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Two-dimensional metal oxides play an important role in electronics and optoelectronics, and it is still a challenge to obtain thin oxides film. Here, a fluidic exfoliation method is applied to synthesis the metal oxides film by using galinstan as the reactant, and Ga2O3 film with ~1 cm size is obtained. Optical microscope and scanning electron microscope images show that the Ga2O3 film is exfoliated from the galinstan without any droplets left. Energy Dispersive X-Ray measurements confirm the existence of the Ga2O3 film. Transmission electron microscope and selected area electron diffraction patterns indicate the oxidation process do not have a prior direction. The alloy liquid based fluidic exfoliation method in room temperature provide a promising route for the synthesis of two-dimensional mental oxides, which shows significant applications in electronic and photoelectronic devices., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figues

We present foundation language models developed to power Apple Intelligence features, including a ~3 billion parameter model designed to run efficiently on devices and a large server-based language model designed for Private Cloud Compute. These models are designed to perform a wide range of tasks efficiently, accurately, and responsibly. This report describes the model architecture, the data used to train the model, the training process, how the models are optimized for inference, and the evaluation results. We highlight our focus on Responsible AI and how the principles are applied throughout the model development.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities across various tasks, yet their development has predominantly centered on high-resource languages like English and Chinese, leaving low-resource languages underserved. To address this disparity, we present SeaLLMs 3, the latest iteration of the SeaLLMs model family, tailored for Southeast Asian languages. This region, characterized by its rich linguistic diversity, has lacked adequate language technology support. SeaLLMs 3 aims to bridge this gap by covering a comprehensive range of languages spoken in this region, including English, Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog, Malay, Burmese, Khmer, Lao, Tamil, and Javanese. Leveraging efficient language enhancement techniques and a specially constructed instruction tuning dataset, SeaLLMs 3 significantly reduces training costs while maintaining high performance and versatility. Our model excels in tasks such as world knowledge, mathematical reasoning, translation, and instruction following, achieving state-of-the-art performance among similarly sized models. Additionally, we prioritized safety and reliability by addressing both general and culture-specific considerations and incorporated mechanisms to reduce hallucinations. This work underscores the importance of inclusive AI, showing that advanced LLM capabilities can benefit underserved linguistic and cultural communities.

Magnetic induction (MI) is an effective technique in emergency through-the-earth communications due to the higher penetration efficiency and lower propagation loss as compared with electromagnetic wave communication. How to cancel the interference between different users and enhance the effectiveness of multi-user transmissions is imperative for the practical application of MI communication. In this paper, we use multi-frequency resonant circuit to establish multiple resonant frequencies for MI communication. The transmissions corresponding to different users operate at different resonant frequencies and multi-user interferences can be naturally mitigated. Numerical results verify our theoretical analyses and show that the proposed system can significantly enhance the performance.

In this paper, we propose a virtual full-duplex (VFD) technique with zero-interval modulation and sampling (ZIMS), where two half-duplex (HD) transceivers can simultaneously transmit signals and each transceiver can effectively receive the desired information. In ZIMS-VFD, the transceiver inserts a zero-interval for each symbol in the transmit signal and provides self-interference (SI)-free intervals for itself. Meanwhile, it samples the receive signal in the provided SI-free intervals and restores the desired symbols. Based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), we formulate the system model and show the transmit signal structure. Then, we give the transceiver design for single input single output (SISO) ZIMS-VFD and extend it to multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communications. Numerical results verify our theoretical analyses and show that ZIMS-VFD can effectively increase the capacity and approach the FD without SI.

