This paper is concerned with the computation of the local Lipschitz constant of feedforward neural networks (FNNs) with activation functions being rectified linear units (ReLUs). The local Lipschitz constant of an FNN for a target input is a reasonable measure for its quantitative evaluation of the reliability. By following a standard procedure using multipliers that capture the behavior of ReLUs,we first reduce the upper bound computation problem of the local Lipschitz constant into a semidefinite programming problem (SDP). Here we newly introduce copositive multipliers to capture the ReLU behavior accurately. Then, by considering the dual of the SDP for the upper bound computation, we second derive a viable test to conclude the exactness of the computed upper bound. However, these SDPs are intractable for practical FNNs with hundreds of ReLUs. To address this issue, we further propose a method to construct a reduced order model whose input-output property is identical to the original FNN over a neighborhood of the target input. We finally illustrate the effectiveness of the model reduction and exactness verification methods with numerical examples of practical FNNs.
This paper explores the transformative potential of digital twin (DT) technology in the context of non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). NTNs, encompassing both airborne and space-borne elements, present unique challenges in network control, management, and optimization. DT is a novel approach to design and manage complicated cyber-physical systems with a high degree of automation, intelligence, and resilience. The adoption of DTs within NTNs offers a dynamic and detailed virtual representation of the entire ecosystem, enabling real-time monitoring, simulations, and data-driven decision-making. This paper delves into the envisioned integration of DTs in NTNs, discussing the technical challenges and highlighting key enabling technologies. Emphasis is placed on technologies such as Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), space-based cloud computing, quantum computing, and others, providing a comprehensive overview of their potentials in empowering DT development for NTNs. In closing, we present a case study involving the implementation of a data-driven DT model to facilitate dynamic and service-oriented network slicing within an open radio access network (O-RAN) architecture for NTNs. This work contributes to shaping the future of network control and management in the dynamic and evolving landscape of non-terrestrial communication systems.
We present a new algorithm to learn a deep neural network model robust against adversarial attacks. Previous algorithms demonstrate an adversarially trained Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) provides improved robustness. We recognize the adversarial learning approach for approximating the multi-modal posterior distribution of a Bayesian model can lead to mode collapse; consequently, the model's achievements in robustness and performance are sub-optimal. Instead, we first propose preventing mode collapse to better approximate the multi-modal posterior distribution. Second, based on the intuition that a robust model should ignore perturbations and only consider the informative content of the input, we conceptualize and formulate an information gain objective to measure and force the information learned from both benign and adversarial training instances to be similar. Importantly. we prove and demonstrate that minimizing the information gain objective allows the adversarial risk to approach the conventional empirical risk. We believe our efforts provide a step toward a basis for a principled method of adversarially training BNNs. Our model demonstrate significantly improved robustness--up to 20%--compared with adversarial training and Adv-BNN under PGD attacks with 0.035 distortion on both CIFAR-10 and STL-10 datasets.
In this paper, a novel joint energy and age of information (AoI) optimization framework for IoT devices in a non-stationary environment is presented. In particular, IoT devices that are distributed in the real-world are required to efficiently utilize their computing resources so as to balance the freshness of their data and their energy consumption. To optimize the performance of IoT devices in such a dynamic setting, a novel lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) solution that enables IoT devices to continuously adapt their policies to each newly encountered environment is proposed. Given that IoT devices have limited energy and computing resources, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is leveraged to visit the IoT devices and update the policy of each device sequentially. As such, the UAV is exploited as a mobile learning agent that can learn a shared knowledge base with a feature base in its training phase, and feature sets of a zero-shot learning method in its testing phase, to generalize between the environments. To optimize the trajectory and flying velocity of the UAV, an actor-critic network is leveraged so as to minimize the UAV energy consumption. Simulation results show that the proposed lifelong RL solution can outperform the state-of-art benchmarks by enhancing the balanced cost of IoT devices by $8.3\%$ when incorporating warm-start policies for unseen environments. In addition, our solution achieves up to $49.38\%$ reduction in terms of energy consumption by the UAV in comparison to the random flying strategy.
