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Continual Federated Learning (CFL) is essential for enabling real-world applications where multiple decentralized clients adaptively learn from continuous data streams. A significant challenge in CFL is mitigating catastrophic forgetting, where models lose previously acquired knowledge when learning new information. Existing approaches often face difficulties due to the constraints of device storage capacities and the heterogeneous nature of data distributions among clients. While some CFL algorithms have addressed these challenges, they frequently rely on unrealistic assumptions about the availability of task boundaries (i.e., knowing when new tasks begin). To address these limitations, we introduce Fed-A-GEM, a federated adaptation of the A-GEM method (Chaudhry et al., 2019), which employs a buffer-based gradient projection approach. Fed-A-GEM alleviates catastrophic forgetting by leveraging local buffer samples and aggregated buffer gradients, thus preserving knowledge across multiple clients. Our method is combined with existing CFL techniques, enhancing their performance in the CFL context. Our experiments on standard benchmarks show consistent performance improvements across diverse scenarios. For example, in a task-incremental learning scenario using the CIFAR-100 dataset, our method can increase the accuracy by up to 27%. Our code is available at https://github.com/shenghongdai/Fed-A-GEM., Comment: A preliminary version of this work was presented at the Federated Learning Systems (FLSys) Workshop @ Sixth Conference on Machine Learning and Systems, June 2023

Fine-tuning large pre-trained models is a common practice in machine learning applications, yet its mathematical analysis remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we study fine-tuning through the lens of memorization capacity. Our new measure, the Fine-Tuning Capacity (FTC), is defined as the maximum number of samples a neural network can fine-tune, or equivalently, as the minimum number of neurons ($m$) needed to arbitrarily change $N$ labels among $K$ samples considered in the fine-tuning process. In essence, FTC extends the memorization capacity concept to the fine-tuning scenario. We analyze FTC for the additive fine-tuning scenario where the fine-tuned network is defined as the summation of the frozen pre-trained network $f$ and a neural network $g$ (with $m$ neurons) designed for fine-tuning. When $g$ is a ReLU network with either 2 or 3 layers, we obtain tight upper and lower bounds on FTC; we show that $N$ samples can be fine-tuned with $m=\Theta(N)$ neurons for 2-layer networks, and with $m=\Theta(\sqrt{N})$ neurons for 3-layer networks, no matter how large $K$ is. Our results recover the known memorization capacity results when $N = K$ as a special case., Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, UAI 2024

Making decent multi-lingual sentence representations is critical to achieve high performances in cross-lingual downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a novel method to align multi-lingual embeddings based on the similarity of sentences measured by a pre-trained mono-lingual embedding model. Given translation sentence pairs, we train a multi-lingual model in a way that the similarity between cross-lingual embeddings follows the similarity of sentences measured at the mono-lingual teacher model. Our method can be considered as contrastive learning with soft labels defined as the similarity between sentences. Our experimental results on five languages show that our contrastive loss with soft labels far outperforms conventional contrastive loss with hard labels in various benchmarks for bitext mining tasks and STS tasks. In addition, our method outperforms existing multi-lingual embeddings including LaBSE, for Tatoeba dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/YAI12xLinq-B/IMASCL, Comment: 8 pages, 1 figures, Accepted at NAACL SRW 2024

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have accelerated their usage in various domains. Given the fact that psychiatric interviews are goal-oriented and structured dialogues between the professional interviewer and the interviewee, it is one of the most underexplored areas where LLMs can contribute substantial value. Here, we explore the use of LLMs for enhancing psychiatric interviews, by analyzing counseling data from North Korean defectors with traumatic events and mental health issues. Specifically, we investigate whether LLMs can (1) delineate the part of the conversation that suggests psychiatric symptoms and name the symptoms, and (2) summarize stressors and symptoms, based on the interview dialogue transcript. Here, the transcript data was labeled by mental health experts for training and evaluation of LLMs. Our experimental results show that appropriately prompted LLMs can achieve high performance on both the symptom delineation task and the summarization task. This research contributes to the nascent field of applying LLMs to psychiatric interview and demonstrates their potential effectiveness in aiding mental health practitioners.

