ZAHA: Introducing the Level of Facade Generalization and the Large-Scale Point Cloud Facade Semantic Segmentation Benchmark Dataset

Facade semantic segmentation is a long-standing challenge in photogrammetry and computer vision. Although the last decades have witnessed the influx of facade segmentation methods, there is a lack of comprehensive facade classes and data covering the architectural variability. In ZAHA, we introduce Level of Facade Generalization (LoFG), novel hierarchical facade classes designed based on international urban modeling standards, ensuring compatibility with real-world challenging classes and uniform methods' comparison. Realizing the LoFG, we present to date the largest semantic 3D facade segmentation dataset, providing 601 million annotated points at five and 15 classes of LoFG2 and LoFG3, respectively. Moreover, we analyze the performance of baseline semantic segmentation methods on our introduced LoFG classes and data, complementing it with a discussion on the unresolved challenges for facade segmentation. We firmly believe that ZAHA shall facilitate further development of 3D facade semantic segmentation methods, enabling robust segmentation indispensable in creating urban digital twins.

Influence-oriented Personalized Federated Learning

Traditional federated learning (FL) methods often rely on fixed weighting for parameter aggregation, neglecting the mutual influence by others. Hence, their effectiveness in heterogeneous data contexts is limited. To address this problem, we propose an influence-oriented federated learning framework, namely FedC^2I, which quantitatively measures Client-level and Class-level Influence to realize adaptive parameter aggregation for each client. Our core idea is to explicitly model the inter-client influence within an FL system via the well-crafted influence vector and influence matrix. The influence vector quantifies client-level influence, enables clients to selectively acquire knowledge from others, and guides the aggregation of feature representation layers. Meanwhile, the influence matrix captures class-level influence in a more fine-grained manner to achieve personalized classifier aggregation. We evaluate the performance of FedC^2I against existing federated learning methods under non-IID settings and the results demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Classifying point clouds at the facade-level using geometric features and deep learning networks

3D building models with facade details are playing an important role in many applications now. Classifying point clouds at facade-level is key to create such digital replicas of the real world. However, few studies have focused on such detailed classification with deep neural networks. We propose a method fusing geometric features with deep learning networks for point cloud classification at facade-level. Our experiments conclude that such early-fused features improve deep learning methods' performance. This method can be applied for compensating deep learning networks' ability in capturing local geometric information and promoting the advancement of semantic segmentation.

Federated Learning on Non-IID Graphs via Structural Knowledge Sharing

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown their superiority in modeling graph data. Owing to the advantages of federated learning, federated graph learning (FGL) enables clients to train strong GNN models in a distributed manner without sharing their private data. A core challenge in federated systems is the non-IID problem, which also widely exists in real-world graph data. For example, local data of clients may come from diverse datasets or even domains, e.g., social networks and molecules, increasing the difficulty for FGL methods to capture commonly shared knowledge and learn a generalized encoder. From real-world graph datasets, we observe that some structural properties are shared by various domains, presenting great potential for sharing structural knowledge in FGL. Inspired by this, we propose FedStar, an FGL framework that extracts and shares the common underlying structure information for inter-graph federated learning tasks. To explicitly extract the structure information rather than encoding them along with the node features, we define structure embeddings and encode them with an independent structure encoder. Then, the structure encoder is shared across clients while the feature-based knowledge is learned in a personalized way, making FedStar capable of capturing more structure-based domain-invariant information and avoiding feature misalignment issues. We perform extensive experiments over both cross-dataset and cross-domain non-IID FGL settings, demonstrating the superiority of FedStar.

Federated Learning from Pre-Trained Models: A Contrastive Learning Approach

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm that allows decentralized clients to learn collaboratively without sharing their private data. However, excessive computation and communication demands pose challenges to current FL frameworks, especially when training large-scale models. To prevent these issues from hindering the deployment of FL systems, we propose a lightweight framework where clients jointly learn to fuse the representations generated by multiple fixed pre-trained models rather than training a large-scale model from scratch. This leads us to a more practical FL problem by considering how to capture more client-specific and class-relevant information from the pre-trained models and jointly improve each client's ability to exploit those off-the-shelf models. In this work, we design a Federated Prototype-wise Contrastive Learning (FedPCL) approach which shares knowledge across clients through their class prototypes and builds client-specific representations in a prototype-wise contrastive manner. Sharing prototypes rather than learnable model parameters allows each client to fuse the representations in a personalized way while keeping the shared knowledge in a compact form for efficient communication. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed FedPCL in the lightweight framework, measuring and visualizing its ability to fuse various pre-trained models on popular FL datasets.

