What Makes Good Collaborative Views? Contrastive Mutual Information Maximization for Multi-Agent Perception

Multi-agent perception (MAP) allows autonomous systems to understand complex environments by interpreting data from multiple sources. This paper investigates intermediate collaboration for MAP with a specific focus on exploring "good" properties of collaborative view (i.e., post-collaboration feature) and its underlying relationship to individual views (i.e., pre-collaboration features), which were treated as an opaque procedure by most existing works. We propose a novel framework named CMiMC (Contrastive Mutual Information Maximization for Collaborative Perception) for intermediate collaboration. The core philosophy of CMiMC is to preserve discriminative information of individual views in the collaborative view by maximizing mutual information between pre- and post-collaboration features while enhancing the efficacy of collaborative views by minimizing the loss function of downstream tasks. In particular, we define multi-view mutual information (MVMI) for intermediate collaboration that evaluates correlations between collaborative views and individual views on both global and local scales. We establish CMiMNet based on multi-view contrastive learning to realize estimation and maximization of MVMI, which assists the training of a collaboration encoder for voxel-level feature fusion. We evaluate CMiMC on V2X-Sim 1.0, and it improves the SOTA average precision by 3.08% and 4.44% at 0.5 and 0.7 IoU (Intersection-over-Union) thresholds, respectively. In addition, CMiMC can reduce communication volume to 1/32 while achieving performance comparable to SOTA. Code and Appendix are released at https://github.com/77SWF/CMiMC.

Automated Customization of On-Thing Inference for Quality-of-Experience Enhancement

The rapid uptake of intelligent applications is pushing deep learning (DL) capabilities to Internet-of-Things (IoT). Despite the emergence of new tools for embedding deep neural networks (DNNs) into IoT devices, providing satisfactory Quality of Experience (QoE) to users is still challenging due to the heterogeneity in DNN architectures, IoT devices, and user preferences. This paper studies automated customization for DL inference on IoT devices (termed as on-thing inference), and our goal is to enhance user QoE by configuring the on-thing inference with an appropriate DNN for users under different usage scenarios. The core of our method is a DNN selection module that learns user QoE patterns on-the-fly and identifies the best-fit DNN for on-thing inference with the learned knowledge. It leverages a novel online learning algorithm, NeuralUCB, that has excellent generalization ability for handling various user QoE patterns. We also embed the knowledge transfer technique in NeuralUCB to expedite the learning process. However, NeuralUCB frequently solicits QoE ratings from users, which incurs non-negligible inconvenience. To address this problem, we design feedback solicitation schemes to reduce the number of QoE solicitations while maintaining the learning efficiency of NeuralUCB. A pragmatic problem, aggregated QoE, is further investigated to improve the practicality of our framework. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world data. The results indicate that our method efficiently learns the user QoE pattern with few solicitations and provides drastic QoE enhancement for IoT devices.

Context-Aware Online Client Selection for Hierarchical Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) has been considered as an appealing framework to tackle data privacy issues of mobile devices compared to conventional Machine Learning (ML). Using Edge Servers (ESs) as intermediaries to perform model aggregation in proximity can reduce the transmission overhead, and it enables great potentials in low-latency FL, where the hierarchical architecture of FL (HFL) has been attracted more attention. Designing a proper client selection policy can significantly improve training performance, and it has been extensively used in FL studies. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies focusing on HFL. In addition, client selection for HFL faces more challenges than conventional FL, e.g., the time-varying connection of client-ES pairs and the limited budget of the Network Operator (NO). In this paper, we investigate a client selection problem for HFL, where the NO learns the number of successful participating clients to improve the training performance (i.e., select as many clients in each round) as well as under the limited budget on each ES. An online policy, called Context-aware Online Client Selection (COCS), is developed based on Contextual Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit (CC-MAB). COCS observes the side-information (context) of local computing and transmission of client-ES pairs and makes client selection decisions to maximize NO's utility given a limited budget. Theoretically, COCS achieves a sublinear regret compared to an Oracle policy on both strongly convex and non-convex HFL. Simulation results also support the efficiency of the proposed COCS policy on real-world datasets.

