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We present an advanced approach to medical question-answering (QA) services, using fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve the accuracy and reliability of healthcare information. Our study focuses on optimizing models like LLaMA-2 and Mistral, which have shown great promise in delivering precise, reliable medical answers. By leveraging comprehensive datasets, we applied fine-tuning techniques such as rsDoRA+ and ReRAG. rsDoRA+ enhances model performance through a combination of decomposed model weights, varied learning rates for low-rank matrices, and rank stabilization, leading to improved efficiency. ReRAG, which integrates retrieval on demand and question rewriting, further refines the accuracy of the responses. This approach enables healthcare providers to access fast, dependable information, aiding in more efficient decision-making and fostering greater patient trust. Our work highlights the potential of fine-tuned LLMs to significantly improve the quality and accessibility of medical information services, ultimately contributing to better healthcare outcomes for all., Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, accepted and to be published in the proceedings of 2024 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW)

We present a refined approach to biomedical question-answering (QA) services by integrating large language models (LLMs) with Multi-BERT configurations. By enhancing the ability to process and prioritize vast amounts of complex biomedical data, this system aims to support healthcare professionals in delivering better patient outcomes and informed decision-making. Through innovative use of BERT and BioBERT models, combined with a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) layer, we enable more specialized and efficient responses to the growing demands of the healthcare sector. Our approach not only addresses the challenge of overfitting by freezing one BERT model while training another but also improves the overall adaptability of QA services. The use of extensive datasets, such as BioASQ and BioMRC, demonstrates the system's ability to synthesize critical information. This work highlights how advanced language models can make a tangible difference in healthcare, providing reliable and responsive tools for professionals to manage complex information, ultimately serving the broader goal of improved care and data-driven insights., Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, accepted and to be published in the proceedings of 2024 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW)

We present an innovative framework that integrates consumer-grade drones into bushfire management, addressing both service improvement and data privacy concerns under Australia's Privacy Act 1988. This system establishes a marketplace where bushfire management authorities, as data consumers, access critical information from drone operators, who serve as data providers. The framework employs local differential privacy to safeguard the privacy of data providers from all system entities, ensuring compliance with privacy standards. Additionally, a blockchain-based solution facilitates fair data and fee exchanges while maintaining immutable records for enhanced accountability. Validated through a proof-of-concept implementation, the framework's scalability and adaptability make it well-suited for large-scale, real-world applications in bushfire management., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted and to be published in the proceedings of 22nd International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2024)

In the domain of spatial crowdsourcing drone services, which includes tasks like delivery, surveillance, and data collection, secure communication is paramount. The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) ensures this by providing a system for digital certificates that authenticate the identities of entities involved, securing data and command transmissions between drones and their operators. However, the centralized trust model of traditional PKI, dependent on Certificate Authorities (CAs), presents a vulnerability due to its single point of failure, risking security breaches. To counteract this, the paper presents D2XChain, a blockchain-based PKI framework designed for the Internet of Drone Things (IoDT). By decentralizing the CA infrastructure, D2XChain eliminates this single point of failure, thereby enhancing the security and reliability of drone communications. Fully compatible with the X.509 standard, it integrates seamlessly with existing PKI systems, supporting all key operations such as certificate registration, validation, verification, and revocation in a distributed manner. This innovative approach not only strengthens the defense of drone services against various security threats but also showcases its practical application through deployment on a private Ethereum testbed, representing a significant advancement in addressing the unique security challenges of drone-based services and ensuring their trustworthy operation in critical tasks., Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, accepted and to be published in the proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2024)

We introduce a privacy-preserving framework for integrating consumer-grade drones into bushfire management. This system creates a marketplace where bushfire management authorities obtain essential data from drone operators. Key features include local differential privacy to protect data providers and a blockchain-based solution ensuring fair data exchanges and accountability. The framework is validated through a proof-of-concept implementation, demonstrating its scalability and potential for various large-scale data collection scenarios. This approach addresses privacy concerns and compliance with regulations like Australia's Privacy Act 1988, offering a practical solution for enhancing bushfire detection and management through crowdsourced drone services., Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, accepted and to be published in the proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2024)

This study introduces the Distributed Drone Reputation Management (DDRM) framework, designed to fortify trust and authenticity within the Internet of Drone Things (IoDT) ecosystem. As drones increasingly play a pivotal role across diverse sectors, integrating crowdsourced drone services within the IoDT has emerged as a vital avenue for democratizing access to these services. A critical challenge, however, lies in ensuring the authenticity and reliability of drone service reviews. Leveraging the Ethereum blockchain, DDRM addresses this challenge by instituting a verifiable and transparent review mechanism. The framework innovates with a dual-token system, comprising the Service Review Authorization Token (SRAT) for facilitating review authorization and the Drone Reputation Enhancement Token (DRET) for rewarding and recognizing drones demonstrating consistent reliability. Comprehensive analysis within this paper showcases DDRM's resilience against various reputation frauds and underscores its operational effectiveness, particularly in enhancing the efficiency and reliability of drone services., Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, accepted and to be published in the proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2024)

