Safety and security issues in programmable IoT systems are still a pressing problem. Many solutions have been proposed to curb unexpected behavior of automation apps installed on IoT platforms by enforcing safety and security policies at runtime. However, all prior work addresses a weaker version of the actual problem as they consider a simple threat model, which is far from the reality. Moreover, these solutions are heavily dependent on the installed apps and catered to specific IoT platforms, which can unfortunately result in inaccurate runtime enforcement of policies. In this paper, we address a stronger version of the problem by considering a realistic threat model, where (i) undesired cyber actions (e.g., lock()/unlock()) can come from not only automation platform backends (e.g., SmartThings) but also close-sourced thirdparty services (e.g., IFTTT), and (ii) physical actions (e.g., user interactions) on devices can move the IoT system to an unsafe state. We propose a runtime mechanism, dubbed Maverick, which employs an app-independent, platform-agnostic mediator to enforce policies against all undesired cyber actions and applies corrective-actions to bring the IoT system back to a safe state if it ever transitions to an unsafe state. To assist users for writing policies, Maverick is equipped with a policy language capable of expressing rich temporal invariants and an automated toolchain that includes a policy synthesizer and a policy analyzer. We implemented Maverick in a prototype and showed its efficacy in both physical and virtual testbeds where it incurred minimal overhead.
This work introduces a reduced order modeling (ROM) framework for the solution of parameterized second-order linear elliptic partial differential equations formulated on unfitted geometries. The goal is to construct efficient projection-based ROMs, which rely on techniques such as the reduced basis method and discrete empirical interpolation. The presence of geometrical parameters in unfitted domain discretizations entails challenges for the application of standard ROMs. Therefore, in this work we propose a methodology based on i) extension of snapshots on the background mesh and ii) localization strategies to decrease the number of reduced basis functions. The method we obtain is computationally efficient and accurate, while it is agnostic with respect to the underlying discretization choice. We test the applicability of the proposed framework with numerical experiments on two model problems, namely the Poisson and linear elasticity problems. In particular, we study several benchmarks formulated on two-dimensional, trimmed domains discretized with splines and we observe a significant reduction of the online computational cost compared to standard ROMs for the same level of accuracy. Moreover, we show the applicability of our methodology to a three-dimensional geometry of a linear elastic problem.
The 6G Internet poses intense demands for intelligent and customized designs to cope with the surging network scale, dynamically time-varying environments, diverse user requirements, and complicated manual configuration. However, traditional rule-based solutions heavily rely on human efforts and expertise, while data-driven intelligent algorithms still lack interpretability and generalization. In this paper, we propose the AIGI (AI-Generated Internet), a novel intention-driven design paradigm for the 6G Internet, which allows operators to quickly generate a variety of customized network solutions and achieve expert-free problem optimization. Driven by the diffusion model-based learning approach, AIGI has great potential to learn the reward-maximizing trajectories, automatically satisfy multiple constraints, adapt to different objectives and scenarios, or even intelligently create novel designs and mechanisms unseen in existing network environments. Finally, we conduct a use case to demonstrate that AIGI can effectively guide the design of transmit power allocation in digital twin-based 6G networks.
A central task in control theory, artificial intelligence, and formal methods is to synthesize reward-maximizing strategies for agents that operate in partially unknown environments. In environments modeled by gray-box Markov decision processes (MDPs), the impact of the agents' actions are known in terms of successor states but not the stochastics involved. In this paper, we devise a strategy synthesis algorithm for gray-box MDPs via reinforcement learning that utilizes interval MDPs as internal model. To compete with limited sampling access in reinforcement learning, we incorporate two novel concepts into our algorithm, focusing on rapid and successful learning rather than on stochastic guarantees and optimality: lower confidence bound exploration reinforces variants of already learned practical strategies and action scoping reduces the learning action space to promising actions. We illustrate benefits of our algorithms by means of a prototypical implementation applied on examples from the AI and formal methods communities.
