智能仪表测量值虽然对于准确的需求预测至关重要，但仍面临一些缺点，包括消费者的隐私，数据泄露问题，仅举几例。最近的文献探索了联合学习（FL）作为一种有前途的隐私机器学习替代方案，该替代方案可以协作学习模型，而无需将私人原始数据暴露于短期负载预测中。尽管有着美德，但标准FL仍然容易受到棘手的网络威胁，称为拜占庭式攻击，这是由错误和/或恶意客户进行的。因此，为了提高联邦联邦短期负载预测对拜占庭威胁的鲁棒性，我们开发了一个最先进的基于私人安全的FL框架，以确保单个智能电表的数据的隐私，同时保护FL的安全性模型和架构。我们提出的框架利用了通过符号随机梯度下降（SignsGD）算法的梯度量化的想法，在本地模型培训后，客户仅将梯度的“符号”传输到控制中心。当我们通过涉及一组拜占庭攻击模型的基准神经网络的实验突出显示时，我们提出的方法会非常有效地减轻此类威胁，从而优于常规的FED-SGD模型。

随着智能设备的扩散和通信中的旋转，配电系统逐渐从被动，手动操作和不灵活的，到大规模互连的网络物理智能电网，以解决未来的能源挑战。然而，由于部署的大规模复杂性和资源限制，若干尖端技术的集成引入了几种安全和隐私漏洞。最近的研究趋势表明，虚假数据注入（FDI）攻击正成为整个智能电网范式内最恶毒的网络威胁之一。因此，本文介绍了对积极分配系统内的直接投资袭击事件的最近进展的全面调查，并提出了分类法，以对智能电网目标进行外商直接投资威胁。相关研究与攻击方法和对电力分配网络的影响形成鲜明对比和总结。最后，我们确定了一些研究差距并推荐了一些未来的研究方向，以指导和激励前瞻性研究人员。

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Periocular refers to the region of the face that surrounds the eye socket. This is a feature-rich area that can be used by itself to determine the identity of an individual. It is especially useful when the iris or the face cannot be reliably acquired. This can be the case of unconstrained or uncooperative scenarios, where the face may appear partially occluded, or the subject-to-camera distance may be high. However, it has received revived attention during the pandemic due to masked faces, leaving the ocular region as the only visible facial area, even in controlled scenarios. This paper discusses the state-of-the-art of periocular biometrics, giving an overall framework of its most significant research aspects.

This short paper compiles the big ideas behind some philosophical views, definitions, and examples of causality. This collection spans the realms of the four commonly adopted approaches to causality: Humes regularity, counterfactual, manipulation, and mechanisms. This short review is motivated by presenting simplified views and definitions and then supplements them with examples from various fields, including economics, education, medicine, politics, physics, and engineering. It is the hope that this short review comes in handy for new and interested readers with little knowledge of causality and causal inference.

In classic reinforcement learning algorithms, agents make decisions at discrete and fixed time intervals. The physical duration between one decision and the next becomes a critical hyperparameter. When this duration is too short, the agent needs to make many decisions to achieve its goal, aggravating the problem's difficulty. But when this duration is too long, the agent becomes incapable of controlling the system. Physical systems, however, do not need a constant control frequency. For learning agents, it is desirable to operate with low frequency when possible and high frequency when necessary. We propose a framework called Continuous-Time Continuous-Options (CTCO), where the agent chooses options as sub-policies of variable durations. Such options are time-continuous and can interact with the system at any desired frequency providing a smooth change of actions. The empirical analysis shows that our algorithm is competitive w.r.t. other time-abstraction techniques, such as classic option learning and action repetition, and practically overcomes the difficult choice of the decision frequency.

