Secure Federated Learning Across Heterogeneous Cloud and High-Performance Computing Resources -- A Case Study on Federated Fine-tuning of LLaMA 2

Federated learning enables multiple data owners to collaboratively train robust machine learning models without transferring large or sensitive local datasets by only sharing the parameters of the locally trained models. In this paper, we elaborate on the design of our Advanced Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning (APPFL) framework, which streamlines end-to-end secure and reliable federated learning experiments across cloud computing facilities and high-performance computing resources by leveraging Globus Compute, a distributed function as a service platform, and Amazon Web Services. We further demonstrate the use case of APPFL in fine-tuning a LLaMA 2 7B model using several cloud resources and supercomputers.

FedCompass: Efficient Cross-Silo Federated Learning on Heterogeneous Client Devices using a Computing Power Aware Scheduler

Cross-silo federated learning offers a promising solution to collaboratively train robust and generalized AI models without compromising the privacy of local datasets, e.g., healthcare, financial, as well as scientific projects that lack a centralized data facility. Nonetheless, because of the disparity of computing resources among different clients (i.e., device heterogeneity), synchronous federated learning algorithms suffer from degraded efficiency when waiting for straggler clients. Similarly, asynchronous federated learning algorithms experience degradation in the convergence rate and final model accuracy on non-identically and independently distributed (non-IID) heterogeneous datasets due to stale local models and client drift. To address these limitations in cross-silo federated learning with heterogeneous clients and data, we propose FedCompass, an innovative semi-asynchronous federated learning algorithm with a computing power aware scheduler on the server side, which adaptively assigns varying amounts of training tasks to different clients using the knowledge of the computing power of individual clients. FedCompass ensures that multiple locally trained models from clients are received almost simultaneously as a group for aggregation, effectively reducing the staleness of local models. At the same time, the overall training process remains asynchronous, eliminating prolonged waiting periods from straggler clients. Using diverse non-IID heterogeneous distributed datasets, we demonstrate that FedCompass achieves faster convergence and higher accuracy than other asynchronous algorithms while remaining more efficient than synchronous algorithms when performing federated learning on heterogeneous clients.

Self-Supervised Masked Digital Elevation Models Encoding for Low-Resource Downstream Tasks

The lack of quality labeled data is one of the main bottlenecks for training Deep Learning models. As the task increases in complexity, there is a higher penalty for overfitting and unstable learning. The typical paradigm employed today is Self-Supervised learning, where the model attempts to learn from a large corpus of unstructured and unlabeled data and then transfer that knowledge to the required task. Some notable examples of self-supervision in other modalities are BERT for Large Language Models, Wav2Vec for Speech Recognition, and the Masked AutoEncoder for Vision, which all utilize Transformers to solve a masked prediction task. GeoAI is uniquely poised to take advantage of the self-supervised methodology due to the decades of data collected, little of which is precisely and dependably annotated. Our goal is to extract building and road segmentations from Digital Elevation Models (DEM) that provide a detailed topography of the earths surface. The proposed architecture is the Masked Autoencoder pre-trained on ImageNet (with the limitation that there is a large domain discrepancy between ImageNet and DEM) with an UperNet Head for decoding segmentations. We tested this model with 450 and 50 training images only, utilizing roughly 5% and 0.5% of the original data respectively. On the building segmentation task, this model obtains an 82.1% Intersection over Union (IoU) with 450 Images and 69.1% IoU with only 50 images. On the more challenging road detection task the model obtains an 82.7% IoU with 450 images and 73.2% IoU with only 50 images. Any hand-labeled dataset made today about the earths surface will be immediately obsolete due to the constantly changing nature of the landscape. This motivates the clear necessity for data-efficient learners that can be used for a wide variety of downstream tasks.

APPFLx: Providing Privacy-Preserving Cross-Silo Federated Learning as a Service

Cross-silo privacy-preserving federated learning (PPFL) is a powerful tool to collaboratively train robust and generalized machine learning (ML) models without sharing sensitive (e.g., healthcare of financial) local data. To ease and accelerate the adoption of PPFL, we introduce APPFLx, a ready-to-use platform that provides privacy-preserving cross-silo federated learning as a service. APPFLx employs Globus authentication to allow users to easily and securely invite trustworthy collaborators for PPFL, implements several synchronous and asynchronous FL algorithms, streamlines the FL experiment launch process, and enables tracking and visualizing the life cycle of FL experiments, allowing domain experts and ML practitioners to easily orchestrate and evaluate cross-silo FL under one platform. APPFLx is available online at https://appflx.link

Sequence Generation via Subsequence Similarity: Theory and Application to UAV Identification

The ability to generate synthetic sequences is crucial for a wide range of applications, and recent advances in deep learning architectures and generative frameworks have greatly facilitated this process. Particularly, unconditional one-shot generative models constitute an attractive line of research that focuses on capturing the internal information of a single image, video, etc. to generate samples with similar contents. Since many of those one-shot models are shifting toward efficient non-deep and non-adversarial approaches, we examine the versatility of a one-shot generative model for augmenting whole datasets. In this work, we focus on how similarity at the subsequence level affects similarity at the sequence level, and derive bounds on the optimal transport of real and generated sequences based on that of corresponding subsequences. We use a one-shot generative model to sample from the vicinity of individual sequences and generate subsequence-similar ones and demonstrate the improvement of this approach by applying it to the problem of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) identification using limited radio-frequency (RF) signals. In the context of UAV identification, RF fingerprinting is an effective method for distinguishing legitimate devices from malicious ones, but heterogenous environments and channel impairments can impose data scarcity and affect the performance of classification models. By using subsequence similarity to augment sequences of RF data with a low ratio (5\%-20\%) of training dataset, we achieve significant improvements in performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score.

