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Ramana Rao Kompella

Publications and source records attributed to Ramana Rao Kompella.

43 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Graphene: Infrastructure Security Posture Analysis with AI-generated Attack Graphs

The rampant occurrence of cybersecurity breaches imposes substantial limitations on the progress of network infrastructures, leading to compromised data, financial losses, potential harm to individuals, and disruptions in essential services. The current security landscape demands the urgent development of a holistic security assessment solution that encompasses vulnerability analysis and investigates the potential exploitation of these vulnerabilities as attack paths. In this paper, we propose Graphene, an advanced system designed to provide a detailed analysis of the security posture of computing infrastructures. Using user-provided information, such as device details and software versions, Graphene performs a comprehensive security assessment. This assessment includes identifying associated vulnerabilities and constructing potential attack graphs that adversaries can exploit. Furthermore, Graphene evaluates the exploitability of these attack paths and quantifies the overall security posture through a scoring mechanism. The system takes a holistic approach by analyzing security layers encompassing hardware, system, network, and cryptography. Furthermore, Graphene delves into the interconnections between these layers, exploring how vulnerabilities in one layer can be leveraged to exploit vulnerabilities in others. In this paper, we present the end-to-end pipeline implemented in Graphene, showcasing the systematic approach adopted for conducting this thorough security analysis.

cs.CR↗

Not All Federated Learning Algorithms Are Created Equal: A Performance Evaluation Study

Federated Learning (FL) emerged as a practical approach to training a model from decentralized data. The proliferation of FL led to the development of numerous FL algorithms and mechanisms. Many prior efforts have given their primary focus on accuracy of those approaches, but there exists little understanding of other aspects such as computational overheads, performance and training stability, etc. To bridge this gap, we conduct extensive performance evaluation on several canonical FL algorithms (FedAvg, FedProx, FedYogi, FedAdam, SCAFFOLD, and FedDyn) by leveraging an open-source federated learning framework called Flame. Our comprehensive measurement study reveals that no single algorithm works best across different performance metrics. A few key observations are: (1) While some state-of-the-art algorithms achieve higher accuracy than others, they incur either higher computation overheads (FedDyn) or communication overheads (SCAFFOLD). (2) Recent algorithms present smaller standard deviation in accuracy across clients than FedAvg, indicating that the advanced algorithms' performances are stable. (3) However, algorithms such as FedDyn and SCAFFOLD are more prone to catastrophic failures without the support of additional techniques such as gradient clipping. We hope that our empirical study can help the community to build best practices in evaluating FL algorithms.

cs.LG↗

Riemannian Multinomial Logistics Regression for SPD Neural Networks

Deep neural networks for learning Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices are gaining increasing attention in machine learning. Despite the significant progress, most existing SPD networks use traditional Euclidean classifiers on an approximated space rather than intrinsic classifiers that accurately capture the geometry of SPD manifolds. Inspired by Hyperbolic Neural Networks (HNNs), we propose Riemannian Multinomial Logistics Regression (RMLR) for the classification layers in SPD networks. We introduce a unified framework for building Riemannian classifiers under the metrics pulled back from the Euclidean space, and showcase our framework under the parameterized Log-Euclidean Metric (LEM) and Log-Cholesky Metric (LCM). Besides, our framework offers a novel intrinsic explanation for the most popular LogEig classifier in existing SPD networks. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated in three applications: radar recognition, human action recognition, and electroencephalography (EEG) classification. The code is available at https://github.com/GitZH-Chen/SPDMLR.git.

cs.LG↗

Urban Scene Diffusion through Semantic Occupancy Map

Generating unbounded 3D scenes is crucial for large-scale scene understanding and simulation. Urban scenes, unlike natural landscapes, consist of various complex man-made objects and structures such as roads, traffic signs, vehicles, and buildings. To create a realistic and detailed urban scene, it is crucial to accurately represent the geometry and semantics of the underlying objects, going beyond their visual appearance. In this work, we propose UrbanDiffusion, a 3D diffusion model that is conditioned on a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) map and generates an urban scene with geometry and semantics in the form of semantic occupancy map. Our model introduces a novel paradigm that learns the data distribution of scene-level structures within a latent space and further enables the expansion of the synthesized scene into an arbitrary scale. After training on real-world driving datasets, our model can generate a wide range of diverse urban scenes given the BEV maps from the held-out set and also generalize to the synthesized maps from a driving simulator. We further demonstrate its application to scene image synthesis with a pretrained image generator as a prior.

cs.CV↗

Flame: Simplifying Topology Extension in Federated Learning

Distributed machine learning approaches, including a broad class of federated learning (FL) techniques, present a number of benefits when deploying machine learning applications over widely distributed infrastructures. The benefits are highly dependent on the details of the underlying machine learning topology, which specifies the functionality executed by the participating nodes, their dependencies and interconnections. Current systems lack the flexibility and extensibility necessary to customize the topology of a machine learning deployment. We present Flame, a new system that provides flexibility of the topology configuration of distributed FL applications around the specifics of a particular deployment context, and is easily extensible to support new FL architectures. Flame achieves this via a new high-level abstraction Topology Abstraction Graphs (TAGs). TAGs decouple the ML application logic from the underlying deployment details, making it possible to specialize the application deployment with reduced development effort. Flame is released as an open source project, and its flexibility and extensibility support a variety of topologies and mechanisms, and can facilitate the development of new FL methodologies.

cs.LG↗

Graph Mixture of Experts: Learning on Large-Scale Graphs with Explicit Diversity Modeling

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have found extensive applications in learning from graph data. However, real-world graphs often possess diverse structures and comprise nodes and edges of varying types. To bolster the generalization capacity of GNNs, it has become customary to augment training graph structures through techniques like graph augmentations and large-scale pre-training on a wider array of graphs. Balancing this diversity while avoiding increased computational costs and the notorious trainability issues of GNNs is crucial. This study introduces the concept of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to GNNs, with the aim of augmenting their capacity to adapt to a diverse range of training graph structures, without incurring explosive computational overhead. The proposed Graph Mixture of Experts (GMoE) model empowers individual nodes in the graph to dynamically and adaptively select more general information aggregation experts. These experts are trained to capture distinct subgroups of graph structures and to incorporate information with varying hop sizes, where those with larger hop sizes specialize in gathering information over longer distances. The effectiveness of GMoE is validated through a series of experiments on a diverse set of tasks, including graph, node, and link prediction, using the OGB benchmark. Notably, it enhances ROC-AUC by $1.81\%$ in ogbg-molhiv and by $1.40\%$ in ogbg-molbbbp, when compared to the non-MoE baselines. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/Graph-Mixture-of-Experts.

cs.LG↗

Fault Localization in Large-Scale Network Policy Deployment

The recent advances in network management automation and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are easing network policy management tasks. At the same time, these new technologies create a new mode of failure in the management cycle itself. Network policies are presented in an abstract model at a centralized controller and deployed as low-level rules across network devices. Thus, any software and hardware element in that cycle can be a potential cause of underlying network problems. In this paper, we present and solve a network policy fault localization problem that arises in operating policy management frameworks for a production network. We formulate our problem via risk modeling and propose a greedy algorithm that quickly localizes faulty policy objects in the network policy. We then design and develop SCOUT---a fully-automated system that produces faulty policy objects and further pinpoints physical-level failures which made the objects faulty. Evaluation results using a real testbed and extensive simulations demonstrate that SCOUT detects faulty objects with small false positives and false negatives.

cs.NI↗