Data collected at Hurricane Ian (2022) quantifies the demands that small uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), or drones, place on the network communication infrastructure and identifies gaps in the field. Drones have been increasingly used since Hurricane Katrina (2005) for disaster response, however getting the data from the drone to the appropriate decision makers throughout incident command in a timely fashion has been problematic. These delays have persisted even as countries such as the USA have made significant investments in wireless infrastructure, rapidly deployable nodes, and an increase in commercial satellite solutions. Hurricane Ian serves as a case study of the mismatch between communications needs and capabilities. In the first four days of the response, nine drone teams flew 34 missions under the direction of the State of Florida FL-UAS1, generating 636GB of data. The teams had access to six different wireless communications networks but had to resort to physically transferring data to the nearest intact emergency operations center in order to make the data available to the relevant agencies. The analysis of the mismatch contributes a model of the drone data-to-decision workflow in a disaster and quantifies wireless network communication requirements throughout the workflow in five factors. Four of the factors-availability, bandwidth, burstiness, and spatial distribution-were previously identified from analyses of Hurricanes Harvey (2017) and Michael (2018). This work adds upload rate as a fifth attribute. The analysis is expected to improve drone design and edge computing schemes as well as inform wireless communication research and development.
We introduce a novel method for the rigorous quantitative evaluation of online algorithms that relaxes the "radical worst-case" perspective of classic competitive analysis. In contrast to prior work, our method, referred to as randomly infused advice (RIA), does not make any probabilistic assumptions about the input sequence and does not rely on the development of designated online algorithms. Rather, it can be applied to existing online randomized algorithms, introducing a means to evaluate their performance in scenarios that lie outside the radical worst-case regime. More concretely, an online algorithm ALG with RIA benefits from pieces of advice generated by an omniscient but not entirely reliable oracle. The crux of the new method is that the advice is provided to ALG by writing it into the buffer B from which ALG normally reads its random bits, hence allowing us to augment it through a very simple and non-intrusive interface. The (un)reliability of the oracle is captured via a parameter 0 {\le} {\alpha} {\le} 1 that determines the probability (per round) that the advice is successfully infused by the oracle; if the advice is not infused, which occurs with probability 1 - {\alpha}, then the buffer B contains fresh random bits (as in the classic online setting). The applicability of the new RIA method is demonstrated by applying it to three extensively studied online problems: paging, uniform metrical task systems, and online set cover. For these problems, we establish new upper bounds on the competitive ratio of classic online algorithms that improve as the infusion parameter {\alpha} increases. These are complemented with (often tight) lower bounds on the competitive ratio of online algorithms with RIA for the three problems.
Research in Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) has established many sources and forms of algorithmic harm, in domains as diverse as health care, finance, policing, and recommendations. Much work remains to be done to mitigate the serious harms of these systems, particularly those disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Despite these ongoing harms, new systems are being developed and deployed which threaten the perpetuation of the same harms and the creation of novel ones. In response, the FATE community has emphasized the importance of anticipating harms. Our work focuses on the anticipation of harms from increasingly agentic systems. Rather than providing a definition of agency as a binary property, we identify 4 key characteristics which, particularly in combination, tend to increase the agency of a given algorithmic system: underspecification, directness of impact, goal-directedness, and long-term planning. We also discuss important harms which arise from increasing agency -- notably, these include systemic and/or long-range impacts, often on marginalized stakeholders. We emphasize that recognizing agency of algorithmic systems does not absolve or shift the human responsibility for algorithmic harms. Rather, we use the term agency to highlight the increasingly evident fact that ML systems are not fully under human control. Our work explores increasingly agentic algorithmic systems in three parts. First, we explain the notion of an increase in agency for algorithmic systems in the context of diverse perspectives on agency across disciplines. Second, we argue for the need to anticipate harms from increasingly agentic systems. Third, we discuss important harms from increasingly agentic systems and ways forward for addressing them. We conclude by reflecting on implications of our work for anticipating algorithmic harms from emerging systems.
Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning approach geared towards applications in edge devices. However, the problem of designing custom neural architectures in federated environments is not tackled from the perspective of overall system efficiency. In this paper, we propose DC-NAS -- a divide-and-conquer approach that performs supernet-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) in a federated system by systematically sampling the search space. We propose a novel diversified sampling strategy that balances exploration and exploitation of the search space by initially maximizing the distance between the samples and progressively shrinking this distance as the training progresses. We then perform channel pruning to reduce the training complexity at the devices further. We show that our approach outperforms several sampling strategies including Hadamard sampling, where the samples are maximally separated. We evaluate our method on the CIFAR10, CIFAR100, EMNIST, and TinyImagenet benchmarks and show a comprehensive analysis of different aspects of federated learning such as scalability, and non-IID data. DC-NAS achieves near iso-accuracy as compared to full-scale federated NAS with 50% fewer resources.
The widespread adoption of Machine Learning systems, especially in more decision-critical applications such as criminal sentencing and bank loans, has led to increased concerns about fairness implications. Algorithms and metrics have been developed to mitigate and measure these discriminations. More recently, works have identified a more challenging form of bias called intersectional bias, which encompasses multiple sensitive attributes, such as race and gender, together. In this survey, we review the state-of-the-art in intersectional fairness. We present a taxonomy for intersectional notions of fairness and mitigation. Finally, we identify the key challenges and provide researchers with guidelines for future directions.
Effective communication is crucial for deploying robots in mission-specific tasks, but inadequate or unreliable communication can greatly reduce mission efficacy, for example in search and rescue missions where communication-denied conditions may occur. In such missions, robots are deployed to locate targets, such as human survivors, but they might get trapped at hazardous locations, such as in a trapping pit or by debris. Thus, the information the robot collected is lost owing to the lack of communication. In our prior work, we developed the notion of a path-based sensor. A path-based sensor detects whether or not an event has occurred along a particular path, but it does not provide the exact location of the event. Such path-based sensor observations are well-suited to communication-denied environments, and various studies have explored methods to improve information gathering in such settings. In some missions it is typical for target elements to be in close proximity to hazardous factors that hinder the information-gathering process. In this study, we examine a similar scenario and conduct experiments to determine if additional knowledge about the correlation between hazards and targets improves the efficiency of information gathering. To incorporate this knowledge, we utilize a Bayesian network representation of domain knowledge and develop an algorithm based on this representation. Our empirical investigation reveals that such additional information on correlation is beneficial only in environments with moderate hazard lethality, suggesting that while knowledge of correlation helps, further research and development is necessary for optimal outcomes.
Many real-world networks, like the Internet, are not the result of central design but instead the outcome of the interaction of local agents who are selfishly optimizing for their individual utility. The famous Network Creation Game [Fabrikant et al., PODC 2003] enables us to understand such processes, their dynamics, and their outcomes in the form of equilibrium states. In this model, agents buy incident edges towards other agents for a price of $\alpha$ and simultaneously try to minimize their buying cost and their total hop distance. Since in many real-world networks, e.g., social networks, consent from both sides is required to maintain a connection, Corbo and Parkes [PODC 2005] proposed a bilateral version of the Network Creation Game, in which mutual consent and payment are required in order to create edges. It is known that the bilateral version has a significantly higher Price of Anarchy, compared to the unilateral version. This is counter-intuitive, since cooperation should help to avoid socially bad states. We investigate this phenomenon by analyzing the Price of Anarchy of the bilateral version with respect to different solution concepts that allow for various degrees of cooperation among the agents. With this, we provide insights into what kind of cooperation is needed to ensure that socially good networks are created. We present a collection of asymptotically tight bounds on the Price of Anarchy that precisely map the impact of cooperation on the quality of tree networks and we find that weak forms of cooperation already yield a significantly improved Price of Anarchy. Moreover, for general networks we show that enhanced cooperation yields close to optimal networks for a wide range of edge prices.
