Feng Wu

Mingxuan Ye, Yufei Kuang, Jie Wang et al.

While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been demonstrated effective in solving complex control tasks, sample efficiency remains a key challenge due to the large amounts of data required for remarkable performance. Existing research explores the application of representation learning for data-efficient RL, e.g., learning predictive representations by predicting long-term future states. However, many existing methods do not fully exploit the structural information inherent in sequential state signals, which can potentially improve the quality of long-term decision-making but is difficult to discern in the time domain. To tackle this problem, we propose State Sequences Prediction via Fourier Transform (SPF), a novel method that exploits the frequency domain of state sequences to extract the underlying patterns in time series data for learning expressive representations efficiently. Specifically, we theoretically analyze the existence of structural information in state sequences, which is closely related to policy performance and signal regularity, and then propose to predict the Fourier transform of infinite-step future state sequences to extract such information. One of the appealing features of SPF is that it is simple to implement while not requiring storage of infinite-step future states as prediction targets. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both sample efficiency and performance.

Yufei Kuang, Xijun Li, Jie Wang et al.

Large-scale LP problems from industry usually contain much redundancy that severely hurts the efficiency and reliability of solving LPs, making presolve (i.e., the problem simplification module) one of the most critical components in modern LP solvers. However, how to design high-quality presolve routines -- that is, the program determining (P1) which presolvers to select, (P2) in what order to execute, and (P3) when to stop -- remains a highly challenging task due to the extensive requirements on expert knowledge and the large search space. Due to the sequential decision property of the task and the lack of expert demonstrations, we propose a simple and efficient reinforcement learning (RL) framework -- namely, reinforcement learning for presolve (RL4Presolve) -- to tackle (P1)-(P3) simultaneously. Specifically, we formulate the routine design task as a Markov decision process and propose an RL framework with adaptive action sequences to generate high-quality presolve routines efficiently. Note that adaptive action sequences help learn complex behaviors efficiently and adapt to various benchmarks. Experiments on two solvers (open-source and commercial) and eight benchmarks (real-world and synthetic) demonstrate that RL4Presolve significantly and consistently improves the efficiency of solving large-scale LPs, especially on benchmarks from industry. Furthermore, we optimize the hard-coded presolve routines in LP solvers by extracting rules from learned policies for simple and efficient deployment to Huawei's supply chain. The results show encouraging economic and academic potential for incorporating machine learning to modern solvers.

Yang Qu, Jinming Ma, Feng Wu

Active voltage control presents a promising avenue for relieving power congestion and enhancing voltage quality, taking advantage of the distributed controllable generators in the power network, such as roof-top photovoltaics. While Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has emerged as a compelling approach to address this challenge, existing MARL approaches tend to overlook the constrained optimization nature of this problem, failing in guaranteeing safety constraints. In this paper, we formalize the active voltage control problem as a constrained Markov game and propose a safety-constrained MARL algorithm. We expand the primal-dual optimization RL method to multi-agent settings, and augment it with a novel approach of double safety estimation to learn the policy and to update the Lagrange-multiplier. In addition, we proposed different cost functions and investigated their influences on the behavior of our constrained MARL method. We evaluate our approach in the power distribution network simulation environment with real-world scale scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with the state-of-the-art MARL methods. This paper is published at \url{https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/2024/}.

Feng Wu, Lei Cui, Shaowen Yao et al.

The prosperity of machine learning has also brought people's concerns about data privacy. Among them, inference attacks can implement privacy breaches in various MLaaS scenarios and model training/prediction phases. Specifically, inference attacks can perform privacy inference on undisclosed target training sets based on outputs of the target model, including but not limited to statistics, membership, semantics, data representation, etc. For instance, infer whether the target data has the characteristics of AIDS. In addition, the rapid development of the machine learning community in recent years, especially the surge of model types and application scenarios, has further stimulated the inference attacks' research. Thus, studying inference attacks and analyzing them in depth is urgent and significant. However, there is still a gap in the systematic discussion of inference attacks from taxonomy, global perspective, attack, and defense perspectives. This survey provides an in-depth and comprehensive inference of attacks and corresponding countermeasures in ML-as-a-service based on taxonomy and the latest researches. Without compromising researchers' intuition, we first propose the 3MP taxonomy based on the community research status, trying to normalize the confusing naming system of inference attacks. Also, we analyze the pros and cons of each type of inference attack, their workflow, countermeasure, and how they interact with other attacks. In the end, we point out several promising directions for researchers from a more comprehensive and novel perspective.

Hanting Li, Mingzhe Sui, Feng Zhao et al.

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild is an extremely challenging task in computer vision due to variant backgrounds, low-quality facial images, and the subjectiveness of annotators. These uncertainties make it difficult for neural networks to learn robust features on limited-scale datasets. Moreover, the networks can be easily distributed by the above factors and perform incorrect decisions. Recently, vision transformer (ViT) and data-efficient image transformers (DeiT) present their significant performance in traditional classification tasks. The self-attention mechanism makes transformers obtain a global receptive field in the first layer which dramatically enhances the feature extraction capability. In this work, we first propose a novel pure transformer-based mask vision transformer (MVT) for FER in the wild, which consists of two modules: a transformer-based mask generation network (MGN) to generate a mask that can filter out complex backgrounds and occlusion of face images, and a dynamic relabeling module to rectify incorrect labels in FER datasets in the wild. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our MVT outperforms state-of-the-art methods on RAF-DB with 88.62%, FERPlus with 89.22%, and AffectNet-7 with 64.57%, respectively, and achieves a comparable result on AffectNet-8 with 61.40%.