Towards Efficient Model-Heterogeneity Federated Learning for Large Models

As demand grows for complex tasks and high-performance applications in edge computing, the deployment of large models in federated learning has become increasingly urgent, given their superior representational power and generalization capabilities. However, the resource constraints and heterogeneity among clients present significant challenges to this deployment. To tackle these challenges, we introduce HeteroTune, an innovative fine-tuning framework tailored for model-heterogeneity federated learning (MHFL). In particular, we propose a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) structure, called FedAdapter, which employs a multi-branch cross-model aggregator to enable efficient knowledge aggregation across diverse models. Benefiting from the lightweight FedAdapter, our approach significantly reduces both the computational and communication overhead. Finally, our approach is simple yet effective, making it applicable to a wide range of large model fine-tuning tasks. Extensive experiments on computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) tasks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results, seamlessly integrating efficiency and performance.

Towards Accurate and Efficient Sub-8-Bit Integer Training

Neural network training is a memory- and compute-intensive task. Quantization, which enables low-bitwidth formats in training, can significantly mitigate the workload. To reduce quantization error, recent methods have developed new data formats and additional pre-processing operations on quantizers. However, it remains quite challenging to achieve high accuracy and efficiency simultaneously. In this paper, we explore sub-8-bit integer training from its essence of gradient descent optimization. Our integer training framework includes two components: ShiftQuant to realize accurate gradient estimation, and L1 normalization to smoothen the loss landscape. ShiftQuant attains performance that approaches the theoretical upper bound of group quantization. Furthermore, it liberates group quantization from inefficient memory rearrangement. The L1 normalization facilitates the implementation of fully quantized normalization layers with impressive convergence accuracy. Our method frees sub-8-bit integer training from pre-processing and supports general devices. This framework achieves negligible accuracy loss across various neural networks and tasks ($0.92\%$ on 4-bit ResNets, $0.61\%$ on 6-bit Transformers). The prototypical implementation of ShiftQuant achieves more than $1.85\times/15.3\%$ performance improvement on CPU/GPU compared to its FP16 counterparts, and $33.9\%$ resource consumption reduction on FPGA than the FP16 counterparts. The proposed fully-quantized L1 normalization layers achieve more than $35.54\%$ improvement in throughout on CPU compared to traditional L2 normalization layers. Moreover, theoretical analysis verifies the advancement of our method.

SeaDATE: Remedy Dual-Attention Transformer with Semantic Alignment via Contrast Learning for Multimodal Object Detection

Multimodal object detection leverages diverse modal information to enhance the accuracy and robustness of detectors. By learning long-term dependencies, Transformer can effectively integrate multimodal features in the feature extraction stage, which greatly improves the performance of multimodal object detection. However, current methods merely stack Transformer-guided fusion techniques without exploring their capability to extract features at various depth layers of network, thus limiting the improvements in detection performance. In this paper, we introduce an accurate and efficient object detection method named SeaDATE. Initially, we propose a novel dual attention Feature Fusion (DTF) module that, under Transformer's guidance, integrates local and global information through a dual attention mechanism, strengthening the fusion of modal features from orthogonal perspectives using spatial and channel tokens. Meanwhile, our theoretical analysis and empirical validation demonstrate that the Transformer-guided fusion method, treating images as sequences of pixels for fusion, performs better on shallow features' detail information compared to deep semantic information. To address this, we designed a contrastive learning (CL) module aimed at learning features of multimodal samples, remedying the shortcomings of Transformer-guided fusion in extracting deep semantic features, and effectively utilizing cross-modal information. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the FLIR, LLVIP, and M3FD datasets have proven our method to be effective, achieving state-of-the-art detection performance.

FoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation Model beyond Multimodal Siamese Network

Multimodal object detection offers a promising prospect to facilitate robust detection in various visual conditions. However, existing two-stream backbone networks are challenged by complex fusion and substantial parameter increments. This is primarily due to large data distribution biases of multimodal homogeneous information. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal object detector, named Low-rank Modal Adaptors (LMA) with a shared backbone. The shared parameters enhance the consistency of homogeneous information, while lightweight modal adaptors focus on modality unique features. Furthermore, we design an adaptive rank allocation strategy to adapt to the varying heterogeneity at different feature levels. When applied to two multimodal object detection datasets, experiments validate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, on DroneVehicle, LMA attains a 10.4% accuracy improvement over the state-of-the-art method with a 149M-parameters reduction. The code is available at https://github.com/zyszxhy/FoRA. Our work was submitted to ACM MM in April 2024, but was rejected. We will continue to refine our work and paper writing next, mainly including proof of theory and multi-task applications of FoRA.

EmbSum: Leveraging the Summarization Capabilities of Large Language Models for Content-Based Recommendations

Content-based recommendation systems play a crucial role in delivering personalized content to users in the digital world. In this work, we introduce EmbSum, a novel framework that enables offline pre-computations of users and candidate items while capturing the interactions within the user engagement history. By utilizing the pretrained encoder-decoder model and poly-attention layers, EmbSum derives User Poly-Embedding (UPE) and Content Poly-Embedding (CPE) to calculate relevance scores between users and candidate items. EmbSum actively learns the long user engagement histories by generating user-interest summary with supervision from large language model (LLM). The effectiveness of EmbSum is validated on two datasets from different domains, surpassing state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods with higher accuracy and fewer parameters. Additionally, the model's ability to generate summaries of user interests serves as a valuable by-product, enhancing its usefulness for personalized content recommendations.

