An Upload-Efficient Scheme for Transferring Knowledge From a Server-Side Pre-trained Generator to Clients in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HtFL) enables collaborative learning on multiple clients with different model architectures while preserving privacy. Despite recent research progress, knowledge sharing in HtFL is still difficult due to data and model heterogeneity. To tackle this issue, we leverage the knowledge stored in pre-trained generators and propose a new upload-efficient knowledge transfer scheme called Federated Knowledge-Transfer Loop (FedKTL). Our FedKTL can produce client-task-related prototypical image-vector pairs via the generator's inference on the server. With these pairs, each client can transfer pre-existing knowledge from the generator to its local model through an additional supervised local task. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets under two types of data heterogeneity with 14 kinds of models including CNNs and ViTs. Results show that our upload-efficient FedKTL surpasses seven state-of-the-art methods by up to 7.31% in accuracy. Moreover, our knowledge transfer scheme is applicable in scenarios with only one edge client. Code: https://github.com/TsingZ0/FedKTL

CGI-DM: Digital Copyright Authentication for Diffusion Models via Contrasting Gradient Inversion

Diffusion Models (DMs) have evolved into advanced image generation tools, especially for few-shot generation where a pretrained model is fine-tuned on a small set of images to capture a specific style or object. Despite their success, concerns exist about potential copyright violations stemming from the use of unauthorized data in this process. In response, we present Contrasting Gradient Inversion for Diffusion Models (CGI-DM), a novel method featuring vivid visual representations for digital copyright authentication. Our approach involves removing partial information of an image and recovering missing details by exploiting conceptual differences between the pretrained and fine-tuned models. We formulate the differences as KL divergence between latent variables of the two models when given the same input image, which can be maximized through Monte Carlo sampling and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). The similarity between original and recovered images serves as a strong indicator of potential infringements. Extensive experiments on the WikiArt and Dreambooth datasets demonstrate the high accuracy of CGI-DM in digital copyright authentication, surpassing alternative validation techniques. Code implementation is available at https://github.com/Nicholas0228/Revelio.

TDViT: Temporal Dilated Video Transformer for Dense Video Tasks

Deep video models, for example, 3D CNNs or video transformers, have achieved promising performance on sparse video tasks, i.e., predicting one result per video. However, challenges arise when adapting existing deep video models to dense video tasks, i.e., predicting one result per frame. Specifically, these models are expensive for deployment, less effective when handling redundant frames, and difficult to capture long-range temporal correlations. To overcome these issues, we propose a Temporal Dilated Video Transformer (TDViT) that consists of carefully designed temporal dilated transformer blocks (TDTB). TDTB can efficiently extract spatiotemporal representations and effectively alleviate the negative effect of temporal redundancy. Furthermore, by using hierarchical TDTBs, our approach obtains an exponentially expanded temporal receptive field and therefore can model long-range dynamics. Extensive experiments are conducted on two different dense video benchmarks, i.e., ImageNet VID for video object detection and YouTube VIS for video instance segmentation. Excellent experimental results demonstrate the superior efficiency, effectiveness, and compatibility of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/guanxiongsun/vfe.pytorch.

Efficient One-stage Video Object Detection by Exploiting Temporal Consistency

Recently, one-stage detectors have achieved competitive accuracy and faster speed compared with traditional two-stage detectors on image data. However, in the field of video object detection (VOD), most existing VOD methods are still based on two-stage detectors. Moreover, directly adapting existing VOD methods to one-stage detectors introduces unaffordable computational costs. In this paper, we first analyse the computational bottlenecks of using one-stage detectors for VOD. Based on the analysis, we present a simple yet efficient framework to address the computational bottlenecks and achieve efficient one-stage VOD by exploiting the temporal consistency in video frames. Specifically, our method consists of a location-prior network to filter out background regions and a size-prior network to skip unnecessary computations on low-level feature maps for specific frames. We test our method on various modern one-stage detectors and conduct extensive experiments on the ImageNet VID dataset. Excellent experimental results demonstrate the superior effectiveness, efficiency, and compatibility of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/guanxiongsun/vfe.pytorch.

Spatio-temporal Prompting Network for Robust Video Feature Extraction

Frame quality deterioration is one of the main challenges in the field of video understanding. To compensate for the information loss caused by deteriorated frames, recent approaches exploit transformer-based integration modules to obtain spatio-temporal information. However, these integration modules are heavy and complex. Furthermore, each integration module is specifically tailored for its target task, making it difficult to generalise to multiple tasks. In this paper, we present a neat and unified framework, called Spatio-Temporal Prompting Network (STPN). It can efficiently extract robust and accurate video features by dynamically adjusting the input features in the backbone network. Specifically, STPN predicts several video prompts containing spatio-temporal information of neighbour frames. Then, these video prompts are prepended to the patch embeddings of the current frame as the updated input for video feature extraction. Moreover, STPN is easy to generalise to various video tasks because it does not contain task-specific modules. Without bells and whistles, STPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely-used datasets for different video understanding tasks, i.e., ImageNetVID for video object detection, YouTubeVIS for video instance segmentation, and GOT-10k for visual object tracking. Code is available at https://github.com/guanxiongsun/vfe.pytorch.

