arXiv subjects

Qifa Yan

Publications and source records attributed to Qifa Yan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Lightweight Adaptive ReduNet via Hyperspherical Manifold Learning

In recent years, a white-box neural network called ReduNet has been proposed, which employs the maximal coding rate reduction (MCR$^2$) principle to transform raw data into low-dimensional discriminative features via a forward layer-wise construction process. Unlike traditional deep networks that rely on backpropagation, ReduNet explicitly derives the parameters of each layer from the features of its preceding layer, offering a mathematically interpretable paradigm. However, this layer-wise construction often requires a large number of layers for the MCR$^2$ objective to reach a stable value, which increases the parameter storage of the unfolded module. To address this issue, we propose LA-ReduNet, a lightweight adaptive architecture that refines the layer-wise update rule and enables discriminative feature representations to be obtained with substantially fewer unfolded layers. Specifically, LA-ReduNet employs hyperspherical manifold learning and adaptive step sizes, thereby reducing by an order of magnitude the number of layers required for the MCR$^2$ objective to reach a stable value. Simulation results demonstrate that, while maintaining comparable classification accuracy, LA-ReduNet requires significantly fewer layers for the MCR$^2$ objective to reach a stable value. Remarkably, under the considered experimental settings, LA-ReduNet requires only approximately $1/29$ of the parameter storage of the unfolded ReduNet module for the MCR$^2$ objective to reach a stable value.

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arXiv2025

A Simple but Accurate Approximation for Multivariate Gaussian Rate-Distortion Function and Its Application in Maximal Coding Rate Reduction

The multivariate Gaussian rate-distortion (RD) function is crucial in various applications, such as digital communications, data storage, or neural networks. However, the complex form of the multivariate Gaussian RD function prevents its application in many neural network-based scenarios that rely on its analytical properties, for example, white-box neural networks, multi-device task-oriented communication, and semantic communication. This paper proposes a simple but accurate approximation for the multivariate Gaussian RD function. The upper and lower bounds on the approximation error (the difference between the approximate and the exact value) are derived, which indicate that for well-conditioned covariance matrices, the approximation error is small. In particular, when the condition number of the covariance matrix approaches 1, the approximation error approaches 0. In addition, based on the proposed approximation, a new classification algorithm called Adaptive Regularized ReduNet (AR-ReduNet) is derived by applying the approximation to ReduNet, which is a white-box classification network oriented from Maximal Coding Rate Reduction (MCR$^2$) principle. Simulation results indicate that AR-ReduNet achieves higher accuracy and more efficient optimization than ReduNet.

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arXiv2023

Robust, Secure and Private Cache-aided Scalar Linear Function Retrieval from Distributed System with Blind and Adversarial Servers

In this work, a distributed server system composed of multiple servers that holds some coded files and multiple users that are interested in retrieving the linear functions of the files is investigated, where the servers are robust, blind and adversarial in the sense that any $J$ servers can together recover all files, while any $I$ colluding servers cannot obtain any information about the files, and at most $A$ servers maliciously provides erroneous information. In addition, the file library must be secure from a wiretapper who obtains all the signals, and the demands of any subset of users must kept private from the other users and servers, even if they collude. A coding scheme is proposed by incorporating the ideas of Shamir's secret sharing and key superposition into the framework of Placement Delivery Array (PDA), originally proposed to characterize the single-server coded caching system without any security or privacy constraints. It is shown that PDAs associated to Maddah-Ali and Niesen's coded caching scheme results in an achievable memory-storage-communication region, such that the storage size and communication load were optimal to within a multiplicative gap, except for the small memory regime when the number of files was smaller than the number of users.

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arXiv2023

A Fundamental Tradeoff Among Storage, Computation, and Communication for Distributed Computing over Star Network

Coded distributed computing can alleviate the communication load by leveraging the redundant storage and computation resources with coding techniques in distributed computing. In this paper, we study a MapReduce-type distributed computing framework over star topological network, where all the workers exchange information through a common access point. The optimal tradeoff among the normalized number of the stored files (storage load), computed intermediate values (computation load) and transmitted bits in the uplink and downlink (communication loads) are characterized. A coded computing scheme is proposed to achieve the Pareto-optimal tradeoff surface, in which the access point only needs to perform simple chain coding between the signals it receives, and information-theretical bound matching the surface is also provided.

