Diffusion models (DMs) have emerged as a powerful class of generative AI models, showing remarkable potential in anomaly detection (AD) tasks across various domains, such as cybersecurity, fraud detection, healthcare, and manufacturing. The intersection of these two fields, termed diffusion models for anomaly detection (DMAD), offers promising solutions for identifying deviations in increasingly complex and high-dimensional data. In this survey, we review recent advances in DMAD research. We begin by presenting the fundamental concepts of AD and DMs, followed by a comprehensive analysis of classic DM architectures including DDPMs, DDIMs, and Score SDEs. We further categorize existing DMAD methods into reconstruction-based, density-based, and hybrid approaches, providing detailed examinations of their methodological innovations. We also explore the diverse tasks across different data modalities, encompassing image, time series, video, and multimodal data analysis. Furthermore, we discuss critical challenges and emerging research directions, including computational efficiency, model interpretability, robustness enhancement, edge-cloud collaboration, and integration with large language models. The collection of DMAD research papers and resources is available at https://github.com/fdjingliu/DMAD.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP). By fine-tuning LLMs with data from specific scenarios, these foundation models can better adapt to various downstream tasks. However, the fine-tuning process poses privacy leakage risks, particularly in centralized data processing scenarios. To address user privacy concerns, federated learning (FL) has been introduced to mitigate the risks associated with centralized data collection from multiple sources. Nevertheless, the privacy of LLMs themselves is equally critical, as potential malicious attacks challenge their security, an issue that has received limited attention in current research. Consequently, establishing a trusted multi-party model fine-tuning environment is essential. Additionally, the local deployment of large LLMs incurs significant storage costs and high computational demands. To address these challenges, we propose for the first time a federated discrete and transferable prompt tuning, namely FedDTPT, for black-box large language models. In the client optimization phase, we adopt a token-level discrete prompt optimization method that leverages a feedback loop based on prediction accuracy to drive gradient-free prompt optimization through the MLM API. For server optimization, we employ an attention mechanism based on semantic similarity to filter all local prompt tokens, along with an embedding distance elbow detection and DBSCAN clustering strategy to enhance the filtering process. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves higher accuracy, reduced communication overhead, and robustness to non-iid data in a black-box setting. Moreover, the optimized prompts are transferable.

Federated learning (FL) is a learning paradigm that enables collaborative training of models using decentralized data. Recently, the utilization of pre-trained weight initialization in FL has been demonstrated to effectively improve model performance. However, the evolving complexity of current pre-trained models, characterized by a substantial increase in parameters, markedly intensifies the challenges associated with communication rounds required for their adaptation to FL. To address these communication cost issues and increase the performance of pre-trained model adaptation in FL, we propose an innovative model interpolation-based local training technique called ``Local Superior Soups.'' Our method enhances local training across different clients, encouraging the exploration of a connected low-loss basin within a few communication rounds through regularized model interpolation. This approach acts as a catalyst for the seamless adaptation of pre-trained models in in FL. We demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency across diverse widely-used FL datasets. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/ubc-tea/Local-Superior-Soups}{https://github.com/ubc-tea/Local-Superior-Soups}.

As the volume of image data grows, data-oriented cloud computing in Internet of Video Things (IoVT) systems encounters latency issues. Task-oriented edge computing addresses this by shifting data analysis to the edge. However, limited computational power of edge devices poses challenges for executing visual tasks. Existing methods struggle to balance high model performance with low resource consumption; lightweight neural networks often underperform, while device-specific models designed by Neural Architecture Search (NAS) fail to adapt to heterogeneous devices. For these issues, we propose a novel co-design framework to optimize neural network architecture and deployment strategies during inference for high-throughput. Specifically, it implements a dynamic model structure based on re-parameterization, coupled with a Roofline-based model partitioning strategy to enhance the computational performance of edge devices. We also employ a multi-objective co-optimization approach to balance throughput and accuracy. Additionally, we derive mathematical consistency and convergence of partitioned models. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in throughput (12.05\% on MNIST, 18.83\% on ImageNet) and superior classification accuracy compared to baseline algorithms. Our method consistently achieves stable performance across different devices, underscoring its adaptability. Simulated experiments further confirm its efficacy in high-accuracy, real-time detection for small objects in IoVT systems.

Cross-silo federated learning (FL) enables the development of machine learning models on datasets distributed across data centers such as hospitals and clinical research laboratories. However, recent research has found that current FL algorithms face a trade-off between local and global performance when confronted with distribution shifts. Specifically, personalized FL methods have a tendency to overfit to local data, leading to a sharp valley in the local model and inhibiting its ability to generalize to out-of-distribution data. In this paper, we propose a novel federated model soup method (i.e., selective interpolation of model parameters) to optimize the trade-off between local and global performance. Specifically, during the federated training phase, each client maintains its own global model pool by monitoring the performance of the interpolated model between the local and global models. This allows us to alleviate overfitting and seek flat minima, which can significantly improve the model's generalization performance. We evaluate our method on retinal and pathological image classification tasks, and our proposed method achieves significant improvements for out-of-distribution generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/ubc-tea/FedSoup.

Effectively utilizing LLMs for complex tasks is challenging, often involving a time-consuming and uncontrollable prompt engineering process. This paper introduces a novel human-LLM interaction framework, Low-code LLM. It incorporates six types of simple low-code visual programming interactions, all supported by clicking, dragging, or text editing, to achieve more controllable and stable responses. Through visual interaction with a graphical user interface, users can incorporate their ideas into the workflow without writing trivial prompts. The proposed Low-code LLM framework consists of a Planning LLM that designs a structured planning workflow for complex tasks, which can be correspondingly edited and confirmed by users through low-code visual programming operations, and an Executing LLM that generates responses following the user-confirmed workflow. We highlight three advantages of the low-code LLM: controllable generation results, user-friendly human-LLM interaction, and broadly applicable scenarios. We demonstrate its benefits using four typical applications. By introducing this approach, we aim to bridge the gap between humans and LLMs, enabling more effective and efficient utilization of LLMs for complex tasks. Our system will be soon publicly available at LowCodeLLM.