Xiang Chen

Jianyi Zhang, Ang Li, Minxue Tang et al.

Due to limited communication capacities of edge devices, most existing federated learning (FL) methods randomly select only a subset of devices to participate in training for each communication round. Compared with engaging all the available clients, the random-selection mechanism can lead to significant performance degradation on non-IID (independent and identically distributed) data. In this paper, we show our key observation that the essential reason resulting in such performance degradation is the class-imbalance of the grouped data from randomly selected clients. Based on our key observation, we design an efficient heterogeneity-aware client sampling mechanism, i.e., Federated Class-balanced Sampling (Fed-CBS), which can effectively reduce class-imbalance of the group dataset from the intentionally selected clients. In particular, we propose a measure of class-imbalance and then employ homomorphic encryption to derive this measure in a privacy-preserving way. Based on this measure, we also design a computation-efficient client sampling strategy, such that the actively selected clients will generate a more class-balanced grouped dataset with theoretical guarantees. Extensive experimental results demonstrate Fed-CBS outperforms the status quo approaches. Furthermore, it achieves comparable or even better performance than the ideal setting where all the available clients participate in the FL training.

Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Ziwen Xu et al.

Understanding knowledge mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing towards trustworthy AGI. This paper reviews knowledge mechanism analysis from a novel taxonomy including knowledge utilization and evolution. Knowledge utilization delves into the mechanism of memorization, comprehension and application, and creation. Knowledge evolution focuses on the dynamic progression of knowledge within individual and group LLMs. Moreover, we discuss what knowledge LLMs have learned, the reasons for the fragility of parametric knowledge, and the potential dark knowledge (hypothesis) that will be challenging to address. We hope this work can help understand knowledge in LLMs and provide insights for future research.

Shuofei Qiao, Runnan Fang, Ningyu Zhang et al.

Recent endeavors towards directly using large language models (LLMs) as agent models to execute interactive planning tasks have shown commendable results. Despite their achievements, however, they still struggle with brainless trial-and-error in global planning and generating hallucinatory actions in local planning due to their poor understanding of the ``real'' physical world. Imitating humans' mental world knowledge model which provides global prior knowledge before the task and maintains local dynamic knowledge during the task, in this paper, we introduce parametric World Knowledge Model (WKM) to facilitate agent planning. Concretely, we steer the agent model to self-synthesize knowledge from both expert and sampled trajectories. Then we develop WKM, providing prior task knowledge to guide the global planning and dynamic state knowledge to assist the local planning. Experimental results on three complex real-world simulated datasets with three state-of-the-art open-source LLMs, Mistral-7B, Gemma-7B, and Llama-3-8B, demonstrate that our method can achieve superior performance compared to various strong baselines. Besides, we analyze to illustrate that our WKM can effectively alleviate the blind trial-and-error and hallucinatory action issues, providing strong support for the agent's understanding of the world. Other interesting findings include: 1) our instance-level task knowledge can generalize better to unseen tasks, 2) weak WKM can guide strong agent model planning, and 3) unified WKM training has promising potential for further development. The code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/WKM.

Luoqiu Li, Xiang Chen, Zhen Bi et al.

Recent neural-based relation extraction approaches, though achieving promising improvement on benchmark datasets, have reported their vulnerability towards adversarial attacks. Thus far, efforts mostly focused on generating adversarial samples or defending adversarial attacks, but little is known about the difference between normal and adversarial samples. In this work, we take the first step to leverage the salience-based method to analyze those adversarial samples. We observe that salience tokens have a direct correlation with adversarial perturbations. We further find the adversarial perturbations are either those tokens not existing in the training set or superficial cues associated with relation labels. To some extent, our approach unveils the characters against adversarial samples. We release an open-source testbed, "DiagnoseAdv" in https://github.com/zjunlp/DiagnoseAdv.

Zhuo Chen, Yichi Zhang, Yin Fang et al.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) play a pivotal role in advancing various AI applications, with the semantic web community's exploration into multi-modal dimensions unlocking new avenues for innovation. In this survey, we carefully review over 300 articles, focusing on KG-aware research in two principal aspects: KG-driven Multi-Modal (KG4MM) learning, where KGs support multi-modal tasks, and Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph (MM4KG), which extends KG studies into the MMKG realm. We begin by defining KGs and MMKGs, then explore their construction progress. Our review includes two primary task categories: KG-aware multi-modal learning tasks, such as Image Classification and Visual Question Answering, and intrinsic MMKG tasks like Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Completion and Entity Alignment, highlighting specific research trajectories. For most of these tasks, we provide definitions, evaluation benchmarks, and additionally outline essential insights for conducting relevant research. Finally, we discuss current challenges and identify emerging trends, such as progress in Large Language Modeling and Multi-modal Pre-training strategies. This survey aims to serve as a comprehensive reference for researchers already involved in or considering delving into KG and multi-modal learning research, offering insights into the evolving landscape of MMKG research and supporting future work.

