Universal Domain Adaptation (UniDA) targets knowledge transfer in the presence of both covariate and label shifts. Recently, Source-free Universal Domain Adaptation (SF-UniDA) has emerged to achieve UniDA without access to source data, which tends to be more practical due to data protection policies. The main challenge lies in determining whether covariate-shifted samples belong to target-private unknown categories. Existing methods tackle this either through hand-crafted thresholding or by developing time-consuming iterative clustering strategies. In this paper, we propose a new idea of LEArning Decomposition (LEAD), which decouples features into source-known and -unknown components to identify target-private data. Technically, LEAD initially leverages the orthogonal decomposition analysis for feature decomposition. Then, LEAD builds instance-level decision boundaries to adaptively identify target-private data. Extensive experiments across various UniDA scenarios have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of LEAD. Notably, in the OPDA scenario on VisDA dataset, LEAD outperforms GLC by 3.5% overall H-score and reduces 75% time to derive pseudo-labeling decision boundaries. Besides, LEAD is also appealing in that it is complementary to most existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/LEAD.

The relationships between things can vary significantly across different spatial or geographical contexts, a phenomenon that manifests in various spatial events such as the disparate impacts of pandemics[1], the dynamics of poverty distribution[2], fluctuations in housing prices[3], etc. By optimizing spatial analysis methods, we can enhance the accuracy of predictions, improve the interpretability of models, and make more effective spatial decisions or interventions[4]. Nonetheless, the inherent complexity of spatial data and the potential for nonlinear relationships pose challenges to enhancing interpretability through traditional spatial analysis techniques.[5]. In terms of models for analyzing spatial varying effects such as spatial filtering models[6-8] and spatial Bayes models [9], Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) and Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) stand out for their application of local spatial weighting schemes, which are instrumental in capturing spatial features more accurately[10, 11]. These linear regression-based approaches, however, encounter significant hurdles in decoding complex spatial phenomena (Figure 1). Various Geographically Weighted (GW) models have been developed to tackle issues such as multicollinearity [12, 13] and to extend the utility of GW models to classification tasks[14-17]. The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies, including Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) [18], Graph Neural Networks (GNN) [19, 20], and Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) [21], has introduced novel ways to mitigate uncertainties around spatial proximity and weighting kernels in GW models. Despite these advancements in marrying geospatial models with AI, challenges remain in addressing nonlinear correlations and deciphering underlying spatial mechanisms.

We study level set teleportation, an optimization sub-routine which seeks to accelerate gradient methods by maximizing the gradient norm on a level-set of the objective function. Since the descent lemma implies that gradient descent (GD) decreases the objective proportional to the squared norm of the gradient, level-set teleportation maximizes this one-step progress guarantee. For convex functions satisfying Hessian stability, we prove that GD with level-set teleportation obtains a combined sub-linear/linear convergence rate which is strictly faster than standard GD when the optimality gap is small. This is in sharp contrast to the standard (strongly) convex setting, where we show level-set teleportation neither improves nor worsens convergence rates. To evaluate teleportation in practice, we develop a projected-gradient-type method requiring only Hessian-vector products. We use this method to show that gradient methods with access to a teleportation oracle uniformly out-perform their standard versions on a variety of learning problems.

This paper presents an efficient method for updating particles in a particle filter (PF) to address the position estimation problem when dealing with sharp-peaked likelihood functions derived from multiple observations. Sharp-peaked likelihood functions commonly arise from millimeter-accurate distance observations of carrier phases in the global navigation satellite system (GNSS). However, when such likelihood functions are used for particle weight updates, the absence of particles within the peaks leads to all particle weights becoming zero. To overcome this problem, in this study, a straightforward and effective approach is introduced for updating particles when dealing with sharp-peaked likelihood functions obtained from multiple observations. The proposed method, termed as the multiple update PF, leverages prior knowledge regarding the spread of distribution for each likelihood function and conducts weight updates and resampling iteratively in the particle update process, prioritizing the likelihood function spreads. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method, particularly when applied to position estimation utilizing GNSS pseudorange and carrier phase observations. The multiple update PF exhibits faster convergence with fewer particles when compared to the conventional PF. Moreover, vehicle position estimation experiments conducted in urban environments reveal that the proposed method outperforms conventional GNSS positioning techniques, yielding more accurate position estimates.

State-of-the-art decentralized learning algorithms typically require the data distribution to be Independent and Identically Distributed (IID). However, in practical scenarios, the data distribution across the agents can have significant heterogeneity. In this work, we propose averaging rate scheduling as a simple yet effective way to reduce the impact of heterogeneity in decentralized learning. Our experiments illustrate the superiority of the proposed method (~3% improvement in test accuracy) compared to the conventional approach of employing a constant averaging rate.

