Federated machine learning is a versatile and flexible tool to utilize distributed data from different sources, especially when communication technology develops rapidly and an unprecedented amount of data could be collected on mobile devices nowadays. Federated learning method exploits not only the data but the computational power of all devices in the network to achieve more efficient model training. Nevertheless, while most traditional federated learning methods work well for homogeneous data and tasks, adapting the method to heterogeneous data and task distribution is challenging. This limitation has constrained the applications of federated learning in real-world contexts, especially in healthcare settings. Inspired by the fundamental idea of meta-learning, in this study we propose a new algorithm, which is an integration of federated learning and meta-learning, to tackle this issue. In addition, owing to the advantage of transfer learning for model generalization, we further improve our algorithm by introducing partial parameter sharing to balance global and local learning. We name this method partial meta-federated learning (PMFL). Finally, we apply the algorithms to two medical datasets. We show that our algorithm could obtain the fastest training speed and achieve the best performance when dealing with heterogeneous medical datasets.

Users may strive to formulate an adequate textual query for their information need. Search engines assist the users by presenting query suggestions. To preserve the original search intent, suggestions should be context-aware and account for the previous queries issued by the user. Achieving context awareness is challenging due to data sparsity. We present a novel hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder architecture that makes possible to account for sequences of previous queries of arbitrary lengths. As a result, our suggestions are sensitive to the order of queries in the context while avoiding data sparsity. Additionally, our model can suggest for rare, or long-tail, queries. The produced suggestions are synthetic and are sampled one word at a time, using computationally cheap decoding techniques. This is in contrast to current synthetic suggestion models relying upon machine learning pipelines and hand-engineered feature sets. Results show that our model outperforms existing context-aware approaches in a next query prediction setting. In addition to query suggestion, our architecture is general enough to be used in a variety of other applications.

Back-propagation has been the workhorse of recent successes of deep learning but it relies on infinitesimal effects (partial derivatives) in order to perform credit assignment. This could become a serious issue as one considers deeper and more non-linear functions, e.g., consider the extreme case of non-linearity where the relation between parameters and cost is actually discrete. Inspired by the biological implausibility of back-propagation, a few approaches have been proposed in the past that could play a similar credit assignment role. In this spirit, we explore a novel approach to credit assignment in deep networks that we call target propagation. The main idea is to compute targets rather than gradients, at each layer. Like gradients, they are propagated backwards. In a way that is related but different from previously proposed proxies for back-propagation which rely on a backwards network with symmetric weights, target propagation relies on auto-encoders at each layer. Unlike back-propagation, it can be applied even when units exchange stochastic bits rather than real numbers. We show that a linear correction for the imperfectness of the auto-encoders, called difference target propagation, is very effective to make target propagation actually work, leading to results comparable to back-propagation for deep networks with discrete and continuous units and denoising auto-encoders and achieving state of the art for stochastic networks. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Deep learning has rapidly moved from a marginal approach in the machine learning community less than ten years ago to one that has strong industrial impact, in particular for high-dimensional perceptual data such as speech and images, but also natural language. The demand for experts in deep learning is growing very fast (faster than we can graduate PhDs), thereby considerably increasing their market value. Deep learning is based on the idea of learning multiple levels of representation, with higher levels computed as a function of lower levels, and corresponding to more abstract concepts automatically discovered by the learner. Deep learning arose out of research on artificial neural networks and graphical models and the literature on that subject has considerably grown in recent years, culminating in the creation of a dedicated conference (ICLR). The tutorial will introduce some of the basic algorithms, both on the supervised and unsupervised sides, as well as discuss some of the guidelines for successfully using them in practice. Finally, it will introduce current research questions regarding the challenge of scaling up deep learning to much larger models that can successfully extract information from huge datasets.

Traditional information retrieval (IR) models use bag-of-words as the basic representation and assume that some form of independence holds between terms. Representing term dependencies and defining a scoring function capable of integrating such additional evidence is theoretically and practically challenging. Recently, Quantum Theory (QT) has been proposed as a possible, more general framework for IR. However, only a limited number of investigations have been made and the potential of QT has not been fully explored and tested. We develop a new, generalized Language Modeling approach for IR by adopting the probabilistic framework of QT. In particular, quantum probability could account for both single and compound terms at once without having to extend the term space artificially as in previous studies. This naturally allows us to avoid the weight-normalization problem, which arises in the current practice by mixing scores from matching compound terms and from matching single terms. Our model is the first practical application of quantum probability to show significant improvements over a robust bag-of-words baseline and achieves better performance on a stronger non bag-of-words baseline.

This paper shows the existence of binary pseudowavelets, bases on the binary domain that exhibit some of the properties of wavelets, such as multiresolution reconstruction and compact support. The binary pseudowavelets are defined on B/sup n/ (binary vectors of length n) and are operated upon with the binary operators logical and, and exclusive or. The forward transform, or analysis, is the decomposition of a binary vector into its constituent binary pseudowavelets. Binary pseudowavelets allow multiresolution, progressive reconstruction of binary vectors by using progressively more coefficients in the inverse transform. Binary pseudowavelets bases, being sparse matrices, also provide for fast transforms; moreover pseudowavelets rely on hardware-friendly operations for efficient software and hardware implementation.

We present the Z-coder, a new adaptive data compression coder for coding binary data. The Z-coder is derived from the Golomb (1966) run-length coder, and retains most of the speed and simplicity of the earlier coder. The Z-coder can also be thought of as a multiplication-free approximate arithmetic coder, showing the close relationship between run-length coding and arithmetic coding. The Z-coder improves upon existing arithmetic coders by its speed and its principled design. We present a derivation of the Z-coder as well as details of the construction of its adaptive probability estimation table.

Summary form only given. The problem of computing the minimum redundancy codes as we observe symbols one by one has received a lot of attention. However, existing algorithms implicitly assumes that either we have a small alphabet or that we have an arbitrary amount of memory at our disposal for the creation of a coding tree. In real life applications one may need to encode symbols coming from a much larger alphabet, for e.g. coding integers. We introduce a new algorithm for adaptive Huffman coding, called algorithm M, that uses space proportional to the number of frequency classes. The algorithm uses a tree with leaves that represent sets of symbols with the same frequency, rather than individual symbols. The code for each symbol is therefore composed of a prefix (specifying the set, or the leaf of the tree) and a suffix (specifying the symbol within the set of same-frequency symbols). The algorithm uses only two operations to remain as close as possible to the optimal: set migration and rebalancing. We analyze the computational complexity of algorithm M, and point to its advantages in terms of low memory complexity and fast decoding. Comparative experiments were performed with algorithm M on the Calgary corpus, with static Huffman coding as well as with another adaptive Huffman coding algorithms, algorithm /spl Lambda/ of Vitter. Experiments show that M performs comparably or better than the other algorithms but requires much less memory. Finally, we present an improved algorithm, M/sup +/, for non-stationary data, which models the distribution of the data in a fixed-size window in the data sequence.