Wireless communication is enabling billions of people to connect to each other and the internet, transforming every sector of the economy, and building the foundations for powerful new technologies that hold great promise to improve lives at an unprecedented rate and scale. The rapid increase in the number of devices and the associated demands for higher data rates and broader network coverage fuels the need for more robust wireless technologies. The key technology identified to address this problem is referred to as Cell-Free Massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO). CF-mMIMO is accompanied by many challenges, one of which is efficiently allocating limited resources. In this paper, we focus on a major resource allocation problem in wireless networks, namely the Pilot Assignment problem (PA). We show that PA is strongly NP-hard and that it does not admit a polynomial-time constant-factor approximation algorithm. Further, we show that PA cannot be approximated in polynomial time within $\mathcal{O}(K^2)$ (where $K$ is the number of users) when the system consists of at least three pilots. Finally, we present an approximation lower bound of $1.058$ (resp. $\epsilon|K|^2$, for $\epsilon >0$) in special cases where the system consists of exactly two (resp. three) pilots.
Integrating first-order logic constraints (FOLCs) with neural networks is a crucial but challenging problem since it involves modeling intricate correlations to satisfy the constraints. This paper proposes a novel neural layer, LogicMP, whose layers perform mean-field variational inference over an MLN. It can be plugged into any off-the-shelf neural network to encode FOLCs while retaining modularity and efficiency. By exploiting the structure and symmetries in MLNs, we theoretically demonstrate that our well-designed, efficient mean-field iterations effectively mitigate the difficulty of MLN inference, reducing the inference from sequential calculation to a series of parallel tensor operations. Empirical results in three kinds of tasks over graphs, images, and text show that LogicMP outperforms advanced competitors in both performance and efficiency.
Edge computing facilitates low-latency services at the network's edge by distributing computation, communication, and storage resources within the geographic proximity of mobile and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The recent advancement in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) technologies has opened new opportunities for edge computing in military operations, disaster response, or remote areas where traditional terrestrial networks are limited or unavailable. In such environments, UAVs can be deployed as aerial edge servers or relays to facilitate edge computing services. This form of computing is also known as UAV-enabled Edge Computing (UEC), which offers several unique benefits such as mobility, line-of-sight, flexibility, computational capability, and cost-efficiency. However, the resources on UAVs, edge servers, and IoT devices are typically very limited in the context of UEC. Efficient resource management is, therefore, a critical research challenge in UEC. In this article, we present a survey on the existing research in UEC from the resource management perspective. We identify a conceptual architecture, different types of collaborations, wireless communication models, research directions, key techniques and performance indicators for resource management in UEC. We also present a taxonomy of resource management in UEC. Finally, we identify and discuss some open research challenges that can stimulate future research directions for resource management in UEC.
Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of devices that communicate with each other through the internet and provides intelligence to industry and people. These devices are running in potentially hostile environments, so the need for security is critical. Trust Management aims to ensure the reliability of the network by assigning a trust value in every node indicating its trust level. This paper presents an exhaustive survey of the current Trust Management techniques for IoT, a classification based on the methods used in every work and a discussion of the open challenges and future research directions.
Quantifying variable importance is essential for answering high-stakes questions in fields like genetics, public policy, and medicine. Current methods generally calculate variable importance for a given model trained on a given dataset. However, for a given dataset, there may be many models that explain the target outcome equally well; without accounting for all possible explanations, different researchers may arrive at many conflicting yet equally valid conclusions given the same data. Additionally, even when accounting for all possible explanations for a given dataset, these insights may not generalize because not all good explanations are stable across reasonable data perturbations. We propose a new variable importance framework that quantifies the importance of a variable across the set of all good models and is stable across the data distribution. Our framework is extremely flexible and can be integrated with most existing model classes and global variable importance metrics. We demonstrate through experiments that our framework recovers variable importance rankings for complex simulation setups where other methods fail. Further, we show that our framework accurately estimates the true importance of a variable for the underlying data distribution. We provide theoretical guarantees on the consistency and finite sample error rates for our estimator. Finally, we demonstrate its utility with a real-world case study exploring which genes are important for predicting HIV load in persons with HIV, highlighting an important gene that has not previously been studied in connection with HIV. Code is available here.
Large language models (LLMs) based on transformers have made significant strides in recent years, the success of which is driven by scaling up their model size. Despite their high algorithmic performance, the computational and memory requirements of LLMs present unprecedented challenges. To tackle the high compute requirements of LLMs, the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture was introduced which is able to scale its model size without proportionally scaling up its computational requirements. Unfortunately, MoE's high memory demands and dynamic activation of sparse experts restrict its applicability to real-world problems. Previous solutions that offload MoE's memory-hungry expert parameters to CPU memory fall short because the latency to migrate activated experts from CPU to GPU incurs high performance overhead. Our proposed Pre-gated MoE system effectively tackles the compute and memory challenges of conventional MoE architectures using our algorithm-system co-design. Pre-gated MoE employs our novel pre-gating function which alleviates the dynamic nature of sparse expert activation, allowing our proposed system to address the large memory footprint of MoEs while also achieving high performance. We demonstrate that Pre-gated MoE is able to improve performance, reduce GPU memory consumption, while also maintaining the same level of model quality. These features allow our Pre-gated MoE system to cost-effectively deploy large-scale LLMs using just a single GPU with high performance.
