Secure and privacy-preserving data aggregation in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) continues to be a focal point of interest in both the industry and academia. Aiming at tackling the challenges and solving the remaining limitations of existing works, this paper introduces a novel Schnorr approval-based IoV data aggregation framework based on a two-layered architecture. In this framework, a server can aggregate the IoV data from clusters without inferring the raw data, real identity and trajectories of vehicles. Notably, we avoid incorporating the widely-accepted techniques such as homomorphic encryption and digital pseudonym to avoid introducing high computation cost to vehicles. We propose a novel concept, data approval, based on the Schnorr signature scheme. With the approval, the fake data injection attack carried out by a cluster head can be defended against. The separation of liability is achieved as well. The evaluation shows that the framework is secure and lightweight for vehicles in terms of the computation and communication costs.
The Compute Express Link (CXL) interconnect has provided the ability to integrate diverse memory types into servers via byte-addressable SerDes links. Harnessing the full potential of such heterogeneous memory systems requires efficient memory tiering. However, existing research in this domain has been constrained by low-resolution and high-overhead memory access profiling techniques. To address this critical challenge, we propose to enhance existing memory tiering systems with a novel NeoMem solution. NeoMem offloads memory profiling functions to device-side controllers, integrating a dedicated hardware unit called NeoProf. NeoProf readily tracks memory access and provides the operating system with crucial page hotness statistics and other useful system state information. On the OS kernel side, we introduce a revamped memory-tiering strategy, enabling accurate and timely hot page promotion based on NeoProf statistics. We implement NeoMem on a real CXL-enabled FPGA platform and Linux kernel v6.3. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that NeoMem achieves 32% to 67% geomean speedup over several existing memory tiering solutions.
The rise in internet usage has led to the generation of massive amounts of data, resulting in the adoption of various supervised and semi-supervised machine learning algorithms, which can effectively utilize the colossal amount of data to train models. However, before deploying these models in the real world, these must be strictly evaluated on performance measures like worst-case recall and satisfy constraints such as fairness. We find that current state-of-the-art empirical techniques offer sub-optimal performance on these practical, non-decomposable performance objectives. On the other hand, the theoretical techniques necessitate training a new model from scratch for each performance objective. To bridge the gap, we propose SelMix, a selective mixup-based inexpensive fine-tuning technique for pre-trained models, to optimize for the desired objective. The core idea of our framework is to determine a sampling distribution to perform a mixup of features between samples from particular classes such that it optimizes the given objective. We comprehensively evaluate our technique against the existing empirical and theoretically principled methods on standard benchmark datasets for imbalanced classification. We find that proposed SelMix fine-tuning significantly improves the performance for various practical non-decomposable objectives across benchmarks.
Open-domain question answering (QA) tasks usually require the retrieval of relevant information from a large corpus to generate accurate answers. We propose a novel approach called Generator-Retriever-Generator (GRG) that combines document retrieval techniques with a large language model (LLM), by first prompting the model to generate contextual documents based on a given question. In parallel, a dual-encoder network retrieves documents that are relevant to the question from an external corpus. The generated and retrieved documents are then passed to the second LLM, which generates the final answer. By combining document retrieval and LLM generation, our approach addresses the challenges of open-domain QA, such as generating informative and contextually relevant answers. GRG outperforms the state-of-the-art generate-then-read and retrieve-then-read pipelines (GENREAD and RFiD) improving their performance by at least by +5.2, +4.2, and +1.6 on TriviaQA, NQ, and WebQ datasets, respectively. We provide code, datasets, and checkpoints at //github.com/abdoelsayed2016/GRG.
Secure aggregation (SecAgg) is a commonly-used privacy-enhancing mechanism in federated learning, affording the server access only to the aggregate of model updates while safeguarding the confidentiality of individual updates. Despite widespread claims regarding SecAgg's privacy-preserving capabilities, a formal analysis of its privacy is lacking, making such presumptions unjustified. In this paper, we delve into the privacy implications of SecAgg by treating it as a local differential privacy (LDP) mechanism for each local update. We design a simple attack wherein an adversarial server seeks to discern which update vector a client submitted, out of two possible ones, in a single training round of federated learning under SecAgg. By conducting privacy auditing, we assess the success probability of this attack and quantify the LDP guarantees provided by SecAgg. Our numerical results unveil that, contrary to prevailing claims, SecAgg offers weak privacy against membership inference attacks even in a single training round. Indeed, it is difficult to hide a local update by adding other independent local updates when the updates are of high dimension. Our findings underscore the imperative for additional privacy-enhancing mechanisms, such as noise injection, in federated learning.
Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems are capable of improving spectral efficiency by employing far more antennas than conventional massive MIMO at the base station (BS). However, beam training in multiuser XL-MIMO systems is challenging. To tackle these issues, we conceive a three-phase graph neural network (GNN)-based beam training scheme for multiuser XL-MIMO systems. In the first phase, only far-field wide beams have to be tested for each user and the GNN is utilized to map the beamforming gain information of the far-field wide beams to the optimal near-field beam for each user. In addition, the proposed GNN-based scheme can exploit the position-correlation between adjacent users for further improvement of the accuracy of beam training. In the second phase, a beam allocation scheme based on the probability vectors produced at the outputs of GNNs is proposed to address the above beam-direction conflicts between users. In the third phase, the hybrid TBF is designed for further reducing the inter-user interference. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the beam training performance of the benchmarks. Moreover, the performance of the proposed beam training scheme approaches that of an exhaustive search, despite requiring only about 7% of the pilot overhead.
Artifact-free super-resolution (SR) aims to translate low-resolution images into their high-resolution counterparts with a strict integrity of the original content, eliminating any distortions or synthetic details. While traditional diffusion-based SR techniques have demonstrated remarkable abilities to enhance image detail, they are prone to artifact introduction during iterative procedures. Such artifacts, ranging from trivial noise to unauthentic textures, deviate from the true structure of the source image, thus challenging the integrity of the super-resolution process. In this work, we propose Self-Adaptive Reality-Guided Diffusion (SARGD), a training-free method that delves into the latent space to effectively identify and mitigate the propagation of artifacts. Our SARGD begins by using an artifact detector to identify implausible pixels, creating a binary mask that highlights artifacts. Following this, the Reality Guidance Refinement (RGR) process refines artifacts by integrating this mask with realistic latent representations, improving alignment with the original image. Nonetheless, initial realistic-latent representations from lower-quality images result in over-smoothing in the final output. To address this, we introduce a Self-Adaptive Guidance (SAG) mechanism. It dynamically computes a reality score, enhancing the sharpness of the realistic latent. These alternating mechanisms collectively achieve artifact-free super-resolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method, delivering detailed artifact-free high-resolution images while reducing sampling steps by 2X. We release our code at //github.com/ProAirVerse/Self-Adaptive-Guidance-Diffusion.git.
No-reference point cloud quality assessment (NR-PCQA) aims to automatically evaluate the perceptual quality of distorted point clouds without available reference, which have achieved tremendous improvements due to the utilization of deep neural networks. However, learning-based NR-PCQA methods suffer from the scarcity of labeled data and usually perform suboptimally in terms of generalization. To solve the problem, we propose a novel contrastive pre-training framework tailored for PCQA (CoPA), which enables the pre-trained model to learn quality-aware representations from unlabeled data. To obtain anchors in the representation space, we project point clouds with different distortions into images and randomly mix their local patches to form mixed images with multiple distortions. Utilizing the generated anchors, we constrain the pre-training process via a quality-aware contrastive loss following the philosophy that perceptual quality is closely related to both content and distortion. Furthermore, in the model fine-tuning stage, we propose a semantic-guided multi-view fusion module to effectively integrate the features of projected images from multiple perspectives. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art PCQA methods on popular benchmarks. Further investigations demonstrate that CoPA can also benefit existing learning-based PCQA models.
The distortion-rate function of output-constrained lossy source coding with limited common randomness is analyzed for the special case of squared error distortion measure. An explicit expression is obtained when both source and reconstruction distributions are Gaussian. This further leads to a partial characterization of the information-theoretic limit of quadratic Gaussian rate-distortion-perception coding with the perception measure given by Kullback-Leibler divergence or squared quadratic Wasserstein distance.
Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
Social relations are often used to improve recommendation quality when user-item interaction data is sparse in recommender systems. Most existing social recommendation models exploit pairwise relations to mine potential user preferences. However, real-life interactions among users are very complicated and user relations can be high-order. Hypergraph provides a natural way to model complex high-order relations, while its potentials for improving social recommendation are under-explored. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose a multi-channel hypergraph convolutional network to enhance social recommendation by leveraging high-order user relations. Technically, each channel in the network encodes a hypergraph that depicts a common high-order user relation pattern via hypergraph convolution. By aggregating the embeddings learned through multiple channels, we obtain comprehensive user representations to generate recommendation results. However, the aggregation operation might also obscure the inherent characteristics of different types of high-order connectivity information. To compensate for the aggregating loss, we innovatively integrate self-supervised learning into the training of the hypergraph convolutional network to regain the connectivity information with hierarchical mutual information maximization. The experimental results on multiple real-world datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the SOTA methods, and the ablation study verifies the effectiveness of the multi-channel setting and the self-supervised task. The implementation of our model is available via //github.com/Coder-Yu/RecQ.