We initiate the study of fair distribution of delivery tasks among a set of agents wherein delivery jobs are placed along the vertices of a graph. Our goal is to fairly distribute delivery costs (modeled as a submodular function) among a fixed set of agents while satisfying some desirable notions of economic efficiency. We adopt well-established fairness concepts$\unicode{x2014}$such as envy-freeness up to one item (EF1) and minimax share (MMS)$\unicode{x2014}$to our setting and show that fairness is often incompatible with the efficiency notion of social optimality. Yet, we characterize instances that admit fair and socially optimal solutions by exploiting graph structures. We further show that achieving fairness along with Pareto optimality is computationally intractable. Nonetheless, we design an XP algorithm (parameterized by the number of agents) for finding MMS and Pareto optimal solutions on every instance, and show that the same algorithm can be modified to find efficient solutions along with EF1, when such solutions exist. We complement our theoretical results by experimentally analyzing the price of fairness on randomly generated graph structures.
Gaussian processes are a powerful framework for quantifying uncertainty and for sequential decision-making but are limited by the requirement of solving linear systems. In general, this has a cubic cost in dataset size and is sensitive to conditioning. We explore stochastic gradient algorithms as a computationally efficient method of approximately solving these linear systems: we develop low-variance optimization objectives for sampling from the posterior and extend these to inducing points. Counterintuitively, stochastic gradient descent often produces accurate predictions, even in cases where it does not converge quickly to the optimum. We explain this through a spectral characterization of the implicit bias from non-convergence. We show that stochastic gradient descent produces predictive distributions close to the true posterior both in regions with sufficient data coverage, and in regions sufficiently far away from the data. Experimentally, stochastic gradient descent achieves state-of-the-art performance on sufficiently large-scale or ill-conditioned regression tasks. Its uncertainty estimates match the performance of significantly more expensive baselines on a large-scale Bayesian~optimization~task.
We consider the problem of learning from data corrupted by underrepresentation bias, where positive examples are filtered from the data at different, unknown rates for a fixed number of sensitive groups. We show that with a small amount of unbiased data, we can efficiently estimate the group-wise drop-out parameters, even in settings where intersectional group membership makes learning each intersectional rate computationally infeasible. Using this estimate for the group-wise drop-out rate, we construct a re-weighting scheme that allows us to approximate the loss of any hypothesis on the true distribution, even if we only observe the empirical error on a biased sample. Finally, we present an algorithm encapsulating this learning and re-weighting process, and we provide strong PAC-style guarantees that, with high probability, our estimate of the risk of the hypothesis over the true distribution will be arbitrarily close to the true risk.
Combining Federated Learning (FL) with a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) is a promising approach for realizing privacy-preserving FL, which has garnered significant academic attention in recent years. Implementing the TEE on the server side enables each round of FL to proceed without exposing the client's gradient information to untrusted servers. This addresses usability gaps in existing secure aggregation schemes as well as utility gaps in differentially private FL. However, to address the issue using a TEE, the vulnerabilities of server-side TEEs need to be considered -- this has not been sufficiently investigated in the context of FL. The main technical contribution of this study is the analysis of the vulnerabilities of TEE in FL and the defense. First, we theoretically analyze the leakage of memory access patterns, revealing the risk of sparsified gradients, which are commonly used in FL to enhance communication efficiency and model accuracy. Second, we devise an inference attack to link memory access patterns to sensitive information in the training dataset. Finally, we propose an oblivious yet efficient aggregation algorithm to prevent memory access pattern leakage. Our experiments on real-world data demonstrate that the proposed method functions efficiently in practical scales.
Submodular function maximization is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem with plenty of applications -- including data summarization, influence maximization, and recommendation. In many of these problems, the goal is to find a solution that maximizes the average utility over all users, for each of whom the utility is defined by a monotone submodular function. However, when the population of users is composed of several demographic groups, another critical problem is whether the utility is fairly distributed across different groups. Although the \emph{utility} and \emph{fairness} objectives are both desirable, they might contradict each other, and, to the best of our knowledge, little attention has been paid to optimizing them jointly. To fill this gap, we propose a new problem called \emph{Bicriteria Submodular Maximization} (BSM) to balance utility and fairness. Specifically, it requires finding a fixed-size solution to maximize the utility function, subject to the value of the fairness function not being below a threshold. Since BSM is inapproximable within any constant factor, we focus on designing efficient instance-dependent approximation schemes. Our algorithmic proposal comprises two methods, with different approximation factors, obtained by converting a BSM instance into other submodular optimization problem instances. Using real-world and synthetic datasets, we showcase applications of our proposed methods in three submodular maximization problems: maximum coverage, influence maximization, and facility location.
