Federated learning (FL) has been recognized as a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning paradigm that enables knowledge sharing among various heterogeneous artificial intelligence (AIoT) devices through centralized global model aggregation. FL suffers from model inaccuracy and slow convergence due to the model heterogeneity of the AIoT devices involved. Although various existing methods try to solve the bottleneck of the model heterogeneity problem, most of them improve the accuracy of heterogeneous models in a coarse-grained manner, which makes it still a great challenge to deploy large-scale AIoT devices. To alleviate the negative impact of this problem and take full advantage of the diversity of each heterogeneous model, we propose an efficient framework named HierarchyFL, which uses a small amount of public data for efficient and scalable knowledge across a variety of differently structured models. By using self-distillation and our proposed ensemble library, each hierarchical model can intelligently learn from each other on cloud servers. Experimental results on various well-known datasets show that HierarchyFL can not only maximize the knowledge sharing among various heterogeneous models in large-scale AIoT systems, but also greatly improve the model performance of each involved heterogeneous AIoT device.

作为一种有希望的隐私机器学习方法，联合学习（FL）可以使客户跨客户培训，而不会损害其机密的本地数据。但是，现有的FL方法遇到了不均分布数据的推理性能低的问题，因为它们中的大多数依赖于联合平均（FIDAVG）基于联合的聚合。通过以粗略的方式平均模型参数，FedAvg将局部模型的个体特征黯然失色，这极大地限制了FL的推理能力。更糟糕的是，在每一轮FL培训中，FedAvg向客户端向客户派遣了相同的初始本地模型，这很容易导致对最佳全局模型的局限性搜索。为了解决上述问题，本文提出了一种新颖有效的FL范式，名为FEDMR（联合模型重组）。与传统的基于FedAvg的方法不同，FEDMR的云服务器将收集到的本地型号的每一层层混合，并重组它们以实现新的模型，以供客户端培训。由于在每场FL比赛中进行了细粒度的模型重组和本地培训，FEDMR可以迅速为所有客户找出一个全球最佳模型。全面的实验结果表明，与最先进的FL方法相比，FEDMR可以显着提高推理准确性而不会引起额外的通信开销。

图形离群值检测是一项具有许多应用程序的新兴但至关重要的机器学习任务。尽管近年来算法扩散，但缺乏标准和统一的绩效评估设置限制了它们在现实世界应用中的进步和使用。为了利用差距，我们（据我们所知）（据我们所知）第一个全面的无监督节点离群值检测基准为unod，并带有以下亮点：（1）评估骨架从经典矩阵分解到最新图形神经的骨架的14个方法网络； （2）在现实世界数据集上使用不同类型的注射异常值和自然异常值对方法性能进行基准测试； （3）通过在不同尺度的合成图上使用运行时和GPU存储器使用算法的效率和可扩展性。基于广泛的实验结果的分析，我们讨论了当前渠道方法的利弊，并指出了多个关键和有希望的未来研究方向。

我们提出了TOD，这是一个在分布式多GPU机器上进行有效且可扩展的离群检测（OD）的系统。 TOD背后的一个关键思想是将OD应用程序分解为基本张量代数操作。这种分解使TOD能够通过利用硬件和软件中深度学习基础架构的最新进展来加速OD计算。此外，要在有限内存的现代GPU上部署昂贵的OD算法，我们引入了两种关键技术。首先，可证明的量化可以加快OD计算的速度，并通过以较低的精度执行特定的浮点操作来减少其内存足迹，同时证明没有准确的损失。其次，为了利用多个GPU的汇总计算资源和内存能力，我们引入了自动批处理，该批次将OD计算分解为小批次，以便在多个GPU上并行执行。 TOD支持一套全面且多样化的OD算法，例如LOF，PCA和HBOS以及实用程序功能。对真实和合成OD数据集的广泛评估表明，TOD平均比领先的基于CPU的OD系统PYOD快11.6倍（最大加速度为38.9倍），并且比各种GPU底线要处理的数据集更大。值得注意的是，TOD可以直接整合其他OD算法，并提供了将经典OD算法与深度学习方法相结合的统一框架。这些组合产生了无限数量的OD方法，其中许多方法是新颖的，可以很容易地在TOD中进行原型。

