Liang Zhao

Manh V. Nguyen, Liang Zhao, Bobin Deng et al.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have recently gained significant interest in on-chip learning in embedded devices and emerged as an energy-efficient alternative to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, to extend SNNs to a Federated Learning (FL) setting involving collaborative model training, the communication between the local devices and the remote server remains the bottleneck, which is often restricted and costly. In this paper, we first explore the inherent robustness of SNNs under noisy communication in FL. Building upon this foundation, we propose a novel Federated Learning with Top-K Sparsification (FLTS) algorithm to reduce the bandwidth usage for FL training. We discover that the proposed scheme with SNNs allows more bandwidth savings compared to ANNs without impacting the model's accuracy. Additionally, the number of parameters to be communicated can be reduced to as low as 6 percent of the size of the original model. We further improve the communication efficiency by enabling dynamic parameter compression during model training. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms significantly outperform the baselines in terms of communication cost and model accuracy and are promising for practical network-efficient FL with SNNs.

Yifei Zhang, Tianxu Jiang, Bo Pan et al.

Explaining the decision-making processes of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models is crucial for addressing their "black box" nature, particularly in tasks like image classification. Traditional eXplainable AI (XAI) methods typically rely on unimodal explanations, either visual or textual, each with inherent limitations. Visual explanations highlight key regions but often lack rationale, while textual explanations provide context without spatial grounding. Further, both explanation types can be inconsistent or incomplete, limiting their reliability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Multimodal Explanation-Guided Learning (MEGL) framework that leverages both visual and textual explanations to enhance model interpretability and improve classification performance. Our Saliency-Driven Textual Grounding (SDTG) approach integrates spatial information from visual explanations into textual rationales, providing spatially grounded and contextually rich explanations. Additionally, we introduce Textual Supervision on Visual Explanations to align visual explanations with textual rationales, even in cases where ground truth visual annotations are missing. A Visual Explanation Distribution Consistency loss further reinforces visual coherence by aligning the generated visual explanations with dataset-level patterns, enabling the model to effectively learn from incomplete multimodal supervision. We validate MEGL on two new datasets, Object-ME and Action-ME, for image classification with multimodal explanations. Experimental results demonstrate that MEGL outperforms previous approaches in prediction accuracy and explanation quality across both visual and textual domains. Our code will be made available upon the acceptance of the paper.

Manh V. Nguyen, Liang Zhao, Bobin Deng et al.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which offer exceptional energy efficiency for inference, and Federated Learning (FL), which offers privacy-preserving distributed training, is a rising area of interest that highly beneficial towards Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Despite this, research that tackles Byzantine attacks and bandwidth limitation in FL-SNNs, both poses significant threats on model convergence and training times, still remains largely unexplored. Going beyond proposing a solution for both of these problems, in this work we highlight the dual benefits of FL-SNNs, against non-omniscient Byzantine adversaries (ones that restrict attackers access to local clients datasets), and greater communication efficiency, over FL-ANNs. Specifically, we discovered that a simple integration of Top-\k{appa} sparsification into the FL apparatus can help leverage the advantages of the SNN models in both greatly reducing bandwidth usage and significantly boosting the robustness of FL training against non-omniscient Byzantine adversaries. Most notably, we saw a massive improvement of roughly 40% accuracy gain in FL-SNNs training under the lethal MinMax attack

Boxiang Dong, Hui, Wang et al.

Cyber attacks pose crucial threats to computer system security, and put digital treasuries at excessive risks. This leads to an urgent call for an effective intrusion detection system that can identify the intrusion attacks with high accuracy. It is challenging to classify the intrusion events due to the wide variety of attacks. Furthermore, in a normal network environment, a majority of the connections are initiated by benign behaviors. The class imbalance issue in intrusion detection forces the classifier to be biased toward the majority/benign class, thus leave many attack incidents undetected. Spurred by the success of deep neural networks in computer vision and natural language processing, in this paper, we design a new system named DeepIDEA that takes full advantage of deep learning to enable intrusion detection and classification. To achieve high detection accuracy on imbalanced data, we design a novel attack-sharing loss function that can effectively move the decision boundary towards the attack classes and eliminates the bias towards the majority/benign class. By using this loss function, DeepIDEA respects the fact that the intrusion mis-classification should receive higher penalty than the attack mis-classification. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the high detection accuracy of DeepIDEA. In particular, compared with eight state-of-the-art approaches, DeepIDEA always provides the best class-balanced accuracy.

Liang Zhao, Yang Wang, Yi Yang et al.

This paper presents two unsupervised learning layers (UL layers) for label-free video analysis: one for fully connected layers, and the other for convolutional ones. The proposed UL layers can play two roles: they can be the cost function layer for providing global training signal; meanwhile they can be added to any regular neural network layers for providing local training signals and combined with the training signals backpropagated from upper layers for extracting both slow and fast changing features at layers of different depths. Therefore, the UL layers can be used in either pure unsupervised or semi-supervised settings. Both a closed-form solution and an online learning algorithm for two UL layers are provided. Experiments with unlabeled synthetic and real-world videos demonstrated that the neural networks equipped with UL layers and trained with the proposed online learning algorithm can extract shape and motion information from video sequences of moving objects. The experiments demonstrated the potential applications of UL layers and online learning algorithm to head orientation estimation and moving object localization.