Abstract:Tabular machine learning systems are frequently trained on data affected by non-uniform corruption, including noisy measurements, missing entries, and feature-specific biases. In practice, these defects are often documented only through column-level reliability indicators rather than instance-wise quality annotations, limiting the applicability of many robustness and cleaning techniques. We present QuAIL, a quality-informed training mechanism that incorporates feature reliability priors directly into the learning process. QuAIL augments existing models with a learnable feature-modulation layer whose updates are selectively constrained by a quality-dependent proximal regularizer, thereby inducing controlled adaptation across features of varying trustworthiness. This stabilizes optimization under structured corruption without explicit data repair or sample-level reweighting. Empirical evaluation across 50 classification and regression datasets demonstrates that QuAIL consistently improves average performance over neural baselines under both random and value-dependent corruption, with especially robust behavior in low-data and systematically biased settings. These results suggest that incorporating feature reliability information directly into optimization dynamics is a practical and effective approach for resilient tabular learning.
Abstract:The widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) comes with a significant environmental impact, particularly in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions. This pressing issue highlights the need for innovative solutions to mitigate AI's ecological footprint. One of the key factors influencing the energy consumption of ML model training is the size of the training dataset. ML models are often trained on vast amounts of data continuously generated by sensors and devices distributed across multiple locations. To reduce data transmission costs and enhance privacy, Federated Learning (FL) enables model training without the need to move or share raw data. While FL offers these advantages, it also introduces challenges due to the heterogeneity of data sources (related to volume and quality), computational node capabilities, and environmental impact. This paper contributes to the advancement of Green AI by proposing a data-centric approach to Green Federated Learning. Specifically, we focus on reducing FL's environmental impact by minimizing the volume of training data. Our methodology involves the analysis of the characteristics of federated datasets, the selecting of an optimal subset of data based on quality metrics, and the choice of the federated nodes with the lowest environmental impact. We develop a comprehensive methodology that examines the influence of data-centric factors, such as data quality and volume, on FL training performance and carbon emissions. Building on these insights, we introduce an interactive recommendation system that optimizes FL configurations through data reduction, minimizing environmental impact during training. Applying this methodology to time series classification has demonstrated promising results in reducing the environmental impact of FL tasks.