Jialin Li

Shuaichen Chang, David Palzer, Jialin Li et al.

Choropleth maps are a common visual representation for region-specific tabular data and are used in a number of different venues (newspapers, articles, etc). These maps are human-readable but are often challenging to deal with when trying to extract data for screen readers, analyses, or other related tasks. Recent research into Visual-Question Answering (VQA) has studied question answering on human-generated charts (ChartQA), such as bar, line, and pie charts. However, little work has paid attention to understanding maps; general VQA models, and ChartQA models, suffer when asked to perform this task. To facilitate and encourage research in this area, we present MapQA, a large-scale dataset of ~800K question-answer pairs over ~60K map images. Our task tests various levels of map understanding, from surface questions about map styles to complex questions that require reasoning on the underlying data. We present the unique challenges of MapQA that frustrate most strong baseline algorithms designed for ChartQA and general VQA tasks. We also present a novel algorithm, Visual Multi-Output Data Extraction based QA (V-MODEQA) for MapQA. V-MODEQA extracts the underlying structured data from a map image with a multi-output model and then performs reasoning on the extracted data. Our experimental results show that V-MODEQA has better overall performance and robustness on MapQA than the state-of-the-art ChartQA and VQA algorithms by capturing the unique properties in map question answering.

Weifu Fu, Qiang Nie, Jialin Li et al.

Despite recent advances in semantic segmentation, an inevitable challenge is the performance degradation caused by the domain shift in real applications. Current dominant approach to solve this problem is unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). However, the absence of labeled target data in UDA is overly restrictive and limits performance. To overcome this limitation, a more practical scenario called semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) has been proposed. Existing SSDA methods are derived from the UDA paradigm and primarily focus on leveraging the unlabeled target data and source data. In this paper, we highlight the significance of exploiting the intra-domain information between the labeled target data and unlabeled target data. Instead of solely using the scarce labeled target data for supervision, we propose a novel SSDA framework that incorporates both Inter and Intra Domain Mixing (IIDM), where inter-domain mixing mitigates the source-target domain gap and intra-domain mixing enriches the available target domain information, and the network can capture more domain-invariant features. We also explore different domain mixing strategies to better exploit the target domain information. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the GTA5 to Cityscapes and SYNTHIA to Cityscapes benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of IIDM, surpassing previous methods by a large margin.

Ziji Shi, Le Jiang, Ang Wang et al.

Tensor parallelism is an essential technique for distributed training of large neural networks. However, automatically determining an optimal tensor parallel strategy is challenging due to the gigantic search space, which grows exponentially with model size and tensor dimension. This prohibits the adoption of auto-parallel systems on larger models. We observe that neural networks usually contain repeated substructures, and build an automatic parallelism framework named TAPAS that eliminates redundant search efforts. TAPAS employs a divide-and-conquer approach that efficiently folds the search space by identifying those unique substructures. As a result, it runs at sub-linear complexity concerning the model size, making it a scalable solution for training large-scale networks. Our evaluations demonstrate that TAPAS outperforms the state-of-the-art automatic parallelism frameworks by up to $160\times$ in search speed on a wide range of models, and the performance of derived strategies is competitive or even better compared with the expert-engineered Megatron-LM library.

Jialin Li, Marta Zagorowska, Giulia De Pasquale et al.

Ensuring safety is a key aspect in sequential decision making problems, such as robotics or process control. The complexity of the underlying systems often makes finding the optimal decision challenging, especially when the safety-critical system is time-varying. Overcoming the problem of optimizing an unknown time-varying reward subject to unknown time-varying safety constraints, we propose TVSafeOpt, a new algorithm built on Bayesian optimization with a spatio-temporal kernel. The algorithm is capable of safely tracking a time-varying safe region without the need for explicit change detection. Optimality guarantees are also provided for the algorithm when the optimization problem becomes stationary. We show that TVSafeOpt compares favorably against SafeOpt on synthetic data, both regarding safety and optimality. Evaluation on a realistic case study with gas compressors confirms that TVSafeOpt ensures safety when solving time-varying optimization problems with unknown reward and safety functions.

Xiang Liu, Liangxi Liu, Feiyang Ye et al.

Efficiently aggregating trained neural networks from local clients into a global model on a server is a widely researched topic in federated learning. Recently, motivated by diminishing privacy concerns, mitigating potential attacks, and reducing communication overhead, one-shot federated learning (i.e., limiting client-server communication into a single round) has gained popularity among researchers. However, the one-shot aggregation performances are sensitively affected by the non-identical training data distribution, which exhibits high statistical heterogeneity in some real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a novel one-shot aggregation method with layer-wise posterior aggregation, named FedLPA. FedLPA aggregates local models to obtain a more accurate global model without requiring extra auxiliary datasets or exposing any private label information, e.g., label distributions. To effectively capture the statistics maintained in the biased local datasets in the practical non-IID scenario, we efficiently infer the posteriors of each layer in each local model using layer-wise Laplace approximation and aggregate them to train the global parameters. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FedLPA significantly improves learning performance over state-of-the-art methods across several metrics.

