Research interests
Distributed Machine Learning, Efficient Machine Learning,
Signal Processing, Artificial General Intelligence
To develop ground-breaking ML methods and cutting-edge AI applications
I was born in Chengdu, Sichuan, China in 1994. I received my B.S. with the highest honor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2016. I received my M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Harvard University in 2018. I received my Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Duke University in 2023.
| May 8, 2023 | One paper is accepted in UAI 2023. |
| Jan 23, 2023 | One paper is accepted in AISTATS 2023. |
| Sep 15, 2022 | Two papers are accepted in NeurIPS 2022. |
2023
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Score-based Quickest Change Detection for Unnormalized Models
Suya Wu, Enmao Diao, Taposh Banerjee, and 2 more authors
In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2023
Classical change detection algorithms typically require modeling pre-change and post-change distributions. The calculations may not be feasible for various machine learning models because of the complexity of computing the partition functions and normalized distributions. Additionally, these methods may suffer from a lack of robustness to model mismatch and noise. In this paper, we develop a new variant of the classical Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) change detection, namely Score-based CUSUM (SCUSUM), based on Fisher divergence and the Hyvärinen score. Our method allows the applications of the quickest change detection for unnormalized distributions. We provide a theoretical analysis of the detection delay given the constraints on false alarms. We prove the asymptotic optimality of the proposed method in some particular cases. We also provide numerical experiments to demonstrate our method’s computation, performance, and robustness advantages.
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Robust Quickest Change Detection for Unnormalized Models
Suya Wu, Enmao Diao, Jie Ding, and 2 more authors
In Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2023
Detecting an abrupt and persistent change in the underlying distribution of online data streams is an important problem in many applications. This paper proposes a new robust score-based algorithm called RSCUSUM, which can be applied to unnormalized models and addresses the issue of unknown post-change distributions. RSCUSUM replaces the Kullback-Leibler divergence with the Fisher divergence between pre- and post-change distributions for computational efficiency in unnormalized statistical models and introduces a notion of the “least favorable” distribution for robust change detection. The algorithm and its theoretical analysis are demonstrated through simulation studies.
2022
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GAL: Gradient Assisted Learning for Decentralized Multi-Organization Collaborations
Enmao Diao, Jie Ding, and Vahid Tarokh
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022
Collaborations among multiple organizations, such as financial institutions, medical centers, and retail markets in decentralized settings are crucial to providing improved service and performance. However, the underlying organizations may have little interest in sharing their local data, models, and objective functions. These requirements have created new challenges for multi-organization collaboration. In this work, we propose Gradient Assisted Learning (GAL), a new method for multiple organizations to assist each other in supervised learning tasks without sharing local data, models, and objective functions. In this framework, all participants collaboratively optimize the aggregate of local loss functions, and each participant autonomously builds its own model by iteratively fitting the gradients of the overarching objective function. We also provide asymptotic convergence analysis and practical case studies of GAL. Experimental studies demonstrate that GAL can achieve performance close to centralized learning when all data, models, and objective functions are fully disclosed.
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SemiFL: Semi-Supervised Federated Learning for Unlabeled Clients with Alternate Training
Enmao Diao, Jie Ding, and Vahid Tarokh
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022
Federated Learning allows the training of machine learning models by using the computation and private data resources of many distributed clients. Most existing results on Federated Learning (FL) assume the clients have ground-truth labels. However, in many practical scenarios, clients may be unable to label task-specific data due to a lack of expertise or resource. We propose SemiFL to address the problem of combining communication-efficient FL such as FedAvg with Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL). In SemiFL, clients have completely unlabeled data and can train multiple local epochs to reduce communication costs, while the server has a small amount of labeled data. We provide a theoretical understanding of the success of data augmentation-based SSL methods to illustrate the bottleneck of a vanilla combination of communication-efficient FL with SSL. To address this issue, we propose alternate training to ‘fine-tune global model with labeled data’ and ‘generate pseudo-labels with the global model.’ We conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the performance of a labeled server with unlabeled clients training with multiple local epochs. Moreover, our method outperforms many existing SSFL baselines and performs competitively with the state-of-the-art FL and SSL results.
