Federated Learning for Traffic Flow Prediction with Synthetic Data Augmentation

Deep-learning based traffic prediction models require vast amounts of data to learn embedded spatial and temporal dependencies. The inherent privacy and commercial sensitivity of such data has encouraged a shift towards decentralised data-driven methods, such as Federated Learning (FL). Under a traditional Machine Learning paradigm, traffic flow prediction models can capture spatial and temporal relationships within centralised data. In reality, traffic data is likely distributed across separate data silos owned by multiple stakeholders. In this work, a cross-silo FL setting is motivated to facilitate stakeholder collaboration for optimal traffic flow prediction applications. This work introduces an FL framework, referred to as FedTPS, to generate synthetic data to augment each client's local dataset by training a diffusion-based trajectory generation model through FL. The proposed framework is evaluated on a large-scale real world ride-sharing dataset using various FL methods and Traffic Flow Prediction models, including a novel prediction model we introduce, which leverages Temporal and Graph Attention mechanisms to learn the Spatio-Temporal dependencies embedded within regional traffic flow data. Experimental results show that FedTPS outperforms multiple other FL baselines with respect to global model performance.

AdaFlow: Opportunistic Inference on Asynchronous Mobile Data with Generalized Affinity Control

The rise of mobile devices equipped with numerous sensors, such as LiDAR and cameras, has spurred the adoption of multi-modal deep intelligence for distributed sensing tasks, such as smart cabins and driving assistance. However, the arrival times of mobile sensory data vary due to modality size and network dynamics, which can lead to delays (if waiting for slower data) or accuracy decline (if inference proceeds without waiting). Moreover, the diversity and dynamic nature of mobile systems exacerbate this challenge. In response, we present a shift to \textit{opportunistic} inference for asynchronous distributed multi-modal data, enabling inference as soon as partial data arrives. While existing methods focus on optimizing modality consistency and complementarity, known as modal affinity, they lack a \textit{computational} approach to control this affinity in open-world mobile environments. AdaFlow pioneers the formulation of structured cross-modality affinity in mobile contexts using a hierarchical analysis-based normalized matrix. This approach accommodates the diversity and dynamics of modalities, generalizing across different types and numbers of inputs. Employing an affinity attention-based conditional GAN (ACGAN), AdaFlow facilitates flexible data imputation, adapting to various modalities and downstream tasks without retraining. Experiments show that AdaFlow significantly reduces inference latency by up to 79.9\% and enhances accuracy by up to 61.9\%, outperforming status quo approaches.

TrajWeaver: Trajectory Recovery with State Propagation Diffusion Model

With the proliferation of location-aware devices, large amount of trajectories have been generated when agents such as people, vehicles and goods flow around the urban environment. These raw trajectories, typically collected from various sources such as GPS in cars, personal mobile devices, and public transport, are often sparse and fragmented due to limited sampling rates, infrastructure coverage and data loss. In this context, trajectory recovery aims to reconstruct such sparse raw trajectories into their dense and continuous counterparts, so that fine-grained movement of agents across space and time can be captured faithfully. Existing trajectory recovery approaches typically rely on the prior knowledge of travel mode or motion patterns, and often fail in densely populated urban areas where accurate maps are absent. In this paper, we present a new recovery framework called TrajWeaver based on probabilistic diffusion models, which is able to recover dense and refined trajectories from the sparse raw ones, conditioned on various auxiliary features such as Areas of Interest along the way, user identity and waybill information. The core of TrajWeaver is a novel State Propagation Diffusion Model (SPDM), which introduces a new state propagation mechanism on top of the standard diffusion models, so that knowledge computed in earlier diffusion steps can be reused later, improving the recovery performance while reducing the number of steps needed. Extensive experiments show that the proposed TrajWeaver can recover from raw trajectories of various lengths, sparsity levels and heterogeneous travel modes, and outperform the state-of-the-art baselines significantly in recovery accuracy. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TrajWeaver/

