联合学习（FL）是一种机器学习范式，可从仍在设备上的分散数据中分发机器学习模型。尽管标准联合优化方法取得了成功，例如FL中的联邦平均（FedAvg），但在文献中，能源需求和硬件诱导的限制因素尚未得到足够的考虑。具体而言，对设备学习的基本需求是，根据整个联邦的能源需求和异质硬件设计，可以将经过训练的模型量化为各种位宽度。在这项工作中，我们介绍了多种联邦平均算法的多种变体，这些算法训练神经网络可靠地进行量化。这样的网络可以量化为各种位宽度，只有有限的精确模型精度降低有限。我们对标准FL基准测试进行了广泛的实验，以评估我们提出的FedAvg变体以量化稳健性，并为我们的fl中的量化变体提供收敛分析。我们的结果表明，整合量化鲁棒性会导致在量化的在设备推断期间，对不同的位宽度明显更健壮的FL模型。

联合学习描述了多个客户端的模型的分布式培训，同时保留数据私有设备。在这项工作中，我们将服务器策划的联合学习过程视为分层潜在的变量模型，其中服务器提供了通过客户端特定的模型参数的先前分发的参数。我们表明，通过简单的高斯前瞻和众所周知的期望 - 最大化（EM）算法的硬版，在这种模型中学习对应于FEDVG，是联合学习设置的最流行的算法。在FEDAVG上的这种透视统一了最近在该字段中的几个工作，并通过分层模型的不同选择开辟了扩展的可能性。基于这种观点，我们进一步提出了一种雇用现有分布的分级模型的变体来促进稀疏性。通过使用Hard-Em算法来学习，我们获得FedSparse，可以在联邦学习设置中学习稀疏神经网络的过程。 FedSparse将来自客户端的通信成本降低到服务器，反之亦然，以及对稀疏网络推断的计算成本 - 这两者都具有很大的实际重要性在联合学习中。

隐私和沟通效率是联邦神经网络培训中的重要挑战，并将它们组合仍然是一个公开的问题。在这项工作中，我们开发了一种统一高度压缩通信和差异隐私（DP）的方法。我们引入基于相对熵编码（REC）到联合设置的压缩技术。通过对REC进行微小的修改，我们获得了一种可怕的私立学习算法，DP-REC，并展示了如何计算其隐私保证。我们的实验表明，DP-REC大大降低了通信成本，同时提供与最先进的隐私保证。

With the advent of Neural Style Transfer (NST), stylizing an image has become quite popular. A convenient way for extending stylization techniques to videos is by applying them on a per-frame basis. However, such per-frame application usually lacks temporal-consistency expressed by undesirable flickering artifacts. Most of the existing approaches for enforcing temporal-consistency suffers from one or more of the following drawbacks. They (1) are only suitable for a limited range of stylization techniques, (2) can only be applied in an offline fashion requiring the complete video as input, (3) cannot provide consistency for the task of stylization, or (4) do not provide interactive consistency-control. Note that existing consistent video-filtering approaches aim to completely remove flickering artifacts and thus do not respect any specific consistency-control aspect. For stylization tasks, however, consistency-control is an essential requirement where a certain amount of flickering can add to the artistic look and feel. Moreover, making this control interactive is paramount from a usability perspective. To achieve the above requirements, we propose an approach that can stylize video streams while providing interactive consistency-control. Apart from stylization, our approach also supports various other image processing filters. For achieving interactive performance, we develop a lite optical-flow network that operates at 80 Frames per second (FPS) on desktop systems with sufficient accuracy. We show that the final consistent video-output using our flow network is comparable to that being obtained using state-of-the-art optical-flow network. Further, we employ an adaptive combination of local and global consistent features and enable interactive selection between the two. By objective and subjective evaluation, we show that our method is superior to state-of-the-art approaches.

Vision transformers have emerged as powerful tools for many computer vision tasks. It has been shown that their features and class tokens can be used for salient object segmentation. However, the properties of segmentation transformers remain largely unstudied. In this work we conduct an in-depth study of the spatial attentions of different backbone layers of semantic segmentation transformers and uncover interesting properties. The spatial attentions of a patch intersecting with an object tend to concentrate within the object, whereas the attentions of larger, more uniform image areas rather follow a diffusive behavior. In other words, vision transformers trained to segment a fixed set of object classes generalize to objects well beyond this set. We exploit this by extracting heatmaps that can be used to segment unknown objects within diverse backgrounds, such as obstacles in traffic scenes. Our method is training-free and its computational overhead negligible. We use off-the-shelf transformers trained for street-scene segmentation to process other scene types.

