Search

Federated continual learning (FCL) aims to learn from sequential data stream in the decentralized federated learning setting, while simultaneously mitigating the catastrophic forgetting issue in classical continual learning. Existing FCL methods usually employ typical rehearsal mechanisms, which could result in privacy violations or additional onerous storage and computational burdens. In this work, an efficient and non-IID robust federated continual learning framework, called Federated Prototype-Augmented Prompt Learning (FPPL), is proposed. The FPPL can collaboratively learn lightweight prompts augmented by prototypes without rehearsal. On the client side, a fusion function is employed to fully leverage the knowledge contained in task-specific prompts for alleviating catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, global prototypes aggregated from the server are used to obtain unified representation through contrastive learning, mitigating the impact of non-IID-derived data heterogeneity. On the server side, locally uploaded prototypes are utilized to perform debiasing on the classifier, further alleviating the performance degradation caused by both non-IID and catastrophic forgetting. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of FPPL, achieving notable performance with an efficient design while remaining robust to diverse non-IID degrees. Code is available at: https://github.com/ycheoo/FPPL.

Group Equivariant Convolution (GConv) can effectively handle rotational symmetry data. They assume uniform and strict rotational symmetry across all features, as the transformations under the specific group. However, real-world data rarely conforms to strict rotational symmetry commonly referred to as Rotational Symmetry-Breaking in the system or dataset, making GConv unable to adapt effectively to this phenomenon. Motivated by this, we propose a simple but highly effective method to address this problem, which utilizes a set of learnable biases called the $G$-Biases under the group order to break strict group constraints and achieve \textbf{R}elaxed \textbf{R}otational \textbf{E}quivarant \textbf{Conv}olution (RREConv). We conduct extensive experiments to validate Relaxed Rotational Equivariance on rotational symmetry groups $\mathcal{C}_n$ (e.g. $\mathcal{C}_2$, $\mathcal{C}_4$, and $\mathcal{C}_6$ groups). Further experiments demonstrate that our proposed RREConv-based methods achieve excellent performance, compared to existing GConv-based methods in classification and detection tasks on natural image datasets.

Introducing Group Equivariant Convolution (GConv) empowers models to explore symmetries hidden in visual data, improving their performance. However, in real-world scenarios, objects or scenes often exhibit perturbations of a symmetric system, specifically a deviation from a symmetric architecture, which can be characterized by a non-trivial action of a symmetry group, known as Symmetry-Breaking. Traditional GConv methods are limited by the strict operation rules in the group space, only ensuring features remain strictly equivariant under limited group transformations, making it difficult to adapt to Symmetry-Breaking or non-rigid transformations. Motivated by this, we introduce a novel Relaxed Rotation GConv (R2GConv) with our defined Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant group $\mathbf{R}_4$. Furthermore, we propose a Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant Network (R2Net) as the backbone and further develop the Symmetry-Breaking Object Detector (SBDet) for 2D object detection built upon it. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed R2GConv in natural image classification tasks, and SBDet achieves excellent performance in object detection tasks with improved generalization capabilities and robustness.

Radiologists must utilize multiple modal images for tumor segmentation and diagnosis due to the limitations of medical imaging and the diversity of tumor signals. This leads to the development of multimodal learning in segmentation. However, the redundancy among modalities creates challenges for existing subtraction-based joint learning methods, such as misjudging the importance of modalities, ignoring specific modal information, and increasing cognitive load. These thorny issues ultimately decrease segmentation accuracy and increase the risk of overfitting. This paper presents the complementary information mutual learning (CIML) framework, which can mathematically model and address the negative impact of inter-modal redundant information. CIML adopts the idea of addition and removes inter-modal redundant information through inductive bias-driven task decomposition and message passing-based redundancy filtering. CIML first decomposes the multimodal segmentation task into multiple subtasks based on expert prior knowledge, minimizing the information dependence between modalities. Furthermore, CIML introduces a scheme in which each modality can extract information from other modalities additively through message passing. To achieve non-redundancy of extracted information, the redundant filtering is transformed into complementary information learning inspired by the variational information bottleneck. The complementary information learning procedure can be efficiently solved by variational inference and cross-modal spatial attention. Numerical results from the verification task and standard benchmarks indicate that CIML efficiently removes redundant information between modalities, outperforming SOTA methods regarding validation accuracy and segmentation effect., Comment: 35 pages, 18 figures

The theory of higher derivative gravity is proposed to solve the non-renormalizable problem in quantum gravity.In this article, We use two numerical methods to fit another static spherically symmetric black hole besides the Schwarzschild black hole.We obtain approximate expressions for two numerical solutions, both of which contain a parameter that deviates from the Schwarzschild degree.We also analyze their degree of precision and the quasi-normal modes of the black hole., Comment: To be modified

The formidable capacity for zero- or few-shot decision-making in language agents encourages us to pose a compelling question: Can language agents be alternatives to PPO agents in traditional sequential decision-making tasks? To investigate this, we first take environments collected in OpenAI Gym as our testbeds and ground them to textual environments that construct the TextGym simulator. This allows for straightforward and efficient comparisons between PPO agents and language agents, given the widespread adoption of OpenAI Gym. To ensure a fair and effective benchmarking, we introduce $5$ levels of scenario for accurate domain-knowledge controlling and a unified RL-inspired framework for language agents. Additionally, we propose an innovative explore-exploit-guided language (EXE) agent to solve tasks within TextGym. Through numerical experiments and ablation studies, we extract valuable insights into the decision-making capabilities of language agents and make a preliminary evaluation of their potential to be alternatives to PPO in classical sequential decision-making problems. This paper sheds light on the performance of language agents and paves the way for future research in this exciting domain. Our code is publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/mail-ecnu/Text-Gym-Agents}.

