Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising framework for distributed machine learning, enabling collaborative model training without sharing local data, thereby preserving privacy and enhancing security. However, data heterogeneity resulting from differences across user behaviors, preferences, and device characteristics poses a significant challenge for federated learning. Most previous works overlook the adjustment of aggregation weights, relying solely on dataset size for weight assignment, which often leads to unstable convergence and reduced model performance. Recently, several studies have sought to refine aggregation strategies by incorporating dataset characteristics and model alignment. However, adaptively adjusting aggregation weights while ensuring data security-without requiring additional proxy data-remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose Federated learning with Adaptive Weight Aggregation (FedAWA), a novel method that adaptively adjusts aggregation weights based on client vectors during the learning process. The client vector captures the direction of model updates, reflecting local data variations, and is used to optimize the aggregation weight without requiring additional datasets or violating privacy. By assigning higher aggregation weights to local models whose updates align closely with the global optimization direction, FedAWA enhances the stability and generalization of the global model. Extensive experiments under diverse scenarios demonstrate the superiority of our method, providing a promising solution to the challenges of data heterogeneity in federated learning.

Tabular data have been playing a mostly important role in diverse real-world fields, such as healthcare, engineering, finance, etc. With the recent success of deep learning, many tabular machine learning (ML) methods based on deep networks (e.g., Transformer, ResNet) have achieved competitive performance on tabular benchmarks. However, existing deep tabular ML methods suffer from the representation entanglement and localization, which largely hinders their prediction performance and leads to performance inconsistency on tabular tasks. To overcome these problems, we explore a novel direction of applying prototype learning for tabular ML and propose a prototype-based tabular representation learning framework, PTaRL, for tabular prediction tasks. The core idea of PTaRL is to construct prototype-based projection space (P-Space) and learn the disentangled representation around global data prototypes. Specifically, PTaRL mainly involves two stages: (i) Prototype Generation, that constructs global prototypes as the basis vectors of P-Space for representation, and (ii) Prototype Projection, that projects the data samples into P-Space and keeps the core global data information via Optimal Transport. Then, to further acquire the disentangled representations, we constrain PTaRL with two strategies: (i) to diversify the coordinates towards global prototypes of different representations within P-Space, we bring up a diversification constraint for representation calibration; (ii) to avoid prototype entanglement in P-Space, we introduce a matrix orthogonalization constraint to ensure the independence of global prototypes. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments in PTaRL coupled with state-of-the-art deep tabular ML models on various tabular benchmarks and the results have shown our consistent superiority.

Real-world datasets usually are class-imbalanced and corrupted by label noise. To solve the joint issue of long-tailed distribution and label noise, most previous works usually aim to design a noise detector to distinguish the noisy and clean samples. Despite their effectiveness, they may be limited in handling the joint issue effectively in a unified way. In this work, we develop a novel pseudo labeling method using class prototypes from the perspective of distribution matching, which can be solved with optimal transport (OT). By setting a manually-specific probability measure and using a learned transport plan to pseudo-label the training samples, the proposed method can reduce the side-effects of noisy and long-tailed data simultaneously. Then we introduce a simple yet effective filter criteria by combining the observed labels and pseudo labels to obtain a more balanced and less noisy subset for a robust model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can extract this class-balanced subset with clean labels, which brings effective performance gains for long-tailed classification with label noise.

Learning from set-structured data is a fundamental problem that has recently attracted increasing attention, where a series of summary networks are introduced to deal with the set input. In fact, many meta-learning problems can be treated as set-input tasks. Most existing summary networks aim to design different architectures for the input set in order to enforce permutation invariance. However, scant attention has been paid to the common cases where different sets in a meta-distribution are closely related and share certain statistical properties. Viewing each set as a distribution over a set of global prototypes, this paper provides a novel optimal transport (OT) based way to improve existing summary networks. To learn the distribution over the global prototypes, we minimize its OT distance to the set empirical distribution over data points, providing a natural unsupervised way to improve the summary network. Since our plug-and-play framework can be applied to many meta-learning problems, we further instantiate it to the cases of few-shot classification and implicit meta generative modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the existing summary networks on learning more powerful summary statistics from sets and can be successfully integrated into metric-based few-shot classification and generative modeling applications, providing a promising tool for addressing set-input and meta-learning problems.

