Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm that enables the training of a shared global model across distributed clients while keeping the training data local. While most prior work on designing systems for FL has focused on using stateful always running components, recent work has shown that components in an FL system can greatly benefit from the usage of serverless computing and Function-as-a-Service technologies. To this end, distributed training of models with severless FL systems can be more resource-efficient and cheaper than conventional FL systems. However, serverless FL systems still suffer from the presence of stragglers, i.e., slow clients due to their resource and statistical heterogeneity. While several strategies have been proposed for mitigating stragglers in FL, most methodologies do not account for the particular characteristics of serverless environments, i.e., cold-starts, performance variations, and the ephemeral stateless nature of the function instances. Towards this, we propose FedLesScan, a novel clustering-based semi-asynchronous training strategy, specifically tailored for serverless FL. FedLesScan dynamically adapts to the behaviour of clients and minimizes the effect of stragglers on the overall system. We implement our strategy by extending an open-source serverless FL system called FedLess. Moreover, we comprehensively evaluate our strategy using the 2nd generation Google Cloud Functions with four datasets and varying percentages of stragglers. Results from our experiments show that compared to other approaches FedLesScan reduces training time and cost by an average of 8% and 20% respectively while utilizing clients better with an average increase in the effective update ratio of 17.75%.

使用虚拟机或虚拟机监视器（VMM）的虚拟机（VM）的服务器虚拟化是云计算技术的重要组成部分，提供基础架构 - AS-Service（IAAS）。 VMM中的故障或异常可以传播到托管的VMS上，并最终影响在这些VM上运行的应用程序的可用性和可靠性。因此，识别并最终识别它非常重要。然而，由于用户无法访问VMM，异常VMM检测是云环境中的挑战。本文通过引入名为IAD的新机器学习的算法，解决了基于云的环境中的异常VMM检测在基于云的环境中的这种挑战。该算法仅使用VM的资源利用率数据托管在那些VMMS上进行异常VMMS检测。在包括合成和实际的四个数据集上测试了发达的算法的准确性，并与四个其他流行算法进行比较，这也可以用于所描述的问题。结果发现，所提出的IAD算法的平均F1分数为83.7％，在四个数据集上平均平均，并且也优于其他算法，平均f1分数为11 \％。

传统的深度学习方法（DL）需要在中央服务器上收集和处理的培训数据，这些中央服务器通常在保健等隐私敏感域中挑战。为此，提出了一种新的学习范式，称为联合学习（FL），在解决隐私和数据所有权问题的同时将DL的潜力带到了这些域。 FL使远程客户端能够在保持数据本地时学习共享ML模型。然而，传统的FL系统面临多种挑战，例如可扩展性，复杂的基础设施管理，并且由于空闲客户端而被浪费的计算和产生的成本。 FL系统的这些挑战与无服务器计算和功能 - AS-Service（FAAS）平台旨在解决的核心问题密切对齐。这些包括快速可扩展性，无基础设施管理，自动缩放为空闲客户端，以及每次使用付费计费模型。为此，我们为无服务器FL展示了一个新颖的系统和框架，称为不发烟。我们的系统支持多个商业和自主主机的FAAS提供商，可以在机构数据中心和边缘设备上部署在云端，内部部署。据我们所知，我们是第一个能够在一大面料的异构FAAS提供商中启用FL，同时提供安全性和差异隐私等重要功能。我们展示了全面的实验，即使用我们的系统可以成功地培训多达200个客户功能的不同任务，更容易实现。此外，我们通过将其与传统的FL系统进行比较来证明我们的方法的实际可行性，并表明它可以更便宜，更资源效率更便宜。

