Xiangyang Xue

Shangchao Su, Bin Li, Xiangyang Xue

With the increasing availability of Foundation Models, federated tuning has garnered attention in the field of federated learning, utilizing data and computation resources from multiple clients to collaboratively fine-tune foundation models. However, in real-world federated scenarios, there often exist a multitude of heterogeneous clients with varying computation and communication resources, rendering them incapable of supporting the entire model fine-tuning process. In response to this challenge, we propose a novel federated tuning algorithm, FedRA. The implementation of FedRA is straightforward and can be seamlessly integrated into any transformer-based model without the need for further modification to the original model. Specifically, in each communication round, FedRA randomly generates an allocation matrix. For resource-constrained clients, it reorganizes a small number of layers from the original model based on the allocation matrix and fine-tunes using adapters. Subsequently, the server aggregates the updated adapter parameters from the clients according to the current allocation matrix into the corresponding layers of the original model. It is worth noting that FedRA also supports scenarios where none of the clients can support the entire global model, which is an impressive advantage. We conduct experiments on two large-scale image datasets, DomainNet and NICO++, under various non-iid settings. The results demonstrate that FedRA outperforms the compared methods significantly. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/leondada/FedRA}.

Fan Shi, Bin Li, Xiangyang Xue

Abstract visual reasoning (AVR) enables humans to quickly discover and generalize abstract rules to new scenarios. Designing intelligent systems with human-like AVR abilities has been a long-standing topic in the artificial intelligence community. Deep AVR solvers have recently achieved remarkable success in various AVR tasks. However, they usually use task-specific designs or parameters in different tasks. In such a paradigm, solving new tasks often means retraining the model, and sometimes retuning the model architectures, which increases the cost of solving AVR problems. In contrast to task-specific approaches, this paper proposes a novel Unified Conditional Generative Solver (UCGS), aiming to address multiple AVR tasks in a unified framework. First, we prove that some well-known AVR tasks can be reformulated as the problem of estimating the predictability of target images in problem panels. Then, we illustrate that, under the proposed framework, training one conditional generative model can solve various AVR tasks. The experiments show that with a single round of multi-task training, UCGS demonstrates abstract reasoning ability across various AVR tasks. Especially, UCGS exhibits the ability of zero-shot reasoning, enabling it to perform abstract reasoning on problems from unseen AVR tasks in the testing phase.

Fan Shi, Bin Li, Xiangyang Xue

Endowing machines with abstract reasoning ability has been a long-term research topic in artificial intelligence. Raven's Progressive Matrix (RPM) is widely used to probe abstract visual reasoning in machine intelligence, where models will analyze the underlying rules and select one image from candidates to complete the image matrix. Participators of RPM tests can show powerful reasoning ability by inferring and combining attribute-changing rules and imagining the missing images at arbitrary positions of a matrix. However, existing solvers can hardly manifest such an ability in realistic RPM tests. In this paper, we propose a deep latent variable model for answer generation problems through Rule AbstractIon and SElection (RAISE). RAISE can encode image attributes into latent concepts and abstract atomic rules that act on the latent concepts. When generating answers, RAISE selects one atomic rule out of the global knowledge set for each latent concept to constitute the underlying rule of an RPM. In the experiments of bottom-right and arbitrary-position answer generation, RAISE outperforms the compared solvers in most configurations of realistic RPM datasets. In the odd-one-out task and two held-out configurations, RAISE can leverage acquired latent concepts and atomic rules to find the rule-breaking image in a matrix and handle problems with unseen combinations of rules and attributes.