Emotion-Aware Interaction Design in Intelligent User Interface Using Multi-Modal Deep Learning

In an era where user interaction with technology is ubiquitous, the importance of user interface (UI) design cannot be overstated. A well-designed UI not only enhances usability but also fosters more natural, intuitive, and emotionally engaging experiences, making technology more accessible and impactful in everyday life. This research addresses this growing need by introducing an advanced emotion recognition system to significantly improve the emotional responsiveness of UI. By integrating facial expressions, speech, and textual data through a multi-branch Transformer model, the system interprets complex emotional cues in real-time, enabling UIs to interact more empathetically and effectively with users. Using the public MELD dataset for validation, our model demonstrates substantial improvements in emotion recognition accuracy and F1 scores, outperforming traditional methods. These findings underscore the critical role that sophisticated emotion recognition plays in the evolution of UIs, making technology more attuned to user needs and emotions. This study highlights how enhanced emotional intelligence in UIs is not only about technical innovation but also about fostering deeper, more meaningful connections between users and the digital world, ultimately shaping how people interact with technology in their daily lives.

Free-Rider and Conflict Aware Collaboration Formation for Cross-Silo Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm that allows multiple FL participants (FL-PTs) to collaborate on training models without sharing private data. Due to data heterogeneity, negative transfer may occur in the FL training process. This necessitates FL-PT selection based on their data complementarity. In cross-silo FL, organizations that engage in business activities are key sources of FL-PTs. The resulting FL ecosystem has two features: (i) self-interest, and (ii) competition among FL-PTs. This requires the desirable FL-PT selection strategy to simultaneously mitigate the problems of free riders and conflicts of interest among competitors. To this end, we propose an optimal FL collaboration formation strategy -- FedEgoists -- which ensures that: (1) a FL-PT can benefit from FL if and only if it benefits the FL ecosystem, and (2) a FL-PT will not contribute to its competitors or their supporters. It provides an efficient clustering solution to group FL-PTs into coalitions, ensuring that within each coalition, FL-PTs share the same interest. We theoretically prove that the FL-PT coalitions formed are optimal since no coalitions can collaborate together to improve the utility of any of their members. Extensive experiments on widely adopted benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of FedEgoists compared to nine state-of-the-art baseline methods, and its ability to establish efficient collaborative networks in cross-silos FL with FL-PTs that engage in business activities.

Benchmarking Data Heterogeneity Evaluation Approaches for Personalized Federated Learning

There is growing research interest in measuring the statistical heterogeneity of clients' local datasets. Such measurements are used to estimate the suitability for collaborative training of personalized federated learning (PFL) models. Currently, these research endeavors are taking place in silos and there is a lack of a unified benchmark to provide a fair and convenient comparison among various approaches in common settings. We aim to bridge this important gap in this paper. The proposed benchmarking framework currently includes six representative approaches. Extensive experiments have been conducted to compare these approaches under five standard non-IID FL settings, providing much needed insights into which approaches are advantageous under which settings. The proposed framework offers useful guidance on the suitability of various data divergence measures in FL systems. It is beneficial for keeping related research activities on the right track in terms of: (1) designing PFL schemes, (2) selecting appropriate data heterogeneity evaluation approaches for specific FL application scenarios, and (3) addressing fairness issues in collaborative model training. The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoni-61/DH-Benchmark.