Bayesian optimization provides a powerful framework for global optimization of black-box, expensive-to-evaluate functions. However, it has a limited capacity in handling data-intensive problems, especially in multi-objective settings, due to the poor scalability of default Gaussian Process surrogates. We present a novel Bayesian optimization framework specifically tailored to address these limitations. Our method leverages a Bayesian neural networks approach for surrogate modeling. This enables efficient handling of large batches of data, modeling complex problems, and generating the uncertainty of the predictions. In addition, our method incorporates a scalable, uncertainty-aware acquisition strategy based on the well-known, easy-to-deploy NSGA-II. This fully parallelizable strategy promotes efficient exploration of uncharted regions. Our framework allows for effective optimization in data-intensive environments with a minimum number of iterations. We demonstrate the superiority of our method by comparing it with state-of-the-art multi-objective optimizations. We perform our evaluation on two real-world problems - airfoil design and color printing - showcasing the applicability and efficiency of our approach. Code is available at: //github.com/an-on-ym-ous/lbn_mobo
Many real-world optimization problems involve uncertain parameters with probability distributions that can be estimated using contextual feature information. In contrast to the standard approach of first estimating the distribution of uncertain parameters and then optimizing the objective based on the estimation, we propose an integrated conditional estimation-optimization (ICEO) framework that estimates the underlying conditional distribution of the random parameter while considering the structure of the optimization problem. We directly model the relationship between the conditional distribution of the random parameter and the contextual features, and then estimate the probabilistic model with an objective that aligns with the downstream optimization problem. We show that our ICEO approach is asymptotically consistent under moderate regularity conditions and further provide finite performance guarantees in the form of generalization bounds. Computationally, performing estimation with the ICEO approach is a non-convex and often non-differentiable optimization problem. We propose a general methodology for approximating the potentially non-differentiable mapping from estimated conditional distribution to the optimal decision by a differentiable function, which greatly improves the performance of gradient-based algorithms applied to the non-convex problem. We also provide a polynomial optimization solution approach in the semi-algebraic case. Numerical experiments are also conducted to show the empirical success of our approach in different situations including with limited data samples and model mismatches.
Learning to restore multiple image degradations within a single model is quite beneficial for real-world applications. Nevertheless, existing works typically concentrate on regarding each degradation independently, while their relationship has been less exploited to ensure the synergistic learning. To this end, we revisit the diverse degradations through the lens of singular value decomposition, with the observation that the decomposed singular vectors and singular values naturally undertake the different types of degradation information, dividing various restoration tasks into two groups,\ie, singular vector dominated and singular value dominated. The above analysis renders a more unified perspective to ascribe the diverse degradations, compared to previous task-level independent learning. The dedicated optimization of degraded singular vectors and singular values inherently utilizes the potential relationship among diverse restoration tasks, attributing to the Decomposition Ascribed Synergistic Learning (DASL). Specifically, DASL comprises two effective operators, namely, Singular VEctor Operator (SVEO) and Singular VAlue Operator (SVAO), to favor the decomposed optimization, which can be lightly integrated into existing convolutional image restoration backbone. Moreover, the congruous decomposition loss has been devised for auxiliary. Extensive experiments on blended five image restoration tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, including image deraining, image dehazing, image denoising, image deblurring, and low-light image enhancement.
With the development of networking technology, the computing system has evolved towards the multi-tier paradigm gradually. However, challenges, such as multi-resource heterogeneity of devices, resource competition of services, and networked system dynamics, make it difficult to guarantee service-level agreement (SLA) for the applications. In this paper, we propose a multi-tier edge-cloud computing framework, EdgeMatrix, to maximize the throughput of the system while guaranteeing different SLA priorities. First, in order to reduce the impact of physical resource heterogeneity, EdgeMatrix introduces the Networked Multi-agent Actor-Critic (NMAC) algorithm to re-define physical resources with the same quality of service as logically isolated resource units and combinations, i.e., cells and channels. In addition, a multi-task mechanism is designed in EdgeMatrix to solve the problem of Joint Service Orchestration and Request Dispatch (JSORD) for matching the requests and services, which can significantly reduce the optimization runtime. For integrating above two algorithms, EdgeMatrix is designed with two time-scales, i.e., coordinating services and resources at the larger time-scale, and dispatching requests at the smaller time-scale. Realistic trace-based experiments proves that the overall throughput of EdgeMatrix is 36.7% better than that of the closest baseline, while the SLA priorities are guaranteed still.
Model selection is an integral problem of model based optimization techniques such as Bayesian optimization (BO). Current approaches often treat model selection as an estimation problem, to be periodically updated with observations coming from the optimization iterations. In this paper, we propose an alternative way to achieve both efficiently. Specifically, we propose a novel way of integrating model selection and BO for the single goal of reaching the function optima faster. The algorithm moves back and forth between BO in the model space and BO in the function space, where the goodness of the recommended model is captured by a score function and fed back, capturing how well the model helped convergence in the function space. The score function is derived in such a way that it neutralizes the effect of the moving nature of the BO in the function space, thus keeping the model selection problem stationary. This back and forth leads to quick convergence for both model selection and BO in the function space. In addition to improved sample efficiency, the framework outputs information about the black-box function. Convergence is proved, and experimental results show significant improvement compared to standard BO.