Full-duplex (FD) is an attractive technology that can significantly boost the throughput of wireless communications. However, it is limited by the severe self-interference (SI) from the transmitter to the local receiver. In this paper, we propose a new SI cancellation (SIC) scheme based on reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), where small RISs are deployed inside FD devices to enhance SIC capability and system capacity under frequencyselective fading channels. The novel scheme can not only address the challenges associated with SIC but also improve the overall performance. We first analyze the near-field behavior of the RIS and then formulate an optimization problem to maximize the SIC capability by controlling the reflection coefficients (RCs) of the RIS and allocating the transmit power of the device. The problem is solved with alternate optimization (AO) algorithm in three cases: ideal case, where both the amplitude and phase of each RIS unit cell can be controlled independently and continuously, continuous phases, where the phase of each RIS unit cell can be controlled independently, while the amplitude is fixed to one, and discrete phases, where the RC of each RIS unit cell can only take discrete values and these discrete values are equally spaced on the unit circle. For the ideal case, the closed-form solution to RC is derived with Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. Based on Riemannian conjugate gradient (RCG) algorithm, we optimize the RC for the case of continuous phases and then extend the solution to the case of discrete phases by the nearest point projection (NPP) method. Simulation results are given to validate the performance of our proposed SIC scheme.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in diverse applications, yet they face significant drawbacks, including high inference latency, expensive training cost, and generation of hallucination. Collaborative decoding between large and small language models (SLMs) offers a novel approach to address these challenges. Inspired by dual-process cognitive theory, we integrate these methods into a unified framework termed Fast and Slow Generating (FS-GEN). This paper explores several techniques within the FS-GEN framework, including speculative decoding, contrastive decoding, and emulator or proxy fine-tuning. We provide a comprehensive analysis of these methodologies, offering insights into their similarities and differences under this framework. Our study delves into the differential knowledge capabilities of LLMs versus SLMs through the FS-GEN lens, revealing that fewer than 20% of collaborative interactions are required across various methods. These interactions adhere to a scaling law relative to the parameter ratios, thereby facilitating predictable collaboration. Furthermore, we investigate the specific positions where collaboration is most effective from an uncertainty perspective, yielding novel insights that could refine FS-GEN methods. Our findings reveal that the essential difference between models of different sizes lies in the uncertainty of the next token prediction, where interventions by larger models are most needed to assist the smaller ones. Code for Reproduction: https://github.com/TsinghuaC3I/FS-GEN

The independent low-rank matrix analysis (ILRMA) method stands out as a prominent technique for multichannel blind audio source separation. It leverages nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and nonnegative canonical polyadic decomposition (NCPD) to model source parameters. While it effectively captures the low-rank structure of sources, the NMF model overlooks inter-channel dependencies. On the other hand, NCPD preserves intrinsic structure but lacks interpretable latent factors, making it challenging to incorporate prior information as constraints. To address these limitations, we introduce a clustered source model based on nonnegative block-term decomposition (NBTD). This model defines blocks as outer products of vectors (clusters) and matrices (for spectral structure modeling), offering interpretable latent vectors. Moreover, it enables straightforward integration of orthogonality constraints to ensure independence among source images. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms ILRMA and its extensions in anechoic conditions and surpasses the original ILRMA in simulated reverberant environments.

Operators experience complicated physiological and psychological states when exposed to extreme heat stress, which can impair cognitive function and decrease performance significantly, ultimately leading to severe secondary disasters. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a feasible technique to identify their abnormal states to enhance the reliability of human-cybernetics systems. With the advancement of deep learning in physiological modeling, a model for evaluating operators' performance driven by electrocardiogram (ECG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was proposed, demonstrating high ecological validity. The model fused a convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone and a graph attention network (GAT) backbone to extract discriminative features from ECG time-frequency spectrums and fNIRS prefrontal cortex (PFC) network respectively with deeper neuroscience domain knowledge, and eventually achieved 0.90 AUC. Results supported that handcrafted features extracted by specialized neuroscience methods can alleviate overfitting. Inspired by the small-world nature of the brain network, the fNIRS PFC network was organized as an undirected graph and embedded by GAT. It is proven to perform better in information aggregation and delivery compared to a simple non-linear transformation. The model provides a potential neuroergonomics application for evaluating the human state in vital human-cybernetics systems under industry 5.0 scenarios.

