Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning with Variance Reduction and Differential Privacy

Federated learning (FL) is designed to preserve data privacy during model training, where the data remains on the client side (i.e., IoT devices), and only model updates of clients are shared iteratively for collaborative learning. However, this process is vulnerable to privacy attacks and Byzantine attacks: the local model updates shared throughout the FL network will leak private information about the local training data, and they can also be maliciously crafted by Byzantine attackers to disturb the learning. In this paper, we propose a new FL scheme that guarantees rigorous privacy and simultaneously enhances system robustness against Byzantine attacks. Our approach introduces sparsification- and momentum-driven variance reduction into the client-level differential privacy (DP) mechanism, to defend against Byzantine attackers. The security design does not violate the privacy guarantee of the client-level DP mechanism; hence, our approach achieves the same client-level DP guarantee as the state-of-the-art. We conduct extensive experiments on both IID and non-IID datasets and different tasks and evaluate the performance of our approach against different Byzantine attacks by comparing it with state-of-the-art defense methods. The results of our experiments show the efficacy of our framework and demonstrate its ability to improve system robustness against Byzantine attacks while achieving a strong privacy guarantee.

Distractor-Aware Fast Tracking via Dynamic Convolutions and MOT Philosophy

A practical long-term tracker typically contains three key properties, i.e. an efficient model design, an effective global re-detection strategy and a robust distractor awareness mechanism. However, most state-of-the-art long-term trackers (e.g., Pseudo and re-detecting based ones) do not take all three key properties into account and therefore may either be time-consuming or drift to distractors. To address the issues, we propose a two-task tracking frame work (named DMTrack), which utilizes two core components (i.e., one-shot detection and re-identification (re-id) association) to achieve distractor-aware fast tracking via Dynamic convolutions (d-convs) and Multiple object tracking (MOT) philosophy. To achieve precise and fast global detection, we construct a lightweight one-shot detector using a novel dynamic convolutions generation method, which provides a unified and more flexible way for fusing target information into the search field. To distinguish the target from distractors, we resort to the philosophy of MOT to reason distractors explicitly by maintaining all potential similarities' tracklets. Benefited from the strength of high recall detection and explicit object association, our tracker achieves state-of-the-art performance on the LaSOT, OxUvA, TLP, VOT2018LT and VOT2019LT benchmarks and runs in real-time (3x faster than comparisons).

Attention-based Supply-Demand Prediction for Autonomous Vehicles

As one of the important functions of the intelligent transportation system (ITS), supply-demand prediction for autonomous vehicles provides a decision basis for its control. In this paper, we present two prediction models (i.e. ARLP model and Advanced ARLP model) based on two system environments that only the current day's historical data is available or several days' historical data are available. These two models jointly consider the spatial, temporal, and semantic relations. Spatial dependency is captured with residual network and dimension reduction. Short term temporal dependency is captured with LSTM. Long term temporal dependency and temporal shifting are captured with LSTM and attention mechanism. Semantic dependency is captured with multi-attention mechanism and autocorrelation coefficient method. Extensive experiments show that our frameworks provide more accurate and stable prediction results than the existing methods.