IoT devices have become indispensable components of our lives, and the advancement of AI technologies will make them even more pervasive, increasing the vulnerability to malfunctions or cyberattacks and raising privacy concerns. Encryption can mitigate these challenges; however, most existing anomaly detection techniques decrypt the data to perform the analysis, potentially undermining the encryption protection provided during transit or storage. Homomorphic encryption schemes are promising solutions as they enable the processing and execution of operations on IoT data while still encrypted, however, these schemes offer only limited operations, which poses challenges to their practical usage. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-preserving anomaly detection solution designed for homomorphically encrypted data generated by IoT devices that efficiently detects abnormal values without performing decryption. We have adapted the Histogram-based anomaly detection technique for TFHE scheme to address limitations related to the input size and the depth of computation by implementing vectorized support operations. These operations include addition, value placement in buckets, labeling abnormal buckets based on a threshold frequency, labeling abnormal values based on their range, and bucket labels. Evaluation results show that the solution effectively detects anomalies without requiring data decryption and achieves consistent results comparable to the mechanism operating on plain data. Also, it shows robustness and resilience against various challenges commonly encountered in IoT environments, such as noisy sensor data, adversarial attacks, communication failures, and device malfunctions. Moreover, the time and computational overheads determined for several solution configurations, despite being large, are reasonable compared to those reported in existing literature.
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies have revolutionized industrial processes, enabling smart automation, real-time data analytics, and improved operational efficiency across diverse industry sectors. IIoT testbeds play a critical role in advancing IIoT research and development (R&D) to provide controlled environments for technology evaluation before their real-world deployment. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on existing IIoT testbeds, aiming to identify benchmark performance, research gaps and explore emerging trends in IIoT systems. We first review the state-of-the-art resource management solutions proposed for IIoT applications. We then categorize the reviewed testbeds according to their deployed communication protocols (including TSN, IEEE 802.15.4, IEEE 802.11 and 5G) and discuss the design and usage of each testbed. Driven by the knowledge gained during this study, we present suggestions and good practices for researchers and practitioners who are planning to design and develop IIoT testbeds for connectivity research.
Fully supervised models are predominant in Bayesian active learning. We argue that their neglect of the information present in unlabelled data harms not just predictive performance but also decisions about what data to acquire. Our proposed solution is a simple framework for semi-supervised Bayesian active learning. We find it produces better-performing models than either conventional Bayesian active learning or semi-supervised learning with randomly acquired data. It is also easier to scale up than the conventional approach. As well as supporting a shift towards semi-supervised models, our findings highlight the importance of studying models and acquisition methods in conjunction.
With the rapid increase in machine learning workloads performed on HPC systems, it is beneficial to regularly perform machine learning specific benchmarks to monitor performance and identify issues. Furthermore, as part of the Edinburgh International Data Facility, EPCC currently hosts a wide range of machine learning accelerators including Nvidia GPUs, the Graphcore Bow Pod64 and Cerebras CS-2, which are managed via Kubernetes and Slurm. We extended the Reframe framework to support the Kubernetes scheduler backend, and utilise Reframe to perform machine learning benchmarks, and we discuss the preliminary results collected and challenges involved in integrating Reframe across multiple platforms and architectures.
Recent successes in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) have led to new technologies capable of generating high-quality code, natural language, and images. The next step is to integrate GenAI technology into products, a task typically conducted by software developers. Such product development always comes with a certain risk of liability. Within this article, we want to shed light on the current state of two such risks: data protection and copyright. Both aspects are crucial for GenAI. This technology deals with data for both model training and generated output. We summarize key aspects regarding our current knowledge that every software developer involved in product development using GenAI should be aware of to avoid critical mistakes that may expose them to liability claims.
Recent advancements in 3D reconstruction technologies have paved the way for high-quality and real-time rendering of complex 3D scenes. Despite these achievements, a notable challenge persists: it is difficult to precisely reconstruct specific objects from large scenes. Current scene reconstruction techniques frequently result in the loss of object detail textures and are unable to reconstruct object portions that are occluded or unseen in views. To address this challenge, we delve into the meticulous 3D reconstruction of specific objects within large scenes and propose a framework termed OMEGAS: Object Mesh Extraction from Large Scenes Guided by GAussian Segmentation. OMEGAS employs a multi-step approach, grounded in several excellent off-the-shelf methodologies. Specifically, initially, we utilize the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to guide the segmentation of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), thereby creating a basic 3DGS model of the target object. Then, we leverage large-scale diffusion priors to further refine the details of the 3DGS model, especially aimed at addressing invisible or occluded object portions from the original scene views. Subsequently, by re-rendering the 3DGS model onto the scene views, we achieve accurate object segmentation and effectively remove the background. Finally, these target-only images are used to improve the 3DGS model further and extract the definitive 3D object mesh by the SuGaR model. In various scenarios, our experiments demonstrate that OMEGAS significantly surpasses existing scene reconstruction methods. Our project page is at: //github.com/CrystalWlz/OMEGAS
We present a structure preserving PINN for solving a series of time dependent PDEs with periodic boundary. Our method can incorporate the periodic boundary condition as the natural output of any deep neural net, hence significantly improving the training accuracy of baseline PINN. Together with mini-batching and other PINN variants (SA-PINN, RBA-PINN, etc.), our structure preserving PINN can even handle stiff PDEs for modeling a wide range of convection-diffusion and reaction-diffusion processes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our PINNs on various PDEs from Allen Cahn, Gray Scott to nonlinear Schrodinger.
