Federated Learning (FL) has garnered significant interest recently due to its potential as an effective solution for tackling many challenges in diverse application scenarios, for example, data privacy in network edge traffic classification. Despite its recognized advantages, FL encounters obstacles linked to statistical data heterogeneity and labeled data scarcity during the training of single-task models for machine learning-based traffic classification, leading to hindered learning performance. In response to these challenges, adopting a hard-parameter sharing multi-task learning model with auxiliary tasks proves to be a suitable approach. Such a model has the capability to reduce communication and computation costs, navigate statistical complexities inherent in FL contexts, and overcome labeled data scarcity by leveraging knowledge derived from interconnected auxiliary tasks. This paper introduces a new framework for federated auxiliary hard-parameter sharing multi-task learning, namely, FedAuxHMTL. The introduced framework incorporates model parameter exchanges between edge server and base stations, enabling base stations from distributed areas to participate in the FedAuxHMTL process and enhance the learning performance of the main task-network edge traffic classification. Empirical experiments are conducted to validate and demonstrate the FedAuxHMTL's effectiveness in terms of accuracy, total global loss, communication costs, computing time, and energy consumption compared to its counterparts.

We propose MM-REACT, a system paradigm that integrates ChatGPT with a pool of vision experts to achieve multimodal reasoning and action. In this paper, we define and explore a comprehensive list of advanced vision tasks that are intriguing to solve, but may exceed the capabilities of existing vision and vision-language models. To achieve such advanced visual intelligence, MM-REACT introduces a textual prompt design that can represent text descriptions, textualized spatial coordinates, and aligned file names for dense visual signals such as images and videos. MM-REACT's prompt design allows language models to accept, associate, and process multimodal information, thereby facilitating the synergetic combination of ChatGPT and various vision experts. Zero-shot experiments demonstrate MM-REACT's effectiveness in addressing the specified capabilities of interests and its wide application in different scenarios that require advanced visual understanding. Furthermore, we discuss and compare MM-REACT's system paradigm with an alternative approach that extends language models for multimodal scenarios through joint finetuning. Code, demo, video, and visualization are available at https://multimodal-react.github.io/

We present a new algorithm that significantly improves the efficiency of exploration for deep Q-learning agents in dialogue systems. Our agents explore via Thompson sampling, drawing Monte Carlo samples from a Bayes-by-Backprop neural network. Our algorithm learns much faster than common exploration strategies such as ε-greedy, Boltzmann, bootstrapping, and intrinsic-reward-based ones. Additionally, we show that spiking the replay buffer with experiences from just a few successful episodes can make Q-learning feasible when it might otherwise fail.

We present a new algorithm that significantly improves the efficiency of exploration for deep Q-learning agents in dialogue systems. Our agents explore via Thompson sampling, drawing Monte Carlo samples from a Bayes-by-Backprop neural network. Our algorithm learns much faster than common exploration strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy, Boltzmann, bootstrapping, and intrinsic-reward-based ones. Additionally, we show that spiking the replay buffer with experiences from just a few successful episodes can make Q-learning feasible when it might otherwise fail.