169 accepted papers
Riemannian optimization has attracted increasing attention recently as it is related to a variety of machine learning problems, including principal component analysis, dictionary learning, and mixture modeling. To tackle modern large-scale machine learning tasks, distributed learning is usually cons
As large language models become increasingly capable and widely deployed, verifying the provenance of machine-generated content is critical to ensuring trust, safety, and accountability. Watermarking techniques have emerged as a promising solution by embedding imperceptible statistical signals into…
Verifying the authenticity of AI-generated text has become increasingly important with the rapid advancement of large language models, and unbiased watermarking has emerged as a promising approach due to its ability to preserve output distribution without degrading quality. However, recent work reve…
Continual learning (CL) aims to acquire new knowledge from a non-stationary data stream while retaining performance on previously learned tasks. Memory-based replay methods mitigate catastrophic forgetting by storing and revisiting past samples, but their effectiveness is fundamentally constrained b…
While collaborative filtering delivers predictive accuracy and efficiency, and Large Language Models (LLMs) enable expressive and generalizable reasoning, modern recommendation systems must bring these strengths together. Growing user expectations, such as natural-language queries and transparent ex…
In recent years, decentralized optimization has gained significant attention for solving machine learning problems where data are distributed across multiple devices. However, existing decentralized optimization algorithms are primarily designed for single-level and two-level optimization tasks, lim…
As policy catches up with the capabilities of generative AI, watermarking is central to content provenance efforts. Inference-time watermarks for autoregressive models are unfit for continuous modalities due to discretization inconsistencies. Existing methods overcome this by finetuning the modality…
Human beings naturally utilize multiple reasoning modalities to learn and solve logical problems, i.e., different representational formats such as natural language, code, and symbolic logic. In contrast, most existing LLM-based approaches operate with a single reasoning modality during training, typ…
Large multimodal models (LMMs) are increasingly adopted as judges in multimodal evaluation systems due to their strong instruction following and consistency with human preferences. However, their ability to follow diverse, fine-grained evaluation criteria remains underexplored. We develop Multi-Crit
Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves either full fine-tuning, which updates all model parameters, or Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), which adjusts a small subset of parameters. However, both approaches have inherent limitations: full fine-tuning is computationally expe…
Parallel thinking has emerged as a promising paradigm for reasoning, yet it imposes significant computational burdens. Existing efficiency methods primarily rely on local, per-trajectory signals and lack principled mechanisms to exploit global dynamics across parallel branches. We introduce 2D probi…
Parallel thinking has emerged as a novel approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by exploring multiple reasoning paths concurrently. However, activating such capabilities through training remains challenging. Existing methods mainly rely on supervised fine-t…
With the rapid development of large multimodal models, reliable judge and critic models have become essential for open-ended evaluation and preference alignment, providing pairwise preferences, numerical scores, and explanatory justifications for assessing model-generated responses. However, existin
While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under st…
As LLMs proliferate with diverse capabilities and costs, LLM routing has emerged by learning to predict each LLM's quality and cost for a given query, then selecting the one with high quality and low cost. However, existing routers implicitly assume a single fixed quality and cost per LLM for each q…
Histopathology whole-slide images (WSIs) are routinely acquired in clinical practice and contain rich tissue morphology but lack direct molecular architecture and functional programs defining pathological states, whereas RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) provides genome-wide transcriptional profiles at subst…
In this paper, we study Riemannian zeroth-order optimization in settings where the underlying Riemannian metric $g$ is geodesically incomplete, and the goal is to approximate stationary points with respect to this incomplete metric. To address this challenge, we construct structure-preserving metric…
The rapid advancement of AIGC-based video generation has underscored the critical need for comprehensive evaluation frameworks that go beyond traditional generation quality metrics to encompass aesthetic appeal. However, existing benchmarks remain largely focused on technical fidelity, leaving a sig
The rapid advancement of AIGC video generation calls for evaluation frameworks that move beyond technical fidelity and incorporate human-centered aesthetic assessment. Existing benchmarks often overlook fine-grained perceptual qualities such as visual aesthetics, artistic style, and human preference
Statistical watermarking techniques are well-established for sequentially decoded language models (LMs). However, these techniques cannot be directly applied to order-agnostic LMs, as the tokens in order-agnostic LMs are not generated sequentially. In this work, we introduce PATTERN-MARK, a pattern-…
Video large language models have not yet been widely deployed, largely due to their tendency to hallucinate. Typical benchmarks for Video-LLMs rely simply on multiple choice questions. Unfortunately, VideoLLMs hallucinate far more aggressively on freeform text generation tasks like video captioning…
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has advanced the multilingual machine translation (MMT), yet the Curse of Multilinguality (CoM) remains a major challenge. Existing work in LLM-based MMT typically mitigates this issue via scaling up training and computation budget, which raises a critic…
Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks using First-Order (FO) optimizers presents significant computational challenges. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning~(PEFT) methods have been proposed to address these challenges by freezing most model parameters and training only…
We study cost-aware routing for large language models across diverse and dynamic pools of models. Existing approaches often overlook prompt-specific context, rely on expensive model profiling, assume a fixed set of experts, or use inefficient trial-and-error strategies. We introduce Cost-Spectrum Co…
Watermarking techniques offer a promising way to identify machine-generated content via embedding covert information into the contents generated from language models (LMs). However, the robustness of the watermarking schemes has not been well explored. In this paper, we present De-mark, an advanced…
Recent advances in diffusion generative models have yielded remarkable progress. While the quality of generated content continues to improve, these models have grown considerably in size and complexity. This increasing computational burden poses significant challenges, particularly in resource-const…
Hierarchical optimization is attracting significant attentions as it can be applied to a broad range of machine learning tasks. Recently, many algorithms are proposed to improve the theoretical results of minimax and bilevel optimizations. Among these works, a core issue that has not been well studi
Federated Learning (FL) studies often assume a static data distribution, whereas real-world scenarios involve dynamic changes. To address this gap, we study Federated Continuous Category Discovery and Learning (FC^2DL), an essential yet underexplored problem that enables FL models to evolve continuo…
In this paper, we study format biases in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). We observe that many widely-used preference models—including human evaluators, GPT-4, and top-ranking models on the RewardBench benchmark—exhibit strong biases towards specific format patterns, such as lists,…
Recent advances have shown that video generation models can enhance robot learning by deriving effective robot actions through inverse dynamics. However, these methods heavily depend on the quality of generated data and struggle with fine-grained manipulation due to the lack of environment feedback.…
Identifying time-delayed latent causal process is crucial for understanding temporal dynamics and enabling downstream reasoning. While recent methods have made progress in identifying latent time-delayed causal processes, they cannot address the dynamics in which the influence of some latent factors…
As artificial intelligence surpasses human capabilities in text generation, the necessity to authenticate the origins of AI-generated content has become paramount. Unbiased watermarks offer a powerful solution by embedding statistical signals into language model-generated text without distorting the…
Current image forensics methods often utilize image features from various frequency domains. However, the effective use of these features frequently depends on complex network architectures and a large number of parameters. In this paper, we introduce a lightweight Multi-Clue image forgery detection…
We introduce LLaVA-Critic, the first open-source large multimodal model (LMM) designed as a generalist evaluator to assess performance across a wide range of multimodal tasks. LLaVA-Critic is trained using a high-quality critic instruction-following dataset that incorporates diverse evaluation crite…
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have demonstrated impressive image generation capabilities. Still, their computational intensity prohibits resource-constrained organizations from deploying T2I models after fine-tuning them on their internal *target* data. While pruning techniques offer a potent…
We introduce \textbf{OmnixR}, an evaluation suite designed to benchmark state-of-the-art Omni-modality Language Models (OLMs), such as GPT-4o and Gemini. Evaluating OLMs, which integrate multiple modalities such as text, vision, and audio, presents unique challenges. Particularly, the user message…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) is an important framework for stochastic optimization when gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. A potential limitation of existing ZOO methods is the bias inherent in most gradient estimators unless the perturbation stepsize vanishes. In this paper, we o…
Shuffling-type gradient methods are favored in practice for their simplicity and rapid empirical performance. Despite extensive development of convergence guarantees under various assumptions in recent years, most require the Lipschitz smoothness condition, which is often not met in common machine l…
In this paper, we explore the two-point zeroth-order gradient estimator and identify the distribution of random perturbations that minimizes the estimator's asymptotic variance as the perturbation stepsize tends to zero. We formulate it as a constrained functional optimization problem over the space…
The rapid advancement of next-token-prediction models has led to widespread adoption across modalities, enabling the creation of realistic synthetic media. In the audio domain, while autoregressive speech models have propelled conversational interactions forward, the potential for misuse, such as im…
In financial applications, reinforcement learning (RL) agents are commonly trained on historical data, where their actions do not influence prices. However, during deployment, these agents trade in live markets where their own transactions can shift asset prices, a phenomenon known as market impact.…
Recent advances in large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have enabled a variety of downstream applications. As T2I models require extensive resources for training, they constitute highly valued intellectual property (IP) for their legitimate owners, yet making them incentive targets for u…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an indispensable part of natural language processing tasks. However, autoregressive sampling has become an efficiency bottleneck. Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding (MDSD) is a recent approach where, when generating each token, a small draft model generates mul…
