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.

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.

The growing interest in intelligent services and privacy protection for mobile devices has given rise to the widespread application of federated learning in Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). Diverse user behaviors call for personalized services with heterogeneous Machine Learning (ML) models on different devices. Federated Multi-task Learning (FMTL) is proposed to train related but personalized ML models for different devices, whereas previous works suffer from excessive communication overhead during training and neglect the model heterogeneity among devices in MEC. Introducing knowledge distillation into FMTL can simultaneously enable efficient communication and model heterogeneity among clients, whereas existing methods rely on a public dataset, which is impractical in reality. To tackle this dilemma, Federated MultI-task Distillation for Multi-access Edge CompuTing (FedICT) is proposed. FedICT direct local-global knowledge aloof during bi-directional distillation processes between clients and the server, aiming to enable multi-task clients while alleviating client drift derived from divergent optimization directions of client-side local models. Specifically, FedICT includes Federated Prior Knowledge Distillation (FPKD) and Local Knowledge Adjustment (LKA). FPKD is proposed to reinforce the clients' fitting of local data by introducing prior knowledge of local data distributions. Moreover, LKA is proposed to correct the distillation loss of the server, making the transferred local knowledge better match the generalized representation. Experiments on three datasets show that FedICT significantly outperforms all compared benchmarks in various data heterogeneous and model architecture settings, achieving improved accuracy with less than 1.2% training communication overhead compared with FedAvg and no more than 75% training communication round compared with FedGKT.

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].

Pre-trained models have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). However, existing pre-training methods underutilize the benefits of language understanding for generation. Inspired by the idea of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), we propose a GAN-style model for encoder-decoder pre-training by introducing an auxiliary discriminator, unifying the ability of language understanding and generation in a single model. Our model, named as GanLM, is trained with two pre-training objectives: replaced token detection and replaced token denoising. Specifically, given masked source sentences, the generator outputs the target distribution and the discriminator predicts whether the target sampled tokens from distribution are incorrect. The target sentence is replaced with misclassified tokens to construct noisy previous context, which is used to generate the gold sentence. In general, both tasks improve the ability of language understanding and generation by selectively using the denoising data. Extensive experiments in language generation benchmarks show that GanLM with the powerful language understanding capability outperforms various strong pre-trained language models (PLMs) and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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}.

In this work, we propose a lightweight integrated LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system with high efficiency and a great loop closure capacity. We found that the current State-of-the-art LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system has poor performance in loop closure. The LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system often fails with the large drifting and suffers from limited efficiency when faced with large-scale circumstances. In this work, firstly, to improve the speed of the whole LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system, we have proposed a new data structure of the sparse voxel-hashing to enhance the efficiency of the LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system. Secondly, to improve the point cloud-based localization performance, we have integrated the loop closure algorithms to improve the localization performance. Extensive experiments on the real-scene large-scale complicated circumstances demonstrate the great effectiveness and robustness of the proposed LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system.