Cross-Domain Decentralized Graph Learning (CD-DGL) is a promising paradigm that enables efficient, privacy-preserving collaboration among multiple parties to unlock the value of cross-domain graph data. However, it faces two fundamental challenges. First, inconsistent label spaces across domains drive local models to learn domain-specific biases, which means domain-invariant topological knowledge extraction beyond label constraints is difficult. Second, existing domain topology shift and heterogeneous model architectures make direct model aggregation infeasible. To address these issues, we first use Extended Persistent Homology (EPH) to reveal and quantify the problem of domain topology shift induced by the cross-domain setting. Building on this insight, we present Decentralized Graph Learning with Topology-Aware Knowledge Fusion (DGTF), a novel framework designed to facilitate positive topological knowledge transfer in CD-DGL. Our framework achieves this by integrating two core strategies: first, a contrastive learning-based approach to extract task-agnostic topological knowledge, and second, a topology-aware, model-independent knowledge fusion method to effectively integrate this topological information. Extensive experiments conducted under various cross-domain and model-heterogeneous settings validate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Federated recommendation systems (FRSs) have recently gained widespread attention due to their ability to train collaborative recommendation models without exchanging raw user data. However, existing FRSs face a severe challenge of data sparsity, which manifests at both the user and item levels. First, user data sparsity: some users may only have a small number of interactions with items, struggling to adequately train the personalized user embedding locally. Second, item data sparsity: some items may only receive a small number of user ratings, causing the global model to lack knowledge about them. Considering these, we propose the Knowledge Enhanced Federated Recommendation System named as KE-FedRS, of which the core idea is to enhance the knowledge of users with few interactions and items with few ratings at both the local and global levels. Specifically, at the local level, we introduce an auxiliary user embedding and average and aggregate this auxiliary embedding across similar users, thereby enriching the knowledge of the local user embedding. At the global level, we propose a hybrid client selection strategy based on item embedding discrepancies, prioritizing clients that exhibit greater divergence in item embeddings from others, thus enhancing the knowledge of items with fewer interactions in the global model. We conduct comprehensive experiments on four real-world datasets, and the results show that the proposed method consistently outperforms baseline approaches in terms of HR@10 and NDCG@10.

With the global aging population on the rise, the amount of disease data related to the elderly is also increasing. Effectively protecting personal data when analyzing and processing disease data has become crucial. Federated learning (FL), as a proven method, is widely used. In the multimodal FL for disease diagnosis, the intricate challenge of modality missing and heterogeneous data distribution across healthcare clients severely degrades model performance and generalization. Existing frameworks struggle to address these issues in scenarios with complex modality missing and data heterogeneity, particularly in privacy-sensitive medical applications. In this article, we introduce a novel framework,modal prototype and contrast for personalized federated learning, which enhances prototype-based multimodal federated learning with personalized local aggregation and enables the adaptive fusion of global prototypes and local client models during training. By leveraging the modal prototype to compensate for missing modalities and modal contrastive training to align client representations with shared prototypes, the framework mitigates global model degradation caused by modality absence. In addition, we adapt the SLAKE medical multimodal dataset into a VQAv2-style classification task, simulating realistic disease diagnosis scenarios with varying modality missing rates (10$\sim$90%). Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. Compared to the baselines, our method improved inference accuracy by up to 13.7% when 90% of the modality was missing during training.

The field of recommender systems aims to predict users’ latent interests by analyzing their preferences and behaviors. However, privacy concerns about user data collection lead to challenges such as incomplete initial information and data sparsity. Federated learning has emerged to address these privacy issues in recommender systems. However, federated recommender systems face heterogeneity among edge devices regarding data features and sample sizes. Moreover, differences in computational and storage capabilities introduce communication overhead and processing delays during parameter aggregation at the third-party server. This article introduces a framework named FedRL , a reinforcement learning federated recommender system for efficient communication using Reinforcement Selector and Hypernet Generator, to address the proposed issues. The Reinforcement Selector dynamically selects participating edge devices and helps to maximize their use of local data resources. Meanwhile, Hypernet Generator optimizes communication bandwidth consumption during the federated learning parameter transmission, enabling rapid deployment and updates of new model architectures or hyperparameters. Furthermore, the framework incorporates item attributes as content embeddings in edge devices’ recommender models, enriching them with global information. Real-world dataset experiments demonstrate that the proposed solution balances recommender quality and communication efficiency. The code for this work is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/diyicheng/FedRL .