Improving the accessibility of psychotherapy with the aid of Large Language Models (LLMs) is garnering a significant attention in recent years. Recognizing cognitive distortions from the interviewee's utterances can be an essential part of psychotherapy, especially for cognitive behavioral therapy. In this paper, we propose ERD, which improves LLM-based cognitive distortion classification performance with the aid of additional modules of (1) extracting the parts related to cognitive distortion, and (2) debating the reasoning steps by multiple agents. Our experimental results on a public dataset show that ERD improves the multi-class F1 score as well as binary specificity score. Regarding the latter score, it turns out that our method is effective in debiasing the baseline method which has high false positive rate, especially when the summary of multi-agent debate is provided to LLMs.

Mitigating hallucination issues is a key challenge that must be overcome to reliably deploy large language models (LLMs) in real-world scenarios. Recently, various methods have been proposed to detect and revise factual errors in LLM-generated texts, in order to reduce hallucination. In this paper, we propose Re-Ex, a method for post-editing LLM-generated responses. Re-Ex introduces a novel reasoning step dubbed as the factual error explanation step. Re-Ex revises the initial response of LLMs using 3-steps : first, external tools are used to retrieve the evidences of the factual errors in the initial LLM response; next, LLM is instructed to explain the problematic parts of the response based on the gathered evidence; finally, LLM revises the initial response using the explanations provided in the previous step. In addition to the explanation step, Re-Ex also incorporates new prompting techniques to reduce the token count and inference time required for the response revision process. Compared with existing methods including FacTool, CoVE, and RARR, Re-Ex provides better detection and revision performance with less inference time and fewer tokens in multiple benchmarks., Comment: 16 pages

Contrastive learning has emerged as a prominent branch of self-supervised learning for several years. Especially, CLIP, which applies contrastive learning to large sets of captioned images, has garnered significant attention. Recently, SigLIP, a variant of CLIP, has been proposed, which uses the sigmoid loss instead of the standard InfoNCE loss. SigLIP achieves the performance comparable to CLIP in a more efficient manner by eliminating the need for a global view. However, theoretical understanding of using the sigmoid loss in contrastive learning is underexplored. In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of using the sigmoid loss in contrastive learning, in the perspective of the geometric structure of learned embeddings. First, we propose the double-Constant Embedding Model (CCEM), a framework for parameterizing various well-known embedding structures by a single variable. Interestingly, the proposed CCEM is proven to contain the optimal embedding with respect to the sigmoid loss. Second, we mathematically analyze the optimal embedding minimizing the sigmoid loss for contrastive learning. The optimal embedding ranges from simplex equiangular-tight-frame to antipodal structure, depending on the temperature parameter used in the sigmoid loss. Third, our experimental results on synthetic datasets coincide with the theoretical results on the optimal embedding structures.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a simple and effective method for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The basic idea of CoT is to let LLMs break down their thought processes step-by-step by putting exemplars in the input prompt. However, the densely structured prompt exemplars of CoT may cause the cognitive overload of LLMs. Inspired by human cognition, we introduce COT-SEP, a method that strategically employs separators at the end of each exemplar in CoT prompting. These separators are designed to help the LLMs understand their thought processes better while reasoning. Interestingly, it turns out that COT-SEP significantly improves the LLMs' performances on complex reasoning tasks (e.g., GSM8K, AQuA, CSQA), compared with the vanilla CoT, which does not use separators. We also study the effects of the type and the location of separators tested on multiple LLMs, including GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, and LLaMA-2 7B.

Contrastive learning has gained significant attention as a method for self-supervised learning. The contrastive loss function ensures that embeddings of positive sample pairs (e.g., different samples from the same class or different views of the same object) are similar, while embeddings of negative pairs are dissimilar. Practical constraints such as large memory requirements make it challenging to consider all possible positive and negative pairs, leading to the use of mini-batch optimization. In this paper, we investigate the theoretical aspects of mini-batch optimization in contrastive learning. We show that mini-batch optimization is equivalent to full-batch optimization if and only if all $\binom{N}{B}$ mini-batches are selected, while sub-optimality may arise when examining only a subset. We then demonstrate that utilizing high-loss mini-batches can speed up SGD convergence and propose a spectral clustering-based approach for identifying these high-loss mini-batches. Our experimental results validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms vanilla SGD in practically relevant settings, providing a better understanding of mini-batch optimization in contrastive learning.

