在联合学习中，针对拜占庭式攻击的大多数现有技术用于IID设置，即客户的数据分布是独立的且分布相同的。在本文中，我们解决了标签偏度，这是一个更现实，更具挑战性的非IID设置，每个客户只能访问几类数据。在这种情况下，最先进的技术遭受选择偏见的影响，导致特定类别的性能下降；由于诚实客户梯度之间的偏差增加，他们也更容易受到拜占庭攻击的影响。为了解决这些限制，我们提出了一种名为Boba的有效的两阶段方法。从理论上讲，我们证明了Boba具有最佳顺序错误的收敛性。从经验上讲，我们在针对各种基线的广泛模型和数据集中验证了Boba的优势无偏见和鲁棒性。

Benefiting from the intrinsic supervision information exploitation capability, contrastive learning has achieved promising performance in the field of deep graph clustering recently. However, we observe that two drawbacks of the positive and negative sample construction mechanisms limit the performance of existing algorithms from further improvement. 1) The quality of positive samples heavily depends on the carefully designed data augmentations, while inappropriate data augmentations would easily lead to the semantic drift and indiscriminative positive samples. 2) The constructed negative samples are not reliable for ignoring important clustering information. To solve these problems, we propose a Cluster-guided Contrastive deep Graph Clustering network (CCGC) by mining the intrinsic supervision information in the high-confidence clustering results. Specifically, instead of conducting complex node or edge perturbation, we construct two views of the graph by designing special Siamese encoders whose weights are not shared between the sibling sub-networks. Then, guided by the high-confidence clustering information, we carefully select and construct the positive samples from the same high-confidence cluster in two views. Moreover, to construct semantic meaningful negative sample pairs, we regard the centers of different high-confidence clusters as negative samples, thus improving the discriminative capability and reliability of the constructed sample pairs. Lastly, we design an objective function to pull close the samples from the same cluster while pushing away those from other clusters by maximizing and minimizing the cross-view cosine similarity between positive and negative samples. Extensive experimental results on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CCGC compared with the existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

Optimal transport (OT) has become a widely used tool in the machine learning field to measure the discrepancy between probability distributions. For instance, OT is a popular loss function that quantifies the discrepancy between an empirical distribution and a parametric model. Recently, an entropic penalty term and the celebrated Sinkhorn algorithm have been commonly used to approximate the original OT in a computationally efficient way. However, since the Sinkhorn algorithm runs a projection associated with the Kullback-Leibler divergence, it is often vulnerable to outliers. To overcome this problem, we propose regularizing OT with the \beta-potential term associated with the so-called $\beta$-divergence, which was developed in robust statistics. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the $\beta$-potential can prevent the mass from being transported to outliers. We experimentally demonstrate that the transport matrix computed with our algorithm helps estimate a probability distribution robustly even in the presence of outliers. In addition, our proposed method can successfully detect outliers from a contaminated dataset

To improve uncertainty quantification of variance networks, we propose a novel tree-structured local neural network model that partitions the feature space into multiple regions based on uncertainty heterogeneity. A tree is built upon giving the training data, whose leaf nodes represent different regions where region-specific neural networks are trained to predict both the mean and the variance for quantifying uncertainty. The proposed Uncertainty-Splitting Neural Regression Tree (USNRT) employs novel splitting criteria. At each node, a neural network is trained on the full data first, and a statistical test for the residuals is conducted to find the best split, corresponding to the two sub-regions with the most significant uncertainty heterogeneity. USNRT is computationally friendly because very few leaf nodes are sufficient and pruning is unnecessary. On extensive UCI datasets, in terms of both calibration and sharpness, USNRT shows superior performance compared to some recent popular methods for variance prediction, including vanilla variance network, deep ensemble, dropout-based methods, tree-based models, etc. Through comprehensive visualization and analysis, we uncover how USNRT works and show its merits.

In the era of Internet of Things (IoT), network-wide anomaly detection is a crucial part of monitoring IoT networks due to the inherent security vulnerabilities of most IoT devices. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) has been proposed to separate network traffics into two disjoint subspaces corresponding to normal and malicious behaviors for anomaly detection. However, the privacy concerns and limitations of devices' computing resources compromise the practical effectiveness of PCA. We propose a federated PCA-based Grassmannian optimization framework that coordinates IoT devices to aggregate a joint profile of normal network behaviors for anomaly detection. First, we introduce a privacy-preserving federated PCA framework to simultaneously capture the profile of various IoT devices' traffic. Then, we investigate the alternating direction method of multipliers gradient-based learning on the Grassmann manifold to guarantee fast training and the absence of detecting latency using limited computational resources. Empirical results on the NSL-KDD dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches. Finally, we show that the Grassmann manifold algorithm is highly adapted for IoT anomaly detection, which permits drastically reducing the analysis time of the system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first federated PCA algorithm for anomaly detection meeting the requirements of IoT networks.

