The introduction of high-quality image generation models, particularly the StyleGAN family, provides a powerful tool to synthesize and manipulate images. However, existing models are built upon high-quality (HQ) data as desired outputs, making them unfit for in-the-wild low-quality (LQ) images, which are common inputs for manipulation. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing a novel GAN structure that allows for generating images with controllable quality. The network can synthesize various image degradation and restore the sharp image via a quality control code. Our proposed QC-StyleGAN can directly edit LQ images without altering their quality by applying GAN inversion and manipulation techniques. It also provides for free an image restoration solution that can handle various degradations, including noise, blur, compression artifacts, and their mixtures. Finally, we demonstrate numerous other applications such as image degradation synthesis, transfer, and interpolation.

Sockeye 3是神经机器翻译（NMT）的Mockeye工具包的最新版本。现在，基于Pytorch，Sockeye 3提供了更快的模型实现和更高级的功能，并具有进一步的简化代码库。这可以通过更快的迭代，对更强大，更快的模型进行有效的培训以及快速从研究转移到生产的新想法的灵活性，从而实现更广泛的实验。当运行可比较的型号时，Sockeye 3的速度比GPU上的其他Pytorch实现快126％，在CPU上的实现速度高达292％。Sockeye 3是根据Apache 2.0许可发布的开源软件。

网络修剪是一种广泛使用的压缩技术，能够以最小的准确性损失显着缩小过度参数化模型。本文表明，修剪可能会产生或加剧不同的影响。该论文阐明了导致这种差异的因素，表明梯度规范的差异以及跨组的决策边界的距离造成了这一关键问题。它详细分析了这些因素，提供了理论和经验支持，并提出了一种简单而有效的解决方案，可以减轻修剪造成的不同影响。

本文调查了差异隐私（DP）与公平性交集中的最新工作。它审查了隐私和公平性可能使目标对准或对比目标的条件，分析了DP如何以及为什么在决策问题和学习任务中加剧偏见和不公平性，并描述了DP系统中出现的公平问题的可用缓解措施。该调查提供了对在公平镜头下部署隐私制度学习或决策任务时，对主要挑战和潜在风险的统一理解。

差异隐私（DP）是私人机器学习系统的重要隐私技术。它允许衡量与个人参与计算相关的风险。但是，最近观察到，DP学习系统可能会加剧不同群体的偏见和不公平性。本文以这些重要的观察为基础，并阐明了在差异私人经验风险最小化问题中产生的不同影响的原因。它着重于两种经过深入研究的DP学习方法中个人组之间产生的准确性差异：输出扰动和差异私有随机梯度下降。本文分析了哪些数据和模型属性负责不成比例的影响，为什么这些方面影响不同的群体不成比例，并提出了减轻这些影响的指南。提出的方法在几个数据集和设置上进行评估。

In this paper, we propose a novel technique, namely INVALIDATOR, to automatically assess the correctness of APR-generated patches via semantic and syntactic reasoning. INVALIDATOR reasons about program semantic via program invariants while it also captures program syntax via language semantic learned from large code corpus using the pre-trained language model. Given a buggy program and the developer-patched program, INVALIDATOR infers likely invariants on both programs. Then, INVALIDATOR determines that a APR-generated patch overfits if: (1) it violates correct specifications or (2) maintains errors behaviors of the original buggy program. In case our approach fails to determine an overfitting patch based on invariants, INVALIDATOR utilizes a trained model from labeled patches to assess patch correctness based on program syntax. The benefit of INVALIDATOR is three-fold. First, INVALIDATOR is able to leverage both semantic and syntactic reasoning to enhance its discriminant capability. Second, INVALIDATOR does not require new test cases to be generated but instead only relies on the current test suite and uses invariant inference to generalize the behaviors of a program. Third, INVALIDATOR is fully automated. We have conducted our experiments on a dataset of 885 patches generated on real-world programs in Defects4J. Experiment results show that INVALIDATOR correctly classified 79% overfitting patches, accounting for 23% more overfitting patches being detected by the best baseline. INVALIDATOR also substantially outperforms the best baselines by 14% and 19% in terms of Accuracy and F-Measure, respectively.

