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Ming Hu

Publications and source records attributed to Ming Hu.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

AdaptiveFL: Adaptive Heterogeneous Federated Learning for Resource-Constrained AIoT Systems

Although Federated Learning (FL) is promising to enable collaborative learning among Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) devices, it suffers from the problem of low classification performance due to various heterogeneity factors (e.g., computing capacity, memory size) of devices and uncertain operating environments. To address these issues, this paper introduces an effective FL approach named AdaptiveFL based on a novel fine-grained width-wise model pruning strategy, which can generate various heterogeneous local models for heterogeneous AIoT devices. By using our proposed reinforcement learning-based device selection mechanism, AdaptiveFL can adaptively dispatch suitable heterogeneous models to corresponding AIoT devices on the fly based on their available resources for local training. Experimental results show that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, AdaptiveFL can achieve up to 16.83% inference improvements for both IID and non-IID scenarios.

cs.LG↗

Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: Toward Efficient and Accurate Split Federated Learning

Due to its advantages in resource constraint scenarios, Split Federated Learning (SFL) is promising in AIoT systems. However, due to data heterogeneity and stragglers, SFL suffers from the challenges of low inference accuracy and low efficiency. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel SFL approach, named Sliding Split Federated Learning (S$^2$FL), which adopts an adaptive sliding model split strategy and a data balance-based training mechanism. By dynamically dispatching different model portions to AIoT devices according to their computing capability, S$^2$FL can alleviate the low training efficiency caused by stragglers. By combining features uploaded by devices with different data distributions to generate multiple larger batches with a uniform distribution for back-propagation, S$^2$FL can alleviate the performance degradation caused by data heterogeneity. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to conventional SFL, S$^2$FL can achieve up to 16.5\% inference accuracy improvement and 3.54X training acceleration.

cs.LG↗

Personalized Federated Instruction Tuning via Neural Architecture Search

Federated Instruction Tuning (FIT) has shown the ability to achieve collaborative model instruction tuning among massive data owners without sharing private data. However, it still faces two key challenges, i.e., data and resource heterogeneity. Due to the varying data distribution and preferences among data owners, FIT cannot adapt to the personalized data of individual owners. Moreover, clients with superior computational abilities are constrained since they need to maintain the same fine-tuning architecture as the weaker clients. To address these issues, we propose a novel Personalized Federated Instruction Tuning (PerFIT) framework based on architecture search. Specifically, PerFIT allows each client to search for a personalized architecture by expanding the trainable parameter space of the global model followed by pruning the parameters to the original state. This procedure allows personalized instruction fine-tuning within expanded parameter spaces, concurrently preserving the same number of trainable parameters. Furthermore, to release the abilities of heterogeneous computational resources and enhance the performance of personalization on local data, we exploit personalized parameter-wise aggregation. The evaluation with multiple LLMs non-IID scenarios demonstrates that compared to the state-of-the-art FIT methods, our approach can achieve up to a 23% decrease in perplexity.

cs.LG↗

MIP: CLIP-based Image Reconstruction from PEFT Gradients

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, as an effective pre-trained multimodal neural network, has been widely used in distributed machine learning tasks, especially Federated Learning (FL). Typically, CLIP-based FL adopts Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) for model training, which only fine-tunes adapter parameters or soft prompts rather than the full parameters. Although PEFT is different from the traditional training mode, in this paper, we theoretically analyze that the gradients of adapters or soft prompts can still be used to perform image reconstruction attacks. Based on our theoretical analysis, we propose Multm-In-Parvo (MIP), a proprietary reconstruction attack method targeting CLIP-based distributed machine learning architecture. Specifically, MIP can reconstruct CLIP training images according to the gradients of soft prompts or an adapter. In addition, MIP includes a label prediction strategy to accelerate convergence and an inverse gradient estimation mechanism to avoid the vanishing gradient problem on the text encoder. Experimental results show that MIP can effectively reconstruct training images according to the gradients of soft prompts or adapters of CLIP models.