Fast Inference Through The Reuse Of Attention Maps In Diffusion Models

Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated unprecedented abilities at flexible and realistic image synthesis. However, the iterative process required to produce a single image is costly and incurs a high latency, prompting researchers to further investigate its efficiency. Typically, improvements in latency have been achieved in two ways: (1) training smaller models through knowledge distillation (KD); and (2) adopting techniques from ODE-theory to facilitate larger step sizes. In contrast, we propose a training-free approach that does not alter the step-size of the sampler. Specifically, we find the repeated calculation of attention maps to be both costly and redundant; therefore, we propose a structured reuse of attention maps during sampling. Our initial reuse policy is motivated by rudimentary ODE-theory, which suggests that reuse is most suitable late in the sampling procedure. After noting a number of limitations in this theoretical approach, we empirically search for a better policy. Unlike methods that rely on KD, our reuse policies can easily be adapted to a variety of setups in a plug-and-play manner. Furthermore, when applied to Stable Diffusion-1.5, our reuse policies reduce latency with minimal repercussions on sample quality.

How Much Is Hidden in the NAS Benchmarks? Few-Shot Adaptation of a NAS Predictor

Neural architecture search has proven to be a powerful approach to designing and refining neural networks, often boosting their performance and efficiency over manually-designed variations, but comes with computational overhead. While there has been a considerable amount of research focused on lowering the cost of NAS for mainstream tasks, such as image classification, a lot of those improvements stem from the fact that those tasks are well-studied in the broader context. Consequently, applicability of NAS to emerging and under-represented domains is still associated with a relatively high cost and/or uncertainty about the achievable gains. To address this issue, we turn our focus towards the recent growth of publicly available NAS benchmarks in an attempt to extract general NAS knowledge, transferable across different tasks and search spaces. We borrow from the rich field of meta-learning for few-shot adaptation and carefully study applicability of those methods to NAS, with a special focus on the relationship between task-level correlation (domain shift) and predictor transferability; which we deem critical for improving NAS on diverse tasks. In our experiments, we use 6 NAS benchmarks in conjunction, spanning in total 16 NAS settings -- our meta-learning approach not only shows superior (or matching) performance in the cross-validation experiments but also successful extrapolation to a new search space and tasks.

Fusion of Radio and Camera Sensor Data for Accurate Indoor Positioning

Indoor positioning systems have received a lot of attention recently due to their importance for many location-based services, e.g. indoor navigation and smart buildings. Lightweight solutions based on WiFi and inertial sensing have gained popularity, but are not fit for demanding applications, such as expert museum guides and industrial settings, which typically require sub-meter location information. In this paper, we propose a novel positioning system, RAVEL (Radio And Vision Enhanced Localization), which fuses anonymous visual detections captured by widely available camera infrastructure, with radio readings (e.g. WiFi radio data). Although visual trackers can provide excellent positioning accuracy, they are plagued by issues such as occlusions and people entering/exiting the scene, preventing their use as a robust tracking solution. By incorporating radio measurements, visually ambiguous or missing data can be resolved through multi-hypothesis tracking. We evaluate our system in a complex museum environment with dim lighting and multiple people moving around in a space cluttered with exhibit stands. Our experiments show that although the WiFi measurements are not by themselves sufficiently accurate, when they are fused with camera data, they become a catalyst for pulling together ambiguous, fragmented, and anonymous visual tracklets into accurate and continuous paths, yielding typical errors below 1 meter.

Fleet Rebalancing for Expanding Shared e-Mobility Systems: A Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

