Spyros Lalis

Giorgos Polychronis, Foivos Pournaropoulos, Christos D. Antonopoulos et al.

Drones are becoming indispensable in many application domains. In data-driven missions, besides sensing, the drone must process the collected data at runtime to decide whether additional action must be taken on the spot, before moving to the next point of interest. If processing does not reveal an event or situation that requires such an action, the drone has waited in vain instead of moving to the next point. If, however, the drone starts moving to the next point and it turns out that a follow-up action is needed at the previous point, it must spend time to fly-back. To take this decision, we propose different machine-learning methods based on branch prediction and reinforcement learning. We evaluate these methods for a wide range of scenarios where the probability of event occurrence changes with time. Our results show that the proposed methods consistently outperform the regression-based method proposed in the literature and can significantly improve the worst-case mission time by up to 4.1x. Also, the achieved median mission time is very close, merely up to 2.7% higher, to that of a method with perfect knowledge of the current underlying event probability at each point of interest.

Joana Tirana, Spyros Lalis, Dimitris Chatzopoulos

Federated Learning (FL) stands out as a widely adopted protocol facilitating the training of Machine Learning (ML) models while maintaining decentralized data. However, challenges arise when dealing with a heterogeneous set of participating devices, causing delays in the training process, particularly among devices with limited resources. Moreover, the task of training ML models with a vast number of parameters demands computing and memory resources beyond the capabilities of small devices, such as mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. To address these issues, techniques like Parallel Split Learning (SL) have been introduced, allowing multiple resource-constrained devices to actively participate in collaborative training processes with assistance from resourceful compute nodes. Nonetheless, a drawback of Parallel SL is the substantial memory allocation required at the compute nodes, for instance training VGG-19 with 100 participants needs 80 GB. In this paper, we introduce Multihop Parallel SL (MP-SL), a modular and extensible ML as a Service (MLaaS) framework designed to facilitate the involvement of resource-constrained devices in collaborative and distributed ML model training. Notably, to alleviate memory demands per compute node, MP-SL supports multihop Parallel SL-based training. This involves splitting the model into multiple parts and utilizing multiple compute nodes in a pipelined manner. Extensive experimentation validates MP-SL's capability to handle system heterogeneity, demonstrating that the multihop configuration proves more efficient than horizontally scaled one-hop Parallel SL setups, especially in scenarios involving more cost-effective compute nodes.

Maria Rafaela Gkeka, Bowen Sun, Evgenia Smirni et al.

Continuous advancements in deep learning have led to significant progress in feature detection, resulting in enhanced accuracy in tasks like Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Nevertheless, the vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial attacks remains a challenge for their reliable deployment in applications, such as navigation of autonomous agents. Even though CNN-based SLAM algorithms are a growing area of research there is a notable absence of a comprehensive presentation and examination of adversarial attacks targeting CNN-based feature detectors, as part of a SLAM system. Our work introduces black-box adversarial perturbations applied to the RGB images fed into the GCN-SLAM algorithm. Our findings on the TUM dataset [30] reveal that even attacks of moderate scale can lead to tracking failure in as many as 76% of the frames. Moreover, our experiments highlight the catastrophic impact of attacking depth instead of RGB input images on the SLAM system.

Christodoulos Pappas, Dimitris Chatzopoulos, Spyros Lalis et al.

The proliferation of resourceful mobile devices that store rich, multidimensional and privacy-sensitive user data motivate the design of federated learning (FL), a machine-learning (ML) paradigm that enables mobile devices to produce an ML model without sharing their data. However, the majority of the existing FL frameworks rely on centralized entities. In this work, we introduce IPLS, a fully decentralized federated learning framework that is partially based on the interplanetary file system (IPFS). By using IPLS and connecting into the corresponding private IPFS network, any party can initiate the training process of an ML model or join an ongoing training process that has already been started by another party. IPLS scales with the number of participants, is robust against intermittent connectivity and dynamic participant departures/arrivals, requires minimal resources, and guarantees that the accuracy of the trained model quickly converges to that of a centralized FL framework with an accuracy drop of less than one per thousand.

Dimitrios Kosmanos, Dimitrios Karagiannis, Antonios Argyriou et al.

Wireless communications are vulnerable against radio frequency (RF) jamming which might be caused either intentionally or unintentionally. A particular subset of wireless networks, vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) which incorporate a series of safety-critical applications, may be a potential target of RF jamming with detrimental safety effects. To ensure secure communication and defend it against this type of attacks, an accurate detection scheme must be adopted. In this paper we introduce a detection scheme that is based on supervised learning. The machine-learning algorithms, KNearest Neighbors (KNN) and Random Forests (RF), utilize a series of features among which is the metric of the variations of relative speed (VRS) between the jammer and the receiver that is passively estimated from the combined value of the useful and the jamming signal at the receiver. To the best of our knowledge, this metric has never been utilized before in a machine-learning detection scheme in the literature. Through offline training and the proposed KNN-VRS, RF-VRS classification algorithms, we are able to efficiently detect various cases of Denial of Service Attacks (DoS) jamming attacks, differentiate them from cases of interference as well as foresee a potential danger successfully and act accordingly.