cs.CV↗

Deep-potential enabled multiscale simulation of gallium nitride devices on boron arsenide cooling substrates

High-efficient heat dissipation plays critical role for high-power-density electronics. Experimental synthesis of ultrahigh thermal conductivity boron arsenide (BAs, 1300 W m-1K-1) cooling substrates into the wide-bandgap semiconductor of gallium nitride (GaN) devices has been realized. However, the lack of systematic analysis on the heat transfer across the BAs-GaN interface hampers the practical applications. In this study, by constructing the accurate and high-efficient machine learning interatomic potentials, we performed multiscale simulations of the BAs-GaN heterostructures. Ultrahigh interfacial thermal conductance (ITC) of 265 MW m-2K-1 is achieved, which lies in the well-matched lattice vibrations of BAs and GaN. Moreover, the competition between grain size and boundary resistance was revealed with size increasing from 1 nm to 100 μm. Such deep-potential equipped multiscale simulations not only promote the practical applications of BAs cooling substrates in electronics, but also offer new approach for designing advanced thermal management systems.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Structure-based out-of-distribution (OOD) materials property prediction: a benchmark study

In real-world material research, machine learning (ML) models are usually expected to predict and discover novel exceptional materials that deviate from the known materials. It is thus a pressing question to provide an objective evaluation of ML model performances in property prediction of out-of-distribution (OOD) materials that are different from the training set distribution. Traditional performance evaluation of materials property prediction models through random splitting of the dataset frequently results in artificially high performance assessments due to the inherent redundancy of typical material datasets. Here we present a comprehensive benchmark study of structure-based graph neural networks (GNNs) for extrapolative OOD materials property prediction. We formulate five different categories of OOD ML problems for three benchmark datasets from the MatBench study. Our extensive experiments show that current state-of-the-art GNN algorithms significantly underperform for the OOD property prediction tasks on average compared to their baselines in the MatBench study, demonstrating a crucial generalization gap in realistic material prediction tasks. We further examine the latent physical spaces of these GNN models and identify the sources of CGCNN, ALIGNN, and DeeperGATGNN's significantly more robust OOD performance than those of the current best models in the MatBench study (coGN and coNGN), and provide insights to improve their performance.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Personalization as a Shortcut for Few-Shot Backdoor Attack against Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Although recent personalization methods have democratized high-resolution image synthesis by enabling swift concept acquisition with minimal examples and lightweight computation, they also present an exploitable avenue for high accessible backdoor attacks. This paper investigates a critical and unexplored aspect of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models - their potential vulnerability to backdoor attacks via personalization. Our study focuses on a zero-day backdoor vulnerability prevalent in two families of personalization methods, epitomized by Textual Inversion and DreamBooth.Compared to traditional backdoor attacks, our proposed method can facilitate more precise, efficient, and easily accessible attacks with a lower barrier to entry. We provide a comprehensive review of personalization in T2I diffusion models, highlighting the operation and exploitation potential of this backdoor vulnerability. To be specific, by studying the prompt processing of Textual Inversion and DreamBooth, we have devised dedicated backdoor attacks according to the different ways of dealing with unseen tokens and analyzed the influence of triggers and concept images on the attack effect. Through comprehensive empirical study, we endorse the utilization of the nouveau-token backdoor attack due to its impressive effectiveness, stealthiness, and integrity, markedly outperforming the legacy-token backdoor attack.

cs.CV↗

Scalable Multiuser Immersive Communications with Multi-numerology and Mini-slot

This paper studies multiuser immersive communications networks in which different user equipment may demand various extended reality (XR) services. In such heterogeneous networks, time-frequency resource allocation needs to be more adaptive since XR services are usually multi-modal and latency-sensitive. To this end, we develop a scalable time-frequency resource allocation method based on multi-numerology and mini-slot. To appropriately determining the discrete parameters of multi-numerology and mini-slot for multiuser immersive communications, the proposed method first presents a novel flexible time-frequency resource block configuration, then it leverages the deep reinforcement learning to maximize the total quality-of-experience (QoE) under different users' QoE constraints. The results confirm the efficiency and scalability of the proposed time-frequency resource allocation method.

