61 accepted papers
Integrating Foundation Models (FMs) into recommendation systems is an emerging and promising research direction. However, centralized paradigms face growing pressure from privacy concerns and strict regulatory requirements. Federated learning offers a viable solution that enables collaborative model
Most federated recommender systems represent each user with a single embedding learned from local interaction data, implicitly assuming that user preferences are fixed and precisely identifiable. In federated settings, however, each client observes only a limited and fragmentary view of user behavio…
Federated foundation models represent a new paradigm to jointly fine-tune pre-trained foundation models across clients. It is still a challenge to fine-tune foundation models for a small group of new users or specialized scenarios, which typically involve limited data compared to the large-scale dat
Dataset-level heterogeneity introduces significant domain biases that fundamentally degrade generalization on general Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs), yet this challenge remains underexplored. This paper rethinks the from-scratch training of TSFMs using the paradigm of federated learning. We p…
One global model in federated learning (FL) might not be sufficient to serve many clients with non-IID tasks and distributions. Despite recent advances in FL to train multiple global models for better personalization, they only provide limited model choices to clients, so local finetuning of multipl
Applying large pre-trained Vision-Language Models to recommendation is a burgeoning field, a direction we term Vision-Language-Recommendation (VLR). Bringing VLR to user-oriented on-device intelligence within a federated learning framework is a crucial step for enhancing user privacy and delivering
Just as LEGO pieces can be assembled into an unlimited variety of structures, heterogeneous federated learning (HFL) can be viewed as the assembly of diverse model components. Inspired by this analogy, we reformulate HFL as a LEGO-like assembly game. The central challenge in HFL lies in learning acr…
Deep learning-based watermarking has made remarkable progress in recent years. To achieve robustness against various distortions, current methods commonly adopt a training strategy where a \underline s ingle \underline r andom \underline d istortion (SRD) is chosen as the noise layer in each trainin
Contemporary AI faces the challenge of balancing generality with user-specific personalization. In federated learning (FL), this challenge is amplified by highly heterogeneous client data with complex non-IID patterns beyond standard modeling assumptions. Many existing FL methods are designed for re…
The Base-New Trade-off (BNT) problem universally exists during the optimization of CLIP-based prompt tuning, where continuous fine-tuning on base (target) classes leads to a simultaneous decrease of generalization ability on new (unseen) classes. Existing approaches attempt to regulate the prompt tu…
Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) addresses the challenges posed by non-IID data by training multiple group- or cluster-specific expert models. However, existing methods often overlook the shared information across clusters, which represents the generalizable knowledge valuable to all participants
Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HtFL) enables collaborative learning across clients with diverse model architectures and non-IID data distributions, which are prevalent in real-world edge computing applications. Existing HtFL approaches typically employ proxy datasets to facilitate knowledge shari…
Training a general-purpose time series foundation models with robust generalization capabilities across diverse applications from scratch is still an open challenge. Efforts are primarily focused on fusing cross-domain time series datasets to extract shared subsequences as tokens for training models…
Effectively leveraging private datasets remains a significant challenge in developing foundation models. Federated Learning (FL) has recently emerged as a collaborative framework that enables multiple users to fine-tune these models while mitigating data privacy risks. Meanwhile, Low-Rank Adaptation
Multifaceted user modeling aims to uncover fine-grained patterns and learn representations from user data, revealing their diverse interests and characteristics, such as profile, preference, and personality. Recent studies on foundation model-based recommendation have emphasized the Transformer arch…
Federated Collaborative Filtering (FedCF) is an emerging field focused on developing a new recommendation framework with preserving privacy in a federated setting. Existing FedCF methods typically combine distributed Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms with privacy-preserving mechanisms, and the…
Can we build accurate world models out of large language models (LLMs)? How can world models benefit LLM agents? The gap between the prior knowledge of LLMs and the specified environment's dynamics usually bottlenecks LLMs' performance as world models. To bridge the gap, we propose a training-free "…
Self-supervised learning (SSL) is capable of learning remarkable representations from centrally available data. Recent works further implement federated learning with SSL to learn from rapidly growing decentralized unlabeled images (e.g., from cameras and phones), often resulting from privacy constr…
Recently, foundation models, particularly large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated an impressive ability to adapt to various tasks by fine-tuning diverse instruction data. Notably, federated foundation models (FedFM) emerge as a privacy preservation method to fine-tune models collaboratively…
Medical entity disambiguation (MED) aims to ground medical mentions in text with ontological entities in knowledge bases (KBs). A notable challenge of MED is the long medical text usually contains multiple entities’ mentions with intricate correlations. However, limited by computation overhead, many…
