Xin Zhang

Xin Zhang, Jia Liu, Zhengyuan Zhu et al.

Network consensus optimization has received increasing attention in recent years and has found important applications in many scientific and engineering fields. To solve network consensus optimization problems, one of the most well-known approaches is the distributed gradient descent method (DGD). However, in networks with slow communication rates, DGD's performance is unsatisfactory for solving high-dimensional network consensus problems due to the communication bottleneck. This motivates us to design a communication-efficient DGD-type algorithm based on compressed information exchanges. Our contributions in this paper are three-fold: i) We develop a communication-efficient algorithm called amplified-differential compression DGD (ADC-DGD) and show that it converges under {\em any} unbiased compression operator; ii) We rigorously prove the convergence performances of ADC-DGD and show that they match with those of DGD without compression; iii) We reveal an interesting phase transition phenomenon in the convergence speed of ADC-DGD. Collectively, our findings advance the state-of-the-art of network consensus optimization theory.

Weidong Liu, Xiaojun Mao, Xiaofei Zhang et al.

In recent years, privacy-preserving machine learning algorithms have attracted increasing attention because of their important applications in many scientific fields. However, in the literature, most privacy-preserving algorithms demand learning objectives to be strongly convex and Lipschitz smooth, which thus cannot cover a wide class of robust loss functions (e.g., quantile/least absolute loss). In this work, we aim to develop a fast privacy-preserving learning solution for a sparse robust regression problem. Our learning loss consists of a robust least absolute loss and an $\ell_1$ sparse penalty term. To fast solve the non-smooth loss under a given privacy budget, we develop a Fast Robust And Privacy-Preserving Estimation (FRAPPE) algorithm for least absolute deviation regression. Our algorithm achieves a fast estimation by reformulating the sparse LAD problem as a penalized least square estimation problem and adopts a three-stage noise injection to guarantee the $(ε,δ)$-differential privacy. We show that our algorithm can achieve better privacy and statistical accuracy trade-off compared with the state-of-the-art privacy-preserving regression algorithms. In the end, we conduct experiments to verify the efficiency of our proposed FRAPPE algorithm.

Hwanwoo Kim, Xin Zhang, Jiwei Zhao et al.

The presence of distribution shifts poses a significant challenge for deploying modern machine learning models in real-world applications. This work focuses on the target shift problem in a regression setting (Zhang et al., 2013; Nguyen et al., 2016). More specifically, the target variable y (also known as the response variable), which is continuous, has different marginal distributions in the training source and testing domain, while the conditional distribution of features x given y remains the same. While most literature focuses on classification tasks with finite target space, the regression problem has an infinite dimensional target space, which makes many of the existing methods inapplicable. In this work, we show that the continuous target shift problem can be addressed by estimating the importance weight function from an ill-posed integral equation. We propose a nonparametric regularized approach named ReTaSA to solve the ill-posed integral equation and provide theoretical justification for the estimated importance weight function. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated with extensive numerical studies on synthetic and real-world datasets.

Xin Zhang, Qiyu Wei, Yingjie Zhu et al.

Automated clinical risk prediction from electronic health records (EHRs) demands modeling both structured diagnostic codes and unstructured narrative notes. However, most prior approaches either handle these modalities separately or rely on simplistic fusion strategies that ignore the directional, hierarchical causal interactions by which narrative observations precipitate diagnoses and propagate risk across admissions. In this paper, we propose THCM-CAL, a Temporal-Hierarchical Causal Model with Conformal Calibration. Our framework constructs a multimodal causal graph where nodes represent clinical entities from two modalities: Textual propositions extracted from notes and ICD codes mapped to textual descriptions. Through hierarchical causal discovery, THCM-CAL infers three clinically grounded interactions: intra-slice same-modality sequencing, intra-slice cross-modality triggers, and inter-slice risk propagation. To enhance prediction reliability, we extend conformal prediction to multi-label ICD coding, calibrating per-code confidence intervals under complex co-occurrences. Experimental results on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV demonstrate the superiority of THCM-CAL.

Weidong Liu, Xiaojun Mao, Xin Zhang

Decentralized sparsity learning has attracted a significant amount of attention recently due to its rapidly growing applications. To obtain the robust and sparse estimators, a natural idea is to adopt the non-smooth median loss combined with a $\ell_1$ sparsity regularizer. However, most of the existing methods suffer from slow convergence performance caused by the {\em double} non-smooth objective. To accelerate the computation, in this paper, we proposed a decentralized surrogate median regression (deSMR) method for efficiently solving the decentralized sparsity learning problem. We show that our proposed algorithm enjoys a linear convergence rate with a simple implementation. We also investigate the statistical guarantee, and it shows that our proposed estimator achieves a near-oracle convergence rate without any restriction on the number of network nodes. Moreover, we establish the theoretical results for sparse support recovery. Thorough numerical experiments and real data study are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Xin Zhang, Jia Liu, Zhengyuan Zhu et al.

