Communications: Overviews
Efficient Distributed Training through Gradient Compression with Sparsification and Quantization Techniques
Singh, Shruti, Kumar, Shantanu
This study investigates the impact of gradient compression on distributed training performance, focusing on sparsification and quantization techniques, including top-k, DGC, and QSGD. In baseline experiments, random-k compression results in severe performance degradation, highlighting its inefficacy. In contrast, using top-k and DGC at 50 times compression yields performance improvements, reducing perplexity by up to 0.06 compared to baseline. Experiments across 1, 2, and 4 workers demonstrate that conservative sparsification can have a regularizing effect, especially for smaller models, while compression ratios above 5000 times impair performance, particularly for DGC. Communication times are reduced across all compression methods, with top-k and DGC decreasing communication to negligible levels at high compression ratios. However, increased computation times offset this efficiency for top-k due to sorting demands, making it less scalable than DGC or QSGD. In convergence tests, sparsification techniques show accelerated convergence, requiring fewer epochs than the baseline, which has implications for computational savings. Although precision trade-offs emerge, floating point errors are mitigated by compression. This study's findings underscore the need to tune hyperparameters specifically for each compression technique to achieve optimal model performance, especially in distributed training systems.
Machine Theory of Mind for Autonomous Cyber-Defence
Swaby, Luke, Stewart, Matthew, Harrold, Daniel, Willis, Chris, Palmer, Gregory
Intelligent autonomous agents hold much potential for the domain of cyber security. However, due to many state-of-the-art approaches relying on uninterpretable black-box models, there is growing demand for methods that offer stakeholders clear and actionable insights into their latent beliefs and motivations. To address this, we evaluate Theory of Mind (ToM) approaches for Autonomous Cyber Operations. Upon learning a robust prior, ToM models can predict an agent's goals, behaviours, and contextual beliefs given only a handful of past behaviour observations. In this paper, we introduce a novel Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based ToM architecture tailored for cyber-defence, Graph-In, Graph-Out (GIGO)-ToM, which can accurately predict both the targets and attack trajectories of adversarial cyber agents over arbitrary computer network topologies. To evaluate the latter, we propose a novel extension of the Wasserstein distance for measuring the similarity of graph-based probability distributions. Whereas the standard Wasserstein distance lacks a fixed reference scale, we introduce a graph-theoretic normalization factor that enables a standardized comparison between networks of different sizes. We furnish this metric, which we term the Network Transport Distance (NTD), with a weighting function that emphasizes predictions according to custom node features, allowing network operators to explore arbitrary strategic considerations. Benchmarked against a Graph-In, Dense-Out (GIDO)-ToM architecture in an abstract cyber-defence environment, our empirical evaluations show that GIGO-ToM can accurately predict the goals and behaviours of various unseen cyber-attacking agents across a range of network topologies, as well as learn embeddings that can effectively characterize their policies.
Towards Data Governance of Frontier AI Models
Hausenloy, Jason, McClements, Duncan, Thakur, Madhavendra
Data is essential to train and fine-tune today's frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models and to develop future ones. To date, academic, legal, and regulatory work has primarily addressed how data can directly harm consumers and creators, such as through privacy breaches, copyright infringements, and bias and discrimination. Our work, instead, focuses on the comparatively neglected question of how data can enable new governance capacities for frontier AI models. This approach for "frontier data governance" opens up new avenues for monitoring and mitigating risks from advanced AI models, particularly as they scale and acquire specific dangerous capabilities. Still, frontier data governance faces challenges that stem from the fundamental properties of data itself: data is non-rival, often non-excludable, easily replicable, and increasingly synthesizable. Despite these inherent difficulties, we propose a set of policy mechanisms targeting key actors along the data supply chain, including data producers, aggregators, model developers, and data vendors. We provide a brief overview of 15 governance mechanisms, of which we centrally introduce five, underexplored policy recommendations. These include developing canary tokens to detect unauthorized use for producers; (automated) data filtering to remove malicious content for pre-training and post-training datasets; mandatory dataset reporting requirements for developers and vendors; improved security for datasets and data generation algorithms; and know-your-customer requirements for vendors. By considering data not just as a source of potential harm, but as a critical governance lever, this work aims to equip policymakers with a new tool for the governance and regulation of frontier AI models.
