Lawrence Ong

Qun Li, Chandra Thapa, Lawrence Ong et al.

Federated learning (FL) is the most popular distributed machine learning technique. FL allows machine-learning models to be trained without acquiring raw data to a single point for processing. Instead, local models are trained with local data; the models are then shared and combined. This approach preserves data privacy as locally trained models are shared instead of the raw data themselves. Broadly, FL can be divided into horizontal federated learning (HFL) and vertical federated learning (VFL). For the former, different parties hold different samples over the same set of features; for the latter, different parties hold different feature data belonging to the same set of samples. In a number of practical scenarios, VFL is more relevant than HFL as different companies (e.g., bank and retailer) hold different features (e.g., credit history and shopping history) for the same set of customers. Although VFL is an emerging area of research, it is not well-established compared to HFL. Besides, VFL-related studies are dispersed, and their connections are not intuitive. Thus, this survey aims to bring these VFL-related studies to one place. Firstly, we classify existing VFL structures and algorithms. Secondly, we present the threats from security and privacy perspectives to VFL. Thirdly, for the benefit of future researchers, we discussed the challenges and prospects of VFL in detail.

Lachlan Drake, Lawrence Ong, Duy T. Ngo

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellites are a key technology to enable connectivity for rural and remote users. Communication satellites in LEO can provide coverage to much larger areas than terrestrial or aerial systems, while offering improved data rates when compared with geostationary systems. However, a major challenge with LEO satellite communications is the high mobility of the satellite, which results in a rapidly changing communication channel. Due to this, it is challenging to fairly allocate communication resources to multiple users in the system. This work proposes an Adaptive Power Allocation and Scheduling Scheme (APASS) to ensure user fairness in the downlink of a LEO satellite system serving mobile ground users. First, a novel channel and transmission model is introduced to capture the variability in channel statistics due to the satellite's trajectory. Then, a non-convex optimization problem is formulated to maximize the minimum rate across all ground users over a fixed set of time slots. To solve this problem, the proposed APASS dynamically allocates power and schedules transmissions based on predicted future channel gains. Numerical results show that APASS achieves strong performance even with substantial prediction errors, faring close to an upper bound that assumes perfect future channel knowledge. Furthermore, it improves the minimum user rate by a factor of 2.98 compared to equal-power allocation and maintains user fairness with a Jain's fairness index of well above 0.99.

Yucheng Liu, Lawrence Ong, Sarah Johnson et al.

We study the information leakage to a guessing adversary in zero-error source coding. The source coding problem is defined by a confusion graph capturing the distinguishability between source symbols. The information leakage is measured by the ratio of the adversary's successful guessing probability after and before eavesdropping the codeword, maximized over all possible source distributions. Such measurement under the basic adversarial model where the adversary makes a single guess and allows no distortion between its estimator and the true sequence is known as the maximum min-entropy leakage or the maximal leakage in the literature. We develop a single-letter characterization of the optimal normalized leakage under the basic adversarial model, together with an optimum-achieving scalar stochastic mapping scheme. An interesting observation is that the optimal normalized leakage is equal to the optimal compression rate with fixed-length source codes, both of which can be simultaneously achieved by some deterministic coding schemes. We then extend the leakage measurement to generalized adversarial models where the adversary makes multiple guesses and allows certain level of distortion, for which we derive single-letter lower and upper bounds.