Decentralized nonconvex optimization has received increasing attention in recent years in machine learning due to its advantages in system robustness, data privacy, and implementation simplicity. However, three fundamental challenges in designing decentralized optimization algorithms are how to reduce their sample, communication, and memory complexities. In this paper, we propose a \underline{g}radient-\underline{t}racking-based \underline{sto}chastic \underline{r}ecursive \underline{m}omentum (GT-STORM) algorithm for efficiently solving nonconvex optimization problems. We show that to reach an $ε^2$-stationary solution, the total number of sample evaluations of our algorithm is $\tilde{O}(m^{1/2}ε^{-3})$ and the number of communication rounds is $\tilde{O}(m^{-1/2}ε^{-3})$, which improve the $O(ε^{-4})$ costs of sample evaluations and communications for the existing decentralized stochastic gradient algorithms. We conduct extensive experiments with a variety of learning models, including non-convex logistical regression and convolutional neural networks, to verify our theoretical findings. Collectively, our results contribute to the state of the art of theories and algorithms for decentralized network optimization.

Xin Zhang, Minghong Fang, Jia Liu et al.

With rise of machine learning (ML) and the proliferation of smart mobile devices, recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in performing ML in wireless edge networks. In this paper, we consider the problem of jointly improving data privacy and communication efficiency of distributed edge learning, both of which are critical performance metrics in wireless edge network computing. Toward this end, we propose a new decentralized stochastic gradient method with sparse differential Gaussian-masked stochastic gradients (SDM-DSGD) for non-convex distributed edge learning. Our main contributions are three-fold: i) We theoretically establish the privacy and communication efficiency performance guarantee of our SDM-DSGD method, which outperforms all existing works; ii) We show that SDM-DSGD improves the fundamental training-privacy trade-off by {\em two orders of magnitude} compared with the state-of-the-art. iii) We reveal theoretical insights and offer practical design guidelines for the interactions between privacy preservation and communication efficiency, two conflicting performance goals. We conduct extensive experiments with a variety of learning models on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets to verify our theoretical findings. Collectively, our results contribute to the theory and algorithm design for distributed edge learning.

Haibo Yang, Xin Zhang, Minghong Fang et al.

In this work, we consider the resilience of distributed algorithms based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in distributed learning with potentially Byzantine attackers, who could send arbitrary information to the parameter server to disrupt the training process. Toward this end, we propose a new Lipschitz-inspired coordinate-wise median approach (LICM-SGD) to mitigate Byzantine attacks. We show that our LICM-SGD algorithm can resist up to half of the workers being Byzantine attackers, while still converging almost surely to a stationary region in non-convex settings. Also, our LICM-SGD method does not require any information about the number of attackers and the Lipschitz constant, which makes it attractive for practical implementations. Moreover, our LICM-SGD method enjoys the optimal $O(md)$ computational time-complexity in the sense that the time-complexity is the same as that of the standard SGD under no attacks. We conduct extensive experiments to show that our LICM-SGD algorithm consistently outperforms existing methods in training multi-class logistic regression and convolutional neural networks with MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. In our experiments, LICM-SGD also achieves a much faster running time thanks to its low computational time-complexity.

Xin Zhang, Jia Liu, Zhengyuan Zhu

In this work, we consider to improve the model estimation efficiency by aggregating the neighbors' information as well as identify the subgroup membership for each node in the network. A tree-based $l_1$ penalty is proposed to save the computation and communication cost. We design a decentralized generalized alternating direction method of multiplier algorithm for solving the objective function in parallel. The theoretical properties are derived to guarantee both the model consistency and the algorithm convergence. Thorough numerical experiments are also conducted to back up our theory, which also show that our approach outperforms in the aspects of the estimation accuracy, computation speed and communication cost.

Xin Zhang, Zhengyuan Zhu

Detecting weak clustered signal in spatial data is important but challenging in applications such as medical image and epidemiology. A more efficient detection algorithm can provide more precise early warning, and effectively reduce the decision risk and cost. To date, many methods have been developed to detect signals with spatial structures. However, most of the existing methods are either too conservative for weak signals or computationally too intensive. In this paper, we consider a novel method named Spatial CUSUM (SCUSUM), which employs the idea of the CUSUM procedure and false discovery rate controlling. We develop theoretical properties of the method which indicates that asymptotically SCUSUM can reach high classification accuracy. In the simulation study, we demonstrate that SCUSUM is sensitive to weak spatial signals. This new method is applied to a real fMRI dataset as illustration, and more irregular weak spatial signals are detected in the images compared to some existing methods, including the conventional FDR, FDR$_L$ and scan statistics.