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Adversarial training (AT) can help improve the robustness of Vision Transformers (ViT) against adversarial attacks by intentionally injecting adversarial examples into the training data. However, this way of adversarial injection inevitably incurs standard accuracy degradation to some extent, thereby calling for a trade-off between standard accuracy and robustness. Besides, the prominent AT solutions are still vulnerable to adaptive attacks. To tackle such shortcomings, this paper proposes a novel ViT architecture, including a detector and a classifier bridged by our newly developed adaptive ensemble. Specifically, we empirically discover that detecting adversarial examples can benefit from the Guided Backpropagation technique. Driven by this discovery, a novel Multi-head Self-Attention (MSA) mechanism is introduced to enhance our detector to sniff adversarial examples. Then, a classifier with two encoders is employed for extracting visual representations respectively from clean images and adversarial examples, with our adaptive ensemble to adaptively adjust the proportion of visual representations from the two encoders for accurate classification. This design enables our ViT architecture to achieve a better trade-off between standard accuracy and robustness. Besides, our adaptive ensemble technique allows us to mask off a random subset of image patches within input data, boosting our ViT's robustness against adaptive attacks, while maintaining high standard accuracy. Experimental results exhibit that our ViT architecture, on CIFAR-10, achieves the best standard accuracy and adversarial robustness of 90.3% and 49.8%, respectively., Comment: 9 pages

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm that enables collaborative training of machine learning models over decentralized devices without exposing their local data. One of the major challenges in FL is the presence of uneven data distributions across client devices, violating the well-known assumption of independent-and-identically-distributed (IID) training samples in conventional machine learning. To address the performance degradation issue incurred by such data heterogeneity, clustered federated learning (CFL) shows its promise by grouping clients into separate learning clusters based on the similarity of their local data distributions. However, state-of-the-art CFL approaches require a large number of communication rounds to learn the distribution similarities during training until the formation of clusters is stabilized. Moreover, some of these algorithms heavily rely on a predefined number of clusters, thus limiting their flexibility and adaptability. In this paper, we propose {\em FedClust}, a novel approach for CFL that leverages the correlation between local model weights and the data distribution of clients. {\em FedClust} groups clients into clusters in a one-shot manner by measuring the similarity degrees among clients based on the strategically selected partial weights of locally trained models. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets with different non-IID data settings. Experimental results demonstrate that {\em FedClust} achieves higher model accuracy up to $\sim$45\% as well as faster convergence with a significantly reduced communication cost up to 2.7$\times$ compared to its state-of-the-art counterparts.

Precise crop yield predictions are of national importance for ensuring food security and sustainable agricultural practices. While AI-for-science approaches have exhibited promising achievements in solving many scientific problems such as drug discovery, precipitation nowcasting, etc., the development of deep learning models for predicting crop yields is constantly hindered by the lack of an open and large-scale deep learning-ready dataset with multiple modalities to accommodate sufficient information. To remedy this, we introduce the CropNet dataset, the first terabyte-sized, publicly available, and multi-modal dataset specifically targeting climate change-aware crop yield predictions for the contiguous United States (U.S.) continent at the county level. Our CropNet dataset is composed of three modalities of data, i.e., Sentinel-2 Imagery, WRF-HRRR Computed Dataset, and USDA Crop Dataset, for over 2200 U.S. counties spanning 6 years (2017-2022), expected to facilitate researchers in developing versatile deep learning models for timely and precisely predicting crop yields at the county-level, by accounting for the effects of both short-term growing season weather variations and long-term climate change on crop yields. Besides, we develop the CropNet package, offering three types of APIs, for facilitating researchers in downloading the CropNet data on the fly over the time and region of interest, and flexibly building their deep learning models for accurate crop yield predictions. Extensive experiments have been conducted on our CropNet dataset via employing various types of deep learning solutions, with the results validating the general applicability and the efficacy of the CropNet dataset in climate change-aware crop yield predictions., Comment: 13 pages

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm enabling collaborative model training on decentralized devices without exposing their local data. A key challenge in FL is the uneven data distribution across client devices, violating the well-known assumption of independent-and-identically-distributed (IID) training samples in conventional machine learning. Clustered federated learning (CFL) addresses this challenge by grouping clients based on the similarity of their data distributions. However, existing CFL approaches require a large number of communication rounds for stable cluster formation and rely on a predefined number of clusters, thus limiting their flexibility and adaptability. This paper proposes FedClust, a novel CFL approach leveraging correlations between local model weights and client data distributions. FedClust groups clients into clusters in a one-shot manner using strategically selected partial model weights and dynamically accommodates newcomers in real-time. Experimental results demonstrate FedClust outperforms baseline approaches in terms of accuracy and communication costs.

Precise crop yield prediction provides valuable information for agricultural planning and decision-making processes. However, timely predicting crop yields remains challenging as crop growth is sensitive to growing season weather variation and climate change. In this work, we develop a deep learning-based solution, namely Multi-Modal Spatial-Temporal Vision Transformer (MMST-ViT), for predicting crop yields at the county level across the United States, by considering the effects of short-term meteorological variations during the growing season and the long-term climate change on crops. Specifically, our MMST-ViT consists of a Multi-Modal Transformer, a Spatial Transformer, and a Temporal Transformer. The Multi-Modal Transformer leverages both visual remote sensing data and short-term meteorological data for modeling the effect of growing season weather variations on crop growth. The Spatial Transformer learns the high-resolution spatial dependency among counties for accurate agricultural tracking. The Temporal Transformer captures the long-range temporal dependency for learning the impact of long-term climate change on crops. Meanwhile, we also devise a novel multi-modal contrastive learning technique to pre-train our model without extensive human supervision. Hence, our MMST-ViT captures the impacts of both short-term weather variations and long-term climate change on crops by leveraging both satellite images and meteorological data. We have conducted extensive experiments on over 200 counties in the United States, with the experimental results exhibiting that our MMST-ViT outperforms its counterparts under three performance metrics of interest.

Video streams usually have to be transcoded to match the characteristics of viewers' devices. Streaming providers have to store numerous transcoded versions of a given video to serve various display devices. Given the fact that viewers' access pattern to video streams follows a long tail distribution, for the video streams with low access rate, we propose to transcode them in an on-demand manner using cloud computing services. The challenge in utilizing cloud services for on-demand video transcoding is to maintain a robust QoS for viewers and cost-efficiency for streaming service providers. To address this challenge, we present the Cloud-based Video Streaming Services (CVS2) architecture. It includes a QoS-aware scheduling that maps transcoding tasks to the VMs by considering the affinity of the transcoding tasks with the allocated heterogeneous VMs. To maintain robustness in the presence of varying streaming requests, the architecture includes a cost-efficient VM Provisioner. This component provides a self- configurable cluster of heterogeneous VMs. The cluster is reconfigured dynamically to maintain the maximum affinity with the arriving workload. Results obtained under diverse workload conditions demonstrate that CVS2 architecture can maintain a robust QoS for viewers while reducing the incurred cost of the streaming service provider up to 85%, Comment: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems