Cloud computing has become the de facto paradigm for delivering software to system users, with organizations and enterprises of all sizes making use of cloud services in some way. On the surface, adopting the cloud appears to be a very efficient approach for offloading concerns such as infrastructure management, logistics, and most importantly for this work, energy consumption and consequent carbon emissions to the cloud service provider. However, this is in many ways not an appropriately accountable solution to managing the contribution of the ICT sector to global emissions. To this effect, in this paper we report on an exploratory case study done in collaboration with a Software as a Service provider operating globally in the telecommunications sector. The study reckons with the service provider using multi-tenant, that is, shared, off-premises data centers for hosting their private cloud infrastructure towards developing a fair model of allocating operational emissions among the service tenants -- customer companies with many distinct users. The developed emissions model has to account for allocating in an appropriate manner the generated emissions between the tenants of the software provider services, and among the different tenants of the same data center. A carbon footprint report generator is developed building on the proposed model which is, in turn, used to present sustainability reports to involved stakeholders for evaluation purposes. Our results show that the model is perceived as transparent, informative, and fair, with requested improvements focusing mainly on the generated reports and the information contained therein.
Large language models trained on source code can support a variety of software development tasks, such as code recommendation and program repair. Large amounts of data for training such models benefit the models' performance. However, the size of the data and models results in long training times and high energy consumption. While publishing source code allows for replicability, users need to repeat the expensive training process if models are not shared. The main goal of the study is to investigate if publications that trained language models for software engineering (SE) tasks share source code and trained artifacts. The second goal is to analyze the transparency on training energy usage. We perform a snowballing-based literature search to find publications on language models for source code, and analyze their reusability from a sustainability standpoint. From 494 unique publications, we identified 293 relevant publications that use language models to address code-related tasks. Among them, 27% (79 out of 293) make artifacts available for reuse. This can be in the form of tools or IDE plugins designed for specific tasks or task-agnostic models that can be fine-tuned for a variety of downstream tasks. Moreover, we collect insights on the hardware used for model training, as well as training time, which together determine the energy consumption of the development process. We find that there are deficiencies in the sharing of information and artifacts for current studies on source code models for software engineering tasks, with 40% of the surveyed papers not sharing source code or trained artifacts. We recommend the sharing of source code as well as trained artifacts, to enable sustainable reproducibility. Moreover, comprehensive information on training times and hardware configurations should be shared for transparency on a model's carbon footprint.
Recommendation algorithm plays an important role in recommendation system (RS), which predicts users' interests and preferences for some given items based on their known information. Recently, a recommendation algorithm based on the graph Laplacian regularization was proposed, which treats the prediction problem of the recommendation system as a reconstruction issue of small samples of the graph signal under the same graph model. Such a technique takes into account both known and unknown labeled samples information, thereby obtaining good prediction accuracy. However, when the data size is large, solving the reconstruction model is computationally expensive even with an approximate strategy. In this paper, we propose an equivalent reconstruction model that can be solved exactly with extremely low computational cost. Finally, a final prediction algorithm is proposed. We find in the experiments that the proposed method significantly reduces the computational cost while maintaining a good prediction accuracy.
With recent advancements in technology, the threats of privacy violations of individuals' sensitive data are surging. Location data, in particular, have been shown to carry a substantial amount of sensitive information. A standard method to mitigate the privacy risks for location data consists in adding noise to the true values to achieve geo-indistinguishability (geo-ind). However, geo-ind alone is not sufficient to cover all privacy concerns. In particular, isolated locations are not sufficiently protected by the state-of-the-art Laplace mechanism (LAP) for geo-ind. In this paper, we focus on a mechanism based on the Blahut-Arimoto algorithm (BA) from the rate-distortion theory. We show that BA, in addition to providing geo-ind, enforces an elastic metric that mitigates the problem of isolation. Furthermore, BA provides an optimal trade-off between information leakage and quality of service. We then proceed to study the utility of BA in terms of the statistics that can be derived from the reported data, focusing on the inference of the original distribution. To this purpose, we de-noise the reported data by applying the iterative Bayesian update (IBU), an instance of the expectation-maximization method. It turns out that BA and IBU are dual to each other, and as a result, they work well together, in the sense that the statistical utility of BA is quite good and better than LAP for high privacy levels. Exploiting these properties of BA and IBU, we propose an iterative method, PRIVIC, for a privacy-friendly incremental collection of location data from users by service providers. We illustrate the soundness and functionality of our method both analytically and with experiments.