Federated Learning (FL) enables local devices to collaboratively learn a shared predictive model by only periodically sharing model parameters with a central aggregator. However, FL can be disadvantaged by statistical heterogeneity produced by the diversity in each local devices data distribution, which creates different levels of Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) data. Furthermore, this can be more complex when optimising different combinations of FL parameters and choosing optimal aggregation. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of different FL training parameters and aggregators over various levels of statistical heterogeneity on three datasets. We propose a systematic data partition strategy to simulate different levels of statistical heterogeneity and a metric to measure the level of IID. Additionally, we empirically identify the best FL model and key parameters for datasets of different characteristics. On the basis of these, we present recommended guidelines for FL parameters and aggregators to optimise model performance under different levels of IID and with different datasets, Comment: 27 pages, 17 figures

Image recognition techniques heavily rely on abundant labeled data, particularly in medical contexts. Addressing the challenges associated with obtaining labeled data has led to the prominence of self-supervised learning and semi-supervised learning, especially in scenarios with limited annotated data. In this paper, we proposed an innovative approach by integrating self-supervised learning into semi-supervised models to enhance medical image recognition. Our methodology commences with pre-training on unlabeled data utilizing the BYOL method. Subsequently, we merge pseudo-labeled and labeled datasets to construct a neural network classifier, refining it through iterative fine-tuning. Experimental results on three different datasets demonstrate that our approach optimally leverages unlabeled data, outperforming existing methods in terms of accuracy for medical image recognition., Comment: Accepted by ICCS 2024

This study delves into the application of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) within the context of imbalanced datasets. Our primary aim is to enhance the performance and stability of GANs in such datasets. In pursuit of this objective, we introduce a novel network architecture known as Damage GAN, building upon the ContraD GAN framework which seamlessly integrates GANs and contrastive learning. Through the utilization of contrastive learning, the discriminator is trained to develop an unsupervised representation capable of distinguishing all provided samples. Our approach draws inspiration from the straightforward framework for contrastive learning of visual representations (SimCLR), leading to the formulation of a distinctive loss function. We also explore the implementation of self-damaging contrastive learning (SDCLR) to further enhance the optimization of the ContraD GAN model. Comparative evaluations against baseline models including the deep convolutional GAN (DCGAN) and ContraD GAN demonstrate the evident superiority of our proposed model, Damage GAN, in terms of generated image distribution, model stability, and image quality when applied to imbalanced datasets., Comment: Accepted by AusDM 2023

Stock prices forecasting has always been a challenging task. Although many research projects adopt machine learning and deep learning algorithms to address the problem, few of them pay attention to the varying degrees of dependencies between stock prices. In this paper we introduce a hybrid model that improves stock price prediction by emphasizing the dependencies between adjacent stock prices. The proposed model, ResNLS, is mainly composed of two neural architectures, ResNet and LSTM. ResNet serves as a feature extractor to identify dependencies between stock prices across time windows, while LSTM analyses the initial time-series data with the combination of dependencies which considered as residuals. In predicting the SSE Composite Index, our experiment reveals that when the closing price data for the previous 5 consecutive trading days is used as the input, the performance of the model (ResNLS-5) is optimal compared to those with other inputs. Furthermore, ResNLS-5 outperforms vanilla CNN, RNN, LSTM, and BiLSTM models in terms of prediction accuracy. It also demonstrates at least a 20% improvement over the current state-of-the-art baselines. To verify whether ResNLS-5 can help clients effectively avoid risks and earn profits in the stock market, we construct a quantitative trading framework for back testing. The experimental results show that the trading strategy based on predictions from ResNLS-5 can successfully mitigate losses during declining stock prices and generate profits in the periods of rising stock prices., Comment: Published to Computational Intelligence

