Cheng Shen

Fanyi Wang, Haotian Hu, Cheng Shen

Recovering texture information from the aliasing regions has always been a major challenge for Single Image Super Resolution (SISR) task. These regions are often submerged in noise so that we have to restore texture details while suppressing noise. To address this issue, we propose a Balanced Attention Mechanism (BAM), which consists of Avgpool Channel Attention Module (ACAM) and Maxpool Spatial Attention Module (MSAM) in parallel. ACAM is designed to suppress extreme noise in the large scale feature maps while MSAM preserves high-frequency texture details. Thanks to the parallel structure, these two modules not only conduct self-optimization, but also mutual optimization to obtain the balance of noise reduction and high-frequency texture restoration during the back propagation process, and the parallel structure makes the inference faster. To verify the effectiveness and robustness of BAM, we applied it to 10 SOTA SISR networks. The results demonstrate that BAM can efficiently improve the networks performance, and for those originally with attention mechanism, the substitution with BAM further reduces the amount of parameters and increases the inference speed. Moreover, we present a dataset with rich texture aliasing regions in real scenes, named realSR7. Experiments prove that BAM achieves better super-resolution results on the aliasing area.

Cheng Shen, Wanli Xue

While the Internet of Things (IoT) can benefit from machine learning by outsourcing model training on the cloud, user data exposure to an untrusted cloud service provider can pose threat to user privacy. Recently, federated learning is proposed as an approach for privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) for the IoT, while its practicability remains unclear. This work presents the evaluation on the efficiency and privacy performance of a readily available federated learning framework based on PySyft, a Python library for distributed deep learning. It is observed that the training speed of the framework is significantly slower than of the centralized approach due to communication overhead. Meanwhile, the framework bears some vulnerability to potential man-in-the-middle attacks at the network level. The report serves as a starting point for PPML performance analysis and suggests the future direction for PPML framework development.