Video aesthetic assessment, a vital area in multimedia computing, integrates computer vision with human cognition. Its progress is limited by the lack of standardized datasets and robust models, as the temporal dynamics of video and multimodal fusion challenges hinder direct application of image-bas…
The protection of cyber Intellectual Property (IP) such as web content is an increasingly critical concern. The rise of large language models (LLMs) with online retrieval capabilities enables convenient access to information but often undermines the rights of original content creators. As users incr
Authorship attribution aims to identify the origin or author of a document. Traditional approaches have heavily relied on manual features and fail to capture long-range correlations, limiting their effectiveness. Recent advancements leverage text embeddings from pre-trained language models, which re…
Watermarking techniques offer a promising way to identify machine-generated content via embedding covert information into the contents generated from language models. A challenge in the domain lies in preserving the distribution of original generated content after watermarking. Our research extends…
Continual Learning (CL) focuses on learning from dynamic and changing data distributions while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Various methods have been developed to address the challenge of catastrophic forgetting, including regularization-based, Bayesian-based, and memory-replay-based tec…
Datasets play a pivotal role in training visual models, facilitating the development of abstract understandings of visual features through diverse image samples and multidimensional attributes. However, in the realm of aesthetic evaluation of artistic images, datasets remain relatively scarce. Exist…
Robust Markov decision process (robust MDP) is an important machine learning framework to make a reliable policy that is robust to environmental perturbation. Despite empirical success and popularity of policy gradient methods, existing policy gradient methods require at least iteration complexity $…
Speculative Sampling (SpS) has been introduced to speed up inference of large language models (LLMs) by generating multiple tokens in a single forward pass under the guidance of a reference model, while preserving the original distribution. We observe that SpS can be derived through maximum coupling…
Fairness is becoming a rising concern in machine learning. Recent research has discovered that state-of-the-art models are amplifying social bias by making biased prediction towards some population groups (characterized by sensitive features like race or gender). Such unfair prediction among groups…
Large language models~(LLMs) strengthen instruction-following capability through instruction-finetuning (IFT) on supervised instruction/response data. However, widely used IFT datasets (e.g., Alpaca's 52k data) surprisingly contain many low-quality instances with incorrect or irrelevant responses, w…
Current techniques for deep neural network (DNN) pruning often involve intricate multi-step processes that require domain-specific expertise making their widespread adoption challenging. To address the limitation the Only-Train-Once (OTO) and OTOv2 are proposed to eliminate the need for additional f…
Most existing dynamic or runtime channel pruning methods have to store all weights to achieve efficient inference which brings extra storage costs. Static pruning methods can reduce storage costs directly but their performance is limited by using a fixed sub-network to approximate the original model…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown remarkable success in modeling complex data distributions for image-to-image translation. Still, their high computational demands prohibit their deployment in practical scenarios like edge devices. Existing GAN compression methods mainly rely on know…
Model extraction is to obtain a cloned model that replicates the functionality of a black-box victim model solely through query-based access. Present defense strategies exhibit shortcomings, manifesting as: (1) computational or memory inefficiencies during deployment; or (2) dependence on expensive…
Minimax optimization is fundamental and important for enormous machine learning applications such as generative adversarial network, adversarial training, and robust optimization. Recently, a variety of minimax algorithms with theoretical guarantees based on Lipschitz smoothness have been proposed.…
Neural network pruning particularly channel pruning is a widely used technique for compressing deep learning models to enable their deployment on edge devices with limited resources. Typically redundant weights or structures are removed to achieve the target resource budget. Although data-driven pru…
Bilevel optimization problems appear in many widely used machine learning tasks. Bilevel optimization models are sensitive to small changes, and bilevel training tasks typically involve limited datasets. Therefore, overfitting is a common challenge in bilevel training tasks. This paper considers the…
By combining differentiable rendering with explicit point-based scene representations, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated breakthrough 3D reconstruction capabilities. However, to date 3DGS has had limited impact on robotics, where high-speed egomotion is pervasive: Egomotion introduc…
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging learning paradigm where a set of distributed clients learns a task under the coordination of a server. The FedAvg algorithm is one of the most widely used methods in FL. In FedAvg, the learning rate is a constant rather than changing adaptively. Adaptive gradie…
Large language models are probabilistic models, and the process of generating content is essentially sampling from the output distribution of the language model. Existing watermarking techniques inject watermarks into the generated content without altering the output quality. On the other hand, exis…
Large language models (LLMs) are instruction followers but the performance varies under different instructions. It is challenging to create the best instruction, especially for black-box LLMs on which backpropagation is forbidden. Instead of directly optimizing the discrete instruction, we optimize…
