The rapid development of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies has not only enabled new applications, but also presented new challenges for reliable communication with limited resources. In this work, we define a deceptively simple novel problem that can arise in these scenarios, in which a set of sensors need to communicate a joint observation. This observation is shared by a random subset of the nodes, which need to propagate it to the rest of the network, but coordination is complex: as signaling constraints require the use of random access schemes over shared channels, each sensor needs to implicitly coordinate with others with the same observation, so that at least one of the transmissions gets through without collisions. Unlike existing medium access control schemes, the goal here is not to maximize total goodput, but rather to make sure that the shared message gets through, regardless of the sender. The lack of any signaling, aside from an acknowledgment or lack thereof from the rest of the network, makes determining the optimal collective transmission strategy a significant challenge. We analyze this coordination problem theoretically, prove its hardness, and provide low-complexity solutions. While a low-complexity clustering-based approach is shown to provide near-optimal performance in certain special cases, for the general scenarios, we model each sensor as a multi-armed bandit (MAB), and provide a learning-based solution. Numerical results show the effectiveness of this approach in a variety of cases.
Current network control plane verification tools cannot scale to large networks, because of the complexity of jointly reasoning about the behaviors of all nodes in the network. In this paper we present a modular approach to control plane verification, whereby end-to-end network properties are verified via a set of purely local checks on individual nodes and edges. The approach targets the verification of safety properties for BGP configurations and provides guarantees in the face of both arbitrary external route announcements from neighbors and arbitrary node/link failures. We have proven the approach correct and also implemented it in a tool called Lightyear. Experimental results show that Lightyear scales dramatically better than prior control plane verifiers. Further, we have used Lightyear to verify three properties of the wide area network of a major cloud provider, containing hundreds of routers and tens of thousands of edges. To our knowledge no prior tool has been demonstrated to provide such guarantees at that scale. Finally, in addition to the scaling benefits, our modular approach to verification makes it easy to localize the causes of configuration errors and to support incremental re-verification as configurations are updated
The work is devoted to the construction of a new interval arithmetic which would combine algorithmic efficiency and high quality estimation of the ranges of expressions.
As machine learning algorithms become increasingly integrated in crucial decision-making scenarios, such as healthcare, recruitment, and risk assessment, there have been increasing concerns about the privacy and fairness of such systems. Federated learning has been viewed as a promising solution for collaboratively training of machine learning models among multiple parties while maintaining the privacy of their local data. However, federated learning also poses new challenges in mitigating the potential bias against certain populations (e.g., demographic groups), as this typically requires centralized access to the sensitive information (e.g., race, gender) of each data point. Motivated by the importance and challenges of group fairness in federated learning, in this work, we propose FairFed, a novel algorithm to enhance group fairness via a fairness-aware aggregation method, which aims to provide fair model performance across different sensitive groups (e.g., racial, gender groups) while maintaining high utility. This formulation can further provide more flexibility in the customized local debiasing strategies for each client. We build our FairFed algorithm around the secure aggregation protocol of federated learning. When running federated training on widely investigated fairness datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art fair federated learning frameworks under a high heterogeneous sensitive attribute distribution. We also investigate the performance of FairFed on naturally distributed real-life data collected from different geographical locations or departments within an organization.
This paper studies the application of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (C-NOMA) networks with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). We aim for maximizing the rate of the strong user with guaranteed weak user's quality of service (QoS) by jointly optimizing power splitting factors, beamforming coefficients, and RIS reflection coefficients in two transmission phases. The formulated problem is difficult to solve due to its complex and non-convex constraints. To tackle this challenging problem, we first use alternating optimization (AO) framework to transform it into three subproblems, and then use the penalty-based arithmetic-geometric mean approximation (PBAGM) algorithm and the successive convex approximation (SCA)-based method to solve them. Numerical results verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the baseline schemes.
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.
Federated Learning has promised a new approach to resolve the challenges in machine learning by bringing computation to the data. The popularity of the approach has led to rapid progress in the algorithmic aspects and the emergence of systems capable of simulating Federated Learning. State of art systems in Federated Learning support a single node aggregator that is insufficient to train a large corpus of devices or train larger-sized models. As the model size or the number of devices increase the single node aggregator incurs memory and computation burden while performing fusion tasks. It also faces communication bottlenecks when a large number of model updates are sent to a single node. We classify the workload for the aggregator into categories and propose a new aggregation service for handling each load. Our aggregation service is based on a holistic approach that chooses the best solution depending on the model update size and the number of clients. Our system provides a fault-tolerant, robust and efficient aggregation solution utilizing existing parallel and distributed frameworks. Through evaluation, we show the shortcomings of the state of art approaches and how a single solution is not suitable for all aggregation requirements. We also provide a comparison of current frameworks with our system through extensive experiments.
Requirements engineering (RE) activities for Machine Learning (ML) are not well-established and researched in the literature. Many issues and challenges exist when specifying, designing, and developing ML-enabled systems. Adding more focus on RE for ML can help to develop more reliable ML-enabled systems. Based on insights collected from previous work and industrial experiences, we propose a catalogue of 45 concerns to be considered when specifying ML-enabled systems, covering five different perspectives we identified as relevant for such systems: objectives, user experience, infrastructure, model, and data. Examples of such concerns include the execution engine and telemetry for the infrastructure perspective, and explainability and reproducibility for the model perspective. We conducted a focus group session with eight software professionals with experience developing ML-enabled systems to validate the importance, quality and feasibility of using our catalogue. The feedback allowed us to improve the catalogue and confirmed its practical relevance. The main research contribution of this work consists in providing a validated set of concerns grouped into perspectives that can be used by requirements engineers to support the specification of ML-enabled systems.
This manuscript portrays optimization as a process. In many practical applications the environment is so complex that it is infeasible to lay out a comprehensive theoretical model and use classical algorithmic theory and mathematical optimization. It is necessary as well as beneficial to take a robust approach, by applying an optimization method that learns as one goes along, learning from experience as more aspects of the problem are observed. This view of optimization as a process has become prominent in varied fields and has led to some spectacular success in modeling and systems that are now part of our daily lives.
Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. As the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Different from previous surveys, this survey paper reviews over forty representative transfer learning approaches from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.
In recent years, mobile devices have gained increasingly development with stronger computation capability and larger storage. Some of the computation-intensive machine learning and deep learning tasks can now be run on mobile devices. To take advantage of the resources available on mobile devices and preserve users' privacy, the idea of mobile distributed machine learning is proposed. It uses local hardware resources and local data to solve machine learning sub-problems on mobile devices, and only uploads computation results instead of original data to contribute to the optimization of the global model. This architecture can not only relieve computation and storage burden on servers, but also protect the users' sensitive information. Another benefit is the bandwidth reduction, as various kinds of local data can now participate in the training process without being uploaded to the server. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on recent studies of mobile distributed machine learning. We survey a number of widely-used mobile distributed machine learning methods. We also present an in-depth discussion on the challenges and future directions in this area. We believe that this survey can demonstrate a clear overview of mobile distributed machine learning and provide guidelines on applying mobile distributed machine learning to real applications.