arXiv subjects

Kangkang Sun

Publications and source records attributed to Kangkang Sun.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Delay-Adaptive Speculation Control for Low-Latency Edge-Cloud LLM Inference

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose tokens and a larger target model to verify them in parallel. In distributed edge-cloud inference, however, draft length must be controlled online: longer drafts amortize communication delay but reduce token acceptance, whereas shorter drafts preserve acceptance but trigger more communication rounds. We formulate this tradeoff as a ratio-type optimal stopping problem and prove that the optimal draft length is a finite delay-monotone threshold. The analysis identifies a critical delay below which single-token speculation is optimal and shows that the optimal length grows only logarithmically with communication delay. For time-varying networks, we extend the model to Markov-modulated channels and establish, under a bounded horizon and monotone stopping-region conditions, a state-dependent threshold policy. For unknown environments, we propose UCB-SpecStop, an online control algorithm with gap-free and gap-dependent expected regret bounds of $O(L_{\max}\sqrt{K_{\max}T\log(K_{\max}T)})$ and $O(\sum_{k:\Delta_k>0}L_{\max}^2\log(K_{\max}T)/\Delta_k)$. We implement the method on a real edge-cloud testbed with a Jetson Orin Nano Super edge node and an RTX~3090 Ti cloud node, using Qwen and Llama draft--target pairs. Experiments validate the predicted phase transition, with transition points near 83~ms and 111~ms. Qwen matches the geometric prediction, while Llama requires empirical-prefix calibration due to heavy-head acceptance. Across the tested delay grid, UCB-SpecStop reduces per-token latency over SpecDec++ by up to 22.4\%, approaches an offline oracle within 0.2--2.4\% in communication-dominated regimes, improves over naive UCB by up to 7.5\%, removes the 14.0--18.7\% gap caused by static tuning under delay drift, and gains 3.0--6.8\% with contextual channel-state information.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Safety-Aware AoI Scheduling for LEO Satellite-Assisted Autonomous Driving

Autonomous platoons traversing infrastructure gaps increasingly depend on LEO satellite backhaul for safety-critical updates, yet no existing framework jointly addresses compound Doppler from simultaneous satellite and vehicle motion, sub-slot handover outages that exceed collision-alert deadlines, and heterogeneous freshness requirements across three vehicular priority classes. The core challenge is a \emph{timescale mismatch}: coarse control slots hide sub-slot outages, which makes both AoI spike analysis and safety verification ill-posed. Ping-pong handover oscillations further compound AoI cost in a way that purely reactive schedulers cannot mitigate. We address these challenges through a unified framework that couples a two-timescale AoI model with tiered time-average safety constraints enforced by virtual queues. A closed-form ping-pong AoI envelope reveals that cumulative penalty grows quadratically in oscillation length, analytically justifying oscillation suppression as the highest-leverage safety mechanism. The resulting drift-plus-penalty template is instantiated as SafeScale-MATD3 with proactive handover timing and multi-task dual-critic MARL. A key finding is that suppressing brief but repeated ping-pong oscillations yields larger safety returns than shortening any single outage, and that tick-level AoI accounting is a necessary condition for verifiable collision-alert guarantees under LEO handovers. Simulations show that SafeScale-MATD3 is the only method satisfying the strict 1 % collision-alert violation budget, reducing violation rate by 4 to 5.5 times versus baselines, while achieving 35 % lower collision-alert AoI and strict Pareto dominance on the energy and freshness tradeoff.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Heterogeneous Mean Field Game Framework for LEO Satellite-Assisted V2X Networks

