聚集的联合学习（FL）已显示通过将客户分组为群集，从而产生有希望的结果。这在单独的客户群在其本地数据的分布方面有显着差异的情况下特别有效。现有的集群FL算法实质上是在试图将客户群体组合在一起，以便同一集群中的客户可以利用彼此的数据来更好地执行联合学习。但是，先前的群集FL算法试图在培训期间间接学习这些分布相似性，这可能会很耗时，因为可能需要许多回合的联合学习，直到群集的形成稳定为止。在本文中，我们提出了一种新的联合学习方法，该方法直接旨在通过分析客户数据子空间之间的主要角度来有效地识别客户之间的分布相似性。每个客户端都以单一的方式在其本地数据上应用截断的奇异值分解（SVD）步骤，以得出一小部分主向量，该量提供了一个签名，可简洁地捕获基础分布的主要特征。提供了一组主要的主向量，以便服务器可以直接识别客户端之间的分布相似性以形成簇。这是通过比较这些主要向量跨越的客户数据子空间之间主要角度的相似性来实现的。该方法提供了一个简单而有效的集群FL框架，该框架解决了广泛的数据异质性问题，而不是标签偏斜的更简单的非iids形式。我们的聚类FL方法还可以为非凸目标目标提供融合保证。我们的代码可在https://github.com/mmorafah/pacfl上找到。

在存在参与者的非IID数据分布的情况下，经典联合学习方法会产生明显的绩效降解。当每个本地数据集的分布与全局数据集有很大不同时，每个客户端的本地目标将与全局Optima不一致，从而导致本地更新中的漂移。这种现象极大地影响了客户的表现。这是为了让客户参加联合学习的主要动力是获得更好的个性化模型。为了解决上述问题，我们提出了一种新的算法弗利斯（Flis），该算法通过利用客户模型的推理相似性，将客户人口与可共同训练数据分布的群集分组。该框架捕获了设置，其中不同的用户组具有自己的目标（学习任务），但通过在同一集群（相同的学习任务）中汇总其数据以执行更有效和个性化的联合学习。我们提出了实验结果，以证明FLIS比CIFAR-100/10，SVHN和FMNIST数据集的最先进基准的好处。我们的代码可在https://github.com/mmorafah/flis上找到。

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted considerable attention as a gradient-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method. Since the introduction of DARTS, there has been little work done on adapting the action space based on state-of-art architecture design principles for CNNs. In this work, we aim to address this gap by incrementally augmenting the DARTS search space with micro-design changes inspired by ConvNeXt and studying the trade-off between accuracy, evaluation layer count, and computational cost. To this end, we introduce the Pseudo-Inverted Bottleneck conv block intending to reduce the computational footprint of the inverted bottleneck block proposed in ConvNeXt. Our proposed architecture is much less sensitive to evaluation layer count and outperforms a DARTS network with similar size significantly, at layer counts as small as 2. Furthermore, with less layers, not only does it achieve higher accuracy with lower GMACs and parameter count, GradCAM comparisons show that our network is able to better detect distinctive features of target objects compared to DARTS.

Solving portfolio management problems using deep reinforcement learning has been getting much attention in finance for a few years. We have proposed a new method using experts signals and historical price data to feed into our reinforcement learning framework. Although experts signals have been used in previous works in the field of finance, as far as we know, it is the first time this method, in tandem with deep RL, is used to solve the financial portfolio management problem. Our proposed framework consists of a convolutional network for aggregating signals, another convolutional network for historical price data, and a vanilla network. We used the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm as the agent to process the reward and take action in the environment. The results suggested that, on average, our framework could gain 90 percent of the profit earned by the best expert.

