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 Li, Xia


One-shot Federated Learning Methods: A Practical Guide

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

One-shot Federated Learning (OFL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that constrains client-server communication to a single round, addressing privacy and communication overhead issues associated with multiple rounds of data exchange in traditional Federated Learning (FL). OFL demonstrates the practical potential for integration with future approaches that require collaborative training models, such as large language models (LLMs). However, current OFL methods face two major challenges: data heterogeneity and model heterogeneity, which result in subpar performance compared to conventional FL methods. Worse still, despite numerous studies addressing these limitations, a comprehensive summary is still lacking. To address these gaps, this paper presents a systematic analysis of the challenges faced by OFL and thoroughly reviews the current methods. We also offer an innovative categorization method and analyze the trade-offs of various techniques. Additionally, we discuss the most promising future directions and the technologies that should be integrated into the OFL field. This work aims to provide guidance and insights for future research.


Automatic Pruning via Structured Lasso with Class-wise Information

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Most pruning methods concentrate on unimportant filters of neural networks. However, they face the loss of statistical information due to a lack of consideration for class-wise data. In this paper, from the perspective of leveraging precise class-wise information for model pruning, we utilize structured lasso with guidance from Information Bottleneck theory. Our approach ensures that statistical information is retained during the pruning process. With these techniques, we introduce two innovative adaptive network pruning schemes: sparse graph-structured lasso pruning with Information Bottleneck (\textbf{sGLP-IB}) and sparse tree-guided lasso pruning with Information Bottleneck (\textbf{sTLP-IB}). The key aspect is pruning model filters using sGLP-IB and sTLP-IB to better capture class-wise relatedness. Compared to multiple state-of-the-art methods, our approaches demonstrate superior performance across three datasets and six model architectures in extensive experiments. For instance, using the VGG16 model on the CIFAR-10 dataset, we achieve a parameter reduction of 85%, a decrease in FLOPs by 61%, and maintain an accuracy of 94.10% (0.14% higher than the original model); we reduce the parameters by 55% with the accuracy at 76.12% using the ResNet architecture on ImageNet (only drops 0.03%). In summary, we successfully reduce model size and computational resource usage while maintaining accuracy. Our codes are at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/IJCAI-8104.


Class-Imbalanced-Aware Adaptive Dataset Distillation for Scalable Pretrained Model on Credit Scoring

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The advent of artificial intelligence has significantly enhanced credit scoring technologies. Despite the remarkable efficacy of advanced deep learning models, mainstream adoption continues to favor tree-structured models due to their robust predictive performance on tabular data. Although pretrained models have seen considerable development, their application within the financial realm predominantly revolves around question-answering tasks and the use of such models for tabular-structured credit scoring datasets remains largely unexplored. Tabular-oriented large models, such as TabPFN, has made the application of large models in credit scoring feasible, albeit can only processing with limited sample sizes. This paper provides a novel framework to combine tabular-tailored dataset distillation technique with the pretrained model, empowers the scalability for TabPFN. Furthermore, though class imbalance distribution is the common nature in financial datasets, its influence during dataset distillation has not been explored. We thus integrate the imbalance-aware techniques during dataset distillation, resulting in improved performance in financial datasets (e.g., a 2.5% enhancement in AUC). This study presents a novel framework for scaling up the application of large pretrained models on financial tabular datasets and offers a comparative analysis of the influence of class imbalance on the dataset distillation process. We believe this approach can broaden the applications and downstream tasks of large models in the financial domain.