Terahertz (THz) communication is one of the most promising candidates to accommodate high-speed mobile data services. This paper proposes a secure hybrid automatic repeat request with incremental redundancy (HARQ-IR) aided THz communication scheme, where the transmission secrecy is ensured by confusing the eavesdropper with dummy messages. The connection and secrecy outage probabilities are then derived in closed-form. Besides, the tail behaviour of the connection outage probability in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is examined by carrying out the asymptotic analysis, and the upper bound of the secrecy outage probability is obtained in a simple form by capitalizing on large deviations. With these results, we take a step further to investigate the secrecy long term average throughput (LTAT). By noticing that HARQ-IR not only improves the reliability of the legitimate user, but also increases the probability of being eavesdropped, a robust rate adaption policy is finally proposed to maximize the LTAT while restricting the connection and secrecy outage probabilities within satisfactory requirements.
Statistical divergences quantify the difference between probability distributions finding multiple uses in machine-learning. However, a fundamental challenge is to estimate divergence from empirical samples since the underlying distributions of the data are usually unknown. In this work, we propose the representation Jensen-Shannon Divergence, a novel divergence based on covariance operators in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS). Our approach embeds the data distributions in an RKHS and exploits the spectrum of the covariance operators of the representations. We provide an estimator from empirical covariance matrices by explicitly mapping the data to an RKHS using Fourier features. This estimator is flexible, scalable, differentiable, and suitable for minibatch-based optimization problems. Additionally, we provide an estimator based on kernel matrices without having an explicit mapping to the RKHS. We show that this quantity is a lower bound on the Jensen-Shannon divergence, and we propose a variational approach to estimate it. We applied our divergence to two-sample testing outperforming related state-of-the-art techniques in several datasets. We used the representation Jensen-Shannon divergence as a cost function to train generative adversarial networks which intrinsically avoids mode collapse and encourages diversity.
In recent years, communication engineers put strong emphasis on artificial neural network (ANN)-based algorithms with the aim of increasing the flexibility and autonomy of the system and its components. In this context, unsupervised training is of special interest as it enables adaptation without the overhead of transmitting pilot symbols. In this work, we present a novel ANN-based, unsupervised equalizer and its trainable field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation. We demonstrate that our custom loss function allows the ANN to adapt for varying channel conditions, approaching the performance of a supervised baseline. Furthermore, as a first step towards a practical communication system, we design an efficient FPGA implementation of our proposed algorithm, which achieves a throughput in the order of Gbit/s, outperforming a high-performance GPU by a large margin.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
We present a novel counterfactual framework for both Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) and Open-Set Recognition (OSR), whose common challenge is generalizing to the unseen-classes by only training on the seen-classes. Our idea stems from the observation that the generated samples for unseen-classes are often out of the true distribution, which causes severe recognition rate imbalance between the seen-class (high) and unseen-class (low). We show that the key reason is that the generation is not Counterfactual Faithful, and thus we propose a faithful one, whose generation is from the sample-specific counterfactual question: What would the sample look like, if we set its class attribute to a certain class, while keeping its sample attribute unchanged? Thanks to the faithfulness, we can apply the Consistency Rule to perform unseen/seen binary classification, by asking: Would its counterfactual still look like itself? If ``yes'', the sample is from a certain class, and ``no'' otherwise. Through extensive experiments on ZSL and OSR, we demonstrate that our framework effectively mitigates the seen/unseen imbalance and hence significantly improves the overall performance. Note that this framework is orthogonal to existing methods, thus, it can serve as a new baseline to evaluate how ZSL/OSR models generalize. Codes are available at //github.com/yue-zhongqi/gcm-cf.
Many real-world applications require the prediction of long sequence time-series, such as electricity consumption planning. Long sequence time-series forecasting (LSTF) demands a high prediction capacity of the model, which is the ability to capture precise long-range dependency coupling between output and input efficiently. Recent studies have shown the potential of Transformer to increase the prediction capacity. However, there are several severe issues with Transformer that prevent it from being directly applicable to LSTF, such as quadratic time complexity, high memory usage, and inherent limitation of the encoder-decoder architecture. To address these issues, we design an efficient transformer-based model for LSTF, named Informer, with three distinctive characteristics: (i) a $ProbSparse$ Self-attention mechanism, which achieves $O(L \log L)$ in time complexity and memory usage, and has comparable performance on sequences' dependency alignment. (ii) the self-attention distilling highlights dominating attention by halving cascading layer input, and efficiently handles extreme long input sequences. (iii) the generative style decoder, while conceptually simple, predicts the long time-series sequences at one forward operation rather than a step-by-step way, which drastically improves the inference speed of long-sequence predictions. Extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets demonstrate that Informer significantly outperforms existing methods and provides a new solution to the LSTF problem.