Structural model pruning is a prominent approach used for reducing the computational cost of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) before their deployment on resource-constrained devices. Yet the majority of proposed ideas require a pretrained model before pruning which is costly to secure. In this p…
Zeroth-order (ZO) methods, which use the finite difference of two function evaluations (also called ZO gradient) to approximate first-order gradient, have attracted much attention recently in machine learning because of their broad applications. The accuracy of the ZO gradient highly depends on how…
"Diffusion probabilistic models can generate high-quality samples. Yet, their sampling process requires numerous denoising steps, making it slow and computationally intensive. We propose to reduce the sampling cost by pruning a pretrained diffusion model into a mixture of efficient experts. First, w…
Continual learning (CL) aims to adapt to non-stationary data distributions while retaining previously acquired knowledge. However, CL models typically face a trade-off between preserving old task knowledge and excelling in new task performance. Existing approaches often sacrifice one for the other.…
In this work, we study the issue of reward hacking on the response length, a challenge emerging in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) on LLMs. A well-formatted, verbose but less helpful response from the LLMs can often deceive LLMs or even human evaluators and achieve high scores. The…
Constrained cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is an emerging learning framework that has been widely applied to manage multi-agent systems, and many primal-dual type algorithms have been developed for it. However, the convergence of primal-dual algorithms crucially relies on stro…
Federated Averaging (FedAvg) is known to experience convergence issues when encountering significant clients system heterogeneity and data heterogeneity. Server momentum has been proposed as an effective mitigation. However, existing server momentum works are restrictive in the momentum formulation,…
Image aesthetic evaluation is a highly prominent research domain in the field of computer vision. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of datasets and corresponding evaluation methodologies for assessing the aesthetic quality of photographic works, leading to the establishment of a relati…
"Compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) task aims to recognize unseen compositional visual concepts, , sliced tomatoes, where the model is learned only from the seen compositions, , sliced potatoes and red tomatoes. Thanks to the prompt tuning on large pre-trained visual language models such as CLI…
Bilevel Optimization has experienced significant advancements recently with the introduction of new efficient algorithms. Mirroring the success in single-level optimization, stochastic gradient-based algorithms are widely used in bilevel optimization. However, a common limitation in these algorithms…
In order to enhance the generalization ability towards unseen domains, universal cross-domain image retrieval methods require a training dataset encompassing diverse domains, which is costly to assemble. Given this constraint, we introduce a novel problem of data-free adaptive cross-domain retrieval…
"Cellular nuclei recognition serves as a fundamental and essential step in the workflow of digital pathology. However, with disparate source organs and staining procedures among histology image clusters, the scanned tiles inherently conform to a non-uniform data distribution, which induces deteriora…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem with general utility is a powerful decision making framework that covers standard RL with cumulative cost, exploration problems, and demonstration learning. Existing works on RL with general utility do not consider the robustness under environmental perturbation,…
Machine learning holds tremendous promise for transforming the fundamental practice of scientific discovery by virtue of its data-driven nature. With the ever-increasing stream of research data collection it would be appealing to autonomously explore patterns and insights from observational data for…
Fine-tuning is essential to adapting pre-trained large language models to downstream applications. With the increasing popularity of LLM-enabled applications, fine-tuning has been performed intensively worldwide, incurring a tremendous amount of computing costs that correspond to big carbon footprin…
The recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have sparked a growing apprehension regarding the potential misuse. One approach to mitigating this risk is to incorporate watermarking techniques into LLMs, allowing for the tracking and attribution of model outputs. This study examines a cruc…
Data selection in instruction tuning emerges as a pivotal process for acquiring high-quality data and training instruction-following large language models (LLMs), but it is still a new and unexplored research area for vision-language models (VLMs). Existing data selection approaches on LLMs either r…
High-quality public datasets significantly prompt the prosperity of deep neural networks (DNNs). Currently, dataset ownership verification (DOV), which consists of dataset watermarking and ownership verification, is the only feasible solution to protect their copyright by preventing unauthorized use…
We study the robust interpolation problem of arbitrary data distributions supported on a bounded space and propose a two-fold law of robustness. Robust interpolation refers to the problem of interpolating $n$ noisy training data points in $R^d$ by a Lipschitz function. Although this problem has been…
A lot of theoretical and empirical evidence shows that the flatter local minima tend to improve generalization. Adversarial Weight Perturbation (AWP) is an emerging technique to efficiently and effectively find such minima. In AMP we minimize the loss w.r.t. a bounded worst-case perturbation of the…
Negative and positive curvatures affect optimization in different ways. However, a lot of existing optimization theories are based on the Lipschitz smoothness assumption, which cannot differentiate between the two. In this paper, we propose to use two separate assumptions for positive and negative c…