Implementation of an Asymmetric Adjusted Activation Function for Class Imbalance Credit Scoring

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Credit scoring is a systematic approach to evaluate a borrower's probability of default (PD) on a bank loan. The data associated with such scenarios are characteristically imbalanced, complicating binary classification owing to the often-underestimated cost of misclassification during the classifier's learning process. Considering the high imbalance ratio (IR) of these datasets, we introduce an innovative yet straightforward optimized activation function by incorporating an IR-dependent asymmetric adjusted factor embedded Sigmoid activation function (ASIG). The embedding of ASIG makes the sensitive margin of the Sigmoid function auto-adjustable, depending on the imbalance nature of the datasets distributed, thereby giving the activation function an asymmetric characteristic that prevents the underrepresentation of the minority class (positive samples) during the classifier's learning process. The experimental results show that the ASIG-embedded-classifier outperforms traditional classifiers on datasets across wide-ranging IRs in the downstream credit-scoring task. The algorithm also shows robustness and stability, even when the IR is ultra-high. Therefore, the algorithm provides a competitive alternative in the financial industry, especially in credit scoring, possessing the ability to effectively process highly imbalanced distribution data.


DECO: Life-Cycle Management of Enterprise-Grade Chatbots

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Software engineers frequently grapple with the challenge of accessing disparate documentation and telemetry data, including Troubleshooting Guides (TSGs), incident reports, code repositories, and various internal tools developed by multiple stakeholders. While on-call duties are inevitable, incident resolution becomes even more daunting due to the obscurity of legacy sources and the pressures of strict time constraints. To enhance the efficiency of on-call engineers (OCEs) and streamline their daily workflows, we introduced DECO -- a comprehensive framework for developing, deploying, and managing enterprise-grade chatbots tailored to improve productivity in engineering routines. This paper details the design and implementation of the DECO framework, emphasizing its innovative NL2SearchQuery functionality and a hierarchical planner. These features support efficient and customized retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG) algorithms that not only extract relevant information from diverse sources but also select the most pertinent toolkits in response to user queries. This enables the addressing of complex technical questions and provides seamless, automated access to internal resources. Additionally, DECO incorporates a robust mechanism for converting unstructured incident logs into user-friendly, structured guides, effectively bridging the documentation gap. Feedback from users underscores DECO's pivotal role in simplifying complex engineering tasks, accelerating incident resolution, and bolstering organizational productivity. Since its launch in September 2023, DECO has demonstrated its effectiveness through extensive engagement, with tens of thousands of interactions from hundreds of active users across multiple organizations within the company.


Graph Retention Networks for Dynamic Graphs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this work, we propose Graph Retention Network as a unified architecture for deep learning on dynamic graphs. The GRN extends the core computational manner of retention to dynamic graph data as graph retention, which empowers the model with three key computational paradigms that enable training parallelism, $O(1)$ low-cost inference, and long-term batch training. This architecture achieves an optimal balance of effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets present the superior performance of the GRN in both edge-level prediction and node-level classification tasks. Our architecture achieves cutting-edge results while maintaining lower training latency, reduced GPU memory consumption, and up to an 86.7x improvement in inference throughput compared to baseline models. The GRNs have demonstrated strong potential to become a widely adopted architecture for dynamic graph learning tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/Chandler-Q/GraphRetentionNet.


ED-ViT: Splitting Vision Transformer for Distributed Inference on Edge Devices

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Deep learning models are increasingly deployed on resource-constrained edge devices for real-time data analytics. In recent years, Vision Transformer models and their variants have demonstrated outstanding performance across various computer vision tasks. However, their high computational demands and inference latency pose significant challenges for model deployment on resource-constraint edge devices. To address this issue, we propose a novel Vision Transformer splitting framework, ED-ViT, designed to execute complex models across multiple edge devices efficiently. Specifically, we partition Vision Transformer models into several sub-models, where each sub-model is tailored to handle a specific subset of data classes. To further minimize computation overhead and inference latency, we introduce a class-wise pruning technique that reduces the size of each sub-model. We conduct extensive experiments on five datasets with three model structures, demonstrating that our approach significantly reduces inference latency on edge devices and achieves a model size reduction of up to 28.9 times and 34.1 times, respectively, while maintaining test accuracy comparable to the original Vision Transformer. Additionally, we compare ED-ViT with two state-of-the-art methods that deploy CNN and SNN models on edge devices, evaluating accuracy, inference time, and overall model size. Our comprehensive evaluation underscores the effectiveness of the proposed ED-ViT framework.