The problem of generating an optimal coalition structure for a given coalition game of rational agents is to find a partition that maximizes their social welfare and is known to be NP-hard. This paper proposes GCS-Q, a novel quantum-supported solution for Induced Subgraph Games (ISGs) in coalition structure generation. GCS-Q starts by considering the grand coalition as initial coalition structure and proceeds by iteratively splitting the coalitions into two nonempty subsets to obtain a coalition structure with a higher coalition value. In particular, given an $n$-agent ISG, the GCS-Q solves the optimal split problem $\mathcal{O} (n)$ times using a quantum annealing device, exploring $\mathcal{O}(2^n)$ partitions at each step. We show that GCS-Q outperforms the currently best classical solvers with its runtime in the order of $n^2$ and an expected worst-case approximation ratio of $93\%$ on standard benchmark datasets.

Cartesian impedance control is a type of motion control strategy for robots that improves safety in partially unknown environments by achieving a compliant behavior of the robot with respect to its external forces. This compliant robot behavior has the added benefit of allowing physical human guidance of the robot. In this paper, we propose a C++ implementation of compliance control valid for any torque-commanded robotic manipulator. The proposed controller implements Cartesian impedance control to track a desired end-effector pose. Additionally, joint impedance is projected in the nullspace of the Cartesian robot motion to track a desired robot joint configuration without perturbing the Cartesian motion of the robot. The proposed implementation also allows the robot to apply desired forces and torques to its environment. Several safety features such as filtering, rate limiting, and saturation are included in the proposed implementation. The core functionalities are in a re-usable base library and a Robot Operating System (ROS) ros_control integration is provided on top of that. The implementation was tested with the KUKA LBR iiwa robot and the Franka Emika Robot (Panda) both in simulation and with the physical robots.

Active learning as a paradigm in deep learning is especially important in applications involving intricate perception tasks such as object detection where labels are difficult and expensive to acquire. Development of active learning methods in such fields is highly computationally expensive and time consuming which obstructs the progression of research and leads to a lack of comparability between methods. In this work, we propose and investigate a sandbox setup for rapid development and transparent evaluation of active learning in deep object detection. Our experiments with commonly used configurations of datasets and detection architectures found in the literature show that results obtained in our sandbox environment are representative of results on standard configurations. The total compute time to obtain results and assess the learning behavior can thereby be reduced by factors of up to 14 when comparing with Pascal VOC and up to 32 when comparing with BDD100k. This allows for testing and evaluating data acquisition and labeling strategies in under half a day and contributes to the transparency and development speed in the field of active learning for object detection.

Using robots in educational contexts has already shown to be beneficial for a student's learning and social behaviour. For levitating them to the next level of providing more effective and human-like tutoring, the ability to adapt to the user and to express proactivity is fundamental. By acting proactively, intelligent robotic tutors anticipate possible situations where problems for the student may arise and act in advance for preventing negative outcomes. Still, the decisions of when and how to behave proactively are open questions. Therefore, this paper deals with the investigation of how the student's cognitive-affective states can be used by a robotic tutor for triggering proactive tutoring dialogue. In doing so, it is aimed to improve the learning experience. For this reason, a concept learning task scenario was observed where a robotic assistant proactively helped when negative user states were detected. In a learning task, the user's states of frustration and confusion were deemed to have negative effects on the outcome of the task and were used to trigger proactive behaviour. In an empirical user study with 40 undergraduate and doctoral students, we studied whether the initiation of proactive behaviour after the detection of signs of confusion and frustration improves the student's concentration and trust in the agent. Additionally, we investigated which level of proactive dialogue is useful for promoting the student's concentration and trust. The results show that high proactive behaviour harms trust, especially when triggered during negative cognitive-affective states but contributes to keeping the student focused on the task when triggered in these states. Based on our study results, we further discuss future steps for improving the proactive assistance of robotic tutoring systems.

Self-training has been shown to be helpful in addressing data scarcity for many domains, including vision, speech, and language. Specifically, self-training, or pseudo-labeling, labels unsupervised data and adds that to the training pool. In this work, we investigate and use pseudo-labeling for a recently proposed novel setup: joint transcription and translation of speech, which suffers from an absence of sufficient data resources. We show that under such data-deficient circumstances, the unlabeled data can significantly vary in domain from the supervised data, which results in pseudo-label quality degradation. We investigate two categories of remedies that require no additional supervision and target the domain mismatch: pseudo-label filtering and data augmentation. We show that pseudo-label analysis and processing as such results in additional gains on top of the vanilla pseudo-labeling setup resulting in total improvements of up to 0.6% absolute WER and 2.2 BLEU points.