Bilevel Optimization has witnessed notable progress recently with new emerging efficient algorithms. However, its application in the Federated Learning setting remains relatively underexplored, and the impact of Federated Learning's inherent challenges on the convergence of bilevel algorithms remain…
Despite incredible advances, deep learning has been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. Numerous approaches were proposed to train robust networks both empirically and certifiably. However, most of them defend against only a single type of attack, while recent work steps forward at defen…
The minimax optimization over Riemannian manifolds (possibly nonconvex constraints) has been actively applied to solve many problems, such as robust dimensionality reduction and deep neural networks with orthogonal weights (Stiefel manifold). Although many optimization algorithms for minimax problem…
The prosperity of deep neural networks (DNNs) is largely benefited from open-source datasets, based on which users can evaluate and improve their methods. In this paper, we revisit backdoor-based dataset ownership verification (DOV), which is currently the only feasible approach to protect the copyr…
Determining kernel sizes of a CNN model is a crucial and non-trivial design choice and significantly impacts its performance. The majority of kernel size design methods rely on complex heuristic tricks or leverage neural architecture search that requires extreme computational resources. Thus, learni…
Federated learning has attracted increasing attention with the emergence of distributed data. While extensive federated learning algorithms have been proposed for the non-convex distributed problem, the federated learning in practice still faces numerous challenges, such as the large training iterat…
Fair classification is an emerging and important research topic in machine learning community. Existing methods usually formulate the fairness metrics as additional inequality constraints, and then embed them into the original objective. This makes fair classification problems unable to be effective…
Conditional stochastic optimization has found applications in a wide range of machine learning tasks, such as invariant learning, AUPRC maximization, and meta-learning. As the demand for training models with large-scale distributed data grows in these applications, there is an increasing need for co…
In this paper we study the second-order optimality of decentralized stochastic algorithm that escapes saddle point efficiently for nonconvex optimization problems. We propose a new pure gradient-based decentralized stochastic algorithm PEDESTAL with a novel convergence analysis framework to address…
Transformers have seen growing interest in processing different modalities, including language and image data. As a result, we can process vision and language data using transformers that are architecturally similar. Leveraging this feature of transformers, we propose weight sharing across two tran…
Exploring good generalization ability is essential in deep metric learning (DML). Most existing DML methods focus on improving the model robustness against category shift to keep the performance on unseen categories. However, in addition to category shift, domain shift also widely exists in real-wor…
This paper proposes a novel algorithm, Transformative Bayesian Learning (TansBL), which bridges the gap between empirical risk minimization (ERM) and Bayesian learning for neural networks. We compare ERM, which uses gradient descent to optimize, and Bayesian learning with importance sampling for the…
Recent studies show that prompt tuning can better leverage the power of large language models than fine-tuning on downstream natural language understanding tasks. However, the existing prompt tuning methods have training instability issues, as the variance of scores under different random seeds is q…
Federated learning (FL) is a promising privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm over distributed data. In this paradigm, each client trains the parameter of a model locally and the server aggregates the parameter from clients periodically. Therefore, we perform the learning and communication ove…
The minimax problems arise throughout machine learning applications, ranging from adversarial training and policy evaluation in reinforcement learning to AUROC maximization. To address the large-scale distributed data challenges across multiple clients with communication-efficient distributed traini…
In this paper, we propose a novel channel pruning method to reduce the computational and storage costs of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Many existing one-shot pruning methods directly remove redundant structures, which brings a huge gap between the model before and after network pruning. Thi…
The success of automated medical image analysis depends on large-scale and expert-annotated training sets. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been raised as a promising approach to alleviate the burden of labeled data collection. However, they generally operate under the closed-set adaptation…
In this paper, we provide a tighter analysis for ProxSkip, an algorithm that allows fewer proximal operator computations to solve composite optimization problems. We improve the existing decreasing speed of Lyapunov function from $\mathcal{O}(p^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(p)$, when $p$, the frequency of the…
In this paper, we propose a novel Hessian inverse free Fully Single Loop Algorithm (FSLA) for bilevel optimization problems. Classic algorithms for bilevel optimization admit a double loop structure which is computationally expensive. Recently, several single loop algorithms have been proposed with…
Learning to improve AUC performance is an important topic in machine learning. However, AUC maximization algorithms may decrease generalization performance due to the noisy data. Self-paced learning is an effective method for handling noisy data. However, existing self-paced learning methods are lim…
In the paper, we design a novel Bregman gradient policy optimization framework for reinforcement learning based on Bregman divergences and momentum techniques. Specifically, we propose a Bregman gradient policy optimization (BGPO) algorithm based on the basic momentum technique and mirror descent it…
