In federated learning systems, the unexpected quitting of participants is inevitable. Such quittings generally do not incur serious consequences in horizontal federated learning (HFL), but they do damage to vertical federated learning (VFL), which has been underexplored in previous research. In this paper, we show that there are two major vulnerabilities when passive parties unexpectedly quit in the deployment phase of VFL — severe performance degradation and intellectual property (IP) leakage of the active party’s labels. To solve these issues, we design PlugVFL to improve the VFL model’s robustness against the unexpected exit of passive parties and protect the active party’s IP in the deployment phase simultaneously. We evaluate our framework on multiple datasets against different inference attacks. The results show that PlugVFL effectively maintains model performance after the passive party quits and successfully disguises label information from the passive party’s feature extractor, thereby mitigating IP leakage.

Current course recommender systems primarily leverage learner-course interactions, course content, learner preferences, and supplementary course details like instructor, institution, ratings, and reviews, to make their recommendation. However, these systems often overlook a critical aspect: the evolving skill demand of the job market. This paper focuses on the perspective of academic researchers, working in collaboration with the industry, aiming to develop a course recommender system that incorporates job market skill demands. In light of the job market's rapid changes and the current state of research in course recommender systems, we outline essential properties for course recommender systems to address these demands effectively, including explainable, sequential, unsupervised, and aligned with the job market and user's goals. Our discussion extends to the challenges and research questions this objective entails, including unsupervised skill extraction from job listings, course descriptions, and resumes, as well as predicting recommendations that align with learner objectives and the job market and designing metrics to evaluate this alignment. Furthermore, we introduce an initial system that addresses some existing limitations of course recommender systems using large Language Models (LLMs) for skill extraction and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for alignment with the job market. We provide empirical results using open-source data to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Exploration and collision-free navigation through an unknown environment is a fundamental task for autonomous robots. In this paper, a novel exploration strategy for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) is presented. The goal of the exploration strategy is the reduction of map entropy regarding occupancy probabilities, which is reflected in a utility function to be maximised. We achieve fast and efficient exploration performance with tight integration between our octree-based occupancy mapping approach, frontier extraction, and motion planning-as a hybrid between frontier-based and sampling-based exploration methods. The computationally expensive frontier clustering employed in classic frontier-based exploration is avoided by exploiting the implicit grouping of frontier voxels in the underlying octree map representation. Candidate next-views are sampled from the map frontiers and are evaluated using a utility function combining map entropy and travel time, where the former is computed efficiently using sparse raycasting. These optimisations along with the targeted exploration of frontier-based methods result in a fast and computationally efficient exploration planner. The proposed method is evaluated using both simulated and real-world experiments, demonstrating clear advantages over state-of-the-art approaches.

In this paper, we propose a novel closed-form transformation estimation method based on moving regularized least squares optimization with thin-plate spline (MRLS-TPS) for non-rigid image deformation. The method takes the user-controlled point-offset-vectors as the input data, and estimates the spatial transformation about the two control point sets for each pixel. To achieve a realistic deformation, we formulates the transformation estimation as a vector-field interpolation problem by a moving regularized least squares method. Unlike MLS, the mapping function is modeled by a non-rigid function thin-plate spline with regularization technique, such that the deformation can satisfy both global linear affine motion and local non-rigid warping. We derive a closed-form solution of the transformation and achieve a fast implementation. In addition, the proposed method can give a wonderful user experience, fast and convenient manipulating. Extensive experiments on real images demonstrated the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods and the commercial software Adobe PhotoShop CS 6, especially in case of flexible object motion.