Knowledge is at the Edge! How to Search in Distributed Machine Learning Models

With the advent of the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 an enormous amount of data is produced at the edge of the network. Due to a lack of computing power, this data is currently send to the cloud where centralized machine learning models are trained to derive higher level knowledge. With the recent development of specialized machine learning hardware for mobile devices, a new era of distributed learning is about to begin that raises a new research question: How can we search in distributed machine learning models? Machine learning at the edge of the network has many benefits, such as low-latency inference and increased privacy. Such distributed machine learning models can also learn personalized for a human user, a specific context, or application scenario. As training data stays on the devices, control over possibly sensitive data is preserved as it is not shared with a third party. This new form of distributed learning leads to the partitioning of knowledge between many devices which makes access difficult. In this paper we tackle the problem of finding specific knowledge by forwarding a search request (query) to a device that can answer it best. To that end, we use a entropy based quality metric that takes the context of a query and the learning quality of a device into account. We show that our forwarding strategy can achieve over 95% accuracy in a urban mobility scenario where we use data from 30 000 people commuting in the city of Trento, Italy.Comment: Published in CoopIS 201

Representation Learning for Attributed Multiplex Heterogeneous Network

Network embedding (or graph embedding) has been widely used in many real-world applications. However, existing methods mainly focus on networks with single-typed nodes/edges and cannot scale well to handle large networks. Many real-world networks consist of billions of nodes and edges of multiple types, and each node is associated with different attributes. In this paper, we formalize the problem of embedding learning for the Attributed Multiplex Heterogeneous Network and propose a unified framework to address this problem. The framework supports both transductive and inductive learning. We also give the theoretical analysis of the proposed framework, showing its connection with previous works and proving its better expressiveness. We conduct systematical evaluations for the proposed framework on four different genres of challenging datasets: Amazon, YouTube, Twitter, and Alibaba. Experimental results demonstrate that with the learned embeddings from the proposed framework, we can achieve statistically significant improvements (e.g., 5.99-28.23% lift by F1 scores; p<<0.01, t-test) over previous state-of-the-art methods for link prediction. The framework has also been successfully deployed on the recommendation system of a worldwide leading e-commerce company, Alibaba Group. Results of the offline A/B tests on product recommendation further confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework in practice.Comment: Accepted to KDD 2019. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/gatn

A dual framework for low-rank tensor completion

One of the popular approaches for low-rank tensor completion is to use the latent trace norm regularization. However, most existing works in this direction learn a sparse combination of tensors. In this work, we fill this gap by proposing a variant of the latent trace norm that helps in learning a non-sparse combination of tensors. We develop a dual framework for solving the low-rank tensor completion problem. We first show a novel characterization of the dual solution space with an interesting factorization of the optimal solution. Overall, the optimal solution is shown to lie on a Cartesian product of Riemannian manifolds. Furthermore, we exploit the versatile Riemannian optimization framework for proposing computationally efficient trust region algorithm. The experiments illustrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm on several real-world datasets across applications.Comment: Aceepted to appear in Advances of Nueral Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2018. A shorter version appeared in the NIPS workshop on Synergies in Geometric Data Analysis 201