We present a framework for using transformer networks as universal computers by programming them with specific weights and placing them in a loop. Our input sequence acts as a punchcard, consisting of instructions and memory for data read/writes. We demonstrate that a constant number of encoder layers can emulate basic computing blocks, including embedding edit operations, non-linear functions, function calls, program counters, and conditional branches. Using these building blocks, we emulate a small instruction-set computer. This allows us to map iterative algorithms to programs that can be executed by a looped, 13-layer transformer. We show how this transformer, instructed by its input, can emulate a basic calculator, a basic linear algebra library, and in-context learning algorithms that employ backpropagation. Our work highlights the versatility of the attention mechanism, and demonstrates that even shallow transformers can execute full-fledged, general-purpose programs.

Yes. In this paper, we investigate strong lottery tickets in generative models, the subnetworks that achieve good generative performance without any weight update. Neural network pruning is considered the main cornerstone of model compression for reducing the costs of computation and memory. Unfortunately, pruning a generative model has not been extensively explored, and all existing pruning algorithms suffer from excessive weight-training costs, performance degradation, limited generalizability, or complicated training. To address these problems, we propose to find a strong lottery ticket via moment-matching scores. Our experimental results show that the discovered subnetwork can perform similarly or better than the trained dense model even when only 10% of the weights remain. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to show the existence of strong lottery tickets in generative models and provide an algorithm to find it stably. Our code and supplementary materials are publicly available.

Devising a fair classifier that does not discriminate against different groups is an important problem in machine learning. Although researchers have proposed various ways of defining group fairness, most of them only focused on the immediate fairness, ignoring the long-term impact of a fair classifier under the dynamic scenario where each individual can improve its feature over time. Such dynamic scenarios happen in real world, e.g., college admission and credit loaning, where each rejected sample makes effort to change its features to get accepted afterwards. In this dynamic setting, the long-term fairness should equalize the samples' feature distribution across different groups after the rejected samples make some effort to improve. In order to promote long-term fairness, we propose a new fairness notion called Equal Improvability (EI), which equalizes the potential acceptance rate of the rejected samples across different groups assuming a bounded level of effort will be spent by each rejected sample. We analyze the properties of EI and its connections with existing fairness notions. To find a classifier that satisfies the EI requirement, we propose and study three different approaches that solve EI-regularized optimization problems. Through experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed EI-regularized algorithms encourage us to find a fair classifier in terms of EI. Finally, we provide experimental results on dynamic scenarios which highlight the advantages of our EI metric in achieving the long-term fairness. Codes are available in a GitHub repository, see https://github.com/guldoganozgur/ei_fairness., Comment: Codes are available in a GitHub repository, see https://github.com/guldoganozgur/ei_fairness. ICLR 2023 Poster. 31 pages, 10 figures, 6 tables

Fine-tuning pretrained language models (LMs) without making any architectural changes has become a norm for learning various language downstream tasks. However, for non-language downstream tasks, a common practice is to employ task-specific designs for input, output layers, and loss functions. For instance, it is possible to fine-tune an LM into an MNIST classifier by replacing the word embedding layer with an image patch embedding layer, the word token output layer with a 10-way output layer, and the word prediction loss with a 10-way classification loss, respectively. A natural question arises: Can LM fine-tuning solve non-language downstream tasks without changing the model architecture or loss function? To answer this, we propose Language-Interfaced Fine-Tuning (LIFT) and study its efficacy and limitations by conducting an extensive empirical study on a suite of non-language classification and regression tasks. LIFT does not make any changes to the model architecture or loss function, and it solely relies on the natural language interface, enabling "no-code machine learning with LMs." We find that LIFT performs comparably well across a wide range of low-dimensional classification and regression tasks, matching the performances of the best baselines in many cases, especially for the classification tasks. We also report experimental results on the fundamental properties of LIFT, including inductive bias, robustness, and sample complexity. We also analyze the effect of pretraining on LIFT and a few properties/techniques specific to LIFT, e.g., context-aware learning via appropriate prompting, calibrated predictions, data generation, and two-stage fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/UW-Madison-Lee-Lab/LanguageInterfacedFineTuning., Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2022

