Peng Xiao

Peng Xiao, Samuel Cheng

In federated learning, models trained on local clients are distilled into a global model. Due to the permutation invariance arises in neural networks, it is necessary to match the hidden neurons first when executing federated learning with neural networks. Through the Bayesian nonparametric framework, Probabilistic Federated Neural Matching (PFNM) matches and fuses local neural networks so as to adapt to varying global model size and the heterogeneity of the data. In this paper, we propose a new method which extends the PFNM with a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence over neural components product, in order to make inference exploiting posterior information in both local and global levels. We also show theoretically that The additional part can be seamlessly concatenated into the match-and-fuse progress. Through a series of simulations, it indicates that our new method outperforms popular state-of-the-art federated learning methods in both single communication round and additional communication rounds situation.

Peng Xiao, Samuel Cheng

Energy disaggregation in a non-intrusive way estimates appliance level electricity consumption from a single meter that measures the whole house electricity demand. Recently, with the ongoing increment of energy data, there are many data-driven deep learning architectures being applied to solve the non-intrusive energy disaggregation problem. However, most proposed methods try to estimate the on-off state or the power consumption of appliance, which need not only large amount of parameters, but also hyper-parameter optimization prior to training and even preprocessing of energy data for a specified appliance. In this paper, instead of estimating on-off state or power consumption, we adapt a neural network to estimate the operational state change of appliance. Our proposed solution is more feasible across various appliances and lower complexity comparing to previous methods. The simulated experiments in the low sample rate dataset REDD show the competitive performance of the designed method, with respect to other two benchmark methods, Hidden Markov Model-based and Graph Signal processing-based approaches.