With the recent success of large language models, particularly foundation models with generalization abilities, applying foundation models for recommendations becomes a new paradigm to improve existing recommendation systems. It becomes a new open challenge to enable the foundation model to capture…
On-device intelligence for weather forecasting uses local deep learning models to analyze weather patterns without centralized cloud computing, holds significance for supporting human activates. Federated Learning is a promising solution for such forecasting by enabling collaborative model training…
Building recommendation systems via federated learning (FL) is a new emerging challenge for next-generation Internet service. Existing FL models share item embedding across clients while keeping the user embedding private and local on the client side. However, identical item embedding cannot capture…
Long document retrieval aims to fetch query-relevant documents from a large-scale collection, where knowledge distillation has become de facto to improve a retriever by mimicking a heterogeneous yet powerful cross-encoder. However, in contrast to passages or sentences, retrieval on long documents su…
This paper demonstrates that pre-trained language models (PLMs) are strong foundation models for on-device meteorological variable modeling. We present LM-Weather, a generic approach to taming PLMs, that have learned massive sequential knowledge from the universe of natural language databases, to ac…
Recent large-scale vision-language pre-training depends on image-text global alignment by contrastive learning and is further boosted by fine-grained alignment in a weakly contrastive manner for cross-modal retrieval. Nonetheless, besides semantic matching learned by contrastive learning, cross-moda…
To enhance the reasoning capabilities of off-the-shelf Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a simple, yet general and effective prompting method, RE2, i.e., Re-Reading the question as input. Unlike most thought-eliciting prompting methods, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), which aim to elicit th…
We propose a simple method that applies a large language model (LLM) to large-scale retrieval in zero-shot scenarios. Our method, the Large language model as Retriever (LameR), is built upon no other neural models but an LLM in a retrieval-augmented retrieval fashion, while breaking brute-force comb…
Information retrieval (IR) plays a crucial role in locating relevant resources from vast amounts of data, and its applications have evolved from traditional knowledge bases to modern retrieval models (RMs). The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has further revolutionized the IR field by enab…
The success of foundation models advances the development of various intelligent and personalized agents to handle intricate tasks in their daily lives, however finite resources and privacy concerns from end users limit the potential of customizing the large intelligent agents for personal use. This…
In sequential decision-making problems involving sensitive attributes like race and gender, reinforcement learning (RL) agents must carefully consider long-term fairness while maximizing returns. Recent works have proposed many different types of fairness notions, but how unfairness arises in RL pro…
How to train a generalizable meta-policy by continually learning a sequence of tasks? It is a natural human skill yet challenging to achieve by current reinforcement learning: the agent is expected to quickly adapt to new tasks (plasticity) meanwhile retaining the common knowledge from previous task…
Distribution shift (e.g., task or domain shift) in continual learning (CL) usually results in catastrophic forgetting of previously learned knowledge. Although it can be alleviated by repeatedly replaying buffered data, the every-step replay is time-consuming. In this paper, we study which modules i…
Federated recommendation is a new Internet service architecture that aims to provide privacy-preserving recommendation services in federated settings. Existing solutions are used to combine distributed recommendation algorithms and privacy-preserving mechanisms. Thus it inherently takes the form of…
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown their superiority in modeling graph data. Owing to the advantages of federated learning, federated graph learning (FGL) enables clients to train strong GNN models in a distributed manner without sharing their private data. A core challenge in federated systems…
A robust summarization system should be able to capture the gist of the document, regardless of the specific word choices or noise in the input. In this work, we first explore the summarization models’ robustness against perturbations including word-level synonym substitution and noise. To create se…
Federated learning (FL) is an effective machine learning paradigm where multiple clients can train models based on heterogeneous data in a decentralized manner without accessing their private data. However, existing FL systems undergo performance deterioration due to feature-level test-time shifts,…
To tackle the global climate challenge, it urgently needs to develop a collaborative platform for comprehensive weather forecasting on large-scale meteorological data. Despite urgency, heterogeneous meteorological sensors across countries and regions, inevitably causing multivariate heterogeneity an…
Heterogeneous federated learning without assuming any structure is challenging due to the conflicts among non-identical data distributions of clients. In practice, clients often comprise near-homogeneous clusters so training a server-side model per cluster mitigates the conflicts. However, FL with c…
A neural ranker plays an indispensable role in the de facto ‘retrieval & rerank’ pipeline, but its training still lags behind due to the weak negative mining during contrastive learning. Compared to retrievers boosted by self-adversarial (i.e., in-distribution) negative mining, the ranker’s heavy st…
Multivariate time series classification is a critical problem in data mining with broad applications. We design a novel convolutional neural network architecture, Attentional Gated Res2Net, for robust multivariate time series classification. AGRes2Net uses hierarchical residual-like connections to a…
Generating new events given context with correlated ones plays a crucial role in many event-centric reasoning tasks. Existing works either limit their scope to specific scenarios or overlook event-level correlations. In this paper, we propose to pre-train a general Correlation-aware context-to-Event…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is inefficient on long-horizon tasks due to sparse rewards and its policy can be fragile to slightly perturbed environments. We address these challenges via a curriculum of tasks with coupled environments, generated by two policies trained jointly with RL: (1) a co-operat…
Heterogeneity across clients in federated learning (FL) usually hinders the optimization convergence and generalization performance when the aggregation of clients' knowledge occurs in the gradient space. For example, clients may differ in terms of data distribution, network latency, input/output sp…
Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm that allows decentralized clients to learn collaboratively without sharing their private data. However, excessive computation and communication demands pose challenges to current FL frameworks, especially when training large-scale models. To pre…
Distant supervision uses triple facts in knowledge graphs to label a corpus for relation extraction, leading to wrong labeling and long-tail problems. Some works use the hierarchy of relations for knowledge transfer to long-tail relations. However, a coarse-grained relation often implies only an att…
The size of the receptive field has been one of the most important factors for One Dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks (1D-CNNs) on time series classification tasks. Large efforts have been taken to choose the appropriate receptive field size, for it has a huge influence on the performance and…
Knowledge sharing and model personalization are two key components in the conceptual framework of personalized federated learning (PFL). Existing PFL methods focus on proposing new model personalization mechanisms while simply implementing knowledge sharing by aggregating models from all clients, re…
This work studies temporal reading comprehension (TRC), which reads a free-text passage and answers temporal ordering questions. Precise question understanding is critical for temporal reading comprehension. For example, the question “What happened before the victory” and “What happened after the vi…
Few-shot classification aims to recognize unseen classes when presented with only a small number of samples. We consider the problem of multi-domain few-shot image classification, where unseen classes and examples come from diverse data sources. This problem has seen growing interest and has inspire…
Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) usually suffers from sparse reward and inefficient exploration in long-horizon tasks. Planning can find the shortest path to a distant goal that provides dense reward/guidance but is inaccurate without a precise environment model. We show that RL and plan…
Aspect-level sentiment classification (ALSC) aims at identifying the sentiment polarity of a specified aspect in a sentence. ALSC is a practical setting in aspect-based sentiment analysis due to no opinion term labeling needed, but it fails to interpret why a sentiment polarity is derived for the as…
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to classify images of an unseen class only based on a few attributes describing that class but no access to any training sample. A popular strategy is to learn a mapping between the semantic space of class attributes and the visual space of images based on the seen clas…
Procedural text understanding aims at tracking the states (e.g., create, move, destroy) and locations of the entities mentioned in a given paragraph. To effectively track the states and locations, it is essential to capture the rich semantic relations between entities, actions, and locations in the…
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) refers to the problem of learning to classify instances from novel classes (unseen) that are absent in the training set (seen). Most ZSL methods infer the correlation between visual features and attributes to train the classifier for unseen classes. They may have a strong bi…
Numerous deep reinforcement learning agents have been proposed, and each of them has its strengths and flaws. In this work, we present a Cooperative Heterogeneous Deep Reinforcement Learning (CHDRL) framework that can learn a policy by integrating the advantages of heterogeneous agents. Specifically…
Many algorithms for Knowledge-Based Question Answering (KBQA) depend on semantic parsing, which translates a question to its logical form. When only weak supervision is provided, it is usually necessary to search valid logical forms for model training. However, a complex question typically involves…
Wrong labeling problem and long-tail relations are two main challenges caused by distant supervision in relation extraction. Recent works alleviate the wrong labeling by selective attention via multi-instance learning, but cannot well handle long-tail relations even if hierarchies of the relations a…
Many graph embedding approaches have been proposed for knowledge graph completion via link prediction. Among those, translating embedding approaches enjoy the advantages of light-weight structure, high efficiency and great interpretability. Especially when extended to complex vector space, they show…
Meta-learning extracts the common knowledge from learning different tasks and uses it for unseen tasks. It can significantly improve tasks that suffer from insufficient training data, e.g., few-shot learning. In most meta-learning methods, tasks are implicitly related by sharing parameters or optimize…
Recurrent neural networks (RNN), convolutional neural networks (CNN) and self-attention networks (SAN) are commonly used to produce context-aware representations. RNN can capture long-range dependency but is hard to parallelize and not time-efficient. CNN focuses on local dependency but does not per…