Word translation without parallel corpora has become feasible, rivaling the performance of supervised methods. Recent findings have shown that the accuracy and robustness of unsupervised word translation (UWT) can be improved by making use of visual observations, which are universal representations across languages. In this work, we investigate the potential of using not only visual observations but also pretrained language-image models for enabling a more efficient and robust UWT. Specifically, we develop a novel UWT method dubbed Word Alignment using Language-Image Pretraining (WALIP), which leverages visual observations via the shared embedding space of images and texts provided by CLIP models (Radford et al., 2021). WALIP has a two-step procedure. First, we retrieve word pairs with high confidences of similarity, computed using our proposed image-based fingerprints, which define the initial pivot for the word alignment. Second, we apply our robust Procrustes algorithm to estimate the linear mapping between two embedding spaces, which iteratively corrects and refines the estimated alignment. Our extensive experiments show that WALIP improves upon the state-of-the-art performance of bilingual word alignment for a few language pairs across different word embeddings and displays great robustness to the dissimilarity of language pairs or training corpora for two word embeddings., Comment: In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP Findings)

Minimizing risk with fairness constraints is one of the popular approaches to learning a fair classifier. Recent works showed that this approach yields an unfair classifier if the training set is corrupted. In this work, we study the minimum amount of data corruption required for a successful flipping attack. First, we find lower/upper bounds on this quantity and show that these bounds are tight when the target model is the unique unconstrained risk minimizer. Second, we propose a computationally efficient data poisoning attack algorithm that can compromise the performance of fair learning algorithms.

Large neural networks can be pruned to a small fraction of their original size, with little loss in accuracy, by following a time-consuming "train, prune, re-train" approach. Frankle & Carbin conjecture that we can avoid this by training "lottery tickets", i.e., special sparse subnetworks found at initialization, that can be trained to high accuracy. However, a subsequent line of work by Frankle et al. and Su et al. presents concrete evidence that current algorithms for finding trainable networks at initialization, fail simple baseline comparisons, e.g., against training random sparse subnetworks. Finding lottery tickets that train to better accuracy compared to simple baselines remains an open problem. In this work, we resolve this open problem by proposing Gem-Miner which finds lottery tickets at initialization that beat current baselines. Gem-Miner finds lottery tickets trainable to accuracy competitive or better than Iterative Magnitude Pruning (IMP), and does so up to $19\times$ faster.

Mixup is a data augmentation method that generates new data points by mixing a pair of input data. While mixup generally improves the prediction performance, it sometimes degrades the performance. In this paper, we first identify the main causes of this phenomenon by theoretically and empirically analyzing the mixup algorithm. To resolve this, we propose GenLabel, a simple yet effective relabeling algorithm designed for mixup. In particular, GenLabel helps the mixup algorithm correctly label mixup samples by learning the class-conditional data distribution using generative models. Via extensive theoretical and empirical analysis, we show that mixup, when used together with GenLabel, can effectively resolve the aforementioned phenomenon, improving the generalization performance and the adversarial robustness.

A recent work by Ramanujan et al. (2020) provides significant empirical evidence that sufficiently overparameterized, random neural networks contain untrained subnetworks that achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on several predictive tasks. A follow-up line of theoretical work provides justification of these findings by proving that slightly overparameterized neural networks, with commonly used continuous-valued random initializations can indeed be pruned to approximate any target network. In this work, we show that the amplitude of those random weights does not even matter. We prove that any target network can be approximated up to arbitrary accuracy by simply pruning a random network of binary $\{\pm1\}$ weights that is only a polylogarithmic factor wider and deeper than the target network.

Federated learning has been spotlighted as a way to train neural networks using distributed data with no need for individual nodes to share data. Unfortunately, it has also been shown that adversaries may be able to extract local data contents off model parameters transmitted during federated learning. A recent solution based on the secure aggregation primitive enabled privacy-preserving federated learning, but at the expense of significant extra communication/computational resources. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity scheme that provides data privacy using substantially reduced communication/computational resources relative to the existing secure solution. The key idea behind the suggested scheme is to design the topology of secret-sharing nodes as a sparse random graph instead of the complete graph corresponding to the existing solution. We first obtain the necessary and sufficient condition on the graph to guarantee both reliability and privacy. We then suggest using the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi graph in particular and provide theoretical guarantees on the reliability/privacy of the proposed scheme. Through extensive real-world experiments, we demonstrate that our scheme, using only $20 \sim 30\%$ of the resources required in the conventional scheme, maintains virtually the same levels of reliability and data privacy in practical federated learning systems.

