The deployment of the sensor nodes (SNs) always plays a decisive role in the system performance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this work, we propose an optimal deployment method for practical heterogeneous WSNs which gives a deep insight into the trade-off between the reliability and deployment cost. Specifically, this work aims to provide the optimal deployment of SNs to maximize the coverage degree and connection degree, and meanwhile minimize the overall deployment cost. In addition, this work fully considers the heterogeneity of SNs (i.e. differentiated sensing range and deployment cost) and three-dimensional (3-D) deployment scenarios. This is a multi-objective optimization problem, non-convex, multimodal and NP-hard. To solve it, we develop a novel swarm-based multi-objective optimization algorithm, known as the competitive multi-objective marine predators algorithm (CMOMPA) whose performance is verified by comprehensive comparative experiments with ten other stateof-the-art multi-objective optimization algorithms. The computational results demonstrate that CMOMPA is superior to others in terms of convergence and accuracy and shows excellent performance on multimodal multiobjective optimization problems. Sufficient simulations are also conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the CMOMPA based optimal SNs deployment method. The results show that the optimized deployment can balance the trade-off among deployment cost, sensing reliability and network reliability. The source code is available on //github.com/iNet-WZU/CMOMPA.
We study differentially private (DP) stochastic optimization (SO) with data containing outliers and loss functions that are not Lipschitz continuous. To date, the vast majority of work on DP SO assumes that the loss is Lipschitz (i.e. stochastic gradients are uniformly bounded), and their error bounds scale with the Lipschitz parameter of the loss. While this assumption is convenient, it is often unrealistic: in many practical problems where privacy is required, data may contain outliers or be unbounded, causing some stochastic gradients to have large norm. In such cases, the Lipschitz parameter may be prohibitively large, leading to vacuous excess risk bounds. Thus, building on a recent line of work [WXDX20, KLZ22], we make the weaker assumption that stochastic gradients have bounded $k$-th moments for some $k \geq 2$. Compared with works on DP Lipschitz SO, our excess risk scales with the $k$-th moment bound instead of the Lipschitz parameter of the loss, allowing for significantly faster rates in the presence of outliers. For convex and strongly convex loss functions, we provide the first asymptotically optimal excess risk bounds (up to a logarithmic factor). Moreover, in contrast to the prior works [WXDX20, KLZ22], our bounds do not require the loss function to be differentiable/smooth. We also devise an accelerated algorithm that runs in linear time and yields improved (compared to prior works) and nearly optimal excess risk for smooth losses. Additionally, our work is the first to address non-convex non-Lipschitz loss functions satisfying the Proximal-PL inequality; this covers some classes of neural nets, among other practical models. Our Proximal-PL algorithm has nearly optimal excess risk that almost matches the strongly convex lower bound. Lastly, we provide shuffle DP variations of our algorithms, which do not require a trusted curator (e.g. for distributed learning).
Classical results in general equilibrium theory assume divisible goods and convex preferences of market participants. In many real-world markets, participants have non-convex preferences and the allocation problem needs to consider complex constraints. Electricity markets are a prime example. In such markets, Walrasian prices are impossible, and heuristic pricing rules based on the dual of the relaxed allocation problem are used in practice. However, these rules have been criticized for high side-payments and inadequate congestion signals. We show that existing pricing heuristics optimize specific design goals that can be conflicting. The trade-offs can be substantial, and we establish that the design of pricing rules is fundamentally a multi-objective optimization problem addressing different incentives. In addition to traditional multi-objective optimization techniques using weighing of individual objectives, we introduce a novel parameter-free pricing rule that minimizes incentives for market participants to deviate locally. Our findings show how the new pricing rule capitalizes on the upsides of existing pricing rules under scrutiny today. It leads to prices that incur low make-whole payments while providing adequate congestion signals and low lost opportunity costs. Our suggested pricing rule does not require weighing of objectives, it is computationally scalable, and balances trade-offs in a principled manner, addressing an important policy issue in electricity markets.
Iterative linear quadratic regulator (iLQR) has gained wide popularity in addressing trajectory optimization problems with nonlinear system models. However, as a model-based shooting method, it relies heavily on an accurate system model to update the optimal control actions and the trajectory determined with forward integration, thus becoming vulnerable to inevitable model inaccuracies. Recently, substantial research efforts in learning-based methods for optimal control problems have been progressing significantly in addressing unknown system models, particularly when the system has complex interactions with the environment. Yet a deep neural network is normally required to fit substantial scale of sampling data. In this work, we present Neural-iLQR, a learning-aided shooting method over the unconstrained control space, in which a neural network with a simple structure is used to represent the local system model. In this framework, the trajectory optimization task is achieved with simultaneous refinement of the optimal policy and the neural network iteratively, without relying on the prior knowledge of the system model. Through comprehensive evaluations on two illustrative control tasks, the proposed method is shown to outperform the conventional iLQR significantly in the presence of inaccuracies in system models.