Weakly Supervised Two-Stage Training Scheme for Deep Video Fight Detection Model

Fight detection in videos is an emerging deep learning application with today's prevalence of surveillance systems and streaming media. Previous work has largely relied on action recognition techniques to tackle this problem. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method that solves the task from a new perspective: we design the fight detection model as a composition of an action-aware feature extractor and an anomaly score generator. Also, considering that collecting frame-level labels for videos is too laborious, we design a weakly supervised two-stage training scheme, where we utilize multiple-instance-learning loss calculated on video-level labels to train the score generator, and adopt the self-training technique to further improve its performance. Extensive experiments on a publicly available large-scale dataset, UBI-Fights, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and the performance on the dataset exceeds several previous state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, we collect a new dataset, VFD-2000, that specializes in video fight detection, with a larger scale and more scenarios than existing datasets. The implementation of our method and the proposed dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/Hepta-Col/VideoFightDetection.

AGNet: Weighing Black Holes with Deep Learning

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are ubiquitously found at the centers of most massive galaxies. Measuring SMBH mass is important for understanding the origin and evolution of SMBHs. However, traditional methods require spectroscopic data which is expensive to gather. We present an algorithm that weighs SMBHs using quasar light time series, circumventing the need for expensive spectra. We train, validate, and test neural networks that directly learn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Stripe 82 light curves for a sample of $38,939$ spectroscopically confirmed quasars to map out the nonlinear encoding between SMBH mass and multi-color optical light curves. We find a 1$\sigma$ scatter of 0.37 dex between the predicted SMBH mass and the fiducial virial mass estimate based on SDSS single-epoch spectra, which is comparable to the systematic uncertainty in the virial mass estimate. Our results have direct implications for more efficient applications with future observations from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Our code, \textsf{AGNet}, is publicly available at {\color{red} \url{https://github.com/snehjp2/AGNet}}.

Confluence of Artificial Intelligence and High Performance Computing for Accelerated, Scalable and Reproducible Gravitational Wave Detection

Finding new ways to use artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate the analysis of gravitational wave data, and ensuring the developed models are easily reusable promises to unlock new opportunities in multi-messenger astrophysics (MMA), and to enable wider use, rigorous validation, and sharing of developed models by the community. In this work, we demonstrate how connecting recently deployed DOE and NSF-sponsored cyberinfrastructure allows for new ways to publish models, and to subsequently deploy these models into applications using computing platforms ranging from laptops to high performance computing clusters. We develop a workflow that connects the Data and Learning Hub for Science (DLHub), a repository for publishing machine learning models, with the Hardware Accelerated Learning (HAL) deep learning computing cluster, using funcX as a universal distributed computing service. We then use this workflow to search for binary black hole gravitational wave signals in open source advanced LIGO data. We find that using this workflow, an ensemble of four openly available deep learning models can be run on HAL and process the entire month of August 2017 of advanced LIGO data in just seven minutes, identifying all four binary black hole mergers previously identified in this dataset, and reporting no misclassifications. This approach, which combines advances in AI, distributed computing, and scientific data infrastructure opens new pathways to conduct reproducible, accelerated, data-driven gravitational wave detection.

Convergence of Artificial Intelligence and High Performance Computing on NSF-supported Cyberinfrastructure

Significant investments to upgrade or construct large-scale scientific facilities demand commensurate investments in R&D to design algorithms and computing approaches to enable scientific and engineering breakthroughs in the big data era. The remarkable success of Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to turn big-data challenges in industry and technology into transformational digital solutions that drive a multi-billion dollar industry, which play an ever increasing role shaping human social patterns, has promoted AI as the most sought after signal processing tool in big-data research. As AI continues to evolve into a computing tool endowed with statistical and mathematical rigor, and which encodes domain expertise to inform and inspire AI architectures and optimization algorithms, it has become apparent that single-GPU solutions for training, validation, and testing are no longer sufficient. This realization has been driving the confluence of AI and high performance computing (HPC) to reduce time-to-insight and to produce robust, reliable, trustworthy, and computationally efficient AI solutions. In this white paper, we present a summary of recent developments in this field, and discuss avenues to accelerate and streamline the use of HPC platforms to design accelerated AI algorithms.

Enabling real-time multi-messenger astrophysics discoveries with deep learning

Multi-messenger astrophysics is a fast-growing, interdisciplinary field that combines data, which vary in volume and speed of data processing, from many different instruments that probe the Universe using different cosmic messengers: electromagnetic waves, cosmic rays, gravitational waves and neutrinos. In this Expert Recommendation, we review the key challenges of real-time observations of gravitational wave sources and their electromagnetic and astroparticle counterparts, and make a number of recommendations to maximize their potential for scientific discovery. These recommendations refer to the design of scalable and computationally efficient machine learning algorithms; the cyber-infrastructure to numerically simulate astrophysical sources, and to process and interpret multi-messenger astrophysics data; the management of gravitational wave detections to trigger real-time alerts for electromagnetic and astroparticle follow-ups; a vision to harness future developments of machine learning and cyber-infrastructure resources to cope with the big-data requirements; and the need to build a community of experts to realize the goals of multi-messenger astrophysics.