Modern deep neural networks have achieved superhuman performance in tasks from image classification to game play. Surprisingly, these various complex systems with massive amounts of parameters exhibit the same remarkable structural properties in their last-layer features and classifiers across canonical datasets. This phenomenon is known as "Neural Collapse," and it was discovered empirically by Papyan et al. \cite{Papyan20}. Recent papers have theoretically shown the global solutions to the training network problem under a simplified "unconstrained feature model" exhibiting this phenomenon. We take a step further and prove the Neural Collapse occurrence for deep linear network for the popular mean squared error (MSE) and cross entropy (CE) loss. Furthermore, we extend our research to imbalanced data for MSE loss and present the first geometric analysis for Neural Collapse under this setting.

We present a Machine Learning (ML) study case to illustrate the challenges of clinical translation for a real-time AI-empowered echocardiography system with data of ICU patients in LMICs. Such ML case study includes data preparation, curation and labelling from 2D Ultrasound videos of 31 ICU patients in LMICs and model selection, validation and deployment of three thinner neural networks to classify apical four-chamber view. Results of the ML heuristics showed the promising implementation, validation and application of thinner networks to classify 4CV with limited datasets. We conclude this work mentioning the need for (a) datasets to improve diversity of demographics, diseases, and (b) the need of further investigations of thinner models to be run and implemented in low-cost hardware to be clinically translated in the ICU in LMICs. The code and other resources to reproduce this work are available at https://github.com/vital-ultrasound/ai-assisted-echocardiography-for-low-resource-countries.

Ensemble learning combines results from multiple machine learning models in order to provide a better and optimised predictive model with reduced bias, variance and improved predictions. However, in federated learning it is not feasible to apply centralised ensemble learning directly due to privacy concerns. Hence, a mechanism is required to combine results of local models to produce a global model. Most distributed consensus algorithms, such as Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), do not normally perform well in such applications. This is because, in such methods predictions of some of the peers are disregarded, so a majority of peers can win without even considering other peers' decisions. Additionally, the confidence score of the result of each peer is not normally taken into account, although it is an important feature to consider for ensemble learning. Moreover, the problem of a tie event is often left un-addressed by methods such as BFT. To fill these research gaps, we propose PoSw (Proof of Swarm), a novel distributed consensus algorithm for ensemble learning in a federated setting, which was inspired by particle swarm based algorithms for solving optimisation problems. The proposed algorithm is theoretically proved to always converge in a relatively small number of steps and has mechanisms to resolve tie events while trying to achieve sub-optimum solutions. We experimentally validated the performance of the proposed algorithm using ECG classification as an example application in healthcare, showing that the ensemble learning model outperformed all local models and even the FL-based global model. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed algorithm is the first attempt to make consensus over the output results of distributed models trained using federated learning.

In the era of Internet of Things (IoT), network-wide anomaly detection is a crucial part of monitoring IoT networks due to the inherent security vulnerabilities of most IoT devices. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) has been proposed to separate network traffics into two disjoint subspaces corresponding to normal and malicious behaviors for anomaly detection. However, the privacy concerns and limitations of devices' computing resources compromise the practical effectiveness of PCA. We propose a federated PCA-based Grassmannian optimization framework that coordinates IoT devices to aggregate a joint profile of normal network behaviors for anomaly detection. First, we introduce a privacy-preserving federated PCA framework to simultaneously capture the profile of various IoT devices' traffic. Then, we investigate the alternating direction method of multipliers gradient-based learning on the Grassmann manifold to guarantee fast training and the absence of detecting latency using limited computational resources. Empirical results on the NSL-KDD dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches. Finally, we show that the Grassmann manifold algorithm is highly adapted for IoT anomaly detection, which permits drastically reducing the analysis time of the system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first federated PCA algorithm for anomaly detection meeting the requirements of IoT networks.