In this work, we discuss building performant Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In particular, we study the importance of various architecture components and data choices. Through careful and comprehensive ablations of the image encoder, the vision language connector, and various pre-training data choices, we identified several crucial design lessons. For example, we demonstrate that for large-scale multimodal pre-training using a careful mix of image-caption, interleaved image-text, and text-only data is crucial for achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) few-shot results across multiple benchmarks, compared to other published pre-training results. Further, we show that the image encoder together with image resolution and the image token count has substantial impact, while the vision-language connector design is of comparatively negligible importance. By scaling up the presented recipe, we build MM1, a family of multimodal models up to 30B parameters, including both dense models and mixture-of-experts (MoE) variants, that are SOTA in pre-training metrics and achieve competitive performance after supervised fine-tuning on a range of established multimodal benchmarks. Thanks to large-scale pre-training, MM1 enjoys appealing properties such as enhanced in-context learning, and multi-image reasoning, enabling few-shot chain-of-thought prompting.

With the advancement of language models (LMs), their exposure to private data is increasingly inevitable, and their deployment (especially for smaller ones) on personal devices, such as PCs and smartphones, has become a prevailing trend. In contexts laden with user information, enabling models to both safeguard user privacy and execute commands efficiently emerges as an essential research imperative. In this paper, we propose CoGenesis, a collaborative generation framework integrating large (hosted on cloud infrastructure) and small models (deployed on local devices) to address privacy concerns logically. Initially, we design a pipeline to create personalized writing instruction datasets enriched with extensive context details as the testbed of this research issue. Subsequently, we introduce two variants of CoGenesis based on sketch and logits respectively. Our experimental findings, based on our synthesized dataset and two additional open-source datasets, indicate that: 1) Large-scale models perform well when provided with user context but struggle in the absence of such context. 2) While specialized smaller models fine-tuned on the synthetic dataset show promise, they still lag behind their larger counterparts. 3) Our CoGenesis framework, utilizing mixed-scale models, showcases competitive performance, providing a feasible solution to privacy issues., Comment: Accepted to ACL 2024 (Main Conference)

Operators' cognitive functions are impaired significantly under extreme heat stress, potentially resulting in more severe secondary disasters. This research investigated the impact of elevated temperature and humidity (25 60%RH, 30 70%RH, 35 80%RH, 40 90%RH) on the cognitive functions and performance of operators. Meanwhile, we explored the psychological-physiological mechanism underlying the change in performance by electrocardiogram (ECG), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and eye tracking physiologically. Psychological aspects such as situation awareness, workload, and working memory were assessed. Eventually, we verified and extended the maximal adaptability model to the extreme condition. Unexpectedly, a temporary improvement in simple reaction tasks but rapid impairment in advanced cognitive functions (i.e. situation awareness, communication, working memory) was obtained above 35 WBGT. The best performance in a suitable environment was due to more effective activation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). With temperature increasing, more mistakes occurred and comprehension was impaired due to drowsiness and lower arousal levels, according to evidence of compensatory effect in fNIRS. In the extreme environment, the enhanced PFC cooperation with higher functional connectivity resulted in a temporary improvement, while depressed activation in PFC, heavy physical load, and poor regulation of the cardiovascular system restricted it. Our results provide a detailed study of the process of operators' performance and cognitive functions when encountering increasing heat stress, as well as its underlying mechanisms from a neuroergonomics perspective. This can contribute to a better understanding of the interaction between operators' performance and workplace conditions, and help to achieve a more reliable human-centered production system in the promising era of Industry 5.0.

Asynchronous protocols have been shown to improve the scalability of federated learning (FL) with a massive number of clients. Meanwhile, momentum-based methods can achieve the best model quality in synchronous FL. However, naively applying momentum in asynchronous FL algorithms leads to slower convergence and degraded model performance. It is still unclear how to effective combinie these two techniques together to achieve a win-win. In this paper, we find that asynchrony introduces implicit bias to momentum updates. In order to address this problem, we propose momentum approximation that minimizes the bias by finding an optimal weighted average of all historical model updates. Momentum approximation is compatible with secure aggregation as well as differential privacy, and can be easily integrated in production FL systems with a minor communication and storage cost. We empirically demonstrate that on benchmark FL datasets, momentum approximation can achieve $1.15 \textrm{--}4\times$ speed up in convergence compared to existing asynchronous FL optimizers with momentum.

