The purpose of training neural networks is to achieve high generalization performance on unseen inputs. However, when trained on imbalanced datasets, a model's prediction tends to favor majority classes over minority classes, leading to significant degradation in the recognition performance of minority classes. To address this issue, we propose class-wise flooding regularization, an extension of flooding regularization applied at the class level. Flooding is a regularization technique that mitigates overfitting by preventing the training loss from falling below a predefined threshold, known as the flooding level, thereby discouraging memorization. Our proposed method assigns a class-specific flooding level based on class frequencies. By doing so, it suppresses overfitting in majority classes while allowing sufficient learning for minority classes. We validate our approach on imbalanced image classification. Compared to conventional flooding regularizations, our method improves the classification performance of minority classes and achieves better overall generalization.
We present a comprehensive analysis of Round-Delayed Amnesiac Flooding (RDAF), a variant of Amnesiac Flooding that introduces round-based asynchrony through adversarial delays. We establish fundamental properties of RDAF, including termination characteristics for different graph types and decidability results under various adversarial models. Our key contributions include: (1) a formal model of RDAF incorporating round-based asynchrony, (2) a proof that flooding always terminates on acyclic graphs despite adversarial delays, (3) a construction showing non-termination is possible on any cyclic graph, (4) a demonstration that termination is undecidable with arbitrary computable adversaries, and (5) the introduction of Eventually Periodic Adversaries (EPA) under which termination becomes decidable. These results enhance our understanding of flooding in communication-delay settings and provide insights for designing robust distributed protocols.
Cities in the United States and worldwide concentrate populations with diverse incomes, demographics and health risks, making access to healthcare facilities and emergency services critical. Urban flooding amplifies congestion and further degrades healthcare accessibility, but its impacts are uneven within and across cities, often burdening underserved populations and underplanned areas. These risks are intensifying as rapid development, aging infrastructure and climate change increase urban flood exposure. Across 30 of the most populous US cities, we show that peak-hour congestion alone reduces accessibility by 4% to 29%, while flooding further reduces it by 2% to more than 90%. These losses depend on flood type, transportation design, infrastructure planning, health vulnerability and spatial inequality. Flooding also increases spatial inequality in healthcare access, but the social burden varies by city and flood type, with urban coastal flooding disproportionately affecting less socially vulnerable populations in the United States. Our findings suggest that targeted approaches for embedding flood resilience in transportation and healthcare systems will be more effective than uni
Broadcast is a central problem in distributed computing. Recently, Hussak and Trehan [PODC'19/DC'23] proposed a stateless broadcasting protocol (Amnesiac Flooding), which was surprisingly proven to terminate in asymptotically optimal time (linear in the diameter of the network). However, it remains unclear: (i) Are there other stateless terminating broadcast algorithms with the desirable properties of Amnesiac Flooding, (ii) How robust is Amnesiac Flooding with respect to \emph{faults}? In this paper we make progress on both of these fronts. Under a reasonable restriction (obliviousness to message content) additional to the fault-free synchronous model, we prove that Amnesiac Flooding is the \emph{only} strictly stateless deterministic protocol that can achieve terminating broadcast. We achieve this by identifying four natural properties of a terminating broadcast protocol that Amnesiac Flooding uniquely satisfies. In contrast, we prove that even minor relaxations of \textit{any} of these four criteria allow the construction of other terminating broadcast protocols. On the other hand, we prove that Amnesiac Flooding can become non-terminating or non-broadcasting, even if we allow j
This paper builds upon the framework of \emph{Morse sequences}, a simple and effective approach to discrete Morse theory. A Morse sequence on a simplicial complex consists of a sequence of nested subcomplexes generated by expansions and fillings-two operations originally introduced by Whitehead. Expansions preserve homotopy, while fillings introduce critical simplexes that capture essential topological features. We extend the notion of Morse sequences to \emph{stacks}, which are monotonic functions defined on simplicial complexes, and define \emph{Morse sequences on stacks} as those whose expansions preserve the homotopy of all sublevel sets. This extension leads to a generalization of the fundamental collapse theorem to weighted simplicial complexes. Within this framework, we focus on a refined class of sequences called \emph{flooding sequences}, which exhibit an ordering behavior similar to that of classical watershed algorithms. Although not every Morse sequence on a stack is a flooding sequence, we show that the gradient vector field associated with any Morse sequence can be recovered through a flooding sequence. Finally, we present algorithmic schemes for computing flooding se
