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The problem of sequentially detecting a moving anomaly is studied, in which the anomaly affects different parts of a sensor network over time. Each network sensor is characterized by a pre- and post-change distribution. Initially, the observations of each sensor are generated according to the corresponding pre-change distribution. After some unknown but deterministic time instant, a moving anomaly emerges, affecting different sets of sensors as time progresses.

Modern machine learning systems require massive amounts of labeled training data in order to achieve high accuracy rates which is very expensive in terms of time and cost. Active learning is an approach which uses feedback to only label the most informative data points and significantly reduce the labeling effort. Many heuristics for selecting data points have been developed in recent years which are usually tailored to a specific task and a general unified framework is lacking.

Algorithmic Information Theory has inspired intractable constructions of general intelligence (AGI), and undiscovered tractable approximations are likely feasible. Reinforcement Learning (RL), the dominant paradigm by which an agent might learn to solve arbitrary solvable problems, gives an agent a dangerous incentive: to gain arbitrary “power” in order to intervene in the provision of their own reward.

We consider a situation in which a decision maker takes sequential and adaptive sensing actions to collect measurements and estimate an unknown parameter taking finitely many values, in the presence of an adversary who also collects measurements whenever a sensing action is taken. This situation can be viewed as an abstraction in which to analyze the mitigation of information leakage inherent to control actions in systems with feedback, such as cyber-physical systems.

In this work, we consider the decoding of short sparse graph-based channel codes via reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we focus on low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, which for example have been standardized in the context of 5G cellular communication systems due to their excellent error correcting performance. LDPC codes are typically decoded via belief propagation on the corresponding bipartite (Tanner) graph of the code via flooding, i.e., all check and variable nodes in the Tanner graph are updated at once.

We devise algorithms for the policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning, assuming access to a simulator and certain side information called the supergraph. Our algorithms explore backward from high-cost states to find high-value ones, in contrast to approaches that work forward from all states. While several papers have demonstrated the utility of backward exploration empirically, we conduct rigorous analyses which show that our algorithms can reduce average-case sample complexity from $O(S \log S)$ to as low as $O(\log S)$ .

Consider N cooperative but non-communicating players where each plays one out of M arms for T turns. Players have different utilities for each arm, represented as an N×M matrix. These utilities are unknown to the players. In each turn, players select an arm and receive a noisy observation of their utility for it. However, if any other players selected the same arm in that turn, all colliding players will receive zero utility due to the conflict. No communication between the players is possible.

Online detection of changes in stochastic systems, referred to as sequential change detection or quickest change detection, is an important research topic in statistics, signal processing, and information theory, and has a wide range of applications. This survey starts with the basics of sequential change detection, and then moves on to generalizations and extensions of sequential change detection theory and methods.

We present a new non-parametric statistic, called the weighed l2 divergence, based on empirical distributions for sequential change detection. We start by constructing the weighed l2 divergence as a fundamental building block for two-sample tests and change detection. The proposed statistic is proved to attain the optimal sample complexity in the offline setting.

This tutorial reviews fundamental contributions to information security. An integrative viewpoint is taken that explains the security metrics, including secrecy, privacy, and others, the methodology of information-theoretic approaches, along with the arising system design principles, as well as techniques that enable the information-theoretic designs to be applied in real communication and computing systems.