Datacenter capacity is growing exponentially to satisfy the increasing demand for emerging computationally-intensive applications, such as deep learning. This trend has led to concerns over datacenters' increasing energy consumption and carbon footprint. The basic prerequisite for optimizing a datacenter's energy- and carbon-efficiency is accurately monitoring and attributing energy consumption to specific users and applications. Since datacenter servers tend to be multi-tenant, i.e., they host many applications, server- and rack-level power monitoring alone does not provide insight into their resident applications' energy usage and carbon emissions. At the same time, current application-level energy monitoring and attribution techniques are intrusive: they require privileged access to servers and require coordinated support in hardware and software, which is not always possible in cloud. To address the problem, we design WattScope, a system for non-intrusively estimating the power consumption of individual applications using external measurements of a server's aggregate power usage without requiring direct access to the server's operating system or applications. Our key insight is that, based on an analysis of production traces, the power characteristics of datacenter workloads, e.g., low variability, low magnitude, and high periodicity, are highly amenable to disaggregation of a server's total power consumption into application-specific values. WattScope adapts and extends a machine learning-based technique for disaggregating building power and applies it to server- and rack-level power meter measurements in data centers. We evaluate WattScope's accuracy on a production workload and show that it yields high accuracy, e.g., often <10% normalized mean absolute error, and is thus a potentially useful tool for datacenters in externally monitoring application-level power usage.
Energy consumption is a fundamental concern in mobile application development, bearing substantial significance for both developers and end-users. Moreover, it is a critical determinant in the consumer's decision-making process when considering a smartphone purchase. From the sustainability perspective, it becomes imperative to explore approaches aimed at mitigating the energy consumption of mobile devices, given the significant global consequences arising from the extensive utilisation of billions of smartphones, which imparts a profound environmental impact. Despite the existence of various energy-efficient programming practices within the Android platform, the dominant mobile ecosystem, there remains a need for documented machine learning-based energy prediction algorithms tailored explicitly for mobile app development. Hence, the main objective of this research is to propose a novel neural network-based framework, enhanced by a metaheuristic approach, to achieve robust energy prediction in the context of mobile app development. The metaheuristic approach here plays a crucial role in not only identifying suitable learning algorithms and their corresponding parameters but also determining the optimal number of layers and neurons within each layer. To the best of our knowledge, prior studies have yet to employ any metaheuristic algorithm to address all these hyperparameters simultaneously. Moreover, due to limitations in accessing certain aspects of a mobile phone, there might be missing data in the data set, and the proposed framework can handle this. In addition, we conducted an optimal algorithm selection strategy, employing 13 metaheuristic algorithms, to identify the best algorithm based on accuracy and resistance to missing values. The comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach yields significant outcomes for energy consumption prediction.
Recently, graph neural networks have been gaining a lot of attention to simulate dynamical systems due to their inductive nature leading to zero-shot generalizability. Similarly, physics-informed inductive biases in deep-learning frameworks have been shown to give superior performance in learning the dynamics of physical systems. There is a growing volume of literature that attempts to combine these two approaches. Here, we evaluate the performance of thirteen different graph neural networks, namely, Hamiltonian and Lagrangian graph neural networks, graph neural ODE, and their variants with explicit constraints and different architectures. We briefly explain the theoretical formulation highlighting the similarities and differences in the inductive biases and graph architecture of these systems. We evaluate these models on spring, pendulum, gravitational, and 3D deformable solid systems to compare the performance in terms of rollout error, conserved quantities such as energy and momentum, and generalizability to unseen system sizes. Our study demonstrates that GNNs with additional inductive biases, such as explicit constraints and decoupling of kinetic and potential energies, exhibit significantly enhanced performance. Further, all the physics-informed GNNs exhibit zero-shot generalizability to system sizes an order of magnitude larger than the training system, thus providing a promising route to simulate large-scale realistic systems.
Events are happening in real-world and real-time, which can be planned and organized occasions involving multiple people and objects. Social media platforms publish a lot of text messages containing public events with comprehensive topics. However, mining social events is challenging due to the heterogeneous event elements in texts and explicit and implicit social network structures. In this paper, we design an event meta-schema to characterize the semantic relatedness of social events and build an event-based heterogeneous information network (HIN) integrating information from external knowledge base, and propose a novel Pair-wise Popularity Graph Convolutional Network (PP-GCN) based fine-grained social event categorization model. We propose a Knowledgeable meta-paths Instances based social Event Similarity (KIES) between events and build a weighted adjacent matrix as input to the PP-GCN model. Comprehensive experiments on real data collections are conducted to compare various social event detection and clustering tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms other alternative social event categorization techniques.
Image segmentation is still an open problem especially when intensities of the interested objects are overlapped due to the presence of intensity inhomogeneity (also known as bias field). To segment images with intensity inhomogeneities, a bias correction embedded level set model is proposed where Inhomogeneities are Estimated by Orthogonal Primary Functions (IEOPF). In the proposed model, the smoothly varying bias is estimated by a linear combination of a given set of orthogonal primary functions. An inhomogeneous intensity clustering energy is then defined and membership functions of the clusters described by the level set function are introduced to rewrite the energy as a data term of the proposed model. Similar to popular level set methods, a regularization term and an arc length term are also included to regularize and smooth the level set function, respectively. The proposed model is then extended to multichannel and multiphase patterns to segment colourful images and images with multiple objects, respectively. It has been extensively tested on both synthetic and real images that are widely used in the literature and public BrainWeb and IBSR datasets. Experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that advantages of the proposed model in terms of bias correction and segmentation accuracy.