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arXiv2021

Multi-User Blind Symmetric Private Information Retrieval from Coded Servers

The problem of Multi-user Blind $X$-secure $T$-colluding Symmetric Private Information Retrieval from Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) coded storage system with $B$ Byzantine and $U$ unresponsive servers (U-B-MDS-MB-XTSPIR) is studied in this paper. Specifically, a database consisting of multiple files, each labeled by $M$ indices, is stored at the distributed system with $N$ servers according to $(N,K+X)$ MDS codes over $\mathbb{F}_q$ such that any group of up to $X$ colluding servers learn nothing about the data files. There are $M$ users, in which each user $m,m=1,\ldots,M$ privately selects an index $\theta_m$ and wishes to jointly retrieve the file specified by the $M$ users' indices $(\theta_1,\ldots,\theta_M)$ from the storage system, while keeping its index $\theta_m$ private from any $T_m$ colluding servers, where there exists $B$ Byzantine servers that can send arbitrary responses maliciously to confuse the users retrieving the desired file and $U$ unresponsive servers that will not respond any message at all. In addition, each user must not learn information about the other users' indices and the database more than the desired file. An U-B-MDS-MB-XTSPIR scheme is constructed based on Lagrange encoding. The scheme achieves a retrieval rate of $1-\frac{K+X+T_1+\ldots+T_M+2B-1}{N-U}$ with secrecy rate $\frac{K+X+T_1+\ldots+T_M-1}{ N-(K+X+T_1+\ldots+T_M+2B+U-1)}$ on the finite field of size $q\geq N+\max\{K, N-(K+X+T_1+\ldots+T_M+2B+U-1)\}$ for any number of files.

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arXiv2021

Coded Alternating Least Squares for Straggler Mitigation in Distributed Recommendations

Matrix factorization is an important representation learning algorithm, e.g., recommender systems, where a large matrix can be factorized into the product of two low dimensional matrices termed as latent representations. This paper investigates the problem of matrix factorization in distributed computing systems with stragglers, those compute nodes that are slow to return computation results. A computation procedure, called coded Alternative Least Square (ALS), is proposed for mitigating the effect of stragglers in such systems. The coded ALS algorithm iteratively computes two low dimensional latent matrices by solving various linear equations, with the Entangled Polynomial Code (EPC) as a building block. We theoretically characterize the maximum number of stragglers that the algorithm can tolerate (or the recovery threshold) in relation to the redundancy of coding (or the code rate). In addition, we theoretically show the computation complexity for the coded ALS algorithm and conduct numerical experiments to validate our design.

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arXiv2021

Improved Constructions for Secure Multi-Party Batch Matrix Multiplication

This paper investigates the problem of Secure Multi-party Batch Matrix Multiplication (SMBMM), where a user aims to compute the pairwise products $\mathbf{A}\divideontimes\mathbf{B}\triangleq(\mathbf{A}^{(1)}\mathbf{B}^{(1)},\ldots,\mathbf{A}^{(M)}\mathbf{B}^{(M)})$ of two batch of massive matrices $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{B}$ that are generated from two sources, through $N$ honest but curious servers which share some common randomness. The matrices $\mathbf{A}$ (resp. $\mathbf{B}$) must be kept secure from any subset of up to $X_{\mathbf{A}}$ (resp. $X_\mathbf{B}$) servers even if they collude, and the user must not obtain any information about $(\mathbf{A},\mathbf{B})$ beyond the products $\mathbf{A}\divideontimes\mathbf{B}$. A novel computation strategy for single secure matrix multiplication problem (i.e., the case $M=1$) is first proposed, and then is generalized to the strategy for SMBMM by means of cross subspace alignment. The SMBMM strategy focuses on the tradeoff between recovery threshold (the number of successful computing servers that the user needs to wait for), system cost (upload cost, the amount of common randomness, and download cost) and system complexity (encoding, computing, and decoding complexities). Notably, compared with the known result by Chen et al., the strategy for the degraded case $X= X_{\mathbf{A}}=X_{\mathbf{B}}$ achieves better recovery threshold, amount of common randomness, download cost and decoding complexity when $X$ is less than some parameter threshold, while the performance with respect to other measures remain identical.