cs.ET↗

AdapterFL: Adaptive Heterogeneous Federated Learning for Resource-constrained Mobile Computing Systems

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative learning of large-scale distributed clients without data sharing. However, due to the disparity of computing resources among massive mobile computing devices, the performance of traditional homogeneous model-based Federated Learning (FL) is seriously limited. On the one hand, to achieve model training in all the diverse clients, mobile computing systems can only use small low-performance models for collaborative learning. On the other hand, devices with high computing resources cannot train a high-performance large model with their insufficient raw data. To address the resource-constrained problem in mobile computing systems, we present a novel heterogeneous FL approach named AdapterFL, which uses a model reassemble strategy to facilitate collaborative training of massive heterogeneous mobile devices adaptively. Specifically, we select multiple candidate heterogeneous models based on the computing performance of massive mobile devices and then divide each heterogeneous model into two partitions. By reassembling the partitions, we can generate models with varied sizes that are combined by the partial parameters of the large model with the partial parameters of the small model. Using these reassembled models for FL training, we can train the partial parameters of the large model using low-performance devices. In this way, we can alleviate performance degradation in large models due to resource constraints. The experimental results show that AdapterFL can achieve up to 12\% accuracy improvement compared to the state-of-the-art heterogeneous federated learning methods in resource-constrained scenarios.

cs.LG↗

NurViD: A Large Expert-Level Video Database for Nursing Procedure Activity Understanding

The application of deep learning to nursing procedure activity understanding has the potential to greatly enhance the quality and safety of nurse-patient interactions. By utilizing the technique, we can facilitate training and education, improve quality control, and enable operational compliance monitoring. However, the development of automatic recognition systems in this field is currently hindered by the scarcity of appropriately labeled datasets. The existing video datasets pose several limitations: 1) these datasets are small-scale in size to support comprehensive investigations of nursing activity; 2) they primarily focus on single procedures, lacking expert-level annotations for various nursing procedures and action steps; and 3) they lack temporally localized annotations, which prevents the effective localization of targeted actions within longer video sequences. To mitigate these limitations, we propose NurViD, a large video dataset with expert-level annotation for nursing procedure activity understanding. NurViD consists of over 1.5k videos totaling 144 hours, making it approximately four times longer than the existing largest nursing activity datasets. Notably, it encompasses 51 distinct nursing procedures and 177 action steps, providing a much more comprehensive coverage compared to existing datasets that primarily focus on limited procedures. To evaluate the efficacy of current deep learning methods on nursing activity understanding, we establish three benchmarks on NurViD: procedure recognition on untrimmed videos, procedure and action recognition on trimmed videos, and action detection. Our benchmark and code will be available at \url{https://github.com/minghu0830/NurViD-benchmark}.

cs.CV↗

Efficient synthesis of Vitamin D3 in a 3D ultraviolet photochemical microreactor fabricated using an ultrafast laser

Large-scale, high-precision, and high-transparency microchannels hold great potential for developing high-performance continuous-flow photochemical reactions. We demonstrate ultrafast laser-enabled fabrication of 3D microchannel reactors in ultraviolet (UV) grade fused silica which exhibit high transparency under the illumination of UV light sources of wavelengths well below 300 nm with excellent mixing efficiency. With the fabricated glass microchannel reactors, we demonstrate continuous-flow UV photochemical synthesis of vitamin D3 with low power consumption of the UV light sources.

physics.app-ph↗

MammalNet: A Large-scale Video Benchmark for Mammal Recognition and Behavior Understanding

