Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm within edge computing (EC) systems, enabling numerous edge devices to collaboratively train artificial intelligence (AI) models while maintaining data privacy. To overcome the communication bottlenecks associated with centralized parameter servers, decentralized federated learning (DFL), which leverages peer-to-peer (P2P) communication, has been extensively explored in the research community. Although researchers design a variety of DFL approach to ensure model convergence, its iterative learning process inevitably incurs considerable cost along with the growth of model complexity and the number of participants. These costs are largely influenced by the dynamic changes of topology in each training round, particularly its sparsity and connectivity conditions. Furthermore, the inherent resources heterogeneity in the edge environments affects energy efficiency of learning process, while data heterogeneity degrades model performance. These factors pose significant challenges to the design of an effective DFL framework for EC systems. To this end, we propose Hat-DFed, a heterogeneity-aware and coset-effective decentralized federated learning (DFL) framework. In Hat-DFed, the topology construction is formulated as a dual optimization problem, which is then proven to be NP-hard, with the goal of maximizing model performance while minimizing cumulative energy consumption in complex edge environments. To solve this problem, we design a two-phase algorithm that dynamically constructs optimal communication topologies while unbiasedly estimating their impact on both model performance and energy cost. Additionally, the algorithm incorporates an importance-aware model aggregation mechanism to mitigate performance degradation caused by data heterogeneity.

My Spotify playlists are undergoing a British invasion this week. Donald Trump announced this week that two US chipmakers would tithe 15% of their revenue from sales in China to the US government. Paying for the license to sell to Chinese customers represents an unprecedented deal. The chipmakers Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15% of their revenue from advanced chips sold to China in return for export licences to the key market. The arrangement will lead to Nvidia giving 15% of its revenue from Chinese sales of its H20 chips, and AMD giving 15% of revenue from Chinese sales of its MI308 chips, according to reports citing US officials.

Apple's AI Ambitions Leave Big Questions Over Its Climate Goals Halfway to its 2030 net-zero goal, Apple faces slow and hold-out suppliers, a tariffs scramble, and an AI race that could profoundly impact eco-friendly ambitions. Here's a simple question: Is the current top iPhone better for the environment than the top iPhone was five years ago? Let's take the iPhone Pro series. If we're looking at recycled and renewable materials, it's an easy yes. Compare the iPhone 11 Pro, released in September 2019, with the iPhone 16 Pro, released in September 2024, and there has been good progress--from a few smaller components and packaging to now at more than 25 percent of the whole phone.

Charges against an American influencer and teen pilot who has been stranded on a remote island in the Antarctic since June have been dropped. Ethan Guo, 19, is alleged to have illegally landed his plane in Chilean territory after embarking on a solo trip to all seven continents to raise money for cancer research, according to local authorities. They accused him of providing false flight plan information to officials who detained him and opened an investigation. A judge has ordered him to leave the area, pay a $30,000 (£22,332) donation to a children's cancer foundation and is banned from re-entering Chilean territory for three years. Mr Guo made headlines last year when he began an attempt to become the youngest person to fly solo to all seven continents and collect donations for research into childhood cancer.

Recent advances in learning rate (LR) scheduling have demonstrated the effectiveness of decay-free approaches that eliminate the traditional decay phase while maintaining competitive performance. Model merging techniques have emerged as particularly promising solutions in this domain. We present Warmup-Stable and Merge (WSM), a general framework that establishes a formal connection between learning rate decay and model merging. WSM provides a unified theoretical foundation for emulating various decay strategies-including cosine decay, linear decay and inverse square root decay-as principled model averaging schemes, while remaining fully compatible with diverse optimization methods. Through extensive experiments, we identify merge duration-the training window for checkpoint aggregation-as the most critical factor influencing model performance, surpassing the importance of both checkpoint interval and merge quantity. Our framework consistently outperforms the widely-adopted Warmup-Stable-Decay (WSD) approach across multiple benchmarks, achieving significant improvements of +3.5% on MATH, +2.9% on HumanEval, and +5.5% on MMLU-Pro. The performance advantages extend to supervised fine-tuning scenarios, highlighting WSM's potential for long-term model refinement.

Deep neural networks can memorize corrupted labels, making data quality critical for model performance, yet real-world datasets are frequently compromised by both label noise and input noise. This paper proposes a mutual information-based framework for data selection under hybrid noise scenarios that quantifies statistical dependencies between inputs and labels. We compute each sample's pointwise contribution to the overall mutual information and find that lower contributions indicate noisy or mislabeled instances. Empirical validation on MNIST with different synthetic noise settings demonstrates that the method effectively filters low-quality samples. Under label corruption, training on high-MI samples improves classification accuracy by up to 15\% compared to random sampling. Furthermore, the method exhibits robustness to benign input modifications, preserving semantically valid data while filtering truly corrupted samples.