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arXiv2021

Capacity-Achieving Private Information Retrieval Schemes from Uncoded Storage Constrained Servers with Low Sub-packetization

This paper investigates reducing sub-packetization of capacity-achieving schemes for uncoded Storage Constrained Private Information Retrieval (SC-PIR) systems. In the SC-PIR system, a user aims to retrieve one out of $K$ files from $N$ servers while revealing nothing about its identity to any individual server, in which the $K$ files are stored at the $N$ servers in an uncoded form and each server can store up to $\mu K$ equivalent files, where $\mu$ is the normalized storage capacity of each server. We first prove that there exists a capacity-achieving SC-PIR scheme for a given storage design if and only if all the packets are stored exactly at $M\triangleq \mu N$ servers for $\mu$ such that $M=\mu N\in\{2,3,\ldots,N\}$. Then, the optimal sub-packetization for capacity-achieving linear SC-PIR schemes is characterized as the solution to an optimization problem, which is typically hard to solve because of involving indicator functions. Moreover, a new notion of array called Storage Design Array (SDA) is introduced for the SC-PIR system. With any given SDA, an associated capacity-achieving SC-PIR scheme is constructed. Next, the SC-PIR schemes that have equal-size packets are investigated. Furthermore, the optimal equal-size sub-packetization among all capacity-achieving linear SC-PIR schemes characterized by Woolsey et al. is proved to be $\frac{N(M-1)}{\gcd(N,M)}$. Finally, by allowing unequal size of packets, a greedy SDA construction is proposed, where the sub-packetization of the associated SC-PIR scheme is upper bounded by $\frac{N(M-1)}{\gcd(N,M)}$. Among all capacity-achieving linear SC-PIR schemes, the sub-packetization is optimal when $\min\{M,N-M\}|N$ or $M=N$, and within a multiplicative gap $\frac{\min\{M,N-M\}}{\gcd(N,M)}$ of the optimal one otherwise. In particular, for the case $N=d\cdot M\pm1$ where $d\geq 2$, another SDA is constructed to obtain lower sub-packetization.

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arXiv2021

Robust and Secure Cache-aided Private Linear Function Retrieval from Coded Servers

This work investigates a system where each user aims to retrieve a scalar linear function of the files of a library, which are Maximum Distance Separable coded and stored at multiple distributed servers. The system needs to guarantee robust decoding in the sense that each user must decode its demanded function with signals received from any subset of servers whose cardinality exceeds a threshold. In addition, (a) the content of the library must be kept secure from a wiretapper who obtains all the signals from the servers;(b) any subset of users together can not obtain any information about the demands of the remaining users; and (c) the users' demands must be kept private against all the servers even if they collude. Achievable schemes are derived by modifying existing Placement Delivery Array (PDA) constructions, originally proposed for single-server single-file retrieval coded caching systems without any privacy or security or robustness constraints. It is shown that the PDAs describing the original Maddah-Ali and Niesen's coded caching scheme result in a load-memory tradeoff that is optimal to within a constant multiplicative gap, except for the small memory regime when the number of file is smaller than the number of users. As by-products, improved order optimality results are derived for three less restrictive systems in all parameter regimes.

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arXiv2020

Symmetric Private Polynomial Computation From Lagrange Encoding

The problem of $X$-secure $T$-colluding symmetric Private Polynomial Computation (PPC) from coded storage system with $B$ Byzantine and $U$ unresponsive servers is studied in this paper. Specifically, a dataset consisting of $M$ files is stored across $N$ distributed servers according to $(N,K+X)$ Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes such that any group of up to $X$ colluding servers can not learn anything about the data files. A user wishes to privately evaluate one out of a set of candidate polynomial functions over the $M$ files from the system, while guaranteeing that any $T$ colluding servers can not learn anything about the identity of the desired function and the user can not learn anything about the $M$ data files more than the desired polynomial function evaluations, in the presence of $B$ Byzantine servers that can send arbitrary responses maliciously to confuse the user and $U$ unresponsive servers that will not respond any information at all. A novel symmetric PPC scheme using Lagrange encoding is proposed. This scheme achieves a PPC rate of $1-\frac{G(K+X-1)+T+2B}{N-U}$ with secrecy rate $\frac{G(K+X-1)+T}{N-(G(K+X-1)+T+2B+U)}$ and finite field size $N+\max\{K,N-(G(K+X-1)+T+2B+U)\}$, where $G$ is the maximum degree over all the candidate polynomial functions. Moreover, to further measure the efficiency of PPC schemes, upload cost, query complexity, server computation complexity and decoding complexity required to implement the scheme are analyzed. Remarkably, the PPC setup studied in this paper generalizes all the previous MDS coded PPC setups and the degraded schemes strictly outperform the best known schemes in terms of (asymptotical) PPC rate, which is the main concern of the PPC schemes.

