In this paper, we develop a comprehensive and tractable analytical framework based on stochastic geometry to evaluate the performance of large-scale fog-aided device-to-device (F-D2D) networks with opportunistic content multicasting. As a part of the analysis, to resolve the contentions of file requests from the cache-incapable conventional user equipments (C-UEs), two simple yet typical candidate file selection schemes for cache-enabled fog user equipments (F-UEs), namely the random file selection (RFS) scheme and the most requested file selection (MRFS) scheme, are considered. Further, to suppress the harmful interference among the concurrent transmissions of F-UEs, a multicast-based opportunistic content delivery strategy is proposed by exploring the idea of opportunistic spectrum access (OSA). Assuming decentralized probabilistic caching, we first derive the activation probability of the F-UEs. Then, by adopting an appropriate approximation, the cache-hit probability, the coverage probability, and thereby the successful content delivery probability (SCDP) of the F-D2D network are evaluated. We also develop an iterative algorithm based on the gradient projection method to obtain a suboptimal caching policy for the maximization of SCDP. Extensive simulation and numerical results are presented to verify our analysis and demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed multicast-based opportunistic content delivery strategy.
Reviews contain rich information about product characteristics and user interests and thus are commonly used to boost recommender system performance. Specifically, previous work show that jointly learning to perform review generation improves rating prediction performance. Meanwhile, these model-produced reviews serve as recommendation explanations, providing the user with insights on predicted ratings. However, while existing models could generate fluent, human-like reviews, it is unclear to what degree the reviews fully uncover the rationale behind the jointly predicted rating. In this work, we perform a series of evaluations that probes state-of-the-art models and their review generation component. We show that the generated explanations are brittle and need further evaluation before being taken as literal rationales for the estimated ratings.
Data stream classification is an important problem in the field of machine learning. Due to the non-stationary nature of the data where the underlying distribution changes over time (concept drift), the model needs to continuously adapt to new data statistics. Stream-based Active Learning (AL) approaches address this problem by interactively querying a human expert to provide new data labels for the most recent samples, within a limited budget. Existing AL strategies assume that labels are immediately available, while in a real-world scenario the expert requires time to provide a queried label (verification latency), and by the time the requested labels arrive they may not be relevant anymore. In this article, we investigate the influence of finite, time-variable, and unknown verification delay, in the presence of concept drift on AL approaches. We propose PRopagate (PR), a latency independent utility estimator which also predicts the requested, but not yet known, labels. Furthermore, we propose a drift-dependent dynamic budget strategy, which uses a variable distribution of the labelling budget over time, after a detected drift. Thorough experimental evaluation, with both synthetic and real-world non-stationary datasets, and different settings of verification latency and budget are conducted and analyzed. We empirically show that the proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art. Additionally, we demonstrate that with variable budget allocation in time, it is possible to boost the performance of AL strategies, without increasing the overall labeling budget.
Operational flare forecasting aims at providing predictions that can be used to make decisions, typically at a daily scale, about the space weather impacts of flare occurrence. This study shows that video-based deep learning can be used for operational purposes when the training and validation sets used for the network optimization are generated while accounting for the periodicity of the solar cycle. Specifically, the paper describes an algorithm that can be applied to build up sets of active regions that are balanced according to the flare class rates associated to a specific cycle phase. These sets are used to train and validate a Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Network made of a combination of a convolutional neural network and a Long-Short Memory network. The reliability of this approach is assessed in the case of two prediction windows containing the solar storm of March 2015 and September 2017, respectively.
Adversarial examples, inputs designed to induce worst-case behavior in machine learning models, have been extensively studied over the past decade. Yet, our understanding of this phenomenon stems from a rather fragmented pool of knowledge; at present, there are a handful of attacks, each with disparate assumptions in threat models and incomparable definitions of optimality. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to characterize worst-case (i.e., optimal) adversaries. We first introduce an extensible decomposition of attacks in adversarial machine learning by atomizing attack components into surfaces and travelers. With our decomposition, we enumerate over components to create 576 attacks (568 of which were previously unexplored). Next, we propose the Pareto Ensemble Attack (PEA): a theoretical attack that upper-bounds attack performance. With our new attacks, we measure performance relative to the PEA on: both robust and non-robust models, seven datasets, and three extended lp-based threat models incorporating compute costs, formalizing the Space of Adversarial Strategies. From our evaluation we find that attack performance to be highly contextual: the domain, model robustness, and threat model can have a profound influence on attack efficacy. Our investigation suggests that future studies measuring the security of machine learning should: (1) be contextualized to the domain & threat models, and (2) go beyond the handful of known attacks used today.