Recommender systems have been successfully used in many domains with the help of machine learning algorithms. However, such applications tend to use multi-dimensional user data, which has raised widespread concerns about the breach of users privacy. Meanwhile, wearable technologies have enabled users to collect fitness-related data through embedded sensors to monitor their conditions or achieve personalized fitness goals. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-aware personalized fitness recommender system. We introduce a multi-level deep learning framework that learns important features from a large-scale real fitness dataset that is collected from wearable IoT devices to derive intelligent fitness recommendations. Unlike most existing approaches, our approach achieves personalization by inferring the fitness characteristics of users from sensory data and thus minimizing the need for explicitly collecting user identity or biometric information, such as name, age, height, weight. In particular, our proposed models and algorithms predict (a) personalized exercise distance recommendations to help users to achieve target calories, (b) personalized speed sequence recommendations to adjust exercise speed given the nature of the exercise and the chosen route, and (c) personalized heart rate sequence to guide the user of the potential health status for future exercises. Our experimental evaluation on a real-world Fitbit dataset demonstrated high accuracy in predicting exercise distance, speed sequence, and heart rate sequence compared to similar studies. Furthermore, our approach is novel compared to existing studies as it does not require collecting and using users sensitive information, and thus it preserves the users privacy., Comment: 30 pages, 16 figures, 36 references

Class imbalance occurs in many real-world applications, including image classification, where the number of images in each class differs significantly. With imbalanced data, the generative adversarial networks (GANs) leans to majority class samples. The two recent methods, Balancing GAN (BAGAN) and improved BAGAN (BAGAN-GP), are proposed as an augmentation tool to handle this problem and restore the balance to the data. The former pre-trains the autoencoder weights in an unsupervised manner. However, it is unstable when the images from different categories have similar features. The latter is improved based on BAGAN by facilitating supervised autoencoder training, but the pre-training is biased towards the majority classes. In this work, we propose a novel Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Balanced Pre-training for Generative Adversarial Networks (CAPGAN) as an augmentation tool to generate realistic synthetic images. In particular, we utilize a conditional convolutional variational autoencoder with supervised and balanced pre-training for the GAN initialization and training with gradient penalty. Our proposed method presents a superior performance of other state-of-the-art methods on the highly imbalanced version of MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and two medical imaging datasets. Our method can synthesize high-quality minority samples in terms of Fr\'echet inception distance, structural similarity index measure and perceptual quality.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) provides an economic approach which aims to enhance understanding the behavior of structures by continuously collects data through multiple networked sensors attached to the structure. This data is then utilized to gain insight into the health of a structure and make timely and economic decisions about its maintenance. The generated SHM sensing data is non-stationary and exists in a correlated multi-way form which makes the batch/off-line learning and standard two-way matrix analysis unable to capture all of these correlations and relationships. In this sense, the online tensor data analysis has become an essential tool for capturing underlying structures in higher-order datasets stored in a tensor $\mathcal{X} \in \mathbb{R} ^{I_1 \times \dots \times I_N} $. The CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition has been extensively studied and applied to approximate X by N loading matrices A(1), . . . ,A(N) where N represents the order of the tensor. We propose a novel algorithm, FP-CPD, to parallelize the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition of a tensor $\mathcal{X} \in \mathbb{R} ^{I_1 \times \dots \times I_N} $. Our approach is based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm which allows us to parallelize the learning process and it is very useful in online setting since it updates $\mathcal{X}^{t+1}$ in one single step. Our SGD algorithm is augmented with Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient (NAG) and perturbation methods to accelerate and guarantee convergence. The experimental results using laboratory-based and real-life structural datasets indicate fast convergence and good scalability.

Federated Learning (FL) has recently emerged as a promising method that employs a distributed learning model structure to overcome data privacy and transmission issues paused by central machine learning models. In FL, datasets collected from different devices or sensors are used to train local models (clients) each of which shares its learning with a centralized model (server). However, this distributed learning approach presents unique learning challenges as the data used at local clients can be non-IID (Independent and Identically Distributed) and statistically diverse which decrease learning accuracy in the central model. In this paper, we overcome this problem by proposing a novel Personalized Conditional FedAvg (PC-FedAvg) which aims to control weights communication and aggregation augmented with a tailored learning algorithm to personalize the resulting models at each client. Our experimental validation on two datasets showed that our PC-FedAvg precisely constructed generalized clients' models and thus achieved higher accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

This paper presents a new Proportional-Integral-Derivative-Accelerated (PIDA) control with a derivative filter to improve quadcopter flight stability in a noisy environment. The mathematical model is derived from having an accurate model with a high level of fidelity by addressing the problems of non-linearity, uncertainties, and coupling. These uncertainties and measurement noises cause instability in flight and automatic hovering. The proposed controller associated with a heuristic Genetic Filter (GF) addresses these challenges. The tuning of the proposed PIDA controller associated with the objective of controlling is performed by Stochastic Dual Simplex Algorithm (SDSA). GF is applied to the PIDA control to estimate the observed states and parameters of quadcopters in both attitude and altitude. The simulation results show that the proposed control associated with GF has a strong ability to track the desired point in the presence of disturbances., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2004.12886