Cross-silo federated learning (FL) has attracted much attention in medical imaging analysis with deep learning in recent years as it can resolve the critical issues of insufficient data, data privacy, and training efficiency. However, there can be a generalization gap between the model trained from…
Communication efficiency is crucial for federated learning (FL). Conducting local training steps in clients to reduce the communication frequency between clients and the server is a common method to address this issue. However, it leads to the client drift problem due to non-i.i.d. data distribution…
The communication bottleneck has been a critical problem in large-scale distributed deep learning. In this work, we study distributed SGD with random block-wise sparsification as the gradient compressor, which is ring-allreduce compatible and highly computation-efficient but leads to inferior perfor…
"In this paper, we propose a novel channel pruning method for compression and acceleration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Many existing channel pruning works try to discover compact sub-networks by optimizing a regularized loss function through differentiable operations. Usually, a learnab…
Parallel optimization has become popular for large-scale learning in the past decades. However, existing methods suffer from huge computational costs, memory usage, and communication burden in high-dimensional scenarios. To address the challenges, we propose a new accelerated doubly sparse asynchron…
Bilevel optimization has been recently used in many machine learning problems such as hyperparameter optimization, policy optimization, and meta learning. Although many bilevel optimization methods have been proposed, they still suffer from the high computational complexities and do not consider the…
"Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) compression is crucial to deploying these models in edge devices with limited resources. Existing channel pruning algorithms for CNNs have achieved plenty of success on complex models. They approach the pruning problem from various perspectives and use different…
Deep learning models have shown to be susceptible to universal adversarial perturbation (UAP), which has aroused wide concerns in the community. Compared with the conventional adversarial attacks that generate adversarial samples at the instance level, UAP can fool the target model for different ins…
Similarity learning can be significantly advanced by informative relationships among different samples and features. The current methods try to excavate the multiple correlations in different aspects, but cannot integrate them into a unified framework. In this paper, we provide to consider the multi…
How to effectively handle label noise has been one of the most practical but challenging tasks in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Recent popular methods for training DNNs with noisy labels mainly focus on directly filtering out samples with low confidence or repeatedly mining valuable information from…
Federated Learning has been actively studied due to its efficiency in numerous real-world applications in the past few years. However, the federated stochastic compositional optimization problem is still underexplored, even though it has widespread applications in machine learning. In this paper, we…
"There have been growing interest in algorithmic fairness for biased data. Although various pre-, in-, and post-processing methods are designed to address this problem, new learning paradigms designed for fair deep models are still necessary. Modern computer vision tasks usually involve large generi…
Recent research works have shown that image retrieval models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where slightly modified test inputs could lead to problematic retrieval results. In this paper, we aim to design a provably robust image retrieval model which keeps the most important evaluation metri…
In this paper, we study the nonconvex-strongly-concave minimax optimization problem on decentralized setting. The minimax problems are attracting increasing attentions because of their popular practical applications such as policy evaluation and adversarial training. As training data become larger,…
Recently, Cross-Modal Hamming space Retrieval (CMHR) regains ever-increasing attention, mainly benefiting from the excellent representation capability of deep neural networks. On the other hand, the vulnerability of deep networks exposes a deep cross-modal retrieval system to various safety risks (e…
Recently decentralized optimization attracts much attention in machine learning because it is more communication-efficient than the centralized fashion. Quantization is a promising method to reduce the communication cost via cutting down the budget of each single communication using the gradient com…
In the paper, we propose a class of efficient mirror descent ascent methods to solve the nonsmooth nonconvex-strongly-concave minimax problems by using dynamic mirror functions, and introduce a convergence analysis framework to conduct rigorous theoretical analysis for our mirror descent ascent met…
Deep neural networks achieve great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, the model deployment is usually subject to some computational resources. Model pruning under computational budget has attracted growing attention. In this paper, we focus on the discrimination-aware compression of…
The stochastic compositional optimization problem covers a wide range of machine learning models, such as sparse additive models and model-agnostic meta-learning. Thus, it is necessary to develop efficient methods for its optimization. Existing methods for the stochastic compositional optimization…
Training deep neural networks using a large batch size has shown promising results and benefits many real-world applications. Warmup is one of nontrivial techniques to stabilize the convergence of large batch training. However, warmup is an empirical method and it is still unknown whether there is a…
In many computer vision problems, it is desired to learn the effective visual data similarity such that the prediction accuracy can be enhanced. Deep Metric Learning (DML) methods have been actively studied to measure the data similarity. Pair-based and proxy-based losses are the two major paradigms…
