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  1. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of mobile edge computing (MEC), on the premise of a costeffective enhancement in the computational ability of hardwareconstrained wireless devices (WDs) comprising the Internet of Things (IoT). In a general multi-server multi-user MEC system, each WD has a computational task to execute and has to select binary (off)loading decisions, along with the analog-amplitude resource allocation variables in an online manner, with the goal of minimizing the overall energy-delay cost (EDC) with dynamic system states. While past works typically rely on the explicit expression of the EDC function, the present contribution considers a practical setting, where in lieu of system state information, the EDC function is not available in analytical form, and instead only the function values at queried points are revealed. Towards tackling such a challenging online combinatorial problem with only bandit information, novel Bayesian optimization (BO) based approaches are put forth by leveraging the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework. Per time slot, the discrete offloading decisions are first obtained via the MAB method, and the analog resource allocation variables are subsequently optimized using the BO selection rule. By exploiting both temporal and contextual information, two novel BO approaches, termed time-varying BO and contextual time-varying BO, are developed. Numerical tests validate the merits of the proposed BO approaches compared with contemporary benchmarks under different MEC network sizes. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available January 1, 2025
  2. Optimizing a black-box function that is expensive to evaluate emerges in a gamut of machine learning and artifcial intelligence applications including drug discovery, policy optimization in robotics, and hyperparameter tuning of learning models to list a few. Bayesian optimization (BO) provides a principled framework to fnd the global optimum of such functions using a limited number of function evaluations. BO relies on a statistical surrogate model to actively select new query points, that is typically captured by a Gaussian process (GP). Unlike most existing approaches that hinge on a single GP surrogate model with a pre-selected kernel function that may confne the expressiveness of the sought function especially under the limited evaluation budget, the present work puts forth a weighted ensemble of GPs as a surrogate model. Building on the advocated Gaussian mixture (GM) posterior, the EGP framework adapts to the most ftted surrogate model as data arrive on-the-fy, offering a richer function space. For the acquisition of next evaluation points, the EGP-based posterior is coupled with an adaptive expected improvement (EI) criterion to balance exploration and exploitation of the search space. Numerical tests on a set of benchmark synthetic functions and two robotic tasks, demonstrate the impressive benefts of the proposed approach. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 4, 2024
  3. Bayesian optimization (BO) has well-documented merits for optimizing black-box functions with an expensive evaluation cost. Such functions emerge in applications as diverse as hyperparameter tuning, drug discovery, and robotics. BO hinges on a Bayesian surrogate model to sequentially select query points so as to balance exploration with exploitation of the search space. Most existing works rely on a single Gaussian process (GP) based surrogate model, where the kernel function form is typically preselected using domain knowledge. To bypass such a design process, this paper leverages an ensemble (E) of GPs to adaptively select the surrogate model fit on-the-fly, yielding a GP mixture posterior with enhanced expressiveness for the sought function. Acquisition of the next evaluation input using this EGP-based function posterior is then enabled by Thompson sampling (TS) that requires no additional design parameters. To endow function sampling with scalability, random feature-based kernel approximation is leveraged per GP model. The novel EGP-TS readily accommodates parallel operation. To further establish convergence of the proposed EGP-TS to the global optimum, analysis is conducted based on the notion of Bayesian regret for both sequential and parallel settings. Tests on synthetic functions and real-world applications showcase the merits of the proposed method. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available May 1, 2024
  4. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of mobile edge computing (MEC), on the premise of a costeffective enhancement in the computational ability of hardware-constrained wireless devices (WDs) comprising the Internet of Things (IoT). In a general multi-server multi-user MEC system, each WD has a computational task to execute and has to select binary (off)loading decisions, along with the analog-amplitude resource allocation variables in an online manner, with the goal of minimizing the overall energy-delay cost (EDC) with dynamic system states. While past works typically rely on the explicit expression of the EDC function, the present contribution considers a practical setting, where in lieu of system state information, the EDC function is not available in analytical form, and instead only the function values at queried points are revealed. Towards tackling such a challenging online combinatorial problem with only bandit information, novel Bayesian optimization (BO) based approach is put forth by leveraging the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework. Per time slot, by exploiting temporal information, the discrete offloading decisions are first obtained via the MAB method, and the analog resource allocation variables are subsequently optimized using the BO selection rule. Numerical tests validate the effectiveness of the proposed BO approach. 
    more » « less
  5. Graph-guided semi-supervised learning (SSL) has gained popularity in several network science applications, including biological, social, and financial ones. SSL becomes particularly challenging when the available nodal labels are scarce, what motivates naturally the active learning (AL) paradigm. AL seeks the most informative nodes to label in order to effectively estimate the nodal values of unobserved nodes. It is also referred to as active sampling, and boils down to learning the sought function mapping, and an acquisition function (AF) to identify the next node(s) to sample. To learn the mapping, this work leverages an adaptive Bayesian model comprising an ensemble (E) of Gaussian Processes (GPs) with enhanced expressiveness of the function space. Unlike most alternatives, the EGP model relies only on the one-hop connectivity of each node. Capitalizing on this EGP model, a suite of novel and intuitive AFs are developed to guide the active sampling process. These AFs are then combined with weights that are adapted incrementally to further robustify performance. Numerical tests on real and synthetic datasets corroborate the merits of the novel methods. 
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