Mina Alibeigi

Yasar Abbas Ur Rehman, Yan Gao, Pedro Porto Buarque de Gusmão et al.

The ubiquity of camera-enabled devices has led to large amounts of unlabeled image data being produced at the edge. The integration of self-supervised learning (SSL) and federated learning (FL) into one coherent system can potentially offer data privacy guarantees while also advancing the quality and robustness of the learned visual representations without needing to move data around. However, client bias and divergence during FL aggregation caused by data heterogeneity limits the performance of learned visual representations on downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a new aggregation strategy termed Layer-wise Divergence Aware Weight Aggregation (L-DAWA) to mitigate the influence of client bias and divergence during FL aggregation. The proposed method aggregates weights at the layer-level according to the measure of angular divergence between the clients' model and the global model. Extensive experiments with cross-silo and cross-device settings on CIFAR-10/100 and Tiny ImageNet datasets demonstrate that our methods are effective and obtain new SOTA performance on both contrastive and non-contrastive SSL approaches.

Hannes Eriksson, Debabrota Basu, Mina Alibeigi et al.

In stochastic games with incomplete information, the uncertainty is evoked by the lack of knowledge about a player's own and the other players' types, i.e. the utility function and the policy space, and also the inherent stochasticity of different players' interactions. In existing literature, the risk in stochastic games has been studied in terms of the inherent uncertainty evoked by the variability of transitions and actions. In this work, we instead focus on the risk associated with the \textit{uncertainty over types}. We contrast this with the multi-agent reinforcement learning framework where the other agents have fixed stationary policies and investigate risk-sensitiveness due to the uncertainty about the other agents' adaptive policies. We propose risk-sensitive versions of existing algorithms proposed for risk-neutral stochastic games, such as Iterated Best Response (IBR), Fictitious Play (FP) and a general multi-objective gradient approach using dual ascent (DAPG). Our experimental analysis shows that risk-sensitive DAPG performs better than competing algorithms for both social welfare and general-sum stochastic games.

Hamid Mousavi, Mohammad Loni, Mina Alibeigi et al.

The deployment of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on edge devices is hindered by the substantial gap between performance requirements and available processing power. While recent research has made significant strides in developing pruning methods to build a sparse network for reducing the computing overhead of DNNs, there remains considerable accuracy loss, especially at high pruning ratios. We find that the architectures designed for dense networks by differentiable architecture search methods are ineffective when pruning mechanisms are applied to them. The main reason is that the current method does not support sparse architectures in their search space and uses a search objective that is made for dense networks and does not pay any attention to sparsity. In this paper, we propose a new method to search for sparsity-friendly neural architectures. We do this by adding two new sparse operations to the search space and modifying the search objective. We propose two novel parametric SparseConv and SparseLinear operations in order to expand the search space to include sparse operations. In particular, these operations make a flexible search space due to using sparse parametric versions of linear and convolution operations. The proposed search objective lets us train the architecture based on the sparsity of the search space operations. Quantitative analyses demonstrate that our search architectures outperform those used in the stateof-the-art sparse networks on the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. In terms of performance and hardware effectiveness, DASS increases the accuracy of the sparse version of MobileNet-v2 from 73.44% to 81.35% (+7.91% improvement) with 3.87x faster inference time.

Hannes Eriksson, Debabrota Basu, Tommy Tram et al.

In this paper, we study the problem of transferring the available Markov Decision Process (MDP) models to learn and plan efficiently in an unknown but similar MDP. We refer to it as \textit{Model Transfer Reinforcement Learning (MTRL)} problem. First, we formulate MTRL for discrete MDPs and Linear Quadratic Regulators (LQRs) with continuous state actions. Then, we propose a generic two-stage algorithm, MLEMTRL, to address the MTRL problem in discrete and continuous settings. In the first stage, MLEMTRL uses a \textit{constrained Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE)}-based approach to estimate the target MDP model using a set of known MDP models. In the second stage, using the estimated target MDP model, MLEMTRL deploys a model-based planning algorithm appropriate for the MDP class. Theoretically, we prove worst-case regret bounds for MLEMTRL both in realisable and non-realisable settings. We empirically demonstrate that MLEMTRL allows faster learning in new MDPs than learning from scratch and achieves near-optimal performance depending on the similarity of the available MDPs and the target MDP.

Ali Zoljodi, Sadegh Abadijou, Mina Alibeigi et al.

Detecting lane markings in road scenes poses a challenge due to their intricate nature, which is susceptible to unfavorable conditions. While lane markings have strong shape priors, their visibility is easily compromised by lighting conditions, occlusions by other vehicles or pedestrians, and fading of colors over time. The detection process is further complicated by the presence of several lane shapes and natural variations, necessitating large amounts of data to train a robust lane detection model capable of handling various scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel self-supervised learning method termed Contrastive Learning for Lane Detection via cross-similarity (CLLD) to enhance the resilience of lane detection models in real-world scenarios, particularly when the visibility of lanes is compromised. CLLD introduces a contrastive learning (CL) method that assesses the similarity of local features within the global context of the input image. It uses the surrounding information to predict lane markings. This is achieved by integrating local feature contrastive learning with our proposed cross-similar operation. The local feature CL concentrates on extracting features from small patches, a necessity for accurately localizing lane segments. Meanwhile, cross-similarity captures global features, enabling the detection of obscured lane segments based on their surroundings. We enhance cross-similarity by randomly masking portions of input images in the process of augmentation. Extensive experiments on TuSimple and CuLane benchmarks demonstrate that CLLD outperforms SOTA contrastive learning methods, particularly in visibility-impairing conditions like shadows, while it also delivers comparable results under normal conditions. Compared to supervised learning, CLLD still excels in challenging scenarios such as shadows and crowded scenes, which are common in real-world driving.

