One of the key challenges in deploying RL to real-world applications is to adapt to variations of unknown environment contexts, such as changing terrains in robotic tasks and fluctuated bandwidth in congestion control. Existing works on adaptation to unknown environment contexts either assume the contexts are the same for the whole episode or assume the context variables are Markovian. However, in many real-world applications, the environment context usually stays stable for a stochastic period and then changes in an abrupt and unpredictable manner within an episode, resulting in a segment structure, which existing works fail to address. To leverage the segment structure of piecewise stable context in real-world applications, in this paper, we propose a \textit{\textbf{Se}gmented \textbf{C}ontext \textbf{B}elief \textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{D}eep~(SeCBAD)} RL method. Our method can jointly infer the belief distribution over latent context with the posterior over segment length and perform more accurate belief context inference with observed data within the current context segment. The inferred belief context can be leveraged to augment the state, leading to a policy that can adapt to abrupt variations in context. We demonstrate empirically that SeCBAD can infer context segment length accurately and outperform existing methods on a toy grid world environment and Mujuco tasks with piecewise-stable context.

Foundation models are redefining how AI systems are built. Practitioners now follow a standard procedure to build their machine learning solutions: download a copy of a foundation model, and fine-tune it using some in-house data about the target task of interest. Consequently, the Internet is swarmed by a handful of foundation models fine-tuned on many diverse tasks. Yet, these individual fine-tunings often lack strong generalization and exist in isolation without benefiting from each other. In our opinion, this is a missed opportunity, as these specialized models contain diverse features. Based on this insight, we propose model recycling, a simple strategy that leverages multiple fine-tunings of the same foundation model on diverse auxiliary tasks, and repurposes them as rich and diverse initializations for the target task. Specifically, model recycling fine-tunes in parallel each specialized model on the target task, and then averages the weights of all target fine-tunings into a final model. Empirically, we show that model recycling maximizes model diversity by benefiting from diverse auxiliary tasks, and achieves a new state of the art on the reference DomainBed benchmark for out-of-distribution generalization. Looking forward, model recycling is a contribution to the emerging paradigm of updatable machine learning where, akin to open-source software development, the community collaborates to incrementally and reliably update machine learning models.

Does the dominant approach to learn representations (as a side effect of optimizing an expected cost for a single training distribution) remain a good approach when we are dealing with multiple distributions. Our thesis is that such scenarios are better served by representations that are "richer" than those obtained with a single optimization episode. This is supported by a collection of empirical results obtained with an apparently na\"ive ensembling technique: concatenating the representations obtained with multiple training episodes using the same data, model, algorithm, and hyper-parameters, but different random seeds. These independently trained networks perform similarly. Yet, in a number of scenarios involving new distributions, the concatenated representation performs substantially better than an equivalently sized network trained from scratch. This proves that the representations constructed by multiple training episodes are in fact different. Although their concatenation carries little additional information about the training task under the training distribution, it becomes substantially more informative when tasks or distributions change. Meanwhile, a single training episode is unlikely to yield such a redundant representation because the optimization process has no reason to accumulate features that do not incrementally improve the training performance.

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。

在易于优化和强大的分布（OOD）概括之间通常存在困境。例如，许多OOD方法依赖于优化具有挑战性的罚款术语。他们要么太强大，无法可靠地优化，要么太虚弱而无法实现目标。我们建议用丰富的表示，其中包含一个潜在有用功能的调色板初始化网络，即使是简单的模型也可以使用。一方面，丰富的表示为优化器提供了良好的初始化。另一方面，它还提供了有助于OOD概括的电感偏差。这种表示形式是由丰富的功能构建（RFC）算法（也称为盆景算法）构建的，该算法由一系列培训情节组成。在发现剧集中，我们以防止网络使用以前迭代中构建的功能的方式制作了多目标优化标准及其相关数据集。在合成事件中，我们使用知识蒸馏来迫使网络同时代表所有先前发现的特征。用盆景表示的网络初始化，始终有助于六种OOD方法在ColoredMnist基准上实现最佳性能。相同的技术在Wilds Camelyon17任务上大大优于可比较的结果，消除了困扰其他方法的高结果差异，并使超参数调谐和模型选择更加可靠。