This paper presents a new framework to use images as the inputs for the controller to have autonomous flight, considering the noisy indoor environment and uncertainties. A new Proportional-Integral-Derivative-Accelerated (PIDA) control with a derivative filter is proposed to improves drone/quadcopter flight stability within a noisy environment and enables autonomous flight using object and depth detection techniques. The mathematical model is derived from an accurate model with a high level of fidelity by addressing the problems of non-linearity, uncertainties, and coupling. The proposed PIDA controller is tuned by Stochastic Dual Simplex Algorithm (SDSA) to support autonomous flight. The simulation results show that adapting the deep learning-based image understanding techniques (RetinaNet ant colony detection and PSMNet) to the proposed controller can enable the generation and tracking of the desired point in the presence of environmental disturbances.

The scheduling of multi-user remote laboratories is modeled as a multimodal function for the proposed optimization algorithm. The hybrid optimization algorithm, hybridization of the Nelder-Mead Simplex algorithm and Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA), is proposed to optimize the timetable problem for the remote laboratories to coordinate shared access. The proposed algorithm utilizes the Simplex algorithm in terms of exploration, and NSGA for sorting local optimum points with consideration of potential areas. The proposed algorithm is applied to difficult nonlinear continuous multimodal functions, and its performance is compared with hybrid Simplex Particle Swarm Optimization, Simplex Genetic Algorithm, and other heuristic algorithms.

Multi-way data analysis has become an essential tool for capturing underlying structures in higher-order datasets stored in tensor $\mathcal{X} \in \mathbb{R} ^{I_1 \times \dots \times I_N} $. $CANDECOMP/PARAFAC$ (CP) decomposition has been extensively studied and applied to approximate $\mathcal{X}$ by $N$ loading matrices $A^{(1)}, \dots, A^{(N)}$ where $N$ represents the order of the tensor. We propose a new efficient CP decomposition solver named NeCPD for non-convex problem in multi-way online data based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. SGD is very useful in online setting since it allows us to update $\mathcal{X}^{(t+1)}$ in one single step. In terms of global convergence, it is well known that SGD stuck in many saddle points when it deals with non-convex problems. We study the Hessian matrix to identify theses saddle points, and then try to escape them using the perturbation approach which adds little noise to the gradient update step. We further apply Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient (NAG) method in SGD algorithm to optimally accelerate the convergence rate and compensate Hessian computational delay time per epoch. Experimental evaluation in the field of structural health monitoring using laboratory-based and real-life structural datasets show that our method provides more accurate results compared with existing online tensor analysis methods., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2003.04497

Multi-way data analysis has become an essential tool for capturing underlying structures in higher-order data sets where standard two-way analysis techniques often fail to discover the hidden correlations between variables in multi-way data. We propose a multi-objective variational autoencoder (MVA) method for smart infrastructure damage detection and diagnosis in multi-way sensing data based on the reconstruction probability of autoencoder deep neural network (ADNN). Our method fuses data from multiple sensors in one ADNN at which informative features are being extracted and utilized for damage identification. It generates probabilistic anomaly scores to detect damage, asses its severity and further localize it via a new localization layer introduced in the ADNN. We evaluated our method on multi-way datasets in the area of structural health monitoring for damage diagnosis purposes. The data was collected from our deployed data acquisition system on a cable-stayed bridge in Western Sydney and from a laboratory based building structure obtained from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately detect structural damage. It was also able to estimate the different levels of damage severity, and capture damage locations in an unsupervised aspect. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, our proposed method shows better performance in terms of damage detection and localization.

The online analysis of multi-way data stored in a tensor $\mathcal{X} \in \mathbb{R} ^{I_1 \times \dots \times I_N} $ has become an essential tool for capturing the underlying structures and extracting the sensitive features which can be used to learn a predictive model. However, data distributions often evolve with time and a current predictive model may not be sufficiently representative in the future. Therefore, incrementally updating the tensor-based features and model coefficients are required in such situations. A new efficient tensor-based feature extraction, named NeSGD, is proposed for online $CANDECOMP/PARAFAC$ (CP) decomposition. According to the new features obtained from the resultant matrices of NeSGD, a new criteria is triggered for the updated process of the online predictive model. Experimental evaluation in the field of structural health monitoring using laboratory-based and real-life structural datasets show that our methods provide more accurate results compared with existing online tensor analysis and model learning. The results showed that the proposed methods significantly improved the classification error rates, were able to assimilate the changes in the positive data distribution over time, and maintained a high predictive accuracy in all case studies.