Memory-Efficient and Secure DNN Inference on TrustZone-enabled Consumer IoT Devices

Edge intelligence enables resource-demanding Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference without transferring original data, addressing concerns about data privacy in consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices. For privacy-sensitive applications, deploying models in hardware-isolated trusted execution environments (TEEs) becomes essential. However, the limited secure memory in TEEs poses challenges for deploying DNN inference, and alternative techniques like model partitioning and offloading introduce performance degradation and security issues. In this paper, we present a novel approach for advanced model deployment in TrustZone that ensures comprehensive privacy preservation during model inference. We design a memory-efficient management method to support memory-demanding inference in TEEs. By adjusting the memory priority, we effectively mitigate memory leakage risks and memory overlap conflicts, resulting in 32 lines of code alterations in the trusted operating system. Additionally, we leverage two tiny libraries: S-Tinylib (2,538 LoCs), a tiny deep learning library, and Tinylibm (827 LoCs), a tiny math library, to support efficient inference in TEEs. We implemented a prototype on Raspberry Pi 3B+ and evaluated it using three well-known lightweight DNN models. The experimental results demonstrate that our design significantly improves inference speed by 3.13 times and reduces power consumption by over 66.5% compared to non-memory optimization method in TEEs.

RAGIC: Risk-Aware Generative Adversarial Model for Stock Interval Construction

Efforts to predict stock market outcomes have yielded limited success due to the inherently stochastic nature of the market, influenced by numerous unpredictable factors. Many existing prediction approaches focus on single-point predictions, lacking the depth needed for effective decision-making and often overlooking market risk. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel model, RAGIC, which introduces sequence generation for stock interval prediction to quantify uncertainty more effectively. Our approach leverages a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to produce future price sequences infused with randomness inherent in financial markets. RAGIC's generator includes a risk module, capturing the risk perception of informed investors, and a temporal module, accounting for historical price trends and seasonality. This multi-faceted generator informs the creation of risk-sensitive intervals through statistical inference, incorporating horizon-wise insights. The interval's width is carefully adjusted to reflect market volatility. Importantly, our approach relies solely on publicly available data and incurs only low computational overhead. RAGIC's evaluation across globally recognized broad-based indices demonstrates its balanced performance, offering both accuracy and informativeness. Achieving a consistent 95% coverage, RAGIC maintains a narrow interval width. This promising outcome suggests that our approach effectively addresses the challenges of stock market prediction while incorporating vital risk considerations.

HI-GAN: Hierarchical Inpainting GAN with Auxiliary Inputs for Combined RGB and Depth Inpainting

Inpainting involves filling in missing pixels or areas in an image, a crucial technique employed in Mixed Reality environments for various applications, particularly in Diminished Reality (DR) where content is removed from a user's visual environment. Existing methods rely on digital replacement techniques which necessitate multiple cameras and incur high costs. AR devices and smartphones use ToF depth sensors to capture scene depth maps aligned with RGB images. Despite speed and affordability, ToF cameras create imperfect depth maps with missing pixels. To address the above challenges, we propose Hierarchical Inpainting GAN (HI-GAN), a novel approach comprising three GANs in a hierarchical fashion for RGBD inpainting. EdgeGAN and LabelGAN inpaint masked edge and segmentation label images respectively, while CombinedRGBD-GAN combines their latent representation outputs and performs RGB and Depth inpainting. Edge images and particularly segmentation label images as auxiliary inputs significantly enhance inpainting performance by complementary context and hierarchical optimization. We believe we make the first attempt to incorporate label images into inpainting process.Unlike previous approaches requiring multiple sequential models and separate outputs, our work operates in an end-to-end manner, training all three models simultaneously and hierarchically. Specifically, EdgeGAN and LabelGAN are first optimized separately and further optimized inside CombinedRGBD-GAN to enhance inpainting quality. Experiments demonstrate that HI-GAN works seamlessly and achieves overall superior performance compared with existing approaches.

DataFrame QA: A Universal LLM Framework on DataFrame Question Answering Without Data Exposure

This paper introduces DataFrame question answering (QA), a novel task that utilizes large language models (LLMs) to generate Pandas queries for information retrieval and data analysis on dataframes, emphasizing safe and non-revealing data handling. Our method, which solely relies on dataframe column names, not only ensures data privacy but also significantly reduces the context window in the prompt, streamlining information processing and addressing major challenges in LLM-based data analysis. We propose DataFrame QA as a comprehensive framework that includes safe Pandas query generation and code execution. Various LLMs, notably GPT-4, are evaluated using the pass@1 metric on the renowned WikiSQL and our newly developed 'UCI-DataFrameQA', tailored for complex data analysis queries. Our findings indicate that GPT-4 achieves pass@1 rates of 86% on WikiSQL and 97% on UCI-DataFrameQA, underscoring its capability in securely retrieving and aggregating dataframe values and conducting sophisticated data analyses. This approach, deployable in a zero-shot manner without prior training or adjustments, proves to be highly adaptable and secure for diverse applications.

Safety in Traffic Management Systems: A Comprehensive Survey

Traffic management systems play a vital role in ensuring safe and efficient transportation on roads. However, the use of advanced technologies in traffic management systems has introduced new safety challenges. Therefore, it is important to ensure the safety of these systems to prevent accidents and minimize their impact on road users. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the literature on safety in traffic management systems. Specifically, we discuss the different safety issues that arise in traffic management systems, the current state of research on safety in these systems, and the techniques and methods proposed to ensure the safety of these systems. We also identify the limitations of the existing research and suggest future research directions.