We study the scheduling problem in a status update system composed of an arbitrary number of information sources with different service time distributions and weights for the purpose of minimizing the weighted sum age of information (AoI). In particular, we study open-loop schedulers which rely only on the statistics (specifically, only on the first two moments) of the source service times, in contrast to closed-loop schedulers that also make use of the actual realizations of the service times and the AoI processes in making scheduling decisions. Open-loop scheduling policies can be constructed off-line and are simpler to implement compared to their closed-loop counterparts. We consider the generate-at-will (GAW) model, and develop an analytical method to calculate the exact AoI for the probabilistic and cyclic open-loop schedulers. In both cases, the server initiates the sampling of a source and the ensuing transmission of the update packet from the source to the server in an open-loop manner; either based on a certain probability (probabilistic scheme) or according to a deterministic cyclic pattern (cyclic scheme). We derive the optimum open-loop cyclic scheduling policy in closed form for the specific case of N=2 sources and propose well-performing heuristic cyclic schedulers for general number of sources, i.e., N>2. We study the proposed cyclic schedulers against probabilistic schedulers and several existing methods in the literature to validate their effectiveness.
Most real-world applications that employ deep neural networks (DNNs) quantize them to low precision to reduce the compute needs. We present a method to improve the robustness of quantized DNNs to white-box adversarial attacks. We first tackle the limitation of deterministic quantization to fixed ``bins'' by introducing a differentiable Stochastic Quantizer (SQ). We explore the hypothesis that different quantizations may collectively be more robust than each quantized DNN. We formulate a training objective to encourage different quantized DNNs to learn different representations of the input image. The training objective captures diversity and accuracy via mutual information between ensemble members. Through experimentation, we demonstrate substantial improvement in robustness against $L_\infty$ attacks even if the attacker is allowed to backpropagate through SQ (e.g., > 50\% accuracy to PGD(5/255) on CIFAR10 without adversarial training), compared to vanilla DNNs as well as existing ensembles of quantized DNNs. We extend the method to detect attacks and generate robustness profiles in the adversarial information plane (AIP), towards a unified analysis of different threat models by correlating the MI and accuracy.
The advent of Generative AI has marked a significant milestone in artificial intelligence, demonstrating remarkable capabilities in generating realistic images, texts, and data patterns. However, these advancements come with heightened concerns over data privacy and copyright infringement, primarily due to the reliance on vast datasets for model training. Traditional approaches like differential privacy, machine unlearning, and data poisoning only offer fragmented solutions to these complex issues. Our paper delves into the multifaceted challenges of privacy and copyright protection within the data lifecycle. We advocate for integrated approaches that combines technical innovation with ethical foresight, holistically addressing these concerns by investigating and devising solutions that are informed by the lifecycle perspective. This work aims to catalyze a broader discussion and inspire concerted efforts towards data privacy and copyright integrity in Generative AI.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated a significant boost in prediction performance on graph data. At the same time, the predictions made by these models are often hard to interpret. In that regard, many efforts have been made to explain the prediction mechanisms of these models from perspectives such as GNNExplainer, XGNN and PGExplainer. Although such works present systematic frameworks to interpret GNNs, a holistic review for explainable GNNs is unavailable. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of explainability techniques developed for GNNs. We focus on explainable graph neural networks and categorize them based on the use of explainable methods. We further provide the common performance metrics for GNNs explanations and point out several future research directions.
One principal approach for illuminating a black-box neural network is feature attribution, i.e. identifying the importance of input features for the network's prediction. The predictive information of features is recently proposed as a proxy for the measure of their importance. So far, the predictive information is only identified for latent features by placing an information bottleneck within the network. We propose a method to identify features with predictive information in the input domain. The method results in fine-grained identification of input features' information and is agnostic to network architecture. The core idea of our method is leveraging a bottleneck on the input that only lets input features associated with predictive latent features pass through. We compare our method with several feature attribution methods using mainstream feature attribution evaluation experiments. The code is publicly available.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Small data challenges have emerged in many learning problems, since the success of deep neural networks often relies on the availability of a huge amount of labeled data that is expensive to collect. To address it, many efforts have been made on training complex models with small data in an unsupervised and semi-supervised fashion. In this paper, we will review the recent progresses on these two major categories of methods. A wide spectrum of small data models will be categorized in a big picture, where we will show how they interplay with each other to motivate explorations of new ideas. We will review the criteria of learning the transformation equivariant, disentangled, self-supervised and semi-supervised representations, which underpin the foundations of recent developments. Many instantiations of unsupervised and semi-supervised generative models have been developed on the basis of these criteria, greatly expanding the territory of existing autoencoders, generative adversarial nets (GANs) and other deep networks by exploring the distribution of unlabeled data for more powerful representations. While we focus on the unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, we will also provide a broader review of other emerging topics, from unsupervised and semi-supervised domain adaptation to the fundamental roles of transformation equivariance and invariance in training a wide spectrum of deep networks. It is impossible for us to write an exclusive encyclopedia to include all related works. Instead, we aim at exploring the main ideas, principles and methods in this area to reveal where we are heading on the journey towards addressing the small data challenges in this big data era.