On Privacy, Security, and Trustworthiness in Distributed Wireless Large AI Models (WLAM)
Yang, Zhaohui, Xu, Wei, Liang, Le, Cui, Yuanhao, Qin, Zhijin, Debbah, Merouane
Combining wireless communication with large artificial intelligence (AI) models can open up a myriad of novel application scenarios. In sixth generation (6G) networks, ubiquitous communication and computing resources allow large AI models to serve democratic large AI models-related services to enable real-time applications like autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems. However, the security considerations and sustainable communication resources limit the deployment of large AI models over distributed wireless networks. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of privacy, security, and trustworthy for distributed wireless large AI model (WLAM). In particular, a detailed privacy and security are analysis for distributed WLAM is fist revealed. The classifications and theoretical findings about privacy and security in distributed WLAM are discussed. Then the trustworthy and ethics for implementing distributed WLAM are described. Finally, the comprehensive applications of distributed WLAM are presented in the context of electromagnetic signal processing.
The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation
Brundage, Miles, Avin, Shahar, Clark, Jack, Toner, Helen, Eckersley, Peter, Garfinkel, Ben, Dafoe, Allan, Scharre, Paul, Zeitzoff, Thomas, Filar, Bobby, Anderson, Hyrum, Roff, Heather, Allen, Gregory C., Steinhardt, Jacob, Flynn, Carrick, hรigeartaigh, Seรกn ร, Beard, SJ, Belfield, Haydn, Farquhar, Sebastian, Lyle, Clare, Crootof, Rebecca, Evans, Owain, Page, Michael, Bryson, Joanna, Yampolskiy, Roman, Amodei, Dario
This report surveys the landscape of potential security threats from malicious uses of AI, and proposes ways to better forecast, prevent, and mitigate these threats. After analyzing the ways in which AI may influence the threat landscape in the digital, physical, and political domains, we make four high-level recommendations for AI researchers and other stakeholders. We also suggest several promising areas for further research that could expand the portfolio of defenses, or make attacks less effective or harder to execute. Finally, we discuss, but do not conclusively resolve, the long-term equilibrium of attackers and defenders.
Was that Sarcasm?: A Literature Survey on Sarcasm Detection
Bagga, Harleen Kaur, Bernard, Jasmine, Shaheen, Sahil, Arora, Sarthak
Sarcasm is hard to interpret as human beings. Being able to interpret sarcasm is often termed as a sign of intelligence, given the complex nature of sarcasm. Hence, this is a field of Natural Language Processing which is still complex for computers to decipher. This Literature Survey delves into different aspects of sarcasm detection, to create an understanding of the underlying problems faced during detection, approaches used to solve this problem, and different forms of available datasets for sarcasm detection.
Digital Twin in Industries: A Comprehensive Survey
Zami, Md Bokhtiar Al, Shaon, Shaba, Quy, Vu Khanh, Nguyen, Dinh C.
Industrial networks are undergoing rapid transformation driven by the convergence of emerging technologies that are revolutionizing conventional workflows, enhancing operational efficiency, and fundamentally redefining the industrial landscape across diverse sectors. Amidst this revolution, Digital Twin (DT) emerges as a transformative innovation that seamlessly integrates real-world systems with their virtual counterparts, bridging the physical and digital realms. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey of the emerging DT-enabled services and applications across industries, beginning with an overview of DT fundamentals and its components to a discussion of key enabling technologies for DT. Different from literature works, we investigate and analyze the capabilities of DT across a wide range of industrial services, including data sharing, data offloading, integrated sensing and communication, content caching, resource allocation, wireless networking, and metaverse. In particular, we present an in-depth technical discussion of the roles of DT in industrial applications across various domains, including manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, energy, agriculture, space, oil and gas, as well as robotics. Throughout the technical analysis, we delve into real-time data communications between physical and virtual platforms to enable industrial DT networking. Subsequently, we extensively explore and analyze a wide range of major privacy and security issues in DT-based industry. Taxonomy tables and the key research findings from the survey are also given, emphasizing important insights into the significance of DT in industries. Finally, we point out future research directions to spur further research in this promising area.
