Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across decentralized edge devices while preserving data privacy. However, existing FL methods often assume clean annotated datasets, impractical for resource-constrained edge devices. In reality, noisy labels are prevalent, posing significant challenges to FL performance. Prior approaches attempt label correction and robust training techniques but exhibit limited efficacy, particularly under high noise levels. This paper introduces ClipFL (Federated Learning Client Pruning), a novel framework addressing noisy labels from a fresh perspective. ClipFL identifies and excludes noisy clients based on their performance on a clean validation dataset, tracked using a Noise Candidacy Score (NCS). The framework comprises three phases: pre-client pruning to identify potential noisy clients and calculate their NCS, client pruning to exclude a percentage of clients with the highest NCS, and post-client pruning for fine-tuning the global model with standard FL on clean clients. Empirical evaluation demonstrates ClipFL's efficacy across diverse datasets and noise levels, achieving accurate noisy client identification, superior performance, faster convergence, and reduced communication costs compared to state-of-the-art FL methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/MMorafah/ClipFL.

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), addressing the out-of-distribution (OOD) action issue has been a focus, but we argue that there exists an OOD state issue that also impairs performance yet has been underexplored. Such an issue describes the scenario when the agent encounters states out of the offline dataset during the test phase, leading to uncontrolled behavior and performance degradation. To this end, we propose SCAS, a simple yet effective approach that unifies OOD state correction and OOD action suppression in offline RL. Technically, SCAS achieves value-aware OOD state correction, capable of correcting the agent from OOD states to high-value in-distribution states. Theoretical and empirical results show that SCAS also exhibits the effect of suppressing OOD actions. On standard offline RL benchmarks, SCAS achieves excellent performance without additional hyperparameter tuning. Moreover, benefiting from its OOD state correction feature, SCAS demonstrates enhanced robustness against environmental perturbations.

Sim2real for robotic manipulation is difficult due to the challenges of simulating complex contacts and generating realistic task distributions. To tackle the latter problem, we introduce ManipGen, which leverages a new class of policies for sim2real transfer: local policies. Locality enables a variety of appealing properties including invariances to absolute robot and object pose, skill ordering, and global scene configuration. We combine these policies with foundation models for vision, language and motion planning and demonstrate SOTA zero-shot performance of our method to Robosuite benchmark tasks in simulation (97%). We transfer our local policies from simulation to reality and observe they can solve unseen long-horizon manipulation tasks with up to 8 stages with significant pose, object and scene configuration variation. ManipGen outperforms SOTA approaches such as SayCan, OpenVLA, LLMTrajGen and VoxPoser across 50 real-world manipulation tasks by 36%, 76%, 62% and 60% respectively. Video results at https://mihdalal.github.io/manipgen/

Distribution shifts on graphs -- the discrepancies in data distribution between training and employing a graph machine learning model -- are ubiquitous and often unavoidable in real-world scenarios. These shifts may severely deteriorate model performance, posing significant challenges for reliable graph machine learning. Consequently, there has been a surge in research on graph machine learning under distribution shifts, aiming to train models to achieve satisfactory performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) test data. In our survey, we provide an up-to-date and forward-looking review of deep graph learning under distribution shifts. Specifically, we cover three primary scenarios: graph OOD generalization, training-time graph OOD adaptation, and test-time graph OOD adaptation. We begin by formally formulating the problems and discussing various types of distribution shifts that can affect graph learning, such as covariate shifts and concept shifts. To provide a better understanding of the literature, we systematically categorize the existing models based on our proposed taxonomy and investigate the adopted techniques behind. We also summarize commonly used datasets in this research area to facilitate further investigation. Finally, we point out promising research directions and the corresponding challenges to encourage further study in this vital domain. Additionally, we provide a continuously updated reading list at https://github.com/kaize0409/Awesome-Graph-OOD.

Hybrid light fidelity (LiFi) and wireless fidelity (WiFi) networks are a promising paradigm of heterogeneous network (HetNet), attributed to the complementary physical properties of optical spectra and radio frequency. However, the current development of such HetNets is mostly bottlenecked by the existing transmission control protocol (TCP), which restricts the user equipment (UE) to connecting one access point (AP) at a time. While the ongoing investigation on multipath TCP (MPTCP) can bring significant benefits, it complicates the network topology of HetNets, making the existing load balancing (LB) learning models less effective. Driven by this, we propose a graph neural network (GNN)-based model to tackle the LB problem for MPTCP-enabled HetNets, which results in a partial mesh topology. Such a topology can be modeled as a graph, with the channel state information and data rate requirement embedded as node features, while the LB solutions are deemed as edge labels. Compared to the conventional deep neural network (DNN), the proposed GNN-based model exhibits two key strengths: i) it can better interpret a complex network topology; and ii) it can handle various numbers of APs and UEs with a single trained model. Simulation results show that against the traditional optimisation method, the proposed learning model can achieve near-optimal throughput within a gap of 11.5%, while reducing the inference time by 4 orders of magnitude. In contrast to the DNN model, the new method can improve the network throughput by up to 21.7%, at a similar inference time level.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made significant advancements in a wide range of natural language processing and vision-language tasks. Access to large web-scale datasets has been a key factor in their success. However, concerns have been raised about the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials and potential copyright infringement. Existing methods, such as sample-level Membership Inference Attacks (MIA) and distribution-based dataset inference, distinguish member data (data used for training) and non-member data by leveraging the common observation that models tend to memorize and show greater confidence in member data. Nevertheless, these methods face challenges when applied to LLMs and VLMs, such as the requirement for ground-truth member data or non-member data that shares the same distribution as the test data. In this paper, we propose a novel dataset-level membership inference method based on Self-Comparison. We find that a member prefix followed by a non-member suffix (paraphrased from a member suffix) can further trigger the model's memorization on training data. Instead of directly comparing member and non-member data, we introduce paraphrasing to the second half of the sequence and evaluate how the likelihood changes before and after paraphrasing. Unlike prior approaches, our method does not require access to ground-truth member data or non-member data in identical distribution, making it more practical. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms traditional MIA and dataset inference techniques across various datasets and models, including including public models, fine-tuned models, and API-based commercial models.