Compound flooding, driven by nonlinear interactions between multiple hydrometeorological factors, poses a significant challenge to hazard prevention. Existing forecasting approaches, whether physics-based or data-driven, often emphasize temporal patterns while underexploring how multiple interacting factors jointly shape flood dynamics. To address this problem, we conduct a large-scale data-driven analysis of compound flooding in South Florida, a typical area for compound flooding, by integrating tidal conditions, rainfall, groundwater stage, and human water management activities. Our analysis reveals three key findings: (i) models that capture temporal dynamics alone fail to represent multi-factor interactions during compound events; (ii) subsurface saturation, as reflected by groundwater levels, emerges as a dominant predictor of flood severity, often outweighing immediate rainfall intensity in this porous coastal region; and (iii) the spatial state of surrounding monitoring stations within a finite effective radius provides critical causal context for flooding, while extending temporal history yields diminishing returns during extreme events. These findings suggest that compound
Flooding can damage pavement infrastructure significantly, causing both immediate and long-term structural and functional issues. This research investigates how flooding events affect pavement deterioration, specifically focusing on measuring pavement roughness by the International Roughness Index (IRI). To quantify these effects, we utilized 20 years of pavement condition data from TxDOT's PMIS database, which is integrated with flood event data, including duration and spatial extent. Statistical analyses were performed to compare IRI values before and after flooding and to calculate the deterioration rates influenced by flood exposure. Moreover, we applied Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques, such as SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), to assess the impact of flooding on pavement performance. The results demonstrate that flood-affected pavements experience a more rapid increase in roughness compared to non-flooded sections. These findings emphasize the need for proactive flood mitigation strategies, including improved drainage systems, flood-resistant materials, and preventative maintenance, to enhance
This study focuses on a method for detecting and classifying distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, such as SYN Flooding, ACK Flooding, HTTP Flooding, and UDP Flooding, using neural networks. Machine learning, particularly neural networks, is highly effective in detecting malicious traffic. A dataset containing normal traffic and various DDoS attacks was used to train a neural network model with a 24-106-5 architecture. The model achieved high Accuracy (99.35%), Precision (99.32%), Recall (99.54%), and F-score (0.99) in the classification task. All major attack types were correctly identified. The model was also further tested in the lab using virtual infrastructures to generate normal and DDoS traffic. The results showed that the model can accurately classify attacks under near-real-world conditions, demonstrating 95.05% accuracy and balanced F-score scores for all attack types. This confirms that neural networks are an effective tool for detecting DDoS attacks in modern information security systems.
Continuous monitoring for road flooding could be achieved through onboard computing of satellite imagery to generate near real-time insights made available to generate dynamic information for maps used for navigation. Given the existing computing hardware like the one considered for the PhiSat-2 mission, the paper describes the feasibility of running the road flooding detection. The simulated onboard imagery dataset development and its annotation process for the OrbitalAI Φsat-2 challenge is described. The flooding events in the city of Bengaluru, India were considered for this challenge. This is followed by the model architecture selection, training, optimization and accuracy results for the model. The results indicate that it is possible to build low size, high accuracy models for the road flooding use case.
Reconstruction closings have all properties of a physical flooding of a topographic surface. They are precious for simplifying gradient images or, filling unwanted catchment basins, on which a subsequent watershed transform extracts the targeted objects. Flooding a topographic surface may be modeled as flooding a node weighted graph (TG), with unweighted edges, the node weights representing the ground level. The progression of a flooding may also be modeled on the region adjacency graph (RAG) of a topographic surface. On a RAG each node represents a catchment basin and edges connect neighboring nodes. The edges are weighted by the altitude of the pass point between both adjacent regions. The graph is flooded from sources placed at the marker positions and each node is assigned to the source by which it has been flooded. The level of the flood is represented on the nodes on each type of graphs. The same flooding may thus be modeled on a TG or on a RAG. We characterize all valid floodings on both types of graphs, as they should verify the laws of hydrostatics. We then show that each flooding of a node weighted graph also is a flooding of an edge weighted graph with appropriate edge w
As a heuristic for improving test accuracy in classification, the "flooding" method proposed by Ishida et al. (2020) sets a threshold for the average surrogate loss at training time; above the threshold, gradient descent is run as usual, but below the threshold, a switch to gradient ascent is made. While setting the threshold is non-trivial and is usually done with validation data, this simple technique has proved remarkably effective in terms of accuracy. On the other hand, what if we are also interested in other metrics such as model complexity or average surrogate loss at test time? As an attempt to achieve better overall performance with less fine-tuning, we propose a softened, pointwise mechanism called SoftAD (soft ascent-descent) that downweights points on the borderline, limits the effects of outliers, and retains the ascent-descent effect of flooding, with no additional computational overhead. We contrast formal stationarity guarantees with those for flooding, and empirically demonstrate how SoftAD can realize classification accuracy competitive with flooding (and the more expensive alternative SAM) while enjoying a much smaller loss generalization gap and model norm.