The voluminous nature of geospatial temporal data from physical monitors and simulation models poses challenges to efficient data access, often resulting in cumbersome temporal selection experiences in web-based data portals. Thus, selecting a subset of time steps for prioritized visualization and pre-loading is highly desirable. Addressing this issue, this paper establishes a multifaceted definition of salient time steps via extensive need-finding studies with domain experts to understand their workflows. Building on this, we propose a novel approach that leverages autoencoders and dynamic programming to facilitate user-driven temporal selections. Structural features, statistical variations, and distance penalties are incorporated to make more flexible selections. User-specified priorities, spatial regions, and aggregations are used to combine different perspectives. We design and implement a web-based interface to enable efficient and context-aware selection of time steps and evaluate its efficacy and usability through case studies, quantitative evaluations, and expert interviews.

Traditional approaches in mental health research apply General Linear Models (GLM) to describe the longitudinal dynamics of observed psycho-behavioral measurements (questionnaire summary scores). Similarly, GLMs are also applied to characterize relationships between neurobiological measurements (regional fMRI signals) and perceptual stimuli or other regional signals. While these methods are useful for exploring linear correlations among the isolated signals of those constructs (i.e., summary scores or fMRI signals), these classical frameworks fall short in providing insights into the comprehensive system-level dynamics underlying observable changes. Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are a statistical model that enable us to describe the sequential relations among multiple observable constructs, and when applied through the lens of Finite State Automata (FSA), can provide a more integrated and intuitive framework for modeling and understanding the underlying controller (the prescription for how to respond to inputs) that fundamentally defines any system, as opposed to linearly correlating output signals produced by the controller. We present a simple and intuitive HMM processing pipeline vcHMM (See Preliminary Data) that highlights FSA theory and is applicable for both behavioral analysis of questionnaire data and fMRI data. HMMs offer theoretic promise as they are computationally equivalent to the FSA, the control processor of a Turing Machine (TM) The dynamic programming Viterbi algorithm is used to leverage the HMM model. It efficiently identifies the most likely sequence of hidden states. The vcHMM pipeline leverages this grammar to understand how behavior and neural activity relate to depression.

This short note describes a simple technique for analyzing probabilistic algorithms that rely on a light-tailed (but not necessarily bounded) source of randomization. We show that the analysis of such an algorithm can be reduced, in a black-box manner and with only a small loss in logarithmic factors, to an analysis of a simpler variant of the same algorithm that uses bounded random variables and often easier to analyze. This approach simultaneously applies to any light-tailed randomization, including exponential, sub-Gaussian, and more general fast-decaying distributions, without needing to appeal to specialized concentration inequalities. Analyses of a generalized Azuma inequality and stochastic optimization with general light-tailed noise are provided to illustrate the technique. We are interested in analyzing randomized algorithms that internally use light-tailed (yet not necessarily bounded) randomization.

This study explores the benefits of integrating the novel clustered federated learning (CFL) approach with non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) under non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) datasets, where multiple devices participate in the aggregation with time limitations and a finite number of sub-channels. A detailed theoretical analysis of the generalization gap that measures the degree of non-IID in the data distribution is presented. Following that, solutions to address the challenges posed by non-IID conditions are proposed with the analysis of the properties. Specifically, users' data distributions are parameterized as concentration parameters and grouped using spectral clustering, with Dirichlet distribution serving as the prior. The investigation into the generalization gap and convergence rate guides the design of sub-channel assignments through the matching-based algorithm, and the power allocation is achieved by Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions with the derived closed-form solution. The extensive simulation results show that the proposed cluster-based FL framework can outperform FL baselines in terms of both test accuracy and convergence rate. Moreover, jointly optimizing sub-channel and power allocation in NOMA-enhanced networks can lead to a significant improvement.

In recent years, personalized recommendation technology has flourished and become one of the hot research directions. The matrix factorization model and the metric learning model which proposed successively have been widely studied and applied. The latter uses the Euclidean distance instead of the dot product used by the former to measure the latent space vector. While avoiding the shortcomings of the dot product, the assumption of Euclidean distance is neglected, resulting in limited recommendation quality of the model. In order to solve this problem, this paper combines the Variationl Information Bottleneck with metric learning model for the first time, and proposes a new metric learning model VIB-DML (Variational Information Bottleneck Distance Metric Learning) for rating prediction, which limits the mutual information of the latent space feature vector to improve the robustness of the model and satisfiy the assumption of Euclidean distance by decoupling the latent space feature vector. In this paper, the experimental results are compared with the root mean square error (RMSE) on the three public datasets. The results show that the generalization ability of VIB-DML is excellent. Compared with the general metric learning model MetricF, the prediction error is reduced by 7.29%. Finally, the paper proves the strong robustness of VIB-DML through experiments.