Chien Van Nguyen, Xuan Shen, Ryan Aponte et al.

Small Language Models (SLMs) have become increasingly important due to their efficiency and performance to perform various language tasks with minimal computational resources, making them ideal for various settings including on-device, mobile, edge devices, among many others. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on SLMs, focusing on their architectures, training techniques, and model compression techniques. We propose a novel taxonomy for categorizing the methods used to optimize SLMs, including model compression, pruning, and quantization techniques. We summarize the benchmark datasets that are useful for benchmarking SLMs along with the evaluation metrics commonly used. Additionally, we highlight key open challenges that remain to be addressed. Our survey aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners interested in developing and deploying small yet efficient language models.

Fuxun Yu, Weishan Zhang, Zhuwei Qin et al.

Federated learning learns from scattered data by fusing collaborative models from local nodes. However, the conventional coordinate-based model averaging by FedAvg ignored the random information encoded per parameter and may suffer from structural feature misalignment. In this work, we propose Fed2, a feature-aligned federated learning framework to resolve this issue by establishing a firm structure-feature alignment across the collaborative models. Fed2 is composed of two major designs: First, we design a feature-oriented model structure adaptation method to ensure explicit feature allocation in different neural network structures. Applying the structure adaptation to collaborative models, matchable structures with similar feature information can be initialized at the very early training stage. During the federated learning process, we then propose a feature paired averaging scheme to guarantee aligned feature distribution and maintain no feature fusion conflicts under either IID or non-IID scenarios. Eventually, Fed2 could effectively enhance the federated learning convergence performance under extensive homo- and heterogeneous settings, providing excellent convergence speed, accuracy, and computation/communication efficiency.

Chengxi Li, Feiyu Gao, Jiajun Bu et al.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is an emerging fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to extract aspects, classify corresponding sentiment polarities and find opinions as the causes of sentiment. The latest research tends to solve the ABSA task in a unified way with end-to-end frameworks. Yet, these frameworks get fine-tuned from downstream tasks without any task-adaptive modification. Specifically, they do not use task-related knowledge well or explicitly model relations between aspect and opinion terms, hindering them from better performance. In this paper, we propose SentiPrompt to use sentiment knowledge enhanced prompts to tune the language model in the unified framework. We inject sentiment knowledge regarding aspects, opinions, and polarities into prompt and explicitly model term relations via constructing consistency and polarity judgment templates from the ground truth triplets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can outperform strong baselines on Triplet Extraction, Pair Extraction, and Aspect Term Extraction with Sentiment Classification by a notable margin.

Cong Shen, Jie Xu, Sihui Zheng et al.

We advocate a new resource allocation framework, which we term resource rationing, for wireless federated learning (FL). Unlike existing resource allocation methods for FL, resource rationing focuses on balancing resources across learning rounds so that their collective impact on the federated learning performance is explicitly captured. This new framework can be integrated seamlessly with existing resource allocation schemes to optimize the convergence of FL. In particular, a novel "later-is-better" principle is at the front and center of resource rationing, which is validated empirically in several instances of wireless FL. We also point out technical challenges and research opportunities that are worth pursuing. Resource rationing highlights the benefits of treating the emerging FL as a new class of service that has its own characteristics, and designing communication algorithms for this particular service.

Sihui Zheng, Cong Shen, Xiang Chen

Communication has been known to be one of the primary bottlenecks of federated learning (FL), and yet existing studies have not addressed the efficient communication design, particularly in wireless FL where both uplink and downlink communications have to be considered. In this paper, we focus on the design and analysis of physical layer quantization and transmission methods for wireless FL. We answer the question of what and how to communicate between clients and the parameter server and evaluate the impact of the various quantization and transmission options of the updated model on the learning performance. We provide new convergence analysis of the well-known FedAvg under non-i.i.d. dataset distributions, partial clients participation, and finite-precision quantization in uplink and downlink communications. These analyses reveal that, in order to achieve an O(1/T) convergence rate with quantization, transmitting the weight requires increasing the quantization level at a logarithmic rate, while transmitting the weight differential can keep a constant quantization level. Comprehensive numerical evaluation on various real-world datasets reveals that the benefit of a FL-tailored uplink and downlink communication design is enormous - a carefully designed quantization and transmission achieves more than 98% of the floating-point baseline accuracy with fewer than 10% of the baseline bandwidth, for majority of the experiments on both i.i.d. and non-i.i.d. datasets. In particular, 1-bit quantization (3.1% of the floating-point baseline bandwidth) achieves 99.8% of the floating-point baseline accuracy at almost the same convergence rate on MNIST, representing the best known bandwidth-accuracy tradeoff to the best of the authors' knowledge.

