Although modern localization methods have achieved remarkable accuracy with various sensors, there are still some circumstances where only proprioceptive sensing works (Inertial Navigation). However, localization and navigation using only IMU sensors (costing less than $1000) still face significant challenges such as low accuracy and large cumulative errors when using traditional filter methods. Furthermore, AI-based approaches, while promising, often yield unpredictable and unreliable outputs. This paper proposes FormerReckoning, an inertial localization estimation framework for wheeled robotics that incorporates physical prompts into a Transformer framework to enhance translation estimation accuracy. Our tests show that FormerReckoning not only reduces mean translation errors to 0.72% but also surpasses all baseline models in performance, demonstrating its potential to provide reliable and precise localization in a cost-effective manner.

Federated learning (FL) enables edge devices to collaboratively learn a model in a distributed fashion. Many existing researches have focused on improving communication efficiency of high-dimensional models and addressing bias caused by local updates. However, most FL algorithms are either based on reliable communications or assuming fixed and known unreliability characteristics. In practice, networks could suffer from dynamic channel conditions and non-deterministic disruptions, with time-varying and unknown characteristics. To this end, in this paper we propose a sparsity-enabled FL framework with both improved communication efficiency and bias reduction, termed as SAFARI. It makes use of similarity among client models to rectify and compensate for bias that results from unreliable communications. More precisely, sparse learning is implemented on local clients to mitigate communication overhead, while to cope with unreliable communications, a similarity-based compensation method is proposed to provide surrogates for missing model updates. With respect to sparse models, we analyze SAFARI under bounded dissimilarity. It is demonstrated that SAFARI under unreliable communications is guaranteed to converge at the same rate as the standard FedAvg with perfect communications. Implementations and evaluations on the CIFAR-10 dataset validate the effectiveness of SAFARI by showing that it can achieve the same convergence speed and accuracy as FedAvg with perfect communications, with up to 60% of the model weights being pruned and a high percentage of client updates missing in each round of model updates.

The widespread adoption of Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-preserving distributed learning methodology, has been impeded by the challenge of high communication overheads, typically arising from the transmission of large-scale models. Existing adaptive quantization methods, designed to mitigate these overheads, operate under the impractical assumption of uniform device participation. Additionally, these methods are limited in their adaptability due to the necessity of manual quantization level selection and often overlook biases inherent in local devices' data, thereby affecting the robustness of the global model. In response, this paper introduces AQUILA (adaptivequantization in device selection strategy), a novel adaptive framework devised to effectively handle these issues, enhancing the efficiency and robustness of FL. AQUILA integrates a sophisticated device selection method that prioritizes the quality and usefulness of device updates. Utilizing the exact global model stored by devices enables a more precise device selection criterion, reduces model deviation, and limits the need for hyperparameter adjustments. Furthermore, AQUILA presents an innovative quantization criterion, optimized to improve communication efficiency while assuring model convergence. Our experiments demonstrate that AQUILA significantly decreases communication costs compared to existing methods, while maintaining comparable model performance across diverse non-homogeneous FL settings, such as Non-IID data and heterogeneous model architectures.

Federated learning (FL) has attracted tremendous attentions in recent years due to its privacy-preserving measures and great potential in some distributed but privacy-sensitive applications, such as finance and health. However, high communication overloads for transmitting high-dimensional networks and extra security masks remain a bottleneck of FL. This article proposes a communication-efficient FL framework with an Adaptive Quantized Gradient (AQG), which adaptively adjusts the quantization level based on a local gradient’s update to fully utilize the heterogeneity of local data distribution for reducing unnecessary transmissions. In addition, client dropout issues are taken into account and an Augmented AQG is developed, which could limit the dropout noise with an appropriate amplification mechanism for transmitted gradients. Theoretical analysis and experiment results show that the proposed AQG leads to 18% to 50% of additional transmission reduction as compared with existing popular methods, including Quantized Gradient Descent (QGD) and Lazily Aggregated Quantized (LAQ) gradient-based methods without deteriorating convergence properties. Experiments with heterogenous data distributions corroborate a more significant transmission reduction compared with independent identical data distributions. The proposed AQG is robust to a client dropping rate up to 90% empirically, and the Augmented AQG manages to further improve the FL system’s communication efficiency with the presence of moderate-scale client dropouts commonly seen in practical FL scenarios.