Geeho Kim

Jinkyu Kim, Geeho Kim, Bohyung Han

A critical challenge of federated learning is data heterogeneity and imbalance across clients, which leads to inconsistency between local networks and unstable convergence of global models. To alleviate the limitations, we propose a novel architectural regularization technique that constructs multiple auxiliary branches in each local model by grafting local and global subnetworks at several different levels and that learns the representations of the main pathway in the local model congruent to the auxiliary hybrid pathways via online knowledge distillation. The proposed technique is effective to robustify the global model even in the non-iid setting and is applicable to various federated learning frameworks conveniently without incurring extra communication costs. We perform comprehensive empirical studies and demonstrate remarkable performance gains in terms of accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods. The source code is available at our project page.

Geeho Kim, Jinkyu Kim, Bohyung Han

Federated learning often suffers from slow and unstable convergence due to the heterogeneous characteristics of participating client datasets. Such a tendency is aggravated when the client participation ratio is low since the information collected from the clients has large variations. To address this challenge, we propose a simple but effective federated learning framework, which improves the consistency across clients and facilitates the convergence of the server model. This is achieved by making the server broadcast a global model with a lookahead gradient. This strategy enables the proposed approach to convey the projected global update information to participants effectively without additional client memory and extra communication costs. We also regularize local updates by aligning each client with the overshot global model to reduce bias and improve the stability of our algorithm. We provide the theoretical convergence rate of our algorithm and demonstrate remarkable performance gains in terms of accuracy and communication efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art methods, especially with low client participation rates. The source code is available at our project page.

Seonguk Seo, Jinkyu Kim, Geeho Kim et al.

We propose a novel contrastive learning framework to effectively address the challenges of data heterogeneity in federated learning. We first analyze the inconsistency of gradient updates across clients during local training and establish its dependence on the distribution of feature representations, leading to the derivation of the supervised contrastive learning (SCL) objective to mitigate local deviations. In addition, we show that a naïve adoption of SCL in federated learning leads to representation collapse, resulting in slow convergence and limited performance gains. To address this issue, we introduce a relaxed contrastive learning loss that imposes a divergence penalty on excessively similar sample pairs within each class. This strategy prevents collapsed representations and enhances feature transferability, facilitating collaborative training and leading to significant performance improvements. Our framework outperforms all existing federated learning approaches by huge margins on the standard benchmarks through extensive experimental results.

Jie Hu, Lingyun Chen, Geeho Kim et al.

History-dependent sampling can reduce long-run Monte Carlo variance by discouraging redundant revisits, but existing schemes typically encode history through empirical measure on finite state spaces, which is infeasible in high-dimensional discrete configuration spaces or ill-posed in continuous domains. We propose Score-Repellent Monte Carlo (SRMC) framework that summarizes trajectory history by a running average of score evaluations in $R^d$, where $d$ is the dimension of the score and state representation. This history is converted into a surrogate target through an exponential score tilt, indexed with $α$ that represents the strength of repellence in controlling the magnitude of the history-based repulsion. The surrogate family is normalization-free in the standard MCMC sense, yielding a generic wrapper: at each iteration, any base kernel targeting $π$ can instead be run on the current surrogate $π_{θ_n}$ while the history is updated online. We analyze the coupled evolution of the history recursion and Monte Carlo estimators using stochastic approximation with controlled Markovian noise, establishing almost sure convergence and a joint central limit theorem. We further identify regimes in which the asymptotic covariance decreases as $α$ increases, with scaling $O(1/α)$, extending the near-zero-variance effect of finite-state history-dependent samplers to general state spaces with constant memory. Experiments on continuous targets and discrete energy-based models demonstrate improved estimator variance and mode coverage, while retaining $O(d)$ memory usage and modest per-iteration overhead.

Geeho Kim, Junoh Kang, Bohyung Han

Visual recognition tasks are often limited to dealing with a small subset of classes simply because the labels for the remaining classes are unavailable. We are interested in identifying novel concepts in a dataset through representation learning based on both labeled and unlabeled examples, and extending the horizon of recognition to both known and novel classes. To address this challenging task, we propose a combinatorial learning approach, which naturally clusters the examples in unseen classes using the compositional knowledge given by multiple supervised meta-classifiers on heterogeneous label spaces. The representations given by the combinatorial embedding are made more robust by unsupervised pairwise relation learning. The proposed algorithm discovers novel concepts via a joint optimization for enhancing the discrimitiveness of unseen classes as well as learning the representations of known classes generalizable to novel ones. Our extensive experiments demonstrate remarkable performance gains by the proposed approach on public datasets for image retrieval and image categorization with novel class discovery.

Seonguk Seo, Yumin Suh, Dongwan Kim et al.

We propose a simple but effective multi-source domain generalization technique based on deep neural networks by incorporating optimized normalization layers that are specific to individual domains. Our approach employs multiple normalization methods while learning separate affine parameters per domain. For each domain, the activations are normalized by a weighted average of multiple normalization statistics. The normalization statistics are kept track of separately for each normalization type if necessary. Specifically, we employ batch and instance normalizations in our implementation to identify the best combination of these two normalization methods in each domain. The optimized normalization layers are effective to enhance the generalizability of the learned model. We demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy of our algorithm in the standard domain generalization benchmarks, as well as viability to further tasks such as multi-source domain adaptation and domain generalization in the presence of label noise.