Personalized sequential recommender has become a key task in the consumer electronics domain. Existing methods for personalized sequential recommenders primarily focus on modeling user behavior and have achieved satisfactory recommender results. However, the inherent quadratic computational complexity in most existing methods often causes typically results in inefficiencies, impeding real-time suggestions. Additionally, these methods cannot be fine-tuned to the personalized needs of users across different scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose the Fine-Grained Global Modeling Learning for Personalized Federated Sequential Recommender (FedSR). Specifically, we design the Associative Mamba Block to model user profiles from a global perspective and enhance prediction efficiency. Furthermore, we introduce the Variable Response Mechanism to fine-tune parameters according to the personalized needs of users. Additionally, we design the Dynamic Magnitude Loss to retain more local personalized information during training. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets confirms that the proposed FedSR surpasses current approaches in terms of both performance and efficiency, up to 9.48% improvement.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is revolutionizing industries through device interconnectivity, enabling real-time data collection and transmission for enhanced monitoring, control, and automation. This has led to improvements in predictive maintenance, production optimization, and supply chain management. The integration of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) within IIoT has been accelerated by increased data availability, computational advancements, and algorithmic innovations, with applications ranging from image processing to autonomous vehicles. Foundation models, such as ChatGPT, are becoming prevalent in IIoT for their capabilities in natural language processing and computer vision. However, the growth of IIoT and foundation models presents challenges, including data volume, real-time processing requirements, computational costs, and security vulnerabilities. Federated learning (FL) addresses these issues by allowing distributed model training without raw data transfer, enhancing privacy and security. FL is particularly beneficial for IIoT’s decentralized architecture and real-time decision-making needs. Despite the advantages, FL faces challenges such as data heterogeneity and communication overhead. To overcome these, we propose a federated learning framework, Fed-CCSQMA, which includes client selection and model aggregation modules to mitigate data heterogeneity’s impact. The client selection module uses Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and clustering to select clients with diverse yet representative data, while the model aggregation module assigns weights based on model accuracy to ensure faster global model convergence. We test our proposed framework on FMNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, with accuracy surpassing baseline methods and faster convergence, demonstrating an improvement in overall generalizability and learning efficiency.

Sequential recommender systems often struggle with accurate personalized recommendations due to data sparsity issues. Existing works use variational autoencoders and generative adversarial network methods to enrich sparse data. However, they often overlook diversity in the latent data distribution, hindering the model’s generative capacity. This characteristic of generative methods can introduce additional noise in many cases. Moreover, retaining personalized user preferences through the generation process remains a challenge. This work introduces DGFedRS, a Federated Recommender System Based on Diffusion Augmentation and Guided Denoising, designed to capture the diversity in the latent data distribution while preserving user-specific information and suppressing noise. In particular, we pre-train the diffusion model using the recommender dataset and use a diffusion augmentation strategy to generate interaction sequences, expanding the sparse user-item interactions in the discrete space. To preserve user-specific preferences in the generated interactions, we employ a guided denoising strategy to guide the generation process during reverse diffusion. Subsequently, we design a noise control strategy to reduce the damage to personalized information during the diffusion process. Additionally, a stepwise scheduling strategy is devised to input generated data into the sequential recommender model based on their challenge levels. The success of the DGFedRS approach is demonstrated by thorough experiments conduct on three real-world datasets.

