Qualcomm just revealed its new budget-friendly mobile chipset, Snapdragon 4 Gen 2. This refresh brings plenty of improvements that will kick lower-tier smartphones up a notch. The platform is designed for excellent battery life, with the company promising "all-day use." Qualcomm also promises fast CPU speeds, 5G connectivity and the potential for upgraded visuals via integrated cameras. The chips feature the proprietary Qualcomm Kryo CPU, with peak speeds up to 2.2 GHz, which is a slight increase over the previous generation. Qualcomm's latest and greatest also boasts quick-charging technology, with the company stating that you get a 50 percent charge in just 15 minutes at the plug.

Federated learning collaboratively trains a neural network on privately owned data held by several participating clients. The gradient descent algorithm, a well-known and popular iterative optimization procedure, is run to train the neural network. Every client uses its local data to compute partial gradients and sends it to the federator which aggregates the results. Privacy of the clients' data is a major concern. In fact, observing the partial gradients can be enough to reveal the clients' data. Private aggregation schemes have been investigated to tackle the privacy problem in federated learning where all the users are connected to each other and to the federator. In this paper, we consider a wireless system architecture where clients are only connected to the federator via base stations. We derive fundamental limits on the communication cost when information-theoretic privacy is required, and introduce and analyze a private aggregation scheme tailored for this setting.

With the proliferation of distributed edge computing resources, the 6G mobile network will evolve into a network for connected intelligence. Along this line, the proposal to incorporate federated learning into the mobile edge has gained considerable interest in recent years. However, the deployment of federated learning faces substantial challenges as massive resource-limited IoT devices can hardly support on-device model training. This leads to the emergence of split learning (SL) which enables servers to handle the major training workload while still enhancing data privacy. In this article, we offer a brief overview of key advancements in SL and articulate its seamless integration with wireless edge networks. We begin by illustrating the tailored 6G architecture to support edge SL. Then, we examine the critical design issues for edge SL, including innovative resource-efficient learning frameworks and resource management strategies under a single edge server. Additionally, we expand the scope to multi-edge scenarios, exploring multi-edge collaboration and mobility management from a networking perspective. Finally, we discuss open problems for edge SL, including convergence analysis, asynchronous SL and U-shaped SL.

Transfer learning has emerged as a key approach in the machine learning domain, enabling the application of knowledge derived from one domain to improve performance on subsequent tasks. Given the often limited information about these subsequent tasks, a strong transfer learning approach calls for the model to capture a diverse range of features during the initial pretraining stage. However, recent research suggests that, without sufficient regularization, the network tends to concentrate on features that primarily reduce the pretraining loss function. This tendency can result in inadequate feature learning and impaired generalization capability for target tasks. To address this issue, we propose Variance-Covariance Regularization (VCR), a regularization technique aimed at fostering diversity in the learned network features. Drawing inspiration from recent advancements in the self-supervised learning approach, our approach promotes learned representations that exhibit high variance and minimal covariance, thus preventing the network from focusing solely on loss-reducing features. We empirically validate the efficacy of our method through comprehensive experiments coupled with in-depth analytical studies on the learned representations. In addition, we develop an efficient implementation strategy that assures minimal computational overhead associated with our method. Our results indicate that VCR is a powerful and efficient method for enhancing transfer learning performance for both supervised learning and self-supervised learning, opening new possibilities for future research in this domain.

To fully exploit the benefits of the fog environment, efficient management of data locality is crucial. Blind or reactive data replication falls short in harnessing the potential of fog computing, necessitating more advanced techniques for predicting where and when clients will connect. While spatial prediction has received considerable attention, temporal prediction remains understudied. Our paper addresses this gap by examining the advantages of incorporating temporal prediction into existing spatial prediction models. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of spatio-temporal prediction models, such as Deep Neural Networks and Markov models, in the context of predictive replication. We propose a novel model using Holt-Winter's Exponential Smoothing for temporal prediction, leveraging sequential and periodical user movement patterns. In a fog network simulation with real user trajectories our model achieves a 15% reduction in excess data with a marginal 1% decrease in data availability.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been increasingly employed to handle the dynamic and complex resource management in network slicing. The deployment of DRL policies in real networks, however, is complicated by heterogeneous cell conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning (TL) aided multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) approach with inter-agent similarity analysis for inter-cell inter-slice resource partitioning. First, we design a coordinated MADRL method with information sharing to intelligently partition resource to slices and manage inter-cell interference. Second, we propose an integrated TL method to transfer the learned DRL policies among different local agents for accelerating the policy deployment. The method is composed of a new domain and task similarity measurement approach and a new knowledge transfer approach, which resolves the problem of from whom to transfer and how to transfer. We evaluated the proposed solution with extensive simulations in a system-level simulator and show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions in terms of performance, convergence speed and sample efficiency. Moreover, by applying TL, we achieve an additional gain over 27% higher than the coordinate MADRL approach without TL.

