Differential privacy (DP) has been recently introduced to linear contextual bandits to formally address the privacy concerns in its associated personalized services to participating users (e.g., recommendations). Prior work largely focus on two trust models of DP: the central model, where a central server is responsible for protecting users sensitive data, and the (stronger) local model, where information needs to be protected directly on user side. However, there remains a fundamental gap in the utility achieved by learning algorithms under these two privacy models, e.g., $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret in the central model as compared to $\tilde{O}(T^{3/4})$ regret in the local model, if all users are unique within a learning horizon $T$. In this work, we aim to achieve a stronger model of trust than the central model, while suffering a smaller regret than the local model by considering recently popular shuffle model of privacy. We propose a general algorithmic framework for linear contextual bandits under the shuffle trust model, where there exists a trusted shuffler in between users and the central server, that randomly permutes a batch of users data before sending those to the server. We then instantiate this framework with two specific shuffle protocols: one relying on privacy amplification of local mechanisms, and another incorporating a protocol for summing vectors and matrices of bounded norms. We prove that both these instantiations lead to regret guarantees that significantly improve on that of the local model, and can potentially be of the order $\tilde{O}(T^{3/5})$ if all users are unique. We also verify this regret behavior with simulations on synthetic data. Finally, under the practical scenario of non-unique users, we show that the regret of our shuffle private algorithm scale as $\tilde{O}(T^{2/3})$, which matches that the central model could achieve in this case.
The design of effective online caching policies is an increasingly important problem for content distribution networks, online social networks and edge computing services, among other areas. This paper proposes a new algorithmic toolbox for tackling this problem through the lens of optimistic online learning. We build upon the Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) framework, which is developed further here to include predictions for the file requests, and we design online caching algorithms for bipartite networks with fixed-size caches or elastic leased caches subject to time-average budget constraints. The predictions are provided by a content recommendation system that influences the users viewing activity and hence can naturally reduce the caching network's uncertainty about future requests. We also extend the framework to learn and utilize the best request predictor in cases where many are available. We prove that the proposed {optimistic} learning caching policies can achieve sub-zero performance loss (regret) for perfect predictions, and maintain the sub-linear regret bound $O(\sqrt T)$, which is the best achievable bound for policies that do not use predictions, even for arbitrary-bad predictions. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated with detailed trace-driven numerical tests.
Removing noise from the any processed images is very important. Noise should be removed in such a way that important information of image should be preserved. A decisionbased nonlinear algorithm for elimination of band lines, drop lines, mark, band lost and impulses in images is presented in this paper. The algorithm performs two simultaneous operations, namely, detection of corrupted pixels and evaluation of new pixels for replacing the corrupted pixels. Removal of these artifacts is achieved without damaging edges and details. However, the restricted window size renders median operation less effective whenever noise is excessive in that case the proposed algorithm automatically switches to mean filtering. The performance of the algorithm is analyzed in terms of Mean Square Error [MSE], Peak-Signal-to-Noise Ratio [PSNR], Signal-to-Noise Ratio Improved [SNRI], Percentage Of Noise Attenuated [PONA], and Percentage Of Spoiled Pixels [POSP]. This is compared with standard algorithms already in use and improved performance of the proposed algorithm is presented. The advantage of the proposed algorithm is that a single algorithm can replace several independent algorithms which are required for removal of different artifacts.
We study reinforcement learning for two-player zero-sum Markov games with simultaneous moves in the finite-horizon setting, where the transition kernel of the underlying Markov games can be parameterized by a linear function over the current state, both players' actions and the next state. In particular, we assume that we can control both players and aim to find the Nash Equilibrium by minimizing the duality gap. We propose an algorithm Nash-UCRL based on the principle "Optimism-in-Face-of-Uncertainty". Our algorithm only needs to find a Coarse Correlated Equilibrium (CCE), which is computationally efficient. Specifically, we show that Nash-UCRL can provably achieve an $\tilde{O}(dH\sqrt{T})$ regret, where $d$ is the linear function dimension, $H$ is the length of the game and $T$ is the total number of steps in the game. To assess the optimality of our algorithm, we also prove an $\tilde{\Omega}( dH\sqrt{T})$ lower bound on the regret. Our upper bound matches the lower bound up to logarithmic factors, which suggests the optimality of our algorithm.