Xiang Liu, Zhenheng Tang, Xia Li et al.

One-shot Federated Learning (OFL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that constrains client-server communication to a single round, addressing privacy and communication overhead issues associated with multiple rounds of data exchange in traditional Federated Learning (FL). OFL demonstrates the practical potential for integration with future approaches that require collaborative training models, such as large language models (LLMs). However, current OFL methods face two major challenges: data heterogeneity and model heterogeneity, which result in subpar performance compared to conventional FL methods. Worse still, despite numerous studies addressing these limitations, a comprehensive summary is still lacking. To address these gaps, this paper presents a systematic analysis of the challenges faced by OFL and thoroughly reviews the current methods. We also offer an innovative categorization method and analyze the trade-offs of various techniques. Additionally, we discuss the most promising future directions and the technologies that should be integrated into the OFL field. This work aims to provide guidance and insights for future research.

Xiang Liu, Yijun Song, Xia Li et al.

Deep learning models are increasingly utilized on resource-constrained edge devices for real-time data analytics. Recently, Vision Transformer and their variants have shown exceptional performance in various computer vision tasks. However, their substantial computational requirements and low inference latency create significant challenges for deploying such models on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, ED-ViT, which is designed to efficiently split and execute complex Vision Transformers across multiple edge devices. Our approach involves partitioning Vision Transformer models into several sub-models, while each dedicated to handling a specific subset of data classes. To further reduce computational overhead and inference latency, we introduce a class-wise pruning technique that decreases the size of each sub-model. Through extensive experiments conducted on five datasets using three model architectures and actual implementation on edge devices, we demonstrate that our method significantly cuts down inference latency on edge devices and achieves a reduction in model size by up to 28.9 times and 34.1 times, respectively, while maintaining test accuracy comparable to the original Vision Transformer. Additionally, we compare ED-ViT with two state-of-the-art methods that deploy CNN and SNN models on edge devices, evaluating metrics such as accuracy, inference time, and overall model size. Our comprehensive evaluation underscores the effectiveness of the proposed ED-ViT framework.

Xiang Liu, Mingchen Li, Xia Li et al.

Modern applications require lightweight neural network models. Most existing neural network pruning methods focus on removing unimportant filters; however, these may result in the loss of statistical information after pruning due to failing to consider the class-wise information. In this paper, we employ the structured lasso from the perspective of utilizing precise class-wise information for model pruning with the help of Information Bottleneck theory, which guides us to ensure the retention of statistical information before and after pruning. With these techniques, we propose two novel adaptive network pruning schemes in parallel: sparse graph-structured lasso pruning with Information Bottleneck (sGLP-IB) and sparse tree-guided lasso pruning with Information Bottleneck (sTLP-IB). The key component is that we prune the model filters utilizing sGLP-IB and sTLP-IB with more precise structured class-wise relatedness. Compared to multiple state-of-the-art methods, our approaches achieve the best performance across three datasets and six model structures on extensive experiments. For example, with the VGG16 model based on the CIFAR-10 dataset, we can reduce the parameters by 85%, decrease the FLOPs by 61%, and maintain an accuracy of 94.10% (0.14% better than the original). For large-scale ImageNet, we can reduce the parameters by 55% while keeping the accuracy at 76.12% (only drop 0.03%) using the ResNet architecture. In summary, we succeed in reducing the model size and computational resource usage while maintaining the effectiveness of accuracy.

Furong Huang, Jialin Li, Xuchen You

Tensor CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition is an important tool that solves a wide class of machine learning problems. Existing popular approaches recover components one by one, not necessarily in the order of larger components first. Recently developed simultaneous power method obtains only a high probability recovery of top $r$ components even when the observed tensor is noiseless. We propose a Slicing Initialized Alternating Subspace Iteration (s-ASI) method that is guaranteed to recover top $r$ components ($ε$-close) simultaneously for (a)symmetric tensors almost surely under the noiseless case (with high probability for a bounded noise) using $O(\log(\log \frac{1}ε))$ steps of tensor subspace iterations. Our s-ASI method introduces a Slice-Based Initialization that runs $O(1/\log(\frac{λ_r}{λ_{r+1}}))$ steps of matrix subspace iterations, where $λ_r$ denotes the r-th top singular value of the tensor. We are the first to provide a theoretical guarantee on simultaneous orthogonal asymmetric tensor decomposition. Under the noiseless case, we are the first to provide an \emph{almost sure} theoretical guarantee on simultaneous orthogonal tensor decomposition. When tensor is noisy, our algorithm for asymmetric tensor is robust to noise smaller than $\min\{O(\frac{(λ_r - λ_{r+1})ε}{\sqrt{r}}), O(δ_0\frac{λ_r -λ_{r+1}}{\sqrt{d}})\}$, where $δ_0$ is a small constant proportional to the probability of bad initializations in the noisy setting.