As deep spatio-temporal neural networks are increasingly utilised in urban computing contexts, the deployment of such methods can have a direct impact on users of critical urban infrastructure, such as public transport, emergency services, and traffic management systems. While many spatio-temporal methods focus on improving accuracy, fairness has recently gained attention due to growing evidence that biased predictions in spatio-temporal applications can disproportionately disadvantage certain demographic or geographic groups, thereby reinforcing existing socioeconomic inequalities and undermining the ethical deployment of AI in public services. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, FairDRL-ST, based on disentangled representation learning, to address fairness concerns in spatio-temporal prediction, with a particular focus on mobility demand forecasting. By leveraging adversarial learning and disentangled representation learning, our framework learns to separate attributes that contain sensitive information. Unlike existing methods that enforce fairness through supervised learning, which may lead to overcompensation and degraded performance, our framework achieves fairness in an unsupervised manner with minimal performance loss. We apply our framework to real-world urban mobility datasets and demonstrate its ability to close fairness gaps while delivering competitive predictive performance compared to state-of-the-art fairness-aware methods.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are being utilized in various aspects of our daily lives, including high-stakes decision-making applications that impact individuals. However, these systems reflect and amplify bias from the data used during training and testing, potentially resulting in biased behavior and inaccurate decisions. For instance, having different misclassification rates between white and black sub-populations. However, effectively and efficiently identifying and correcting biased behavior in DNNs is a challenge. This paper introduces FairFLRep, an automated fairness-aware fault localization and repair technique that identifies and corrects potentially bias-inducing neurons in DNN classifiers. FairFLRep focuses on adjusting neuron weights associated with sensitive attributes, such as race or gender, that contribute to unfair decisions. By analyzing the input-output relationships within the network, FairFLRep corrects neurons responsible for disparities in predictive quality parity. We evaluate FairFLRep on four image classification datasets using two DNN classifiers, and four tabular datasets with a DNN model. The results show that FairFLRep consistently outperforms existing methods in improving fairness while preserving accuracy. An ablation study confirms the importance of considering fairness during both fault localization and repair stages. Our findings also show that FairFLRep is more efficient than the baseline approaches in repairing the network.

The security of LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) is critically threatened by propagation vulnerability, where malicious agents can distort collective decision-making through inter-agent message interactions. While existing supervised defense methods demonstrate promising performance, they may be impractical in real-world scenarios due to their heavy reliance on labeled malicious agents to train a supervised malicious detection model. To enable practical and generalizable MAS defenses, in this paper, we propose BlindGuard, an unsupervised defense method that learns without requiring any attack-specific labels or prior knowledge of malicious behaviors. To this end, we establish a hierarchical agent encoder to capture individual, neighborhood, and global interaction patterns of each agent, providing a comprehensive understanding for malicious agent detection. Meanwhile, we design a corruption-guided detector that consists of directional noise injection and contrastive learning, allowing effective detection model training solely on normal agent behaviors. Extensive experiments show that BlindGuard effectively detects diverse attack types (i.e., prompt injection, memory poisoning, and tool attack) across MAS with various communication patterns while maintaining superior generalizability compared to supervised baselines. The code is available at: https://github.com/MR9812/BlindGuard.

The introduction of 5G and the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architecture has enabled more flexible and intelligent network deployments. However, the increased complexity and openness of these architectures also introduce novel security challenges, such as data manipulation attacks on the semi-standardised Shared Data Layer (SDL) within the O-RAN platform through malicious xApps. In particular, malicious xApps can exploit this vulnerability by introducing subtle Unicode-wise alterations (hypoglyphs) into the data that are being used by traditional machine learning (ML)-based anomaly detection methods. These Unicode-wise manipulations can potentially bypass detection and cause failures in anomaly detection systems based on traditional ML, such as AutoEncoders, which are unable to process hypoglyphed data without crashing. We investigate the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for anomaly detection within the O-RAN architecture to address this challenge. We demonstrate that LLM-based xApps maintain robust operational performance and are capable of processing manipulated messages without crashing. While initial detection accuracy requires further improvements, our results highlight the robustness of LLMs to adversarial attacks such as hypoglyphs in input data. There is potential to use their adaptability through prompt engineering to further improve the accuracy, although this requires further research. Additionally, we show that LLMs achieve low detection latency (under 0.07 seconds), making them suitable for Near-Real-Time (Near-RT) RIC deployments.