Statistical Learning
FedMSGL: A Self-Expressive Hypergraph Based Federated Multi-View Learning
Li, Daoyuan, Yang, Zuyuan, Xie, Shengli
Federated learning is essential for enabling collaborative model training across decentralized data sources while preserving data privacy and security. This approach mitigates the risks associated with centralized data collection and addresses concerns related to data ownership and compliance. Despite significant advancements in federated learning algorithms that address communication bottlenecks and enhance privacy protection, existing works overlook the impact of differences in data feature dimensions, resulting in global models that disproportionately depend on participants with large feature dimensions. Additionally, current single-view federated learning methods fail to account for the unique characteristics of multi-view data, leading to suboptimal performance in processing such data. To address these issues, we propose a Self-expressive Hypergraph Based Federated Multi-view Learning method (FedMSGL). The proposed method leverages self-expressive character in the local training to learn uniform dimension subspace with latent sample relation. At the central side, an adaptive fusion technique is employed to generate the global model, while constructing a hypergraph from the learned global and view-specific subspace to capture intricate interconnections across views. Experiments on multi-view datasets with different feature dimensions validated the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Parsing the Language of Expression: Enhancing Symbolic Regression with Domain-Aware Symbolic Priors
Huang, Sikai, Wen, Yixin Berry, Adusumilli, Tara, Choudhary, Kusum, Yang, Haizhao
Symbolic regression is essential for deriving interpretable expressions that elucidate complex phenomena by exposing the underlying mathematical and physical relationships in data. In this paper, we present an advanced symbolic regression method that integrates symbol priors from diverse scientific domains - including physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering - into the regression process. By systematically analyzing domain-specific expressions, we derive probability distributions of symbols to guide expression generation. We propose novel tree-structured recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that leverage these symbol priors, enabling domain knowledge to steer the learning process. Additionally, we introduce a hierarchical tree structure for representing expressions, where unary and binary operators are organized to facilitate more efficient learning. To further accelerate training, we compile characteristic expression blocks from each domain and include them in the operator dictionary, providing relevant building blocks. Experimental results demonstrate that leveraging symbol priors significantly enhances the performance of symbolic regression, resulting in faster convergence and higher accuracy.
Manify: A Python Library for Learning Non-Euclidean Representations
Chlenski, Philippe, Du, Kaizhu, Satow, Dylan, Pe'er, Itsik
Leveraging manifold learning techniques, Manify provides tools for learning embeddings in (products of) non-Euclidean spaces, performing classification and regression with data that lives in such spaces, and estimating the curvature of a manifold. Manify aims to advance research and applications in machine learning by offering a comprehensive suite of tools for manifold-based data analysis.
Action-Aware Pro-Active Safe Exploration for Mobile Robot Mapping
ฤฐลleyen, Aykut, van de Molengraft, Renรฉ, Arslan, รmรผr
Safe autonomous exploration of unknown environments is an essential skill for mobile robots to effectively and adaptively perform environmental mapping for diverse critical tasks. Due to its simplicity, most existing exploration methods rely on the standard frontier-based exploration strategy, which directs a robot to the boundary between the known safe and the unknown unexplored spaces to acquire new information about the environment. This typically follows a recurrent persistent planning strategy, first selecting an informative frontier viewpoint, then moving the robot toward the selected viewpoint until reaching it, and repeating these steps until termination. However, exploration with persistent planning may lack adaptivity to continuously updated maps, whereas highly adaptive exploration with online planning often suffers from high computational costs and potential issues with livelocks. In this paper, as an alternative to less-adaptive persistent planning and costly online planning, we introduce a new proactive preventive replanning strategy for effective exploration using the immediately available actionable information at a viewpoint to avoid redundant, uninformative last-mile exploration motion. We also use the actionable information of a viewpoint as a systematic termination criterion for exploration. To close the gap between perception and action, we perform safe and informative path planning that minimizes the risk of collision with detected obstacles and the distance to unexplored regions, and we apply action-aware viewpoint selection with maximal information utility per total navigation cost. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our action-aware proactive exploration method in numerical simulations and hardware experiments.
Double-Stage Feature-Level Clustering-Based Mixture of Experts Framework
Badjie, Bakary, Cecรญlio, Josรฉ, Casimiro, Antรณnio
The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model has succeeded in deep learning (DL). However, its complex architecture and advantages over dense models in image classification remain unclear. In previous studies, MoE performance has often been affected by noise and outliers in the input space. Some approaches incorporate input clustering for training MoE models, but most clustering algorithms lack access to labeled data, limiting their effectiveness. This paper introduces the Double-stage Feature-level Clustering and Pseudo-labeling-based Mixture of Experts (DFCP-MoE) framework, which consists of input feature extraction, feature-level clustering, and a computationally efficient pseudo-labeling strategy. This approach reduces the impact of noise and outliers while leveraging a small subset of labeled data to label a large portion of unlabeled inputs. We propose a conditional end-to-end joint training method that improves expert specialization by training the MoE model on well-labeled, clustered inputs. Unlike traditional MoE and dense models, the DFCP-MoE framework effectively captures input space diversity, leading to competitive inference results. We validate our approach on three benchmark datasets for multi-class classification tasks.