In this paper, federated learning (FL) over wireless networks is investigated. In each communication round, a subset of devices is selected to participate in the aggregation with limited time and energy. In order to minimize the convergence time, global loss and latency are jointly considered in a Stackelberg game based framework. Specifically, age of information (AoI) based device selection is considered at leader-level as a global loss minimization problem, while sub-channel assignment, computational resource allocation, and power allocation are considered at follower-level as a latency minimization problem. By dividing the follower-level problem into two sub-problems, the best response of the follower is obtained by a monotonic optimization based resource allocation algorithm and a matching based sub-channel assignment algorithm. By deriving the upper bound of convergence rate, the leader-level problem is reformulated, and then a list based device selection algorithm is proposed to achieve Stackelberg equilibrium. Simulation results indicate that the proposed device selection scheme outperforms other schemes in terms of the global loss, and the developed algorithms can significantly decrease the time consumption of computation and communication.
Multi-relational networks play an important role in today's world and are utilized to capture complex relationships between the data. Their applications span many domains such as biomedical, financial, social, etc., and because of their increasing usability, it becomes crucial to find efficient ways to deal with the added complexity of multiple layers. In this work, we propose a novel approach to represent these complex networks using a single aggregated adjacency matrix, by utilizing primes as surrogates for the relations. Due to the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, this allows for a lossless, compact representation of the whole multi-relational graph, using a single adjacency matrix. Moreover, this representation enables the fast computation of multi-hop adjacency matrices, that can be useful for a variety of downstream tasks. We present simple and complex tasks in which this representation can be useful and showcase its efficiency and performance. Finally, we also provide insights on the advantages and the open challenges that still need to be addressed and motivate future work.
This paper investigates user scheduling and trajectory optimization for a network supported by an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The IRS is powered via the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique. The IRS boosts users' uplink signals to improve the network's longevity and energy efficiency. It simultaneously harvests energy with a non-linear energy harvesting circuit and reflects the incident signals by controlling its reflection coefficients and phase shifts. The trajectory of the UAV impacts the efficiency of these operations. We minimize the maximum energy consumption of all users by joint optimization of user scheduling, UAV trajectory/velocity, and IRS phase shifts/reflection coefficients while guaranteeing each user's minimum required data rate and harvested energy of the IRS. We first derive a closed-form solution for the IRS phase shifts and then address the non-convexity of the critical problem. Finally, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to optimize the remaining variables iteratively. We demonstrate the gains over several benchmarks. For instance, with a 50-element IRS, min-max energy consumption can be as low as 0.0404 (Joule), a 7.13% improvement over the No IRS case (achieving 0.0435 (Joule)). We also show that IRS-UAV without EH performs best at the cost of circuit power consumption of the IRS (a 20% improvement over the No IRS case).
A new type of experiment that aims to determine the optimal quantities of a sequence of factors is eliciting considerable attention in medical science, bioengineering, and many other disciplines. Such studies require the simultaneous optimization of both quantities and the sequence orders of several components which are called quantitative-sequence (QS) factors. Given the large and semi-discrete solution spaces in such experiments, efficiently identifying optimal or near-optimal solutions by using a small number of experimental trials is a nontrivial task. To address this challenge, we propose a novel active learning approach, called QS-learning, to enable effective modeling and efficient optimization for experiments with QS factors. QS-learning consists of three parts: a novel mapping-based additive Gaussian process (MaGP) model, an efficient global optimization scheme (QS-EGO), and a new class of optimal designs (QS-design). The theoretical properties of the proposed method are investigated, and optimization techniques using analytical gradients are developed. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated via a real drug experiment on lymphoma treatment and several simulation studies.
Bid optimization for online advertising from single advertiser's perspective has been thoroughly investigated in both academic research and industrial practice. However, existing work typically assume competitors do not change their bids, i.e., the wining price is fixed, leading to poor performance of the derived solution. Although a few studies use multi-agent reinforcement learning to set up a cooperative game, they still suffer the following drawbacks: (1) They fail to avoid collusion solutions where all the advertisers involved in an auction collude to bid an extremely low price on purpose. (2) Previous works cannot well handle the underlying complex bidding environment, leading to poor model convergence. This problem could be amplified when handling multiple objectives of advertisers which are practical demands but not considered by previous work. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-objective cooperative bid optimization formulation called Multi-Agent Cooperative bidding Games (MACG). MACG sets up a carefully designed multi-objective optimization framework where different objectives of advertisers are incorporated. A global objective to maximize the overall profit of all advertisements is added in order to encourage better cooperation and also to protect self-bidding advertisers. To avoid collusion, we also introduce an extra platform revenue constraint. We analyze the optimal functional form of the bidding formula theoretically and design a policy network accordingly to generate auction-level bids. Then we design an efficient multi-agent evolutionary strategy for model optimization. Offline experiments and online A/B tests conducted on the Taobao platform indicate both single advertiser's objective and global profit have been significantly improved compared to state-of-art methods.
The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, if not better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity can reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field.
When and why can a neural network be successfully trained? This article provides an overview of optimization algorithms and theory for training neural networks. First, we discuss the issue of gradient explosion/vanishing and the more general issue of undesirable spectrum, and then discuss practical solutions including careful initialization and normalization methods. Second, we review generic optimization methods used in training neural networks, such as SGD, adaptive gradient methods and distributed methods, and theoretical results for these algorithms. Third, we review existing research on the global issues of neural network training, including results on bad local minima, mode connectivity, lottery ticket hypothesis and infinite-width analysis.