随着深度学习模型逐渐成为时间序列预测的主要主力，因此，对抗性攻击下对预测和决策系统的潜在脆弱性已成为近年来的主要问题。尽管对单变量时间序列的预测开始研究这种行为和防御机制，但关于多变量预测的研究仍然很少，由于其在不同时间序列之间编码相关性的能力，通常是优选的。在这项工作中，我们考虑到攻击预算约束和多个时间序列之间的相关结构，研究和设计对多元概率预测模型的对抗性攻击。具体而言，我们研究了稀疏的间接攻击，该攻击仅通过攻击少数其他项目的历史来节省攻击成本，从而损害了项目（时间序列）的预测（时间序列）。为了打击这些攻击，我们还制定了两种防御策略。首先，我们采用随机平滑度到多元时间序列方案，并通过经验实验验证其有效性。其次，我们利用稀疏的攻击者来实现端到端的对抗训练，从而提供强大的概率预测者。对REAL数据集进行的广泛实验证实，与其他基线防御机制相比，我们的攻击方案具有强大的功能，并且我们的防御算法更有效。

In federated learning problems, data is scattered across different servers and exchanging or pooling it is often impractical or prohibited. We develop a Bayesian nonparametric framework for federated learning with neural networks. Each data server is assumed to provide local neural network weights, which are modeled through our framework. We then develop an inference approach that allows us to synthesize a more expressive global network without additional supervision, data pooling and with as few as a single communication round. We then demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on federated learning problems simulated from two popular image classification datasets. 1

In this work, we propose a new approach that combines data from multiple sensors for reliable obstacle avoidance. The sensors include two depth cameras and a LiDAR arranged so that they can capture the whole 3D area in front of the robot and a 2D slide around it. To fuse the data from these sensors, we first use an external camera as a reference to combine data from two depth cameras. A projection technique is then introduced to convert the 3D point cloud data of the cameras to its 2D correspondence. An obstacle avoidance algorithm is then developed based on the dynamic window approach. A number of experiments have been conducted to evaluate our proposed approach. The results show that the robot can effectively avoid static and dynamic obstacles of different shapes and sizes in different environments.

We introduce an approach for the answer-aware question generation problem. Instead of only relying on the capability of strong pre-trained language models, we observe that the information of answers and questions can be found in some relevant sentences in the context. Based on that, we design a model which includes two modules: a selector and a generator. The selector forces the model to more focus on relevant sentences regarding an answer to provide implicit local information. The generator generates questions by implicitly combining local information from the selector and global information from the whole context encoded by the encoder. The model is trained jointly to take advantage of latent interactions between the two modules. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that our model is better than strong pre-trained models for the question generation task. The code is also available (shorturl.at/lV567).

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

Time series, sets of sequences in chronological order, are essential data in statistical research with many forecasting applications. Although recent performance in many Transformer-based models has been noticeable, long multi-horizon time series forecasting remains a very challenging task. Going beyond transformers in sequence translation and transduction research, we observe the effects of down-and-up samplings that can nudge temporal saliency patterns to emerge in time sequences. Motivated by the mentioned observation, in this paper, we propose a novel architecture, Temporal Saliency Detection (TSD), on top of the attention mechanism and apply it to multi-horizon time series prediction. We renovate the traditional encoder-decoder architecture by making as a series of deep convolutional blocks to work in tandem with the multi-head self-attention. The proposed TSD approach facilitates the multiresolution of saliency patterns upon condensed multi-heads, thus progressively enhancing complex time series forecasting. Experimental results illustrate that our proposed approach has significantly outperformed existing state-of-the-art methods across multiple standard benchmark datasets in many far-horizon forecasting settings. Overall, TSD achieves 31% and 46% relative improvement over the current state-of-the-art models in multivariate and univariate time series forecasting scenarios on standard benchmarks. The Git repository is available at https://github.com/duongtrung/time-series-temporal-saliency-patterns.

