在本文中，我们提出了一个新的基于聚类的主动学习框架，即使用基于聚类的采样（ALCS）的主动学习，以解决标记数据的短缺。ALCS采用基于密度的聚类方法来探索数据集群结构，而无需详尽的参数调整。引入了基于双簇边界的样本查询过程，以提高对高度重叠类分类的学习绩效。此外，我们制定了一种有效的多样性探索策略，以解决查询样品之间的冗余。我们的实验结果证明了ALCS方法的疗效。

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.

Driven by the global decarbonization effort, the rapid integration of renewable energy into the conventional electricity grid presents new challenges and opportunities for the battery energy storage system (BESS) participating in the energy market. Energy arbitrage can be a significant source of revenue for the BESS due to the increasing price volatility in the spot market caused by the mismatch between renewable generation and electricity demand. In addition, the Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) markets established to stabilize the grid can offer higher returns for the BESS due to their capability to respond within milliseconds. Therefore, it is crucial for the BESS to carefully decide how much capacity to assign to each market to maximize the total profit under uncertain market conditions. This paper formulates the bidding problem of the BESS as a Markov Decision Process, which enables the BESS to participate in both the spot market and the FCAS market to maximize profit. Then, Proximal Policy Optimization, a model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithm, is employed to learn the optimal bidding strategy from the dynamic environment of the energy market under a continuous bidding scale. The proposed model is trained and validated using real-world historical data of the Australian National Electricity Market. The results demonstrate that our developed joint bidding strategy in both markets is significantly profitable compared to individual markets.

Point cloud analysis is receiving increasing attention, however, most existing point cloud models lack the practical ability to deal with the unavoidable presence of unknown objects. This paper mainly discusses point cloud analysis under open-set settings, where we train the model without data from unknown classes and identify them in the inference stage. Basically, we propose to solve open-set point cloud analysis using a novel Point Cut-and-Mix mechanism consisting of Unknown-Point Simulator and Unknown-Point Estimator modules. Specifically, we use the Unknown-Point Simulator to simulate unknown data in the training stage by manipulating the geometric context of partial known data. Based on this, the Unknown-Point Estimator module learns to exploit the point cloud's feature context for discriminating the known and unknown data. Extensive experiments show the plausibility of open-set point cloud analysis and the effectiveness of our proposed solutions. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/ShiQiu0419/pointcam}.

Split Learning (SL) and Federated Learning (FL) are two prominent distributed collaborative learning techniques that maintain data privacy by allowing clients to never share their private data with other clients and servers, and fined extensive IoT applications in smart healthcare, smart cities, and smart industry. Prior work has extensively explored the security vulnerabilities of FL in the form of poisoning attacks. To mitigate the effect of these attacks, several defenses have also been proposed. Recently, a hybrid of both learning techniques has emerged (commonly known as SplitFed) that capitalizes on their advantages (fast training) and eliminates their intrinsic disadvantages (centralized model updates). In this paper, we perform the first ever empirical analysis of SplitFed's robustness to strong model poisoning attacks. We observe that the model updates in SplitFed have significantly smaller dimensionality as compared to FL that is known to have the curse of dimensionality. We show that large models that have higher dimensionality are more susceptible to privacy and security attacks, whereas the clients in SplitFed do not have the complete model and have lower dimensionality, making them more robust to existing model poisoning attacks. Our results show that the accuracy reduction due to the model poisoning attack is 5x lower for SplitFed compared to FL.

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) continue to affect the livelihood of individuals in countries in the Southeast Asia and Western Pacific region. These diseases have been long existing and have caused devastating health problems and economic decline to people in low- and middle-income (developing) countries. An estimated 1.7 billion of the world's population suffer one or more NTDs annually, this puts approximately one in five individuals at risk for NTDs. In addition to health and social impact, NTDs inflict significant financial burden to patients, close relatives, and are responsible for billions of dollars lost in revenue from reduced labor productivity in developing countries alone. There is an urgent need to better improve the control and eradication or elimination efforts towards NTDs. This can be achieved by utilizing machine learning tools to better the surveillance, prediction and detection program, and combat NTDs through the discovery of new therapeutics against these pathogens. This review surveys the current application of machine learning tools for NTDs and the challenges to elevate the state-of-the-art of NTDs surveillance, management, and treatment.

