Existing research on data valuation in federated and swarm learning focuses on valuing client contributions and works best when data across clients is independent and identically distributed (IID). In practice, data is rarely distributed IID. We develop an approach called DDVal for decentralized data valuation, capable of valuing individual data points in federated and swarm learning. DDVal is based on sharing deep features and approximating Shapley values through a k-nearest neighbor approximation method. This allows for novel applications, for example, to simultaneously reward institutions and individuals for providing data to a decentralized machine learning task. The valuation of data points through DDVal allows to also draw hierarchical conclusions on the contribution of institutions, and we empirically show that the accuracy of DDVal in estimating institutional contributions is higher than existing Shapley value approximation methods for federated learning. Specifically, it reaches a cosine similarity in approximating Shapley values of 99.969 % in both, IID and non-IID data distributions across institutions, compared with 99.301 % and 97.250 % for the best state of the art methods. DDVal scales with the number of data points instead of the number of clients, and has a loglinear complexity. This scales more favorably than existing approaches with an exponential complexity. We show that DDVal is especially efficient in data distribution scenarios with many clients that have few data points - for example, more than 16 clients with 8,000 data points each. By integrating DDVal into a decentralized system, we show that it is not only suitable for centralized federated learning, but also decentralized swarm learning, which aligns well with the research on emerging internet technologies such as web3 to reward users for providing data to algorithms.
Data valuation is critical in machine learning, as it helps enhance model transparency and protect data properties. Existing data valuation methods have primarily focused on discriminative models, neglecting deep generative models that have recently gained considerable attention. Similar to discriminative models, there is an urgent need to assess data contributions in deep generative models as well. However, previous data valuation approaches mainly relied on discriminative model performance metrics and required model retraining. Consequently, they cannot be applied directly and efficiently to recent deep generative models, such as generative adversarial networks and diffusion models, in practice. To bridge this gap, we formulate the data valuation problem in generative models from a similarity-matching perspective. Specifically, we introduce Generative Model Valuator (GMValuator), the first model-agnostic approach for any generative models, designed to provide data valuation for generation tasks. We have conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. To the best of their knowledge, GMValuator is the first work that offers a training-free, post-hoc data valuation strategy for deep generative models.
Genes are fundamental for analyzing biological systems and many recent works proposed to utilize gene expression for various biological tasks by deep learning models. Despite their promising performance, it is hard for deep neural networks to provide biological insights for humans due to their black-box nature. Recently, some works integrated biological knowledge with neural networks to improve the transparency and performance of their models. However, these methods can only incorporate partial biological knowledge, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose the Biological Factor Regulatory Neural Network (BFReg-NN), a generic framework to model relations among biological factors in cell systems. BFReg-NN starts from gene expression data and is capable of merging most existing biological knowledge into the model, including the regulatory relations among genes or proteins (e.g., gene regulatory networks (GRN), protein-protein interaction networks (PPI)) and the hierarchical relations among genes, proteins and pathways (e.g., several genes/proteins are contained in a pathway). Moreover, BFReg-NN also has the ability to provide new biologically meaningful insights because of its white-box characteristics. Experimental results on different gene expression-based tasks verify the superiority of BFReg-NN compared with baselines. Our case studies also show that the key insights found by BFReg-NN are consistent with the biological literature.
Setting proper evaluation objectives for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is vital for making XAI algorithms follow human communication norms, support human reasoning processes, and fulfill human needs for AI explanations. In this article, we examine explanation plausibility, which is the most pervasive human-grounded concept in XAI evaluation. Plausibility measures how reasonable the machine explanation is compared to the human explanation. Plausibility has been conventionally formulated as an important evaluation objective for AI explainability tasks. We argue against this idea, and show how optimizing and evaluating XAI for plausibility is sometimes harmful, and always ineffective to achieve model understandability, transparency, and trustworthiness. Specifically, evaluating XAI algorithms for plausibility regularizes the machine explanation to express exactly the same content as human explanation, which deviates from the fundamental motivation for humans to explain: expressing similar or alternative reasoning trajectories while conforming to understandable forms or language. Optimizing XAI for plausibility regardless of the model decision correctness also jeopardizes model trustworthiness, as doing so breaks an important assumption in human-human explanation namely that plausible explanations typically imply correct decisions, and violating this assumption eventually leads to either undertrust or overtrust of AI models. Instead of being the end goal in XAI evaluation, plausibility can serve as an intermediate computational proxy for the human process of interpreting explanations to optimize the utility of XAI. We further highlight the importance of explainability-specific evaluation objectives by differentiating the AI explanation task from the object localization task.
Despite Federated Learning (FL)'s trend for learning machine learning models in a distributed manner, it is susceptible to performance drops when training on heterogeneous data. Recently, dataset distillation has been explored in order to improve the efficiency and scalability of FL by creating a smaller, synthetic dataset that retains the performance of a model trained on the local private datasets. We discover that using distilled local datasets can amplify the heterogeneity issue in FL. To address this, we propose a new method, called Federated Virtual Learning on Heterogeneous Data with Local-Global Distillation (FEDLGD), which trains FL using a smaller synthetic dataset (referred as virtual data) created through a combination of local and global distillation. Specifically, to handle synchronization and class imbalance, we propose iterative distribution matching to allow clients to have the same amount of balanced local virtual data; to harmonize the domain shifts, we use federated gradient matching to distill global virtual data that are shared with clients without hindering data privacy to rectify heterogeneous local training via enforcing local-global feature similarity. We experiment on both benchmark and real-world datasets that contain heterogeneous data from different sources. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art heterogeneous FL algorithms under the setting with a very limited amount of distilled virtual data.
Maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is a particularly useful distance metric for differentially private data generation: when used with finite-dimensional features it allows us to summarize and privatize the data distribution once, which we can repeatedly use during generator training without further privacy loss. An important question in this framework is, then, what features are useful to distinguish between real and synthetic data distributions, and whether those enable us to generate quality synthetic data. This work considers the using the features of $\textit{neural tangent kernels (NTKs)}$, more precisely $\textit{empirical}$ NTKs (e-NTKs). We find that, perhaps surprisingly, the expressiveness of the untrained e-NTK features is comparable to that of the features taken from pre-trained perceptual features using public data. As a result, our method improves the privacy-accuracy trade-off compared to other state-of-the-art methods, without relying on any public data, as demonstrated on several tabular and image benchmark datasets.
Mitigating the discrimination of machine learning models has gained increasing attention in medical image analysis. However, rare works focus on fair treatments for patients with multiple sensitive demographic ones, which is a crucial yet challenging problem for real-world clinical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel method for fair representation learning with respect to multi-sensitive attributes. We pursue the independence between target and multi-sensitive representations by achieving orthogonality in the representation space. Concretely, we enforce the column space orthogonality by keeping target information on the complement of a low-rank sensitive space. Furthermore, in the row space, we encourage feature dimensions between target and sensitive representations to be orthogonal. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with extensive experiments on the CheXpert dataset. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to mitigate unfairness with respect to multiple sensitive attributes in the field of medical imaging.
Human organs constantly undergo anatomical changes due to a complex mix of short-term (e.g., heartbeat) and long-term (e.g., aging) factors. Evidently, prior knowledge of these factors will be beneficial when modeling their future state, i.e., via image generation. However, most of the medical image generation tasks only rely on the input from a single image, thus ignoring the sequential dependency even when longitudinal data is available. Sequence-aware deep generative models, where model input is a sequence of ordered and timestamped images, are still underexplored in the medical imaging domain that is featured by several unique challenges: 1) Sequences with various lengths; 2) Missing data or frame, and 3) High dimensionality. To this end, we propose a sequence-aware diffusion model (SADM) for the generation of longitudinal medical images. Recently, diffusion models have shown promising results on high-fidelity image generation. Our method extends this new technique by introducing a sequence-aware transformer as the conditional module in a diffusion model. The novel design enables learning longitudinal dependency even with missing data during training and allows autoregressive generation of a sequence of images during inference. Our extensive experiments on 3D longitudinal medical images demonstrate the effectiveness of SADM compared with baselines and alternative methods.
U-shaped networks are widely used in various medical image tasks, such as segmentation, restoration and reconstruction, but most of them usually rely on centralized learning and thus ignore privacy issues. To address the privacy concerns, federated learning (FL) and split learning (SL) have attracted increasing attention. However, it is hard for both FL and SL to balance the local computational cost, model privacy and parallel training simultaneously. To achieve this goal, in this paper, we propose Robust Split Federated Learning (RoS-FL) for U-shaped medical image networks, which is a novel hybrid learning paradigm of FL and SL. Previous works cannot preserve the data privacy, including the input, model parameters, label and output simultaneously. To effectively deal with all of them, we design a novel splitting method for U-shaped medical image networks, which splits the network into three parts hosted by different parties. Besides, the distributed learning methods usually suffer from a drift between local and global models caused by data heterogeneity. Based on this consideration, we propose a dynamic weight correction strategy (\textbf{DWCS}) to stabilize the training process and avoid model drift. Specifically, a weight correction loss is designed to quantify the drift between the models from two adjacent communication rounds. By minimizing this loss, a correction model is obtained. Then we treat the weighted sum of correction model and final round models as the result. The effectiveness of the proposed RoS-FL is supported by extensive experimental results on different tasks. Related codes will be released at https://github.com/Zi-YuanYang/RoS-FL.
Federated learning enables a large amount of edge computing devices to learn a model without data sharing jointly. As a leading algorithm in this setting, Federated Average FedAvg, which runs Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in parallel on local devices and averages the sequences only once in a while, have been widely used due to their simplicity and low communication cost. However, despite recent research efforts, it lacks theoretical analysis under assumptions beyond smoothness. In this paper, we analyze the convergence of FedAvg. Different from the existing work, we relax the assumption of strong smoothness. More specifically, we assume the semi-smoothness and semi-Lipschitz properties for the loss function, which have an additional first-order term in assumption definitions. In addition, we also assume bound on the gradient, which is weaker than the commonly used bounded gradient assumption in the convergence analysis scheme. As a solution, this paper provides a theoretical convergence study on Federated Learning.