Plotting

Attack-Aware Noise Calibration for Differential Privacy

Neural Information Processing Systems

Differential privacy (DP) is a widely used approach for mitigating privacy risks when training machine learning models on sensitive data. DP mechanisms add noise during training to limit the risk of information leakage. The scale of the added noise is critical, as it determines the trade-off between privacy and utility. The standard practice is to select the noise scale to satisfy a given privacy budget ฮต. This privacy budget is in turn interpreted in terms of operational attack risks, such as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of inference attacks aimed to recover information about the training data records.


Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Robust Routing Problem with Uncertain Travel Times

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the robust routing problem with uncertain travel times under the min-max regret criterion, which represents an extended and robust version of the classic traveling salesman problem (TSP) and vehicle routing problem (VRP). The general budget uncertainty set is employed to capture the uncertainty, which provides the capability to control the conservatism of obtained solutions and covers the commonly used interval uncertainty set as a special case. The goal is to obtain a robust solution that minimizes the maximum deviation from the optimal routing time in the worst-case scenario. Given the significant advancements and broad applications of neural combinatorial optimization methods in recent years, we present our initial attempt to combine neural approaches for solving this problem. We propose a dual multi-head cross attention mechanism to extract problem features represented by the inputted uncertainty sets. To tackle the built-in maximization problem, we derive the regret value by invoking a pre-trained model, subsequently utilizing it as the reward during the model training. Our experimental results on the robust TSP and VRP demonstrate the efficacy of our neural combinatorial optimization method, showcasing its ability to efficiently handle the robust routing problem of various sizes within a shorter time compared with alternative heuristic approaches.




Supplementary Material for A Benchmark Dataset for Event-Guided Human Pose Estimation and Tracking in Extreme Conditions

Neural Information Processing Systems

We have included in the supplementary material the parts that we could not mention in the main paper. Section A covers the implementation details, Section B presents additional experiments, and Section C describes the detailed annotation process. Lastly, we have included a description of the license and ethical considerations in the Section D.


A Benchmark Dataset for Event-Guided Human Pose Estimation and Tracking in Extreme Conditions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multi-person pose estimation and tracking have been actively researched by the computer vision community due to their practical applicability. However, existing human pose estimation and tracking datasets have only been successful in typical scenarios, such as those without motion blur or with well-lit conditions. These RGB-based datasets are limited to learning under extreme motion blur situations or poor lighting conditions, making them inherently vulnerable to such scenarios.



Appendix) F (w

Neural Information Processing Systems

We implement pipeline between data downloading and data ingestion to accelerate the training. After completing the computation of gradients, the worker would directly send the gradient with the token back to the PS in a non-blocking way. In this way, the fast workers would ingest much more data than the straggling workers. When a worker recovered from a failure, it would drop the previous state (e.g., data in the batch buffer and token) and proceed to deal with the new batch. The disappearance of a specific token would not change the correctness and efficiency of GBA.


GBA: A Tuning-free Approach to Switch between Synchronous and Asynchronous Training for Recommendation Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

High-concurrency asynchronous training upon parameter server (PS) architecture and high-performance synchronous training upon all-reduce (AR) architecture are the most commonly deployed distributed training modes for recommendation models. Although synchronous AR training is designed to have higher training efficiency, asynchronous PS training would be a better choice for training speed when there are stragglers (slow workers) in the shared cluster, especially under limited computing resources. An ideal way to take full advantage of these two training modes is to switch between them upon the cluster status. However, switching training modes often requires tuning hyper-parameters, which is extremely time-and resource-consuming. We find two obstacles to a tuning-free approach: the different distribution of the gradient values and the stale gradients from the stragglers.


To Err Like Human: Affective Bias-Inspired Measures for Visual Emotion Recognition Evaluation Jufeng Yang

Neural Information Processing Systems

Accuracy is a commonly adopted performance metric in various classification tasks, which measures the proportion of correctly classified samples among all samples. It assumes equal importance for all classes, hence equal severity for misclassifications. However, in the task of emotional classification, due to the psychological similarities between emotions, misclassifying a certain emotion into one class may be more severe than another, e.g., misclassifying'excitement' as'anger' apparently is more severe than as'awe'. Albeit high meaningful for many applications, metrics capable of measuring these cases of misclassifications in visual emotion recognition tasks have yet to be explored. In this paper, based on Mikel's emotion wheel from psychology, we propose a novel approach for evaluating the performance in visual emotion recognition, which takes into account the distance on the emotion wheel between different emotions to mimic the psychological nuances of emotions. Experimental results in semi-supervised learning on emotion recognition and user study have shown that our proposed metrics is more effective than the accuracy to assess the performance and conforms to the cognitive laws of human emotions.