Controlled Territory and Conflict Tracking (CONTACT): (Geo-)Mapping Occupied Territory from Open Source Intelligence

Open-source intelligence provides a stream of unstructured textual data that can inform assessments of territorial control. We present CONTACT, a framework for territorial control prediction using large language models (LLMs) and minimal supervision. We evaluate two approaches: SetFit, an embedding-based few-shot classifier, and a prompt tuning method applied to BLOOMZ-560m, a multilingual generative LLM. Our model is trained on a small hand-labeled dataset of news articles covering ISIS activity in Syria and Iraq, using prompt-conditioned extraction of control-relevant signals such as military operations, casualties, and location references. We show that the BLOOMZ-based model outperforms the SetFit baseline, and that prompt-based supervision improves generalization in low-resource settings. CONTACT demonstrates that LLMs fine-tuned using few-shot methods can reduce annotation burdens and support structured inference from open-ended OSINT streams. Our code is available at https://github.com/PaulKMandal/CONTACT/.

Vertical Federated Image Segmentation

With the popularization of AI solutions for image based problems, there has been a growing concern for both data privacy and acquisition. In a large number of cases, information is located on separate data silos and it can be difficult for a developer to consolidate all of it in a fashion that is appropriate for machine learning model development. Alongside this, a portion of these localized data regions may not have access to a labelled ground truth. This indicates that they have the capacity to reach conclusions numerically, but are not able to assign classifications amid a lack of pertinent information. Such a determination is often negligible, especially when attempting to develop image based solutions that often necessitate this capability. With this being the case, we propose an innovative vertical federated learning (VFL) model architecture that can operate under this common set of conditions. This is the first (and currently the only) implementation of a system that can work under the constraints of a VFL environment and perform image segmentation while maintaining nominal accuracies. We achieved this by utilizing an FCN that boasts the ability to operate on federates that lack labelled data and privately share the respective weights with a central server, that of which hosts the necessary features for classification. Tests were conducted on the CamVid dataset in order to determine the impact of heavy feature compression required for the transfer of information between federates, as well as to reach nominal conclusions about the overall performance metrics when working under such constraints.

Horizontal Federated Computer Vision

In the modern world, the amount of visual data recorded has been rapidly increasing. In many cases, data is stored in geographically distinct locations and thus requires a large amount of time and space to consolidate. Sometimes, there are also regulations for privacy protection which prevent data consolidation. In this work, we present federated implementations for object detection and recognition using a federated Faster R-CNN (FRCNN) and image segmentation using a federated Fully Convolutional Network (FCN). Our FRCNN was trained on 5000 examples of the COCO2017 dataset while our FCN was trained on the entire train set of the CamVid dataset. The proposed federated models address the challenges posed by the increasing volume and decentralized nature of visual data, offering efficient solutions in compliance with privacy regulations.

Vertical Federated Alzheimer's Detection on Multimodal Data

In the era of rapidly advancing medical technologies, the segmentation of medical data has become inevitable, necessitating the development of privacy preserving machine learning algorithms that can train on distributed data. Consolidating sensitive medical data is not always an option particularly due to the stringent privacy regulations imposed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). In this paper, we introduce a HIPAA compliant framework that can train from distributed data. We then propose a multimodal vertical federated model for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) detection, a serious neurodegenerative condition that can cause dementia, severely impairing brain function and hindering simple tasks, especially without preventative care. This vertical federated model offers a distributed architecture that enables collaborative learning across diverse sources of medical data while respecting privacy constraints imposed by HIPAA. It is also able to leverage multiple modalities of data, enhancing the robustness and accuracy of AD detection. Our proposed model not only contributes to the advancement of federated learning techniques but also holds promise for overcoming the hurdles posed by data segmentation in medical research. By using vertical federated learning, this research strives to provide a framework that enables healthcare institutions to harness the collective intelligence embedded in their distributed datasets without compromising patient privacy.

An FNet based Auto Encoder for Long Sequence News Story Generation

In this paper, we design an auto encoder based off of Google's FNet Architecture in order to generate text from a subset of news stories contained in Google's C4 dataset. We discuss previous attempts and methods to generate text from autoencoders and non LLM Models. FNET poses multiple advantages to BERT based encoders in the realm of efficiency which train 80% faster on GPUs and 70% faster on TPUs. We then compare outputs of how this autencoder perfroms on different epochs. Finally, we analyze what outputs the encoder produces with different seed text.