最近，优化衍生的学习（ODL）吸引了学习和视觉领域的关注，该学习和视觉领域从优化的角度设计了学习模型。但是，以前的ODL方法将训练和超训练程序视为两个分离的阶段，这意味着在训练过程中必须固定超训练变量，因此也不可能同时获得训练和超级培训的收敛性训练变量。在这项工作中，我们将基于定点迭代的广义Krasnoselkii-Mann（GKM）计划设计为我们的基本ODL模块，该模块将现有的ODL方法统一为特殊情况。在GKM方案下，构建了双级元优化（BMO）算法框架，以共同解决最佳训练和超训练变量。我们严格地证明了训练定点迭代的基本关节融合以及优化超训练的超训练的过程，无论是在近似质量方面还是在固定分析上。实验证明了BMO在稀疏编码和现实世界中的竞争性能的效率，例如图像反卷积和降雨的删除。

基于梯度的高参数调整的优化方法可确保理论收敛到固定解决方案时，对于固定的上层变量值，双光线程序的下层级别强烈凸（LLSC）和平滑（LLS）。对于在许多机器学习算法中调整超参数引起的双重程序，不满足这种情况。在这项工作中，我们开发了一种基于不精确度（VF-IDCA）的基于依次收敛函数函数算法。我们表明，该算法从一系列的超级参数调整应用程序中实现了无LLSC和LLS假设的固定解决方案。我们的广泛实验证实了我们的理论发现，并表明，当应用于调子超参数时，提出的VF-IDCA会产生较高的性能。

近年来，已经开发出各种基于梯度的方法来解决机器学习和计算机视觉地区的双层优化（BLO）问题。然而，这些现有方法的理论正确性和实际有效性总是依赖于某些限制性条件（例如，下层单身，LLS），这在现实世界中可能很难满足。此外，以前的文献仅证明了基于其特定的迭代策略的理论结果，因此缺乏一般的配方，以统一分析不同梯度的BLO的收敛行为。在这项工作中，我们从乐观的双级视点制定BLOS，并建立一个名为Bi-Level血液血统聚合（BDA）的新梯度的算法框架，以部分地解决上述问题。具体而言，BDA提供模块化结构，以分级地聚合上层和下层子问题以生成我们的双级迭代动态。从理论上讲，我们建立了一般会聚分析模板，并导出了一种新的证据方法，以研究基于梯度的BLO方法的基本理论特性。此外，这项工作系统地探讨了BDA在不同优化场景中的收敛行为，即，考虑从解决近似子问题返回的各种解决方案质量（即，全局/本地/静止解决方案）。广泛的实验证明了我们的理论结果，并展示了所提出的超参数优化和元学习任务算法的优越性。源代码可在https://github.com/vis-opt-group/bda中获得。

本文首先提出了一种凸双翼优化范例，可以在现实世界场景中制定和优化流行的学习和视觉问题。与传统方法不同，直接基于给定的问题制定设计其迭代方案，我们将任务导向的能量引入我们的潜在约束，这集成了更丰富的任务信息。通过明确地重新表征可行性，我们建立了一种高效且灵活的算法框架，可以使用缩小解决方案空间和强大的辅助（基于任务的域知识和数据分布）来解决凸模型。理论上，我们提出了基于潜在可行性重新表征的数值策略的收敛分析。我们还在计算误差扰动下分析了理论会聚的稳定性。进行了广泛的数值实验，以验证我们的理论调查结果，并评估我们对不同应用方法的实际表现。

Increasing research interests focus on sequential recommender systems, aiming to model dynamic sequence representation precisely. However, the most commonly used loss function in state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models has essential limitations. To name a few, Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss suffers the vanishing gradient problem from numerous negative sampling and predictionbiases; Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss subjects to negative sampling numbers, thereby it is likely to ignore valuable negative examples and reduce the training efficiency; Cross-Entropy (CE) loss only focuses on the last timestamp of the training sequence, which causes low utilization of sequence information and results in inferior user sequence representation. To avoid these limitations, in this paper, we propose to calculate Cumulative Cross-Entropy (CCE) loss over the sequence. CCE is simple and direct, which enjoys the virtues of painless deployment, no negative sampling, and effective and efficient training. We conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CCE. The results show that employing CCE loss on three state-of-the-art models GRU4Rec, SASRec, and S3-Rec can reach 125.63%, 69.90%, and 33.24% average improvement of full ranking NDCG@5, respectively. Using CCE, the performance curve of the models on the test data increases rapidly with the wall clock time, and is superior to that of other loss functions in almost the whole process of model training.