Few Shot Instance Segmentation (FSIS) requires models to detect and segment novel classes with limited several support examples. In this work, we explore a simple yet unified solution for FSIS as well as its incremental variants, and introduce a new framework named Reference Twice (RefT) to fully explore the relationship between support/query features based on a Transformer-like framework. Our key insights are two folds: Firstly, with the aid of support masks, we can generate dynamic class centers more appropriately to re-weight query features. Secondly, we find that support object queries have already encoded key factors after base training. In this way, the query features can be enhanced twice from two aspects, i.e., feature-level and instance-level. In particular, we firstly design a mask-based dynamic weighting module to enhance support features and then propose to link object queries for better calibration via cross-attention. After the above steps, the novel classes can be improved significantly over our strong baseline. Additionally, our new framework can be easily extended to incremental FSIS with minor modification. When benchmarking results on the COCO dataset for FSIS, gFSIS, and iFSIS settings, our method achieves a competitive performance compared to existing approaches across different shots, e.g., we boost nAP by noticeable +8.2/+9.4 over the current state-of-the-art FSIS method for 10/30-shot. We further demonstrate the superiority of our approach on Few Shot Object Detection. Code and model will be available.

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.

In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on discounted MDPs, robust average-reward MDPs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we focus on robust average-reward MDPs, where the goal is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case average reward over an uncertainty set. We first take an approach that approximates average-reward MDPs using discounted MDPs. We prove that the robust discounted value function converges to the robust average-reward as the discount factor $\gamma$ goes to $1$, and moreover, when $\gamma$ is large, any optimal policy of the robust discounted MDP is also an optimal policy of the robust average-reward. We further design a robust dynamic programming approach, and theoretically characterize its convergence to the optimum. Then, we investigate robust average-reward MDPs directly without using discounted MDPs as an intermediate step. We derive the robust Bellman equation for robust average-reward MDPs, prove that the optimal policy can be derived from its solution, and further design a robust relative value iteration algorithm that provably finds its solution, or equivalently, the optimal robust policy.

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted considerable attention as a gradient-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method. Since the introduction of DARTS, there has been little work done on adapting the action space based on state-of-art architecture design principles for CNNs. In this work, we aim to address this gap by incrementally augmenting the DARTS search space with micro-design changes inspired by ConvNeXt and studying the trade-off between accuracy, evaluation layer count, and computational cost. To this end, we introduce the Pseudo-Inverted Bottleneck conv block intending to reduce the computational footprint of the inverted bottleneck block proposed in ConvNeXt. Our proposed architecture is much less sensitive to evaluation layer count and outperforms a DARTS network with similar size significantly, at layer counts as small as 2. Furthermore, with less layers, not only does it achieve higher accuracy with lower GMACs and parameter count, GradCAM comparisons show that our network is able to better detect distinctive features of target objects compared to DARTS.

Automatic font generation without human experts is a practical and significant problem, especially for some languages that consist of a large number of characters. Existing methods for font generation are often in supervised learning. They require a large number of paired data, which are labor-intensive and expensive to collect. In contrast, common unsupervised image-to-image translation methods are not applicable to font generation, as they often define style as the set of textures and colors. In this work, we propose a robust deformable generative network for unsupervised font generation (abbreviated as DGFont++). We introduce a feature deformation skip connection (FDSC) to learn local patterns and geometric transformations between fonts. The FDSC predicts pairs of displacement maps and employs the predicted maps to apply deformable convolution to the low-level content feature maps. The outputs of FDSC are fed into a mixer to generate final results. Moreover, we introduce contrastive self-supervised learning to learn a robust style representation for fonts by understanding the similarity and dissimilarities of fonts. To distinguish different styles, we train our model with a multi-task discriminator, which ensures that each style can be discriminated independently. In addition to adversarial loss, another two reconstruction losses are adopted to constrain the domain-invariant characteristics between generated images and content images. Taking advantage of FDSC and the adopted loss functions, our model is able to maintain spatial information and generates high-quality character images in an unsupervised manner. Experiments demonstrate that our model is able to generate character images of higher quality than state-of-the-art methods.

Neural operators, which emerge as implicit solution operators of hidden governing equations, have recently become popular tools for learning responses of complex real-world physical systems. Nevertheless, the majority of neural operator applications has thus far been data-driven, which neglects the intrinsic preservation of fundamental physical laws in data. In this paper, we introduce a novel integral neural operator architecture, to learn physical models with fundamental conservation laws automatically guaranteed. In particular, by replacing the frame-dependent position information with its invariant counterpart in the kernel space, the proposed neural operator is by design translation- and rotation-invariant, and consequently abides by the conservation laws of linear and angular momentums. As applications, we demonstrate the expressivity and efficacy of our model in learning complex material behaviors from both synthetic and experimental datasets, and show that, by automatically satisfying these essential physical laws, our learned neural operator is not only generalizable in handling translated and rotated datasets, but also achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency as compared to baseline neural operator models.