Shichao Xu

Shichao Xu, Lixu Wang, Yixuan Wang et al.

Data quantity and quality are crucial factors for data-driven learning methods. In some target problem domains, there are not many data samples available, which could significantly hinder the learning process. While data from similar domains may be leveraged to help through domain adaptation, obtaining high-quality labeled data for those source domains themselves could be difficult or costly. To address such challenges on data insufficiency for classification problem in a target domain, we propose a weak adaptation learning (WAL) approach that leverages unlabeled data from a similar source domain, a low-cost weak annotator that produces labels based on task-specific heuristics, labeling rules, or other methods (albeit with inaccuracy), and a small amount of labeled data in the target domain. Our approach first conducts a theoretical analysis on the error bound of the trained classifier with respect to the data quantity and the performance of the weak annotator, and then introduces a multi-stage weak adaptation learning method to learn an accurate classifier by lowering the error bound. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in learning an accurate classifier with limited labeled data in the target domain and unlabeled data in the source domain.

Lixu Wang, Shichao Xu, Xiao Wang et al.

Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach for training decentralized data located on local client devices while improving efficiency and privacy. However, the distribution and quantity of the training data on the clients' side may lead to significant challenges such as class imbalance and non-IID (non-independent and identically distributed) data, which could greatly impact the performance of the common model. While much effort has been devoted to helping FL models converge when encountering non-IID data, the imbalance issue has not been sufficiently addressed. In particular, as FL training is executed by exchanging gradients in an encrypted form, the training data is not completely observable to either clients or servers, and previous methods for class imbalance do not perform well for FL. Therefore, it is crucial to design new methods for detecting class imbalance in FL and mitigating its impact. In this work, we propose a monitoring scheme that can infer the composition of training data for each FL round, and design a new loss function -- \textbf{Ratio Loss} to mitigate the impact of the imbalance. Our experiments demonstrate the importance of acknowledging class imbalance and taking measures as early as possible in FL training, and the effectiveness of our method in mitigating the impact. Our method is shown to significantly outperform previous methods, while maintaining client privacy.

Lixu Wang, Shichao Xu, Xiao Wang et al.

Federated learning (FL) has recently emerged as a new form of collaborative machine learning, where a common model can be learned while keeping all the training data on local devices. Although it is designed for enhancing the data privacy, we demonstrated in this paper a new direction in inference attacks in the context of FL, where valuable information about training data can be obtained by adversaries with very limited power. In particular, we proposed three new types of attacks to exploit this vulnerability. The first type of attack, Class Sniffing, can detect whether a certain label appears in training. The other two types of attacks can determine the quantity of each label, i.e., Quantity Inference attack determines the composition proportion of the training label owned by the selected clients in a single round, while Whole Determination attack determines that of the whole training process. We evaluated our attacks on a variety of tasks and datasets with different settings, and the corresponding results showed that our attacks work well generally. Finally, we analyzed the impact of major hyper-parameters to our attacks and discussed possible defenses.

Shichao Xu, Shuyue Lan, Qi Zhu

Instance segmentation is a promising yet challenging topic in computer vision. Recent approaches such as Mask R-CNN typically divide this problem into two parts -- a detection component and a mask generation branch, and mostly focus on the improvement of the detection part. In this paper, we present an approach that extends Mask R-CNN with five novel optimization techniques for improving the mask generation branch and reducing the conflicts between the mask branch and the detection component in training. These five techniques are independent to each other and can be flexibly utilized in building various instance segmentation architectures for increasing the overall accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with tests on the COCO dataset.