Federated Learning (FL) is currently one of the most popular technologies in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) due to its collaborative learning and ability to preserve client privacy. However, it faces challenges such as non-identically and non-independently distributed (non-IID) and data with imbalanced labels among local clients. To address these limitations, the research community has explored various approaches such as using local model parameters, federated generative adversarial learning, and federated representation learning. In our study, we propose a novel Clustered FedStack framework based on the previously published Stacked Federated Learning (FedStack) framework. The local clients send their model predictions and output layer weights to a server, which then builds a robust global model. This global model clusters the local clients based on their output layer weights using a clustering mechanism. We adopt three clustering mechanisms, namely K-Means, Agglomerative, and Gaussian Mixture Models, into the framework and evaluate their performance. We use Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) with the maximum likelihood function to determine the number of clusters. The Clustered FedStack models outperform baseline models with clustering mechanisms. To estimate the convergence of our proposed framework, we use Cyclical learning rates.

Combining large language models with logical reasoning enhance their capacity to address problems in a robust and reliable manner. Nevertheless, the intricate nature of logical reasoning poses challenges to gathering reliable data from web for building comprehensive training datasets, subsequently affecting the performance on downstream tasks. To address this, we introduce a novel logic-driven data augmentation approach, AMR-LDA. AMR-LDA converts the original text into an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph, a structured semantic representation that encapsulates the logic structure of the sentence, upon which operations are performed to generate logically modified AMR graphs. The modified AMR graphs are subsequently converted back into texts to create augmented data. Notably, our methodology is architecture-agnostic and enhances generative large language models, such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, through prompt augmentation, and fine-tuning discriminative large language models through contrastive learning with logic-driven data augmentation. Empirical evidence underscores the efficacy of our proposed method with improvement in performance across seven downstream tasks, such as logical reasoning reading comprehension, textual entailment, and natural language inference. Furthermore, our method ranked first on the ReClor leaderboard \url{https://eval.ai/web/challenges/challenge-page/503/leaderboard/1347}. The source code and data are publicly available \url{https://github.com/Strong-AI-Lab/Logical-Equivalence-driven-AMR-Data-Augmentation-for-Representation-Learning}.

We consider a contrastive learning approach to knowledge graph embedding (KGE) via InfoNCE. For KGE, efficient learning relies on augmenting the training data with negative triples. However, most KGE works overlook the bias from generating the negative triples-false negative triples (factual triples missing from the knowledge graph). We argue that the generation of high-quality (i.e., hard) negative triples might lead to an increase in false negative triples. To mitigate the impact of false negative triples during the generation of hard negative triples, we propose the Hardness and Structure-aware (\textbf{HaSa}) contrastive KGE method, which alleviates the effect of false negative triples while generating the hard negative triples. Experiments show that HaSa improves the performance of InfoNCE-based KGE approaches and achieves state-of-the-art results in several metrics for WN18RR datasets and competitive results for FB15k-237 datasets compared to both classic and pre-trained LM-based KGE methods.

Modern automated surveillance techniques are heavily reliant on deep learning methods. Despite the superior performance, these learning systems are inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks - maliciously crafted inputs that are designed to mislead, or trick, models into making incorrect predictions. An adversary can physically change their appearance by wearing adversarial t-shirts, glasses, or hats or by specific behavior, to potentially avoid various forms of detection, tracking and recognition of surveillance systems; and obtain unauthorized access to secure properties and assets. This poses a severe threat to the security and safety of modern surveillance systems. This paper reviews recent attempts and findings in learning and designing physical adversarial attacks for surveillance applications. In particular, we propose a framework to analyze physical adversarial attacks and provide a comprehensive survey of physical adversarial attacks on four key surveillance tasks: detection, identification, tracking, and action recognition under this framework. Furthermore, we review and analyze strategies to defend against the physical adversarial attacks and the methods for evaluating the strengths of the defense. The insights in this paper present an important step in building resilience within surveillance systems to physical adversarial attacks.

Recently, with the rapid deployment of service APIs, personalized service recommendations have played a paramount role in the growth of the e-commerce industry. Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters determining the service performance, often used for recommendation, fluctuate over time. Thus, the QoS prediction is essential to identify a suitable service among functionally equivalent services over time. The contemporary temporal QoS prediction methods hardly achieved the desired accuracy due to various limitations, such as the inability to handle data sparsity and outliers and capture higher-order temporal relationships among user-service interactions. Even though some recent recurrent neural-network-based architectures can model temporal relationships among QoS data, prediction accuracy degrades due to the absence of other features (e.g., collaborative features) to comprehend the relationship among the user-service interactions. This paper addresses the above challenges and proposes a scalable strategy for Temporal QoS Prediction using Multi-source Collaborative-Features (TPMCF), achieving high prediction accuracy and faster responsiveness. TPMCF combines the collaborative-features of users/services by exploiting user-service relationship with the spatio-temporal auto-extracted features by employing graph convolution and transformer encoder with multi-head self-attention. We validated our proposed method on WS-DREAM-2 datasets. Extensive experiments showed TPMCF outperformed major state-of-the-art approaches regarding prediction accuracy while ensuring high scalability and reasonably faster responsiveness.

