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Huanyu Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Huanyu Wu.

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Half a Century of Distributed Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Consensus: Design Principles and Evolutionary Pathways

The concept of distributed consensus originated in the 1970s and gained widespread attention following Leslie Lamport's influential publication on the Byzantine Generals Problem in the 1980s. Over the past five decades, distributed consensus has become an extensively researched field. Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) has emerged as a prominent and widely adopted solution due to its conceptual clarity, effectiveness, and resilience to arbitrary failures. However, PBFT does not universally address all scenarios, highlighting the necessity of developing a comprehensive understanding of the history, evolution, and foundational principles of distributed consensus. This article systematically reviews the historical evolution and foundational principles of distributed consensus, examining pivotal advancements including fault-tolerant state machine replication (SMR), consensus protocols in partially synchronous and asynchronous networks, and recent innovations in Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based consensus mechanisms. We further analyse the core design rationales, essential components, and underlying primitives across various distributed fault-tolerant protocols. The relationship between BFT consensus mechanisms and their applications in environments requiring robust resilience against adversarial faults is also explored. Finally, we discuss emerging research areas and challenges, such as consensus for wireless and blockchain scenarios, highlighting potential future developments. This comprehensive overview offers valuable insights to inform the design, optimisation, and implementation of distributed consensus systems across multiple application scenarios.

cs.DC

CMCRD: Cross-Modal Contrastive Representation Distillation for Emotion Recognition

Emotion recognition is an important component of affective computing, and also human-machine interaction. Unimodal emotion recognition is convenient, but the accuracy may not be high enough; on the contrary, multi-modal emotion recognition may be more accurate, but it also increases the complexity and cost of the data collection system. This paper considers cross-modal emotion recognition, i.e., using both electroencephalography (EEG) and eye movement in training, but only EEG or eye movement in test. We propose cross-modal contrastive representation distillation (CMCRD), which uses a pre-trained eye movement classification model to assist the training of an EEG classification model, improving feature extraction from EEG signals, or vice versa. During test, only EEG signals (or eye movement signals) are acquired, eliminating the need for multi-modal data. CMCRD not only improves the emotion recognition accuracy, but also makes the system more simplified and practical. Experiments using three different neural network architectures on three multi-modal emotion recognition datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of CMCRD. Compared with the EEG-only model, it improved the average classification accuracy by about 6.2%.

cs.HC

Motor Imagery Classification for Asynchronous EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces

Motor imagery (MI) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) enable the direct control of external devices through the imagined movements of various body parts. Unlike previous systems that used fixed-length EEG trials for MI decoding, asynchronous BCIs aim to detect the user's MI without explicit triggers. They are challenging to implement, because the algorithm needs to first distinguish between resting-states and MI trials, and then classify the MI trials into the correct task, all without any triggers. This paper proposes a sliding window prescreening and classification (SWPC) approach for MI-based asynchronous BCIs, which consists of two modules: a prescreening module to screen MI trials out of the resting-state, and a classification module for MI classification. Both modules are trained with supervised learning followed by self-supervised learning, which refines the feature extractors. Within-subject and cross-subject asynchronous MI classifications on four different EEG datasets validated the effectiveness of SWPC, i.e., it always achieved the highest average classification accuracy, and outperformed the best state-of-the-art baseline on each dataset by about 2%.

cs.HC

When Distributed Consensus Meets Wireless Connected Autonomous Systems: A Review and A DAG-based Approach

The connected and autonomous systems (CAS) and auto-driving era is coming into our life. To support CAS applications such as AI-driven decision-making and blockchain-based smart data management platform, data and message exchange/dissemination is a fundamental element. The distributed message broadcast and forward protocols in CAS, such as vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET), can suffer from significant message loss and uncertain transmission delay, and faulty nodes might disseminate fake messages to confuse the network. Therefore, the consensus mechanism is essential in CAS with distributed structure to guaranteed correct nodes agree on the same parameter and reach consistency. However, due to the wireless nature of CAS, traditional consensus cannot be directly deployed. This article reviews several existing consensus mechanisms, including average/maximum/minimum estimation consensus mechanisms that apply on quantity, Byzantine fault tolerance consensus for request, state machine replication (SMR) and blockchain, as well as their implementations in CAS. To deploy wireless-adapted consensus, we propose a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based message structure to build a non-equivocation data dissemination protocol for CAS, which has resilience against message loss and unpredictable forwarding latency. Finally, we enhance this protocol by developing a two-dimension DAG-based strategy to achieve partial order for blockchain and total order for the distributed service model SMR.

cs.NI

Facial Affect Analysis: Learning from Synthetic Data & Multi-Task Learning Challenges

Facial affect analysis remains a challenging task with its setting transitioned from lab-controlled to in-the-wild situations. In this paper, we present novel frameworks to handle the two challenges in the 4th Affective Behavior Analysis In-The-Wild (ABAW) competition: i) Multi-Task-Learning (MTL) Challenge and ii) Learning from Synthetic Data (LSD) Challenge. For MTL challenge, we adopt the SMM-EmotionNet with a better ensemble strategy of feature vectors. For LSD challenge, we propose respective methods to combat the problems of single labels, imbalanced distribution, fine-tuning limitations, and choice of model architectures. Experimental results on the official validation sets from the competition demonstrated that our proposed approaches outperformed baselines by a large margin. The code is available at https://github.com/sylyoung/ABAW4-HUST-ANT.

cs.LG