The electrification of shared mobility has become popular across the globe. Many cities have their new shared e-mobility systems deployed, with continuously expanding coverage from central areas to the city edges. A key challenge in the operation of these systems is fleet rebalancing, i.e., how EVs should be repositioned to better satisfy future demand. This is particularly challenging in the context of expanding systems, because i) the range of the EVs is limited while charging time is typically long, which constrain the viable rebalancing operations; and ii) the EV stations in the system are dynamically changing, i.e., the legitimate targets for rebalancing operations can vary over time. We tackle these challenges by first investigating rich sets of data collected from a real-world shared e-mobility system for one year, analyzing the operation model, usage patterns and expansion dynamics of this new mobility mode. With the learned knowledge we design a high-fidelity simulator, which is able to abstract key operation details of EV sharing at fine granularity. Then we model the rebalancing task for shared e-mobility systems under continuous expansion as a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problem, which directly takes the range and charging properties of the EVs into account. We further propose a novel policy optimization approach with action cascading, which is able to cope with the expansion dynamics and solve the formulated MARL. We evaluate the proposed approach extensively, and experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art, offering significant performance gain in both satisfied demand and net revenue.

BLOX: Macro Neural Architecture Search Benchmark and Algorithms

Neural architecture search (NAS) has been successfully used to design numerous high-performance neural networks. However, NAS is typically compute-intensive, so most existing approaches restrict the search to decide the operations and topological structure of a single block only, then the same block is stacked repeatedly to form an end-to-end model. Although such an approach reduces the size of search space, recent studies show that a macro search space, which allows blocks in a model to be different, can lead to better performance. To provide a systematic study of the performance of NAS algorithms on a macro search space, we release Blox - a benchmark that consists of 91k unique models trained on the CIFAR-100 dataset. The dataset also includes runtime measurements of all the models on a diverse set of hardware platforms. We perform extensive experiments to compare existing algorithms that are well studied on cell-based search spaces, with the emerging blockwise approaches that aim to make NAS scalable to much larger macro search spaces. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/blox.

High Speed Rotation Estimation with Dynamic Vision Sensors

Rotational speed is one of the important metrics to be measured for calibrating the electric motors in manufacturing, monitoring engine during car repairing, faults detection on electrical appliance and etc. However, existing measurement techniques either require prohibitive hardware (e.g., high-speed camera) or are inconvenient to use in real-world application scenarios. In this paper, we propose, EV-Tach, an event-based tachometer via efficient dynamic vision sensing on mobile devices. EV-Tach is designed as a high-fidelity and convenient tachometer by introducing dynamic vision sensor as a new sensing modality to capture the high-speed rotation precisely under various real-world scenarios. By designing a series of signal processing algorithms bespoke for dynamic vision sensing on mobile devices, EV-Tach is able to extract the rotational speed accurately from the event stream produced by dynamic vision sensing on rotary targets. According to our extensive evaluations, the Relative Mean Absolute Error (RMAE) of EV-Tach is as low as 0.03% which is comparable to the state-of-the-art laser tachometer under fixed measurement mode. Moreover, EV-Tach is robust to subtle movement of user's hand, therefore, can be used as a handheld device, where the laser tachometer fails to produce reasonable results.

GeoPointGAN: Synthetic Spatial Data with Local Label Differential Privacy

Synthetic data generation is a fundamental task for many data management and data science applications. Spatial data is of particular interest, and its sensitive nature often leads to privacy concerns. We introduce GeoPointGAN, a novel GAN-based solution for generating synthetic spatial point datasets with high utility and strong individual level privacy guarantees. GeoPointGAN's architecture includes a novel point transformation generator that learns to project randomly generated point co-ordinates into meaningful synthetic co-ordinates that capture both microscopic (e.g., junctions, squares) and macroscopic (e.g., parks, lakes) geographic features. We provide our privacy guarantees through label local differential privacy, which is more practical than traditional local differential privacy. We seamlessly integrate this level of privacy into GeoPointGAN by augmenting the discriminator to the point level and implementing a randomized response-based mechanism that flips the labels associated with the 'real' and 'fake' points used in training. Extensive experiments show that GeoPointGAN significantly outperforms recent solutions, improving by up to 10 times compared to the most competitive baseline. We also evaluate GeoPointGAN using range, hotspot, and facility location queries, which confirm the practical effectiveness of GeoPointGAN for privacy-preserving querying. The results illustrate that a strong level of privacy is achieved with little-to-no adverse utility cost, which we explain through the generalization and regularization effects that are realized by flipping the labels of the data during training.