Energy and data-efficient online time series prediction for predicting evolving dynamical systems are critical in several fields, especially edge AI applications that need to update continuously based on streaming data. However, current DNN-based supervised online learning models require a large amount of training data and cannot quickly adapt when the underlying system changes. Moreover, these models require continuous retraining with incoming data making them highly inefficient. To solve these issues, we present a novel Continuous Learning-based Unsupervised Recurrent Spiking Neural Network Model (CLURSNN), trained with spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP). CLURSNN makes online predictions by reconstructing the underlying dynamical system using Random Delay Embedding by measuring the membrane potential of neurons in the recurrent layer of the RSNN with the highest betweenness centrality. We also use topological data analysis to propose a novel methodology using the Wasserstein Distance between the persistence homologies of the predicted and observed time series as a loss function. We show that the proposed online time series prediction methodology outperforms state-of-the-art DNN models when predicting an evolving Lorenz63 dynamical system.
Recent advances in hardware and big data acquisition have accelerated the development of deep learning techniques. For an extended period of time, increasing the model complexity has led to performance improvements for various tasks. However, this trend is becoming unsustainable and there is a need for alternative, computationally lighter methods. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for efficient training of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for large-scale spatial problems. To accomplish this we investigate the properties of CNNs for tasks where the underlying signals are stationary. We show that a CNN trained on small windows of such signals achieves a nearly performance on much larger windows without retraining. This claim is supported by our theoretical analysis, which provides a bound on the performance degradation. Additionally, we conduct thorough experimental analysis on two tasks: multi-target tracking and mobile infrastructure on demand. Our results show that the CNN is able to tackle problems with many hundreds of agents after being trained with fewer than ten. Thus, CNN architectures provide solutions to these problems at previously computationally intractable scales.
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are brain-inspired energy-efficient models that encode information in spatiotemporal dynamics. Recently, deep SNNs trained directly have shown great success in achieving high performance on classification tasks with very few time steps. However, how to design a directly-trained SNN for the regression task of object detection still remains a challenging problem. To address this problem, we propose EMS-YOLO, a novel directly-trained SNN framework for object detection, which is the first trial to train a deep SNN with surrogate gradients for object detection rather than ANN-SNN conversion strategies. Specifically, we design a full-spike residual block, EMS-ResNet, which can effectively extend the depth of the directly-trained SNN with low power consumption. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze and prove the EMS-ResNet could avoid gradient vanishing or exploding. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art ANN-SNN conversion methods (at least 500 time steps) in extremely fewer time steps (only 4 time steps). It is shown that our model could achieve comparable performance to the ANN with the same architecture while consuming 5.83 times less energy on the frame-based COCO Dataset and the event-based Gen1 Dataset.
State-of-the-art performance for many edge applications is achieved by deep neural networks (DNNs). Often, these DNNs are location- and time-sensitive, and must be delivered over a wireless channel rapidly and efficiently. In this paper, we introduce AirNet, a family of novel training and transmission methods that allow DNNs to be efficiently delivered over wireless channels under stringent transmit power and latency constraints. This corresponds to a new class of joint source-channel coding problems, aimed at delivering DNNs with the goal of maximizing their accuracy at the receiver, rather than recovering them with high fidelity. In AirNet, we propose the direct mapping of the DNN parameters to transmitted channel symbols, while the network is trained to meet the channel constraints, and exhibit robustness against channel noise. AirNet achieves higher accuracy compared to separation-based alternatives. We further improve the performance of AirNet by pruning the network below the available bandwidth, and expanding it for improved robustness. We also benefit from unequal error protection by selectively expanding important layers of the network. Finally, we develop an approach, which simultaneously trains a spectrum of DNNs, each targeting a different channel condition, resolving the impractical memory requirements of training distinct networks for different channel conditions.
Gait recognition is a biometric technique that identifies individuals by their unique walking styles, which is suitable for unconstrained environments and has a wide range of applications. While current methods focus on exploiting body part-based representations, they often neglect the hierarchical dependencies between local motion patterns. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical spatio-temporal representation learning (HSTL) framework for extracting gait features from coarse to fine. Our framework starts with a hierarchical clustering analysis to recover multi-level body structures from the whole body to local details. Next, an adaptive region-based motion extractor (ARME) is designed to learn region-independent motion features. The proposed HSTL then stacks multiple ARMEs in a top-down manner, with each ARME corresponding to a specific partition level of the hierarchy. An adaptive spatio-temporal pooling (ASTP) module is used to capture gait features at different levels of detail to perform hierarchical feature mapping. Finally, a frame-level temporal aggregation (FTA) module is employed to reduce redundant information in gait sequences through multi-scale temporal downsampling. Extensive experiments on CASIA-B, OUMVLP, GREW, and Gait3D datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art while maintaining a reasonable balance between model accuracy and complexity.