Monitoring animal behavior can facilitate conservation efforts by providing key insights into wildlife health, population status, and ecosystem function. Automatic recognition of animals and their behaviors is critical for capitalizing on the large unlabeled datasets generated by modern video devices and for accelerating monitoring efforts at scale. However, the development of automated recognition systems is currently hindered by a lack of appropriately labeled datasets. Existing video datasets 1) do not classify animals according to established biological taxonomies; 2) are too small to facilitate large-scale behavioral studies and are often limited to a single species; and 3) do not feature temporally localized annotations and therefore do not facilitate localization of targeted behaviors within longer video sequences. Thus, we propose MammalNet, a new large-scale animal behavior dataset with taxonomy-guided annotations of mammals and their common behaviors. MammalNet contains over 18K videos totaling 539 hours, which is ~10 times larger than the largest existing animal behavior dataset. It covers 17 orders, 69 families, and 173 mammal categories for animal categorization and captures 12 high-level animal behaviors that received focus in previous animal behavior studies. We establish three benchmarks on MammalNet: standard animal and behavior recognition, compositional low-shot animal and behavior recognition, and behavior detection. Our dataset and code have been made available at: https://mammal-net.github.io.

cs.CV↗

Architecture-agnostic Iterative Black-box Certified Defense against Adversarial Patches

The adversarial patch attack aims to fool image classifiers within a bounded, contiguous region of arbitrary changes, posing a real threat to computer vision systems (e.g., autonomous driving, content moderation, biometric authentication, medical imaging) in the physical world. To address this problem in a trustworthy way, proposals have been made for certified patch defenses that ensure the robustness of classification models and prevent future patch attacks from breaching the defense. State-of-the-art certified defenses can be compatible with any model architecture, as well as achieve high clean and certified accuracy. Although the methods are adaptive to arbitrary patch positions, they inevitably need to access the size of the adversarial patch, which is unreasonable and impractical in real-world attack scenarios. To improve the feasibility of the architecture-agnostic certified defense in a black-box setting (i.e., position and size of the patch are both unknown), we propose a novel two-stage Iterative Black-box Certified Defense method, termed IBCD.In the first stage, it estimates the patch size in a search-based manner by evaluating the size relationship between the patch and mask with pixel masking. In the second stage, the accuracy results are calculated by the existing white-box certified defense methods with the estimated patch size. The experiments conducted on two popular model architectures and two datasets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of IBCD.

cs.CV↗

Real-time spectroscopic monitoring of continuous synthesis of zinc oxide nanostructures in femtosecond laser fabricated 3D microfluidic microchannels with integrated on-chip fiber probe array

Materials synthesis in a microfluidic environment enables the flexible and controllable production of various types of nanostructures which are of great potential in the fields of chemistry, environmental science, bioengineering, and medicine. Here, we demonstrate on-chip simultaneous continuous-flow synthesis and in-situ spectrum diagnosis of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanomaterials using a femtosecond-fabricated three-dimensional microchannel reactor integrated with an array of optical fiber probes. The microchannel reactor including 3D concentration gradient generators followed by 3D micromixing units provides high-efficiency manipulation of reactants with different concentrations as well as parallel reaction dynamics in an autonomous manner. The integrated optical fiber probe array allows precise and parallel spectropic detection in different microchannels with high spatial and temporal resolutions for screening the synthetic conditions. The synthesized ZnO nanostructures can be tailored in size, shape, and morphology by tuning the flow rates and reactant concentrations based on the spectroscopic signals detected with the fiber probe array.

physics.app-ph↗

Physics Guided Deep Learning for Generative Design of Crystal Materials with Symmetry Constraints

