Finding efficient routes for data packets is an essential task in computer networking. The optimal routes depend greatly on the current network topology, state and traffic demand, and they can change within milliseconds. Reinforcement Learning can help to learn network representations that provide routing decisions for possibly novel situations. So far, this has commonly been done using fluid network models. We investigate their suitability for millisecond-scale adaptations with a range of traffic mixes and find that packet-level network models are necessary to capture true dynamics, in particular in the presence of TCP traffic. To this end, we present $\textit{PackeRL}$, the first packet-level Reinforcement Learning environment for routing in generic network topologies. Our experiments confirm that learning-based strategies that have been trained in fluid environments do not generalize well to this more realistic, but more challenging setup. Hence, we also introduce two new algorithms for learning sub-second Routing Optimization. We present $\textit{M-Slim}$, a dynamic shortest-path algorithm that excels at high traffic volumes but is computationally hard to scale to large network topologies, and $\textit{FieldLines}$, a novel next-hop policy design that re-optimizes routing for any network topology within milliseconds without requiring any re-training. Both algorithms outperform current learning-based approaches as well as commonly used static baseline protocols in scenarios with high-traffic volumes. All findings are backed by extensive experiments in realistic network conditions in our fast and versatile training and evaluation framework.

Nonlinear time series models with exogenous regressors are essential in econometrics, queuing theory, and machine learning, though their statistical analysis remains incomplete. Key results, such as the law of large numbers and the functional central limit theorem, are known for weakly dependent variables. We demonstrate the transfer of mixing properties from the exogenous regressor to the response via coupling arguments. Additionally, we study Markov chains in random environments with drift and minorization conditions, even under non-stationary environments with favorable mixing properties, and apply this framework to single-server queuing models.

In the context of cellular networks, users located at the periphery of cells are particularly vulnerable to substantial interference from neighbouring cells, which can be represented as a two-user interference channel. This study introduces two highly effective methodologies, namely TwinNet and SiameseNet, using autoencoders, tailored for the design of encoders and decoders for block transmission and detection in interference-limited environments. The findings unambiguously illustrate that the developed models are capable of leveraging the interference structure to outperform traditional methods reliant on complete orthogonality. While it is recognized that systems employing coordinated transmissions and independent detection can offer greater capacity, the specific gains of data-driven models have not been thoroughly quantified or elucidated. This paper conducts an analysis to demonstrate the quantifiable advantages of such models in particular scenarios. Additionally, a comprehensive examination of the characteristics of codewords generated by these models is provided to offer a more intuitive comprehension of how these models achieve superior performance.

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks support a variety of safety, entertainment, and commercial applications. This is realized by applying the principles of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to facilitate connectivity among vehicles and between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs). Network congestion management is essential for IoVs and it represents a significant concern due to its impact on improving the efficiency of transportation systems and providing reliable communication among vehicles for the timely delivery of safety-critical packets. This paper introduces a framework for proactive congestion management for IoV networks. We generate congestion scenarios and a data set to predict the congestion using LSTM. We present the framework and the packet congestion dataset. Simulation results using SUMO with NS3 demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework for forecasting IoV network congestion and clustering/prioritizing packets employing recurrent neural networks.

With the boom of machine learning (ML) techniques, software practitioners build ML systems to process the massive volume of streaming data for diverse software engineering tasks such as failure prediction in AIOps. Trained using historical data, such ML models encounter performance degradation caused by concept drift, i.e., data and inter-relationship (concept) changes between training and production. It is essential to use concept rift detection to monitor the deployed ML models and re-train the ML models when needed. In this work, we explore applying state-of-the-art (SOTA) concept drift detection techniques on synthetic and real-world datasets in an industrial setting. Such an industrial setting requires minimal manual effort in labeling and maximal generality in ML model architecture. We find that current SOTA semi-supervised methods not only require significant labeling effort but also only work for certain types of ML models. To overcome such limitations, we propose a novel model-agnostic technique (CDSeer) for detecting concept drift. Our evaluation shows that CDSeer has better precision and recall compared to the state-of-the-art while requiring significantly less manual labeling. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CDSeer at concept drift detection by evaluating it on eight datasets from different domains and use cases. Results from internal deployment of CDSeer on an industrial proprietary dataset show a 57.1% improvement in precision while using 99% fewer labels compared to the SOTA concept drift detection method. The performance is also comparable to the supervised concept drift detection method, which requires 100% of the data to be labeled. The improved performance and ease of adoption of CDSeer are valuable in making ML systems more reliable.

Classification of personal text messages has many useful applications in surveillance, e-commerce, and mental health care, to name a few. Giving applications access to personal texts can easily lead to (un)intentional privacy violations. We propose the first privacy-preserving solution for text classification that is provably secure. Our method, which is based on Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC), encompasses both feature extraction from texts, and subsequent classification with logistic regression and tree ensembles. We prove that when using our secure text classification method, the application does not learn anything about the text, and the author of the text does not learn anything about the text classification model used by the application beyond what is given by the classification result itself.