Dataset distillation has emerged as a prominent technique to improve data efficiency when training machine learning models. It encapsulates the knowledge from a large dataset into a smaller synthetic dataset. A model trained on this smaller distilled dataset can attain comparable performance to a model trained on the original training dataset. However, the existing dataset distillation techniques mainly aim at achieving the best trade-off between resource usage efficiency and model utility. The security risks stemming from them have not been explored. This study performs the first backdoor attack against the models trained on the data distilled by dataset distillation models in the image domain. Concretely, we inject triggers into the synthetic data during the distillation procedure rather than during the model training stage, where all previous attacks are performed. We propose two types of backdoor attacks, namely NAIVEATTACK and DOORPING. NAIVEATTACK simply adds triggers to the raw data at the initial distillation phase, while DOORPING iteratively updates the triggers during the entire distillation procedure. We conduct extensive evaluations on multiple datasets, architectures, and dataset distillation techniques. Empirical evaluation shows that NAIVEATTACK achieves decent attack success rate (ASR) scores in some cases, while DOORPING reaches higher ASR scores (close to 1.0) in all cases. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study to analyze the factors that may affect the attack performance. Finally, we evaluate multiple defense mechanisms against our backdoor attacks and show that our attacks can practically circumvent these defense mechanisms.

We present a dynamic path planning algorithm to navigate an amphibious rotor craft through a concave time-invariant obstacle field while attempting to minimize energy usage. We create a nonlinear quaternion state model that represents the rotor craft dynamics above and below the water. The 6 degree of freedom dynamics used within a layered architecture to generate motion paths for the vehicle to follow and the required control inputs. The rotor craft has a 3 dimensional map of its surroundings that is updated via limited range onboard sensor readings within the current medium (air or water). Path planning is done via PRM and D* Lite.

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

We present Muse, a text-to-image Transformer model that achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance while being significantly more efficient than diffusion or autoregressive models. Muse is trained on a masked modeling task in discrete token space: given the text embedding extracted from a pre-trained large language model (LLM), Muse is trained to predict randomly masked image tokens. Compared to pixel-space diffusion models, such as Imagen and DALL-E 2, Muse is significantly more efficient due to the use of discrete tokens and requiring fewer sampling iterations; compared to autoregressive models, such as Parti, Muse is more efficient due to the use of parallel decoding. The use of a pre-trained LLM enables fine-grained language understanding, translating to high-fidelity image generation and the understanding of visual concepts such as objects, their spatial relationships, pose, cardinality etc. Our 900M parameter model achieves a new SOTA on CC3M, with an FID score of 6.06. The Muse 3B parameter model achieves an FID of 7.88 on zero-shot COCO evaluation, along with a CLIP score of 0.32. Muse also directly enables a number of image editing applications without the need to fine-tune or invert the model: inpainting, outpainting, and mask-free editing. More results are available at https://muse-model.github.io

The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are revolutionizing how people move, sense, and interact with cities. This paper reviews the literature on the appearance and function of cities to illustrate how visual information has been used to understand them. A conceptual framework, Urban Visual Intelligence, is introduced to systematically elaborate on how new image data sources and AI techniques are reshaping the way researchers perceive and measure cities, enabling the study of the physical environment and its interactions with socioeconomic environments at various scales. The paper argues that these new approaches enable researchers to revisit the classic urban theories and themes, and potentially help cities create environments that are more in line with human behaviors and aspirations in the digital age.

Logic Mill is a scalable and openly accessible software system that identifies semantically similar documents within either one domain-specific corpus or multi-domain corpora. It uses advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to generate numerical representations of documents. Currently it leverages a large pre-trained language model to generate these document representations. The system focuses on scientific publications and patent documents and contains more than 200 million documents. It is easily accessible via a simple Application Programming Interface (API) or via a web interface. Moreover, it is continuously being updated and can be extended to text corpora from other domains. We see this system as a general-purpose tool for future research applications in the social sciences and other domains.

The release of ChatGPT, a language model capable of generating text that appears human-like and authentic, has gained significant attention beyond the research community. We expect that the convincing performance of ChatGPT incentivizes users to apply it to a variety of downstream tasks, including prompting the model to simplify their own medical reports. To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted an exploratory case study. In a questionnaire, we asked 15 radiologists to assess the quality of radiology reports simplified by ChatGPT. Most radiologists agreed that the simplified reports were factually correct, complete, and not potentially harmful to the patient. Nevertheless, instances of incorrect statements, missed key medical findings, and potentially harmful passages were reported. While further studies are needed, the initial insights of this study indicate a great potential in using large language models like ChatGPT to improve patient-centered care in radiology and other medical domains.