In this work, we aim to consider the application of contrastive learning in the scenario of the recommendation system adequately, making it more suitable for recommendation task. We propose a learning paradigm called supervised contrastive learning(SCL) to support the graph convolutional neural network. Specifically, we will calculate the similarity between different nodes in user side and item side respectively during data preprocessing, and then when applying contrastive learning, not only will the augmented views be regarded as the positive samples, but also a certain number of similar samples will be regarded as the positive samples, which is different with SimCLR that treats other samples in a batch as negative samples. We apply SCL on the most advanced LightGCN. In addition, in order to consider the uncertainty of node interaction, we also propose a new data augment method called node replication. Empirical research and ablation study on Gowalla, Yelp2018, Amazon-Book datasets prove the effectiveness of SCL and node replication, which improve the accuracy of recommendations and robustness to interactive noise.
We study online convex optimization with switching costs, a practically important but also extremely challenging problem due to the lack of complete offline information. By tapping into the power of machine learning (ML) based optimizers, ML-augmented online algorithms (also referred to as expert calibration in this paper) have been emerging as state of the art, with provable worst-case performance guarantees. Nonetheless, by using the standard practice of training an ML model as a standalone optimizer and plugging it into an ML-augmented algorithm, the average cost performance can be even worse than purely using ML predictions. In order to address the "how to learn" challenge, we propose EC-L2O (expert-calibrated learning to optimize), which trains an ML-based optimizer by explicitly taking into account the downstream expert calibrator. To accomplish this, we propose a new differentiable expert calibrator that generalizes regularized online balanced descent and offers a provably better competitive ratio than pure ML predictions when the prediction error is large. For training, our loss function is a weighted sum of two different losses -- one minimizing the average ML prediction error for better robustness, and the other one minimizing the post-calibration average cost. We also provide theoretical analysis for EC-L2O, highlighting that expert calibration can be even beneficial for the average cost performance and that the high-percentile tail ratio of the cost achieved by EC-L2O to that of the offline optimal oracle (i.e., tail cost ratio) can be bounded. Finally, we test EC-L2O by running simulations for sustainable datacenter demand response. Our results demonstrate that EC-L2O can empirically achieve a lower average cost as well as a lower competitive ratio than the existing baseline algorithms.
Many recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) optical flow models use finite-step recurrent update operations to emulate traditional algorithms by encouraging iterative refinements toward a stable flow estimation. However, these RNNs impose large computation and memory overheads, and are not directly trained to model such stable estimation. They can converge poorly and thereby suffer from performance degradation. To combat these drawbacks, we propose deep equilibrium (DEQ) flow estimators, an approach that directly solves for the flow as the infinite-level fixed point of an implicit layer (using any black-box solver), and differentiates through this fixed point analytically (thus requiring $O(1)$ training memory). This implicit-depth approach is not predicated on any specific model, and thus can be applied to a wide range of SOTA flow estimation model designs. The use of these DEQ flow estimators allows us to compute the flow faster using, e.g., fixed-point reuse and inexact gradients, consumes $4\sim6\times$ times less training memory than the recurrent counterpart, and achieves better results with the same computation budget. In addition, we propose a novel, sparse fixed-point correction scheme to stabilize our DEQ flow estimators, which addresses a longstanding challenge for DEQ models in general. We test our approach in various realistic settings and show that it improves SOTA methods on Sintel and KITTI datasets with substantially better computational and memory efficiency.
