Algorithms with predictions is a recent framework that has been used to overcome pessimistic worst-case bounds in incomplete information settings. In the context of scheduling, very recent work has leveraged machine-learned predictions to design algorithms that achieve improved approximation ratios in settings where the processing times of the jobs are initially unknown. In this paper, we study the speed-robust scheduling problem where the speeds of the machines, instead of the processing times of the jobs, are unknown and augment this problem with predictions. Our main result is an algorithm that achieves a $\min\{\eta^2(1+\alpha), (2 + 2/\alpha)\}$ approximation, for any $\alpha \in (0,1)$, where $\eta \geq 1$ is the prediction error. When the predictions are accurate, this approximation outperforms the best known approximation for speed-robust scheduling without predictions of $2-1/m$, where $m$ is the number of machines, while simultaneously maintaining a worst-case approximation of $2 + 2/\alpha$ even when the predictions are arbitrarily wrong. In addition, we obtain improved approximations for three special cases: equal job sizes, infinitesimal job sizes, and binary machine speeds. We also complement our algorithmic results with lower bounds. Finally, we empirically evaluate our algorithm against existing algorithms for speed-robust scheduling.

This paper illustrates the technologies of user next intent prediction with a concept knowledge graph. The system has been deployed on the Web at Alipay, serving more than 100 million daily active users. Specifically, we propose AlipayKG to explicitly characterize user intent, which is an offline concept knowledge graph in the Life-Service domain modeling the historical behaviors of users, the rich content interacted by users and the relations between them. We further introduce a Transformer-based model which integrates expert rules from the knowledge graph to infer the online user's next intent. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can effectively enhance the performance of the downstream tasks while retaining explainability.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are found to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, and various methods have been proposed for the defense. Among these methods, adversarial training has been drawing increasing attention because of its simplicity and effectiveness. However, the performance of the adversarial training is greatly limited by the architectures of target DNNs, which often makes the resulting DNNs with poor accuracy and unsatisfactory robustness. To address this problem, we propose DSARA to automatically search for the neural architectures that are accurate and robust after adversarial training. In particular, we design a novel cell-based search space specially for adversarial training, which improves the accuracy and the robustness upper bound of the searched architectures by carefully designing the placement of the cells and the proportional relationship of the filter numbers. Then we propose a two-stage search strategy to search for both accurate and robust neural architectures. At the first stage, the architecture parameters are optimized to minimize the adversarial loss, which makes full use of the effectiveness of the adversarial training in enhancing the robustness. At the second stage, the architecture parameters are optimized to minimize both the natural loss and the adversarial loss utilizing the proposed multi-objective adversarial training method, so that the searched neural architectures are both accurate and robust. We evaluate the proposed algorithm under natural data and various adversarial attacks, which reveals the superiority of the proposed method in terms of both accurate and robust architectures. We also conclude that accurate and robust neural architectures tend to deploy very different structures near the input and the output, which has great practical significance on both hand-crafting and automatically designing of accurate and robust neural architectures.

Federated learning (FL) is a method to train model with distributed data from numerous participants such as IoT devices. It inherently assumes a uniform capacity among participants. However, participants have diverse computational resources in practice due to different conditions such as different energy budgets or executing parallel unrelated tasks. It is necessary to reduce the computation overhead for participants with inefficient computational resources, otherwise they would be unable to finish the full training process. To address the computation heterogeneity, in this paper we propose a strategy for estimating local models without computationally intensive iterations. Based on it, we propose Computationally Customized Federated Learning (CCFL), which allows each participant to determine whether to perform conventional local training or model estimation in each round based on its current computational resources. Both theoretical analysis and exhaustive experiments indicate that CCFL has the same convergence rate as FedAvg without resource constraints. Furthermore, CCFL can be viewed of a computation-efficient extension of FedAvg that retains model performance while considerably reducing computation overhead.

A computational graph in a deep neural network (DNN) denotes a specific data flow diagram (DFD) composed of many tensors and operators. Existing toolkits for visualizing computational graphs are not applicable when the structure is highly complicated and large-scale (e.g., BERT [1]). To address this problem, we propose leveraging a suite of visual simplification techniques, including a cycle-removing method, a module-based edge-pruning algorithm, and an isomorphic subgraph stacking strategy. We design and implement an interactive visualization system that is suitable for computational graphs with up to 10 thousand elements. Experimental results and usage scenarios demonstrate that our tool reduces 60% elements on average and hence enhances the performance for recognizing and diagnosing DNN models. Our contributions are integrated into an open-source DNN visualization toolkit, namely, MindInsight [2].

Reasoning, as an essential ability for complex problem-solving, can provide back-end support for various real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis, negotiation, etc. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge research on reasoning with language model prompting. We introduce research works with comparisons and summaries and provide systematic resources to help beginners. We also discuss the potential reasons for emerging such reasoning abilities and highlight future research directions.

Conversational text-to-SQL is designed to translate multi-turn natural language questions into their corresponding SQL queries. Most state-of-the-art conversational text- to-SQL methods are incompatible with generative pre-trained language models (PLMs), such as T5. In this paper, we present a two-stage unified MultI-task Generation frAmework (MIGA) that leverages PLMs' ability to tackle conversational text-to-SQL. In the pre-training stage, MIGA first decomposes the main task into several related sub-tasks and then unifies them into the same sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) paradigm with task-specific natural language prompts to boost the main task from multi-task training. Later in the fine-tuning stage, we propose four SQL perturbations to alleviate the error propagation problem. MIGA tends to achieve state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks (SparC and CoSQL). We also provide extensive analyses and discussions to shed light on some new perspectives for conversational text-to-SQL.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used for medical image segmentation. In most studies, only the output layer is exploited to compute the final segmentation results and the hidden representations of the deep learned features have not been well understood. In this paper, we propose a prototype segmentation (ProtoSeg) method to compute a binary segmentation map based on deep features. We measure the segmentation abilities of the features by computing the Dice between the feature segmentation map and ground-truth, named as the segmentation ability score (SA score for short). The corresponding SA score can quantify the segmentation abilities of deep features in different layers and units to understand the deep neural networks for segmentation. In addition, our method can provide a mean SA score which can give a performance estimation of the output on the test images without ground-truth. Finally, we use the proposed ProtoSeg method to compute the segmentation map directly on input images to further understand the segmentation ability of each input image. Results are presented on segmenting tumors in brain MRI, lesions in skin images, COVID-related abnormality in CT images, prostate segmentation in abdominal MRI, and pancreatic mass segmentation in CT images. Our method can provide new insights for interpreting and explainable AI systems for medical image segmentation. Our code is available on: \url{https://github.com/shengfly/ProtoSeg}.

Federated learning achieves joint training of deep models by connecting decentralized data sources, which can significantly mitigate the risk of privacy leakage. However, in a more general case, the distributions of labels among clients are different, called ``label distribution skew''. Directly applying conventional federated learning without consideration of label distribution skew issue significantly hurts the performance of the global model. To this end, we propose a novel federated learning method, named FedMGD, to alleviate the performance degradation caused by the label distribution skew issue. It introduces a global Generative Adversarial Network to model the global data distribution without access to local datasets, so the global model can be trained using the global information of data distribution without privacy leakage. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on several public benchmarks. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Sheng-T/FedMGD}.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.