Deep clustering gradually becomes an important branch in unsupervised learning methods. However, current approaches hardly take into consideration the semantic sample relationships that existed in both local and global features. In addition, since the deep features are updated on-the-fly, relying on…
Channel pruning is a class of powerful methods for model compression. When pruning a neural network, it's ideal to obtain a sub-network with higher accuracy. However, a sub-network does not necessarily have high accuracy with low classification loss (loss-metric mismatch). In the paper, we first con…
Federated Learning (FL) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. A leading training algorithm in FL is local SGD, which updates the model parameter on each worker and averages model parameters across different workers only once in a while. Although it has fewer communication rounds than t…
We investigate the distributions of Conjugate Kernel (CK) and Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) for ReLU networks with random initialization. We derive the precise distributions and moments of the diagonal elements of these kernels. For a feedforward network, these values converge in law to a log-normal d…
In the paper, we study the underdamped Langevin diffusion (ULD) with strongly-convex potential consisting of finite summation of $N$ smooth components, and propose an efficient discretization method, which requires $O(N+d^\frac{1}{3}N^\frac{2}{3}/\varepsilon^\frac{2}{3})$ gradient evaluations to ach…
Adaptive gradient methods have shown excellent performances for solving many machine learning problems. Although multiple adaptive gradient methods were recently studied, they mainly focus on either empirical or theoretical aspects and also only work for specific problems by using some specific ad…
Vertical federated learning (VFL) attracts increasing attention due to the emerging demands of multi-party collaborative modeling and concerns of privacy leakage. In the real VFL applications, usually only one or partial parties hold labels, which makes it challenging for all parties to collaborativ…
Although the distributed machine learning methods can speed up the training of large deep neural networks, the communication cost has become the non-negligible bottleneck to constrain the performance. To address this challenge, the gradient compression based communication-efficient distributed learn…
Learning feature embedding directly from images without any human supervision is a very challenging and essential task in the field of computer vision and machine learning. Following the paradigm in supervised manner, most existing unsupervised metric learning approaches mainly focus on binary simil…
Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) has become an increasingly important research topic in machine learning. Despite all the practical success, most of existing NMF models are still vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Adversarial NMF (ANMF) approach…
Lighter model and faster inference are the focus of current single image super-resolution (SISR) research. However, existing methods are still hard to be applied in real-world applications due to the requirement of its heavy computation. Model quantization is an effective way to significantly reduce…
Frank-Wolfe algorithm is an efficient method for optimizing non-convex constrained problems. However, most of existing methods focus on the first-order case. In real-world applications, the gradient is not always available. To address the problem of lacking gradient in many applications, we propose…
In this paper, we target to address the problem of compression and acceleration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Specifically, we propose a novel structural pruning method to obtain a compact CNN with strong discriminative power. To find such networks, we propose an efficient discrete optimi…
Ordered Weighted $L_{1}$ (OWL) regularized regression is a new regression analysis for high-dimensional sparse learning. Proximal gradient methods are used as standard approaches to solve OWL regression. However, it is still a burning issue to solve OWL regression due to considerable computational c…
In the paper, we propose a class of efficient momentum-based policy gradient methods for the model-free reinforcement learning, which use adaptive learning rates and do not require any large batches. Specifically, we propose a fast important-sampling momentum-based policy gradient (IS-MBPG) method b…
Classical subspace clustering methods often assume that the raw form data lie in a union of the low-dimension linear subspace. This assumption is too strict in practice, which largely limits the generalization of subspace clustering. To tackle this issue, deep subspace clustering (DSC) networks base…
Training the deep convolutional neural network for computer vision problems is slow and inefficient, especially when it is large and distributed across multiple devices. The inefficiency is caused by the backpropagation algorithm's forward locking, backward locking, and update locking problems. Exis…
This paper introduces a novel Robust Regression (RR) model, named Sinkhorn regression, which imposes Sinkhorn distances on both loss function and regularization. Traditional RR methods target at searching for an element-wise loss function (e.g., Lp-norm) to characterize the errors such that ou…
Most existing feature selection methods in literature are linear models, so that the nonlinear relations between features and response variables are not considered. Meanwhile, in these feature selection models, the interactions between features are often ignored or just discussed under prior structu…
An intriguing property of adversarial examples is their transferability, which suggests that black-box attacks are feasible in real-world applications. Previous works mostly study the transferability on non-targeted setting. However, recent studies show that targeted adversarial examples are more di…
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for nuclei instance segmentation is important for digital pathology, as it alleviates the burden of labor-intensive annotation and domain shift across datasets. In this work, we propose a Cycle Consistency Panoptic Domain Adaptive Mask R-CNN (CyC-PDAM) architectu…