Learning Cascade Ranking as One Network
Wang, Yunli, Zhang, Zhen, Wang, Zhiqiang, Yang, Zixuan, Li, Yu, Yang, Jian, Wen, Shiyang, Jiang, Peng, Gai, Kun
Cascade Ranking is a prevalent architecture in large-scale top-k selection systems like recommendation and advertising platforms. Traditional training methods focus on single-stage optimization, neglecting interactions between stages. Recent advances such as RankFlow and FS-LTR have introduced interaction-aware training paradigms but still struggle to 1) align training objectives with the goal of the entire cascade ranking (i.e., end-to-end recall) and 2) learn effective collaboration patterns for different stages. To address these challenges, we propose LCRON, which introduces a novel surrogate loss function derived from the lower bound probability that ground truth items are selected by cascade ranking, ensuring alignment with the overall objective of the system. According to the properties of the derived bound, we further design an auxiliary loss for each stage to drive the reduction of this bound, leading to a more robust and effective top-k selection. LCRON enables end-to-end training of the entire cascade ranking system as a unified network. Experimental results demonstrate that LCRON achieves significant improvement over existing methods on public benchmarks and industrial applications, addressing key limitations in cascade ranking training and significantly enhancing system performance.
Mitigating Membership Inference Vulnerability in Personalized Federated Learning
Jung, Kangsoo, Biswas, Sayan, Palamidessi, Catuscia
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative model training without the need to share clients' personal data, thereby preserving privacy. However, the non-IID nature of the clients' data introduces major challenges for FL, highlighting the importance of personalized federated learning (PFL) methods. In PFL, models are trained to cater to specific feature distributions present in the population data. A notable method for PFL is the Iterative Federated Clustering Algorithm (IFCA), which mitigates the concerns associated with the non-IID-ness by grouping clients with similar data distributions. While it has been shown that IFCA enhances both accuracy and fairness, its strategy of dividing the population into smaller clusters increases vulnerability to Membership Inference Attacks (MIA), particularly among minorities with limited training samples. In this paper, we introduce IFCA-MIR, an improved version of IFCA that integrates MIA risk assessment into the clustering process. Allowing clients to select clusters based on both model performance and MIA vulnerability, IFCA-MIR achieves an improved performance with respect to accuracy, fairness, and privacy. We demonstrate that IFCA-MIR significantly reduces MIA risk while maintaining comparable model accuracy and fairness as the original IFCA.
Adjusted Count Quantification Learning on Graphs
Damke, Clemens, Hรผllermeier, Eyke
Quantification learning is the task of predicting the label distribution of a set of instances. We study this problem in the context of graph-structured data, where the instances are vertices. Previously, this problem has only been addressed via node clustering methods. In this paper, we extend the popular Adjusted Classify & Count (ACC) method to graphs. We show that the prior probability shift assumption upon which ACC relies is often not fulfilled and propose two novel graph quantification techniques: Structural importance sampling (SIS) makes ACC applicable in graph domains with covariate shift. Neighborhood-aware ACC improves quantification in the presence of non-homophilic edges. We show the effectiveness of our techniques on multiple graph quantification tasks.
Revisiting Agnostic Boosting
da Cunha, Arthur, Hรธgsgaard, Mikael Mรธller, Paudice, Andrea, Sun, Yuxin
Boosting is a key method in statistical learning, allowing for converting weak learners into strong ones. While well studied in the realizable case, the statistical properties of weak-to-strong learning remains less understood in the agnostic setting, where there are no assumptions on the distribution of the labels. In this work, we propose a new agnostic boosting algorithm with substantially improved sample complexity compared to prior works under very general assumptions. Our approach is based on a reduction to the realizable case, followed by a margin-based filtering step to select high-quality hypotheses. We conjecture that the error rate achieved by our proposed method is optimal up to logarithmic factors.
Pig behavior dataset and Spatial-temporal perception and enhancement networks based on the attention mechanism for pig behavior recognition
Qi, Fangzheng, Hou, Zhenjie, Lin, En, Li, Xing, Liang, iuzhen, Zhou, Xinwen
The recognition of pig behavior plays a crucial role in smart farming and welfare assurance for pigs. Currently, in the field of pig behavior recognition, the lack of publicly available behavioral datasets not only limits the development of innovative algorithms but also hampers model robustness and algorithm optimization.This paper proposes a dataset containing 13 pig behaviors that significantly impact welfare.Based on this dataset, this paper proposes a spatial-temporal perception and enhancement networks based on the attention mechanism to model the spatiotemporal features of pig behaviors and their associated interaction areas in video data. The network is composed of a spatiotemporal perception network and a spatiotemporal feature enhancement network. The spatiotemporal perception network is responsible for establishing connections between the pigs and the key regions of their behaviors in the video data. The spatiotemporal feature enhancement network further strengthens the important spatial features of individual pigs and captures the long-term dependencies of the spatiotemporal features of individual behaviors by remodeling these connections, thereby enhancing the model's perception of spatiotemporal changes in pig behaviors. Experimental results demonstrate that on the dataset established in this paper, our proposed model achieves a MAP score of 75.92%, which is an 8.17% improvement over the best-performing traditional model. This study not only improces the accuracy and generalizability of individual pig behavior recognition but also provides new technological tools for modern smart farming. The dataset and related code will be made publicly available alongside this paper.