Due to its decentralized nature, Federated Learning (FL) lends itself to adversarial attacks in the form of backdoors during training. The goal of a backdoor is to corrupt the performance of the trained model on specific sub-tasks (e.g., by classifying green cars as frogs). A range of FL backdoor attacks have been introduced in the literature, but also methods to defend against them, and it is currently an open question whether FL systems can be tailored to be robust against backdoors. In this work, we provide evidence to the contrary. We first establish that, in the general case, robustness to backdoors implies model robustness to adversarial examples, a major open problem in itself. Furthermore, detecting the presence of a backdoor in a FL model is unlikely assuming first order oracles or polynomial time. We couple our theoretical results with a new family of backdoor attacks, which we refer to as edge-case backdoors. An edge-case backdoor forces a model to misclassify on seemingly easy inputs that are however unlikely to be part of the training, or test data, i.e., they live on the tail of the input distribution. We explain how these edge-case backdoors can lead to unsavory failures and may have serious repercussions on fairness, and exhibit that with careful tuning at the side of the adversary, one can insert them across a range of machine learning tasks (e.g., image classification, OCR, text prediction, sentiment analysis).

Recent advances in large-scale distributed learning algorithms have enabled communication-efficient training via SignSGD. Unfortunately, a major issue continues to plague distributed learning: namely, Byzantine failures may incur serious degradation in learning accuracy. This paper proposes Election Coding, a coding-theoretic framework to guarantee Byzantine-robustness for SignSGD with Majority Vote, which uses minimum worker-master communication in both directions. The suggested framework explores new information-theoretic limits of finding the majority opinion when some workers could be malicious, and paves the road to implement robust and efficient distributed learning algorithms. Under this framework, we construct two types of explicit codes, random Bernoulli codes and deterministic algebraic codes, that can tolerate Byzantine attacks with a controlled amount of computational redundancy. For the Bernoulli codes, we provide upper bounds on the error probability in estimating the majority opinion, which give useful insights into code design for tolerating Byzantine attacks. As for deterministic codes, we construct an explicit code which perfectly tolerates Byzantines, and provide tight upper/lower bounds on the minimum required computational redundancy. Finally, the Byzantine-tolerance of the suggested coding schemes is confirmed by deep learning experiments on Amazon EC2 using Python with MPI4py package., Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2020

Coded distributed computing has been considered as a promising technique which makes large-scale systems robust to the "straggler" workers. Yet, practical system models for distributed computing have not been available that reflect the clustered or grouped structure of real-world computing servers. Neither the large variations in the computing power and bandwidth capabilities across different servers have been properly modeled. We suggest a group-based model to reflect practical conditions and develop an appropriate coding scheme for this model. The suggested code, called group code, employs parallel encoding for each group. We show that the suggested coding scheme can asymptotically achieve optimal computing time in regimes of infinite n, the number of workers. While theoretical analysis is conducted in the asymptotic regime, numerical results also show that the suggested scheme achieves near-optimal computing time for any finite but reasonably large n. Moreover, we demonstrate that the decoding complexity of the suggested scheme is significantly reduced by the virtue of parallel decoding., Comment: 9 pages, submitted to ISIT 2019

Coded computation is a framework which provides redundancy in distributed computing systems to speed up largescale tasks. Although most existing works assume an error-free scenarios in a master-worker setup, the link failures are common in current wired/wireless networks. In this paper, we consider the straggler problem in coded distributed computing with link failures, by modeling the links between the master node and worker nodes as packet erasure channels. When the master fails to detect the received signal, retransmission is required for each worker which increases the overall run-time to finish the task. We first investigate the expected overall run-time in this setting using an (n; k) maximum distance separable (MDS) code. We obtain the lower and upper bounds on the latency in closed-forms and give guidelines to design MDS code depending on the packet erasure probability. Finally, we consider a setup where the number of retransmissions is limited due to the bandwidth constraint. By formulating practical optimization problems related to latency, transmission bandwidth and probability of successful computation, we obtain achievable performance curves as a function of packet erasure probability., Comment: 12 pages

