In recent centralized nonconvex distributed learning and federated learning, local methods are one of the promising approaches to reduce communication time. However, existing work has mainly focused on studying first-order optimality guarantees. On the other side, second-order optimality guaranteed algorithms, i.e., algorithms escaping saddle points, have been extensively studied in the nondistributed optimization literature. In this paper, we study a new local algorithm called Bias-Variance Reduced Local Perturbed SGD (BVR-L-PSGD), that combines the existing bias-variance reduced gradient estimator with parameter perturbation to find second-order optimal points in centralized nonconvex distributed optimization. BVR-L-PSGD enjoys second-order optimality with nearly the same communication complexity as the best known one of BVR-L-SGD to find first-order optimality. Particularly, the communication complexity is better than non-local methods when the local datasets heterogeneity is smaller than the smoothness of the local loss. In an extreme case, the communication complexity approaches to eΘ(1)when the local datasets heterogeneity goes to zero.

In this section, in order to help readers understand the metric in the paper, we first revisit the definition of the Shapley value [14], which is widely considered as an unbiased estimation of the numerical importance w.r.t. each input variable. In game theory, the complex system is usually represented as a game, where each input variable is taken as a player, and the output of this system is regarded as the total reward of all players. Given a game with multiple players (input variables) N = {1,2,,n}, some players cooperate to pursue a high reward. Thus, the task is to divide the total reward, and fairly assign the divided elementary reward to each individual player. In this way, the elementary reward can be considered as the numerical importance of the corresponding variable to the complex system. Let 2N def= {S|S N}indicate all potential subsets of N. The game v: 2N R is a function, which estimates the overall reward v(S) earned by each specific subset of players S N. In this way, the Shapley value, denoted by φ(i), represents the numerical importance of the player ito the game v. φ(i) = X Using Shapley values to explain DNNs.

Visual question answering (VQA) is designed to examine the visual-textual reasoning ability of an intelligent agent. However, recent observations show that many VQA models may only capture the biases between questions and answers in a dataset rather than showing real reasoning abilities. For example, given a question, some VQA models tend to output the answer that occurs frequently in the dataset and ignore the images. To reduce this tendency, existing methods focus on weakening the language bias. Meanwhile, only a few works also consider vision bias implicitly.

Human Intelligence (HI) excels at combining basic skills to solve complex tasks. This capability is vital for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and should be embedded in comprehensive AIAgents, enabling them to harness expert models for complex task-solving towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising learning and reasoning abilities, and can effectively use external models, tools, plugins, or APIs to tackle complex problems. In this work, we introduce OpenAGI, an open-source AGI research and development platform designed for solving multi-step, real-world tasks. Specifically, OpenAGI uses a dual strategy, integrating standard benchmark tasks for benchmarking and evaluation, and open-ended tasks including more expandable models, tools, plugins, or APIs for creative problem-solving. Tasks are presented as natural language queries to the LLM, which then selects and executes appropriate models. We also propose a Reinforcement Learning from Task Feedback (RLTF) mechanism that uses task results to improve the LLM's task-solving ability, which creates a self-improving AI feedback loop. While we acknowledge that AGI is a broad and multifaceted research challenge with no singularly defined solution path, the integration of LLMs with domain-specific expert models, inspired by mirroring the blend of general and specialized intelligence in humans, offers a promising approach towards AGI.