Nonnegative tensor factorization (NTF) has become an important tool for feature extraction and part-based representation with preserved intrinsic structure information from nonnegative high-order data. However, the original NTF methods utilize Euclidean or Kullback-Leibler divergence as the loss function which treats each feature equally leading to the neglect of the side-information of features. To utilize correlation information of features and manifold information of samples, we introduce Wasserstein manifold nonnegative tensor factorization (WMNTF), which minimizes the Wasserstein distance between the distribution of input tensorial data and the distribution of reconstruction. Although some researches about Wasserstein distance have been proposed in nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), they ignore the spatial structure information of higher-order data. We use Wasserstein distance (a.k.a Earth Mover's distance or Optimal Transport distance) as a metric and add a graph regularizer to a latent factor. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with other NMF and NTF methods.

Multichannel convolutive blind speech source separation refers to the problem of separating different speech sources from the observed multichannel mixtures without much a priori information about the mixing system. Multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization (MNMF) has been proven to be one of the most powerful separation frameworks and the representative algorithms such as MNMF and the independent low-rank matrix analysis (ILRMA) have demonstrated great performance. However, the sparseness properties of speech source signals are not fully taken into account in such a framework. It is well known that speech signals are sparse in nature, which is considered in this work to improve the separation performance. Specifically, we utilize the Bingham and Laplace distributions to formulate a disjoint constraint regularizer, which is subsequently incorporated into both MNMF and ILRMA. We then derive majorization-minimization rules for updating parameters related to the source model, resulting in the development of two enhanced algorithms: s-MNMF and s-ILRMA. Comprehensive simulations are conducted, and the results unequivocally demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed methodologies.

The so-called independent low-rank matrix analysis (ILRMA) has demonstrated a great potential for dealing with the problem of determined blind source separation (BSS) for audio and speech signals. This method assumes that the spectra from different frequency bands are independent and the spectral coefficients in any frequency band are Gaussian distributed. The Itakura-Saito divergence is then employed to estimate the source model related parameters. In reality, however, the spectral coefficients from different frequency bands may be dependent, which is not considered in the existing ILRMA algorithm. This paper presents an improved version of ILRMA, which considers the dependency between the spectral coefficients from different frequency bands. The Sinkhorn divergence is then exploited to optimize the source model parameters. As a result of using the cross-band information, the BSS performance is improved. But the number of parameters to be estimated also increases significantly, and so is the computational complexity. To reduce the algorithm complexity, we apply the Kronecker product to decompose the modeling matrix into the product of a number of matrices of much smaller dimensionality. An efficient algorithm is then developed to implement the Sinkhorn divergence based BSS algorithm and the complexity is reduced by an order of magnitude.

Neural implicit scene representations have recently shown encouraging results in dense visual SLAM. However, existing methods produce low-quality scene reconstruction and low-accuracy localization performance when scaling up to large indoor scenes and long sequences. These limitations are mainly due to their single, global radiance field with finite capacity, which does not adapt to large scenarios. Their end-to-end pose networks are also not robust enough with the growth of cumulative errors in large scenes. To this end, we introduce PLGSLAM, a neural visual SLAM system capable of high-fidelity surface reconstruction and robust camera tracking in real-time. To handle large-scale indoor scenes, PLGSLAM proposes a progressive scene representation method which dynamically allocates new local scene representation trained with frames within a local sliding window. This allows us to scale up to larger indoor scenes and improves robustness (even under pose drifts). In local scene representation, PLGSLAM utilizes tri-planes for local high-frequency features with multi-layer perceptron (MLP) networks for the low-frequency feature, achieving smoothness and scene completion in unobserved areas. Moreover, we propose local-to-global bundle adjustment method with a global keyframe database to address the increased pose drifts on long sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that PLGSLAM achieves state-of-the-art scene reconstruction results and tracking performance across various datasets and scenarios (both in small and large-scale indoor environments)., Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2024

