Meta-reinforcement learning via buffering graph signatures for live video streaming events

In this study, we present a meta-learning model to adapt the predictions of the network's capacity between viewers who participate in a live video streaming event. We propose the MELANIE model, where an event is formulated as a Markov Decision Process, performing meta-learning on reinforcement learning tasks. By considering a new event as a task, we design an actor-critic learning scheme to compute the optimal policy on estimating the viewers' high-bandwidth connections. To ensure fast adaptation to new connections or changes among viewers during an event, we implement a prioritized replay memory buffer based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence of the reward/throughput of the viewers' connections. Moreover, we adopt a model-agnostic meta-learning framework to generate a global model from past events. As viewers scarcely participate in several events, the challenge resides on how to account for the low structural similarity of different events. To combat this issue, we design a graph signature buffer to calculate the structural similarities of several streaming events and adjust the training of the global model accordingly. We evaluate the proposed model on the link weight prediction task on three real-world datasets of live video streaming events. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, with an average relative gain of 25% against state-of-the-art strategies. For reproduction purposes, our evaluation datasets and implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/stefanosantaris/melanie © 2021 Owner/Author

Knowledge distillation on neural networks for evolving graphs

Graph representation learning on dynamic graphs has become an important task on several real-world applications, such as recommender systems, email spam detection, and so on. To efficiently capture the evolution of a graph, representation learning approaches employ deep neural networks, with large amount of parameters to train. Due to the large model size, such approaches have high online inference latency. As a consequence, such models are challenging to deploy to an industrial setting with vast number of users/nodes. In this study, we propose DynGKD, a distillation strategy to transfer the knowledge from a large teacher model to a small student model with low inference latency, while achieving high prediction accuracy. We first study different distillation loss functions to separately train the student model with various types of information from the teacher model. In addition, we propose a hybrid distillation strategy for evolving graph representation learning to combine the teacher’s different types of information. Our experiments with five publicly available datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model against several baselines, with average relative drop 40.60 % in terms of RMSE in the link prediction task. Moreover, our DynGKD model achieves a compression ratio of 21:100, accelerating the inference latency with a speed up factor × 30 , when compared with the teacher model. For reproduction purposes, we make our datasets and implementation publicly available at https://github.com/stefanosantaris/DynGKD. © 2021, The Author(s)