Yuxin Wang

Fanfei Meng, Lele Zhang, Yu Chen et al.

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging paradigm for decentralized training of machine learning models on distributed clients, without revealing the data to the central server. The learning scheme may be horizontal, vertical or hybrid (both vertical and horizontal). Most existing research work with deep neural network (DNN) modelling is focused on horizontal data distributions, while vertical and hybrid schemes are much less studied. In this paper, we propose a generalized algorithm FedEmb, for modelling vertical and hybrid DNN-based learning. The idea of our algorithm is characterised by higher inference accuracy, stronger privacy-preserving properties, and lower client-server communication bandwidth demands as compared with existing work. The experimental results show that FedEmb is an effective method to tackle both split feature & subject space decentralized problems, shows 0.3% to 4.2% inference accuracy improvement with limited privacy revealing for datasets stored in local clients, and reduces 88.9 % time complexity over vertical baseline method.

Fanfei Meng, Lele Zhang, Yu Chen et al.

Transformer requires a fixed number of layers and heads which makes them inflexible to the complexity of individual samples and expensive in training and inference. To address this, we propose a sample-based Dynamic Hierarchical Transformer (DHT) model whose layers and heads can be dynamically configured with single data samples via solving contextual bandit problems. To determine the number of layers and heads, we use the Uniform Confidence Bound while we deploy combinatorial Thompson Sampling in order to select specific head combinations given their number. Different from previous work that focuses on compressing trained networks for inference only, DHT is not only advantageous for adaptively optimizing the underlying network architecture during training but also has a flexible network for efficient inference. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive data-driven dynamic transformer without any additional auxiliary neural networks that implement the dynamic system. According to the experiment results, we achieve up to 74% computational savings for both training and inference with a minimal loss of accuracy.

Farida Al Haddad, Yuxin Wang, Malcolm Mielle

Artificial intelligence has the potential to impact safety and efficiency in safety-critical domains such as construction, manufacturing, and healthcare. For example, using sensor data from wearable devices, such as inertial measurement units (IMUs), human gestures can be detected while maintaining privacy, thereby ensuring that safety protocols are followed. However, strict safety requirements in these domains have limited the adoption of AI, since accurate calibration of predicted probabilities and robustness against out-of-distribution (OOD) data is necessary. This paper proposes UAC (Uncertainty-Aware Calibration), a novel two-step method to address these challenges in IMU-based gesture recognition. First, we present an uncertainty-aware gesture network architecture that predicts both gesture probabilities and their associated uncertainties from IMU data. This uncertainty is then used to calibrate the probabilities of each potential gesture. Second, an entropy-weighted expectation of predictions over multiple IMU data windows is used to improve accuracy while maintaining correct calibration. Our method is evaluated using three publicly available IMU datasets for gesture detection and is compared to three state-of-the-art calibration methods for neural networks: temperature scaling, entropy maximization, and Laplace approximation. UAC outperforms existing methods, achieving improved accuracy and calibration in both OOD and in-distribution scenarios. Moreover, we find that, unlike our method, none of the state-of-the-art methods significantly improve the calibration of IMU-based gesture recognition models. In conclusion, our work highlights the advantages of uncertainty-aware calibration of neural networks, demonstrating improvements in both calibration and accuracy for gesture detection using IMU data.

Qingfeng Ji, Yuxin Wang, Letong Sun

Recently, MLP structures have regained popularity, with MLP-Mixer standing out as a prominent example. In the field of computer vision, MLP-Mixer is noted for its ability to extract data information from both channel and token perspectives, effectively acting as a fusion of channel and token information. Indeed, Mixer represents a paradigm for information extraction that amalgamates channel and token information. The essence of Mixer lies in its ability to blend information from diverse perspectives, epitomizing the true concept of "mixing" in the realm of neural network architectures. Beyond channel and token considerations, it is possible to create more tailored mixers from various perspectives to better suit specific task requirements. This study focuses on the domain of audio recognition, introducing a novel model named Audio Spectrogram Mixer with Roll-Time and Hermit FFT (ASM-RH) that incorporates insights from both time and frequency domains. Experimental results demonstrate that ASM-RH is particularly well-suited for audio data and yields promising outcomes across multiple classification tasks. The models and optimal weights files will be published.