Recently it was shown that the seminal Maddah-Ali and Niesen (MAN) coded caching scheme leaks the demand information of each user to the others. Many works have considered coded caching with demand privacy, while each non-trivial existing coded caching scheme with private demands was built on the fact that the cache information of each user is private to the others. However, most of these schemes leak the users' cache information. Consequently, in most realistic settings (e.g., video streaming), where the system is used over time with multiple sequential transmission rounds, these schemes leak demand privacy beyond the first round. This observation motivates our new formulation of coded caching with simultaneously private demands and caches. The main contribution of this paper is a new construction that generates private coded caching schemes by leveraging two-server private information retrieval (PIR) schemes. We show that if in the PIR scheme the demand is uniform over all files and the queries are independent, the resulting caching scheme is private on both the demands and on the caches. Interestingly, we propose a new construction of two-server PIR schemes in this class by leveraging coded caching schemes. By applying the seminal MAN coded caching scheme into our construction, the resulting two-server PIR scheme is proved to be order optimal. This is a second new structural result, somehow closing the loop in the relation between coded caching and PIR. Finally, to explore a broader tradeoff between cache privacy and transmission load, we relax the cache privacy constraint and introduce the definition of leakage on cache information. Then, again as a by-product of our new construction, we propose new schemes with perfect demand privacy and imperfect cache privacy that achieve an order-gain in load with respect to the scheme with perfect privacy on both demands and caches.
Despite progress in automated fact-checking, most systems require a significant amount of labeled training data, which is expensive. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot method, which instead of operating directly on the claim and evidence sentences, decomposes them into semantic triples augmented using external knowledge graphs, and uses large language models trained for natural language inference. This allows it to generalize to adversarial datasets and domains that supervised models require specific training data for. Our empirical results show that our approach outperforms previous zero-shot approaches on FEVER, FEVER-Symmetric, FEVER 2.0, and Climate-FEVER, while being comparable or better than supervised models on the adversarial and the out-of-domain datasets.
Service platforms must determine rules for matching heterogeneous demand (customers) and supply (workers) that arrive randomly over time and may be lost if forced to wait too long for a match. Our objective is to maximize the cumulative value of matches, minus costs incurred when demand and supply wait. We develop a fluid model, that approximates the evolution of the stochastic model, and captures explicitly the nonlinear dependence between the amount of demand and supply waiting and the distribution of their patience times, also known as reneging or abandonment times in the literature. The fluid model invariant states approximate the steady-state mean queue-lengths in the stochastic system, and, therefore, can be used to develop an optimization problem whose optimal solution provides matching rates between demand and supply types that are asymptotically optimal (on fluid scale, as demand and supply rates grow large). We propose a discrete review matching policy that asymptotically achieves the optimal matching rates. We further show that when the aforementioned matching optimization problem has an optimal extreme point solution, which occurs when the patience time distributions have increasing hazard rate functions, a state-independent priority policy, that ranks the edges on the bipartite graph connecting demand and supply, is asymptotically optimal. A key insight from this analysis is that the ranking critically depends on the patience time distributions, and may be different for different distributions even if they have the same mean, demonstrating that models assuming, e.g., exponential patience times for tractability, may lack robustness. Finally, we observe that when holding costs are zero, a discrete review policy, that does not require knowledge of inter-arrival and patience time distributions, is asymptotically optimal.
It is anticipated that integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) would be one of the key enablers of next-generation wireless networks (such as beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G) for supporting a variety of emerging applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the recent advances in ISAC systems, with a particular focus on their foundations, system design, networking aspects and ISAC applications. Furthermore, we discuss the corresponding open questions of the above that emerged in each issue. Hence, we commence with the information theory of sensing and communications (S$\&$C), followed by the information-theoretic limits of ISAC systems by shedding light on the fundamental performance metrics. Next, we discuss their clock synchronization and phase offset problems, the associated Pareto-optimal signaling strategies, as well as the associated super-resolution ISAC system design. Moreover, we envision that ISAC ushers in a paradigm shift for the future cellular networks relying on network sensing, transforming the classic cellular architecture, cross-layer resource management methods, and transmission protocols. In ISAC applications, we further highlight the security and privacy issues of wireless sensing. Finally, we close by studying the recent advances in a representative ISAC use case, namely the multi-object multi-task (MOMT) recognition problem using wireless signals.
Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with high dimensional and continuous observations, such as camera images, is required for many real life robotics and planning problems. Recent researches suggested machine learned probabilistic models as observation models, but their use is currently too computationally expensive for online deployment. We deal with the question of what would be the implication of using simplified observation models for planning, while retaining formal guarantees on the quality of the solution. Our main contribution is a novel probabilistic bound based on a statistical total variation distance of the simplified model. We show that it bounds the theoretical POMDP value w.r.t. original model, from the empirical planned value with the simplified model, by generalizing recent results of particle-belief MDP concentration bounds. Our calculations can be separated into offline and online parts, and we arrive at formal guarantees without having to access the costly model at all during planning, which is also a novel result. Finally, we demonstrate in simulation how to integrate the bound into the routine of an existing continuous online POMDP solver.
We present a SMT-based checker for the recently proposed VIPR certificate, the first proof format for the correctness of answers produced by mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) solvers. The checker is based on the equivalence between the correctness of a VIPR certificate and the satisfiability of a formula in the theory of linear/integer real arithmetic. Evaluation on existing benchmark instances demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach.
Many real world data, particularly in the natural sciences and computer vision, lie on known Riemannian manifolds such as spheres, tori or the group of rotation matrices. The predominant approaches to learning a distribution on such a manifold require solving a differential equation in order to sample from the model and evaluate densities. The resulting sampling times are slowed down by a high number of function evaluations. In this work, we propose an alternative approach which only requires a single function evaluation followed by a projection to the manifold. Training is achieved by an adaptation of the recently proposed free-form flow framework to Riemannian manifolds. The central idea is to estimate the gradient of the negative log-likelihood via a trace evaluated in the tangent space. We evaluate our method on various manifolds, and find significantly faster inference at competitive performance compared to previous work. We make our code public at //github.com/vislearn/FFF.
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on "emotion shift" frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an "easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets.
The military is investigating methods to improve communication and agility in its multi-domain operations (MDO). Nascent popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) has gained traction in public and government domains. Its usage in MDO may revolutionize future battlefields and may enable strategic advantage. While this technology offers leverage to military capabilities, it comes with challenges where one is the uncertainty and associated risk. A key question is how can these uncertainties be addressed. Recently published studies proposed information camouflage to transform information from one data domain to another. As this is comparatively a new approach, we investigate challenges of such transformations and how these associated uncertainties can be detected and addressed, specifically unknown-unknowns to improve decision-making.
Deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Data Fusion techniques have gained popularity in public and government domains. This usually requires capturing and consolidating data from multiple sources. As datasets do not necessarily originate from identical sensors, fused data typically results in a complex data problem. Because military is investigating how heterogeneous IoT devices can aid processes and tasks, we investigate a multi-sensor approach. Moreover, we propose a signal to image encoding approach to transform information (signal) to integrate (fuse) data from IoT wearable devices to an image which is invertible and easier to visualize supporting decision making. Furthermore, we investigate the challenge of enabling an intelligent identification and detection operation and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Deep Learning and Anomaly Detection models that can support future application that utilizes hand gesture data from wearable devices.
Automatic KB completion for commonsense knowledge graphs (e.g., ATOMIC and ConceptNet) poses unique challenges compared to the much studied conventional knowledge bases (e.g., Freebase). Commonsense knowledge graphs use free-form text to represent nodes, resulting in orders of magnitude more nodes compared to conventional KBs (18x more nodes in ATOMIC compared to Freebase (FB15K-237)). Importantly, this implies significantly sparser graph structures - a major challenge for existing KB completion methods that assume densely connected graphs over a relatively smaller set of nodes. In this paper, we present novel KB completion models that can address these challenges by exploiting the structural and semantic context of nodes. Specifically, we investigate two key ideas: (1) learning from local graph structure, using graph convolutional networks and automatic graph densification and (2) transfer learning from pre-trained language models to knowledge graphs for enhanced contextual representation of knowledge. We describe our method to incorporate information from both these sources in a joint model and provide the first empirical results for KB completion on ATOMIC and evaluation with ranking metrics on ConceptNet. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of language model representations in boosting link prediction performance and the advantages of learning from local graph structure (+1.5 points in MRR for ConceptNet) when training on subgraphs for computational efficiency. Further analysis on model predictions shines light on the types of commonsense knowledge that language models capture well.