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Pruning Deep Neural Networks from a Sparsity Perspective
Enmao Diao, Ganghua Wang, Jiawei Zhang, and 3 more authors
In The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022
In recent years, deep network pruning has attracted significant attention in order to enable the rapid deployment of AI into small devices with computation and memory constraints. Pruning is often achieved by dropping redundant weights, neurons, or layers of a deep network while attempting to retain a comparable test performance. Many deep pruning algorithms have been proposed with impressive empirical success. However, existing approaches lack a quantifiable measure to estimate the compressibility of a sub-network during each pruning iteration and thus may under-prune or over-prune the model. In this work, we propose PQ Index (PQI) to measure the potential compressibility of deep neural networks and use this to develop a Sparsity-informed Adaptive Pruning (SAP) algorithm. Our extensive experiments corroborate the hypothesis that for a generic pruning procedure, PQI decreases first when a large model is being effectively regularized and then increases when its compressibility reaches a limit that appears to correspond to the beginning of underfitting. Subsequently, PQI decreases again when the model collapse and significant deterioration in the performance of the model start to occur. Additionally, our experiments demonstrate that the proposed adaptive pruning algorithm with proper choice of hyper-parameters is superior to the iterative pruning algorithms such as the lottery ticket-based pruning methods, in terms of both compression efficiency and robustness.
2020
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DRASIC: Distributed Recurrent Autoencoder for Scalable Image Compression
Enmao Diao, Jie Ding, and Vahid Tarokh
In 2020 Data Compression Conference (DCC), 2020
We propose a new architecture for distributed image compression from a group of distributed data sources. The work is motivated by practical needs of data-driven codec design, low power consumption, robustness, and data privacy. The proposed architecture, which we refer to as Distributed Recurrent Autoencoder for Scalable Image Compression (DRASIC), is able to train distributed encoders and one joint decoder on correlated data sources. Its compression capability is much better than the method of training codecs separately. Meanwhile, the performance of our distributed system with 10 distributed sources is only within 2 dB peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of the performance of a single codec trained with all data sources. We experiment distributed sources with different correlations and show how our data-driven methodology well matches the Slepian-Wolf Theorem in Distributed Source Coding (DSC). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first data-driven DSC framework for general distributed code design with deep learning.
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Speech Emotion Recognition with Dual-Sequence LSTM Architecture
Jianyou Wang, Michael Xue, Ryan Culhane, and 3 more authors
In ICASSP 2020-2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2020
Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) has emerged as a critical component of the next generation human-machine interfacing technologies. In this work, we propose a new dual-level model that predicts emotions based on both MFCC features and mel-spectrograms produced from raw audio signals. Each utterance is preprocessed into MFCC features and two mel-spectrograms at different time-frequency resolutions. A standard LSTM processes the MFCC features, while a novel LSTM architecture, denoted as Dual-Sequence LSTM (DS-LSTM), processes the two mel-spectrograms simultaneously. The outputs are later averaged to produce a final classification of the utterance. Our proposed model achieves, on average, a weighted accuracy of 72.7% and an unweighted accuracy of 73.3%—a 6% improvement over current state-of-the-art unimodal models—and is comparable with multimodal models that leverage textual information as well as audio signals.
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HeteroFL: Computation and Communication Efficient Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Clients
Enmao Diao, Jie Ding, and Vahid Tarokh
In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2020
Federated Learning (FL) is a method of training machine learning models on private data distributed over a large number of possibly heterogeneous clients such as mobile phones and IoT devices. In this work, we propose a new federated learning framework named HeteroFL to address heterogeneous clients equipped with very different computation and communication capabilities. Our solution can enable the training of heterogeneous local models with varying computation complexities and still produce a single global inference model. For the first time, our method challenges the underlying assumption of existing work that local models have to share the same architecture as the global model. We demonstrate several strategies to enhance FL training and conduct extensive empirical evaluations, including five computation complexity levels of three model architecture on three datasets. We show that adaptively distributing subnetworks according to clients’ capabilities is both computation and communication efficient.
2019
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Restricted Recurrent Neural Networks
Enmao Diao, Jie Ding, and Vahid Tarokh
In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), 2019
Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and its variations such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), have become standard building blocks for learning online data of sequential nature in many research areas, including natural language processing and speech data analysis. In this paper, we present a new methodology to significantly reduce the number of parameters in RNNs while maintaining performance that is comparable or even better than classical RNNs. The new proposal, referred to as Restricted Recurrent Neural Network (RRNN), restricts the weight matrices corresponding to the input data and hidden states at each time step to share a large proportion of parameters. The new architecture can be regarded as a compression of its classical counterpart, but it does not require pre-training or sophisticated parameter fine-tuning, both of which are major issues in most existing compression techniques. Experiments on natural language modeling show that compared with its classical counterpart, the restricted recurrent architecture generally produces comparable results at about 50% compression rate. In particular, the Restricted LSTM can outperform classical RNN with even less number of parameters.