EfficientMFD: Towards More Efficient Multimodal Synchronous Fusion Detection

Multimodal image fusion and object detection play a vital role in autonomous driving. Current joint learning methods have made significant progress in the multimodal fusion detection task combining the texture detail and objective semantic information. However, the tedious training steps have limited its applications to wider real-world industrial deployment. To address this limitation, we propose a novel end-to-end multimodal fusion detection algorithm, named EfficientMFD, to simplify models that exhibit decent performance with only one training step. Synchronous joint optimization is utilized in an end-to-end manner between two components, thus not being affected by the local optimal solution of the individual task. Besides, a comprehensive optimization is established in the gradient matrix between the shared parameters for both tasks. It can converge to an optimal point with fusion detection weights. We extensively test it on several public datasets, demonstrating superior performance on not only visually appealing fusion but also favorable detection performance (e.g., 6.6% mAP50:95) over other state-of-the-art approaches.

SPAR: Personalized Content-Based Recommendation via Long Engagement Attention

Leveraging users' long engagement histories is essential for personalized content recommendations. The success of pretrained language models (PLMs) in NLP has led to their use in encoding user histories and candidate items, framing content recommendations as textual semantic matching tasks. However, existing works still struggle with processing very long user historical text and insufficient user-item interaction. In this paper, we introduce a content-based recommendation framework, SPAR, which effectively tackles the challenges of holistic user interest extraction from the long user engagement history. It achieves so by leveraging PLM, poly-attention layers and attention sparsity mechanisms to encode user's history in a session-based manner. The user and item side features are sufficiently fused for engagement prediction while maintaining standalone representations for both sides, which is efficient for practical model deployment. Moreover, we enhance user profiling by exploiting large language model (LLM) to extract global interests from user engagement history. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods.

Angle Robustness Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Navigation in GNSS-Denied Scenarios

Due to the inability to receive signals from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) in extreme conditions, achieving accurate and robust navigation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a challenging task. Recently emerged, vision-based navigation has been a promising and feasible alternative to GNSS-based navigation. However, existing vision-based techniques are inadequate in addressing flight deviation caused by environmental disturbances and inaccurate position predictions in practical settings. In this paper, we present a novel angle robustness navigation paradigm to deal with flight deviation in point-to-point navigation tasks. Additionally, we propose a model that includes the Adaptive Feature Enhance Module, Cross-knowledge Attention-guided Module and Robust Task-oriented Head Module to accurately predict direction angles for high-precision navigation. To evaluate the vision-based navigation methods, we collect a new dataset termed as UAV_AR368. Furthermore, we design the Simulation Flight Testing Instrument (SFTI) using Google Earth to simulate different flight environments, thereby reducing the expenses associated with real flight testing. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art by achieving improvements of 26.0% and 45.6% in the success rate of arrival under ideal and disturbed circumstances, respectively.

SwiMDiff: Scene-wide Matching Contrastive Learning with Diffusion Constraint for Remote Sensing Image

With recent advancements in aerospace technology, the volume of unlabeled remote sensing image (RSI) data has increased dramatically. Effectively leveraging this data through self-supervised learning (SSL) is vital in the field of remote sensing. However, current methodologies, particularly contrastive learning (CL), a leading SSL method, encounter specific challenges in this domain. Firstly, CL often mistakenly identifies geographically adjacent samples with similar semantic content as negative pairs, leading to confusion during model training. Secondly, as an instance-level discriminative task, it tends to neglect the essential fine-grained features and complex details inherent in unstructured RSIs. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce SwiMDiff, a novel self-supervised pre-training framework designed for RSIs. SwiMDiff employs a scene-wide matching approach that effectively recalibrates labels to recognize data from the same scene as false negatives. This adjustment makes CL more applicable to the nuances of remote sensing. Additionally, SwiMDiff seamlessly integrates CL with a diffusion model. Through the implementation of pixel-level diffusion constraints, we enhance the encoder's ability to capture both the global semantic information and the fine-grained features of the images more comprehensively. Our proposed framework significantly enriches the information available for downstream tasks in remote sensing. Demonstrating exceptional performance in change detection and land-cover classification tasks, SwiMDiff proves its substantial utility and value in the field of remote sensing.

Multimodal Informative ViT: Information Aggregation and Distribution for Hyperspectral and LiDAR Classification

In multimodal land cover classification (MLCC), a common challenge is the redundancy in data distribution, where irrelevant information from multiple modalities can hinder the effective integration of their unique features. To tackle this, we introduce the Multimodal Informative Vit (MIVit), a system with an innovative information aggregate-distributing mechanism. This approach redefines redundancy levels and integrates performance-aware elements into the fused representation, facilitating the learning of semantics in both forward and backward directions. MIVit stands out by significantly reducing redundancy in the empirical distribution of each modality's separate and fused features. It employs oriented attention fusion (OAF) for extracting shallow local features across modalities in horizontal and vertical dimensions, and a Transformer feature extractor for extracting deep global features through long-range attention. We also propose an information aggregation constraint (IAC) based on mutual information, designed to remove redundant information and preserve complementary information within embedded features. Additionally, the information distribution flow (IDF) in MIVit enhances performance-awareness by distributing global classification information across different modalities' feature maps. This architecture also addresses missing modality challenges with lightweight independent modality classifiers, reducing the computational load typically associated with Transformers. Our results show that MIVit's bidirectional aggregate-distributing mechanism between modalities is highly effective, achieving an average overall accuracy of 95.56% across three multimodal datasets. This performance surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in MLCC. The code for MIVit is accessible at https://github.com/icey-zhang/MIViT.