Data scarcity is a notable problem, especially in the medical domain, due to patient data laws. Therefore, efficient Pre-Training techniques could help in combating this problem. In this paper, we demonstrate that a model trained on the time direction of functional neuro-imaging data could help in any downstream task, for example, classifying diseases from healthy controls in fMRI data. We train a Deep Neural Network on Independent components derived from fMRI data using the Independent component analysis (ICA) technique. It learns time direction in the ICA-based data. This pre-trained model is further trained to classify brain disorders in different datasets. Through various experiments, we have shown that learning time direction helps a model learn some causal relation in fMRI data that helps in faster convergence, and consequently, the model generalizes well in downstream classification tasks even with fewer data records.

The emergence of COVID-19 has had a global and profound impact, not only on society as a whole, but also on the lives of individuals. Various prevention measures were introduced around the world to limit the transmission of the disease, including face masks, mandates for social distancing and regular disinfection in public spaces, and the use of screening applications. These developments also triggered the need for novel and improved computer vision techniques capable of (i) providing support to the prevention measures through an automated analysis of visual data, on the one hand, and (ii) facilitating normal operation of existing vision-based services, such as biometric authentication schemes, on the other. Especially important here, are computer vision techniques that focus on the analysis of people and faces in visual data and have been affected the most by the partial occlusions introduced by the mandates for facial masks. Such computer vision based human analysis techniques include face and face-mask detection approaches, face recognition techniques, crowd counting solutions, age and expression estimation procedures, models for detecting face-hand interactions and many others, and have seen considerable attention over recent years. The goal of this survey is to provide an introduction to the problems induced by COVID-19 into such research and to present a comprehensive review of the work done in the computer vision based human analysis field. Particular attention is paid to the impact of facial masks on the performance of various methods and recent solutions to mitigate this problem. Additionally, a detailed review of existing datasets useful for the development and evaluation of methods for COVID-19 related applications is also provided. Finally, to help advance the field further, a discussion on the main open challenges and future research direction is given.

身份验证系统容易受到模型反演攻击的影响，在这种攻击中，对手能够近似目标机器学习模型的倒数。生物识别模型是这种攻击的主要候选者。这是因为反相生物特征模型允许攻击者产生逼真的生物识别输入，以使生物识别认证系统欺骗。进行成功模型反转攻击的主要限制之一是所需的训练数据量。在这项工作中，我们专注于虹膜和面部生物识别系统，并提出了一种新技术，可大大减少必要的训练数据量。通过利用多个模型的输出，我们能够使用1/10进行模型反演攻击，以艾哈迈德和富勒（IJCB 2020）的训练集大小（IJCB 2020）进行虹膜数据，而Mai等人的训练集大小为1/1000。 （模式分析和机器智能2019）的面部数据。我们将新的攻击技术表示为结构性随机，并损失对齐。我们的攻击是黑框，不需要了解目标神经网络的权重，只需要输出向量的维度和值。为了显示对齐损失的多功能性，我们将攻击框架应用于会员推理的任务（Shokri等，IEEE S＆P 2017），对生物识别数据。对于IRIS，针对分类网络的会员推断攻击从52％提高到62％的准确性。

面部表现攻击检测（PAD）对于保护面部识别（FR）应用程序至关重要。 FR性能已被证明对某些人口统计学和非人口统计学组是不公平的。但是，面部垫的公平性是一个研究的问题，这主要是由于缺乏适当的注释数据。为了解决此问题，这项工作首先通过组合几个知名的PAD数据集，在其中提供了七个人类宣传的属性标签，从而提出了一个组合的注释数据集（CAAD-PAD）。然后，这项工作通过研究我们的CAAD-Pad上的四个面部垫方法，全面分析了一组面垫的公平及其与培训数据的性质和操作决策阈值分配（ODTA）的关系。同时代表垫子的公平性和绝对垫性能，我们引入了一种新颖的指标，即准确性平衡公平（ABF）。关于CAAD-PAD的广泛实验表明，训练数据和ODTA会引起性别，遮挡和其他属性组的不公平性。基于这些分析，我们提出了一种数据增强方法Fairswap，该方法旨在破坏身份/语义信息和指南模型以挖掘攻击线索而不是与属性相关的信息。详细的实验结果表明，Fairswap通常可以提高垫子性能和面部垫的公平性。