Coordinating mixed fleets of massive vehicles under stringent delay constraints is a central scalability bottleneck in next-generation mobile computing networks, especially when passenger cars, freight trucks, and autonomous vehicles share the same radio and multi-access edge computing (MEC) infrastructure. Heterogeneous mean field games (HMFG) are a principled framework for this setting, but a fundamental design question remains open: how many agent types should be used for a fleet of size $N$? The difficulty is a two-sided trade-off that existing theory does not resolve: using more types improves heterogeneity representation, but it reduces per-class sample size and weakens the mean-field approximation accuracy. This paper resolves that trade-off through an explicit $\varepsilon$-Nash error decomposition, a closed-form type-selection law, a heterogeneity-aware equilibrium solver, and a robust extension to time-varying LEO backhaul dynamics. For the 1D queue state space, the optimal type count satisfies $K^*(N)=\Theta(N^{1/3})$; for the joint queue-channel model ($d=2$), the scaling becomes $K^*(N)=\Theta(N^{1/5})$ with logarithmic correction. The unified formula $K^*(N)=\Theta(N^{\alpha/(\alpha+\beta)})$ provides dimension-dependent design guidance, reducing type granularity to a principled, set-once system parameter rather than a per-deployment tuning burden. Experiments validate the 1D scaling law with empirical slope $0.334 \pm 0.004$, achieve $2.3\times$ faster PDHG convergence at $K=5$, and deliver up to $29.5\%$ lower delay and $60\%$ higher throughput than homogeneous baselines. Unlike model-free DRL methods whose training complexity scales with the state-action space, the proposed HMFG solver has per-iteration complexity $O(K^2 N_q N_t)$ independent of fleet size $N$, making it suitable for large-scale mobile edge computing deployment.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2026

Hierarchical Battery-Aware Game Algorithm for ISL Power Allocation in LEO Mega-Constellations

Sustaining high inter-satellite link (ISL) throughput under intermittent solar harvesting is a fundamental challenge for LEO mega-constellations. Existing works impose static power ceilings that ignore real-time battery state and comprehensive onboard power budgets, causing eclipse-period energy crises. Learning-based approaches capture battery dynamics but lack equilibrium guarantees and do not scale beyond small constellations. We propose the \textbf{Hierarchical Battery-Aware Game (HBAG)} algorithm, a unified game-theoretic framework for ISL power allocation that operates identically across finite and mega-constellation regimes. For finite constellations, HBAG converges to a unique variational equilibrium; as constellation size grows, the same distributed update rule converges to the Mean Field Game (MFG) equilibrium without algorithm redesign. Comprehensive experiments on Starlink Shell~A ($M=172$, $\theta=0.38$) show that HBAG achieves \textbf{100\% energy sustainability rate} (ESR) in all 10 independent runs, representing a \textbf{+87.4\%} gain over the traditional static-power baseline (SATFLOW-L, ESR\,=\,12.6\%). At the same time, HBAG reduces the flow violation ratio by \textbf{78.3\%} to 7.62\% (below the 10\% industry tolerance). HBAG further maintains ESR $\geq 93.4\%$ across eclipse fractions $\theta \in [0,\,0.6]$ and scales linearly to 5{,}000 satellites with less than 75\,ms per-slot runtime, confirming deployment feasibility at full Starlink scale.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2026

Privacy as Commodity: MFG-RegretNet for Large-Scale Privacy Trading in Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a prominent paradigm for privacy-preserving distributed machine learning, yet two fundamental challenges hinder its large-scale adoption. First, gradient inversion attacks can reconstruct sensitive training data from uploaded model updates, so privacy risk persists even when raw data remain local. Second, without adequate monetary compensation, rational clients have little incentive to contribute high-quality gradients, limiting participation at scale. To address these challenges, a privacy trading market is developed in which clients sell their differential privacy budgets as a commodity and receive explicit economic compensation for privacy sacrifice. This market is formalized as a Privacy Auction Game (PAG), and the existence of a Bayesian Nash Equilibrium is established under dominant-strategy incentive compatibility (DSIC), individual rationality (IR), and budget feasibility. To overcome the NP-hard, high-dimensional Nash Equilibrium computation at scale, \textit{MFG-RegretNet} is introduced as a deep-learning-based auction mechanism that combines mean-field game (MFG) approximation with differentiable mechanism design. The MFG reduction lowers per-round computational complexity from $\mathcal{O}(N^2 \log N)$ to $\mathcal{O}(N)$ while incurring only an $\mathcal{O}(N^{-1/2})$ equilibrium approximation gap. Extensive experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 demonstrate that MFG-RegretNet outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in incentive compatibility, auction revenue, and social welfare, while maintaining competitive downstream FL model accuracy.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2026

CoE: Collaborative Entropy for Uncertainty Quantification in Agentic Multi-LLM Systems