With the development of 5G communication and smart devices, the prosperity of online content has boosted Recommender System (RS) research. Due to the data scarcity problem, researchers employ knowledge transfer techniques to improve the accuracy of RS. Data sharing or data augmentation are promising methods for such a problem, but the data suffers from privacy leakage during sharing. Thus, federated learning has been adopted to collaboratively train recommender models while preserving data privacy. Federated Recommender System (FRS) combines federated learning and RS to provide distributed recommendation services to the users. However, the existing FRS suffers from massive communication and system heterogeneity, where the necessity of model transmission and the diversity of the clients bring significant communication overhead to the system. In this article, we propose Efficient Federated Recommender System with Adaptive Model Pruning and Momentum-based Batch Adjustment ( \(eFRSA^{2}\) ) to reduce the communication overhead of FRS. \(eFRSA^{2}\) contains two modules. Adaptive Model Pruning utilizes magnitude pruning to reduce the communication volume and adaptively modifies the compression ratios of different clients to maintain the model accuracy. Momentum-based Batch Adjustment adjusts the local training batch number by a similar method of gradient descent with momentum to align the local computation time of the clients and reduce the communication overhead. The experimental results demonstrate that \(eFRSA^{2}\) can reduce up to 90% communication volume and mitigate the system heterogeneity by over 75%, demonstrating the priority of \(eFRSA^{2}\) in training efficiency. Source code can be found at https://github.com/shhjwu5/eFRSA2 .

Distributed intelligence enables the widespread deployment of AI technology, greatly promoting the development of AI. Federated learning is a widely used distributed intelligence technology that allows iterative optimization of global model while protecting user data privacy. Currently, federated learning faces some security threats, as its open architecture provides attackers with opportunities to disrupt the learning process by submitting malicious updates or inserting backdoors. In this article, we propose a robust federated learning method to defend against potential malicious attacks. Specifically, we enhance the algorithm’s performance and stability by implementing localized stepwise updates on the client side and element-wise anomaly detection on the server side. We conducted experiments in a more realistic non-i.i.d. scenario and compared the results with other typical federated learning methods. Our results demonstrate that our approach exhibits strong robustness under non-i.i.d. data distributions, outperforming other methods in terms of test accuracy and resilience to attacks.

With the rapid development of big data and the Internet of Things (IoT), traffic data from an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is becoming more and more accessible. To understand and simulate the traffic patterns from the traffic data, Multimedia Cognitive Computing (MCC) is an efficient and practical approach. Distributed Machine Learning (DML) has been the trend to provide sufficient computing resources and efficiency for MCC tasks to handle massive data and complex models. DML can speed up computation with those computing resources but introduces communication overhead. Gradient collaborative management or gradient aggregation in DML for MCC tasks is a critical task. An efficient managing algorithm of the communication schedules for gradient aggregation in ITS can improve the performance of MCC tasks. However, existing communication schedules typically rely on specific physical connection matrices, which have low robustness when a malfunction occurs. In this article, we propose Robust Searching-based Gradient Collaborative Management (RSGCM) in Intelligent Transportation System, a practical ring-based gradient managing algorithm for communication schedules across devices to deal with ITS malfunction. RSGCM provides solutions of communication schedules to various kinds of connection matrices with an acceptable amount of training time. Our experimental results have shown that RSGCM can deal with more varieties of connection matrices than existing state-of-the-art communication schedules. RSGCM also increases the robustness of ITS since it can restore the system’s functionality in an acceptable time when device or connection breakdown happens.