Clustering is an important problem in various machine learning applications, but still a challenging task when dealing with complex real data. The existing clustering algorithms utilize either shallow models with insufficient capacity for capturing the non-linear nature of data, or deep models with…
Regular model compression methods focus on RGB input. While cross domain tasks demand more DNN models, each domain often needs its own model. Consequently, for such tasks, the storage cost, memory footprint and computation cost increase dramatically compared to single RGB input. Moreover, the distin…
Distance Metric Learning aims to learn an appropriate metric that faithfully measures the distance between two data points. Traditional metric learning methods usually calculate the pairwise distance with fixed distance functions (\emph{e.g.,}\ Euclidean distance) in the projected feature spaces. Ho…
Dropout is a popular technique to train large-scale deep neural networks to alleviate the overfitting problem. To disclose the underlying reasons for its gain, numerous works have tried to explain it from different perspectives. In this paper, unlike existing works, we explore it from a new perspect…
In this paper, we propose a faster stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for nonconvex optimization by using a new stochastic path-integrated differential estimator (SPIDER), called as SPIDER-ADMM. Moreover, we prove that the SPIDER-ADMM achieves a record-breaking incremental…
In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end trainable Video Question Answering (VideoQA) framework with three major components: 1) a new heterogeneous memory which can effectively learn global context information from appearance and motion features; 2) a redesigned question memory which helps under…
Group regularized learning problems (such as group Lasso) are important in machine learning. The asynchronous parallel stochastic optimization algorithms have received huge attentions recently as handling large scale problems. However, existing asynchronous stochastic algorithms for solving the…
Metric learning, aiming to learn a discriminative Mahalanobis distance matrix M that can effectively reflect the similarity between data samples, has been widely studied in various image recognition problems. Most of the existing metric learning methods input the features extracted directly from the…
Backpropagation algorithm is indispensable for the training of feedforward neural networks. It requires propagating error gradients sequentially from the output layer all the way back to the input layer. The backward locking in backpropagation algorithm constrains us from updating network layers in…
Face alignment has been extensively studied in computer vision community due to its fundamental role in facial analysis, but it remains an unsolved problem. The major challenges lie in the highly nonlinear relationship between face images and associated facial shapes, which is coupled by underlying…
Asynchronous parallel stochastic gradient optimization has been playing a pivotal role to solve large-scale machine learning problems in big data applications. Zeroth-order (derivative-free) methods estimate the gradient only by two function evaluations, thus have been applied to solve the problems…
Training a neural network using backpropagation algorithm requires passing error gradients sequentially through the network. The backward locking prevents us from updating network layers in parallel and fully leveraging the computing resources. Recently, there are several works trying to decouple a…
Unsupervised deep hash functions have not shown satisfactory improvements against the shallow alternatives, and usually, require supervised pretraining to avoid getting stuck in bad local minima. In this paper, we propose a deep unsupervised hashing function, called HashGAN, which outperforms unsupe…
In this paper, we propose a new clustering model, called DEeP Embedded RegularIzed ClusTering (DEPICT), which efficiently maps data into a discriminative embedding subspace and precisely predicts cluster assignments. DEPICT generally consists of a multinomial logistic regression function stacked on…
A family of learning algorithms generated from additive models have attracted much attention recently for their flexibility and interpretability in high dimensional data analysis. Among them, learning models with grouped variables have shown competitive performance for prediction and variable select…
Co-clustering methods have been widely applied to document clustering and gene expression analysis. These methods make use of the duality between features and samples such that the co-occurring structure of sample and feature clusters can be extracted. In graph based co-clustering methods, a biparti…
Texture classification has been extensively studied in computer vision. Recent research shows that the combination of Fisher vector (FV) encoding and convolutional neural network (CNN) provides significant improvement in texture classification over the previous feature representation methods. Howeve…
Linear regression models have been successfully used to function estimation and model selection in high-dimensional data analysis. However, most existing methods are built on least squares with the mean square error (MSE) criterion, which are sensitive to outliers and their performance may be degrad…
Nystr\"{o}m method has been used successfully to improve the computational efficiency of kernel ridge regression (KRR). Recently, theoretical analysis of Nystr\"{o}m KRR, including generalization bound and convergence rate, has been established based on reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) asso…
Texture, as a fundamental characteristic of objects, has attracted much attention in computer vision research. Performance of texture classification is however still lacking for some challenging cases, largely due to the high intra-class variation and low inter-class distinction. To tackle these iss…
For many computer vision applications, the data sets distribute on certain low-dimensional subspaces. Subspace clustering is to find such underlying subspaces and cluster the data points correctly. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view subspace clustering method. The proposed method performs…