Stock Broad-Index Trend Patterns Learning via Domain Knowledge Informed Generative Network

Predicting the Stock movement attracts much attention from both industry and academia. Despite such significant efforts, the results remain unsatisfactory due to the inherently complicated nature of the stock market driven by factors including supply and demand, the state of the economy, the political climate, and even irrational human behavior. Recently, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have been extended for time series data; however, robust methods are primarily for synthetic series generation, which fall short for appropriate stock prediction. This is because existing GANs for stock applications suffer from mode collapse and only consider one-step prediction, thus underutilizing the potential of GAN. Furthermore, merging news and market volatility are neglected in current GANs. To address these issues, we exploit expert domain knowledge in finance and, for the first time, attempt to formulate stock movement prediction into a Wasserstein GAN framework for multi-step prediction. We propose IndexGAN, which includes deliberate designs for the inherent characteristics of the stock market, leverages news context learning to thoroughly investigate textual information and develop an attentive seq2seq learning network that captures the temporal dependency among stock prices, news, and market sentiment. We also utilize the critic to approximate the Wasserstein distance between actual and predicted sequences and develop a rolling strategy for deployment that mitigates noise from the financial market. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world broad-based indices, demonstrating the superior performance of our architecture over other state-of-the-art baselines, also validating all its contributing components.

SafeLight: A Reinforcement Learning Method toward Collision-free Traffic Signal Control

Traffic signal control is safety-critical for our daily life. Roughly one-quarter of road accidents in the U.S. happen at intersections due to problematic signal timing, urging the development of safety-oriented intersection control. However, existing studies on adaptive traffic signal control using reinforcement learning technologies have focused mainly on minimizing traffic delay but neglecting the potential exposure to unsafe conditions. We, for the first time, incorporate road safety standards as enforcement to ensure the safety of existing reinforcement learning methods, aiming toward operating intersections with zero collisions. We have proposed a safety-enhanced residual reinforcement learning method (SafeLight) and employed multiple optimization techniques, such as multi-objective loss function and reward shaping for better knowledge integration. Extensive experiments are conducted using both synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets. Results show that our method can significantly reduce collisions while increasing traffic mobility.

A review of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and its applications in a wide variety of disciplines -- From Medical to Remote Sensing

We look into Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), its prevalent variants and applications in a number of sectors. GANs combine two neural networks that compete against one another using zero-sum game theory, allowing them to create much crisper and discrete outputs. GANs can be used to perform image processing, video generation and prediction, among other computer vision applications. GANs can also be utilised for a variety of science-related activities, including protein engineering, astronomical data processing, remote sensing image dehazing, and crystal structure synthesis. Other notable fields where GANs have made gains include finance, marketing, fashion design, sports, and music. Therefore in this article we provide a comprehensive overview of the applications of GANs in a wide variety of disciplines. We first cover the theory supporting GAN, GAN variants, and the metrics to evaluate GANs. Then we present how GAN and its variants can be applied in twelve domains, ranging from STEM fields, such as astronomy and biology, to business fields, such as marketing and finance, and to arts, such as music. As a result, researchers from other fields may grasp how GANs work and apply them to their own study. To the best of our knowledge, this article provides the most comprehensive survey of GAN's applications in different fields.

High Resolution Solar Image Generation using Generative Adversarial Networks

We applied Deep Learning algorithm known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to perform solar image-to-image translation. That is, from Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)/Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager(HMI) line of sight magnetogram images to SDO/Atmospheric Imaging Assembly(AIA) 0304-{\AA} images. The Ultraviolet(UV)/Extreme Ultraviolet(EUV) observations like the SDO/AIA0304-{\AA} images were only made available to scientists in the late 1990s even though the magenetic field observations like the SDO/HMI have been available since the 1970s. Therefore by leveraging Deep Learning algorithms like GANs we can give scientists access to complete datasets for analysis. For generating high resolution solar images we use the Pix2PixHD and Pix2Pix algorithms. The Pix2PixHD algorithm was specifically designed for high resolution image generation tasks, and the Pix2Pix algorithm is by far the most widely used image to image translation algorithm. For training and testing we used the data for the year 2012, 2013 and 2014. The results show that our deep learning models are capable of generating high resolution(1024 x 1024 pixels) AIA0304 images from HMI magnetograms. Specifically, the pixel-to-pixel Pearson Correlation Coefficient of the images generated by Pix2PixHD and original images is as high as 0.99. The number is 0.962 if Pix2Pix is used to generate images. The results we get for our Pix2PixHD model is better than the results obtained by previous works done by others to generate AIA0304 images. Thus, we can use these models to generate AIA0304 images when the AIA0304 data is not available which can be used for understanding space weather and giving researchers the capability to predict solar events such as Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections. As far as we know, our work is the first attempt to leverage Pix2PixHD algorithm for SDO/HMI to SDO/AIA0304 image-to-image translation.

A Deep Spatio-Temporal Fuzzy Neural Network for Passenger Demand Prediction

In spite of its importance, passenger demand prediction is a highly challenging problem, because the demand is simultaneously influenced by the complex interactions among many spatial and temporal factors and other external factors such as weather. To address this problem, we propose a Spatio-TEmporal Fuzzy neural Network (STEF-Net) to accurately predict passenger demands incorporating the complex interactions of all known important factors. We design an end-to-end learning framework with different neural networks modeling different factors. Specifically, we propose to capture spatio-temporal feature interactions via a convolutional long short-term memory network and model external factors via a fuzzy neural network that handles data uncertainty significantly better than deterministic methods. To keep the temporal relations when fusing two networks and emphasize discriminative spatio-temporal feature interactions, we employ a novel feature fusion method with a convolution operation and an attention layer. As far as we know, our work is the first to fuse a deep recurrent neural network and a fuzzy neural network to model complex spatial-temporal feature interactions with additional uncertain input features for predictive learning. Experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset show that our model achieves more than 10% improvement over the state-of-the-art approaches.