Describing visual content in a natural-language utterance is an emerging interdisciplinary problem, which lies at the intersection of computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) ((1)). As a sentence-level short image caption ((2, 3, 4)) has a limited descriptive capacity, (5) introduce a paragraphlevel caption method that aims to generate a detailed and coherent paragraph for describing an image in a finer manner. Recent advances in image paragraph generation focus on building different types of hierarchical recurrent neural network (HRNN), e.g., LSTM ((6)), to generate the visual paragraphs. For HRNN, the high-level RNN recursively produces a sequence of sentence-level topic vectors given the image features as the input, while the low-level RNN is subsequently adopted to decode each topic vector into an output sentence. By modeling each sentence and coupling the sentences into one paragraph, these hierarchical architectures often outperform the flat models ((5)). To improve the performance and generate more diverse paragraphs, advanced methods, extending the HRNN based on generative adversarial network (GAN) ((7)) or variational auto-encoders (VAE) ((8)), are proposed by (9) and (10).

We develop a recurrent gamma belief network (rGBN) for radar automatic target recognition (RATR) based on high-resolution range profile (HRRP), which characterizes the temporal dependence across the range cells of HRRP. The proposed rGBN adopts a hierarchy of gamma distributions to build its temporal deep generative model. For scalable training and fast out-of-sample prediction, we propose the hybrid of a stochastic-gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and a recurrent variational inference model to perform posterior inference. To utilize the label information to extract more discriminative latent representations, we further propose supervised rGBN to jointly model the HRRP samples and their corresponding labels. Experimental results on synthetic and measured HRRP data show that the proposed models are efficient in computation, have good classification accuracy and generalization ability, and provide highly interpretable multi-stochastic-layer latent structure.

To build a flexible and interpretable model for document analysis, we develop deep autoencoding topic model (DATM) that uses a hierarchy of gamma distributions to construct its multi-stochastic-layer generative network. In order to provide scalable posterior inference for the parameters of the generative network, we develop topic-layer-adaptive stochastic gradient Riemannian MCMC that jointly learns simplex-constrained global parameters across all layers and topics, with topic and layer specific learning rates. Given a posterior sample of the global parameters, in order to efficiently infer the local latent representations of a document under DATM across all stochastic layers, we propose a Weibull upward-downward variational encoder that deterministically propagates information upward via a deep neural network, followed by a Weibull distribution based stochastic downward generative model. To jointly model documents and their associated labels, we further propose supervised DATM that enhances the discriminative power of its latent representations. The efficacy and scalability of our models are demonstrated on both unsupervised and supervised learning tasks on big corpora.

We develop deep Poisson-gamma dynamical systems (DPGDS) to model sequentially observed multivariate count data, improving previously proposed models by not only mining deep hierarchical latent structure from the data, but also capturing both first-order and long-range temporal dependencies. Using sophisticated but simple-to-implement data augmentation techniques, we derived closed-form Gibbs sampling update equations by first backward and upward propagating auxiliary latent counts, and then forward and downward sampling latent variables. Moreover, we develop stochastic gradient MCMC inference that is scalable to very long multivariate count time series. Experiments on both synthetic and a variety of real-world data demonstrate that the proposed model not only has excellent predictive performance, but also provides highly interpretable multilayer latent structure to represent hierarchical and temporal information propagation.

We develop deep Poisson-gamma dynamical systems (DPGDS) to model sequentially observedmultivariate count data, improving previously proposed models by not only mining deep hierarchical latent structure from the data, but also capturing both first-order and long-range temporal dependencies. Using sophisticated but simple-to-implement data augmentation techniques, we derived closed-form Gibbs sampling update equations by first backward and upward propagating auxiliary latent counts, and then forward and downward sampling latent variables. Moreover, wedevelop stochastic gradient MCMC inference that is scalable to very long multivariate count time series. Experiments on both synthetic and a variety of real-world data demonstrate that the proposed model not only has excellent predictive performance, but also provides highly interpretable multilayer latent structure to represent hierarchical and temporal information propagation.

We develop deep Poisson-gamma dynamical systems (DPGDS) to model sequentially observed multivariate count data, improving previously proposed models by not only mining deep hierarchical latent structure from the data, but also capturing both first-order and long-range temporal dependencies. Using sophisticated but simple-to-implement data augmentation techniques, we derived closed-form Gibbs sampling update equations by first backward and upward propagating auxiliary latent counts, and then forward and downward sampling latent variables. Moreover, we develop stochastic gradient MCMC inference that is scalable to very long multivariate count time series. Experiments on both synthetic and a variety of real-world data demonstrate that the proposed model not only has excellent predictive performance, but also provides highly interpretable multilayer latent structure to represent hierarchical and temporal information propagation.