Game theory has by now found numerous applications in various fields, including economics, industry, jurisprudence, and artificial intelligence, where each player only cares about its own interest in a noncooperative or cooperative manner, but without obvious malice to other players. However, in many practical applications, such as poker, chess, evader pursuing, drug interdiction, coast guard, cyber-security, and national defense, players often have apparently adversarial stances, that is, selfish actions of each player inevitably or intentionally inflict loss or wreak havoc on other players. Along this line, this paper provides a systematic survey on three main game models widely employed in adversarial games, i.e., zero-sum normal-form and extensive-form games, Stackelberg (security) games, zero-sum differential games, from an array of perspectives, including basic knowledge of game models, (approximate) equilibrium concepts, problem classifications, research frontiers, (approximate) optimal strategy seeking techniques, prevailing algorithms, and practical applications. Finally, promising future research directions are also discussed for relevant adversarial games.
Automated Driving Systems (ADS) have made great achievements in recent years thanks to the efforts from both academia and industry. A typical ADS is composed of multiple modules, including sensing, perception, planning and control, which brings together the latest advances in multiple domains. Despite these achievements, safety assurance of the systems is still of great significance, since the unsafe behavior of ADS can bring catastrophic consequences and unacceptable economic and social losses. Testing is an important approach to system validation for the deployment in practice; in the context of ADS, it is extremely challenging, due to the system complexity and multidisciplinarity. There has been a great deal of literature that focuses on the testing of ADS, and a number of surveys have also emerged to summarize the technical advances. However, most of these surveys focus on the system-level testing that is performed within software simulators, and thereby ignore the distinct features of individual modules. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the existing ADS testing literature, which takes into account both module-level and system-level testing. Specifically, we make the following contributions: (1) we build a threat model that reveals the potential safety threats for each module of an ADS; (2) we survey the module-level testing techniques for ADS and highlight the technical differences affected by the properties of the modules; (3) we also survey the system-level testing techniques, but we focus on empirical studies that take a bird's-eye view on the system, the problems due to the collaborations between modules, and the gaps between ADS testing in simulators and real world; (4) we identify the challenges and opportunities in ADS testing, which facilitates the future research in this field.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved unprecedented success in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), including computer vision, natural language processing and speech recognition. However, their superior performance comes at the considerable cost of computational complexity, which greatly hinders their applications in many resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Therefore, methods and techniques that are able to lift the efficiency bottleneck while preserving the high accuracy of DNNs are in great demand in order to enable numerous edge AI applications. This paper provides an overview of efficient deep learning methods, systems and applications. We start from introducing popular model compression methods, including pruning, factorization, quantization as well as compact model design. To reduce the large design cost of these manual solutions, we discuss the AutoML framework for each of them, such as neural architecture search (NAS) and automated pruning and quantization. We then cover efficient on-device training to enable user customization based on the local data on mobile devices. Apart from general acceleration techniques, we also showcase several task-specific accelerations for point cloud, video and natural language processing by exploiting their spatial sparsity and temporal/token redundancy. Finally, to support all these algorithmic advancements, we introduce the efficient deep learning system design from both software and hardware perspectives.
Since deep neural networks were developed, they have made huge contributions to everyday lives. Machine learning provides more rational advice than humans are capable of in almost every aspect of daily life. However, despite this achievement, the design and training of neural networks are still challenging and unpredictable procedures. To lower the technical thresholds for common users, automated hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) has become a popular topic in both academic and industrial areas. This paper provides a review of the most essential topics on HPO. The first section introduces the key hyper-parameters related to model training and structure, and discusses their importance and methods to define the value range. Then, the research focuses on major optimization algorithms and their applicability, covering their efficiency and accuracy especially for deep learning networks. This study next reviews major services and toolkits for HPO, comparing their support for state-of-the-art searching algorithms, feasibility with major deep learning frameworks, and extensibility for new modules designed by users. The paper concludes with problems that exist when HPO is applied to deep learning, a comparison between optimization algorithms, and prominent approaches for model evaluation with limited computational resources.