Federated Learning for Privacy-Preserving Open Innovation Future on Digital Health

Privacy protection is an ethical issue with broad concern in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Federated learning is a new machine learning paradigm to learn a shared model across users or organisations without direct access to the data. It has great potential to be the next-general AI model training framework that offers privacy protection and therefore has broad implications for the future of digital health and healthcare informatics. Implementing an open innovation framework in the healthcare industry, namely open health, is to enhance innovation and creative capability of health-related organisations by building a next-generation collaborative framework with partner organisations and the research community. In particular, this game-changing collaborative framework offers knowledge sharing from diverse data with a privacy-preserving. This chapter will discuss how federated learning can enable the development of an open health ecosystem with the support of AI. Existing challenges and solutions for federated learning will be discussed.

Federated Learning for Open Banking

Open banking enables individual customers to own their banking data, which provides fundamental support for the boosting of a new ecosystem of data marketplaces and financial services. In the near future, it is foreseeable to have decentralized data ownership in the finance sector using federated learning. This is a just-in-time technology that can learn intelligent models in a decentralized training manner. The most attractive aspect of federated learning is its ability to decompose model training into a centralized server and distributed nodes without collecting private data. This kind of decomposed learning framework has great potential to protect users' privacy and sensitive data. Therefore, federated learning combines naturally with an open banking data marketplaces. This chapter will discuss the possible challenges for applying federated learning in the context of open banking, and the corresponding solutions have been explored as well.

FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning over Heterogeneous Devices

The heterogeneity across devices usually hinders the optimization convergence and generalization performance of federated learning (FL) when the aggregation of devices' knowledge occurs in the gradient space. For example, devices may differ in terms of data distribution, network latency, input/output space, and/or model architecture, which can easily lead to the misalignment of their local gradients. To improve the tolerance to heterogeneity, we propose a novel federated prototype learning (FedProto) framework in which the devices and server communicate the class prototypes instead of the gradients. FedProto aggregates the local prototypes collected from different devices, and then sends the global prototypes back to all devices to regularize the training of local models. The training on each device aims to minimize the classification error on the local data while keeping the resulting local prototypes sufficiently close to the corresponding global ones. Through experiments, we propose a benchmark setting tailored for heterogeneous FL, with FedProto outperforming several recent FL approaches on multiple datasets.

LSTM-based Anomaly Detection for Non-linear Dynamical System

Anomaly detection for non-linear dynamical system plays an important role in ensuring the system stability. However, it is usually complex and has to be solved by large-scale simulation which requires extensive computing resources. In this paper, we propose a novel anomaly detection scheme in non-linear dynamical system based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to capture complex temporal changes of the time sequence and make multi-step predictions. Specifically, we first present the framework of LSTM-based anomaly detection in non-linear dynamical system, including data preprocessing, multi-step prediction and anomaly detection. According to the prediction requirement, two types of training modes are explored in multi-step prediction, where samples in a wall shear stress dataset are collected by an adaptive sliding window. On the basis of the multi-step prediction result, a Local Average with Adaptive Parameters (LAAP) algorithm is proposed to extract local numerical features of the time sequence and estimate the upcoming anomaly. The experimental results show that our proposed multi-step prediction method can achieve a higher prediction accuracy than traditional method in wall shear stress dataset, and the LAAP algorithm performs better than the absolute value-based method in anomaly detection task.

Dynamic Energy Dispatch in Isolated Microgrids Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

This paper focuses on deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based energy dispatch for isolated microgrids (MGs) with diesel generators (DGs), photovoltaic (PV) panels, and a battery. A finite-horizon Partial Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) model is formulated and solved by learning from historical data to capture the uncertainty in future electricity consumption and renewable power generation. In order to deal with the instability problem of DRL algorithms and unique characteristics of finite-horizon models, two novel DRL algorithms, namely, FH-DDPG and FH-RDPG, are proposed to derive energy dispatch policies with and without fully observable state information. A case study using real isolated microgrid data is performed, where the performance of the proposed algorithms are compared with the myopic algorithm as well as other baseline DRL algorithms. Moreover, the impact of uncertainties on MG performance is decoupled into two levels and evaluated respectively.