CLARA: A Constrained Reinforcement Learning Based Resource Allocation Framework for Network Slicing

As mobile networks proliferate, we are experiencing a strong diversification of services, which requires greater flexibility from the existing network. Network slicing is proposed as a promising solution for resource utilization in 5G and future networks to address this dire need. In network slicing, dynamic resource orchestration and network slice management are crucial for maximizing resource utilization. Unfortunately, this process is too complex for traditional approaches to be effective due to a lack of accurate models and dynamic hidden structures. We formulate the problem as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) without knowing models and hidden structures. Additionally, we propose to solve the problem using CLARA, a Constrained reinforcement LeArning based Resource Allocation algorithm. In particular, we analyze cumulative and instantaneous constraints using adaptive interior-point policy optimization and projection layer, respectively. Evaluations show that CLARA clearly outperforms baselines in resource allocation with service demand guarantees.

IPO: Interior-point Policy Optimization under Constraints

In this paper, we study reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to solve real-world decision problems with the objective of maximizing the long-term reward as well as satisfying cumulative constraints. We propose a novel first-order policy optimization method, Interior-point Policy Optimization (IPO), which augments the objective with logarithmic barrier functions, inspired by the interior-point method. Our proposed method is easy to implement with performance guarantees and can handle general types of cumulative multiconstraint settings. We conduct extensive evaluations to compare our approach with state-of-the-art baselines. Our algorithm outperforms the baseline algorithms, in terms of reward maximization and constraint satisfaction.

Less is More: Culling the Training Set to Improve Robustness of Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Prior defenses attempted to make deep networks more robust by either improving the network architecture or adding adversarial examples into the training set, with their respective limitations. We propose a new direction. Motivated by recent research that shows that outliers in the training set have a high negative influence on the trained model, our approach makes the model more robust by detecting and removing outliers in the training set without modifying the network architecture or requiring adversarial examples. We propose two methods for detecting outliers based on canonical examples and on training errors, respectively. After removing the outliers, we train the classifier with the remaining examples to obtain a sanitized model. Our evaluation shows that the sanitized model improves classification accuracy and forces the attacks to generate adversarial examples with higher distortions. Moreover, the Kullback-Leibler divergence from the output of the original model to that of the sanitized model allows us to distinguish between normal and adversarial examples reliably.