87 research outputs found
Boosting Federated Learning Convergence with Prototype Regularization
As a distributed machine learning technique, federated learning (FL) requires
clients to collaboratively train a shared model with an edge server without
leaking their local data. However, the heterogeneous data distribution among
clients often leads to a decrease in model performance. To tackle this issue,
this paper introduces a prototype-based regularization strategy to address the
heterogeneity in the data distribution. Specifically, the regularization
process involves the server aggregating local prototypes from distributed
clients to generate a global prototype, which is then sent back to the
individual clients to guide their local training. The experimental results on
MNIST and Fashion-MNIST show that our proposal achieves improvements of 3.3%
and 8.9% in average test accuracy, respectively, compared to the most popular
baseline FedAvg. Furthermore, our approach has a fast convergence rate in
heterogeneous settings
Enhancing Few-shot Image Classification with Cosine Transformer
This paper addresses the few-shot image classification problem, where the
classification task is performed on unlabeled query samples given a small
amount of labeled support samples only. One major challenge of the few-shot
learning problem is the large variety of object visual appearances that
prevents the support samples to represent that object comprehensively. This
might result in a significant difference between support and query samples,
therefore undermining the performance of few-shot algorithms. In this paper, we
tackle the problem by proposing Few-shot Cosine Transformer (FS-CT), where the
relational map between supports and queries is effectively obtained for the
few-shot tasks. The FS-CT consists of two parts, a learnable prototypical
embedding network to obtain categorical representations from support samples
with hard cases, and a transformer encoder to effectively achieve the
relational map from two different support and query samples. We introduce
Cosine Attention, a more robust and stable attention module that enhances the
transformer module significantly and therefore improves FS-CT performance from
5% to over 20% in accuracy compared to the default scaled dot-product
mechanism. Our method performs competitive results in mini-ImageNet, CUB-200,
and CIFAR-FS on 1-shot learning and 5-shot learning tasks across backbones and
few-shot configurations. We also developed a custom few-shot dataset for Yoga
pose recognition to demonstrate the potential of our algorithm for practical
application. Our FS-CT with cosine attention is a lightweight, simple few-shot
algorithm that can be applied for a wide range of applications, such as
healthcare, medical, and security surveillance. The official implementation
code of our Few-shot Cosine Transformer is available at
https://github.com/vinuni-vishc/Few-Shot-Cosine-Transforme
FedMEKT: Distillation-based Embedding Knowledge Transfer for Multimodal Federated Learning
Federated learning (FL) enables a decentralized machine learning paradigm for
multiple clients to collaboratively train a generalized global model without
sharing their private data. Most existing works simply propose typical FL
systems for single-modal data, thus limiting its potential on exploiting
valuable multimodal data for future personalized applications. Furthermore, the
majority of FL approaches still rely on the labeled data at the client side,
which is limited in real-world applications due to the inability of
self-annotation from users. In light of these limitations, we propose a novel
multimodal FL framework that employs a semi-supervised learning approach to
leverage the representations from different modalities. Bringing this concept
into a system, we develop a distillation-based multimodal embedding knowledge
transfer mechanism, namely FedMEKT, which allows the server and clients to
exchange the joint knowledge of their learning models extracted from a small
multimodal proxy dataset. Our FedMEKT iteratively updates the generalized
global encoders with the joint embedding knowledge from the participating
clients. Thereby, to address the modality discrepancy and labeled data
constraint in existing FL systems, our proposed FedMEKT comprises local
multimodal autoencoder learning, generalized multimodal autoencoder
construction, and generalized classifier learning. Through extensive
experiments on three multimodal human activity recognition datasets, we
demonstrate that FedMEKT achieves superior global encoder performance on linear
evaluation and guarantees user privacy for personal data and model parameters
while demanding less communication cost than other baselines
Micronutrient Deficits Are Still Public Health Issues among Women and Young Children in Vietnam
Background: The 2000 Vietnamese National Nutrition Survey showed that the population’s dietary intake had improved since 1987. However, inequalities were found in food consumption between socioeconomic groups. As no national data exist on the prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies, a survey was conducted in 2010 to assess the micronutrient status of randomly selected 1526 women of reproductive age and 586 children aged 6–75 mo. Principal Findings: In women, according to international thresholds, prevalence of zinc deficiency (ZnD, 67.262.6%) and vitamin B12 deficiency (11.761.7%) represented public health problems, whereas prevalence of anemia (11.661.0%) and iron deficiency (ID, 13.761.1%) were considered low, and folate (,3%) and vitamin A (VAD,,2%) deficiencies were considered negligible. However, many women had marginal folate (25.1%) and vitamin A status (13.6%). Moreover, overweight (BMI$23 kg/m 2 for Asian population) or underweight occurred in 20 % of women respectively highlighting the double burden of malnutrition. In children, a similar pattern was observed for ZnD (51.963.5%), anemia (9.161.4%) and ID (12.961.5%) whereas prevalence of marginal vitamin A status was also high (47.362.2%). There was a significant effect of age on anemia and ID prevalence, with the youngest age group (6–17 mo) having the highest risk for anemia, ID, ZnD and marginal vitamin A status as compared to other groups. Moreover, the poorest groups of population had a higher risk for zinc, anemia and ID
Project management between will and representation
This article challenges some deep-rooted assumptions of project management. Inspired by the work of the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, it calls for looking at projects through two complementary lenses: one that accounts for cognitive and representational aspects and one that accounts for material and volitional aspects. Understanding the many ways in which these aspects transpire and interact in projects sheds new light on project organizations, as imperfect and fragile representations that chase a shifting nexus of intractable human, social, technical, and material processes. This, in turn, can bring about a new grasp of notions such as value,\ud
knowledge, complexity, and risk
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