optimizing Framework for Radiology Report Summarization with ChatGPT

The 'Impression' section of a radiology report is a critical basis for communication between radiologists and other physicians, and it is typically written by radiologists based on the 'Findings' section. However, writing numerous impressions can be laborious and error-prone for radiologists. Although recent studies have achieved promising results in automatic impression generation using large-scale medical text data for pre-training and fine-tuning pre-trained language models, such models often require substantial amounts of medical text data and have poor generalization performance. While large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have shown strong generalization capabilities and performance, their performance in specific domains, such as radiology, remains under-investigated and potentially limited. To address this limitation, we propose ImpressionGPT, which leverages the in-context learning capability of LLMs by constructing dynamic contexts using domain-specific, individualized data. This dynamic prompt approach enables the model to learn contextual knowledge from semantically similar examples from existing data. Additionally, we design an iterative optimization algorithm that performs automatic evaluation on the generated impression results and composes the corresponding instruction prompts to further optimize the model. The proposed ImpressionGPT model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both MIMIC-CXR and OpenI datasets without requiring additional training data or fine-tuning the LLMs. This work presents a paradigm for localizing LLMs that can be applied in a wide range of similar application scenarios, bridging the gap between general-purpose LLMs and the specific language processing needs of various domains.

ChatABL: Abductive Learning via Natural Language Interaction with ChatGPT

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have recently demonstrated significant potential in mathematical abilities, providing valuable reasoning paradigm consistent with human natural language. However, LLMs currently have difficulty in bridging perception, language understanding and reasoning capabilities due to incompatibility of the underlying information flow among them, making it challenging to accomplish tasks autonomously. On the other hand, abductive learning (ABL) frameworks for integrating the two abilities of perception and reasoning has seen significant success in inverse decipherment of incomplete facts, but it is limited by the lack of semantic understanding of logical reasoning rules and the dependence on complicated domain knowledge representation. This paper presents a novel method (ChatABL) for integrating LLMs into the ABL framework, aiming at unifying the three abilities in a more user-friendly and understandable manner. The proposed method uses the strengths of LLMs' understanding and logical reasoning to correct the incomplete logical facts for optimizing the performance of perceptual module, by summarizing and reorganizing reasoning rules represented in natural language format. Similarly, perceptual module provides necessary reasoning examples for LLMs in natural language format. The variable-length handwritten equation deciphering task, an abstract expression of the Mayan calendar decoding, is used as a testbed to demonstrate that ChatABL has reasoning ability beyond most existing state-of-the-art methods, which has been well supported by comparative studies. To our best knowledge, the proposed ChatABL is the first attempt to explore a new pattern for further approaching human-level cognitive ability via natural language interaction with ChatGPT.

TimelyFL: Heterogeneity-aware Asynchronous Federated Learning with Adaptive Partial Training

In cross-device Federated Learning (FL) environments, scaling synchronous FL methods is challenging as stragglers hinder the training process. Moreover, the availability of each client to join the training is highly variable over time due to system heterogeneities and intermittent connectivity. Recent asynchronous FL methods (e.g., FedBuff) have been proposed to overcome these issues by allowing slower users to continue their work on local training based on stale models and to contribute to aggregation when ready. However, we show empirically that this method can lead to a substantial drop in training accuracy as well as a slower convergence rate. The primary reason is that fast-speed devices contribute to many more rounds of aggregation while others join more intermittently or not at all, and with stale model updates. To overcome this barrier, we propose TimelyFL, a heterogeneity-aware asynchronous FL framework with adaptive partial training. During the training, TimelyFL adjusts the local training workload based on the real-time resource capabilities of each client, aiming to allow more available clients to join in the global update without staleness. We demonstrate the performance benefits of TimelyFL by conducting extensive experiments on various datasets (e.g., CIFAR-10, Google Speech, and Reddit) and models (e.g., ResNet20, VGG11, and ALBERT). In comparison with the state-of-the-art (i.e., FedBuff), our evaluations reveal that TimelyFL improves participation rate by 21.13%, harvests 1.28x - 2.89x more efficiency on convergence rate, and provides a 6.25% increment on test accuracy.

When Brain-inspired AI Meets AGI

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has been a long-standing goal of humanity, with the aim of creating machines capable of performing any intellectual task that humans can do. To achieve this, AGI researchers draw inspiration from the human brain and seek to replicate its principles in intelligent machines. Brain-inspired artificial intelligence is a field that has emerged from this endeavor, combining insights from neuroscience, psychology, and computer science to develop more efficient and powerful AI systems. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of brain-inspired AI from the perspective of AGI. We begin with the current progress in brain-inspired AI and its extensive connection with AGI. We then cover the important characteristics for both human intelligence and AGI (e.g., scaling, multimodality, and reasoning). We discuss important technologies toward achieving AGI in current AI systems, such as in-context learning and prompt tuning. We also investigate the evolution of AGI systems from both algorithmic and infrastructural perspectives. Finally, we explore the limitations and future of AGI.

FedAudio: A Federated Learning Benchmark for Audio Tasks

Federated learning (FL) has gained substantial attention in recent years due to the data privacy concerns related to the pervasiveness of consumer devices that continuously collect data from users. While a number of FL benchmarks have been developed to facilitate FL research, none of them include audio data and audio-related tasks. In this paper, we fill this critical gap by introducing a new FL benchmark for audio tasks which we refer to as FedAudio. FedAudio includes four representative and commonly used audio datasets from three important audio tasks that are well aligned with FL use cases. In particular, a unique contribution of FedAudio is the introduction of data noises and label errors to the datasets to emulate challenges when deploying FL systems in real-world settings. FedAudio also includes the benchmark results of the datasets and a PyTorch library with the objective of facilitating researchers to fairly compare their algorithms. We hope FedAudio could act as a catalyst to inspire new FL research for audio tasks and thus benefit the acoustic and speech research community. The datasets and benchmark results can be accessed at https://github.com/zhang-tuo-pdf/FedAudio.