Coding for distributed computing supports low-latency computation by relieving the burden of straggling workers. While most existing works assume a simple master-worker model, we consider a hierarchical computational structure consisting of groups of workers, motivated by the need to reflect the architectures of real-world distributed computing systems. In this work, we propose a hierarchical coding scheme for this model, as well as analyze its decoding cost and expected computation time. Specifically, we first provide upper and lower bounds on the expected computing time of the proposed scheme. We also show that our scheme enables efficient parallel decoding, thus reducing decoding costs by orders of magnitude over non-hierarchical schemes. When considering both decoding cost and computing time, the proposed hierarchical coding is shown to outperform existing schemes in many practical scenarios., Comment: 7 pages, part of the paper is submitted to ISIT2018

This paper considers capacity-achieving coding for the clustered form of distributed storage that reflects practical storage networks. To reflect the clustered structure with limited cross-cluster communication bandwidths, nodes in the same cluster are set to communicate $\beta_I$ symbols, while nodes in other clusters can communicate $\beta_c \leq \beta_I$ symbols with one another. We provide two types of exact regenerating codes which achieve the capacity of clustered distributed storage: the minimum-bandwidth-regenerating (MBR) codes and the minimum-storage-regenerating (MSR) codes. First, we construct MBR codes for general parameter settings of clustered distributed storage. The suggested MBR code is a generalization of an existing code proposed by Rashmi et al., for scenarios where storage nodes are dispersed into L > 1 clusters. The proposed MBR code for the $\beta_c = 0$ case requires a much smaller field size compared to existing local MBR codes. Secondly, we devise MSR codes for clustered distributed storage. Focus is given on two important cases:$\epsilon=0$ and $\epsilon \in [1/(n-k), 1]$, where $\epsilon=\beta_c/\beta_I$ is the ratio of the available cross- to intra-cluster repair bandwidths, n is the total number of distributed nodes and k is the number of contact nodes in data retrieval. The former represents the scenario where cross-cluster communication is not allowed, while the latter corresponds to the case of minimum node storage overhead. For $\epsilon=0$, two existing locally repairable codes are proven to be MSR codes for the clustered model. For $\epsilon \in [1/(n-k), 1]$, existing MSR codes for the non-clustered model are applicable to clustered scenarios with a simple modification., Comment: 25 pages, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Clustered distributed storage models real data centers where intra- and cross-cluster repair bandwidths are different. In this paper, exact-repair minimum-storage-regenerating (MSR) codes achieving capacity of clustered distributed storage are designed. Focus is given on two cases: $\epsilon=0$ and $\epsilon=1/(n-k)$, where $\epsilon$ is the ratio of the available cross- and intra-cluster repair bandwidths, $n$ is the total number of distributed nodes and $k$ is the number of contact nodes in data retrieval. The former represents the scenario where cross-cluster communication is not allowed, while the latter corresponds to the case of minimum cross-cluster bandwidth that is possible under the minimum storage overhead constraint. For the $\epsilon=0$ case, two types of locally repairable codes are proven to achieve the MSR point. As for $\epsilon=1/(n-k)$, an explicit MSR coding scheme is suggested for the two-cluster situation under the specific condition of $n = 2k$., Comment: 9 pages, a part of this paper is submitted to IEEE ISIT2018

Pilot contamination, caused by the reuse of pilots among interfering cells, remains as a significant obstacle that limits the performance of massive multi-input multi-output antenna systems. To handle this problem, less aggressive reuse of pilots involving allocation of additional pilots for interfering users is closely examined in this paper. Hierarchical pilot reuse methods are proposed, which effectively mitigate pilot contamination and increase the net throughput of the system. Among the suggested hierarchical pilot reuse schemes, the optimal way of assigning pilots to different users is obtained in a closed-form solution which maximizes the net sum-rate in a given coherence time. Simulation results confirm that when the ratio of the channel coherence time to the number of users in each cell is sufficiently large, less aggressive reuse of pilots yields significant performance advantage relative to the case where all cells reuse the same pilot set., Comment: 13 pages, to be appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

