Industry
QATCH: Benchmarking SQL-centric tasks with Table Representation Learning Models on Your Data
Table Representation Learning (TRL) models are commonly pre-trained on large open-domain datasets comprising millions of tables and then used to address downstream tasks. Choosing the right TRL model to use on proprietary data can be challenging, as the best results depend on the content domain, schema, and data quality. Our purpose is to support end-users in testing TRL models on proprietary data in two established SQL-centric tasks, i.e., Question Answering (QA) and Semantic Parsing (SP). We present QATCH (Query-Aided TRLChecklist), a toolbox to highlight TRL models' strengths and weaknesses on relational tables unseen at training time. For an input table, QATCH automatically generates a testing checklist tailored to QA and SP. Checklist generation is driven by a SQL query engine that crafts tests of different complexity. This design facilitates inherent portability, allowing the checks to be used by alternative models. We also introduce a set of cross-task performance metrics evaluating the TRL model's performance over its output. Finally, we show how QATCH automatically generates tests for proprietary datasets to evaluate various state-of-the-art models including TAPAS, TAPEX, and CHATGPT.
On the Complexity of Adversarial Decision Making
A central problem in online learning and decision making--from bandits to reinforcement learning--is to understand what modeling assumptions lead to sampleefficient learning guarantees. We consider a general adversarial decision making framework that encompasses (structured) bandit problems with adversarial rewards and reinforcement learning problems with adversarial dynamics. Our main result is to show--via new upper and lower bounds--that the Decision-Estimation Coefficient, a complexity measure introduced by Foster et al. [17] in the stochastic counterpart to our setting, is necessary and sufficient to obtain low regret for adversarial decision making. However, compared to the stochastic setting, one must apply the Decision-Estimation Coefficient to the convex hull of the class of models (or, hypotheses) under consideration. This establishes that the price of accommodating adversarial rewards or dynamics is governed by the behavior of the model class under convexification, and recovers a number of existing results--both positive and negative. En route to obtaining these guarantees, we provide new structural results that connect the Decision-Estimation Coefficient to variants of other well-known complexity measures, including the Information Ratio of Russo and Van Roy [47] and the Exploration-by-Optimization objective of Lattimore and György [32].
Learning on the Edge: Online Learning with Stochastic Feedback Graphs
The framework of feedback graphs is a generalization of sequential decisionmaking with bandit or full information feedback. In this work, we study an extension where the directed feedback graph is stochastic, following a distribution similar to the classical Erdős-Rényi model. Specifically, in each round every edge in the graph is either realized or not with a distinct probability for each edge.
Xi tests China's reach by blocking already-done Meta deal
Xi tests China's reach by blocking already-done Meta deal The Manus decision comes just weeks before China's Xi Jinping and the U.S. president are scheduled to meet at a high-profile summit. Meta cut the deal for Manus as part of its effort to catch up with rivals such as Alphabet's Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. China has sought for years to exert influence over business deals beyond its home turf. Still, its decision to press Meta Platforms to unwind a $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus marks a step unlike anything it's tried before. The country's powerful state planner decreed Monday that the deal must be canceled -- four months after it was sealed.
Adv-Attribute: Inconspicuous and Transferable Adversarial Attack on Face Recognition
Deep learning models have shown their vulnerability when dealing with adversarial attacks. Existing attacks almost perform on low-level instances, such as pixels and super-pixels, and rarely exploit semantic clues. For face recognition attacks, existing methods typically generate the ℓp-norm perturbations on pixels, however, resulting in low attack transferability and high vulnerability to denoising defense models. In this work, instead of performing perturbations on the low-level pixels, we propose to generate attacks through perturbing on the high-level semantics to improve attack transferability. Specifically, a unified flexible framework, Adversarial Attributes (Adv-Attribute), is designed to generate inconspicuous and transferable attacks on face recognition, which crafts the adversarial noise and adds it into different attributes based on the guidance of the difference in face recognition features from the target. Moreover, the importance-aware attribute selection and the multi-objective optimization strategy are introduced to further ensure the balance of stealthiness and attacking strength. Extensive experiments on the FFHQ and CelebA-HQ datasets show that the proposed Adv-Attribute method achieves the state-of-the-art attacking success rates while maintaining better visual effects against recent attack methods.
On Learning Fairness and Accuracy on Multiple Subgroups
We propose an analysis in fair learning that preserves the utility of the data while reducing prediction disparities under the criteria of group sufficiency. We focus on the scenario where the data contains multiple or even many subgroups, each with limited number of samples. As a result, we present a principled method for learning a fair predictor for all subgroups via formulating it as a bilevel objective. In the lower-level, the subgroup-specific predictors are learned through a small amount of data and the fair predictor. In the upper-level, the fair predictor is updated to be close to all subgroup specific predictors. We further prove that such a bilevel objective can effectively control the group sufficiency and generalization error. We evaluate the proposed framework on real-world datasets. Empirical evidence suggests the consistently improved fair predictions, as well as the comparable accuracy to the baselines.
Japan Airlines to test humanoid robots for airport ground handling work
A humanoid robot performs ground handling tasks at Tokyo's Haneda Airport on Monday. Japan Airlines (JAL) and GMO AI & Robotics, a unit of GMO Internet Group, have announced a demonstration experiment to utilize humanoid robots for ground handling tasks at Tokyo's Haneda Airport. The roughly three-year test will begin next month with the aim of reducing the need for manpower and cutting employee workloads amid a severe labor shortage in the industry. In the test, announced Monday, two robots made in China will carry out tasks such as transporting containers and opening and closing levers that secure them. Future plans include enabling the robots to operate autonomously, thereby expanding the range of tasks they can perform.
Towards Personalized Federated Learning via Heterogeneous Model Reassembly
This paper focuses on addressing the practical yet challenging problem of model heterogeneity in federated learning, where clients possess models with different network structures. To track this problem, we propose a novel framework called pFedHR, which leverages heterogeneous model reassembly to achieve personalized federated learning. In particular, we approach the problem of heterogeneous model personalization as a model-matching optimization task on the server side. Moreover, pFedHRautomatically and dynamically generates informative and diverse personalized candidates with minimal human intervention. Furthermore, our proposed heterogeneous model reassembly technique mitigates the adverse impact introduced by using public data with different distributions from the client data to a certain extent. Experimental results demonstrate that pFedHRoutperforms baselines on three datasets under both IID and Non-IID settings. Additionally, pFedHReffectively reduces the adverse impact of using different public data and dynamically generates diverse personalized models in an automated manner2.