32 accepted papers
Accurate survival modeling in biomedical studies is often hindered by rare events, limited effective sample sizes, and settings with limited or partially observed information (e.g., covariates of interest that are difficult or expensive to collect, highly-structured sampling designs, or nuisance par…
Autonomous execution of long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation tasks traditionally requires extensive real-world data and expert engineering, posing significant cost and scalability challenges. This paper proposes a novel framework integrating hierarchical semantic decomposition, reinforcement lear
In the field of robotic manipulation, traditional methods lack the flexibility required to meet the demands of diverse applications. Consequently, researchers have increasingly focused on developing more general techniques, particularly for long-horizon and gentle manipulation, to enhance the manipu
In-context learning (ICL) relies heavily on high-quality demonstrations drawn from large annotated corpora. Existing approaches detect noisy annotations by ranking local perplexities, presuming that noisy samples yield higher perplexities than their clean counterparts. However, this assumption break…
Large language models (LLMs) can learn vast amounts of knowledge from diverse domains during pre-training. However, long-tail knowledge from specialized domains is often scarce and underrepresented, rarely appearing in the models’ memorization. Prior work has shown that in-context learning (ICL) wit…
Automated assessment of open responses in K–12 science education poses significant challenges due to the multimodal nature of student work, which often integrates textual explanations, drawings, and handwritten elements. Traditional evaluation methods that focus solely on textual analysis fail to ca
In the field of dexterous robotic manipulation, integrating visual and tactile modalities to inform manipulation policies presents significant challenges, especially in non-contact scenarios where reliance on tactile perception can be inadequate. Visual affordance techniques currently offer effectiv
Fine-tuning large language models (LMs) for individual tasks yields strong performance but is expensive for deployment and storage. Recent works explore model merging to combine multiple task-specific models into a single multi-task model without additional training. However, existing merging method…
Recent advances in unsupervised learning have shown that unsupervised pre-training, followed by fine-tuning, can improve model generalization. However, a rigorous understanding of how the representation function learned on an unlabeled dataset affects the generalization of the fine-tuned model is la…
An increasing number of robotic manipulation tasks now use optical tactile sensors to provide tactile feedback, making tactile servo control a crucial aspect of robotic operations. This paper presents a rapid tactile transfer framework (RTTF) that achieves optical-tactile image sim2real transfer and…
Training a high-performance deep neural network requires large amounts of data and computational resources. Protecting the intellectual property (IP) and commercial ownership of a deep model is challenging yet increasingly crucial. A major stream of watermarking strategies implants verifiable back…
Federated learning (FL) emerges as a popular distributed learning schema that learns a model from a set of participating users without sharing raw data. One major challenge of FL comes with heterogeneous users, who may have distributionally different (or non-iid) data and varying computation resourc…
Continual Test-time Adaptation (CTA) is a promising art to secure accuracy gains in continually-changing environments. The state-of-the-art adaptations improve out-of-distribution model accuracy via computation-efficient online test-time gradient descents but meanwhile cost about times of memory ver…
Data-free knowledge distillation (KD) helps transfer knowledge from a pre-trained model (known as the teacher model) to a smaller model (known as the student model) without access to the original training data used for training the teacher model. However, the security of the synthetic or out-of-dist…
Deep neural networks have witnessed huge successes in many challenging prediction tasks and yet they often suffer from out-of-distribution (OoD) samples, misclassifying them with high confidence. Recent advances show promising OoD detection performance for centralized training, and however, OoD dete…
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) possess powerful prediction capability thanks to their over-parameterization design, although the large model complexity makes it suffer from noisy supervision. Recent approaches seek to eliminate impacts from noisy labels by excluding data points with large loss values a…
Deep Gradient Leakage (DGL) is a highly effective attack that recovers private training images from gradient vectors. This attack casts significant privacy challenges on distributed learning from clients with sensitive data, where clients are required to share gradients. Defending against such att…
Data augmentation has been a popular method for fine-tuning pre-trained language models to increase model robustness and performance. With augmentation data coming from modifying gold train data (in-sample augmentation) or being harvested from general domain unlabeled data (out-of-sample augmentatio…
Federated learning (FL) provides a distributed learning framework for multiple participants to collaborate learning without sharing raw data. In many practical FL scenarios, participants have heterogeneous resources due to disparities in hardware and inference dynamics that require quickly loading m…
As deep learning blooms with growing demand for computation and data resources, outsourcing model training to a powerful cloud server becomes an attractive alternative to training at a low-power and cost-effective end device. Traditional outsourcing requires uploading device data to the cloud server…
The rise of Federated Learning (FL) is bringing machine learning to edge computing by utilizing data scattered across edge devices. However, the heterogeneity of edge network topologies and the uncertainty of wireless transmission are two major obstructions of FL’s wide application in edge computing…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its superiority in solving sequential decision-making problems. However, heavy dependence on immediate reward feedback impedes the wide application of RL. On the other hand, imitation learning (IL) tackles RL without relying on environmental supervision b…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Previous works have shown it extremely challenging to unlearn the undesired backdoor behavior from the network, since the entire network can be affected by the backdoor samples. In this paper, we propose a brand-new backdoor defense str…
Density estimation is a widely used method to perform unsupervised anomaly detection. By learning the density function, data points with relatively low densities are classified as anomalies. Unfortunately, the presence of anomalies in training data may significantly impact the density estimation pro…
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to co…
Training deep neural network models in the presence of corrupted supervision is challenging as the corrupted data points may significantly impact generalization performance. To alleviate this problem, we present an efficient robust algorithm that achieves strong guarantees without any assumption on…
Protecting privacy in gradient-based learning has become increasingly critical as more sensitive information is being used. Many existing solutions seek to protect the sensitive gradients by constraining the overall privacy cost within a constant budget, where the protection is hand-designed and emp…
Unsupervised anomaly detection plays a crucial role in many critical applications. Driven by the success of deep learning, recent years have witnessed growing interests in applying deep neural networks (DNNs) to anomaly detection problems. A common approach is using autoencoders to learn a feature r…
Learning from Observations (LfO) is a practical reinforcement learning scenario from which many applications can benefit through the reuse of incomplete resources. Compared to conventional imitation learning (IL), LfO is more challenging because of the lack of expert action guidance. In both conven…
Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization. Towards the sample-efficient RL, we propose ranking policy gradi…
We propose a sparse and low-rank tensor regression model to relate a univariate outcome to a feature tensor, in which each unit-rank tensor from the CP decomposition of the coefficient tensor is assumed to be sparse. This structure is both parsimonious and highly interpretable, as it implies that th…
Affordable sensors lead to an increasing interest in acquiring and modeling data with multiple modalities. Learning from multiple modalities has shown to significantly improve performance in object recognition. However, in practice it is common that the sensing equipment experiences unforeseeable ma…