In this paper, we have attempted to study the behaviour of the family wise error rate (FWER) for Bonferroni's procedure in a nearly independent setup for normal distribution. In search for a suitable correlation penalty, it has been noted that the root mean square (RMS) of correlations is not appropriate under this setup as opposed to the study of \cite{efron2007correlation}. We have provided a suitable correction factor for deviation from independence and approximated the FWER under this nearly independent setup.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Integrated Waste Management is planning for the eventual transportation, storage, and disposal of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW) from nuclear power plant and DOE sites. The Stakeholder Tool for Assessing Radioactive Transportation (START) is a web-based, geospatial decision-support tool developed for evaluating routing options and other aspects of transporting SNF and HLW, covering rail, truck, barge, and intermodal infrastructure and operations in the continental United States. The verification and validation (V&V) process is intended to independently assess START to provide confidence in the ability of START to accurately provide intended results. The V&V process checks the START tool using a variety of methods, ranging from independent hand calculations to comparison of START performance and results to those of other codes. The V&V activity was conducted independently from the START development team with opportunities to provide feedback and collaborate throughout the process. The V&V analyzed attributes of transportation routes produced by START, including route distance and both population and population density captured within buffer zones around routes. Population in the buffer zone, population density in the buffer zone, and route distance were all identified as crucial outputs of the START code and were subject to V&V tasks. Some of the improvements identified through the V&V process were standardizing the underlying population data in START, changing the projection of the population raster data, and changes to the methodology used for population density to improve its applicability for expected users. This collaboration also led to suggested improvements to some of the underlying shape file segments within START.
Multivariate sequential data collected in practice often exhibit temporal irregularities, including nonuniform time intervals and component misalignment. However, if uneven spacing and asynchrony are endogenous characteristics of the data rather than a result of insufficient observation, the information content of these irregularities plays a defining role in characterizing the multivariate dependence structure. Existing approaches for probabilistic forecasting either overlook the resulting statistical heterogeneities, are susceptible to imputation biases, or impose parametric assumptions on the data distribution. This paper proposes an end-to-end solution that overcomes these limitations by allowing the observation arrival times to play the central role of model construction, which is at the core of temporal irregularities. To acknowledge temporal irregularities, we first enable unique hidden states for components so that the arrival times can dictate when, how, and which hidden states to update. We then develop a conditional flow representation to non-parametrically represent the data distribution, which is typically non-Gaussian, and supervise this representation by carefully factorizing the log-likelihood objective to select conditional information that facilitates capturing time variation and path dependency. The broad applicability and superiority of the proposed solution are confirmed by comparing it with existing approaches through ablation studies and testing on real-world datasets.
Reliable probabilistic primality tests are fundamental in public-key cryptography. In adversarial scenarios, a composite with a high probability of passing a specific primality test could be chosen. In such cases, we need worst-case error estimates for the test. However, in many scenarios the numbers are randomly chosen and thus have significantly smaller error probability. Therefore, we are interested in average case error estimates. In this paper, we establish such bounds for the strong Lucas primality test, as only worst-case, but no average case error bounds, are currently available. This allows us to use this test with more confidence. We examine an algorithm that draws odd $k$-bit integers uniformly and independently, runs $t$ independent iterations of the strong Lucas test with randomly chosen parameters, and outputs the first number that passes all $t$ consecutive rounds. We attain numerical upper bounds on the probability on returing a composite. Furthermore, we consider a modified version of this algorithm that excludes integers divisible by small primes, resulting in improved bounds. Additionally, we classify the numbers that contribute most to our estimate.
We consider the problem of discovering $K$ related Gaussian directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where the involved graph structures share a consistent causal order and sparse unions of supports. Under the multi-task learning setting, we propose a $l_1/l_2$-regularized maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for learning $K$ linear structural equation models. We theoretically show that the joint estimator, by leveraging data across related tasks, can achieve a better sample complexity for recovering the causal order (or topological order) than separate estimations. Moreover, the joint estimator is able to recover non-identifiable DAGs, by estimating them together with some identifiable DAGs. Lastly, our analysis also shows the consistency of union support recovery of the structures. To allow practical implementation, we design a continuous optimization problem whose optimizer is the same as the joint estimator and can be approximated efficiently by an iterative algorithm. We validate the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the joint estimator in experiments.
The aim of this work is to develop a fully-distributed algorithmic framework for training graph convolutional networks (GCNs). The proposed method is able to exploit the meaningful relational structure of the input data, which are collected by a set of agents that communicate over a sparse network topology. After formulating the centralized GCN training problem, we first show how to make inference in a distributed scenario where the underlying data graph is split among different agents. Then, we propose a distributed gradient descent procedure to solve the GCN training problem. The resulting model distributes computation along three lines: during inference, during back-propagation, and during optimization. Convergence to stationary solutions of the GCN training problem is also established under mild conditions. Finally, we propose an optimization criterion to design the communication topology between agents in order to match with the graph describing data relationships. A wide set of numerical results validate our proposal. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work combining graph convolutional neural networks with distributed optimization.