The rise of mobile AI accelerators allows latency-sensitive applications to execute lightweight Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on the client side. However, critical applications require powerful models that edge devices cannot host and must therefore offload requests, where the high-dimensional data will compete for limited bandwidth. This work proposes shifting away from focusing on executing shallow layers of partitioned DNNs. Instead, it advocates concentrating the local resources on variational compression optimized for machine interpretability. We introduce a novel framework for resource-conscious compression models and extensively evaluate our method in an environment reflecting the asymmetric resource distribution between edge devices and servers. Our method achieves 60% lower bitrate than a state-of-the-art SC method without decreasing accuracy and is up to 16x faster than offloading with existing codec standards.
Modern computing requires efficient and dependable data transport. Current solutions like Bluetooth, SMS (Short Message Service), and Email have their restrictions on efficiency, file size, compatibility, and cost. In order to facilitate direct communication and resource sharing amongst linked devices, this research study offers a cross-platform peer-to-peer (P2P) data transmission solution that takes advantage of P2P networks' features. The system enables cost-effective and high-performance data transport by using the compute, storage, and network resources of the participating devices. Simple file sharing, adaptability, dependability, and high performance are some of the important benefits. The examination of the suggested solution is presented in this paper and includes discussion of the P2P architecture, data transfer mechanisms, performance assessment, implementation issues, security concerns, and the potential difficulties that needs to be addressed. The research intends to validate the efficacy and potential of the suggested cross-platform P2P data transfer solution, delivering better efficiency and dependability for users across various platforms, through practical investigations and comparisons with existing approaches.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved unprecedented success in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), including computer vision, natural language processing and speech recognition. However, their superior performance comes at the considerable cost of computational complexity, which greatly hinders their applications in many resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Therefore, methods and techniques that are able to lift the efficiency bottleneck while preserving the high accuracy of DNNs are in great demand in order to enable numerous edge AI applications. This paper provides an overview of efficient deep learning methods, systems and applications. We start from introducing popular model compression methods, including pruning, factorization, quantization as well as compact model design. To reduce the large design cost of these manual solutions, we discuss the AutoML framework for each of them, such as neural architecture search (NAS) and automated pruning and quantization. We then cover efficient on-device training to enable user customization based on the local data on mobile devices. Apart from general acceleration techniques, we also showcase several task-specific accelerations for point cloud, video and natural language processing by exploiting their spatial sparsity and temporal/token redundancy. Finally, to support all these algorithmic advancements, we introduce the efficient deep learning system design from both software and hardware perspectives.
Since the cyberspace consolidated as fifth warfare dimension, the different actors of the defense sector began an arms race toward achieving cyber superiority, on which research, academic and industrial stakeholders contribute from a dual vision, mostly linked to a large and heterogeneous heritage of developments and adoption of civilian cybersecurity capabilities. In this context, augmenting the conscious of the context and warfare environment, risks and impacts of cyber threats on kinetic actuations became a critical rule-changer that military decision-makers are considering. A major challenge on acquiring mission-centric Cyber Situational Awareness (CSA) is the dynamic inference and assessment of the vertical propagations from situations that occurred at the mission supportive Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), up to their relevance at military tactical, operational and strategical views. In order to contribute on acquiring CSA, this paper addresses a major gap in the cyber defence state-of-the-art: the dynamic identification of Key Cyber Terrains (KCT) on a mission-centric context. Accordingly, the proposed KCT identification approach explores the dependency degrees among tasks and assets defined by commanders as part of the assessment criteria. These are correlated with the discoveries on the operational network and the asset vulnerabilities identified thorough the supported mission development. The proposal is presented as a reference model that reveals key aspects for mission-centric KCT analysis and supports its enforcement and further enforcement by including an illustrative application case.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.
While existing work in robust deep learning has focused on small pixel-level $\ell_p$ norm-based perturbations, this may not account for perturbations encountered in several real world settings. In many such cases although test data might not be available, broad specifications about the types of perturbations (such as an unknown degree of rotation) may be known. We consider a setup where robustness is expected over an unseen test domain that is not i.i.d. but deviates from the training domain. While this deviation may not be exactly known, its broad characterization is specified a priori, in terms of attributes. We propose an adversarial training approach which learns to generate new samples so as to maximize exposure of the classifier to the attributes-space, without having access to the data from the test domain. Our adversarial training solves a min-max optimization problem, with the inner maximization generating adversarial perturbations, and the outer minimization finding model parameters by optimizing the loss on adversarial perturbations generated from the inner maximization. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on three types of naturally occurring perturbations -- object-related shifts, geometric transformations, and common image corruptions. Our approach enables deep neural networks to be robust against a wide range of naturally occurring perturbations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach by showing the robustness gains of deep neural networks trained using our adversarial training on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and a new variant of the CLEVR dataset.