Xinchi Qiu, Yan Gao, Lorenzo Sani et al.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning paradigm that facilitates collaborative training of a shared global model across devices while keeping data localized. The deployment of FL in numerous real-world applications faces delays, primarily due to the prevalent reliance on supervised tasks. Generating detailed labels at edge devices, if feasible, is demanding, given resource constraints and the imperative for continuous data updates. In addressing these challenges, solutions such as federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL), which relies on unlabeled clients' data and a limited amount of labeled data on the server, become pivotal. In this paper, we propose FedAnchor, an innovative FSSL method that introduces a unique double-head structure, called anchor head, paired with the classification head trained exclusively on labeled anchor data on the server. The anchor head is empowered with a newly designed label contrastive loss based on the cosine similarity metric. Our approach mitigates the confirmation bias and overfitting issues associated with pseudo-labeling techniques based on high-confidence model prediction samples. Extensive experiments on CIFAR10/100 and SVHN datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by a significant margin in terms of convergence rate and model accuracy.

Viktor Valadi, Xinchi Qiu, Pedro Porto Buarque de Gusmão et al.

Federated learning (FL) systems are susceptible to attacks from malicious actors who might attempt to corrupt the training model through various poisoning attacks. FL also poses new challenges in addressing group bias, such as ensuring fair performance for different demographic groups. Traditional methods used to address such biases require centralized access to the data, which FL systems do not have. In this paper, we present a novel approach FedVal for both robustness and fairness that does not require any additional information from clients that could raise privacy concerns and consequently compromise the integrity of the FL system. To this end, we propose an innovative score function based on a server-side validation method that assesses client updates and determines the optimal aggregation balance between locally-trained models. Our research shows that this approach not only provides solid protection against poisoning attacks but can also be used to reduce group bias and subsequently promote fairness while maintaining the system's capability for differential privacy. Extensive experiments on the CIFAR-10, FEMNIST, and PUMS ACSIncome datasets in different configurations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, resulting in state-of-the-art performances. We have proven robustness in situations where 80% of participating clients are malicious. Additionally, we have shown a significant increase in accuracy for underrepresented labels from 32% to 53%, and increase in recall rate for underrepresented features from 19% to 50%.

Mina Alibeigi, William Ljungbergh, Adam Tonderski et al.

Existing datasets for autonomous driving (AD) often lack diversity and long-range capabilities, focusing instead on 360° perception and temporal reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce Zenseact Open Dataset (ZOD), a large-scale and diverse multimodal dataset collected over two years in various European countries, covering an area 9x that of existing datasets. ZOD boasts the highest range and resolution sensors among comparable datasets, coupled with detailed keyframe annotations for 2D and 3D objects (up to 245m), road instance/semantic segmentation, traffic sign recognition, and road classification. We believe that this unique combination will facilitate breakthroughs in long-range perception and multi-task learning. The dataset is composed of Frames, Sequences, and Drives, designed to encompass both data diversity and support for spatio-temporal learning, sensor fusion, localization, and mapping. Frames consist of 100k curated camera images with two seconds of other supporting sensor data, while the 1473 Sequences and 29 Drives include the entire sensor suite for 20 seconds and a few minutes, respectively. ZOD is the only large-scale AD dataset released under a permissive license, allowing for both research and commercial use. More information, and an extensive devkit, can be found at https://zod.zenseact.com

Hannes Eriksson, Debabrota Basu, Mina Alibeigi et al.

In this paper, we consider risk-sensitive sequential decision-making in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Our contributions are two-fold. First, we introduce a novel and coherent quantification of risk, namely composite risk, which quantifies the joint effect of aleatory and epistemic risk during the learning process. Existing works considered either aleatory or epistemic risk individually, or as an additive combination. We prove that the additive formulation is a particular case of the composite risk when the epistemic risk measure is replaced with expectation. Thus, the composite risk is more sensitive to both aleatory and epistemic uncertainty than the individual and additive formulations. We also propose an algorithm, SENTINEL-K, based on ensemble bootstrapping and distributional RL for representing epistemic and aleatory uncertainty respectively. The ensemble of K learners uses Follow The Regularised Leader (FTRL) to aggregate the return distributions and obtain the composite risk. We experimentally verify that SENTINEL-K estimates the return distribution better, and while used with composite risk estimates, demonstrates higher risk-sensitive performance than state-of-the-art risk-sensitive and distributional RL algorithms.

Mina Alibeigi, Majid Nili Ahmadabadi, Babak Nadjar Araabi

Nowadays, robots become a companion in everyday life. To be well-accepted by humans, robots should efficiently understand meanings of their partners' motions and body language, and respond accordingly. Learning concepts by imitation brings them this ability in a user-friendly way. This paper presents a fast and robust model for Incremental Learning of Concepts by Imitation (ILoCI). In ILoCI, observed multimodal spatio-temporal demonstrations are incrementally abstracted and generalized based on both their perceptual and functional similarities during the imitation. In this method, perceptually similar demonstrations are abstracted by a dynamic model of mirror neuron system. An incremental method is proposed to learn their functional similarities through a limited number of interactions with the teacher. Learning all concepts together by the proposed memory rehearsal enables robot to utilize the common structural relations among concepts which not only expedites the learning process especially at the initial stages, but also improves the generalization ability and the robustness against discrepancies between observed demonstrations. Performance of ILoCI is assessed using standard LASA handwriting benchmark data set. The results show efficiency of ILoCI in concept acquisition, recognition and generation in addition to its robustness against variability in demonstrations.