In high dimensional regression, where the number of covariates is of the order of the number of observations, ridge penalization is often used as a remedy against overfitting. Unfortunately, for correlated covariates such regularisation typically induces in generalized linear models not only shrinking of the estimated parameter vector, but also an unwanted \emph{rotation} relative to the true vector. We show analytically how this problem can be removed by using a generalization of ridge penalization, and we analyse the asymptotic properties of the corresponding estimators in the high dimensional regime, using the cavity method. Our results also provide a quantitative rationale for tuning the parameter that controlling the amount of shrinking. We compare our theoretical predictions with simulated data and find excellent agreement.
In recent studies, the generalization properties for distributed learning and random features assumed the existence of the target concept over the hypothesis space. However, this strict condition is not applicable to the more common non-attainable case. In this paper, using refined proof techniques, we first extend the optimal rates for distributed learning with random features to the non-attainable case. Then, we reduce the number of required random features via data-dependent generating strategy, and improve the allowed number of partitions with additional unlabeled data. Theoretical analysis shows these techniques remarkably reduce computational cost while preserving the optimal generalization accuracy under standard assumptions. Finally, we conduct several experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets, and the empirical results validate our theoretical findings.
Federated learning (FL) provides an efficient paradigm to jointly train a global model leveraging data from distributed users. As the local training data come from different users who may not be trustworthy, several studies have shown that FL is vulnerable to poisoning attacks. Meanwhile, to protect the privacy of local users, FL is always trained in a differentially private way (DPFL). Thus, in this paper, we ask: Can we leverage the innate privacy property of DPFL to provide certified robustness against poisoning attacks? Can we further improve the privacy of FL to improve such certification? We first investigate both user-level and instance-level privacy of FL and propose novel mechanisms to achieve improved instance-level privacy. We then provide two robustness certification criteria: certified prediction and certified attack cost for DPFL on both levels. Theoretically, we prove the certified robustness of DPFL under a bounded number of adversarial users or instances. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments to verify our theories under a range of attacks on different datasets. We show that DPFL with a tighter privacy guarantee always provides stronger robustness certification in terms of certified attack cost, but the optimal certified prediction is achieved under a proper balance between privacy protection and utility loss.
Subsampling or subdata selection is a useful approach in large-scale statistical learning. Most existing studies focus on model-based subsampling methods which significantly depend on the model assumption. In this paper, we consider the model-free subsampling strategy for generating subdata from the original full data. In order to measure the goodness of representation of a subdata with respect to the original data, we propose a criterion, generalized empirical F-discrepancy (GEFD), and study its theoretical properties in connection with the classical generalized L2-discrepancy in the theory of uniform designs. These properties allow us to develop a kind of low-GEFD data-driven subsampling method based on the existing uniform designs. By simulation examples and a real case study, we show that the proposed subsampling method is superior to the random sampling method. Moreover, our method keeps robust under diverse model specifications while other popular subsampling methods are under-performing. In practice, such a model-free property is more appealing than the model-based subsampling methods, where the latter may have poor performance when the model is misspecified, as demonstrated in our simulation studies.
Properly handling missing data is a fundamental challenge in recommendation. Most present works perform negative sampling from unobserved data to supply the training of recommender models with negative signals. Nevertheless, existing negative sampling strategies, either static or adaptive ones, are insufficient to yield high-quality negative samples --- both informative to model training and reflective of user real needs. In this work, we hypothesize that item knowledge graph (KG), which provides rich relations among items and KG entities, could be useful to infer informative and factual negative samples. Towards this end, we develop a new negative sampling model, Knowledge Graph Policy Network (KGPolicy), which works as a reinforcement learning agent to explore high-quality negatives. Specifically, by conducting our designed exploration operations, it navigates from the target positive interaction, adaptively receives knowledge-aware negative signals, and ultimately yields a potential negative item to train the recommender. We tested on a matrix factorization (MF) model equipped with KGPolicy, and it achieves significant improvements over both state-of-the-art sampling methods like DNS and IRGAN, and KG-enhanced recommender models like KGAT. Further analyses from different angles provide insights of knowledge-aware sampling. We release the codes and datasets at //github.com/xiangwang1223/kgpolicy.
Many current applications use recommendations in order to modify the natural user behavior, such as to increase the number of sales or the time spent on a website. This results in a gap between the final recommendation objective and the classical setup where recommendation candidates are evaluated by their coherence with past user behavior, by predicting either the missing entries in the user-item matrix, or the most likely next event. To bridge this gap, we optimize a recommendation policy for the task of increasing the desired outcome versus the organic user behavior. We show this is equivalent to learning to predict recommendation outcomes under a fully random recommendation policy. To this end, we propose a new domain adaptation algorithm that learns from logged data containing outcomes from a biased recommendation policy and predicts recommendation outcomes according to random exposure. We compare our method against state-of-the-art factorization methods, in addition to new approaches of causal recommendation and show significant improvements.