4.3DCNov 10, 2025
Resilient by Design -- Active Inference for Distributed Continuum IntelligencePraveen Kumar Donta, Alfreds Lapkovskis, Enzo Mingozzi et al.
Failures are the norm in highly complex and heterogeneous devices spanning the distributed computing continuum (DCC), from resource-constrained IoT and edge nodes to high-performance computing systems. Ensuring reliability and global consistency across these layers remains a major challenge, especially for AI-driven workloads requiring real-time, adaptive coordination. This work-in-progress paper introduces a Probabilistic Active Inference Resilience Agent (PAIR-Agent) to achieve resilience in DCC systems. PAIR-Agent performs three core operations: (i) constructing a causal fault graph from device logs, (ii) identifying faults while managing certainties and uncertainties using Markov blankets and the free energy principle, and (iii) autonomously healing issues through active inference. Through continuous monitoring and adaptive reconfiguration, the agent maintains service continuity and stability under diverse failure conditions. Theoretical validations confirm the reliability and effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Automatic Fused Multimodal Deep Learning for Plant IdentificationAlfreds Lapkovskis, Natalia Nefedova, Ali Beikmohammadi
Plant classification is vital for ecological conservation and agricultural productivity, enhancing our understanding of plant growth dynamics and aiding species preservation. The advent of deep learning (DL) techniques has revolutionized this field by enabling autonomous feature extraction, significantly reducing the dependence on manual expertise. However, conventional DL models often rely solely on single data sources, failing to capture the full biological diversity of plant species comprehensively. Recent research has turned to multimodal learning to overcome this limitation by integrating multiple data types, which enriches the representation of plant characteristics. This shift introduces the challenge of determining the optimal point for modality fusion. In this paper, we introduce a pioneering multimodal DL-based approach for plant classification with automatic modality fusion. Utilizing the multimodal fusion architecture search, our method integrates images from multiple plant organs -- flowers, leaves, fruits, and stems -- into a cohesive model. To address the lack of multimodal datasets, we contributed Multimodal-PlantCLEF, a restructured version of the PlantCLEF2015 dataset tailored for multimodal tasks. Our method achieves 82.61% accuracy on 979 classes of Multimodal-PlantCLEF, surpassing state-of-the-art methods and outperforming late fusion by 10.33%. Through the incorporation of multimodal dropout, our approach demonstrates strong robustness to missing modalities. We validate our model against established benchmarks using standard performance metrics and McNemar's test, further underscoring its superiority.