Despite the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, there remains a linguistic bias that favors high-resource languages, such as English, often at the expense of low-resource and regional languages. To address this imbalance, we introduce SeaLLMs, an innovative series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. SeaLLMs are built upon the Llama-2 model and further advanced through continued pre-training with an extended vocabulary, specialized instruction and alignment tuning to better capture the intricacies of regional languages. This allows them to respect and reflect local cultural norms, customs, stylistic preferences, and legal considerations. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that SeaLLM-13b models exhibit superior performance across a wide spectrum of linguistic tasks and assistant-style instruction-following capabilities relative to comparable open-source models. Moreover, they outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages, such as Thai, Khmer, Lao, and Burmese, by large margins while remaining lightweight and cost-effective to operate., Comment: Technical report, ACL 2024 DEMO TRACK

The theoretical landscape of federated learning (FL) undergoes rapid evolution, but its practical application encounters a series of intricate challenges, and hyperparameter optimization is one of these critical challenges. Amongst the diverse adjustments in hyperparameters, the adaptation of the learning rate emerges as a crucial component, holding the promise of significantly enhancing the efficacy of FL systems. In response to this critical need, this paper presents FedHyper, a novel hypergradient-based learning rate adaptation algorithm specifically designed for FL. FedHyper serves as a universal learning rate scheduler that can adapt both global and local rates as the training progresses. In addition, FedHyper not only showcases unparalleled robustness to a spectrum of initial learning rate configurations but also significantly alleviates the necessity for laborious empirical learning rate adjustments. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of FedHyper's convergence rate and conduct extensive experiments on vision and language benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that FEDHYPER consistently converges 1.1-3x faster than FedAvg and the competing baselines while achieving superior final accuracy. Moreover, FedHyper catalyzes a remarkable surge in accuracy, augmenting it by up to 15% compared to FedAvg under suboptimal initial learning rate settings.

Ultra-compact spectrometers are becoming increasingly popular for their promising applications in biomedical analysis, environmental monitoring, and food safety. In this work, we report a novel single-pixel-photodetector spectrometer with a spectral range from 480 nm to 820 nm, based on the AlGaAs/GaAs p-graded-n junction with a voltage-tunable optical response. To reconstruct the optical spectrum, we propose a tailored method called Neural Spectral Fields (NSF) that leverages the unique wavelength and bias-dependent responsivity matrix. Our spectrometer achieves a high spectral wavelength accuracy of up to 0.30 nm and a spectral resolution of up to 10 nm. Additionally, we demonstrate the high spectral imaging performance of the device. The compatibility of our demonstration with the standard III-V process greatly accelerates the commercialization of miniaturized spectrometers.

This work considers the category distribution heterogeneity in federated learning. This issue is due to biased labeling preferences at multiple clients and is a typical setting of data heterogeneity. To alleviate this issue, most previous works consider either regularizing local models or fine-tuning the global model, while they ignore the adjustment of aggregation weights and simply assign weights based on the dataset size. However, based on our empirical observations and theoretical analysis, we find that the dataset size is not optimal and the discrepancy between local and global category distributions could be a beneficial and complementary indicator for determining aggregation weights. We thus propose a novel aggregation method, Federated Learning with Discrepancy-aware Collaboration (FedDisco), whose aggregation weights not only involve both the dataset size and the discrepancy value, but also contribute to a tighter theoretical upper bound of the optimization error. FedDisco also promotes privacy-preservation, communication and computation efficiency, as well as modularity. Extensive experiments show that our FedDisco outperforms several state-of-the-art methods and can be easily incorporated with many existing methods to further enhance the performance. Our code will be available at https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/FedDisco., Comment: Accepted by International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML2023)

