Improving Privacy-Preserving Vertical Federated Learning by Efficient Communication with ADMM

Federated learning (FL) enables distributed devices to jointly train a shared model while keeping the training data local. Different from the horizontal FL (HFL) setting where each client has partial data samples, vertical FL (VFL), which allows each client to collect partial features, has attracted intensive research efforts recently. In this paper, we identified two challenges that state-of-the-art VFL frameworks are facing: (1) some works directly average the learned feature embeddings and therefore might lose the unique properties of each local feature set; (2) server needs to communicate gradients with the clients for each training step, incurring high communication cost that leads to rapid consumption of privacy budgets. In this paper, we aim to address the above challenges and propose an efficient VFL with multiple linear heads (VIM) framework, where each head corresponds to local clients by taking the separate contribution of each client into account. In addition, we propose an Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM)-based method to solve our optimization problem, which reduces the communication cost by allowing multiple local updates in each step, and thus leads to better performance under differential privacy. We consider various settings including VFL with model splitting and without model splitting. For both settings, we carefully analyze the differential privacy mechanism for our framework. Moreover, we show that a byproduct of our framework is that the weights of learned linear heads reflect the importance of local clients. We conduct extensive evaluations and show that on four real-world datasets, VIM achieves significantly higher performance and faster convergence compared with state-of-the-arts. We also explicitly evaluate the importance of local clients and show that VIM enables functionalities such as client-level explanation and client denoising

An All Deep System for Badminton Game Analysis

The CoachAI Badminton 2023 Track1 initiative aim to automatically detect events within badminton match videos. Detecting small objects, especially the shuttlecock, is of quite importance and demands high precision within the challenge. Such detection is crucial for tasks like hit count, hitting time, and hitting location. However, even after revising the well-regarded shuttlecock detecting model, TrackNet, our object detection models still fall short of the desired accuracy. To address this issue, we've implemented various deep learning methods to tackle the problems arising from noisy detectied data, leveraging diverse data types to improve precision. In this report, we detail the detection model modifications we've made and our approach to the 11 tasks. Notably, our system garnered a score of 0.78 out of 1.0 in the challenge.Comment: Golden Award for IJCAI CoachAI Challenge 2023: Team NTNUEE AIoTLa

Reliability-Constrained Economic Dispatch with Analytical Formulation of Operational Risk Evaluation

Operational reliability and the decision-making process of economic dispatch (ED) are closely related and important for power system operation. Consideration of reliability indices and reliability constraints together in the operation problem is very challenging due to the problem size and tight reliability constraints. In this paper, a comprehensive reliability-constrained economic dispatch model with analytical formulation of operational risk evaluation (RCED-AF) is proposed to tackle the operational risk problem of power systems. An operational reliability evaluation model considering the ED decision is designed to accurately assess the system behavior. A computation scheme is also developed to achieve efficient update of risk indices for each ED decision by approximating the reliability evaluation procedure with an analytical polynomial function. The RCED-AF model can be constructed with decision-dependent reliability constraints expressed by the sparse polynomial chaos expansion. Case studies demonstrate that the proposed RCED-AF model is effective and accurate in the optimization of the reliability and the cost for day-ahead economic dispatch

(Methoxy­carbon­yl)hydrazinium chloride monohydrate

In the title compound, C2H7N2O2 +·Cl−·H2O, the non-H atoms of the cation are approximately coplanar. The organic cations, chloride ions and water mol­ecules are linked into a two-dimensional network parallel to the bc plane by N—H⋯O, N—H⋯Cl and O—H⋯Cl hydrogen bonds