A Survey on Automatic Online Hate Speech Detection in Low-Resource Languages
Das, Susmita, Dutta, Arpita, Roy, Kingshuk, Mondal, Abir, Mukhopadhyay, Arnab
The expanding influence of social media platforms over the past decade has impacted the way people communicate. The level of obscurity provided by social media and easy accessibility of the internet has facilitated the spread of hate speech. The terms and expressions related to hate speech gets updated with changing times which poses an obstacle to policy-makers and researchers in case of hate speech identification. With growing number of individuals using their native languages to communicate with each other, hate speech in these low-resource languages are also growing. Although, there is awareness about the English-related approaches, much attention have not been provided to these low-resource languages due to lack of datasets and online available data. This article provides a detailed survey of hate speech detection in low-resource languages around the world with details of available datasets, features utilized and techniques used. This survey further discusses the prevailing surveys, overlapping concepts related to hate speech, research challenges and opportunities.
Semantic Edge Computing and Semantic Communications in 6G Networks: A Unifying Survey and Research Challenges
Zhang, Milin, Abdi, Mohammad, Dasari, Venkat R., Restuccia, Francesco
Semantic Edge Computing (SEC) and Semantic Communications (SemComs) have been proposed as viable approaches to achieve real-time edge-enabled intelligence in sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. On one hand, SemCom leverages the strength of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to encode and communicate the semantic information only, while making it robust to channel distortions by compensating for wireless effects. Ultimately, this leads to an improvement in the communication efficiency. On the other hand, SEC has leveraged distributed DNNs to divide the computation of a DNN across different devices based on their computational and networking constraints. Although significant progress has been made in both fields, the literature lacks a systematic view to connect both fields. In this work, we fulfill the current gap by unifying the SEC and SemCom fields. We summarize the research problems in these two fields and provide a comprehensive review of the state of the art with a focus on their technical strengths and challenges.
An End-to-End Smart Predict-then-Optimize Framework for Vehicle Relocation Problems in Large-Scale Vehicle Crowd Sensing
Wang, Xinyu, Peng, Yiyang, Ma, Wei
Ubiquitous mobile devices have catalyzed the development of vehicle crowd sensing (VCS). In particular, vehicle sensing systems show great potential in the flexible acquisition of spatio-temporal urban data through built-in sensors under diverse sensing scenarios. However, vehicle systems often exhibit biased coverage due to the heterogeneous nature of trip requests and routes. To achieve a high sensing coverage, a critical challenge lies in optimally relocating vehicles to minimize the divergence between vehicle distributions and target sensing distributions. Conventional approaches typically employ a two-stage predict-then-optimize (PTO) process: first predicting real-time vehicle distributions and subsequently generating an optimal relocation strategy based on the predictions. However, this approach can lead to suboptimal decision-making due to the propagation of errors from upstream prediction. To this end, we develop an end-to-end Smart Predict-then-Optimize (SPO) framework by integrating optimization into prediction within the deep learning architecture, and the entire framework is trained by minimizing the task-specific matching divergence rather than the upstream prediction error. Methodologically, we formulate the vehicle relocation problem by quadratic programming (QP) and incorporate a novel unrolling approach based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) within the SPO framework to compute gradients of the QP layer, facilitating backpropagation and gradient-based optimization for end-to-end learning. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated by real-world taxi datasets in Hong Kong. Utilizing the alternating differentiation method, the general SPO framework presents a novel concept of addressing decision-making problems with uncertainty, demonstrating significant potential for advancing applications in intelligent transportation systems.