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) often utilize external knowledge graphs (KGs) to introduce rich semantic information and recommend relevant items through natural language dialogues. However, original KGs employed in existing CRSs are often incomplete and sparse, which limits the reasoning capability in recommendation. Moreover, only few of existing studies exploit the dialogue context to dynamically refine knowledge from KGs for better recommendation. To address the above issues, we propose the Variational Reasoning over Incomplete KGs Conversational Recommender (VRICR). Our key idea is to incorporate the large dialogue corpus naturally accompanied with CRSs to enhance the incomplete KGs; and perform dynamic knowledge reasoning conditioned on the dialogue context. Specifically, we denote the dialogue-specific subgraphs of KGs as latent variables with categorical priors for adaptive knowledge graphs refactor. We propose a variational Bayesian method to approximate posterior distributions over dialogue-specific subgraphs, which not only leverages the dialogue corpus for restructuring missing entity relations but also dynamically selects knowledge based on the dialogue context. Finally, we infuse the dialogue-specific subgraphs to decode the recommendation and responses. We conduct experiments on two benchmark CRSs datasets. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Relation extraction (RE), which has relied on structurally annotated corpora for model training, has been particularly challenging in low-resource scenarios and domains. Recent literature has tackled low-resource RE by self-supervised learning, where the solution involves pretraining the relation embedding by RE-based objective and finetuning on labeled data by classification-based objective. However, a critical challenge to this approach is the gap in objectives, which prevents the RE model from fully utilizing the knowledge in pretrained representations. In this paper, we aim at bridging the gap and propose to pretrain and finetune the RE model using consistent objectives of contrastive learning. Since in this kind of representation learning paradigm, one relation may easily form multiple clusters in the representation space, we further propose a multi-center contrastive loss that allows one relation to form multiple clusters to better align with pretraining. Experiments on two document-level RE datasets, BioRED and Re-DocRED, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Particularly, when using 1% end-task training data, our method outperforms PLM-based RE classifier by 10.5% and 5.8% on the two datasets, respectively.

Relation Extraction (RE) has been extended to cross-document scenarios because many relations are not simply described in a single document. This inevitably brings the challenge of efficient open-space evidence retrieval to support the inference of cross-document relations, along with the challenge of multi-hop reasoning on top of entities and evidence scattered in an open set of documents. To combat these challenges, we propose Mr.CoD, a multi-hop evidence retrieval method based on evidence path mining and ranking with adapted dense retrievers. We explore multiple variants of retrievers to show evidence retrieval is an essential part in cross-document RE. Experiments on CodRED show that evidence retrieval with Mr.Cod effectively acquires cross-document evidence that essentially supports open-setting cross-document RE. Additionally, we show that Mr.CoD facilitates evidence retrieval and boosts end-to-end RE performance with effective multi-hop reasoning in both closed and open settings of RE.

Data Augmentation (DA) is frequently used to automatically provide additional training data without extra human annotation. However, data augmentation may introduce noisy data that impairs training. To guarantee the quality of augmented data, existing methods either assume no noise exists in the augmented data and adopt consistency training or use simple heuristics such as training loss and diversity constraints to filter out ``noisy'' data. However, those filtered examples may still contain useful information, and dropping them completely causes loss of supervision signals. In this paper, based on the assumption that the original dataset is cleaner than the augmented data, we propose an on-the-fly denoising technique for data augmentation that learns from soft augmented labels provided by an organic teacher model trained on the cleaner original data. A simple self-regularization module is applied to force the model prediction to be consistent across two distinct dropouts to further prevent overfitting on noisy labels. Our method can be applied to augmentation techniques in general and can consistently improve the performance on both text classification and question-answering tasks.

In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, the Enhanced Interactive Transformer (EIT), to address the issue of head degradation in self-attention mechanisms. Our approach replaces the traditional multi-head self-attention mechanism with the Enhanced Multi-Head Attention (EMHA) mechanism, which relaxes the one-to-one mapping constraint among queries and keys, allowing each query to attend to multiple keys. Furthermore, we introduce two interaction models, Inner-Subspace Interaction and Cross-Subspace Interaction, to fully utilize the many-to-many mapping capabilities of EMHA. Extensive experiments on a wide range of tasks (e.g. machine translation, abstractive summarization, grammar correction, language modelling and brain disease automatic diagnosis) show its superiority with a very modest increase in model size.