联合学习已被提议作为隐私的机器学习框架，该框架使多个客户能够在不共享原始数据的情况下进行协作。但是，在此框架中，设计并不能保证客户隐私保护。先前的工作表明，联邦学习中的梯度共享策略可能容易受到数据重建攻击的影响。但是，实际上，考虑到高沟通成本或由于增强隐私要求，客户可能不会传输原始梯度。实证研究表明，梯度混淆，包括通过梯度噪声注入和通过梯度压缩的无意化混淆的意图混淆，可以提供更多的隐私保护，以防止重建攻击。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个针对联合学习中图像分类任务的新数据重建攻击框架。我们表明，通常采用的梯度后处理程序，例如梯度量化，梯度稀疏和梯度扰动，可能会在联合学习中具有错误的安全感。与先前的研究相反，我们认为不应将隐私增强视为梯度压缩的副产品。此外，我们在提出的框架下设计了一种新方法，以在语义层面重建图像。我们量化语义隐私泄漏，并根据图像相似性分数进行比较。我们的比较挑战了文献中图像数据泄漏评估方案。结果强调了在现有联合学习算法中重新审视和重新设计对客户数据的隐私保护机制的重要性。

联合学习（FL）是一种保护隐私的范式，其中多个参与者共同解决机器学习问题而无需共享原始数据。与传统的分布式学习不同，FL的独特特征是统计异质性，即，跨参与者的数据分布彼此不同。同时，神经网络解释的最新进展已广泛使用神经切线核（NTK）进行收敛分析。在本文中，我们提出了一个新颖的FL范式，该范式由NTK框架赋予了能力。该范式通过传输比常规FL范式更具表现力的更新数据来解决统计异质性的挑战。具体而言，通过样本的雅各布矩阵，而不是模型的权重/梯度，由参与者上传。然后，服务器构建了经验内核矩阵，以更新全局模型，而无需明确执行梯度下降。我们进一步开发了一种具有提高沟通效率和增强隐私性的变体。数值结果表明，与联邦平均相比，所提出的范式可以达到相同的精度，同时将通信弹的数量减少数量级。

Federated learning allows collaborative workers to solve a machine learning problem while preserving data privacy. Recent studies have tackled various challenges in federated learning, but the joint optimization of communication overhead, learning reliability, and deployment efficiency is still an open problem. To this end, we propose a new scheme named federated learning via plurality vote (FedVote). In each communication round of FedVote, workers transmit binary or ternary weights to the server with low communication overhead. The model parameters are aggregated via weighted voting to enhance the resilience against Byzantine attacks. When deployed for inference, the model with binary or ternary weights is resource-friendly to edge devices. We show that our proposed method can reduce quantization error and converges faster compared with the methods directly quantizing the model updates.

联合学习可以使远程工作人员能够协作培训共享机器学习模型，同时允许在本地保持训练数据。在无线移动设备的用例中，由于功率和带宽有限，通信开销是关键瓶颈。前工作已经利用了各种数据压缩工具，例如量化和稀疏，以减少开销。在本文中，我们提出了一种用于联合学习的预测编码的压缩方案。该方案在所有设备中具有共享预测功能，并且允许每个工作人员发送来自参考的压缩残余矢量。在每个通信中，我们基于速率失真成本选择预测器和量化器，并进一步降低熵编码的冗余。广泛的模拟表明，与其他基线方法相比，甚至更好的学习性能，通信成本可以减少高达99％。

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) captures cross-sectional data and is used for the screening, monitoring, and treatment planning of retinal diseases. Technological developments to increase the speed of acquisition often results in systems with a narrower spectral bandwidth, and hence a lower axial resolution. Traditionally, image-processing-based techniques have been utilized to reconstruct subsampled OCT data and more recently, deep-learning-based methods have been explored. In this study, we simulate reduced axial scan (A-scan) resolution by Gaussian windowing in the spectral domain and investigate the use of a learning-based approach for image feature reconstruction. In anticipation of the reduced resolution that accompanies wide-field OCT systems, we build upon super-resolution techniques to explore methods to better aid clinicians in their decision-making to improve patient outcomes, by reconstructing lost features using a pixel-to-pixel approach with an altered super-resolution generative adversarial network (SRGAN) architecture.

