Disentangling data distribution for Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) facilitates collaborative training of a global model whose performance is boosted by private data owned by distributed clients, without compromising data privacy. Yet the wide applicability of FL is hindered by entanglement of data distributions across different clients. This paper demonstrates for the first time that by disentangling data distributions FL can in principle achieve efficiencies comparable to those of distributed systems, requiring only one round of communication. To this end, we propose a novel FedDistr algorithm, which employs stable diffusion models to decouple and recover data distributions. Empirical results on the CIFAR100 and DomainNet datasets show that FedDistr significantly enhances model utility and efficiency in both disentangled and near-disentangled scenarios while ensuring privacy, outperforming traditional federated learning methods.

Breaking the Hourglass Phenomenon of Residual Quantization: Enhancing the Upper Bound of Generative Retrieval

Generative retrieval (GR) has emerged as a transformative paradigm in search and recommender systems, leveraging numeric-based identifier representations to enhance efficiency and generalization. Notably, methods like TIGER employing Residual Quantization-based Semantic Identifiers (RQ-SID), have shown significant promise in e-commerce scenarios by effectively managing item IDs. However, a critical issue termed the "\textbf{Hourglass}" phenomenon, occurs in RQ-SID, where intermediate codebook tokens become overly concentrated, hindering the full utilization of generative retrieval methods. This paper analyses and addresses this problem by identifying data sparsity and long-tailed distribution as the primary causes. Through comprehensive experiments and detailed ablation studies, we analyze the impact of these factors on codebook utilization and data distribution. Our findings reveal that the "Hourglass" phenomenon substantially impacts the performance of RQ-SID in generative retrieval. We propose effective solutions to mitigate this issue, thereby significantly enhancing the effectiveness of generative retrieval in real-world E-commerce applications.

Unlearning during Learning: An Efficient Federated Machine Unlearning Method

In recent years, Federated Learning (FL) has garnered significant attention as a distributed machine learning paradigm. To facilitate the implementation of the right to be forgotten, the concept of federated machine unlearning (FMU) has also emerged. However, current FMU approaches often involve additional time-consuming steps and may not offer comprehensive unlearning capabilities, which renders them less practical in real FL scenarios. In this paper, we introduce FedAU, an innovative and efficient FMU framework aimed at overcoming these limitations. Specifically, FedAU incorporates a lightweight auxiliary unlearning module into the learning process and employs a straightforward linear operation to facilitate unlearning. This approach eliminates the requirement for extra time-consuming steps, rendering it well-suited for FL. Furthermore, FedAU exhibits remarkable versatility. It not only enables multiple clients to carry out unlearning tasks concurrently but also supports unlearning at various levels of granularity, including individual data samples, specific classes, and even at the client level. We conducted extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100 datasets to evaluate the performance of FedAU. The results demonstrate that FedAU effectively achieves the desired unlearning effect while maintaining model accuracy.

Federated Domain-Specific Knowledge Transfer on Large Language Models Using Synthetic Data

As large language models (LLMs) demonstrate unparalleled performance and generalization ability, LLMs are widely used and integrated into various applications. When it comes to sensitive domains, as commonly described in federated learning scenarios, directly using external LLMs on private data is strictly prohibited by stringent data security and privacy regulations. For local clients, the utilization of LLMs to improve the domain-specific small language models (SLMs), characterized by limited computational resources and domain-specific data, has attracted considerable research attention. By observing that LLMs can empower domain-specific SLMs, existing methods predominantly concentrate on leveraging the public data or LLMs to generate more data to transfer knowledge from LLMs to SLMs. However, due to the discrepancies between LLMs' generated data and clients' domain-specific data, these methods cannot yield substantial improvements in the domain-specific tasks. In this paper, we introduce a Federated Domain-specific Knowledge Transfer (FDKT) framework, which enables domain-specific knowledge transfer from LLMs to SLMs while preserving clients' data privacy. The core insight is to leverage LLMs to augment data based on domain-specific few-shot demonstrations, which are synthesized from private domain data using differential privacy. Such synthetic samples share similar data distribution with clients' private data and allow the server LLM to generate particular knowledge to improve clients' SLMs. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed FDKT framework consistently and greatly improves SLMs' task performance by around 5\% with a privacy budget of less than 10, compared to local training on private data.

Gaussian Time Machine: A Real-Time Rendering Methodology for Time-Variant Appearances

Recent advancements in neural rendering techniques have significantly enhanced the fidelity of 3D reconstruction. Notably, the emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has marked a significant milestone by adopting a discrete scene representation, facilitating efficient training and real-time rendering. Several studies have successfully extended the real-time rendering capability of 3DGS to dynamic scenes. However, a challenge arises when training images are captured under vastly differing weather and lighting conditions. This scenario poses a challenge for 3DGS and its variants in achieving accurate reconstructions. Although NeRF-based methods (NeRF-W, CLNeRF) have shown promise in handling such challenging conditions, their computational demands hinder real-time rendering capabilities. In this paper, we present Gaussian Time Machine (GTM) which models the time-dependent attributes of Gaussian primitives with discrete time embedding vectors decoded by a lightweight Multi-Layer-Perceptron(MLP). By adjusting the opacity of Gaussian primitives, we can reconstruct visibility changes of objects. We further propose a decomposed color model for improved geometric consistency. GTM achieved state-of-the-art rendering fidelity on 3 datasets and is 100 times faster than NeRF-based counterparts in rendering. Moreover, GTM successfully disentangles the appearance changes and renders smooth appearance interpolation.