传统的深度传感器产生准确的真实世界深度估计，即使仅在仿真域训练的最先进的学习方法也会超越。由于在模拟域中容易获得地面真理深度，但在真实域中很难获得，因此我们提出了一种利用两个世界的最佳方法的方法。在本文中，我们展示了一个新的框架，ActiveZero，这是一个混合域学习解决方案，适用于不需要真实世界深度注释的活动立体宽度系统。首先，我们通过使用混合域学习策略来证明我们的方法对分发外数据的可转换性。在仿真域中，我们在形状原语数据集上使用监督差异丢失和自我监督损失的组合。相比之下，在真实域中，我们只在数据集中使用自我监督损失，这些损失是从培训仿真数据或测试真实数据的分发。其次，我们的方法介绍了一种名为Temporal IR的自我监督损失，以增加我们在难以感知地区的重新注入的鲁棒性和准确性。最后，我们展示了如何训练该方法的端到端，并且每个模块对于获得最终结果很重要。关于真实数据的广泛定性和定量评估表明了甚至可以击败商业深度传感器的最新状态。

Though CNNs have achieved the state-of-the-art performance on various vision tasks, they are vulnerable to adversarial examples -crafted by adding human-imperceptible perturbations to clean images. However, most of the existing adversarial attacks only achieve relatively low success rates under the challenging black-box setting, where the attackers have no knowledge of the model structure and parameters. To this end, we propose to improve the transferability of adversarial examples by creating diverse input patterns. Instead of only using the original images to generate adversarial examples, our method applies random transformations to the input images at each iteration. Extensive experiments on ImageNet show that the proposed attack method can generate adversarial examples that transfer much better to different networks than existing baselines. By evaluating our method against top defense solutions and official baselines from NIPS 2017 adversarial competition, the enhanced attack reaches an average success rate of 73.0%, which outperforms the top-1 attack submission in the NIPS competition by a large margin of 6.6%. We hope that our proposed attack strategy can serve as a strong benchmark baseline for evaluating the robustness of networks to adversaries and the effectiveness of different defense methods in the future. Code is available at https: //github.com/cihangxie/DI-2-FGSM .

Convolutional neural networks have demonstrated high accuracy on various tasks in recent years. However, they are extremely vulnerable to adversarial examples. For example, imperceptible perturbations added to clean images can cause convolutional neural networks to fail. In this paper, we propose to utilize randomization at inference time to mitigate adversarial effects. Specifically, we use two randomization operations: random resizing, which resizes the input images to a random size, and random padding, which pads zeros around the input images in a random manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed randomization method is very effective at defending against both single-step and iterative attacks. Our method provides the following advantages: 1) no additional training or fine-tuning, 2) very few additional computations, 3) compatible with other adversarial defense methods. By combining the proposed randomization method with an adversarially trained model, it achieves a normalized score of 0.924 (ranked No.2 among 107 defense teams) in the NIPS 2017 adversarial examples defense challenge, which is far better than using adversarial training alone with a normalized score of 0.773 (ranked No.56). The code is public available at https: //github.com/cihangxie/NIPS2017_adv_challenge_defense.

It has been well demonstrated that adversarial examples, i.e., natural images with visually imperceptible perturbations added, cause deep networks to fail on image classification. In this paper, we extend adversarial examples to semantic segmentation and object detection which are much more difficult. Our observation is that both segmentation and detection are based on classifying multiple targets on an image (e.g., the target is a pixel or a receptive field in segmentation, and an object proposal in detection). This inspires us to optimize a loss function over a set of pixels/proposals for generating adversarial perturbations. Based on this idea, we propose a novel algorithm named Dense Adversary Generation (DAG), which generates a large family of adversarial examples, and applies to a wide range of state-of-the-art deep networks for segmentation and detection. We also find that the adversarial perturbations can be transferred across networks with different training data, based on different architectures, and even for different recognition tasks. In particular, the transferability across networks with the same architecture is more significant than in other cases. Besides, summing up heterogeneous perturbations often leads to better transfer performance, which provides an effective method of blackbox adversarial attack.

Reinforcement learning often suffer from the sparse reward issue in real-world robotics problems. Learning from demonstration (LfD) is an effective way to eliminate this problem, which leverages collected expert data to aid online learning. Prior works often assume that the learning agent and the expert aim to accomplish the same task, which requires collecting new data for every new task. In this paper, we consider the case where the target task is mismatched from but similar with that of the expert. Such setting can be challenging and we found existing LfD methods can not effectively guide learning in mismatched new tasks with sparse rewards. We propose conservative reward shaping from demonstration (CRSfD), which shapes the sparse rewards using estimated expert value function. To accelerate learning processes, CRSfD guides the agent to conservatively explore around demonstrations. Experimental results of robot manipulation tasks show that our approach outperforms baseline LfD methods when transferring demonstrations collected in a single task to other different but similar tasks.