Privacy protection is an essential issue in personalized news recommendation, and federated learning can potentially mitigate the privacy concern by training personalized news recommendation models over decentralized user data.For a theoretical privacy guarantee, differential privacy is necessary. However, applying differential privacy to federated recommendation training and serving conventionally suffers from the unsatisfactory trade-off between privacy and utility due to the high-dimensional characteristics of model gradients and hidden representations. In addition, there is no formal privacy guarantee for both training and serving in federated recommendation. In this paper, we propose a unified federated news recommendation method for effective and privacy-preserving model training and online serving with differential privacy guarantees. We first clarify the notion of differential privacy over users' behavior data for both model training and online serving in the federated recommendation scenario. Next, we propose a privacy-preserving online serving mechanism under this definition with differentially private user interest decomposition. More specifically, it decomposes the high-dimensional and privacy-sensitive user embedding into a combination of public basic vectors and adds noise to the combination coefficients. In this way, it can avoid the dimension curse and improve the utility by reducing the required noise intensity for differential privacy. Besides, we design a federated recommendation model training method with differential privacy, which can avoid the dimension-dependent noise for large models via label permutation and differentially private attention modules. Experiments on real-world news recommendation datasets validate the effectiveness of our method in achieving a good trade-off between privacy protection and utility for federated news recommendations.
In the context of personalized federated learning (FL), the critical challenge is to balance local model improvement and global model tuning when the personal and global objectives may not be exactly aligned. Inspired by Bayesian hierarchical models, we develop a self-aware personalized FL method where each client can automatically balance the training of its local personal model and the global model that implicitly contributes to other clients' training. Such a balance is derived from the inter-client and intra-client uncertainty quantification. A larger inter-client variation implies more personalization is needed. Correspondingly, our method uses uncertainty-driven local training steps and aggregation rule instead of conventional local fine-tuning and sample size-based aggregation. With experimental studies on synthetic data, Amazon Alexa audio data, and public datasets such as MNIST, FEMNIST, CIFAR10, and Sent140, we show that our proposed method can achieve significantly improved personalization performance compared with the existing counterparts.
Federated learning (FL) promotes predictive model training at the Internet of things (IoT) devices by evading data collection cost in terms of energy, time, and privacy. We model the learning gain achieved by an IoT device against its participation cost as its utility. Due to the device-heterogeneity, the local model learning cost and its quality, which can be time-varying, differs from device to device. We show that this variation results in utility unfairness because the same global model is shared among the devices. By default, the master is unaware of the local model computation and transmission costs of the devices, thus it is unable to address the utility unfairness problem. Also, a device may exploit this lack of knowledge at the master to intentionally reduce its expenditure and thereby enhance its utility. We propose to control the quality of the global model shared with the devices, in each round, based on their contribution and expenditure. This is achieved by employing differential privacy to curtail global model divulgence based on the learning contribution. In addition, we devise adaptive computation and transmission policies for each device to control its expenditure in order to mitigate utility unfairness. Our results show that the proposed scheme reduces the standard deviation of the energy cost of devices by 99% in comparison to the benchmark scheme, while the standard deviation of the training loss of devices varies around 0.103.
Federated learning with differential privacy, or private federated learning, provides a strategy to train machine learning models while respecting users' privacy. However, differential privacy can disproportionately degrade the performance of the models on under-represented groups, as these parts of the distribution are difficult to learn in the presence of noise. Existing approaches for enforcing fairness in machine learning models have considered the centralized setting, in which the algorithm has access to the users' data. This paper introduces an algorithm to enforce group fairness in private federated learning, where users' data does not leave their devices. First, the paper extends the modified method of differential multipliers to empirical risk minimization with fairness constraints, thus providing an algorithm to enforce fairness in the central setting. Then, this algorithm is extended to the private federated learning setting. The proposed algorithm, \texttt{FPFL}, is tested on a federated version of the Adult dataset and an "unfair" version of the FEMNIST dataset. The experiments on these datasets show how private federated learning accentuates unfairness in the trained models, and how FPFL is able to mitigate such unfairness.