The utilization of large-scale distributed renewable energy promotes the development of the multi-microgrid (MMG), which raises the need of developing an effective energy management method to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency. The multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) has been widely used for the energy management problem because of its real-time scheduling ability. However, its training requires massive energy operation data of microgrids (MGs), while gathering these data from different MGs would threaten their privacy and data security. Therefore, this paper tackles this practical yet challenging issue by proposing a federated multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (F-MADRL) algorithm via the physics-informed reward. In this algorithm, the federated learning (FL) mechanism is introduced to train the F-MADRL algorithm thus ensures the privacy and the security of data. In addition, a decentralized MMG model is built, and the energy of each participated MG is managed by an agent, which aims to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency according to the physics-informed reward. At first, MGs individually execute the self-training based on local energy operation data to train their local agent models. Then, these local models are periodically uploaded to a server and their parameters are aggregated to build a global agent, which will be broadcasted to MGs and replace their local agents. In this way, the experience of each MG agent can be shared and the energy operation data is not explicitly transmitted, thus protecting the privacy and ensuring data security. Finally, experiments are conducted on Oak Ridge national laboratory distributed energy control communication lab microgrid (ORNL-MG) test system, and the comparisons are carried out to verify the effectiveness of introducing the FL mechanism and the outperformance of our proposed F-MADRL.

This paper presents a safety-critical locomotion control framework for quadrupedal robots. Our goal is to enable quadrupedal robots to safely navigate in cluttered environments. To tackle this, we introduce exponential Discrete Control Barrier Functions (exponential DCBFs) with duality-based obstacle avoidance constraints into a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Whole-Body Control (WBC) framework for quadrupedal locomotion control. This enables us to use polytopes to describe the shapes of the robot and obstacles for collision avoidance while doing locomotion control of quadrupedal robots. Compared to most prior work, especially using CBFs, that utilize spherical and conservative approximation for obstacle avoidance, this work demonstrates a quadrupedal robot autonomously and safely navigating through very tight spaces in the real world. (Our open-source code is available at github.com/HybridRobotics/quadruped_nmpc_dcbf_duality, and the video is available at youtu.be/p1gSQjwXm1Q.)

Three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging technique has been applied for scoliosis assessment, but current assessment method only uses coronal projection image and cannot illustrate the 3D deformity and vertebra rotation. The vertebra detection is essential to reveal 3D spine information, but the detection task is challenging due to complex data and limited annotations. We propose VertMatch, a two-step framework to detect vertebral structures in 3D ultrasound volume by utilizing unlabeled data in semi-supervised manner. The first step is to detect the possible positions of structures on transverse slice globally, and then the local patches are cropped based on detected positions. The second step is to distinguish whether the patches contain real vertebral structures and screen the predicted positions from the first step. VertMatch develops three novel components for semi-supervised learning: for position detection in the first step, (1) anatomical prior is used to screen pseudo labels generated from confidence threshold method; (2) multi-slice consistency is used to utilize more unlabeled data by inputting multiple adjacent slices; (3) for patch identification in the second step, the categories are rebalanced in each batch to solve imbalance problem. Experimental results demonstrate that VertMatch can detect vertebra accurately in ultrasound volume and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. VertMatch is also validated in clinical application on forty ultrasound scans, and it can be a promising approach for 3D assessment of scoliosis.

Free-text rationales (FTRs) follow how humans communicate by explaining reasoning processes via natural language. A number of recent works have studied how to improve language model (LM) generalization by using FTRs to teach LMs the correct reasoning processes behind correct task outputs. These prior works aim to learn from FTRs by appending them to the LM input or target output, but this may introduce an input distribution shift or conflict with the task objective, respectively. We propose KNIFE, which distills FTR knowledge from an FTR-augmented teacher LM (takes both task input and FTR) to a student LM (takes only task input), which is used for inference. Crucially, the teacher LM's forward computation has a bottleneck stage in which all of its FTR states are masked out, which pushes knowledge from the FTR states into the task input/output states. Then, FTR knowledge is distilled to the student LM by training its task input/output states to align with the teacher LM's. On two question answering datasets, we show that KNIFE significantly outperforms existing FTR learning methods, in both fully-supervised and low-resource settings.

Time series anomaly detection strives to uncover potential abnormal behaviors and patterns from temporal data, and has fundamental significance in diverse application scenarios. Constructing an effective detection model usually requires adequate training data stored in a centralized manner, however, this requirement sometimes could not be satisfied in realistic scenarios. As a prevailing approach to address the above problem, federated learning has demonstrated its power to cooperate with the distributed data available while protecting the privacy of data providers. However, it is still unclear that how existing time series anomaly detection algorithms perform with decentralized data storage and privacy protection through federated learning. To study this, we conduct a federated time series anomaly detection benchmark, named FedTADBench, which involves five representative time series anomaly detection algorithms and four popular federated learning methods. We would like to answer the following questions: (1)How is the performance of time series anomaly detection algorithms when meeting federated learning? (2) Which federated learning method is the most appropriate one for time series anomaly detection? (3) How do federated time series anomaly detection approaches perform on different partitions of data in clients? Numbers of results as well as corresponding analysis are provided from extensive experiments with various settings. The source code of our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/fanxingliu2020/FedTADBench.