In Internet applications, network conversation is the primary communication between the user and server. The server needs to efficiently and quickly return the corresponding service according to the conversation sent by the user to improve the users’ Quality of Service. Thus, Conversation Information Seeking (CIS) research has become a hot topic today. In Cloud Computing (CC), a central service mode, the conversation is transmitted between the user and the remote cloud over a long distance. With the explosive growth of Internet applications, network congestion, long-distance communication, and single point of failure have brought new challenges to the centralized service mode. People put forward Edge Cloud Computing (ECC) to meet the new challenges of the centralized service mode of CC. As a distributed service mode, ECC is an extension of CC. By migrating services from the remote cloud to the network edge closer to users, ECC can solve the above challenges in CC well. In ECC, people solve the problem of CIS through edge caching. The current research focuses on designing the edge cache strategy to achieve more predictable caching. In this article, we propose an edge cache placement method Evolutionary Game based Caching Placement Strategy (EG-CPS). This method consists of three modules: the user preference prediction module, the content popularity calculation module, and the cache placement decision module. To maximize the predictability of the cache strategy, we are committed to optimizing the cache hit rate and service latency. The simulation experiment compares the proposed strategy with several other cache strategies. The experimental results illustrate that EG-CPS can reduce up to 2.4% of the original average content request latency, increase the average direct cache hit rate by 1.7%, and increase the average edge cache hit rate by 3.3%.

With the rapid development of wireless communication, achieving the neXt generation Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications (xURLLC) in 6G mobile communication systems has become a critical problem. Among many applications in xURLLC, deep learning model inference requires improvement over its efficiency. Due to the heterogeneous hardware environment in 6G, parallel schedules from distributed machine learning and edge computing has been borrowed to tackle the efficiency problem. However, traditional parallel schedules suffer from high latency, low throughput, and low device utility. In this paper, we propose Automatic Pipeline Parallelism ($AP^{2}$), a parallel inference framework for deep learning applications in 6G mobile communication systems, to improve the model inference efficiency while maintaining reliability.$AP^{2}$contains three sub-modules. A task-device affinity predictor predicts a task’s expected execution time on a given device. The parallel inference arrangement optimizer finds the most suitable device for each task. The parallel inference scheduler converts the arrangement to a schedule that can be directly executed in the system. The experimental results show that$AP^{2}$can achieve better latency, throughput, reliability, and device utility than other parallel schedules. Also, the priority of the sub-module designs has been approved through the experiments.

In multi-objective bilevel optimisation problems, the upper-level performance of different lower-level optimal solutions may be very different, even though they belong to the same lower-level problem. It may lead to poor optimisation results. Therefore, the lower-level search should search lower-level non-dominated solutions that are also non-dominated in the upper-level objective space. In this paper, we use two populations in the lower-level search. The first population maintains non-dominance and diversity in the lower-level objective space and provides the second population with convergence pressure from the lower level. The second population selects the upper-level non-dominated solutions that are not dominated by the first population in the lower-level objective space, which make the second population maintain the non-dominance at both upper and lower levels. Besides, to improve the search efficiency, we set up the upper-level mating pool to generate the upper-level vectors of offsprings near the upper-level vectors of the better individuals in the current population. To balance convergence and diversity, the selection operator of a decomposition based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is adopted. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a set of benchmark problems and a real-world optimisation problem. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is efficient and effective.

In this paper, we focus on three problems in deep learning based medical image segmentation. Firstly, U-net, as a popular model for medical image segmentation, is difficult to train when convolutional layers increase even though a deeper network usually has a better generalization ability because of more learnable parameters. Secondly, the exponential ReLU (ELU), as an alternative of ReLU, is not much different from ReLU when the network of interest gets deep. Thirdly, the Dice loss, as one of the pervasive loss functions for medical image segmentation, is not effective when the prediction is close to ground truth and will cause oscillation during training. To address the aforementioned three problems, we propose and validate a deeper network that can fit medical image datasets that are usually small in the sample size. Meanwhile, we propose a new loss function to accelerate the learning process and a combination of different activation functions to improve the network performance. Our experimental results suggest that our network is comparable or superior to state-of-the-art methods.

We apply the cubic-spline interpolation to estimate isophotes from sparsely sampled digital images. For any non-pixel, we interpolate it by cubic spline, and by solving the yielding cubic function analytically, we find positions of pixels with the same intensity value. Experiment results are given and discussed. This spreads some important light on the nature of interpolation in images and why the well-known zigzag effects are obtained when images are interpolated.