35,472 research outputs found
LAGC: Lazily Aggregated Gradient Coding for Straggler-Tolerant and Communication-Efficient Distributed Learning
Gradient-based distributed learning in Parameter Server (PS) computing
architectures is subject to random delays due to straggling worker nodes, as
well as to possible communication bottlenecks between PS and workers. Solutions
have been recently proposed to separately address these impairments based on
the ideas of gradient coding, worker grouping, and adaptive worker selection.
This paper provides a unified analysis of these techniques in terms of
wall-clock time, communication, and computation complexity measures.
Furthermore, in order to combine the benefits of gradient coding and grouping
in terms of robustness to stragglers with the communication and computation
load gains of adaptive selection, novel strategies, named Lazily Aggregated
Gradient Coding (LAGC) and Grouped-LAG (G-LAG), are introduced. Analysis and
results show that G-LAG provides the best wall-clock time and communication
performance, while maintaining a low computational cost, for two representative
distributions of the computing times of the worker nodes.Comment: Submitte
Fairs for e-commerce: the benefits of aggregating buyers and sellers
In recent years, many new and interesting models of successful online
business have been developed. Many of these are based on the competition
between users, such as online auctions, where the product price is not fixed
and tends to rise. Other models, including group-buying, are based on
cooperation between users, characterized by a dynamic price of the product that
tends to go down. There is not yet a business model in which both sellers and
buyers are grouped in order to negotiate on a specific product or service. The
present study investigates a new extension of the group-buying model, called
fair, which allows aggregation of demand and supply for price optimization, in
a cooperative manner. Additionally, our system also aggregates products and
destinations for shipping optimization. We introduced the following new
relevant input parameters in order to implement a double-side aggregation: (a)
price-quantity curves provided by the seller; (b) waiting time, that is, the
longer buyers wait, the greater discount they get; (c) payment time, which
determines if the buyer pays before, during or after receiving the product; (d)
the distance between the place where products are available and the place of
shipment, provided in advance by the buyer or dynamically suggested by the
system. To analyze the proposed model we implemented a system prototype and a
simulator that allow to study effects of changing some input parameters. We
analyzed the dynamic price model in fairs having one single seller and a
combination of selected sellers. The results are very encouraging and motivate
further investigation on this topic
Privacy-enhancing Aggregation of Internet of Things Data via Sensors Grouping
Big data collection practices using Internet of Things (IoT) pervasive
technologies are often privacy-intrusive and result in surveillance, profiling,
and discriminatory actions over citizens that in turn undermine the
participation of citizens to the development of sustainable smart cities.
Nevertheless, real-time data analytics and aggregate information from IoT
devices open up tremendous opportunities for managing smart city
infrastructures. The privacy-enhancing aggregation of distributed sensor data,
such as residential energy consumption or traffic information, is the research
focus of this paper. Citizens have the option to choose their privacy level by
reducing the quality of the shared data at a cost of a lower accuracy in data
analytics services. A baseline scenario is considered in which IoT sensor data
are shared directly with an untrustworthy central aggregator. A grouping
mechanism is introduced that improves privacy by sharing data aggregated first
at a group level compared as opposed to sharing data directly to the central
aggregator. Group-level aggregation obfuscates sensor data of individuals, in a
similar fashion as differential privacy and homomorphic encryption schemes,
thus inference of privacy-sensitive information from single sensors becomes
computationally harder compared to the baseline scenario. The proposed system
is evaluated using real-world data from two smart city pilot projects. Privacy
under grouping increases, while preserving the accuracy of the baseline
scenario. Intra-group influences of privacy by one group member on the other
ones are measured and fairness on privacy is found to be maximized between
group members with similar privacy choices. Several grouping strategies are
compared. Grouping by proximity of privacy choices provides the highest privacy
gains. The implications of the strategy on the design of incentives mechanisms
are discussed
An Empirical Study of Mini-Batch Creation Strategies for Neural Machine Translation
Training of neural machine translation (NMT) models usually uses mini-batches
for efficiency purposes. During the mini-batched training process, it is
necessary to pad shorter sentences in a mini-batch to be equal in length to the
longest sentence therein for efficient computation. Previous work has noted
that sorting the corpus based on the sentence length before making mini-batches
reduces the amount of padding and increases the processing speed. However,
despite the fact that mini-batch creation is an essential step in NMT training,
widely used NMT toolkits implement disparate strategies for doing so, which
have not been empirically validated or compared. This work investigates
mini-batch creation strategies with experiments over two different datasets.
Our results suggest that the choice of a mini-batch creation strategy has a
large effect on NMT training and some length-based sorting strategies do not
always work well compared with simple shuffling.Comment: 8 pages, accepted to the First Workshop on Neural Machine Translatio
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