This work introduces NetDiff, an expressive graph denoising diffusion probabilistic architecture that generates wireless ad hoc network link topologies. Such networks, with directional antennas, can achieve unmatched performance when the communication links are designed to provide good geometric properties, notably by reducing interference between these links while respecting diverse physical constraints. How to craft such a link assignment algorithm is yet a real problem. Deep graph generation offers multiple advantages compared to traditional approaches: it allows to relieve the network nodes of the communication burden caused by the search of viable links and to avoid resorting to heavy combinatorial methods to find a good link topology. Denoising diffusion also provides a built-in method to update the network over time. Given that graph neural networks sometimes tend to struggle with global, structural properties, we augment the popular graph transformer with cross-attentive modulation tokens in order to improve global control over the predicted topology. We also incorporate simple node and edge features, as well as additional loss terms, to facilitate the compliance with the network topology physical constraints. A network evolution algorithm based on partial diffusion is also proposed to maintain a stable network topology over time when the nodes move. Our results show that the generated links are realistic, present structural properties similar to the dataset graphs', and require only minor corrections and verification steps to be operational.

Dropout, a network operator, when enabled is likely to dramatically impact the performance of Flash-Attention, which in turn increases the end-to-end training time of Large-Language-Models (LLMs). The main contributor to such performance degradation is the Random Number Generation (RNG) phase that is traditionally fused into the Flash-Attention kernel. As RNG and Attention have the same hardware bottlenecks, RNG latency can hardly be hidden within the Attention kernel. We propose overlapping RNG with previous GEMM layers in the network to hide RNG runtime and improve end-to-end performance. RNG and GEMM have distinct resource requirements and hardware bottlenecks, so they can run in parallel without compromising each other's performance. Our fine-grained performance model, cross-validated by silicon results, shows 1.14x speedup on one transformer block (including multi-head attention and feed-forward layers) for Llama2, and up to 1.23x speedup when varying workload sizes, on GH100 GPUs with FP8 precision. Further, we extend our theoretical model to different RNG implementations and hardware architectures, and discuss the widely applicable benefits for overlapping RNG with GEMM layers.

Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput (L4S), as an emerging router-queue management technique, has seen steady deployment in the industry. An L4S-enabled router assigns each packet to the queue based on the packet header marking. Currently, L4S employs per-flow queue selection, i.e. all packets of a flow are marked the same way and thus use the same queues, even though each packet is marked separately. However, this may hurt tail latency and latency-sensitive applications because transient congestion and queue buildups may only affect a fraction of packets in a flow. We present SwiftQueue, a new L4S queue-selection strategy in which a sender uses a novel per-packet latency predictor to pinpoint which packets likely have latency spikes or drops. The insight is that many packet-level latency variations result from complex interactions among recent packets at shared router queues. Yet, these intricate packet-level latency patterns are hard to learn efficiently by traditional models. Instead, SwiftQueue uses a custom Transformer, which is well-studied for its expressiveness on sequential patterns, to predict the next packet's latency based on the latencies of recently received ACKs. Based on the predicted latency of each outgoing packet, SwiftQueue's sender dynamically marks the L4S packet header to assign packets to potentially different queues, even within the same flow. Using real network traces, we show that SwiftQueue is 45-65% more accurate in predicting latency and its variations than state-of-art methods. Based on its latency prediction, SwiftQueue reduces the tail latency for L4S-enabled flows by 36-45%, compared with the existing L4S queue-selection method.

Multi-task ranking models have become essential for modern real-world recommendation systems. While most recommendation researches focus on designing sophisticated models for specific scenarios, achieving performance improvement for multi-task ranking models across various scenarios still remains a significant challenge. Training all tasks naively can result in inconsistent learning, highlighting the need for the development of multi-task optimization (MTO) methods to tackle this challenge. Conventional methods assume that the optimal joint gradient on shared parameters leads to optimal parameter updates. However, the actual update on model parameters may deviates significantly from gradients when using momentum based optimizers such as Adam, and we design and execute statistical experiments to support the observation. In this paper, we propose a novel Parameter Update Balancing algorithm for multi-task optimization, denoted as PUB. In contrast to traditional MTO method which are based on gradient level tasks fusion or loss level tasks fusion, PUB is the first work to optimize multiple tasks through parameter update balancing. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark multi-task ranking datasets demonstrate that PUB consistently improves several multi-task backbones and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, experiments on benchmark computer vision datasets show the great potential of PUB in various multi-task learning scenarios. Furthermore, we deployed our method for an industrial evaluation on the real-world commercial platform, HUAWEI AppGallery, where PUB significantly enhances the online multi-task ranking model, efficiently managing the primary traffic of a crucial channel.