22 accepted papers
In real-world scenarios, data collection for reinforcement learning (RL) is often constrained by safety concerns and high costs, resulting in limited data availability. Diffusion models (DMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in capturing complex distributions, making data augmentat…
Quantum computing promises to revolutionize various fields, yet the execution of quantum programs necessitates an effective compilation process. This involves strategically mapping quantum circuits onto the physical qubits of a quantum processor. The qubits' arrangement, or topology, is pivotal to t…
Adaptive optimization is critical in federated learning, where enabling adaptivity on both the server and client sides has proven essential for achieving optimal performance. However, the scalability of such jointly adaptive systems is often hindered by resource limitations in communication and memo…
Distributed optimization has become the default training paradigm in modern machine learning due to the growing scale of models and datasets. To mitigate communication overhead, local updates are often applied before global aggregation, resulting in a nested optimization approach with inner and oute…
The generalization error (risk) of a supervised statistical learning algorithm quantifies its prediction ability on previously unseen data. Inspired by exponential tilting, Li et al. (2021) proposed the {\it tilted empirical risk} (TER) as a non-linear risk metric for machine learning applications…
Optimizing the performance of many objectives (instantiated by tasks or clients) jointly with a few Pareto stationary solutions (models) is critical in machine learning. However, previous multi-objective optimization methods often focus on a few objectives and cannot scale to many objectives that ou…
One of the major bottlenecks for deploying popular first-order differentially private (DP) machine learning algorithms (e.g., DP-SGD) lies in their high computation and memory cost, despite the existence of optimized implementations. Zeroth-order methods have promise in mitigating the overhead, as…
To build a responsible data economy and protect data ownerhip, it is crucial to enable learning models from separate, heterogeneous data sources without centralization. For example, federated learning (FL) aims to train models across massive remote devices or isolated organizations, while keeping us…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has been demonstrated to improve the generalization performance of overparameterized models by seeking flat minima on the loss landscape through optimizing model parameters that incur the largest loss within a neighborhood. Nevertheless, such min-max formulations a…
Encoder-decoder transformer models have achieved great success on various vision-language (VL) and language tasks, but they suffer from high inference latency. Typically, the decoder takes up most of the latency because of the auto-regressive decoding. To accelerate the inference, we propose an appr…
Privacy costs may negate the benefits of using adaptive optimizers in differentially private model training. Prior works typically address this issue by using auxiliary information (e.g., public data) to boost the effectiveness of adaptive optimization. In this work, we explore techniques to estimat…
In every communication round of federated learning, a random subset of clients communicate their model updates back to the server which then aggregates them all. The optimal size of this subset is not known and several studies have shown that typically random selection does not perform ve…
Domain adaptive text classification is a challenging problem for the large-scale pretrained language models because they often require expensive additional labeled data to adapt to new domains. Existing works usually fails to leverage the implicit relationships among words across domains. In this pa…
"Deep learning has recently achieved significant progress in trajectory forecasting. However, the scarcity of trajectory data inhibits the data-hungry deep-learning models from learning good representations. While pre-training methods for representation learning exist in computer vision and natural…
Adaptive optimization methods have become the default solvers for many machine learning tasks. Unfortunately, the benefits of adaptivity may degrade when training with differential privacy, as the noise added to ensure privacy reduces the effectiveness of the adaptive preconditioner. To this end, we…
Existing language models usually require large amount of labeled data and are severely challenged by domain shift. In this work we propose a novel model for cross-domain sentiment classification - CLIM - Contrastive Learning with mutual Information Maximization, to explore the potential of contrasti…
Fairness and robustness are two important concerns for federated learning systems. In this work, we identify that robustness to data and model poisoning attacks and fairness, measured as the uniformity of performance across devices, are competing constraints in statistically heterogeneous networks.…
Tuning hyperparameters is a crucial but arduous part of the machine learning pipeline. Hyperparameter optimization is even more challenging in federated learning, where models are learned over a distributed network of heterogeneous devices; here, the need to keep data on device and perform local tra…
In this work, we explore the unique challenges—and opportunities—of unsupervised federated learning (FL). We develop and analyze a one-shot federated clustering scheme, kfed, based on the widely-used Lloyd’s method for $k$-means clustering. In contrast to many supervised problems, we show that the i…
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is typically designed to perform well on the average loss, which can result in estimators that are sensitive to outliers, generalize poorly, or treat subgroups unfairly. While many methods aim to address these problems individually, in this work, we explore them thr…
3D perception on point-cloud is a challenging and crucial computer vision task. A point-cloud consists of a sparse, unstructured, and unordered set of points. To understand a point-cloud, previous point-based methods, such as PointNet++, extract visual features through the hierarchical aggregation o…
Federated learning involves training statistical models in massive, heterogeneous networks. Naively minimizing an aggregate loss function in such a network may disproportionately advantage or disadvantage some of the devices. In this work, we propose q-Fair Federated Learning (q-FFL), a novel optimi…