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arXiv2020

Key Superposition Simultaneously Achieves Security and Privacy in Cache-Aided Linear Function Retrieval

This work investigates the problem of cache-aided content Secure and demand Private Linear Function Retrieval (SP-LFR), where three constraints are imposed on the system:(a) each user is interested in retrieving an arbitrary linear combination of the files in the server's library;(b) the content of the library must be kept secure from a wiretapper who obtains the signal sent by the server; and (c) no colluding subset of users together obtain information about the demands of the remaining users. A procedure is proposed to derive an SP-LFR scheme from a given Placement Delivery Array (PDA), which is known to give coded caching schemes with low subpacketization for systems with neither security nor privacy constraints. This procedure uses the superposition of security keys and privacy keys in both the cache placement and transmitted signal to guarantee content security and demand privacy, respectively. In particular, among all PDA-based SP-LFR schemes, the memory-load pairs achieved by the PDA describing the Maddah-Ali and Niesen's scheme are Pareto-optimal and have the lowest subpacketization. Moreover, the achieved load-memory tradeoff is optimal to within a constant multiplicative gap except for the small memory regime (i.e., when the cache size is between 1 and 2) and the number of files is smaller than the number of users. Remarkably, the memory-load tradeoff does not increase compared to the best known schemes that guarantee either only content security in all regimes or only demand privacy in regime mentioned above.

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arXiv2020

Fundamental Limits of Caching for Demand Privacy against Colluding Users

This work investigates the problem of demand privacy against colluding users for shared-link coded caching systems, where no subset of users can learn any information about the demands of the remaining users. The notion of privacy used here is stronger than similar notions adopted in past work and is motivated by the practical need to insure privacy regardless of the file distribution. Two scenarios are considered: Single File Retrieval (SFR) and Linear Function Retrieval (LFR), where in the latter case each user demands an arbitrary linear combination of the files at the server. The main contributions of this paper are a novel achievable scheme for LFR, referred as privacy key scheme, and a new information theoretic converse bound for SFR. Clearly, being SFR a special case of LFR, an achievable scheme for LFR works for SFR as well, and a converse for SFR is a valid converse for LFR as well. By comparing the performance of the achievable scheme with the converse bound derived in this paper (for the small cache size regime) and existing converse bounds without privacy constraints (in the remaining memory regime), the communication load of the privacy key scheme turns out to be optimal to within a constant multiplicative gap in all parameter regimes. Numerical results show that the new privacy key scheme outperforms in some regime known schemes based on the idea of virtual users, which also satisfy the stronger notion of user privacy against colluding users adopted here. Moreover, the privacy key scheme enjoys much lower subpacketization than known schemes based on virtual users.

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arXiv2020

Adaptive Gradient Coding

This paper focuses on mitigating the impact of stragglers in distributed learning system. Unlike the existing results designed for a fixed number of stragglers, we developed a new scheme called Adaptive Gradient Coding(AGC) with flexible tolerance of various number of stragglers. Our scheme gives an optimal tradeoff between computation load, straggler tolerance and communication cost. In particular, it allows to minimize the communication cost according to the real-time number of stragglers in the practical environments. Implementations on Amazon EC2 clusters using Python with mpi4py package verify the flexibility in several situations.

