Boyu Chen

Xinjia Li, Boyu Chen, Wenlian Lu

The performance of federated learning in neural networks is generally influenced by the heterogeneity of the data distribution. For a well-performing global model, taking a weighted average of the local models, as done by most existing federated learning algorithms, may not guarantee consistency with local models in the space of neural network maps. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of federated learning equipped with the process of decentralized knowledge distillation (FedDKD) (i.e., without data on the server). The FedDKD introduces a module of decentralized knowledge distillation (DKD) to distill the knowledge of the local models to train the global model by approaching the neural network map average based on the metric of divergence defined in the loss function, other than only averaging parameters as done in literature. Numeric experiments on various heterogeneous datasets reveal that FedDKD outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with more efficient communication and training in a few DKD steps, especially on some extremely heterogeneous datasets.

Boyu Chen, Yu Qiao, Yali Wang

Tiny Actions Challenge focuses on understanding human activities in real-world surveillance. Basically, there are two main difficulties for activity recognition in this scenario. First, human activities are often recorded at a distance, and appear in a small resolution without much discriminative clue. Second, these activities are naturally distributed in a long-tailed way. It is hard to alleviate data bias for such heavy category imbalance. To tackle these problems, we propose a comprehensive recognition solution in this paper. First, we train video backbones with data balance, in order to alleviate overfitting in the challenge benchmark. Second, we design a dual-resolution distillation framework, which can effectively guide low-resolution action recognition by super-resolution knowledge. Finally, we apply model en-semble with post-processing, which can further boost per-formance on the long-tailed categories. Our solution ranks Top-1 on the leaderboard.

Xiang Chen, Hao Li, Jiangxin Dong et al.

This paper presents a review for the LoViF Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration. The challenge aimed to advance research on real-world all-in-one image restoration under diverse real-world degradation conditions, including blur, low-light, haze, rain, and snow. It provided a unified benchmark to evaluate the robustness and generalization ability of restoration models across multiple degradation categories within a common framework. The competition attracted 124 registered participants and received 9 valid final submissions with corresponding fact sheets, significantly contributing to the progress of real-world all-in-one image restoration. This report provides a detailed analysis of the submitted methods and corresponding results, emphasizing recent progress in unified real-world image restoration. The analysis highlights effective approaches and establishes a benchmark for future research in real-world low-level vision.

Dennis Wu, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Weijian Li et al.

We present STanHop-Net (Sparse Tandem Hopfield Network) for multivariate time series prediction with memory-enhanced capabilities. At the heart of our approach is STanHop, a novel Hopfield-based neural network block, which sparsely learns and stores both temporal and cross-series representations in a data-dependent fashion. In essence, STanHop sequentially learn temporal representation and cross-series representation using two tandem sparse Hopfield layers. In addition, StanHop incorporates two additional external memory modules: a Plug-and-Play module and a Tune-and-Play module for train-less and task-aware memory-enhancements, respectively. They allow StanHop-Net to swiftly respond to certain sudden events. Methodologically, we construct the StanHop-Net by stacking STanHop blocks in a hierarchical fashion, enabling multi-resolution feature extraction with resolution-specific sparsity. Theoretically, we introduce a sparse extension of the modern Hopfield model (Generalized Sparse Modern Hopfield Model) and show that it endows a tighter memory retrieval error compared to the dense counterpart without sacrificing memory capacity. Empirically, we validate the efficacy of our framework on both synthetic and real-world settings.

Yaoting Huang, Boyu Chen, Wenlian Lu et al.

Due to the complication of the presented problem, intelligent algorithms show great power to solve the parts logistics optimization problem related to the vehicle routing problem (VRP). However, most of the existing research to VRP are incomprehensive and failed to solve a real-work parts logistics problem. In this work, towards SAIC logistics problem, we propose a systematic solution to this 2-Dimensional Loading Capacitated Multi-Depot Heterogeneous VRP with Time Windows by integrating diverse types of intelligent algorithms, including, a heuristic algorithm to initialize feasible logistics planning schemes by imitating manual planning, the core Tabu Search algorithm for global optimization, accelerated by a novel bundle technique, heuristically algorithms for routing, packing and queuing associated, and a heuristic post-optimization process to promote the optimal solution. Based on these algorithms, the SAIC Motor has successfully established an intelligent management system to give a systematic solution for the parts logistics planning, superior than manual planning in its performance, customizability and expandability.

Boyu Chen, Wenlian Lu, Ernest Fokoue

Meta-learning is a promising method to achieve efficient training method towards deep neural net and has been attracting increases interests in recent years. But most of the current methods are still not capable to train complex neuron net model with long-time training process. In this paper, a novel second-order meta-optimizer, named Meta-learning with Hessian-Free(MLHF) approach, is proposed based on the Hessian-Free approach. Two recurrent neural networks are established to generate the damping and the precondition matrix of this Hessian-Free framework. A series of techniques to meta-train the MLHF towards stable and reinforce the meta-training of this optimizer, including the gradient calculation of $H$. Numerical experiments on deep convolution neural nets, including CUDA-convnet and ResNet18(v2), with datasets of CIFAR10 and ILSVRC2012, indicate that the MLHF shows good and continuous training performance during the whole long-time training process, i.e., both the rapid-decreasing early stage and the steadily-deceasing later stage, and so is a promising meta-learning framework towards elevating the training efficiency in real-world deep neural nets.