Autodidactic Neurosurgeon: Collaborative Deep Inference for Mobile Edge Intelligence via Online Learning

Recent breakthroughs in deep learning (DL) have led to the emergence of many intelligent mobile applications and services, but in the meanwhile also pose unprecedented computing challenges on resource-constrained mobile devices. This paper builds a collaborative deep inference system between a resource-constrained mobile device and a powerful edge server, aiming at joining the power of both on-device processing and computation offloading. The basic idea of this system is to partition a deep neural network (DNN) into a front-end part running on the mobile device and a back-end part running on the edge server, with the key challenge being how to locate the optimal partition point to minimize the end-to-end inference delay. Unlike existing efforts on DNN partitioning that rely heavily on a dedicated offline profiling stage to search for the optimal partition point, our system has a built-in online learning module, called Autodidactic Neurosurgeon (ANS), to automatically learn the optimal partition point on-the-fly. Therefore, ANS is able to closely follow the changes of the system environment by generating new knowledge for adaptive decision making. The core of ANS is a novel contextual bandit learning algorithm, called $\mu$LinUCB, which not only has provable theoretical learning performance guarantee but also is ultra-lightweight for easy real-world implementation. We implement our system on a video stream object detection testbed to validate the design of ANS and evaluate its performance. The experiments show that ANS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in terms of tracking system changes and reducing the end-to-end inference delay.

Bandwidth Allocation for Multiple Federated Learning Services in Wireless Edge Networks

This paper studies a federated learning (FL) system, where \textit{multiple} FL services co-exist in a wireless network and share common wireless resources. It fills the void of wireless resource allocation for multiple simultaneous FL services in the existing literature. Our method designs a two-level resource allocation framework comprising \emph{intra-service} resource allocation and \emph{inter-service} resource allocation. The intra-service resource allocation problem aims to minimize the length of FL rounds by optimizing the bandwidth allocation among the clients of each FL service. Based on this, an inter-service resource allocation problem is further considered, which distributes bandwidth resources among multiple simultaneous FL services. We consider both cooperative and selfish providers of the FL services. For cooperative FL service providers, we design a distributed bandwidth allocation algorithm to optimize the overall performance of multiple FL services, meanwhile cater to the fairness among FL services and the privacy of clients. For selfish FL service providers, a new auction scheme is designed with the FL service owners as the bidders and the network provider as the auctioneer. The designed auction scheme strikes a balance between the overall FL performance and fairness. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithms outperform other benchmarks under various network conditions.

Spatio-temporal Edge Service Placement: A Bandit Learning Approach

Shared edge computing platforms deployed at the radio access network are expected to significantly improve quality of service delivered by Application Service Providers (ASPs) in a flexible and economic way. However, placing edge service in every possible edge site by an ASP is practically infeasible due to the ASP's prohibitive budget requirement. In this paper, we investigate the edge service placement problem of an ASP under a limited budget, where the ASP dynamically rents computing/storage resources in edge sites to host its applications in close proximity to end users. Since the benefit of placing edge service in a specific site is usually unknown to the ASP a priori, optimal placement decisions must be made while learning this benefit. We pose this problem as a novel combinatorial contextual bandit learning problem. It is "combinatorial" because only a limited number of edge sites can be rented to provide the edge service given the ASP's budget. It is "contextual" because we utilize user context information to enable finer-grained learning and decision making. To solve this problem and optimize the edge computing performance, we propose SEEN, a Spatial-temporal Edge sErvice placemeNt algorithm. Furthermore, SEEN is extended to scenarios with overlapping service coverage by incorporating a disjunctively constrained knapsack problem. In both cases, we prove that our algorithm achieves a sublinear regret bound when it is compared to an oracle algorithm that knows the exact benefit information. Simulations are carried out on a real-world dataset, whose results show that SEEN significantly outperforms benchmark solutions.

Online Learning for Offloading and Autoscaling in Energy Harvesting Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (a.k.a. fog computing) has recently emerged to enable in-situ processing of delay-sensitive applications at the edge of mobile networks. Providing grid power supply in support of mobile edge computing, however, is costly and even infeasible (in certain rugged or under-developed areas), thus mandating on-site renewable energy as a major or even sole power supply in increasingly many scenarios. Nonetheless, the high intermittency and unpredictability of renewable energy make it very challenging to deliver a high quality of service to users in energy harvesting mobile edge computing systems. In this paper, we address the challenge of incorporating renewables into mobile edge computing and propose an efficient reinforcement learning-based resource management algorithm, which learns on-the-fly the optimal policy of dynamic workload offloading (to the centralized cloud) and edge server provisioning to minimize the long-term system cost (including both service delay and operational cost). Our online learning algorithm uses a decomposition of the (offline) value iteration and (online) reinforcement learning, thus achieving a significant improvement of learning rate and run-time performance when compared to standard reinforcement learning algorithms such as Q-learning. We prove the convergence of the proposed algorithm and analytically show that the learned policy has a simple monotone structure amenable to practical implementation. Our simulation results validate the efficacy of our algorithm, which significantly improves the edge computing performance compared to fixed or myopic optimization schemes and conventional reinforcement learning algorithms.