Beyond Similarity: Personalized Federated Recommendation with Composite Aggregation

Federated recommendation aims to collect global knowledge by aggregating local models from massive devices, to provide recommendations while ensuring privacy. Current methods mainly leverage aggregation functions invented by federated vision community to aggregate parameters from similar clients, e.g., clustering aggregation. Despite considerable performance, we argue that it is suboptimal to apply them to federated recommendation directly. This is mainly reflected in the disparate model architectures. Different from structured parameters like convolutional neural networks in federated vision, federated recommender models usually distinguish itself by employing one-to-one item embedding table. Such a discrepancy induces the challenging embedding skew issue, which continually updates the trained embeddings but ignores the non-trained ones during aggregation, thus failing to predict future items accurately. To this end, we propose a personalized Federated recommendation model with Composite Aggregation (FedCA), which not only aggregates similar clients to enhance trained embeddings, but also aggregates complementary clients to update non-trained embeddings. Besides, we formulate the overall learning process into a unified optimization algorithm to jointly learn the similarity and complementarity. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets substantiate the effectiveness of our proposed model. The source codes are available at https://github.com/hongleizhang/FedCA.

DFA-GNN: Forward Learning of Graph Neural Networks by Direct Feedback Alignment

Graph neural networks are recognized for their strong performance across various applications, with the backpropagation algorithm playing a central role in the development of most GNN models. However, despite its effectiveness, BP has limitations that challenge its biological plausibility and affect the efficiency, scalability and parallelism of training neural networks for graph-based tasks. While several non-BP training algorithms, such as the direct feedback alignment, have been successfully applied to fully-connected and convolutional network components for handling Euclidean data, directly adapting these non-BP frameworks to manage non-Euclidean graph data in GNN models presents significant challenges. These challenges primarily arise from the violation of the i.i.d. assumption in graph data and the difficulty in accessing prediction errors for all samples (nodes) within the graph. To overcome these obstacles, in this paper we propose DFA-GNN, a novel forward learning framework tailored for GNNs with a case study of semi-supervised learning. The proposed method breaks the limitations of BP by using a dedicated forward training mechanism. Specifically, DFA-GNN extends the principles of DFA to adapt to graph data and unique architecture of GNNs, which incorporates the information of graph topology into the feedback links to accommodate the non-Euclidean characteristics of graph data. Additionally, for semi-supervised graph learning tasks, we developed a pseudo error generator that spreads residual errors from training data to create a pseudo error for each unlabeled node. These pseudo errors are then utilized to train GNNs using DFA. Extensive experiments on 10 public benchmarks reveal that our learning framework outperforms not only previous non-BP methods but also the standard BP methods, and it exhibits excellent robustness against various types of noise and attacks.

TransFR: Transferable Federated Recommendation with Pre-trained Language Models

Federated recommendations (FRs), facilitating multiple local clients to collectively learn a global model without disclosing user private data, have emerged as a prevalent architecture for privacy-preserving recommendations. In conventional FRs, a dominant paradigm is to utilize discrete identities to represent users/clients and items, which are subsequently mapped to domain-specific embeddings to participate in model training. Despite considerable performance, we reveal three inherent limitations that can not be ignored in federated settings, i.e., non-transferability across domains, unavailability in cold-start settings, and potential privacy violations during federated training. To this end, we propose a transferable federated recommendation model with universal textual representations, TransFR, which delicately incorporates the general capabilities empowered by pre-trained language models and the personalized abilities by fine-tuning local private data. Specifically, it first learns domain-agnostic representations of items by exploiting pre-trained models with public textual corpora. To tailor for federated recommendation, we further introduce an efficient federated fine-tuning and a local training mechanism. This facilitates personalized local heads for each client by utilizing their private behavior data. By incorporating pre-training and fine-tuning within FRs, it greatly improves the adaptation efficiency transferring to a new domain and the generalization capacity to address cold-start issues. Through extensive experiments on several datasets, we demonstrate that our TransFR model surpasses several state-of-the-art FRs in terms of accuracy, transferability, and privacy.

Bridging the Gap: Multi-Level Cross-Modality Joint Alignment for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Visible-Infrared person Re-IDentification (VI-ReID) is a challenging cross-modality image retrieval task that aims to match pedestrians' images across visible and infrared cameras. To solve the modality gap, existing mainstream methods adopt a learning paradigm converting the image retrieval task into an image classification task with cross-entropy loss and auxiliary metric learning losses. These losses follow the strategy of adjusting the distribution of extracted embeddings to reduce the intra-class distance and increase the inter-class distance. However, such objectives do not precisely correspond to the final test setting of the retrieval task, resulting in a new gap at the optimization level. By rethinking these keys of VI-ReID, we propose a simple and effective method, the Multi-level Cross-modality Joint Alignment (MCJA), bridging both modality and objective-level gap. For the former, we design the Modality Alignment Augmentation, which consists of three novel strategies, the weighted grayscale, cross-channel cutmix, and spectrum jitter augmentation, effectively reducing modality discrepancy in the image space. For the latter, we introduce a new Cross-Modality Retrieval loss. It is the first work to constrain from the perspective of the ranking list, aligning with the goal of the testing stage. Moreover, based on the global feature only, our method exhibits good performance and can serve as a strong baseline method for the VI-ReID community.

