Enhancing IoT Intelligence: A Transformer-based Reinforcement Learning Methodology

The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to an explosion of data generated by interconnected devices, presenting both opportunities and challenges for intelligent decision-making in complex environments. Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches often struggle to fully harness this data due to their limited ability to process and interpret the intricate patterns and dependencies inherent in IoT applications. This paper introduces a novel framework that integrates transformer architectures with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to address these challenges. By leveraging the self-attention mechanism of transformers, our approach enhances RL agents' capacity for understanding and acting within dynamic IoT environments, leading to improved decision-making processes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method across various IoT scenarios, from smart home automation to industrial control systems, showing marked improvements in decision-making efficiency and adaptability. Our contributions include a detailed exploration of the transformer's role in processing heterogeneous IoT data, a comprehensive evaluation of the framework's performance in diverse environments, and a benchmark against traditional RL methods. The results indicate significant advancements in enabling RL agents to navigate the complexities of IoT ecosystems, highlighting the potential of our approach to revolutionize intelligent automation and decision-making in the IoT landscape.

A Comprehensive Survey on Applications of Transformers for Deep Learning Tasks

Transformer is a deep neural network that employs a self-attention mechanism to comprehend the contextual relationships within sequential data. Unlike conventional neural networks or updated versions of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), transformer models excel in handling long dependencies between input sequence elements and enable parallel processing. As a result, transformer-based models have attracted substantial interest among researchers in the field of artificial intelligence. This can be attributed to their immense potential and remarkable achievements, not only in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks but also in a wide range of domains, including computer vision, audio and speech processing, healthcare, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Although several survey papers have been published highlighting the transformer's contributions in specific fields, architectural differences, or performance evaluations, there is still a significant absence of a comprehensive survey paper encompassing its major applications across various domains. Therefore, we undertook the task of filling this gap by conducting an extensive survey of proposed transformer models from 2017 to 2022. Our survey encompasses the identification of the top five application domains for transformer-based models, namely: NLP, Computer Vision, Multi-Modality, Audio and Speech Processing, and Signal Processing. We analyze the impact of highly influential transformer-based models in these domains and subsequently classify them based on their respective tasks using a proposed taxonomy. Our aim is to shed light on the existing potential and future possibilities of transformers for enthusiastic researchers, thus contributing to the broader understanding of this groundbreaking technology.

The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions

The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed, including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture. Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic, multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions, and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users, scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution.

ON-DEMAND-FL: A Dynamic and Efficient Multi-Criteria Federated Learning Client Deployment Scheme

In this paper, we increase the availability and integration of devices in the learning process to enhance the convergence of federated learning (FL) models. To address the issue of having all the data in one location, federated learning, which maintains the ability to learn over decentralized data sets, combines privacy and technology. Until the model converges, the server combines the updated weights obtained from each dataset over a number of rounds. The majority of the literature suggested client selection techniques to accelerate convergence and boost accuracy. However, none of the existing proposals have focused on the flexibility to deploy and select clients as needed, wherever and whenever that may be. Due to the extremely dynamic surroundings, some devices are actually not available to serve as clients in FL, which affects the availability of data for learning and the applicability of the existing solution for client selection. In this paper, we address the aforementioned limitations by introducing an On-Demand-FL, a client deployment approach for FL, offering more volume and heterogeneity of data in the learning process. We make use of the containerization technology such as Docker to build efficient environments using IoT and mobile devices serving as volunteers. Furthermore, Kubernetes is used for orchestration. The Genetic algorithm (GA) is used to solve the multi-objective optimization problem due to its evolutionary strategy. The performed experiments using the Mobile Data Challenge (MDC) dataset and the Localfed framework illustrate the relevance of the proposed approach and the efficiency of the on-the-fly deployment of clients whenever and wherever needed with less discarded rounds and more available data.

Reward Shaping Using Convolutional Neural Network

In this paper, we propose Value Iteration Network for Reward Shaping (VIN-RS), a potential-based reward shaping mechanism using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The proposed VIN-RS embeds a CNN trained on computed labels using the message passing mechanism of the Hidden Markov Model. The CNN processes images or graphs of the environment to predict the shaping values. Recent work on reward shaping still has limitations towards training on a representation of the Markov Decision Process (MDP) and building an estimate of the transition matrix. The advantage of VIN-RS is to construct an effective potential function from an estimated MDP while automatically inferring the environment transition matrix. The proposed VIN-RS estimates the transition matrix through a self-learned convolution filter while extracting environment details from the input frames or sampled graphs. Due to (1) the previous success of using message passing for reward shaping; and (2) the CNN planning behavior, we use these messages to train the CNN of VIN-RS. Experiments are performed on tabular games, Atari 2600 and MuJoCo, for discrete and continuous action space. Our results illustrate promising improvements in the learning speed and maximum cumulative reward compared to the state-of-the-art.

Cloud computing as a platform for monetizing data services: A two-sided game business model

With the unprecedented reliance on cloud computing as the backbone for storing today's big data, we argue in this paper that the role of the cloud should be reshaped from being a passive virtual market to become an active platform for monetizing the big data through Artificial Intelligence (AI) services. The objective is to enable the cloud to be an active platform that can help big data service providers reach a wider set of customers and cloud users (i.e., data consumers) to be exposed to a larger and richer variety of data to run their data analytic tasks. To achieve this vision, we propose a novel game theoretical model, which consists of a mix of cooperative and competitive strategies. The players of the game are the big data service providers, cloud computing platform, and cloud users. The strategies of the players are modeled using the two-sided market theory that takes into consideration the network effects among involved parties, while integrating the externalities between the cloud resources and consumer demands into the design of the game. Simulations conducted using Amazon and google clustered data show that the proposed model improves the total surplus of all the involved parties in terms of cloud resources provision and monetary profits compared to the current merchant model.

A two-level solution to fight against dishonest opinions in recommendation-based trust systems

In this paper, we propose a mechanism to deal with dishonest opinions in recommendation-based trust models, at both the collection and processing levels. We consider a scenario in which an agent requests recommendations from multiple parties to build trust toward another agent. At the collection level, we propose to allow agents to self-assess the accuracy of their recommendations and autonomously decide on whether they would participate in the recommendation process or not. At the processing level, we propose a recommendations aggregation technique that is resilient to collusion attacks, followed by a credibility update mechanism for the participating agents. The originality of our work stems from its consideration of dishonest opinions at both the collection and processing levels, which allows for better and more persistent protection against dishonest recommenders. Experiments conducted on the Epinions dataset show that our solution yields better performance in protecting the recommendation process against Sybil attacks, in comparison with a competing model that derives the optimal network of advisors based on the agents' trust values.