Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has exploded key revolutions in several leading industries, such as energy, agriculture, mining, transportation, and healthcare. Due to the nature of high capacity and fast transmission speed, 5G plays a pivot role in enhancing the industrial procedures, practices and guidelines, such as crowdsourcing, cloud outsourcing and platform subcontracting. Spatial crowdsourcing (SC)-servers (such as offered by DiDi, MeiTuan and Uber) assign different tasks based on workers' location information.However, SC-servers are often untrustworthy and have the threat of revealing workers' privacy. In this paper, we introduce a framework Geo-MOEA (Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm) to protect location privacy of workers involved on SC platform in 5G environment. We propose an adaptive regionalized obfuscation mechanism with inference error bounds based on geo-indistinguishability (a strong notion of differential privacy), which is suitable for the context of large-scale location data and task allocations. This offers locally generated pseudo-locations of workers to be reported instead of their actual locations.Further, to optimize the trade-off between SC service availability and privacy protection, we utilize MOEA to improve the global applicability of the mechanism in 5G environment. Finally, by simulating the location scenario, the visual results on experiments show that the mechanism can not only protect location privacy, but also achieve high availability of services as desired.
We introduce a new constrained optimization method for policy gradient reinforcement learning, which uses two trust regions to regulate each policy update. In addition to using the proximity of one single old policy as the first trust region as done by prior works, we propose to form a second trust region through the construction of another virtual policy that represents a wide range of past policies. We then enforce the new policy to stay closer to the virtual policy, which is beneficial in case the old policy performs badly. More importantly, we propose a mechanism to automatically build the virtual policy from a memory buffer of past policies, providing a new capability for dynamically selecting appropriate trust regions during the optimization process. Our proposed method, dubbed as Memory-Constrained Policy Optimization (MCPO), is examined on a diverse suite of environments including robotic locomotion control, navigation with sparse rewards and Atari games, consistently demonstrating competitive performance against recent on-policy constrained policy gradient methods.
Interacting agents receive public information at no cost and flexibly acquire private information at a cost proportional to entropy reduction. When a policymaker provides more public information, agents acquire less private information, thus lowering information costs. Does more public information raise or reduce uncertainty faced by agents? Is it beneficial or detrimental to welfare? To address these questions, we examine the impacts of public information on flexible information acquisition in a linear-quadratic-Gaussian game with arbitrary quadratic material welfare. More public information raises uncertainty if and only if the game exhibits strategic complementarity, which can be harmful to welfare. However, when agents acquire a large amount of information, more provision of public information increases welfare through a substantial reduction in the cost of information. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for welfare to increase with public information and identify optimal public information disclosure, which is either full or partial disclosure depending upon the welfare function and the slope of the best response.
The naive importance sampling (IS) estimator generally does not work well in examples involving simultaneous inference on several targets, as the importance weights can take arbitrarily large values, making the estimator highly unstable. In such situations, alternative multiple IS estimators involving samples from multiple proposal distributions are preferred. Just like the naive IS, the success of these multiple IS estimators crucially depends on the choice of the proposal distributions. The selection of these proposal distributions is the focus of this article. We propose three methods: (i) a geometric space filling approach, (ii) a minimax variance approach, and (iii) a maximum entropy approach. The first two methods are applicable to any IS estimator, whereas the third approach is described in the context of Doss's (2010) two-stage IS estimator. For the first method, we propose a suitable measure of 'closeness' based on the symmetric Kullback-Leibler divergence, while the second and third approaches use estimates of asymptotic variances of Doss's (2010) IS estimator and Geyer's (1994) reverse logistic regression estimator, respectively. Thus, when samples from the proposal distributions are obtained by running Markov chains, we provide consistent spectral variance estimators for these asymptotic variances. The proposed methods for selecting proposal densities are illustrated using various detailed examples.
Embodied AI is a recent research area that aims at creating intelligent agents that can move and operate inside an environment. Existing approaches in this field demand the agents to act in completely new and unexplored scenes. However, this setting is far from realistic use cases that instead require executing multiple tasks in the same environment. Even if the environment changes over time, the agent could still count on its global knowledge about the scene while trying to adapt its internal representation to the current state of the environment. To make a step towards this setting, we propose Spot the Difference: a novel task for Embodied AI where the agent has access to an outdated map of the environment and needs to recover the correct layout in a fixed time budget. To this end, we collect a new dataset of occupancy maps starting from existing datasets of 3D spaces and generating a number of possible layouts for a single environment. This dataset can be employed in the popular Habitat simulator and is fully compliant with existing methods that employ reconstructed occupancy maps during navigation. Furthermore, we propose an exploration policy that can take advantage of previous knowledge of the environment and identify changes in the scene faster and more effectively than existing agents. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture outperforms existing state-of-the-art models for exploration on this new setting.
The concept of federated learning (FL) was first proposed by Google in 2016. Thereafter, FL has been widely studied for the feasibility of application in various fields due to its potential to make full use of data without compromising the privacy. However, limited by the capacity of wireless data transmission, the employment of federated learning on mobile devices has been making slow progress in practical. The development and commercialization of the 5th generation (5G) mobile networks has shed some light on this. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of existing federated learning schemes for mobile devices and propose a novel cross-device federated learning framework, which utilizes the anonymous communication technology and ring signature to protect the privacy of participants while reducing the computation overhead of mobile devices participating in FL. In addition, our scheme implements a contribution-based incentive mechanism to encourage mobile users to participate in FL. We also give a case study of autonomous driving. Finally, we present the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme and discuss some open issues in federated learning.