MAMBA: Multi-level Aggregation via Memory Bank for Video Object Detection

State-of-the-art video object detection methods maintain a memory structure, either a sliding window or a memory queue, to enhance the current frame using attention mechanisms. However, we argue that these memory structures are not efficient or sufficient because of two implied operations: (1) concatenating all features in memory for enhancement, leading to a heavy computational cost; (2) frame-wise memory updating, preventing the memory from capturing more temporal information. In this paper, we propose a multi-level aggregation architecture via memory bank called MAMBA. Specifically, our memory bank employs two novel operations to eliminate the disadvantages of existing methods: (1) light-weight key-set construction which can significantly reduce the computational cost; (2) fine-grained feature-wise updating strategy which enables our method to utilize knowledge from the whole video. To better enhance features from complementary levels, i.e., feature maps and proposals, we further propose a generalized enhancement operation (GEO) to aggregate multi-level features in a unified manner. We conduct extensive evaluations on the challenging ImageNetVID dataset. Compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves superior performance in terms of both speed and accuracy. More remarkably, MAMBA achieves mAP of 83.7/84.6% at 12.6/9.1 FPS with ResNet-101. Code is available at https://github.com/guanxiongsun/vfe.pytorch.

FedTGP: Trainable Global Prototypes with Adaptive-Margin-Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Data and Model Heterogeneity in Federated Learning

Recently, Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HtFL) has attracted attention due to its ability to support heterogeneous models and data. To reduce the high communication cost of transmitting model parameters, a major challenge in HtFL, prototype-based HtFL methods are proposed to solely share class representatives, a.k.a, prototypes, among heterogeneous clients while maintaining the privacy of clients' models. However, these prototypes are naively aggregated into global prototypes on the server using weighted averaging, resulting in suboptimal global knowledge which negatively impacts the performance of clients. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel HtFL approach called FedTGP, which leverages our Adaptive-margin-enhanced Contrastive Learning (ACL) to learn Trainable Global Prototypes (TGP) on the server. By incorporating ACL, our approach enhances prototype separability while preserving semantic meaning. Extensive experiments with twelve heterogeneous models demonstrate that our FedTGP surpasses state-of-the-art methods by up to 9.08% in accuracy while maintaining the communication and privacy advantages of prototype-based HtFL. Our code is available at https://github.com/TsingZ0/FedTGP.

SkyMask: Attack-agnostic Robust Federated Learning with Fine-grained Learnable Masks

Federated Learning (FL) is becoming a popular paradigm for leveraging distributed data and preserving data privacy. However, due to the distributed characteristic, FL systems are vulnerable to Byzantine attacks that compromised clients attack the global model by uploading malicious model updates. Most existing Byzantine-robust FL systems statistically analyze the weights of whole individual model updates uploaded by clients to defend against Byzantine attacks. With the development of layer-level and parameter-level fine-grained attacks, the attacks' stealthiness and effectiveness have been significantly improved. Due to unawareness or overreaction, the existing model-level defense methods degrade the training efficiency and model performance. To address this problem, we propose SkyMask, a new attack-agnostic robust FL system that leverages fine-grained learnable masks to identify malicious model updates at the parameter-level. Specifically, the FL server applies parameter-level masks to model updates uploaded by clients and trains the masks over a small clean dataset (i.e., root dataset) to learn the subtle difference between benign and malicious model updates in a high-dimension space. Our extensive experiments involve different models on three public datasets under state-of-the-art (SOTA) attacks, where the results show that SkyMask achieves up to 10% higher testing accuracy compared with SOTA defense strategies and successfully defends against attacks with malicious clients of a high fraction up to 80%. In the meantime, the experimental results demonstrate the scalability of our approach and the weak dependence on the data distribution of the root dataset.

PFLlib: Personalized Federated Learning Algorithm Library

Amid the ongoing advancements in Federated Learning (FL), a machine learning paradigm that allows collaborative learning with data privacy protection, personalized FL (pFL) has gained significant prominence as a research direction within the FL domain. Whereas traditional FL (tFL) focuses on jointly learning a global model, pFL aims to achieve a balance between the global and personalized objectives of each client in FL settings. To foster the pFL research community, we propose PFLlib, a comprehensive pFL algorithm library with an integrated evaluation platform. In PFLlib, We implement 34 state-of-the-art FL algorithms (including 7 classic tFL algorithms and 27 pFL algorithms) and provide various evaluation environments with three statistically heterogeneous scenarios and 14 datasets. At present, PFLlib has already gained 850 stars and 199 forks on GitHub.

Eliminating Domain Bias for Federated Learning in Representation Space

Recently, federated learning (FL) is popular for its privacy-preserving and collaborative learning abilities. However, under statistically heterogeneous scenarios, we observe that biased data domains on clients cause a representation bias phenomenon and further degenerate generic representations during local training, i.e., the representation degeneration phenomenon. To address these issues, we propose a general framework Domain Bias Eliminator (DBE) for FL. Our theoretical analysis reveals that DBE can promote bi-directional knowledge transfer between server and client, as it reduces the domain discrepancy between server and client in representation space. Besides, extensive experiments on four datasets show that DBE can greatly improve existing FL methods in both generalization and personalization abilities. The DBE-equipped FL method can outperform ten state-of-the-art personalized FL methods by a large margin. Our code is public at https://github.com/TsingZ0/DBE.