A new system model reflecting the clustered structure of distributed storage is suggested to investigate interplay between storage overhead and repair bandwidth as storage node failures occur. Large data centers with multiple racks/disks or local networks of storage devices (e.g. sensor network) are good applications of the suggested clustered model. In realistic scenarios involving clustered storage structures, repairing storage nodes using intact nodes residing in other clusters is more bandwidth-consuming than restoring nodes based on information from intra-cluster nodes. Therefore, it is important to differentiate between intra-cluster repair bandwidth and cross-cluster repair bandwidth in modeling distributed storage. Capacity of the suggested model is obtained as a function of fundamental resources of distributed storage systems, namely, node storage capacity, intra-cluster repair bandwidth and cross-cluster repair bandwidth. The capacity is shown to be asymptotically equivalent to a monotonic decreasing function of number of clusters, as the number of storage nodes increases without bound. Based on the capacity expression, feasible sets of required resources which enable reliable storage are obtained in a closed-form solution. Specifically, it is shown that the cross-cluster traffic can be minimized to zero (i.e., intra-cluster local repair becomes possible) by allowing extra resources on storage capacity and intra-cluster repair bandwidth, according to the law specified in the closed-form. The network coding schemes with zero cross-cluster traffic are defined as intra-cluster repairable codes, which are shown to be a class of the previously developed locally repairable codes., Comment: To Appear at IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Pilot reuse in multi-cell massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system is investigated where user groups with different priorities exist. Recent investigation on pilot reuse has revealed that when the ratio of the coherent time interval to the number of users is reasonably high, it is beneficial not to fully reuse pilots from interfering cells. This work finds the optimum pilot assignment strategy that would maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR) given the user groups with different priorities. A closed-form solution for the optimal pilot assignment is derived and is shown to make intuitive sense. Performance comparison shows that under wide range of channel conditions, the optimal pilot assignment that uses extra set of pilots achieves better WSR performance than conventional full pilot reuse., Comment: 13 pages, to appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 2017

This paper considers the security issue of practical distributed storage systems (DSSs) which consist of multiple clusters of storage nodes. Noticing that actual storage nodes constituting a DSS are distributed in multiple clusters, two novel eavesdropper models - the node-restricted model and the cluster-restricted model - are suggested which reflect the clustered nature of DSSs. In the node-restricted model, an eavesdropper cannot access the individual nodes, but can eavesdrop incoming/outgoing data for $L_c$ compromised clusters. In the cluster-restricted model, an eavesdropper can access a total of $l$ individual nodes but the number of accessible clusters is limited to $L_c$. We provide an upper bound on the securely storable data for each model, while a specific network coding scheme which achieves the upper bound is obtained for the node-restricted model, given some mild condition on the node storage size., Comment: 6 pages, accepted at IEEE ICC 2017

A new system model reflecting the clustered structure of distributed storage is suggested to investigate bandwidth requirements for repairing failed storage nodes. Large data centers with multiple racks/disks or local networks of storage devices (e.g. sensor network) are good applications of the suggested clustered model. In realistic scenarios involving clustered storage structures, repairing storage nodes using intact nodes residing in other clusters is more bandwidth-consuming than restoring nodes based on information from intra-cluster nodes. Therefore, it is important to differentiate between intra-cluster repair bandwidth and cross-cluster repair bandwidth in modeling distributed storage. Capacity of the suggested model is obtained as a function of fundamental resources of distributed storage systems, namely, storage capacity, intra-cluster repair bandwidth and cross-cluster repair bandwidth. Based on the capacity expression, feasible sets of required resources which enable reliable storage are analyzed. It is shown that the cross-cluster traffic can be minimized to zero (i.e., intra-cluster local repair becomes possible) by allowing extra resources on storage capacity and intra-cluster repair bandwidth, according to a law specified in a closed-form. Moreover, trade-off between cross-cluster traffic and intra-cluster traffic is observed for sufficiently large storage capacity., Comment: 7 pages, accepted at IEEE ICC 2017