The dynamic response of the legged robot locomotion is non-Lipschitz and can be stochastic due to environmental uncertainties. To test, validate, and characterize the safety performance of legged robots, existing solutions on observed and inferred risk can be incomplete and sampling inefficient. Some formal verification methods suffer from the model precision and other surrogate assumptions. In this paper, we propose a scenario sampling based testing framework that characterizes the overall safety performance of a legged robot by specifying (i) where (in terms of a set of states) the robot is potentially safe, and (ii) how safe the robot is within the specified set. The framework can also help certify the commercial deployment of the legged robot in real-world environment along with human and compare safety performance among legged robots with different mechanical structures and dynamic properties. The proposed framework is further deployed to evaluate a group of state-of-the-art legged robot locomotion controllers from various model-based, deep neural network involved, and reinforcement learning based methods in the literature. Among a series of intended work domains of the studied legged robots (e.g. tracking speed on sloped surface, with abrupt changes on demanded velocity, and against adversarial push-over disturbances), we show that the method can adequately capture the overall safety characterization and the subtle performance insights. Many of the observed safety outcomes, to the best of our knowledge, have never been reported by the existing work in the legged robot literature.
We demonstrate that merely analog transmissions and match filtering can realize the function of an edge server in federated learning (FL). Therefore, a network with massively distributed user equipments (UEs) can achieve large-scale FL without an edge server. We also develop a training algorithm that allows UEs to continuously perform local computing without being interrupted by the global parameter uploading, which exploits the full potential of UEs' processing power. We derive convergence rates for the proposed schemes to quantify their training efficiency. The analyses reveal that when the interference obeys a Gaussian distribution, the proposed algorithm retrieves the convergence rate of a server-based FL. But if the interference distribution is heavy-tailed, then the heavier the tail, the slower the algorithm converges. Nonetheless, the system run time can be largely reduced by enabling computation in parallel with communication, whereas the gain is particularly pronounced when communication latency is high. These findings are corroborated via excessive simulations.
Bayesian model selection provides a powerful framework for objectively comparing models directly from observed data, without reference to ground truth data. However, Bayesian model selection requires the computation of the marginal likelihood (model evidence), which is computationally challenging, prohibiting its use in many high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems. With Bayesian imaging applications in mind, in this work we present the proximal nested sampling methodology to objectively compare alternative Bayesian imaging models for applications that use images to inform decisions under uncertainty. The methodology is based on nested sampling, a Monte Carlo approach specialised for model comparison, and exploits proximal Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques to scale efficiently to large problems and to tackle models that are log-concave and not necessarily smooth (e.g., involving l_1 or total-variation priors). The proposed approach can be applied computationally to problems of dimension O(10^6) and beyond, making it suitable for high-dimensional inverse imaging problems. It is validated on large Gaussian models, for which the likelihood is available analytically, and subsequently illustrated on a range of imaging problems where it is used to analyse different choices of dictionary and measurement model.
One of the most important problems in system identification and statistics is how to estimate the unknown parameters of a given model. Optimization methods and specialized procedures, such as Empirical Minimization (EM) can be used in case the likelihood function can be computed. For situations where one can only simulate from a parametric model, but the likelihood is difficult or impossible to evaluate, a technique known as the Two-Stage (TS) Approach can be applied to obtain reliable parametric estimates. Unfortunately, there is currently a lack of theoretical justification for TS. In this paper, we propose a statistical decision-theoretical derivation of TS, which leads to Bayesian and Minimax estimators. We also show how to apply the TS approach on models for independent and identically distributed samples, by computing quantiles of the data as a first step, and using a linear function as the second stage. The proposed method is illustrated via numerical simulations.
Mechanism design is a central research branch in microeconomics. An effective mechanism can significantly improve performance and efficiency of social decisions under desired objectives, such as to maximize social welfare or to maximize revenue for agents. However, mechanism design is challenging for many common models including the public project problem model which we study in this thesis. A typical public project problem is a group of agents crowdfunding a public project (e.g., building a bridge). The mechanism will decide the payment and allocation for each agent (e.g., how much the agent pays, and whether the agent can use it) according to their valuations. The mechanism can be applied to various economic scenarios, including those related to cyber security. There are different constraints and optimized objectives for different public project scenarios (sub-problems), making it unrealistic to design a universal mechanism that fits all scenarios, and designing mechanisms for different settings manually is a taxing job. Therefore, we explore automated mechanism design (AMD) of public project problems under different constraints. In this thesis, we focus on the public project problem, which includes many sub-problems (excludable/non-excludable, divisible/indivisible, binary/non-binary). We study the classical public project model and extend this model to other related areas such as the zero-day exploit markets. For different sub-problems of the public project problem, we adopt different novel machine learning techniques to design optimal or near-optimal mechanisms via automated mechanism design. We evaluate our mechanisms by theoretical analysis or experimentally comparing our mechanisms against existing mechanisms. The experiments and theoretical results show that our mechanisms are better than state-of-the-art automated or manual mechanisms.