数据异构联合学习（FL）系统遭受了两个重要的收敛误差来源：1）客户漂移错误是由于在客户端执行多个局部优化步骤而引起的，以及2）部分客户参与错误，这是一个事实，仅一小部分子集边缘客户参加每轮培训。我们发现其中，只有前者在文献中受到了极大的关注。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了FedVarp，这是在服务器上应用的一种新颖的差异算法，它消除了由于部分客户参与而导致的错误。为此，服务器只是将每个客户端的最新更新保持在内存中，并将其用作每回合中非参与客户的替代更新。此外，为了减轻服务器上的内存需求，我们提出了一种新颖的基于聚类的方差降低算法clusterfedvarp。与以前提出的方法不同，FedVarp和ClusterFedVarp均不需要在客户端上进行其他计算或其他优化参数的通信。通过广泛的实验，我们表明FedVarp优于最先进的方法，而ClusterFedVarp实现了与FedVarp相当的性能，并且记忆要求较少。

联合学习（FL）是分布式学习的一种变体，其中Edge设备可以协作学习模型，而无需与中央服务器或彼此共享数据。我们将使用公共客户库作为多模型FL的联合设置中同时培训多个独立模型的过程。在这项工作中，我们提出了用于多模型FL的流行FedAvg算法的两个变体，并具有可证明的收敛保证。我们进一步表明，对于相同数量的计算，多模型FL可以比单独训练每个模型具有更好的性能。我们通过在强凸，凸和非凸面设置中进行实验来补充理论结果。

由于众所周知，强化学习算法是数据密集型的，因此从环境中进行采样观测的任务通常在多个代理之间分配。但是，将这些观察结果从代理转移到中心位置可能会非常昂贵，并且还可以损害每个代理人本地行为政策的隐私。在本文中，我们考虑了一个联合加强学习框架，其中多个代理商协作学习了一个全球模型，而无需共享他们的个人数据和政策。每个代理都维护模型的本地副本，并使用本地采样数据对其进行更新。尽管具有n个代理可以启用n次数据的采样，但尚不清楚它是否导致比例收敛的加速。我们提出了联合版本的On-Policy TD，Off-Policy TD和Q学习，并分析其收敛性。对于所有这些算法，据我们所知，我们是第一个考虑马尔可夫噪声和多个局部更新的人，并证明相对于代理的数量是线性收敛的速度。为了获得这些结果，我们表明联邦TD和Q学习是与马尔可夫噪声联合随机近似的一般框架的特殊情况，并且我们利用该框架提供了适用于所有算法的统一收敛分析。

现有理论预测，数据异质性将降低联邦平均（FedAvg）算法在联合学习中的性能。但是，实际上，简单的FedAvg算法的收敛良好。本文解释了与以前的理论预测相矛盾的FedAvg的看似不合理的有效性。我们发现，在以前的理论分析中，有界梯度差异的关键假设太悲观了，无法表征实际应用中的数据异质性。对于一个简单的二次问题，我们证明存在很大的梯度差异对FedAvg的收敛性没有任何负面影响。在这一观察结果的推动下，我们提出了一个新的数量，最佳的平均漂移，以衡量数据异质性的效果，并明确使用它来提出对FedAvg的新理论分析。我们表明，在许多实际联合训练任务中，最佳的平均漂移几乎为零，而梯度差异可能很大。我们的新分析表明，FedAvg可以在均质和异质数据设置中具有相同的收敛速率，因此可以更好地理解其经验成功。

In federated optimization, heterogeneity in the clients' local datasets and computation speeds results in large variations in the number of local updates performed by each client in each communication round. Naive weighted aggregation of such models causes objective inconsistency, that is, the global model converges to a stationary point of a mismatched objective function which can be arbitrarily different from the true objective. This paper provides a general framework to analyze the convergence of federated heterogeneous optimization algorithms. It subsumes previously proposed methods such as FedAvg and FedProx and provides the first principled understanding of the solution bias and the convergence slowdown due to objective inconsistency. Using insights from this analysis, we propose Fed-Nova, a normalized averaging method that eliminates objective inconsistency while preserving fast error convergence.

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.

众所周知，即使通过核心点之间捕获数据点之间的相似性，也可以通过捕获相似性来提供准确的预测和不确定性估计，以提供准确的预测和不确定性估计。然而，传统的GP内核在捕获高维数据点之间的相似性时不是非常有效的。神经网络可用于学习在高维数据中编码复杂结构的良好表示，并且可以用作GP内核的输入。然而，神经网络的巨大数据要求使得这种方法在小数据设置中无效。为了解决代表学习和数据效率的冲突问题，我们建议通过使用概率神经网络来学习概率嵌入的深核。我们的方法将高维数据映射到低维子空间中的概率分布，然后计算这些分布之间的内核以捕获相似性。要启用端到端学习，我们可以推导出用于培训模型的功能梯度血清过程。各种数据集的实验表明，我们的方法在监督和半监督设置中占GP内核学习中的最先进。我们还将我们的方法扩展到其他小型数据范例，例如少量分类，在迷你想象网和小熊数据集上以前的方式胜过先前的方法。

The United States coastline spans 95,471 miles; a distance that cannot be effectively patrolled or secured by manual human effort alone. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with infrared cameras and deep-learning based algorithms represent a more efficient alternative for identifying and segmenting objects of interest - namely, ships. However, standard approaches to training these algorithms require large-scale datasets of densely labeled infrared maritime images. Such datasets are not publicly available and manually annotating every pixel in a large-scale dataset would have an extreme labor cost. In this work we demonstrate that, in the context of segmenting ships in infrared imagery, weakly-supervising an algorithm with sparsely labeled data can drastically reduce data labeling costs with minimal impact on system performance. We apply weakly-supervised learning to an unlabeled dataset of 7055 infrared images sourced from the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD). We find that by sparsely labeling only 32 points per image, weakly-supervised segmentation models can still effectively detect and segment ships, with a Jaccard score of up to 0.756.

The paper presents a cross-domain review analysis on four popular review datasets: Amazon, Yelp, Steam, IMDb. The analysis is performed using Hadoop and Spark, which allows for efficient and scalable processing of large datasets. By examining close to 12 million reviews from these four online forums, we hope to uncover interesting trends in sales and customer sentiment over the years. Our analysis will include a study of the number of reviews and their distribution over time, as well as an examination of the relationship between various review attributes such as upvotes, creation time, rating, and sentiment. By comparing the reviews across different domains, we hope to gain insight into the factors that drive customer satisfaction and engagement in different product categories.

Visual language such as charts and plots is ubiquitous in the human world. Comprehending plots and charts requires strong reasoning skills. Prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) models require at least tens of thousands of training examples and their reasoning capabilities are still much limited, especially on complex human-written queries. This paper presents the first one-shot solution to visual language reasoning. We decompose the challenge of visual language reasoning into two steps: (1) plot-to-text translation, and (2) reasoning over the translated text. The key in this method is a modality conversion module, named as DePlot, which translates the image of a plot or chart to a linearized table. The output of DePlot can then be directly used to prompt a pretrained large language model (LLM), exploiting the few-shot reasoning capabilities of LLMs. To obtain DePlot, we standardize the plot-to-table task by establishing unified task formats and metrics, and train DePlot end-to-end on this task. DePlot can then be used off-the-shelf together with LLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Compared with a SOTA model finetuned on more than >28k data points, DePlot+LLM with just one-shot prompting achieves a 24.0% improvement over finetuned SOTA on human-written queries from the task of chart QA.