Recently, there has been a surge in methodological development for the difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to evaluate causal effects. Standard methods in the literature rely on the parallel trends assumption to identify the average treatment effect on the treated. However, the parallel trends assumption may be violated in the presence of unmeasured confounding, and the average treatment effect on the treated may not be useful in learning a treatment assignment policy for the entire population. In this article, we propose a general instrumented DiD approach for learning the optimal treatment policy. Specifically, we establish identification results using a binary instrumental variable (IV) when the parallel trends assumption fails to hold. Additionally, we construct a Wald estimator, novel inverse probability weighting (IPW) estimators, and a class of semiparametric efficient and multiply robust estimators, with theoretical guarantees on consistency and asymptotic normality, even when relying on flexible machine learning algorithms for nuisance parameters estimation. Furthermore, we extend the instrumented DiD to the panel data setting. We evaluate our methods in extensive simulations and a real data application.

What is a studio to do when their spin-off eclipses the original? That is where Turn 10 finds themselves in 2023, as it became clear that Forza Horizon – with its crystalline vistas, relentless DayGlo positivity, and resplendent open-world approach – had left more of a mark on the culture than its staid, closed-circuit mother franchise. It has been six years since Turn 10 put out a video game under the Forza Motorsport name, and now that they've finally returned to the well, you may be surprised that the studio has resisted weaving in those streamlined, casual-friendly ovations they discovered on their trips to Mexico and Australia. Forza Motorsport is a driving sim at its most icy and luxuriant; a sumptuous cathedral built to sanctify raw V8 power. The game may leave some Horizon vacationers cold but breath easy, grognards – it's clear that Turn 10 hasn't lost its fastball.

In recent years, deep learning has revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) by enabling the development of models that can learn complex representations of language data, leading to significant improvements in performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. Deep learning models for NLP typically use large amounts of data to train deep neural networks, allowing them to learn the patterns and relationships in language data. This is in contrast to traditional NLP approaches, which rely on hand-engineered features and rules to perform NLP tasks. The ability of deep neural networks to learn hierarchical representations of language data, handle variable-length input sequences, and perform well on large datasets makes them well-suited for NLP applications. Driven by the exponential growth of textual data and the increasing demand for condensed, coherent, and informative summaries, text summarization has been a critical research area in the field of NLP. Applying deep learning to text summarization refers to the use of deep neural networks to perform text summarization tasks. In this survey, we begin with a review of fashionable text summarization tasks in recent years, including extractive, abstractive, multi-document, and so on. Next, we discuss most deep learning-based models and their experimental results on these tasks. The paper also covers datasets and data representation for summarization tasks. Finally, we delve into the opportunities and challenges associated with summarization tasks and their corresponding methodologies, aiming to inspire future research efforts to advance the field further. A goal of our survey is to explain how these methods differ in their requirements as understanding them is essential for choosing a technique suited for a specific setting.

Retrieval-Augmented Machine Translation (RAMT) is attracting growing attention. This is because RAMT not only improves translation metrics, but is also assumed to implement some form of domain adaptation. In this contribution, we study another salient trait of RAMT, its ability to make translation decisions more transparent by allowing users to go back to examples that contributed to these decisions. For this, we propose a novel architecture aiming to increase this transparency. This model adapts a retrieval-augmented version of the Levenshtein Transformer and makes it amenable to simultaneously edit multiple fuzzy matches found in memory. We discuss how to perform training and inference in this model, based on multi-way alignment algorithms and imitation learning. Our experiments show that editing several examples positively impacts translation scores, notably increasing the number of target spans that are copied from existing instances.

We study how to perform unlearning, i.e. forgetting undesirable (mis)behaviors, on large language models (LLMs). We show at least three scenarios of aligning LLMs with human preferences can benefit from unlearning: (1) removing harmful responses, (2) erasing copyright-protected content as requested, and (3) eliminating hallucinations. Unlearning, as an alignment technique, has three advantages. (1) It only requires negative (e.g. harmful) examples, which are much easier and cheaper to collect (e.g. via red teaming or user reporting) than positive (e.g. helpful and often human-written) examples required in RLHF (RL from human feedback). (2) It is computationally efficient. (3) It is especially effective when we know which training samples cause the misbehavior. To the best of our knowledge, our work is among the first to explore LLM unlearning. We are also among the first to formulate the settings, goals, and evaluations in LLM unlearning. We show that if practitioners only have limited resources, and therefore the priority is to stop generating undesirable outputs rather than to try to generate desirable outputs, unlearning is particularly appealing. Despite only having negative samples, our ablation study shows that unlearning can still achieve better alignment performance than RLHF with just 2% of its computational time.