smart city operators

Abstract: Vision-based image classification models benefit from Federated Learning (FL) across vehicles, however learning accurate models from distributed vehicular cameras is challenging due to data heterogeneity and privacy concerns. To improve performance on non-IID data, advanced FL optimization approaches have emerged that share auxiliary insights, such as client gradient behaviors. While these gradient-guided optimized FL methods improve the model accuracy, their reliance on sharing additional gradient information introduces a previously unexplored privacy vulnerability. In our empirical privacy-leakage experiment, we show that a malicious server can infer clients' label sets from shared guidance matrices under heterogeneous client label distributions (simulated via Dirichlet-based label partitions), between 50% and 84% accuracy. To address this privacy leakage, we propose PPFLex that replaces the central server with three Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) servers to securely compute the global guidance matrix and perform federated averaging under semi-honest and malicious MPC server assumptions. We evaluate PPFLex on widely used traffic-sign classification datasets (e.g., GTSRB and BTSC) as representative autonomous vehicle perception benchmarks, comparing against baselines. Our results show that PPFLex achieves accuracy comparable to the plain-text FedLEx pipeline while preventing privacy leakage, incurring acceptable MPC overhead.

Abstract: Regional digital twins (DTs) under mobility must coordinate contributor admission over congested broadcast networks without fixed infrastructure. Per-sender redundancy mitigation cannot make this set-level decision because only the host has a region-wide coverage map. Treating regional state as a public good, this letter develops a host-coordinated protocol admitting contributors whose timely, non-redundant coverage gain exceeds a congestion price within a cycle deadline. A 13-byte beacon digest enables pre-transmission scoring. Standards-based simulation shows the protocol reduces the timely actionable coverage deficit from 5.6\% to 1.4\% at load comparable to ETSI redundancy mitigation and by 26\% versus random admission at matched tight-budget load.

Abstract: Estimating reliable cross-modality association is crucial to unsupervised visible-infrared person re-ID. While optimal transport is shown to be a practical solution for cross-modality association, it suffers from the rigidness of hard label assignment without considering the impact of cluster noise. Moreover, enforcing only cross-modality contrast is also suboptimal, as it fails to jointly optimize the similarity relation within and across modality. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for cross-modality learning by well exploitation of prototypes: First, instead of contrasting with cross-modality prototypes, we show that modality-unified prototypical contrast facilitates better modality invariance by jointly and simultaneously optimizing similarity relation within and across-modality. Taking self-prototype as a steady teacher, we further refine the instance-prototype online relation through prototype-guided self-distillation. The two components are optimized in a unified framework, leading to a simple yet effective model. On standard VI-ReID benchmarks, we perform extensive comparison and analysis, validating the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code is available at: https://github.com/Terminator8758/PoSeD.