SSC3OD: Sparsely Supervised Collaborative 3D Object Detection from LiDAR Point Clouds

Collaborative 3D object detection, with its improved interaction advantage among multiple agents, has been widely explored in autonomous driving. However, existing collaborative 3D object detectors in a fully supervised paradigm heavily rely on large-scale annotated 3D bounding boxes, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. To tackle this issue, we propose a sparsely supervised collaborative 3D object detection framework SSC3OD, which only requires each agent to randomly label one object in the scene. Specifically, this model consists of two novel components, i.e., the pillar-based masked autoencoder (Pillar-MAE) and the instance mining module. The Pillar-MAE module aims to reason over high-level semantics in a self-supervised manner, and the instance mining module generates high-quality pseudo labels for collaborative detectors online. By introducing these simple yet effective mechanisms, the proposed SSC3OD can alleviate the adverse impacts of incomplete annotations. We generate sparse labels based on collaborative perception datasets to evaluate our method. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets reveal that our proposed SSC3OD can effectively improve the performance of sparsely supervised collaborative 3D object detectors.

The Cascaded Forward Algorithm for Neural Network Training

Backpropagation algorithm has been widely used as a mainstream learning procedure for neural networks in the past decade, and has played a significant role in the development of deep learning. However, there exist some limitations associated with this algorithm, such as getting stuck in local minima and experiencing vanishing/exploding gradients, which have led to questions about its biological plausibility. To address these limitations, alternative algorithms to backpropagation have been preliminarily explored, with the Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm being one of the most well-known. In this paper we propose a new learning framework for neural networks, namely Cascaded Forward (CaFo) algorithm, which does not rely on BP optimization as that in FF. Unlike FF, our framework directly outputs label distributions at each cascaded block, which does not require generation of additional negative samples and thus leads to a more efficient process at both training and testing. Moreover, in our framework each block can be trained independently, so it can be easily deployed into parallel acceleration systems. The proposed method is evaluated on four public image classification benchmarks, and the experimental results illustrate significant improvement in prediction accuracy in comparison with the baseline.

Collaborative Perception in Autonomous Driving: Methods, Datasets and Challenges

Collaborative perception is essential to address occlusion and sensor failure issues in autonomous driving. In recent years, deep learning on collaborative perception has become even thriving, with numerous methods have been proposed. Although some works have reviewed and analyzed the basic architecture and key components in this field, there is still a lack of reviews on systematical collaboration modules in perception networks and large-scale collaborative perception datasets. The primary goal of this work is to address the abovementioned issues and provide a comprehensive review of recent achievements in this field. First, we introduce fundamental technologies and collaboration schemes. Following that, we provide an overview of practical collaborative perception methods and systematically summarize the collaboration modules in networks to improve collaboration efficiency and performance while also ensuring collaboration robustness and safety. Then, we present large-scale public datasets and summarize quantitative results on these benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenges and promising future research directions.

LightFR: Lightweight Federated Recommendation with Privacy-preserving Matrix Factorization

Federated recommender system (FRS), which enables many local devices to train a shared model jointly without transmitting local raw data, has become a prevalent recommendation paradigm with privacy-preserving advantages. However, previous work on FRS performs similarity search via inner product in continuous embedding space, which causes an efficiency bottleneck when the scale of items is extremely large. We argue that such a scheme in federated settings ignores the limited capacities in resource-constrained user devices (i.e., storage space, computational overhead, and communication bandwidth), and makes it harder to be deployed in large-scale recommender systems. Besides, it has been shown that the transmission of local gradients in real-valued form between server and clients may leak users' private information. To this end, we propose a lightweight federated recommendation framework with privacy-preserving matrix factorization, LightFR, that is able to generate high-quality binary codes by exploiting learning to hash techniques under federated settings, and thus enjoys both fast online inference and economic memory consumption. Moreover, we devise an efficient federated discrete optimization algorithm to collaboratively train model parameters between the server and clients, which can effectively prevent real-valued gradient attacks from malicious parties. Through extensive experiments on four real-world datasets, we show that our LightFR model outperforms several state-of-the-art FRS methods in terms of recommendation accuracy, inference efficiency and data privacy.

Boundary Corrected Multi-scale Fusion Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation

Image semantic segmentation aims at the pixel-level classification of images, which has requirements for both accuracy and speed in practical application. Existing semantic segmentation methods mainly rely on the high-resolution input to achieve high accuracy and do not meet the requirements of inference time. Although some methods focus on high-speed scene parsing with lightweight architectures, they can not fully mine semantic features under low computation with relatively low performance. To realize the real-time and high-precision segmentation, we propose a new method named Boundary Corrected Multi-scale Fusion Network, which uses the designed Low-resolution Multi-scale Fusion Module to extract semantic information. Moreover, to deal with boundary errors caused by low-resolution feature map fusion, we further design an additional Boundary Corrected Loss to constrain overly smooth features. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves a state-of-the-art balance of accuracy and speed for the real-time semantic segmentation.

LighTN: Light-weight Transformer Network for Performance-overhead Tradeoff in Point Cloud Downsampling

Compared with traditional task-irrelevant downsampling methods, task-oriented neural networks have shown improved performance in point cloud downsampling range. Recently, Transformer family of networks has shown a more powerful learning capacity in visual tasks. However, Transformer-based architectures potentially consume too many resources which are usually worthless for low overhead task networks in downsampling range. This paper proposes a novel light-weight Transformer network (LighTN) for task-oriented point cloud downsampling, as an end-to-end and plug-and-play solution. In LighTN, a single-head self-correlation module is presented to extract refined global contextual features, where three projection matrices are simultaneously eliminated to save resource overhead, and the output of symmetric matrix satisfies the permutation invariant. Then, we design a novel downsampling loss function to guide LighTN focuses on critical point cloud regions with more uniform distribution and prominent points coverage. Furthermore, We introduce a feed-forward network scaling mechanism to enhance the learnable capacity of LighTN according to the expand-reduce strategy. The result of extensive experiments on classification and registration tasks demonstrates LighTN can achieve state-of-the-art performance with limited resource overhead.