The non-line-of-sight imaging technique aims to reconstruct targets from multiply reflected light. For most existing methods, dense points on the relay surface are raster scanned to obtain high-quality reconstructions, which requires a long acquisition time. In this work, we propose a signal-surface collaborative regularization (SSCR) framework that provides noise-robust reconstructions with a minimal number of measurements. Using Bayesian inference, we design joint regularizations of the estimated signal, the 3D voxel-based representation of the objects, and the 2D surface-based description of the targets. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that combines regularizations in mixed dimensions for hidden targets. Experiments on synthetic and experimental datasets illustrated the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method under both confocal and non-confocal settings. We report the reconstruction of the hidden targets with complex geometric structures with only $5 \times 5$ confocal measurements from public datasets, indicating an acceleration of the conventional measurement process by a factor of 10000. Besides, the proposed method enjoys low time and memory complexities with sparse measurements. Our approach has great potential in real-time non-line-of-sight imaging applications such as rescue operations and autonomous driving., Comment: main article: 10 pages, 7 figures supplement: 11 pages, 24 figures

Nonnegative Tucker Factorization (NTF) minimizes the euclidean distance or Kullback-Leibler divergence between the original data and its low-rank approximation which often suffers from grossly corruptions or outliers and the neglect of manifold structures of data. In particular, NTF suffers from rotational ambiguity, whose solutions with and without rotation transformations are equally in the sense of yielding the maximum likelihood. In this paper, we propose three Robust Manifold NTF algorithms to handle outliers by incorporating structural knowledge about the outliers. They first applies a half-quadratic optimization algorithm to transform the problem into a general weighted NTF where the weights are influenced by the outliers. Then, we introduce the correntropy induced metric, Huber function and Cauchy function for weights respectively, to handle the outliers. Finally, we introduce a manifold regularization to overcome the rotational ambiguity of NTF. We have compared the proposed method with a number of representative references covering major branches of NTF on a variety of real-world image databases. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method under two evaluation metrics (accuracy and nmi).

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging aims at reconstructing targets obscured from the direct line of sight. Existing NLOS imaging algorithms require dense measurements at rectangular grid points in a large area of the relay surface, which severely hinders their availability to variable relay scenarios in practical applications such as robotic vision, autonomous driving, rescue operations and remote sensing. In this work, we propose a Bayesian framework for NLOS imaging with no specific requirements on the spatial pattern of illumination and detection points. By introducing virtual confocal signals, we design a confocal complemented signal-object collaborative regularization (CC-SOCR) algorithm for high quality reconstructions. Our approach is capable of reconstructing both albedo and surface normal of the hidden objects with fine details under the most general relay setting. Moreover, with a regular relay surface, coarse rather than dense measurements are enough for our approach such that the acquisition time can be reduced significantly. As demonstrated in multiple experiments, the new framework substantially enhances the applicability of NLOS imaging., Comment: main article: 32 pages with 8 figures; supplementary information: 49 pages with 26 figures

An oft-cited challenge of federated learning is the presence of heterogeneity. \emph{Data heterogeneity} refers to the fact that data from different clients may follow very different distributions. \emph{System heterogeneity} refers to the fact that client devices have different system capabilities. A considerable number of federated optimization methods address this challenge. In the literature, empirical evaluations usually start federated training from random initialization. However, in many practical applications of federated learning, the server has access to proxy data for the training task that can be used to pre-train a model before starting federated training. We empirically study the impact of starting from a pre-trained model in federated learning using four standard federated learning benchmark datasets. Unsurprisingly, starting from a pre-trained model reduces the training time required to reach a target error rate and enables the training of more accurate models (up to 40\%) than is possible when starting from random initialization. Surprisingly, we also find that starting federated learning from a pre-trained initialization reduces the effect of both data and system heterogeneity. We recommend that future work proposing and evaluating federated optimization methods evaluate the performance when starting from random and pre-trained initializations. We also believe this study raises several questions for further work on understanding the role of heterogeneity in federated optimization., Comment: v2. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2206.15387