Reward-free reinforcement learning (RF-RL), a recently introduced RL paradigm, relies on random action-taking to explore the unknown environment without any reward feedback information. While the primary goal of the exploration phase in RF-RL is to reduce the uncertainty in the estimated model with minimum number of trajectories, in practice, the agent often needs to abide by certain safety constraint at the same time. It remains unclear how such safe exploration requirement would affect the corresponding sample complexity in order to achieve the desired optimality of the obtained policy in planning. In this work, we make a first attempt to answer this question. In particular, we consider the scenario where a safe baseline policy is known beforehand, and propose a unified Safe reWard-frEe ExploraTion (SWEET) framework. We then particularize the SWEET framework to the tabular and the low-rank MDP settings, and develop algorithms coined Tabular-SWEET and Low-rank-SWEET, respectively. Both algorithms leverage the concavity and continuity of the newly introduced truncated value functions, and are guaranteed to achieve zero constraint violation during exploration with high probability. Furthermore, both algorithms can provably find a near-optimal policy subject to any constraint in the planning phase. Remarkably, the sample complexities under both algorithms match or even outperform the state of the art in their constraint-free counterparts up to some constant factors, proving that safety constraint hardly increases the sample complexity for RF-RL.
Despite the advancement of machine learning techniques in recent years, state-of-the-art systems lack robustness to "real world" events, where the input distributions and tasks encountered by the deployed systems will not be limited to the original training context, and systems will instead need to adapt to novel distributions and tasks while deployed. This critical gap may be addressed through the development of "Lifelong Learning" systems that are capable of 1) Continuous Learning, 2) Transfer and Adaptation, and 3) Scalability. Unfortunately, efforts to improve these capabilities are typically treated as distinct areas of research that are assessed independently, without regard to the impact of each separate capability on other aspects of the system. We instead propose a holistic approach, using a suite of metrics and an evaluation framework to assess Lifelong Learning in a principled way that is agnostic to specific domains or system techniques. Through five case studies, we show that this suite of metrics can inform the development of varied and complex Lifelong Learning systems. We highlight how the proposed suite of metrics quantifies performance trade-offs present during Lifelong Learning system development - both the widely discussed Stability-Plasticity dilemma and the newly proposed relationship between Sample Efficient and Robust Learning. Further, we make recommendations for the formulation and use of metrics to guide the continuing development of Lifelong Learning systems and assess their progress in the future.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
Effective multi-robot teams require the ability to move to goals in complex environments in order to address real-world applications such as search and rescue. Multi-robot teams should be able to operate in a completely decentralized manner, with individual robot team members being capable of acting without explicit communication between neighbors. In this paper, we propose a novel game theoretic model that enables decentralized and communication-free navigation to a goal position. Robots each play their own distributed game by estimating the behavior of their local teammates in order to identify behaviors that move them in the direction of the goal, while also avoiding obstacles and maintaining team cohesion without collisions. We prove theoretically that generated actions approach a Nash equilibrium, which also corresponds to an optimal strategy identified for each robot. We show through extensive simulations that our approach enables decentralized and communication-free navigation by a multi-robot system to a goal position, and is able to avoid obstacles and collisions, maintain connectivity, and respond robustly to sensor noise.
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays a critical role in recommender systems and online advertising. The data used in these applications are multi-field categorical data, where each feature belongs to one field. Field information is proved to be important and there are several works considering fields in their models. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to model the field information effectively and efficiently. The proposed approach is a direct improvement of FwFM, and is named as Field-matrixed Factorization Machines (FmFM, or $FM^2$). We also proposed a new explanation of FM and FwFM within the FmFM framework, and compared it with the FFM. Besides pruning the cross terms, our model supports field-specific variable dimensions of embedding vectors, which acts as soft pruning. We also proposed an efficient way to minimize the dimension while keeping the model performance. The FmFM model can also be optimized further by caching the intermediate vectors, and it only takes thousands of floating-point operations (FLOPs) to make a prediction. Our experiment results show that it can out-perform the FFM, which is more complex. The FmFM model's performance is also comparable to DNN models which require much more FLOPs in runtime.
Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.
Within the rapidly developing Internet of Things (IoT), numerous and diverse physical devices, Edge devices, Cloud infrastructure, and their quality of service requirements (QoS), need to be represented within a unified specification in order to enable rapid IoT application development, monitoring, and dynamic reconfiguration. But heterogeneities among different configuration knowledge representation models pose limitations for acquisition, discovery and curation of configuration knowledge for coordinated IoT applications. This paper proposes a unified data model to represent IoT resource configuration knowledge artifacts. It also proposes IoT-CANE (Context-Aware recommendatioN systEm) to facilitate incremental knowledge acquisition and declarative context driven knowledge recommendation.