nnm
Private Aggregation for Byzantine-Resilient Heterogeneous Federated Learning
Egger, Maximilian, Bitar, Rawad
Ensuring resilience to Byzantine clients while maintaining the privacy of the clients' data is a fundamental challenge in federated learning (FL). When the clients' data is homogeneous, suitable countermeasures were studied from an information-theoretic perspective utilizing secure aggregation techniques while ensuring robust aggregation of the clients' gradients. However, the countermeasures used fail when the clients' data is heterogeneous. Suitable pre-processing techniques, such as nearest neighbor mixing, were recently shown to enhance the performance of those countermeasures in the heterogeneous setting. Nevertheless, those pre-processing techniques cannot be applied with the introduced privacy-preserving mechanisms. We propose a multi-stage method encompassing a careful co-design of verifiable secret sharing, secure aggregation, and a tailored symmetric private information retrieval scheme to achieve information-theoretic privacy guarantees and Byzantine resilience under data heterogeneity. We evaluate the effectiveness of our scheme on a variety of attacks and show how it outperforms the previously known techniques. Since the communication overhead of secure aggregation is non-negligible, we investigate the interplay with zero-order estimation methods that reduce the communication cost in state-of-the-art FL tasks and thereby make private aggregation scalable.
Data-driven Nonlinear Modal Analysis with Physics-constrained Deep Learning: Numerical and Experimental Study
Rostamijavanani, Abdolvahhab, Li, Shanwu, Yang, Yongchao
To fully understand, analyze, and determine the behavior of dynamical systems, it is crucial to identify their intrinsic modal coordinates. In nonlinear dynamical systems, this task is challenging as the modal transformation based on the superposition principle that works well for linear systems is no longer applicable. To understand the nonlinear dynamics of a system, one of the main approaches is to use the framework of Nonlinear Normal Modes (NNMs) which attempts to provide an in-depth representation. In this research, we examine the effectiveness of NNMs in characterizing nonlinear dynamical systems. Given the difficulty of obtaining closed-form models or equations for these real-world systems, we present a data-driven framework that combines physics and deep learning to the nonlinear modal transformation function of NNMs from response data only. We assess the framework's ability to represent the system by analyzing its mode decomposition, reconstruction, and prediction accuracy using a nonlinear beam as an example. Initially, we perform numerical simulations on a nonlinear beam at different energy levels in both linear and nonlinear scenarios. Afterward, using experimental vibration data of a nonlinear beam, we isolate the first two NNMs. It is observed that the NNMs' frequency values increase as the excitation level of energy increases, and the configuration plots become more twisted (more nonlinear). In the experiment, the framework successfully decomposed the first two NNMs of the nonlinear beam using experimental free vibration data and captured the dynamics of the structure via prediction and reconstruction of some physical points of the beam.
Swing-Up of a Weakly Actuated Double Pendulum via Nonlinear Normal Modes
Sachtler, Arne, Calzolari, Davide, Raff, Maximilian, Schmidt, Annika, Wotte, Yannik P., Della Santina, Cosimo, Remy, C. David, Albu-Schรคffer, Alin
We identify the nonlinear normal modes spawning from the stable equilibrium of a double pendulum under gravity, and we establish their connection to homoclinic orbits through the unstable upright position as energy increases. This result is exploited to devise an efficient swing-up strategy for a double pendulum with weak, saturating actuators. Our approach involves stabilizing the system onto periodic orbits associated with the nonlinear modes while gradually injecting energy. Since these modes are autonomous system evolutions, the required control effort for stabilization is minimal. Even with actuator limitations of less than 1% of the maximum gravitational torque, the proposed method accomplishes the swing-up of the double pendulum by allowing sufficient time.
A recipe of training neural network-based LDPC decoders
It is known belief propagation decoding variants of LDPC codes can be unrolled easily as neural networks after assigning differed weights to message passing edges flexibly. In this paper we focus on how to determine these weights, in the form of trainable paramters, within a framework of deep learning. Firstly, a new method is proposed to generate high-quality training data via exploiting an approximation to the targeted mixture density. Then the strong positive correlation between training loss and decoding metrics is fully exposed after tracing the training evolution curves. Lastly, for the purpose of facilitating training convergence and reducing decoding complexity, we highlight the necessity of slashing the number of trainable parameters while emphasizing the locations of these survived ones, which is justified in the extensive simulation.
Expressive Recommender Systems through Normalized Nonnegative Models
Stark, Cyril J. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
We introduce normalized nonnegative models (NNM) for explorative data analysis. NNMs are partial convexifications of models from probability theory. We demonstrate their value at the example of item recommendation. We show that NNM-based recommender systems satisfy three criteria that all recommender systems should ideally satisfy: high predictive power, computational tractability, and expressive representations of users and items. Expressive user and item representations are important in practice to succinctly summarize the pool of customers and the pool of items. In NNMs, user representations are expressive because each user's preference can be regarded as normalized mixture of preferences of stereotypical users. The interpretability of item and user representations allow us to arrange properties of items (e.g., genres of movies or topics of documents) or users (e.g., personality traits) hierarchically.
Recommender systems inspired by the structure of quantum theory
Physicists use quantum models to describe the behavior of physical systems. Quantum models owe their success to their interpretability, to their relation to probabilistic models (quantization of classical models) and to their high predictive power. Beyond physics, these properties are valuable in general data science. This motivates the use of quantum models to analyze general nonphysical datasets. Here we provide both empirical and theoretical insights into the application of quantum models in data science. In the theoretical part of this paper, we firstly show that quantum models can be exponentially more efficient than probabilistic models because there exist datasets that admit low-dimensional quantum models and only exponentially high-dimensional probabilistic models. Secondly, we explain in what sense quantum models realize a useful relaxation of compressed probabilistic models. Thirdly, we show that sparse datasets admit low-dimensional quantum models and finally, we introduce a method to compute hierarchical orderings of properties of users (e.g., personality traits) and items (e.g., genres of movies). In the empirical part of the paper, we evaluate quantum models in item recommendation and observe that the predictive power of quantum-inspired recommender systems can compete with state-of-the-art recommender systems like SVD++ and PureSVD. Furthermore, we make use of the interpretability of quantum models by computing hierarchical orderings of properties of users and items. This work establishes a connection between data science (item recommendation), information theory (communication complexity), mathematical programming (positive semidefinite factorizations) and physics (quantum models).
Expressive recommender systems through normalized nonnegative models
We introduce normalized nonnegative models (NNM) for explorative data analysis. NNMs are partial convexifications of models from probability theory. We demonstrate their value at the example of item recommendation. We show that NNM-based recommender systems satisfy three criteria that all recommender systems should ideally satisfy: high predictive power, computational tractability, and expressive representations of users and items. Expressive user and item representations are important in practice to succinctly summarize the pool of customers and the pool of items. In NNMs, user representations are expressive because each user's preference can be regarded as normalized mixture of preferences of stereotypical users. The interpretability of item and user representations allow us to arrange properties of items (e.g., genres of movies or topics of documents) or users (e.g., personality traits) hierarchically.