Leveraging Compressed Frame Sizes For Ultra-Fast Video Classification

Classifying videos into distinct categories, such as Sport and Music Video, is crucial for multimedia understanding and retrieval, especially when an immense volume of video content is being constantly generated. Traditional methods require video decompression to extract pixel-level features like color, texture, and motion, thereby increasing computational and storage demands. Moreover, these methods often suffer from performance degradation in low-quality videos. We present a novel approach that examines only the post-compression bitstream of a video to perform classification, eliminating the need for bitstream decoding. To validate our approach, we built a comprehensive data set comprising over 29,000 YouTube video clips, totaling 6,000 hours and spanning 11 distinct categories. Our evaluations indicate precision, accuracy, and recall rates consistently above 80%, many exceeding 90%, and some reaching 99%. The algorithm operates approximately 15,000 times faster than real-time for 30fps videos, outperforming traditional Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm by seven orders of magnitude.

Evaluating Membership Inference Attacks and Defenses in Federated Learning

Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) pose a growing threat to privacy preservation in federated learning. The semi-honest attacker, e.g., the server, may determine whether a particular sample belongs to a target client according to the observed model information. This paper conducts an evaluation of existing MIAs and corresponding defense strategies. Our evaluation on MIAs reveals two important findings about the trend of MIAs. Firstly, combining model information from multiple communication rounds (Multi-temporal) enhances the overall effectiveness of MIAs compared to utilizing model information from a single epoch. Secondly, incorporating models from non-target clients (Multi-spatial) significantly improves the effectiveness of MIAs, particularly when the clients' data is homogeneous. This highlights the importance of considering the temporal and spatial model information in MIAs. Next, we assess the effectiveness via privacy-utility tradeoff for two type defense mechanisms against MIAs: Gradient Perturbation and Data Replacement. Our results demonstrate that Data Replacement mechanisms achieve a more optimal balance between preserving privacy and maintaining model utility. Therefore, we recommend the adoption of Data Replacement methods as a defense strategy against MIAs. Our code is available in https://github.com/Liar-Mask/FedMIA.

A Theoretical Analysis of Efficiency Constrained Utility-Privacy Bi-Objective Optimization in Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively learn a shared model without sharing their individual data. Concerns about utility, privacy, and training efficiency in FL have garnered significant research attention. Differential privacy has emerged as a prevalent technique in FL, safeguarding the privacy of individual user data while impacting utility and training efficiency. Within Differential Privacy Federated Learning (DPFL), previous studies have primarily focused on the utility-privacy trade-off, neglecting training efficiency, which is crucial for timely completion. Moreover, differential privacy achieves privacy by introducing controlled randomness (noise) on selected clients in each communication round. Previous work has mainly examined the impact of noise level ($\sigma$) and communication rounds ($T$) on the privacy-utility dynamic, overlooking other influential factors like the sample ratio ($q$, the proportion of selected clients). This paper systematically formulates an efficiency-constrained utility-privacy bi-objective optimization problem in DPFL, focusing on $\sigma$, $T$, and $q$. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis, yielding analytical solutions for the Pareto front. Extensive empirical experiments verify the validity and efficacy of our analysis, offering valuable guidance for low-cost parameter design in DPFL.

Improving Language Model-Based Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Multi-Scale Acoustic Prompts

Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis aims to clone any unseen speaker's voice without adaptation parameters. By quantizing speech waveform into discrete acoustic tokens and modeling these tokens with the language model, recent language model-based TTS models show zero-shot speaker adaptation capabilities with only a 3-second acoustic prompt of an unseen speaker. However, they are limited by the length of the acoustic prompt, which makes it difficult to clone personal speaking style. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot TTS model with the multi-scale acoustic prompts based on a neural codec language model VALL-E. A speaker-aware text encoder is proposed to learn the personal speaking style at the phoneme-level from the style prompt consisting of multiple sentences. Following that, a VALL-E based acoustic decoder is utilized to model the timbre from the timbre prompt at the frame-level and generate speech. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms baselines in terms of naturalness and speaker similarity, and can achieve better performance by scaling out to a longer style prompt.

Judging a video by its bitstream cover

Classifying videos into distinct categories, such as Sport and Music Video, is crucial for multimedia understanding and retrieval, especially in an age where an immense volume of video content is constantly being generated. Traditional methods require video decompression to extract pixel-level features like color, texture, and motion, thereby increasing computational and storage demands. Moreover, these methods often suffer from performance degradation in low-quality videos. We present a novel approach that examines only the post-compression bitstream of a video to perform classification, eliminating the need for bitstream. We validate our approach using a custom-built data set comprising over 29,000 YouTube video clips, totaling 6,000 hours and spanning 11 distinct categories. Our preliminary evaluations indicate precision, accuracy, and recall rates well over 80%. The algorithm operates approximately 15,000 times faster than real-time for 30fps videos, outperforming traditional Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm by six orders of magnitude.