Uncertainty estimation in multi-LLM systems remains largely single-model-centric: existing methods quantify uncertainty within each model but do not adequately capture semantic disagreement across models. To address this gap, we propose Collaborative Entropy (CoE), a unified information-theoretic metric for semantic uncertainty in multi-LLM collaboration. CoE is defined on a shared semantic cluster space and combines two components: intra-model semantic entropy and inter-model divergence to the ensemble mean. CoE is not a weighted ensemble predictor; it is a system-level uncertainty measure that characterizes collaborative confidence and disagreement. We analyze several core properties of CoE, including non-negativity, zero-value certainty under perfect semantic consensus, and the behavior of CoE when individual models collapse to delta distributions. These results clarify when reducing per-model uncertainty is sufficient and when residual inter-model disagreement remains. We also present a simple CoE-guided, training-free post-hoc coordination heuristic as a practical application of the metric. Experiments on \textit{TriviaQA} and \textit{SQuAD} with LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct, Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct, and Mistral-7B-Instruct show that CoE provides stronger uncertainty estimation than standard entropy- and divergence-based baselines, with gains becoming larger as additional heterogeneous models are introduced. Overall, CoE offers a useful uncertainty-aware perspective on multi-LLM collaboration.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

FedPF: Accurate Target Privacy Preserving Federated Learning Balancing Fairness and Utility

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without data sharing, yet participants face a fundamental challenge, e.g., simultaneously ensuring fairness across demographic groups while protecting sensitive client data. We introduce a differentially private fair FL algorithm (FedPF) that transforms this multi-objective optimization into a zero-sum game where fairness and privacy constraints compete against model utility. Our theoretical analysis reveals an inverse relationship: privacy mechanisms that protect sensitive attributes can reduce the statistical power available for detecting and correcting demographic biases under finite samples in federated settings. We further show that our theoretical bounds are consistent with a non-monotonic fairness-utility relationship, which is empirically validated by experiments where moderate fairness constraints improve generalization before excessive enforcement degrades performance. Compared with mainstream algorithms, even under strict privacy constraints, FedPF still maintains the lowest discrimination level among all tested algorithms while retaining high utility. Experimental validation demonstrates up to 42.9 % discrimination reduction across three datasets while maintaining competitive accuracy, but more importantly, reveals that achieving strong privacy and fairness simultaneously requires carefully balanced tradeoffs rather than optimizing either objective in isolation. Furthermore, hardware-level simulations demonstrate that FedPF maintains a low computational footprint, making it suitable for resource-constrained edge devices. The source code for our proposed algorithm is publicly accessible at https://github.com/szpsunkk/FedPF.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

FeatureFool: Zero-Query Fooling of Video Models via Feature Map

The vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs) has been preliminarily verified. Existing black-box adversarial attacks usually require multi-round interaction with the model and consume numerous queries, which is impractical in the real-world and hard to scale to recently emerged Video-LLMs. Moreover, no attack in the video domain directly leverages feature maps to shift the clean-video feature space. We therefore propose FeatureFool, a stealthy, video-domain, zero-query black-box attack that utilizes information extracted from a DNN to alter the feature space of clean videos. Unlike query-based methods that rely on iterative interaction, FeatureFool performs a zero-query attack by directly exploiting DNN-extracted information. This efficient approach is unprecedented in the video domain. Experiments show that FeatureFool achieves an attack success rate above 70\% against traditional video classifiers without any queries. Benefiting from the transferability of the feature map, it can also craft harmful content and bypass Video-LLM recognition. Additionally, adversarial videos generated by FeatureFool exhibit high quality in terms of SSIM, PSNR, and Temporal-Inconsistency, making the attack barely perceptible. This paper may contain violent or explicit content.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Toward the Tradeoffs between Privacy, Fairness and Utility in Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a novel privacy-protection distributed machine learning paradigm that guarantees user privacy and prevents the risk of data leakage due to the advantage of the client's local training. Researchers have struggled to design fair FL systems that ensure fairness of results. However, the interplay between fairness and privacy has been less studied. Increasing the fairness of FL systems can have an impact on user privacy, while an increase in user privacy can affect fairness. In this work, on the client side, we use fairness metrics, such as Demographic Parity (DemP), Equalized Odds (EOs), and Disparate Impact (DI), to construct the local fair model. To protect the privacy of the client model, we propose a privacy-protection fairness FL method. The results show that the accuracy of the fair model with privacy increases because privacy breaks the constraints of the fairness metrics. In our experiments, we conclude the relationship between privacy, fairness and utility, and there is a tradeoff between these.

cs.LG↗