In the last decade, multi-hop cooperation has evolved bringing several advantages including coverage improvement, more reliability of wireless links, and power consumption reduction. Still, its application has raised several challenges, such as the need for secure transmission at each hop, algorithms to perform relay selection and the accurate models to facilitate performance analysis. This paper addresses the problem of physical layer (PHY) security in a multi-hop wireless cooperative network, where communication at each hop is assisted by multiple relays forming a cluster, each cluster being surrounded by multiple eavesdroppers which together may tap transmissions from both the source and the relays. The main focus of the study is on analyzing the benefits of various relay selection schemes for protecting the source-destination transmission against the eavesdroppers, which can collude and combine information via diversity combining techniques. To be specific, four relay selection schemes, which differ in the way they employ available measures link quality, are considered to deliver the source information to the destination via a decode-and-forward (DF) strategy. To evaluate the security performance of the multi-hop cooperative link in the presence of colluding eavesdroppers, we derive novel closed-form analytical expressions for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) with consideration of special cases of practical interest.

Neural architecture search, which aims to automatically search for architectures (e.g., convolution, max pooling) of neural networks that maximize validation performance, has achieved remarkable progress recently. In many application scenarios, several parties would like to collaboratively search for a shared neural architecture by leveraging data from all parties. However, due to privacy concerns, no party wants its data to be seen by other parties. To address this problem, we propose federated neural architecture search (FNAS), where different parties collectively search for a differentiable architecture by exchanging gradients of architecture variables without exposing their data to other parties. To further preserve privacy, we study differentially-private FNAS (DP-FNAS), which adds random noise to the gradients of architecture variables. We provide theoretical guarantees of DP-FNAS in achieving differential privacy. Experiments show that DP-FNAS can search highly-performant neural architectures while protecting the privacy of individual parties. The code is available at https://github.com/UCSD-AI4H/DP-FNAS

Low-rank matrix factorization problems such as non negative matrix factorization (NMF) can be categorized as a clustering or dimension reduction technique. The latter denotes techniques designed to find representations of some high dimensional dataset in a lower dimensional manifold without a significant loss of information. If such a representation exists, the features ought to contain the most relevant features of the dataset. Many linear dimensionality reduction techniques can be formulated as a matrix factorization. In this paper, we combine the conjugate gradient (CG) method with the Barzilai and Borwein (BB) gradient method, and propose a BB scaling CG method for NMF problems. The new method does not require to compute and store matrices associated with Hessian of the objective functions. Moreover, adopting a suitable BB step size along with a proper nonmonotone strategy which comes by the size convex parameter $\eta_k$, results in a new algorithm that can significantly improve the CPU time, efficiency, the number of function evaluation. Convergence result is established and numerical comparisons of methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed method is efficient in comparison with existing methods and demonstrate the superiority of our algorithms.

Finding a small subset of data whose linear combination spans other data points, also called column subset selection problem (CSSP), is an important open problem in computer science with many applications in computer vision and deep learning. There are some studies that solve CSSP in a polynomial time complexity w.r.t. the size of the original dataset. A simple and efficient selection algorithm with a linear complexity order, referred to as spectrum pursuit (SP), is proposed that pursuits spectral components of the dataset using available sample points. The proposed non-greedy algorithm aims to iteratively find K data samples whose span is close to that of the first K spectral components of entire data. SP has no parameter to be fine tuned and this desirable property makes it problem-independent. The simplicity of SP enables us to extend the underlying linear model to more complex models such as nonlinear manifolds and graph-based models. The nonlinear extension of SP is introduced as kernel-SP (KSP). The superiority of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated in a wide range of applications.