skip to main content


Title: Does Unsupervised Architecture Representation Learning Help Neural Architecture Search?
Award ID(s):
1632051
NSF-PAR ID:
10301291
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS'20)
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. As data privacy continues to be a crucial human-right concern as recognized by the UN, regulatory agencies have demanded developers obtain user permission before accessing user-sensitive data. Mainly through the use of privacy policies statements, developers fulfill their legal requirements to keep users abreast of the requests for their data. In addition, platforms such as Android enforces explicit permission request using the permission model. Nonetheless, recent research has shown that service providers hardly make full disclosure when requesting data in these statements. Neither is the current permission model designed to provide adequate informed consent. Often users have no clear understanding of the reason and scope of usage of the data request. This paper proposes an unambiguous, informed consent process that provides developers with a standardized method for declaring Intent. Our proposed Intent-aware permission architecture extends the current Android permission model with a precise mechanism for full disclosure of purpose and scope limitation. The design of which is based on an ontology study of data requests purposes. The overarching objective of this model is to ensure end-users are adequately informed before making decisions on their data. Additionally, this model has the potential to improve trust between end-users and developers. 
    more » « less
  2. Existing Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods either encode neural architectures using discrete encodings that do not scale well, or adopt supervised learning-based methods to jointly learn architecture representations and optimize architecture search on such representations which incurs search bias. Despite the widespread use, architecture representations learned in NAS are still poorly understood. We observe that the structural properties of neural architectures are hard to preserve in the latent space if architecture representation learning and search are coupled, resulting in less effective search performance. In this work, we find empirically that pre-training architecture representations using only neural architectures without their accuracies as labels improves the downstream architecture search efficiency. To explain this finding, we visualize how unsupervised architecture representation learning better encourages neural architectures with similar connections and operators to cluster together. This helps map neural architectures with similar performance to the same regions in the latent space and makes the transition of architectures in the latent space relatively smooth, which considerably benefits diverse downstream search strategies. 
    more » « less
  3. The vision of smart homes is rapidly becoming a reality, as the Internet of Things and other smart devices are deployed widely. Although smart devices offer convenience, they also create a significant management problem for home residents. With a large number and variety of devices in the home, residents may find it difficult to monitor, or even locate, devices. A central controller that brings all the home’s smart devices under secure management and a unified interface would help homeowners and residents track and manage their devices. We envision a solution called the SPLICEcube whose goal is to detect smart devices, locate them in three dimensions within the home, securely monitor their network traffic, and keep an inventory of devices and important device information throughout the device’s lifecycle. The SPLICEcube system consists of the following components: 1) a main cube, which is a centralized hub that incorporates and expands on the functionality of the home router, 2) a database that holds network data, and 3) a set of support cubelets that can be used to extend the range of the network and assist in gathering network data. To deliver this vision of identifying, securing, and managing smart devices, we introduce an architecture that facilitates intelligent research applications (such as network anomaly detection, intrusion detection, device localization, and device firmware updates) to be integrated into the SPLICEcube. In this thesis, we design a general-purpose Wi-Fi architecture that underpins the SPLICEcube. The architecture specifically showcases the functionality of the cubelets (Wi-Fi frame detection, Wi-Fi frame parsing, and transmission to cube), the functionality of the cube (routing, reception from cubelets, information storage, data disposal, and research application integration), and the functionality of the database (network data storage). We build and evaluate a prototype implementation to demonstrate our approach is scalable to accommodate new devices and extensible to support different applications. Specifically, we demonstrate a successful proof-of-concept use of the SPLICEcube architecture by integrating a security research application: an "Inside-Outside detection" system that classifies an observed Wi-Fi device as being inside or outside the home. 
    more » « less