To date, no "information-theoretic" frameworks for reasoning about generalization error have been shown to establish minimax rates for gradient descent in the setting of stochastic convex optimization. In this work, we consider the prospect of establishing such rates via several existing information-theoretic frameworks: input-output mutual information bounds, conditional mutual information bounds and variants, PAC-Bayes bounds, and recent conditional variants thereof. We prove that none of these bounds are able to establish minimax rates. We then consider a common tactic employed in studying gradient methods, whereby the final iterate is corrupted by Gaussian noise, producing a noisy "surrogate" algorithm. We prove that minimax rates cannot be established via the analysis of such surrogates. Our results suggest that new ideas are required to analyze gradient descent using information-theoretic techniques.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men worldwide and the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. One of the prognostic features in prostate cancer is the Gleason grading of histopathology images. The Gleason grade is assigned based on tumor architecture on Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained whole slide images (WSI) by the pathologists. This process is time-consuming and has known interobserver variability. In the past few years, deep learning algorithms have been used to analyze histopathology images, delivering promising results for grading prostate cancer. However, most of the algorithms rely on the fully annotated datasets which are expensive to generate. In this work, we proposed a novel weakly-supervised algorithm to classify prostate cancer grades. The proposed algorithm consists of three steps: (1) extracting discriminative areas in a histopathology image by employing the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) algorithm based on Transformers, (2) representing the image by constructing a graph using the discriminative patches, and (3) classifying the image into its Gleason grades by developing a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN) based on the gated attention mechanism. We evaluated our algorithm using publicly available datasets, including TCGAPRAD, PANDA, and Gleason 2019 challenge datasets. We also cross validated the algorithm on an independent dataset. Results show that the proposed model achieved state-of-the-art performance in the Gleason grading task in terms of accuracy, F1 score, and cohen-kappa. The code is available at https://github.com/NabaviLab/Prostate-Cancer.

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication has been proposed as a potential solution to improve the robustness and safety of autonomous vehicles by improving coordination and removing the barrier of non-line-of-sight sensing. Cooperative Vehicle Safety (CVS) applications are tightly dependent on the reliability of the underneath data system, which can suffer from loss of information due to the inherent issues of their different components, such as sensors failures or the poor performance of V2X technologies under dense communication channel load. Particularly, information loss affects the target classification module and, subsequently, the safety application performance. To enable reliable and robust CVS systems that mitigate the effect of information loss, we proposed a Context-Aware Target Classification (CA-TC) module coupled with a hybrid learning-based predictive modeling technique for CVS systems. The CA-TC consists of two modules: A Context-Aware Map (CAM), and a Hybrid Gaussian Process (HGP) prediction system. Consequently, the vehicle safety applications use the information from the CA-TC, making them more robust and reliable. The CAM leverages vehicles path history, road geometry, tracking, and prediction; and the HGP is utilized to provide accurate vehicles' trajectory predictions to compensate for data loss (due to communication congestion) or sensor measurements' inaccuracies. Based on offline real-world data, we learn a finite bank of driver models that represent the joint dynamics of the vehicle and the drivers' behavior. We combine offline training and online model updates with on-the-fly forecasting to account for new possible driver behaviors. Finally, our framework is validated using simulation and realistic driving scenarios to confirm its potential in enhancing the robustness and reliability of CVS systems.

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

Aiming at highly accurate object detection for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), this paper presents a Deep Neural Network based 3D object detection model that leverages a three-stage feature extractor by developing a novel LIDAR-Camera fusion scheme. The proposed feature extractor extracts high-level features from two input sensory modalities and recovers the important features discarded during the convolutional process. The novel fusion scheme effectively fuses features across sensory modalities and convolutional layers to find the best representative global features. The fused features are shared by a two-stage network: the region proposal network (RPN) and the detection head (DH). The RPN generates high-recall proposals, and the DH produces final detection results. The experimental results show the proposed model outperforms more recent research on the KITTI 2D and 3D detection benchmark, particularly for distant and highly occluded instances.

Text-based personality computing (TPC) has gained many research interests in NLP. In this paper, we describe 15 challenges that we consider deserving the attention of the research community. These challenges are organized by the following topics: personality taxonomies, measurement quality, datasets, performance evaluation, modelling choices, as well as ethics and fairness. When addressing each challenge, not only do we combine perspectives from both NLP and social sciences, but also offer concrete suggestions towards more valid and reliable TPC research.