Compound flooding, where the combination or successive occurrence of two or more flood drivers leads to an extreme impact, can greatly exacerbate the adverse consequences associated with flooding in coastal regions. This paper reviews the practices and trends in coastal compound flood research methodologies and applications, as well as synthesizes key findings at regional and global scales. Systematic review is employed to construct a literature database of 271 studies relevant to compound flood hazards in a coastal context. This review explores the types of compound flood events, their mechanistic processes, and synthesizes the definitions and terms exhibited throughout the literature. Considered in the review are six flood drivers (fluvial, pluvial, coastal, groundwater, damming/dam failure, and tsunami) and five precursor events and environmental conditions (soil moisture, snow, temp/heat, fire, and drought). Furthermore, this review summarizes the trends in research methodology, examines the wide range of study applications, and considers the influences of climate change and urban environments. Finally, this review highlights the knowledge gaps in compound flood research and di
Multi-armed bandits are extensively used to model sequential decision-making, making them ubiquitous in many real-life applications such as online recommender systems and wireless networking. We consider a multi-agent setting where each agent solves their own bandit instance endowed with a different set of arms. Their goal is to minimize their group regret while collaborating via some communication protocol over a given network. Previous literature on this problem only considered arm heterogeneity and networked agents separately. In this work, we introduce a setting that encompasses both features. For this novel setting, we first provide a rigorous regret analysis for a standard flooding protocol combined with the classic UCB policy. Then, to mitigate the issue of high communication costs incurred by flooding in complex networks, we propose a new protocol called Flooding with Absorption (FwA). We provide a theoretical analysis of the resulting regret bound and discuss the advantages of using FwA over flooding. Lastly, we experimentally verify on various scenarios, including dynamic networks, that FwA leads to significantly lower communication costs despite minimal regret performanc
Traditional wisdom for network management allocates network resources separately for the measurement and data transmission tasks. Heavy measurement tasks may take up resources for data transmission and significantly reduce network performance. It is therefore challenging for interference graphs, deemed as incurring heavy measurement overhead, to be used in practice in wireless networks. To address this challenge in wireless sensor networks, we propose to use power as a new dimension for interference graph estimation (IGE) and integrate IGE with concurrent flooding such that IGE can be done simultaneously with flooding using the same frequency-time resources. With controlled and real-world experiments, we show that it is feasible to efficiently achieve IGE via concurrent flooding on the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices by controlling the transmit powers of nodes. We believe that efficient IGE would be a key enabler for the practical use of the existing scheduling algorithms assuming known interference graphs.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown remarkable performance in image generation. However, GAN training suffers from the problem of instability. One of the main approaches to address this problem is to modify the loss function, often using regularization terms in addition to changing the type of adversarial losses. This paper focuses on directly regularizing the adversarial loss function. We propose a method that applies flooding, an overfitting suppression method in supervised learning, to GANs to directly prevent the discriminator's loss from becoming excessively low. Flooding requires tuning the flood level, but when applied to GANs, we propose that the appropriate range of flood level settings is determined by the adversarial loss function, supported by theoretical analysis of GANs using the binary cross entropy loss. We experimentally verify that flooding stabilizes GAN training and can be combined with other stabilization techniques. We also show that by restricting the discriminator's loss to be no less than the flood level, the training proceeds stably even when the flood level is somewhat high.