This paper presents an open-source dataset RflyMAD, a Multicopter Abnomal Dataset developed by Reliable Flight Control (Rfly) Group aiming to promote the development of research fields like fault detection and isolation (FDI) or health assessment (HA). The entire 114 GB dataset includes 11 types of faults under 6 flight statuses which are adapted from ADS-33 file to cover more occasions in which the multicopters have different mobility levels when faults occur. In the total 5629 flight cases, the fault time is up to 3283 minutes, and there are 2566 cases for software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulation, 2566 cases for hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation and 497 cases for real flight. As it contains simulation data based on RflySim and real flight data, it is possible to improve the quantity while increasing the data quality. In each case, there are ULog, Telemetry log, Flight information and processed files for researchers to use and check. The RflyMAD dataset could be used as a benchmark for fault diagnosis methods and the support relationship between simulation data and real flight is verified through transfer learning methods. More methods as a baseline will be presented in the future, and RflyMAD will be updated with more data and types. In addition, the dataset and related toolkit can be accessed through https://rfly-openha.github.io/documents/4_resources/dataset.html.

Leveraging the generative ability of image diffusion models offers great potential for zero-shot video-to-video translation. The key lies in how to maintain temporal consistency across generated video frames by image diffusion models. Previous methods typically adopt cross-frame attention, \emph{i.e.,} sharing the \textit{key} and \textit{value} tokens across attentions of different frames, to encourage the temporal consistency. However, in those works, temporal inconsistency issue may not be thoroughly solved, rendering the fidelity of generated videos limited.%The current state of the art cross-frame attention method aims at maintaining fine-grained visual details across frames, but it is still challenged by the temporal coherence problem. In this paper, we find the bottleneck lies in the unconstrained query tokens and propose a new zero-shot video-to-video translation framework, named \textit{LatentWarp}. Our approach is simple: to constrain the query tokens to be temporally consistent, we further incorporate a warping operation in the latent space to constrain the query tokens. Specifically, based on the optical flow obtained from the original video, we warp the generated latent features of last frame to align with the current frame during the denoising process. As a result, the corresponding regions across the adjacent frames can share closely-related query tokens and attention outputs, which can further improve latent-level consistency to enhance visual temporal coherence of generated videos. Extensive experiment results demonstrate the superiority of \textit{LatentWarp} in achieving video-to-video translation with temporal coherence.

This paper presents the summary of the Efficient Face Recognition Competition (EFaR) held at the 2023 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2023). The competition received 17 submissions from 6 different teams. To drive further development of efficient face recognition models, the submitted solutions are ranked based on a weighted score of the achieved verification accuracies on a diverse set of benchmarks, as well as the deployability given by the number of floating-point operations and model size. The evaluation of submissions is extended to bias, cross-quality, and large-scale recognition benchmarks. Overall, the paper gives an overview of the achieved performance values of the submitted solutions as well as a diverse set of baselines. The submitted solutions use small, efficient network architectures to reduce the computational cost, some solutions apply model quantization. An outlook on possible techniques that are underrepresented in current solutions is given as well., Comment: Accepted at IJCB 2023

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality text and making predictions based on large amounts of data, including the media domain. However, in practical applications, the differences between the media's use cases and the general-purpose applications of LLMs have become increasingly apparent, especially Chinese. This paper examines the unique characteristics of media-domain-specific LLMs compared to general LLMs, designed a diverse set of task instruction types to cater the specific requirements of the domain and constructed unique datasets that are tailored to the media domain. Based on these, we proposed MediaGPT, a domain-specific LLM for the Chinese media domain, training by domain-specific data and experts SFT data. By performing human experts evaluation and strong model evaluation on a validation set, this paper demonstrated that MediaGPT outperforms mainstream models on various Chinese media domain tasks and verifies the importance of domain data and domain-defined prompt types for building an effective domain-specific LLM.

Over-generalization is a thorny issue in cognitive science, where people may become overly cautious due to past experiences. Agents in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) also have been found to suffer relative over-generalization (RO) as people do and stuck to sub-optimal cooperation. Recent methods have shown that assigning reasoning ability to agents can mitigate RO algorithmically and empirically, but there has been a lack of theoretical understanding of RO, let alone designing provably RO-free methods. This paper first proves that RO can be avoided when the MARL method satisfies a consistent reasoning requirement under certain conditions. Then we introduce a novel reasoning framework, called negotiated reasoning, that first builds the connection between reasoning and RO with theoretical justifications. After that, we propose an instantiated algorithm, Stein variational negotiated reasoning (SVNR), which uses Stein variational gradient descent to derive a negotiation policy that provably avoids RO in MARL under maximum entropy policy iteration. The method is further parameterized with neural networks for amortized learning, making computation efficient. Numerical experiments on many RO-challenged environments demonstrate the superiority and efficiency of SVNR compared to state-of-the-art methods in addressing RO., Comment: 21 pages