We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball oracle acceleration [CJJJLST20, ACJJS21], we develop algorithms achieving state-of-the-art complexities for SCO in parallel and private settings. For a SCO objective constrained to the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we obtain the following results (up to polylogarithmic factors). We give a parallel algorithm obtaining optimization error $\epsilon_{\text{opt}}$ with $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3}$ gradient oracle query depth and $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3} + \epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2}$ gradient queries in total, assuming access to a bounded-variance stochastic gradient estimator. For $\epsilon_{\text{opt}} \in [d^{-1}, d^{-1/4}]$, our algorithm matches the state-of-the-art oracle depth of [BJLLS19] while maintaining the optimal total work of stochastic gradient descent. We give an $(\epsilon_{\text{dp}}, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, given $n$ samples of Lipschitz loss functions, obtains near-optimal optimization error and makes $\min(n, n^2\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^2 d^{-1}) + \min(n^{4/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{1/3}, (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1})$ queries to the gradients of these functions. In the regime $d \le n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{2}$, where privacy comes at no cost in terms of the optimal loss up to constants, our algorithm uses $n + (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1}$ queries and improves recent advancements of [KLL21, AFKT21]. In the moderately low-dimensional setting $d \le \sqrt n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{3/2}$, our query complexity is near-linear.

Cashews are grown by over 3 million smallholders in more than 40 countries worldwide as a principal source of income. As the third largest cashew producer in Africa, Benin has nearly 200,000 smallholder cashew growers contributing 15% of the country's national export earnings. However, a lack of information on where and how cashew trees grow across the country hinders decision-making that could support increased cashew production and poverty alleviation. By leveraging 2.4-m Planet Basemaps and 0.5-m aerial imagery, newly developed deep learning algorithms, and large-scale ground truth datasets, we successfully produced the first national map of cashew in Benin and characterized the expansion of cashew plantations between 2015 and 2021. In particular, we developed a SpatioTemporal Classification with Attention (STCA) model to map the distribution of cashew plantations, which can fully capture texture information from discriminative time steps during a growing season. We further developed a Clustering Augmented Self-supervised Temporal Classification (CASTC) model to distinguish high-density versus low-density cashew plantations by automatic feature extraction and optimized clustering. Results show that the STCA model has an overall accuracy of 80% and the CASTC model achieved an overall accuracy of 77.9%. We found that the cashew area in Benin has doubled from 2015 to 2021 with 60% of new plantation development coming from cropland or fallow land, while encroachment of cashew plantations into protected areas has increased by 70%. Only half of cashew plantations were high-density in 2021, suggesting high potential for intensification. Our study illustrates the power of combining high-resolution remote sensing imagery and state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to better understand tree crops in the heterogeneous smallholder landscape.

There are multiple scales of abstraction from which we can describe the same image, depending on whether we are focusing on fine-grained details or a more global attribute of the image. In brain mapping, learning to automatically parse images to build representations of both small-scale features (e.g., the presence of cells or blood vessels) and global properties of an image (e.g., which brain region the image comes from) is a crucial and open challenge. However, most existing datasets and benchmarks for neuroanatomy consider only a single downstream task at a time. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new dataset, annotations, and multiple downstream tasks that provide diverse ways to readout information about brain structure and architecture from the same image. Our multi-task neuroimaging benchmark (MTNeuro) is built on volumetric, micrometer-resolution X-ray microtomography images spanning a large thalamocortical section of mouse brain, encompassing multiple cortical and subcortical regions. We generated a number of different prediction challenges and evaluated several supervised and self-supervised models for brain-region prediction and pixel-level semantic segmentation of microstructures. Our experiments not only highlight the rich heterogeneity of this dataset, but also provide insights into how self-supervised approaches can be used to learn representations that capture multiple attributes of a single image and perform well on a variety of downstream tasks. Datasets, code, and pre-trained baseline models are provided at: https://mtneuro.github.io/ .

In this paper, we develop an efficient multi-scale network to predict action classes in partial videos in an end-to-end manner. Unlike most existing methods with offline feature generation, our method directly takes frames as input and further models motion evolution on two different temporal scales.Therefore, we solve the complexity problems of the two stages of modeling and the problem of insufficient temporal and spatial information of a single scale. Our proposed End-to-End MultiScale Network (E2EMSNet) is composed of two scales which are named segment scale and observed global scale. The segment scale leverages temporal difference over consecutive frames for finer motion patterns by supplying 2D convolutions. For observed global scale, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is incorporated to capture motion features of observed frames. Our model provides a simple and efficient modeling framework with a small computational cost. Our E2EMSNet is evaluated on three challenging datasets: BIT, HMDB51, and UCF101. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for action prediction in videos.

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can confound the action-reward or action-next-state relationships, rendering many existing OPE approaches ineffective. This paper develops an instrumental variable (IV)-based method for consistent OPE in confounded Markov decision processes (MDPs). Similar to single-stage decision making, we show that IV enables us to correctly identify the target policy's value in infinite horizon settings as well. Furthermore, we propose an efficient and robust value estimator and illustrate its effectiveness through extensive simulations and analysis of real data from a world-leading short-video platform.