Flooding protocols based on concurrent transmissions are regarded as the most reliable way to collect or disseminate data across a multi-hop low-power wireless mesh network. Recent works have shown that such protocols are effective for narrowband communication not only over IEEE 802.15.4, but also over the BLE 5 physical layers (PHYs). However, to date, existing literature has only built synchronous flooding solutions on top of a single PHY, and there has been no attempt to leverage different PHYs at runtime to increase performance. This paper fills this gap and presents OSF, an open-source framework that enables the design of multi-PHY synchronous flooding solutions thanks to a novel radio driver and middle-ware architecture capable of dynamically switching the underlying physical layer. This allows exploitation of the specific benefits of each PHY (e.g., higher data-rate, increased robustness) on-demand during each flood, increasing performance. We tailor OSF to the off-the-shelf nRF52840 platform, and showcase its benefits by comparing single-PHY and multi-PHY synchronous flooding solutions on a real-world testbed.
We present Submerse, an end-to-end framework for visualizing flooding scenarios on large and immersive display ecologies. Specifically, we reconstruct a surface mesh from input flood simulation data and generate a to-scale 3D virtual scene by incorporating geographical data such as terrain, textures, buildings, and additional scene objects. To optimize computation and memory performance for large simulation datasets, we discretize the data on an adaptive grid using dynamic quadtrees and support level-of-detail based rendering. Moreover, to provide a perception of flooding direction for a time instance, we animate the surface mesh by synthesizing water waves. As interaction is key for effective decision-making and analysis, we introduce two novel techniques for flood visualization in immersive systems: (1) an automatic scene-navigation method using optimal camera viewpoints generated for marked points-of-interest based on the display layout, and (2) an AR-based focus+context technique using an auxiliary display system. Submerse is developed in collaboration between computer scientists and atmospheric scientists. We evaluate the effectiveness of our system and application by conducti
Due to climate change the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall events, which contribute to urban flooding, are expected to increase in many places. These floods can damage transport infrastructure and disrupt mobility, highlighting the need for cities to adapt to escalating risks. Reinforcement learning (RL) serves as a powerful tool for uncovering optimal adaptation strategies, determining how and where to deploy adaptation measures effectively, even under significant uncertainty. In this study, we leverage RL to identify the most effective timing and locations for implementing measures, aiming to reduce both direct and indirect impacts of flooding. Our framework integrates climate change projections of future rainfall events and floods, models city-wide motorized trips, and quantifies direct and indirect impacts on infrastructure and mobility. Preliminary results suggest that our RL-based approach can significantly enhance decision-making by prioritizing interventions in specific urban areas and identifying the optimal periods for their implementation. Our framework is publicly available: \url{https://github.com/MLSM-at-DTU/floods_transport_rl}.
Basic synchronous flooding proceeds in rounds. Given a finite undirected (network) graph $G$, a set of sources $I \subseteq G$ initiate flooding in the first round by every node in $I$ sending the same message to all of its neighbours. In each subsequent round, nodes send the message to all of their neighbours from which they did not receive the message in the previous round. Flooding terminates when no node in $G$ sends a message in a round. The question of termination has not been settled - rather, non-termination is implicitly assumed to be possible. We show that flooding terminates on every finite graph. In the case of a single source $g_0$, flooding terminates in $e$ rounds if $G$ is bipartite and $j$ rounds with $e < j \leq e+d+1$ otherwise, where $e$ and $d$ are the eccentricity of $g_0$ and diameter of $G$ respectively. For communication/broadcast to all nodes, this is asymptotically time optimal and obviates the need for construction and maintenance of spanning structures. We extend to dynamic flooding initiated in multiple rounds with possibly multiple messages. The cases where a node only sends a message to neighbours from which it did not receive {\it any} message in
The broadcast operation in distributed systems is used to spread information located at some nodes to all other nodes. This operation is often realized by flooding, where the source nodes send a message containing the information to all neighbors. Each node receiving the message for the first time forwards it to all other neighbors. A stateless variant of flooding for synchronous systems is called amnesiac flooding. In this case, every time a node receives a message, it forwards it to those neighbors, from which it did not receive the message in the current round. The algorithm is oblivious and therefore scales very well. Stateless protocols are advantageous in high volume applications, increasing performance by removing the load caused by retention of session information and by providing crash tolerance. In this paper we analyze the termination time of amnesiac flooding. We define the (k,c)-flooding problem, which aims at finding a set $S$ of size $k$, such that amnesiac flooding when started concurrently by all nodes of $S$ terminates in a minimal number of rounds. We prove that this problem is NP-complete. We provide sharp upper and lower bounds for the time complexity of amnesi