Fuxun Yu, Weishan Zhang, Zhuwei Qin et al.

Federated learning learns from scattered data by fusing collaborative models from local nodes. However, due to chaotic information distribution, the model fusion may suffer from structural misalignment with regard to unmatched parameters. In this work, we propose a novel federated learning framework to resolve this issue by establishing a firm structure-information alignment across collaborative models. Specifically, we design a feature-oriented regulation method ({$Ψ$-Net}) to ensure explicit feature information allocation in different neural network structures. Applying this regulating method to collaborative models, matchable structures with similar feature information can be initialized at the very early training stage. During the federated learning process under either IID or non-IID scenarios, dedicated collaboration schemes further guarantee ordered information distribution with definite structure matching, so as the comprehensive model alignment. Eventually, this framework effectively enhances the federated learning applicability to extensive heterogeneous settings, while providing excellent convergence speed, accuracy, and computation/communication efficiency.

Fuxun Yu, Qide Dong, Xiang Chen

With the excellent accuracy and feasibility, the Neural Networks have been widely applied into the novel intelligent applications and systems. However, with the appearance of the Adversarial Attack, the NN based system performance becomes extremely vulnerable:the image classification results can be arbitrarily misled by the adversarial examples, which are crafted images with human unperceivable pixel-level perturbation. As this raised a significant system security issue, we implemented a series of investigations on the adversarial attack in this work: We first identify an image's pixel vulnerability to the adversarial attack based on the adversarial saliency analysis. By comparing the analyzed saliency map and the adversarial perturbation distribution, we proposed a new evaluation scheme to comprehensively assess the adversarial attack precision and efficiency. Then, with a novel adversarial saliency prediction method, a fast adversarial example generation framework, namely "ASP", is proposed with significant attack efficiency improvement and dramatic computation cost reduction. Compared to the previous methods, experiments show that ASP has at most 12 times speed-up for adversarial example generation, 2 times lower perturbation rate, and high attack success rate of 87% on both MNIST and Cifar10. ASP can be also well utilized to support the data-hungry NN adversarial training. By reducing the attack success rate as much as 90%, ASP can quickly and effectively enhance the defense capability of NN based system to the adversarial attacks.

Liang Xiao, Xiaoyue Wan, Canhuang Dai et al.

Mobile edge computing usually uses cache to support multimedia contents in 5G mobile Internet to reduce the computing overhead and latency. Mobile edge caching (MEC) systems are vulnerable to various attacks such as denial of service attacks and rogue edge attacks. This article investigates the attack models in MEC systems, focusing on both the mobile offloading and the caching procedures. In this paper, we propose security solutions that apply reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to provide secure offloading to the edge nodes against jamming attacks. We also present light-weight authentication and secure collaborative caching schemes to protect data privacy. We evaluate the performance of the RL-based security solution for mobile edge caching and discuss the challenges that need to be addressed in the future.

Xiang Chen, Bowei Chen, Mohan Kankanhalli

Displaying banner advertisements (in short, ads) on webpages has usually been discussed as an Internet economics topic where a publisher uses auction models to sell an online user's page view to advertisers and the one with the highest bid can have her ad displayed to the user. This is also called \emph{real-time bidding} (RTB) and the ad displaying process ensures that the publisher's benefit is maximized or there is an equilibrium in ad auctions. However, the benefits of the other two stakeholders -- the advertiser and the user -- have been rarely discussed. In this paper, we propose a two-stage computational framework that selects a banner ad based on the optimized trade-offs among all stakeholders. The first stage is still auction based and the second stage re-ranks ads by considering the benefits of all stakeholders. Our metric variables are: the publisher's revenue, the advertiser's utility, the ad memorability, the ad click-through rate (CTR), the contextual relevance, and the visual saliency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that optimizes trade-offs among all stakeholders in RTB by incorporating multimedia metrics. An algorithm is also proposed to determine the optimal weights of the metric variables. We use both ad auction datasets and multimedia datasets to validate the proposed framework. Our experimental results show that the publisher can significantly improve the other stakeholders' benefits by slightly reducing her revenue in the short-term. In the long run, advertisers and users will be more engaged, the increased demand of advertising and the increased supply of page views can then boost the publisher's revenue.