TOKYO--SoftBank Group Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said Wednesday he was devoting himself to artificial intelligence and new inventions after what he described as a tear-filled rethinking of his life's mission.

SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son declared he will get off the sidelines and go back on the offensive in tech investing soon, seeking to establish his credentials in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. The billionaire is ending years of relative dormancy after his Vision Fund, the world's largest pool of tech capital, racked up billions of dollars of losses as a COVID-era internet boom withered and a global economic downturn sapped valuations. The Vision Fund's return to the field is welcome news for a startup ecosystem whose largest players from Uber Technologies to Coupang scaled up thanks to steady financing from the Japanese firm. SoftBank's signature portfolio firm is now Arm, the British chip designer Son argues is central to AI. Arm is now on track for one of the largest initial public offerings this year. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software.

Network slicing enables operators to efficiently support diverse applications on a common physical infrastructure. The ever-increasing densification of network deployment leads to complex and non-trivial inter-cell interference, which requires more than inaccurate analytic models to dynamically optimize resource management for network slices. In this paper, we develop a DIRP algorithm with multiple deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents to cooperatively optimize resource partition in individual cells to fulfill the requirements of each slice, based on two alternative reward functions. Nevertheless, existing DRL approaches usually tie the pretrained model parameters to specific network environments with poor transferability, which raises practical deployment concerns in large-scale mobile networks. Hence, we design a novel transfer learning-aided DIRP (TL-DIRP) algorithm to ease the transfer of DIRP agents across different network environments in terms of sample efficiency, model reproducibility, and algorithm scalability. The TL-DIRP algorithm first centrally trains a generalized model and then transfers the "generalist" to each local agent as "specialist" with distributed finetuning and execution. TL-DIRP consists of two steps: 1) centralized training of a generalized distributed model, 2) transferring the "generalist" to each "specialist" with distributed finetuning and execution. The numerical results show that not only DIRP outperforms existing baseline approaches in terms of faster convergence and higher reward, but more importantly, TL-DIRP significantly improves the service performance, with reduced exploration cost, accelerated convergence rate, and enhanced model reproducibility. As compared to a traffic-aware baseline, TL-DIRP provides about 15% less violation ratio of the quality of service (QoS) for the worst slice service and 8.8% less violation on the average service QoS.

We consider a system of several collocated nodes sharing a time slotted wireless channel, and seek a MAC (medium access control) that (i) provides low mean delay, (ii) has distributed control (i.e., there is no central scheduler), and (iii) does not require explicit exchange of state information or control signals. The design of such MAC protocols must keep in mind the need for contention access at light traffic, and scheduled access in heavy traffic, leading to the long-standing interest in hybrid, adaptive MACs. Working in the discrete time setting, for the distributed MAC design, we consider a practical information structure where each node has local information and some common information obtained from overhearing. In this setting, "ZMAC" is an existing protocol that is hybrid and adaptive. We approach the problem via two steps (1) We show that it is sufficient for the policy to be "greedy" and "exhaustive". Limiting the policy to this class reduces the problem to obtaining a queue switching policy at queue emptiness instants. (2) Formulating the delay optimal scheduling as a POMDP (partially observed Markov decision process), we show that the optimal switching rule is Stochastic Largest Queue (SLQ). Using this theory as the basis, we then develop a practical distributed scheduler, QZMAC, which is also tunable. We implement QZMAC on standard off-the-shelf TelosB motes and also use simulations to compare QZMAC with the full-knowledge centralized scheduler, and with ZMAC. We use our implementation to study the impact of false detection while overhearing the common information, and the efficiency of QZMAC. Our simulation results show that the mean delay with QZMAC is close that of the full-knowledge centralized scheduler.