Previous work on data privacy in federated learning systems focuses on privacy-preserving operations for data from users who have agreed to share their data for training. However, modern data privacy agreements also empower users to use the system while opting out of sharing their data as desired. When combined with stragglers that arise from heterogeneous device capabilities, the result is missing data from a variety of sources that introduces bias and degrades model performance. In this paper, we present FLOSS, a system that mitigates the impacts of such missing data on federated learning in the presence of stragglers and user opt-out, and empirically demonstrate its performance in simulations.

In this paper, we challenge the conventional practice in Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS) of using averaged class-wise text embeddings, which are typically obtained by encoding each class name with multiple templates (e.g., a photo of , a sketch of a ). We investigate the impact of templates for OVSS, and find that for each class, there exist single-template classifiers--which we refer to as class-experts--that significantly outperform the conventional averaged classifier. First, to identify these class-experts, we introduce a novel approach that estimates them without any labeled data or training. By leveraging the class-wise prediction entropy of single-template classifiers, we select those yielding the lowest entropy as the most reliable class-experts. Second, we combine the outputs of class-experts in a new fusion process. Our plug-and-play method, coined FLOSS, is orthogonal and complementary to existing OVSS methods, offering an improvement without the need for additional labels or training. Extensive experiments show that FLOSS consistently enhances state-of-the-art OVSS models, generalizes well across datasets with different distribution shifts, and delivers substantial improvements in low-data scenarios where only a few unlabeled images are available. Our code is available at https://github.com/yasserben/FLOSS .

Robotic dentistry is becoming a reality. Your dentist may remind you to brush, floss and mouthwash – but what is the "right" order to do it? While all steps of oral hygiene can benefit dental health, Dr. Mike Wei, DDS, of New York City, shared with Fox News Digital that he'd recommend the below order. Starting with floss helps to remove food debris and plaque between the teeth and along the gumline, which a toothbrush "may not reach effectively," according to Wei. Dr. Ellie Phillips (not pictured) recommends using xylitol gum and mints to promote healthy salivary flow.

Time series analysis is a fundamental task in various application domains, and deep learning approaches have demonstrated remarkable performance in this area. However, many real-world time series data exhibit significant periodic or quasi-periodic dynamics that are often not adequately captured by existing deep learning-based solutions. This results in an incomplete representation of the underlying dynamic behaviors of interest. To address this gap, we propose an unsupervised method called Floss that automatically regularizes learned representations in the frequency domain. The Floss method first automatically detects major periodicities from the time series. It then employs periodic shift and spectral density similarity measures to learn meaningful representations with periodic consistency. In addition, Floss can be easily incorporated into both supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised learning frameworks. We conduct extensive experiments on common time series classification, forecasting, and anomaly detection tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of Floss. We incorporate Floss into several representative deep learning solutions to justify our design choices and demonstrate that it is capable of automatically discovering periodic dynamics and improving state-of-the-art deep learning models.

The study of natural and human-made processes often results in long sequences of temporally-ordered values, aka time series (TS). Such processes often consist of multiple states, e.g. operating modes of a machine, such that state changes in the observed processes result in changes in the distribution of shape of the measured values. Time series segmentation (TSS) tries to find such changes in TS post-hoc to deduce changes in the data-generating process. TSS is typically approached as an unsupervised learning problem aiming at the identification of segments distinguishable by some statistical property. Current algorithms for TSS require domain-dependent hyper-parameters to be set by the user, make assumptions about the TS value distribution or the types of detectable changes which limits their applicability. Common hyperparameters are the measure of segment homogeneity and the number of change points, which are particularly hard to tune for each data set. We present ClaSP, a novel, highly accurate, hyper-parameter-free and domain-agnostic method for TSS. ClaSP hierarchically splits a TS into two parts. A change point is determined by training a binary TS classifier for each possible split point and selecting the one split that is best at identifying subsequences to be from either of the partitions. ClaSP learns its main two model-parameters from the data using two novel bespoke algorithms. In our experimental evaluation using a benchmark of 107 data sets, we show that ClaSP outperforms the state of the art in terms of accuracy and is fast and scalable. Furthermore, we highlight properties of ClaSP using several real-world case studies.

From analyzing X-rays to documenting the results of your visit, Artificial Intelligence will be relied upon to make your dental appointment more efficient and to enhance your care. Dentem created a platform that integrates machine learning APIs, including the ability to auto-populate tooth charting. It offers dental practices software services that synchronize appointments across all platforms and maintains all patients' records electronically. They currently offer Dx Vision that uses machine learning to assess dental images for areas of concern and soon will offer D Assistant, a virtual assistant that will respond to a dentist's voice commands. As with other healthcare applications, Artificial Intelligence will be able to support dentists as a virtual second opinion when they determine a care plan.

Fortnite Battle Royale has been a runaway success, so much so that it has brought in more than $1bn (£780m), and has broken into mainstream culture in a way few video games do. The rapper 2 Milly, the actor Alfonso Ribeiro and the family of Russell Horning, otherwise known as the Backpack Kid, are suing the company for allegedly copying what they say are their dance creations, and not paying them to do so. Jordan Erica Webber talks to Dr Barbara Lauriat of the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College London about why we should look to the Elizabethan era to learn more about intellectual property law. She also chats to the Guardian's former Games editor Keith Stuart about what is happening with the lawsuits. The lawyer Alex Tutty then explains why it is unlikely to be an open-and-shut case.

The robot apocalypse is nigh. Boston Dynamics' robots are doing backflips and opening doors for their friends. Oh, and these 7-foot-long robot arms can lift 500 pounds each, which means they could theoretically crush, like, six humans at once. The robot apocalypse is also laughable. Watch a robot attempt a task it hasn't been explicitly trained to do, and it'll fall flat on its face or just give up and catch on fire.