Subspace-based Approximate Hessian Method for Zeroth-Order Optimization

Zeroth-order optimization addresses problems where gradient information is inaccessible or impractical to compute. While most existing methods rely on first-order approximations, incorporating second-order (curvature) information can, in principle, significantly accelerate convergence. However, the high cost of function evaluations required to estimate Hessian matrices often limits practical applicability. We present the subspace-based approximate Hessian (ZO-SAH) method, a zeroth-order optimization algorithm that mitigates these costs by focusing on randomly selected two-dimensional subspaces. Within each subspace, ZO-SAH estimates the Hessian by fitting a quadratic polynomial to the objective function and extracting its second-order coefficients. To further reduce function-query costs, ZO-SAH employs a periodic subspace-switching strategy that reuses function evaluations across optimization steps. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets, including logistic regression and deep neural network training tasks, demonstrate that ZO-SAH achieves significantly faster convergence than existing zeroth-order methods.

SlAction: Non-intrusive, Lightweight Obstructive Sleep Apnea Detection using Infrared Video

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a prevalent sleep disorder affecting approximately one billion people world-wide. The current gold standard for diagnosing OSA, Polysomnography (PSG), involves an overnight hospital stay with multiple attached sensors, leading to potential inaccuracies due to the first-night effect. To address this, we present SlAction, a non-intrusive OSA detection system for daily sleep environments using infrared videos. Recognizing that sleep videos exhibit minimal motion, this work investigates the fundamental question: "Are respiratory events adequately reflected in human motions during sleep?" Analyzing the largest sleep video dataset of 5,098 hours, we establish correlations between OSA events and human motions during sleep. Our approach uses a low frame rate (2.5 FPS), a large size (60 seconds) and step (30 seconds) for sliding window analysis to capture slow and long-term motions related to OSA. Furthermore, we utilize a lightweight deep neural network for resource-constrained devices, ensuring all video streams are processed locally without compromising privacy. Evaluations show that SlAction achieves an average F1 score of 87.6% in detecting OSA across various environments. Implementing SlAction on NVIDIA Jetson Nano enables real-time inference (~3 seconds for a 60-second video clip), highlighting its potential for early detection and personalized treatment of OSA.