Prompt learning for pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP has demonstrated potent applicability across diverse downstream tasks. This lightweight approach has quickly gained traction from federated learning (FL) researchers who seek to efficiently adapt VLMs to heterogeneous scenarios. However, current federated prompt learning methods are habitually restricted to the traditional FL paradigm, where the participating clients are generally only allowed to download a single globally aggregated model from the server. While justifiable for training full-sized models under federated settings, in this work, we argue that this paradigm is ill-suited for lightweight prompts. By facilitating the clients to download multiple pre-aggregated prompts as fixed non-local experts, we propose Personalized Federated Mixture of Adaptive Prompts (pFedMoAP), a novel FL framework that personalizes the prompt learning process through the lens of Mixture of Experts (MoE). pFedMoAP implements a local attention-based gating network that learns to generate enhanced text features for better alignment with local image data on the client, benefiting from both local and downloaded non-local adaptive prompt experts. The non-local experts are sparsely selected from a server-maintained pool, fostering collaborative learning across clients. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, we conduct extensive experiments across 9 datasets under various heterogeneous federated settings. The results show that pFedMoAP consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives, underscoring its efficacy in personalizing prompt learning for CLIP within the federated learning paradigm.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in various tasks but are still vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks, where attackers create jailbreak prompts to mislead the model to produce harmful or offensive content. Current jailbreak methods either rely heavily on manually crafted templates, which pose challenges in scalability and adaptability, or struggle to generate semantically coherent prompts, making them easy to detect. Additionally, most existing approaches involve lengthy prompts, leading to higher query costs.In this paper, to remedy these challenges, we introduce a novel jailbreaking attack framework, which is an automated, black-box jailbreaking attack framework that adapts the black-box fuzz testing approach with a series of customized designs. Instead of relying on manually crafted templates, our method starts with an empty seed pool, removing the need to search for any related jailbreaking templates. We also develop three novel question-dependent mutation strategies using an LLM helper to generate prompts that maintain semantic coherence while significantly reducing their length. Additionally, we implement a two-level judge module to accurately detect genuine successful jailbreaks. We evaluated our method on 7 representative LLMs and compared it with 5 state-of-the-art jailbreaking attack strategies. For proprietary LLM APIs, such as GPT-3.5 turbo, GPT-4, and Gemini-Pro, our method achieves attack success rates of over 90%,80% and 74%, respectively, exceeding existing baselines by more than 60%. Additionally, our method can maintain high semantic coherence while significantly reducing the length of jailbreak prompts. When targeting GPT-4, our method can achieve over 78% attack success rate even with 100 tokens. Moreover, our method demonstrates transferability and is robust to state-of-the-art defenses. We will open-source our codes upon publication.

Recent advancements in multimodal models highlight the value of rewritten captions for improving performance, yet key challenges remain. For example, while synthetic captions often provide superior quality and image-text alignment, it is not clear whether they can fully replace AltTexts: the role of synthetic captions and their interaction with original web-crawled AltTexts in pre-training is still not well understood. Moreover, different multimodal foundation models may have unique preferences for specific caption formats, but efforts to identify the optimal captions for each model remain limited. In this work, we propose a novel, controllable, and scalable captioning pipeline designed to generate diverse caption formats tailored to various multimodal models. By examining Short Synthetic Captions (SSC) towards Dense Synthetic Captions (DSC+) as case studies, we systematically explore their effects and interactions with AltTexts across models such as CLIP, multimodal LLMs, and diffusion models. Our findings reveal that a hybrid approach that keeps both synthetic captions and AltTexts can outperform the use of synthetic captions alone, improving both alignment and performance, with each model demonstrating preferences for particular caption formats. This comprehensive analysis provides valuable insights into optimizing captioning strategies, thereby advancing the pre-training of multimodal foundation models.

In the field of spoken language processing, audio-visual speech processing is receiving increasing research attention. Key components of this research include tasks such as lip reading, audio-visual speech recognition, and visual-to-speech synthesis. Although significant success has been achieved, theoretical analysis is still insufficient for audio-visual tasks. This paper presents a quantitative analysis based on information theory, focusing on information intersection between different modalities. Our results show that this analysis is valuable for understanding the difficulties of audio-visual processing tasks as well as the benefits that could be obtained by modality integration.