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arXiv2019

A new Capacity-Achieving Private Information Retrieval Scheme with (Almost) Optimal File Length for Coded Servers

In a distributed storage system, private information retrieval (PIR) guarantees that a user retrieves one file from the system without revealing any information about the identity of its interested file to any individual server. In this paper, we investigate $(N,K,M)$ coded sever model of PIR, where each of $M$ files is distributed to the $N$ servers in the form of $(N,K)$ maximum distance separable (MDS) code for some $N>K$ and $M>1$. As a result, we propose a new capacity-achieving $(N,K,M)$ coded linear PIR scheme such that it can be implemented with file length $\frac{K(N-K)}{\gcd(N,K)}$, which is much smaller than the previous best result $K\big(\frac{N}{\gcd(N,K)}\big)^{M-1}$. Notably, among all the capacity-achieving coded linear PIR schemes, we show that the file length is optimal if $M>\big\lfloor \frac{K}{\gcd(N,K)}-\frac{K}{N-K}\big\rfloor+1$, and within a multiplicative gap $\frac{K}{\gcd(N,K)}$ of a lower bound on the minimum file length otherwise.

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arXiv2019

A Fundamental Storage-Communication Tradeoff for Distributed Computing with Straggling Nodes

Placement delivery arrays for distributed computing (Comp-PDAs) have recently been proposed as a framework to construct universal computing schemes for MapReduce-like systems. In this work, we extend this concept to systems with straggling nodes, i.e., to systems where a subset of the nodes cannot accomplish the assigned map computations in due time. Unlike most previous works that focused on computing linear functions, our results are universal and apply for arbitrary map and reduce functions. Our contributions are as follows. Firstly, we show how to construct a universal coded computing scheme for MapReduce-like systems with straggling nodes from any given Comp-PDA. We also characterize the storage and communication loads of the resulting scheme in terms of the Comp-PDA parameters. Then, we prove an information-theoretic converse bound on the storage-communication (SC) tradeoff achieved by universal computing schemes with straggling nodes. We show that the information-theoretic bound matches the performance achieved by the coded computing schemes with straggling nodes corresponding to the Maddah-Ali and Niesen (MAN) PDAs, i.e., to the Comp-PDAs describing Maddah-Ali and Niesen's coded caching scheme. Interestingly, the same Comp-PDAs (the MAN-PDAs) are optimal for any number of straggling nodes, which implies that the map phase of optimal coded computing schemes does not need to be adapted to the number of stragglers in the system. We finally prove that while the points that lie exactly on the fundamental SC tradeoff cannot be achieved with Comp-PDAs that require smaller number of files than the MAN-PDAs, this is possible for some of the points that lie close to the SC tradeoff. For these latter points, the decrease in the requested number of files can be exponential in the number of nodes of the system.

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arXiv2018

Storage, Computation, and Communication: A Fundamental Tradeoff in Distributed Computing

We consider a MapReduce-like distributed computing system. We derive a lower bound on the communication cost for any given storage and computation costs. This lower bound matches the achievable bound we proposed recently. As a result, we completely characterize the optimal tradeoff between the storage, the computation, and the communication. Our result generalizes the previous one by Li et al. to also account for the number of computed intermediate values.

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arXiv2018

A Storage-Computation-Communication Tradeoff for Distributed Computing

This paper investigates distributed computing systems where computations are split into "Map" and "Reduce" functions. A new coded scheme, called distributed computing and coded communication (D3C), is proposed, and its communication load is analyzed as a function of the available storage space and the number of intermediate values (IVA) to be computed. D3C achieves the smallest possible communication load for a given storage space, while a smaller number of IVAs need to be computed compared to Li et al.'s coded distributed computing (CDC) scheme. More generally, our scheme can flexibly trade between storage space and the number of IVAs to be computed. Communication load is then analyzed for any given tradeoff.

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arXiv2018

Placement Delivery Array Design for Combination Networks with Edge Caching

A major practical limitation of the Maddah-Ali-Niesen coded caching techniques is their high subpacketization level. For the simple network with a single server and multiple users, Yan \emph{et al.} proposed an alternative scheme with the so-called placement delivery arrays (PDA). Such a scheme requires slightly higher transmission rates but significantly reduces the subpacketization level. In this paper, we extend the PDA framework and propose three low-subpacketization schemes for combination networks, i.e., networks with a single server, multiple relays, and multiple cache-aided users that are connected to subsets of relays. One of the schemes achieves the cutset lower bound on the link rate when the cache memories are sufficiently large. Our other two schemes apply only to \emph{resolvable} combination networks. For these networks and for a wide range of cache sizes, the new schemes perform closely to the coded caching schemes that directly apply Maddah-Ali-Niesen scheme while having significantly reduced subpacketization levels.

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