One of the key challenges in federated learning (FL) is local data distribution heterogeneity across clients, which may cause inconsistent feature spaces across clients. To address this issue, we propose a novel method FedFM, which guides each client's features to match shared category-wise anchors (landmarks in feature space). This method attempts to mitigate the negative effects of data heterogeneity in FL by aligning each client's feature space. Besides, we tackle the challenge of varying objective function and provide convergence guarantee for FedFM. In FedFM, to mitigate the phenomenon of overlapping feature spaces across categories and enhance the effectiveness of feature matching, we further propose a more precise and effective feature matching loss called contrastive-guiding (CG), which guides each local feature to match with the corresponding anchor while keeping away from non-corresponding anchors. Additionally, to achieve higher efficiency and flexibility, we propose a FedFM variant, called FedFM-Lite, where clients communicate with server with fewer synchronization times and communication bandwidth costs. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that FedFM with CG outperforms several works by quantitative and qualitative comparisons. FedFM-Lite can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods with five to ten times less communication costs., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures

Existing theory predicts that data heterogeneity will degrade the performance of the Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm in federated learning. However, in practice, the simple FedAvg algorithm converges very well. This paper explains the seemingly unreasonable effectiveness of FedAvg that contradicts the previous theoretical predictions. We find that the key assumption of bounded gradient dissimilarity in previous theoretical analyses is too pessimistic to characterize data heterogeneity in practical applications. For a simple quadratic problem, we demonstrate there exist regimes where large gradient dissimilarity does not have any negative impact on the convergence of FedAvg. Motivated by this observation, we propose a new quantity, average drift at optimum, to measure the effects of data heterogeneity, and explicitly use it to present a new theoretical analysis of FedAvg. We show that the average drift at optimum is nearly zero across many real-world federated training tasks, whereas the gradient dissimilarity can be large. And our new analysis suggests FedAvg can have identical convergence rates in homogeneous and heterogeneous data settings, and hence, leads to better understanding of its empirical success.

Federated Learning (FL) under distributed concept drift is a largely unexplored area. Although concept drift is itself a well-studied phenomenon, it poses particular challenges for FL, because drifts arise staggered in time and space (across clients). To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to explicitly study data heterogeneity in both dimensions. We first demonstrate that prior solutions to drift adaptation that use a single global model are ill-suited to staggered drifts, necessitating multiple-model solutions. We identify the problem of drift adaptation as a time-varying clustering problem, and we propose two new clustering algorithms for reacting to drifts based on local drift detection and hierarchical clustering. Empirical evaluation shows that our solutions achieve significantly higher accuracy than existing baselines, and are comparable to an idealized algorithm with oracle knowledge of the ground-truth clustering of clients to concepts at each time step., Comment: 20 pages. Published in AISTATS 2023

Prompting has shown impressive success in enabling large pretrained language models (LMs) to perform diverse NLP tasks, especially when only few downstream data are available. Automatically finding the optimal prompt for each task, however, is challenging. Most existing work resorts to tuning soft prompt (e.g., embeddings) which falls short of interpretability, reusability across LMs, and applicability when gradients are not accessible. Discrete prompt, on the other hand, is difficult to optimize, and is often created by "enumeration (e.g., paraphrasing)-then-selection" heuristics that do not explore the prompt space systematically. This paper proposes RLPrompt, an efficient discrete prompt optimization approach with reinforcement learning (RL). RLPrompt formulates a parameter-efficient policy network that generates the desired discrete prompt after training with reward. To overcome the complexity and stochasticity of reward signals by the large LM environment, we incorporate effective reward stabilization that substantially enhances the training efficiency. RLPrompt is flexibly applicable to different types of LMs, such as masked (e.g., BERT) and left-to-right models (e.g., GPTs), for both classification and generation tasks. Experiments on few-shot classification and unsupervised text style transfer show superior performance over a wide range of existing finetuning or prompting methods. Interestingly, the resulting optimized prompts are often ungrammatical gibberish text; and surprisingly, those gibberish prompts are transferrable between different LMs to retain significant performance, indicating LM prompting may not follow human language patterns., Comment: EMNLP 2022 Camera Ready. Code available at https://github.com/mingkaid/rl-prompt