Systolic arrays and shared-L1-memory manycore clusters are commonly used architectural paradigms that offer different trade-offs to accelerate parallel workloads. While the first excel with regular dataflow at the cost of rigid architectures and complex programming models, the second are versatile and easy to program but require explicit dataflow management and synchronization. This work aims at enabling efficient systolic execution on shared-L1-memory manycore clusters. We devise a flexible architecture where small and energy-efficient RISC-V cores act as the systolic array's processing elements (PEs) and can form diverse, reconfigurable systolic topologies through queues mapped in the cluster's shared memory. We introduce two low-overhead RISC-V ISA extensions for efficient systolic execution, namely Xqueue and Queue-linked registers (QLRs), which support queue management in hardware. The Xqueue extension enables single-instruction access to shared-memory-mapped queues, while QLRs allow implicit and autonomous access to them, relieving the cores of explicit communication instructions. We demonstrate Xqueue and QLRs in MemPool, an open-source shared-memory cluster with 256 PEs, and analyze the hybrid systolic-shared-memory architecture's trade-offs on several DSP kernels with diverse arithmetic intensity. For an area increase of just 6%, our hybrid architecture can double MemPool's compute unit utilization, reaching up to 73%. In typical conditions (TT/0.80V/25{\deg}C), in a 22 nm FDX technology, our hybrid architecture runs at 600 MHz with no frequency degradation and is up to 65% more energy efficient than the shared-memory baseline, achieving up to 208 GOPS/W, with up to 63% of power spent in the PEs.
With the advent of 5G commercialization, the need for more reliable, faster, and intelligent telecommunication systems are envisaged for the next generation beyond 5G (B5G) radio access technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are not just immensely popular in the service layer applications but also have been proposed as essential enablers in many aspects of B5G networks, from IoT devices and edge computing to cloud-based infrastructures. However, most of the existing surveys in B5G security focus on the performance of AI/ML models and their accuracy, but they often overlook the accountability and trustworthiness of the models' decisions. Explainable AI (XAI) methods are promising techniques that would allow system developers to identify the internal workings of AI/ML black-box models. The goal of using XAI in the security domain of B5G is to allow the decision-making processes of the security of systems to be transparent and comprehensible to stakeholders making the systems accountable for automated actions. In every facet of the forthcoming B5G era, including B5G technologies such as RAN, zero-touch network management, E2E slicing, this survey emphasizes the role of XAI in them and the use cases that the general users would ultimately enjoy. Furthermore, we presented the lessons learned from recent efforts and future research directions on top of the currently conducted projects involving XAI.
Sequential recommendation aims to leverage users' historical behaviors to predict their next interaction. Existing works have not yet addressed two main challenges in sequential recommendation. First, user behaviors in their rich historical sequences are often implicit and noisy preference signals, they cannot sufficiently reflect users' actual preferences. In addition, users' dynamic preferences often change rapidly over time, and hence it is difficult to capture user patterns in their historical sequences. In this work, we propose a graph neural network model called SURGE (short for SeqUential Recommendation with Graph neural nEtworks) to address these two issues. Specifically, SURGE integrates different types of preferences in long-term user behaviors into clusters in the graph by re-constructing loose item sequences into tight item-item interest graphs based on metric learning. This helps explicitly distinguish users' core interests, by forming dense clusters in the interest graph. Then, we perform cluster-aware and query-aware graph convolutional propagation and graph pooling on the constructed graph. It dynamically fuses and extracts users' current activated core interests from noisy user behavior sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and proprietary industrial datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains of our proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods. Further studies on sequence length confirm that our method can model long behavioral sequences effectively and efficiently.
Machine learning techniques have deeply rooted in our everyday life. However, since it is knowledge- and labor-intensive to pursue good learning performance, human experts are heavily involved in every aspect of machine learning. In order to make machine learning techniques easier to apply and reduce the demand for experienced human experts, automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged as a hot topic with both industrial and academic interest. In this paper, we provide an up to date survey on AutoML. First, we introduce and define the AutoML problem, with inspiration from both realms of automation and machine learning. Then, we propose a general AutoML framework that not only covers most existing approaches to date but also can guide the design for new methods. Subsequently, we categorize and review the existing works from two aspects, i.e., the problem setup and the employed techniques. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of AutoML approaches and explain the reasons underneath their successful applications. We hope this survey can serve as not only an insightful guideline for AutoML beginners but also an inspiration for future research.