Qian Xu

Youlong Ding, Xueyang Wu, Zhitao Li et al.

Recently, the artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) has been gaining increasing attention, with an intriguing vision of providing highly intelligent services through the network connection of things, leading to an advanced AI-driven ecology. However, recent regulatory restrictions on data privacy preclude uploading sensitive local data to data centers and utilizing them in a centralized approach. Directly applying federated learning algorithms in this scenario could hardly meet the industrial requirements of both efficiency and accuracy. Therefore, we propose an efficient industrial federated learning framework for AIoT in terms of a face recognition application. Specifically, we propose to utilize the concept of transfer learning to speed up federated training on devices and further present a novel design of a private projector that helps protect shared gradients without incurring additional memory consumption or computational cost. Empirical studies on a private Asian face dataset show that our approach can achieve high recognition accuracy in only 20 communication rounds, demonstrating its effectiveness in prediction and its efficiency in training.

Xueyang Wu, Shengqi Tan, Qian Xu et al.

Federated learning, as a privacy-preserving collaborative machine learning paradigm, has been gaining more and more attention in the industry. With the huge rise in demand, there have been many federated learning platforms that allow federated participants to set up and build a federated model from scratch. However, exiting platforms are highly intrusive, complicated, and hard to integrate with built machine learning models. For many real-world businesses that already have mature serving models, existing federated learning platforms have high entry barriers and development costs. This paper presents a simple yet practical federated learning plug-in inspired by ensemble learning, dubbed WrapperFL, allowing participants to build/join a federated system with existing models at minimal costs. The WrapperFL works in a plug-and-play way by simply attaching to the input and output interfaces of an existing model, without the need of re-development, significantly reducing the overhead of manpower and resources. We verify our proposed method on diverse tasks under heterogeneous data distributions and heterogeneous models. The experimental results demonstrate that WrapperFL can be successfully applied to a wide range of applications under practical settings and improves the local model with federated learning at a low cost.

Liu Yang, Di Chai, Junxue Zhang et al.

Vertical federated learning (VFL) is a promising category of federated learning for the scenario where data is vertically partitioned and distributed among parties. VFL enriches the description of samples using features from different parties to improve model capacity. Compared with horizontal federated learning, in most cases, VFL is applied in the commercial cooperation scenario of companies. Therefore, VFL contains tremendous business values. In the past few years, VFL has attracted more and more attention in both academia and industry. In this paper, we systematically investigate the current work of VFL from a layered perspective. From the hardware layer to the vertical federated system layer, researchers contribute to various aspects of VFL. Moreover, the application of VFL has covered a wide range of areas, e.g., finance, healthcare, etc. At each layer, we categorize the existing work and explore the challenges for the convenience of further research and development of VFL. Especially, we design a novel MOSP tree taxonomy to analyze the core component of VFL, i.e., secure vertical federated machine learning algorithm. Our taxonomy considers four dimensions, i.e., machine learning model (M), protection object (O), security model (S), and privacy-preserving protocol (P), and provides a comprehensive investigation.

Minglei Yuan, Qian Xu, Chunhao Cai et al.

The transductive inference is an effective technique in the few-shot learning task, where query sets update prototypes to improve themselves. However, these methods optimize the model by considering only the classification scores of the query instances as confidence while ignoring the uncertainty of these classification scores. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Uncertainty-Based Network, which models the uncertainty of classification results with the help of mutual information. Specifically, we first data augment and classify the query instance and calculate the mutual information of these classification scores. Then, mutual information is used as uncertainty to assign weights to classification scores, and the iterative update strategy based on classification scores and uncertainties assigns the optimal weights to query instances in prototype optimization. Extensive results on four benchmarks show that Uncertainty-Based Network achieves comparable performance in classification accuracy compared to state-of-the-art method.

Wenzheng Feng, Jie Zhang, Yuxiao Dong et al.

We study the problem of semi-supervised learning on graphs, for which graph neural networks (GNNs) have been extensively explored. However, most existing GNNs inherently suffer from the limitations of over-smoothing, non-robustness, and weak-generalization when labeled nodes are scarce. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework -- GRAPH RANDOM NEURAL NETWORKS (GRAND) -- to address these issues. In GRAND, we first design a random propagation strategy to perform graph data augmentation. Then we leverage consistency regularization to optimize the prediction consistency of unlabeled nodes across different data augmentations. Extensive experiments on graph benchmark datasets suggest that GRAND significantly outperforms state-of-the-art GNN baselines on semi-supervised node classification. Finally, we show that GRAND mitigates the issues of over-smoothing and non-robustness, exhibiting better generalization behavior than existing GNNs. The source code of GRAND is publicly available at https://github.com/Grand20/grand.

Jindong Hong, Wencheng Zhang, Shiqin Qiao et al.

Shoulder disorders, such as frozen shoulder (a.k.a., adhesive capsulitis), are common conditions affecting the health of people worldwide, and have a high incidence rate among the elderly and workers engaged in repetitive shoulder tasks. In regions with scarce medical resources, achieving early and accurate diagnosis poses significant challenges, and there is an urgent need for low-cost and easily scalable auxiliary diagnostic solutions. This research introduces videos captured by consumer-grade devices as the basis for diagnosis, reducing the cost for users. We focus on the innovative application of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in the preliminary diagnosis of shoulder disorders and propose a Hybrid Motion Video Diagnosis framework (HMVDx). This framework divides the two tasks of action understanding and disease diagnosis, which are respectively completed by two MLLMs. In addition to traditional evaluation indicators, this work proposes a novel metric called Usability Index by the logical process of medical decision-making (action recognition, movement diagnosis, and final diagnosis). This index evaluates the effectiveness of MLLMs in the medical field from the perspective of the entire medical diagnostic pathway, revealing the potential value of low-cost MLLMs in medical applications for medical practitioners. In experimental comparisons, the accuracy of HMVDx in diagnosing shoulder joint injuries has increased by 79.6\% compared with direct video diagnosis, a significant technical contribution to future research on the application of MLLMs for video understanding in the medical field.

Minglei Yuan, Wenhai Wang, Tao Wang et al.

Few-shot learning aims to recognize new categories using very few labeled samples. Although few-shot learning has witnessed promising development in recent years, most existing methods adopt an average operation to calculate prototypes, thus limited by the outlier samples. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective framework for few-shot classification, which can learn to generate preferable prototypes from few support data, with the help of an episodic prototype generator module. The generated prototype is meant to be close to a certain \textit{\targetproto{}} and is less influenced by outlier samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this module, and our approach gets a significant raise over baseline models, and get a competitive result compared to previous methods on \textit{mini}ImageNet, \textit{tiered}ImageNet, and cross-domain (\textit{mini}ImageNet $\rightarrow$ CUB-200-2011) datasets.

Yanyan Liang, Yanfeng Zhang, Dechao Gao et al.

How to utilize deep learning methods for graph classification tasks has attracted considerable research attention in the past few years. Regarding graph classification tasks, the graphs to be classified may have various graph sizes (i.e., different number of nodes and edges) and have various graph properties (e.g., average node degree, diameter, and clustering coefficient). The diverse property of graphs has imposed significant challenges on existing graph learning techniques since diverse graphs have different best-fit hyperparameters. It is difficult to learn graph features from a set of diverse graphs by a unified graph neural network. This motivates us to use a multiplex structure in a diverse way and utilize a priori properties of graphs to guide the learning. In this paper, we propose MxPool, which concurrently uses multiple graph convolution/pooling networks to build a hierarchical learning structure for graph representation learning tasks. Our experiments on numerous graph classification benchmarks show that our MxPool has superiority over other state-of-the-art graph representation learning methods.