Search and rescue, wildfire monitoring, and flood/hurricane impact assessment are mission-critical services for recent IoT networks. Communication synchronization, dependability, and minimal communication jitter are major simulation and system issues for the time-based physics-based ROS simulator, event-based network-based wireless simulator, and complex dynamics of mobile and heterogeneous IoT devices deployed in actual environments. Simulating a heterogeneous multi-robot system before deployment is difficult due to synchronizing physics (robotics) and network simulators. Due to its master-based architecture, most TCP/IP-based synchronization middlewares use ROS1. A real-time ROS2 architecture with masterless packet discovery synchronizes robotics and wireless network simulations. A velocity-aware Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) technique for ground and aerial robots using Data Distribution Service (DDS) publish-subscribe transport minimizes packet loss, synchronization, transmission, and communication jitters. Gazebo and NS-3 simulate and test. Simulator-agnostic middleware. LOS/NLOS and TCP/UDP protocols tested our ROS2-based synchronization middleware for packet loss probability and average latency. A thorough ablation research replaced NS-3 with EMANE, a real-time wireless network simulator, and masterless ROS2 with master-based ROS1. Finally, we tested network synchronization and jitter using one aerial drone (Duckiedrone) and two ground vehicles (TurtleBot3 Burger) on different terrains in masterless (ROS2) and master-enabled (ROS1) clusters. Our middleware shows that a large-scale IoT infrastructure with a diverse set of stationary and robotic devices can achieve low-latency communications (12% and 11% reduction in simulation and real) while meeting mission-critical application reliability (10% and 15% packet loss reduction) and high-fidelity requirements.

Cement is the most used construction material. The performance of cement hydrate depends on the constituent phases, viz. alite, belite, aluminate, and ferrites present in the cement clinker, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Traditionally, clinker phases are analyzed from optical images relying on a domain expert and simple image processing techniques. However, the non-uniformity of the images, variations in the geometry and size of the phases, and variabilities in the experimental approaches and imaging methods make it challenging to obtain the phases. Here, we present a machine learning (ML) approach to detect clinker microstructure phases automatically. To this extent, we create the first annotated dataset of cement clinker by segmenting alite and belite particles. Further, we use supervised ML methods to train models for identifying alite and belite regions. Specifically, we finetune the image detection and segmentation model Detectron-2 on the cement microstructure to develop a model for detecting the cement phases, namely, Cementron. We demonstrate that Cementron, trained only on literature data, works remarkably well on new images obtained from our experiments, demonstrating its generalizability. We make Cementron available for public use.

现有的自我监督学习策略被限制在有限的目标或主要针对单峰应用程序的通用下游任务。对于复杂性和域亲和力（例如模因分析）而言，这对命令性的多模式应用有了孤立的进展。在这里，我们介绍了两种自我监督的预训练方法，即ext-pie-net和mm-simclr（i）在预训练期间使用现成的多模式仇恨语音数据，并且（ii）执行自我 - 通过合并多个专业借口任务，有效地迎合模因分析所需的复杂多模式表示学习，从而有效地迎合了学习。我们实验不同的自我实验策略，包括可以帮助学习丰富的跨模式表示并使用流行的线性探测来评估可恨模因任务的潜在变体。拟议的解决方案通过标签有效的培训与完全监督的基线竞争，同时在梅诺特挑战的所有三个任务上明显优于他们，分别为0.18％，23.64％和0.93％的绩效增长。此外，我们通过在Harmeme任务上报告竞争性能来证明所提出的解决方案的普遍性。最后，我们通过分析特定于任务的学习，使用更少的标记培训样本来建立学习表现的质量，并争辩说，自主策略和手头下游任务的复杂性是相关的。我们的努力强调了更好的多模式自学方法的要求，涉及有效的微调和可推广性能的专业借口任务。

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。