Discovering new materials is a challenging task in materials science crucial to the progress of human society. Conventional approaches based on experiments and simulations are labor-intensive or costly with success heavily depending on experts' heuristic knowledge. Here, we propose a deep learning based Physics Guided Crystal Generative Model (PGCGM) for efficient crystal material design with high structural diversity and symmetry. Our model increases the generation validity by more than 700\% compared to FTCP, one of the latest structure generators and by more than 45\% compared to our previous CubicGAN model. Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations are used to validate the generated structures with 1,869 materials out of 2,000 are successfully optimized and deposited into the Carolina Materials Database \url{www.carolinamatdb.org}, of which 39.6\% have negative formation energy and 5.3\% have energy-above-hull less than 0.25 eV/atom, indicating their thermodynamic stability and potential synthesizability.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

HierarchyFL: Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Hierarchical Self-Distillation

Federated learning (FL) has been recognized as a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning paradigm that enables knowledge sharing among various heterogeneous artificial intelligence (AIoT) devices through centralized global model aggregation. FL suffers from model inaccuracy and slow convergence due to the model heterogeneity of the AIoT devices involved. Although various existing methods try to solve the bottleneck of the model heterogeneity problem, most of them improve the accuracy of heterogeneous models in a coarse-grained manner, which makes it still a great challenge to deploy large-scale AIoT devices. To alleviate the negative impact of this problem and take full advantage of the diversity of each heterogeneous model, we propose an efficient framework named HierarchyFL, which uses a small amount of public data for efficient and scalable knowledge across a variety of differently structured models. By using self-distillation and our proposed ensemble library, each hierarchical model can intelligently learn from each other on cloud servers. Experimental results on various well-known datasets show that HierarchyFL can not only maximize the knowledge sharing among various heterogeneous models in large-scale AIoT systems, but also greatly improve the model performance of each involved heterogeneous AIoT device.

cs.LG↗

GitFL: Adaptive Asynchronous Federated Learning using Version Control

As a promising distributed machine learning paradigm that enables collaborative training without compromising data privacy, Federated Learning (FL) has been increasingly used in AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things) design. However, due to the lack of efficient management of straggling devices, existing FL methods greatly suffer from the problems of low inference accuracy and long training time. Things become even worse when taking various uncertain factors (e.g., network delays, performance variances caused by process variation) existing in AIoT scenarios into account. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel asynchronous FL framework named GitFL, whose implementation is inspired by the famous version control system Git. Unlike traditional FL, the cloud server of GitFL maintains a master model (i.e., the global model) together with a set of branch models indicating the trained local models committed by selected devices, where the master model is updated based on both all the pushed branch models and their version information, and only the branch models after the pull operation are dispatched to devices. By using our proposed Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based device selection mechanism, a pulled branch model with an older version will be more likely to be dispatched to a faster and less frequently selected device for the next round of local training. In this way, GitFL enables both effective control of model staleness and adaptive load balance of versioned models among straggling devices, thus avoiding the performance deterioration. Comprehensive experimental results on well-known models and datasets show that, compared with state-of-the-art asynchronous FL methods, GitFL can achieve up to 2.64X training acceleration and 7.88% inference accuracy improvements in various uncertain scenarios.

cs.LG↗

Algorithmic Decision-Making Safeguarded by Human Knowledge

Commercial AI solutions provide analysts and managers with data-driven business intelligence for a wide range of decisions, such as demand forecasting and pricing. However, human analysts may have their own insights and experiences about the decision-making that is at odds with the algorithmic recommendation. In view of such a conflict, we provide a general analytical framework to study the augmentation of algorithmic decisions with human knowledge: the analyst uses the knowledge to set a guardrail by which the algorithmic decision is clipped if the algorithmic output is out of bound, and seems unreasonable. We study the conditions under which the augmentation is beneficial relative to the raw algorithmic decision. We show that when the algorithmic decision is asymptotically optimal with large data, the non-data-driven human guardrail usually provides no benefit. However, we point out three common pitfalls of the algorithmic decision: (1) lack of domain knowledge, such as the market competition, (2) model misspecification, and (3) data contamination. In these cases, even with sufficient data, the augmentation from human knowledge can still improve the performance of the algorithmic decision.

stat.ML↗