Identifying causal relationships among distinct brain areas, known as effective connectivity, holds key insights into the brain's information processing and cognitive functions. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals exhibit intricate dynamics and inter-areal interactions within the brain. However, methods for characterizing nonlinear causal interactions among multiple brain regions remain relatively underdeveloped. In this study, we proposed a data-driven framework to infer effective connectivity by perturbing the trained neural networks. Specifically, we trained neural networks (i.e., CNN, vanilla RNN, GRU, LSTM, and Transformer) to predict future EEG signals according to historical data and perturbed the networks' input to obtain effective connectivity (EC) between the perturbed EEG channel and the rest of the channels. The EC reflects the causal impact of perturbing one node on others. The performance was tested on the synthetic EEG generated by a biological-plausible Jansen-Rit model. CNN and Transformer obtained the best performance on both 3-channel and 90-channel synthetic EEG data, outperforming the classical Granger causality method. Our work demonstrated the potential of perturbing an artificial neural network, learned to predict future system dynamics, to uncover the underlying causal structure.
Link prediction is a very fundamental task on graphs. Inspired by traditional path-based methods, in this paper we propose a general and flexible representation learning framework based on paths for link prediction. Specifically, we define the representation of a pair of nodes as the generalized sum of all path representations, with each path representation as the generalized product of the edge representations in the path. Motivated by the Bellman-Ford algorithm for solving the shortest path problem, we show that the proposed path formulation can be efficiently solved by the generalized Bellman-Ford algorithm. To further improve the capacity of the path formulation, we propose the Neural Bellman-Ford Network (NBFNet), a general graph neural network framework that solves the path formulation with learned operators in the generalized Bellman-Ford algorithm. The NBFNet parameterizes the generalized Bellman-Ford algorithm with 3 neural components, namely INDICATOR, MESSAGE and AGGREGATE functions, which corresponds to the boundary condition, multiplication operator, and summation operator respectively. The NBFNet is very general, covers many traditional path-based methods, and can be applied to both homogeneous graphs and multi-relational graphs (e.g., knowledge graphs) in both transductive and inductive settings. Experiments on both homogeneous graphs and knowledge graphs show that the proposed NBFNet outperforms existing methods by a large margin in both transductive and inductive settings, achieving new state-of-the-art results.
Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
Co-evolving time series appears in a multitude of applications such as environmental monitoring, financial analysis, and smart transportation. This paper aims to address the following challenges, including (C1) how to incorporate explicit relationship networks of the time series; (C2) how to model the implicit relationship of the temporal dynamics. We propose a novel model called Network of Tensor Time Series, which is comprised of two modules, including Tensor Graph Convolutional Network (TGCN) and Tensor Recurrent Neural Network (TRNN). TGCN tackles the first challenge by generalizing Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) for flat graphs to tensor graphs, which captures the synergy between multiple graphs associated with the tensors. TRNN leverages tensor decomposition to model the implicit relationships among co-evolving time series. The experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. Existing neural networks mainly operate in the spatial domain with fixed input sizes. For practical applications, images are usually large and have to be downsampled to the predetermined input size of neural networks. Even though the downsampling operations reduce computation and the required communication bandwidth, it removes both redundant and salient information obliviously, which results in accuracy degradation. Inspired by digital signal processing theories, we analyze the spectral bias from the frequency perspective and propose a learning-based frequency selection method to identify the trivial frequency components which can be removed without accuracy loss. The proposed method of learning in the frequency domain leverages identical structures of the well-known neural networks, such as ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and Mask R-CNN, while accepting the frequency-domain information as the input. Experiment results show that learning in the frequency domain with static channel selection can achieve higher accuracy than the conventional spatial downsampling approach and meanwhile further reduce the input data size. Specifically for ImageNet classification with the same input size, the proposed method achieves 1.41% and 0.66% top-1 accuracy improvements on ResNet-50 and MobileNetV2, respectively. Even with half input size, the proposed method still improves the top-1 accuracy on ResNet-50 by 1%. In addition, we observe a 0.8% average precision improvement on Mask R-CNN for instance segmentation on the COCO dataset.
Many natural language processing tasks solely rely on sparse dependencies between a few tokens in a sentence. Soft attention mechanisms show promising performance in modeling local/global dependencies by soft probabilities between every two tokens, but they are not effective and efficient when applied to long sentences. By contrast, hard attention mechanisms directly select a subset of tokens but are difficult and inefficient to train due to their combinatorial nature. In this paper, we integrate both soft and hard attention into one context fusion model, "reinforced self-attention (ReSA)", for the mutual benefit of each other. In ReSA, a hard attention trims a sequence for a soft self-attention to process, while the soft attention feeds reward signals back to facilitate the training of the hard one. For this purpose, we develop a novel hard attention called "reinforced sequence sampling (RSS)", selecting tokens in parallel and trained via policy gradient. Using two RSS modules, ReSA efficiently extracts the sparse dependencies between each pair of selected tokens. We finally propose an RNN/CNN-free sentence-encoding model, "reinforced self-attention network (ReSAN)", solely based on ReSA. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) and Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK) datasets.