Chengyi Yang

Yuanyuan Chen, Zichen Chen, Sheng Guo et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-empowered industrial fault diagnostics is important in ensuring the safe operation of industrial applications. Since complex industrial systems often involve multiple industrial plants (possibly belonging to different companies or subsidiaries) with sensitive data collected and stored in a distributed manner, collaborative fault diagnostic model training often needs to leverage federated learning (FL). As the scale of the industrial fault diagnostic models are often large and communication channels in such systems are often not exclusively used for FL model training, existing deployed FL model training frameworks cannot train such models efficiently across multiple institutions. In this paper, we report our experience developing and deploying the Federated Opportunistic Block Dropout (FEDOBD) approach for industrial fault diagnostic model training. By decomposing large-scale models into semantic blocks and enabling FL participants to opportunistically upload selected important blocks in a quantized manner, it significantly reduces the communication overhead while maintaining model performance. Since its deployment in ENN Group in February 2022, FEDOBD has served two coal chemical plants across two cities in China to build industrial fault prediction models. It helped the company reduce the training communication overhead by over 70% compared to its previous AI Engine, while maintaining model performance at over 85% test F1 score. To our knowledge, it is the first successfully deployed dropout-based FL approach.

Has Sun, Xiaoli Tang, Chengyi Yang et al.

Accurately estimating gas usage is essential for the efficient functioning of gas distribution networks and saving operational costs. Traditional methods rely on centralized data processing, which poses privacy risks. Federated learning (FL) offers a solution to this problem by enabling local data processing on each participant, such as gas companies and heating stations. However, local training and communication overhead may discourage gas companies and heating stations from actively participating in the FL training process. To address this challenge, we propose a Hierarchical FL Incentive Mechanism for Gas Usage Estimation (HI-GAS), which has been testbedded in the ENN Group, one of the leading players in the natural gas and green energy industry. It is designed to support horizontal FL among gas companies, and vertical FL among each gas company and heating station within a hierarchical FL ecosystem, rewarding participants based on their contributions to FL. In addition, a hierarchical FL model aggregation approach is also proposed to improve the gas usage estimation performance by aggregating models at different levels of the hierarchy. The incentive scheme employs a multi-dimensional contribution-aware reward distribution function that combines the evaluation of data quality and model contribution to incentivize both gas companies and heating stations within their jurisdiction while maintaining fairness. Results of extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.

Shubao Zhao, Ming Jin, Zhaoxiang Hou et al.

Time series forecasting is a critical and challenging task in practical application. Recent advancements in pre-trained foundation models for time series forecasting have gained significant interest. However, current methods often overlook the multi-scale nature of time series, which is essential for accurate forecasting. To address this, we propose HiMTM, a hierarchical multi-scale masked time series modeling with self-distillation for long-term forecasting. HiMTM integrates four key components: (1) hierarchical multi-scale transformer (HMT) to capture temporal information at different scales; (2) decoupled encoder-decoder (DED) that directs the encoder towards feature extraction while the decoder focuses on pretext tasks; (3) hierarchical self-distillation (HSD) for multi-stage feature-level supervision signals during pre-training; and (4) cross-scale attention fine-tuning (CSA-FT) to capture dependencies between different scales for downstream tasks. These components collectively enhance multi-scale feature extraction in masked time series modeling, improving forecasting accuracy. Extensive experiments on seven mainstream datasets show that HiMTM surpasses state-of-the-art self-supervised and end-to-end learning methods by a considerable margin of 3.16-68.54\%. Additionally, HiMTM outperforms the latest robust self-supervised learning method, PatchTST, in cross-domain forecasting by a significant margin of 2.3\%. The effectiveness of HiMTM is further demonstrated through its application in natural gas demand forecasting.

Xinxing Zhou, Jiaqi Ye, Shubao Zhao et al.

The exponential growth of multivariate time series data from sensor networks in domains like industrial monitoring and smart cities requires efficient and accurate forecasting models. Current deep learning methods often fail to adequately capture long-range dependencies and complex inter-variable relationships, especially under real-time processing constraints. These limitations arise as many models are optimized for either short-term forecasting with limited receptive fields or long-term accuracy at the cost of efficiency. Additionally, dynamic and intricate interactions between variables in real-world data further complicate modeling efforts. To address these limitations, we propose EffiCANet, an Efficient Convolutional Attention Network designed to enhance forecasting accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. EffiCANet integrates three key components: (1) a Temporal Large-kernel Decomposed Convolution (TLDC) module that captures long-term temporal dependencies while reducing computational overhead; (2) an Inter-Variable Group Convolution (IVGC) module that captures complex and evolving relationships among variables; and (3) a Global Temporal-Variable Attention (GTVA) mechanism that prioritizes critical temporal and inter-variable features. Extensive evaluations across nine benchmark datasets show that EffiCANet achieves the maximum reduction of 10.02% in MAE over state-of-the-art models, while cutting computational costs by 26.2% relative to conventional large-kernel convolution methods, thanks to its efficient decomposition strategy.