Yuchen Liu

Xuanchao Ma, Yuchen Liu

Ethylene leakage detection has become one of the most important research directions in the field of target detection due to the fact that ethylene leakage in the petrochemical industry is closely related to production safety and environmental pollution. Under infrared conditions, there are many factors that affect the texture characteristics of ethylene, such as ethylene concentration, background, and so on. We find that the detection criteria used in infrared imaging ethylene leakage detection research cannot fully reflect real-world production conditions, which is not conducive to evaluate the performance of current image-based target detection methods. Therefore, we create a new infrared image dataset of ethylene leakage with different concentrations and backgrounds, including 54275 images. We use the proposed dataset benchmark to evaluate seven advanced image-based target detection algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate the performance and limitations of existing algorithms, and the dataset benchmark has good versatility and effectiveness.

Yu Liu, Utkarsh Pratiush, Jason Bemis et al.

The rapid development of computation power and machine learning algorithms has paved the way for automating scientific discovery with a scanning probe microscope (SPM). The key elements towards operationalization of automated SPM are the interface to enable SPM control from Python codes, availability of high computing power, and development of workflows for scientific discovery. Here we build a Python interface library that enables controlling an SPM from either a local computer or a remote high-performance computer (HPC), which satisfies the high computation power need of machine learning algorithms in autonomous workflows. We further introduce a general platform to abstract the operations of SPM in scientific discovery into fixed-policy or reward-driven workflows. Our work provides a full infrastructure to build automated SPM workflows for both routine operations and autonomous scientific discovery with machine learning.

Minghong Fang, Zifan Zhang, Hairi et al.

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train machine learning models without revealing their private training data. In conventional FL, the system follows the server-assisted architecture (server-assisted FL), where the training process is coordinated by a central server. However, the server-assisted FL framework suffers from poor scalability due to a communication bottleneck at the server, and trust dependency issues. To address challenges, decentralized federated learning (DFL) architecture has been proposed to allow clients to train models collaboratively in a serverless and peer-to-peer manner. However, due to its fully decentralized nature, DFL is highly vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where malicious clients could manipulate the system by sending carefully-crafted local models to their neighboring clients. To date, only a limited number of Byzantine-robust DFL methods have been proposed, most of which are either communication-inefficient or remain vulnerable to advanced poisoning attacks. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm called BALANCE (Byzantine-robust averaging through local similarity in decentralization) to defend against poisoning attacks in DFL. In BALANCE, each client leverages its own local model as a similarity reference to determine if the received model is malicious or benign. We establish the theoretical convergence guarantee for BALANCE under poisoning attacks in both strongly convex and non-convex settings. Furthermore, the convergence rate of BALANCE under poisoning attacks matches those of the state-of-the-art counterparts in Byzantine-free settings. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that BALANCE outperforms existing DFL methods and effectively defends against poisoning attacks.