TAMBRIDGE: Bridging Frame-Centered Tracking and 3D Gaussian Splatting for Enhanced SLAM

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The limited robustness of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to motion blur and camera noise, along with its poor real-time performance, restricts its application in robotic SLAM tasks. Upon analysis, the primary causes of these issues are the density of views with motion blur and the cumulative errors in dense pose estimation from calculating losses based on noisy original images and rendering results, which increase the difficulty of 3DGS rendering convergence. Thus, a cutting-edge 3DGS-based SLAM system is introduced, leveraging the efficiency and flexibility of 3DGS to achieve real-time performance while remaining robust against sensor noise, motion blur, and the challenges posed by long-session SLAM. Central to this approach is the Fusion Bridge module, which seamlessly integrates tracking-centered ORB Visual Odometry with mapping-centered online 3DGS. Precise pose initialization is enabled by this module through joint optimization of re-projection and rendering loss, as well as strategic view selection, enhancing rendering convergence in large-scale scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art rendering quality and localization accuracy, positioning this system as a promising solution for real-world robotics applications that require stable, near-real-time performance. Our project is available at https://ZeldaFromHeaven.github.io/TAMBRIDGE/


VG4D: Vision-Language Model Goes 4D Video Recognition

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Understanding the real world through point cloud video is a crucial aspect of robotics and autonomous driving systems. However, prevailing methods for 4D point cloud recognition have limitations due to sensor resolution, which leads to a lack of detailed information. Recent advances have shown that Vision-Language Models (VLM) pre-trained on web-scale text-image datasets can learn fine-grained visual concepts that can be transferred to various downstream tasks. However, effectively integrating VLM into the domain of 4D point clouds remains an unresolved problem. In this work, we propose the Vision-Language Models Goes 4D (VG4D) framework to transfer VLM knowledge from visual-text pre-trained models to a 4D point cloud network. Our approach involves aligning the 4D encoder's representation with a VLM to learn a shared visual and text space from training on large-scale image-text pairs. By transferring the knowledge of the VLM to the 4D encoder and combining the VLM, our VG4D achieves improved recognition performance. To enhance the 4D encoder, we modernize the classic dynamic point cloud backbone and propose an improved version of PSTNet, im-PSTNet, which can efficiently model point cloud videos. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for action recognition on both the NTU RGB+D 60 dataset and the NTU RGB+D 120 dataset. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Shark0-0/VG4D}.


Uncertainty-Aware Testing-Time Optimization for 3D Human Pose Estimation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Although data-driven methods have achieved success in 3D human pose estimation, they often suffer from domain gaps and exhibit limited generalization. In contrast, optimization-based methods excel in fine-tuning for specific cases but are generally inferior to data-driven methods in overall performance. We observe that previous optimization-based methods commonly rely on projection constraint, which only ensures alignment in 2D space, potentially leading to the overfitting problem. To address this, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware testing-time Optimization (UAO) framework, which keeps the prior information of pre-trained model and alleviates the overfitting problem using the uncertainty of joints. Specifically, during the training phase, we design an effective 2D-to-3D network for estimating the corresponding 3D pose while quantifying the uncertainty of each 3D joint. For optimization during testing, the proposed optimization framework freezes the pre-trained model and optimizes only a latent state. Projection loss is then employed to ensure the generated poses are well aligned in 2D space for high-quality optimization. Furthermore, we utilize the uncertainty of each joint to determine how much each joint is allowed for optimization. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework are validated through extensive experiments on two challenging datasets: Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. Notably, our approach outperforms the previous best result by a large margin of 4.5% on Human3.6M. Our source code will be open-sourced.