Physics-Informed Data Denoising for Real-Life Sensing Systems

Sensors measuring real-life physical processes are ubiquitous in today's interconnected world. These sensors inherently bear noise that often adversely affects performance and reliability of the systems they support. Classic filtering-based approaches introduce strong assumptions on the time or frequency characteristics of sensory measurements, while learning-based denoising approaches typically rely on using ground truth clean data to train a denoising model, which is often challenging or prohibitive to obtain for many real-world applications. We observe that in many scenarios, the relationships between different sensor measurements (e.g., location and acceleration) are analytically described by laws of physics (e.g., second-order differential equation). By incorporating such physics constraints, we can guide the denoising process to improve even in the absence of ground truth data. In light of this, we design a physics-informed denoising model that leverages the inherent algebraic relationships between different measurements governed by the underlying physics. By obviating the need for ground truth clean data, our method offers a practical denoising solution for real-world applications. We conducted experiments in various domains, including inertial navigation, CO2 monitoring, and HVAC control, and achieved state-of-the-art performance compared with existing denoising methods. Our method can denoise data in real time (4ms for a sequence of 1s) for low-cost noisy sensors and produces results that closely align with those from high-precision, high-cost alternatives, leading to an efficient, cost-effective approach for more accurate sensor-based systems.

Towards Diverse and Coherent Augmentation for Time-Series Forecasting

Time-series data augmentation mitigates the issue of insufficient training data for deep learning models. Yet, existing augmentation methods are mainly designed for classification, where class labels can be preserved even if augmentation alters the temporal dynamics. We note that augmentation designed for forecasting requires diversity as well as coherence with the original temporal dynamics. As time-series data generated by real-life physical processes exhibit characteristics in both the time and frequency domains, we propose to combine Spectral and Time Augmentation (STAug) for generating more diverse and coherent samples. Specifically, in the frequency domain, we use the Empirical Mode Decomposition to decompose a time series and reassemble the subcomponents with random weights. This way, we generate diverse samples while being coherent with the original temporal relationships as they contain the same set of base components. In the time domain, we adapt a mix-up strategy that generates diverse as well as linearly in-between coherent samples. Experiments on five real-world time-series datasets demonstrate that STAug outperforms the base models without data augmentation as well as state-of-the-art augmentation methods.

Modeling Label Semantics Improves Activity Recognition

Human activity recognition (HAR) aims to classify sensory time series into different activities, with wide applications in activity tracking, healthcare, human computer interaction, etc. Existing HAR works improve recognition performance by designing more complicated feature extraction methods, but they neglect the label semantics by simply treating labels as integer IDs. We find that many activities in the current HAR datasets have shared label names, e.g., "open door" and "open fridge", "walk upstairs" and "walk downstairs". Through some exploratory analysis, we find that such shared structure in activity names also maps to similarity in the input features. To this end, we design a sequence-to-sequence framework to decode the label name semantics rather than classifying labels as integer IDs. Our proposed method decomposes learning activities into learning shared tokens ("open", "walk"), which is easier than learning the joint distribution ("open fridge", "walk upstairs") and helps transfer learning to activities with insufficient data samples. For datasets originally without shared tokens in label names, we also offer an automated method, using OpenAI's ChatGPT, to generate shared actions and objects. Extensive experiments on seven HAR benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. We also show better performance in the long-tail activity distribution settings and few-shot settings.

Federated Learning with Client-Exclusive Classes

Existing federated classification algorithms typically assume the local annotations at every client cover the same set of classes. In this paper, we aim to lift such an assumption and focus on a more general yet practical non-IID setting where every client can work on non-identical and even disjoint sets of classes (i.e., client-exclusive classes), and the clients have a common goal which is to build a global classification model to identify the union of these classes. Such heterogeneity in client class sets poses a new challenge: how to ensure different clients are operating in the same latent space so as to avoid the drift after aggregation? We observe that the classes can be described in natural languages (i.e., class names) and these names are typically safe to share with all parties. Thus, we formulate the classification problem as a matching process between data representations and class representations and break the classification model into a data encoder and a label encoder. We leverage the natural-language class names as the common ground to anchor the class representations in the label encoder. In each iteration, the label encoder updates the class representations and regulates the data representations through matching. We further use the updated class representations at each round to annotate data samples for locally-unaware classes according to similarity and distill knowledge to local models. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that the proposed method can outperform various classical and state-of-the-art federated learning methods designed for learning with non-IID data.

B2RL: An open-source Dataset for Building Batch Reinforcement Learning

Batch reinforcement learning (BRL) is an emerging research area in the RL community. It learns exclusively from static datasets (i.e. replay buffers) without interaction with the environment. In the offline settings, existing replay experiences are used as prior knowledge for BRL models to find the optimal policy. Thus, generating replay buffers is crucial for BRL model benchmark. In our B2RL (Building Batch RL) dataset, we collected real-world data from our building management systems, as well as buffers generated by several behavioral policies in simulation environments. We believe it could help building experts on BRL research. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to open-source building datasets for the purpose of BRL learning.

Sensei: Self-Supervised Sensor Name Segmentation

A sensor name, typically an alphanumeric string, encodes the key context (e.g., function and location) of a sensor needed for deploying smart building applications. Sensor names, however, are curated in a building vendor-specific manner using different structures and vocabularies that are often esoteric. They thus require tremendous manual effort to annotate on a per-building basis; even to just segment these sensor names into meaningful chunks. In this paper, we propose a fully automated self-supervised framework, Sensei, which can learn to segment sensor names without any human annotation. Specifically, we employ a neural language model to capture the underlying sensor naming structure and then induce self-supervision based on information from the language model to build the segmentation model. Extensive experiments on five real-world buildings comprising thousands of sensors demonstrate the superiority of Sensei over baseline methods.

Sensor-Type Classification in Buildings

Many sensors/meters are deployed in commercial buildings to monitor and optimize their performance. However, because sensor metadata is inconsistent across buildings, software-based solutions are tightly coupled to the sensor metadata conventions (i.e. schemas and naming) for each building. Running the same software across buildings requires significant integration effort. Metadata normalization is critical for scaling the deployment process and allows us to decouple building-specific conventions from the code written for building applications. It also allows us to deal with missing metadata. One important aspect of normalization is to differentiate sensors by the typeof phenomena being observed. In this paper, we propose a general, simple, yet effective classification scheme to differentiate sensors in buildings by type. We perform ensemble learning on data collected from over 2000 sensor streams in two buildings. Our approach is able to achieve more than 92% accuracy for classification within buildings and more than 82% accuracy for across buildings. We also introduce a method for identifying potential misclassified streams. This is important because it allows us to identify opportunities to attain more input from experts -- input that could help improve classification accuracy when ground truth is unavailable. We show that by adjusting a threshold value we are able to identify at least 30% of the misclassified instances.