Machine Learning as a service (MLaaS) permits resource-limited clients to access powerful data analytics services ubiquitously. Despite its merits, MLaaS poses significant concerns regarding the integrity of delegated computation and the privacy of the server's model parameters. To address this issue, Zhang et al. (CCS'20) initiated the study of zero-knowledge Machine Learning (zkML). Few zkML schemes have been proposed afterward; however, they focus on sole ML classification algorithms that may not offer satisfactory accuracy or require large-scale training data and model parameters, which may not be desirable for some applications. We propose ezDPS, a new efficient and zero-knowledge ML inference scheme. Unlike prior works, ezDPS is a zkML pipeline in which the data is processed in multiple stages for high accuracy. Each stage of ezDPS is harnessed with an established ML algorithm that is shown to be effective in various applications, including Discrete Wavelet Transformation, Principal Components Analysis, and Support Vector Machine. We design new gadgets to prove ML operations effectively. We fully implemented ezDPS and assessed its performance on real datasets. Experimental results showed that ezDPS achieves one-to-three orders of magnitude more efficient than the generic circuit-based approach in all metrics while maintaining more desirable accuracy than single ML classification approaches.

Collecting large-scale medical datasets with fully annotated samples for training of deep networks is prohibitively expensive, especially for 3D volume data. Recent breakthroughs in self-supervised learning (SSL) offer the ability to overcome the lack of labeled training samples by learning feature representations from unlabeled data. However, most current SSL techniques in the medical field have been designed for either 2D images or 3D volumes. In practice, this restricts the capability to fully leverage unlabeled data from numerous sources, which may include both 2D and 3D data. Additionally, the use of these pre-trained networks is constrained to downstream tasks with compatible data dimensions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for unsupervised joint learning on 2D and 3D data modalities. Given a set of 2D images or 2D slices extracted from 3D volumes, we construct an SSL task based on a 2D contrastive clustering problem for distinct classes. The 3D volumes are exploited by computing vectored embedding at each slice and then assembling a holistic feature through deformable self-attention mechanisms in Transformer, allowing incorporating long-range dependencies between slices inside 3D volumes. These holistic features are further utilized to define a novel 3D clustering agreement-based SSL task and masking embedding prediction inspired by pre-trained language models. Experiments on downstream tasks, such as 3D brain segmentation, lung nodule detection, 3D heart structures segmentation, and abnormal chest X-ray detection, demonstrate the effectiveness of our joint 2D and 3D SSL approach. We improve plain 2D Deep-ClusterV2 and SwAV by a significant margin and also surpass various modern 2D and 3D SSL approaches.

Air pollution is an emerging problem that needs to be solved especially in developed and developing countries. In Vietnam, air pollution is also a concerning issue in big cities such as Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh cities where air pollution comes mostly from vehicles such as cars and motorbikes. In order to tackle the problem, the paper focuses on developing a solution that can estimate the emitted PM2.5 pollutants by counting the number of vehicles in the traffic. We first investigated among the recent object detection models and developed our own traffic surveillance system. The observed traffic density showed a similar trend to the measured PM2.5 with a certain lagging in time, suggesting a relation between traffic density and PM2.5. We further express this relationship with a mathematical model which can estimate the PM2.5 value based on the observed traffic density. The estimated result showed a great correlation with the measured PM2.5 plots in the urban area context.

Pareto Front Learning (PFL) was recently introduced as an effective approach to obtain a mapping function from a given trade-off vector to a solution on the Pareto front, which solves the multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem. Due to the inherent trade-off between conflicting objectives, PFL offers a flexible approach in many scenarios in which the decision makers can not specify the preference of one Pareto solution over another, and must switch between them depending on the situation. However, existing PFL methods ignore the relationship between the solutions during the optimization process, which hinders the quality of the obtained front. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel PFL framework namely \ourmodel, which employs a hypernetwork to generate multiple solutions from a set of diverse trade-off preferences and enhance the quality of the Pareto front by maximizing the Hypervolume indicator defined by these solutions. The experimental results on several MOO machine learning tasks show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the baselines in producing the trade-off Pareto front.