Farhad Shirani works at North Dakota State University.

Posts

Towards Robust Fidelity for Evaluating Explainability of Graph Neural Networks

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Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are neural models that leverage the dependency structure in graphical data via message passing among the graph nodes. GNNs have emerged as pivotal architectures in analyzing graph-structured data, and their expansive application in sensitive domains requires a comprehensive understanding of their decision-making processes — necessitating a framework for GNN explainability. An explanation function for GNNs takes a pre-trained GNN along with a graph as input, to produce a ‘sufficient statistic’ subgraph with respect to the graph label. A main challenge in studying GNN explainability is to provide f idelity measures that evaluate the performance of these explanation functions. This paper studies this foundational challenge, spotlighting the inherent limitations of prevailing fidelity metrics, including Fid+, Fid?, and Fid?. Specifically, a formal, information-theoretic definition of explainability is introduced and it is shown that existing metrics often fail to align with this definition across various statistical scenarios. The reason is due to potential distribution shifts when subgraphs are removed in computing these fidelity measures. Subsequently, a robust class of fidelity measures are introduced, and it is shown analytically that they are resilient to distribution shift issues and are applicable in a wide range of scenarios. Extensive empirical analysis on both synthetic and real datasets are provided to illustrate that the proposed metrics are more coherent with gold standard metrics. The source code is available at https://trustai4s-lab.github.io/fidelity.

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Opportunistic Temporal Fair Mode Selection and User Scheduling in Full-Duplex Systems

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In-band full-duplex (FD) communication has emerged as one of the promising techniques to improve data rates in next generation wireless systems. Typical FD scenarios considered in the literature assume FD base stations (BSs) and half-duplex (HD) users activated either in uplink (UL) or downlink (DL), where inter-user interference (IUI) is treated as noise at the DL user. This paper considers more general FD scenarios where an arbitrary fraction of the users are capable of FD and/or they can perform successive interference cancellation (SIC) to mitigate IUI. Consequently, one user can be activated in either UL or DL (HD-UL and HD-DL modes), or simultaneously in both directions requiring self-interference mitigation (SIM) at that user (FD-SIM mode). Furthermore, two users can be scheduled, one in UL and the other in DL (both operating in HD), where the DL user can treat IUI as noise (FD-IN mode) or perform SIC to mitigate IUI (FD-SIC mode). This paper studies opportunistic mode selection and user scheduling under long-term and short-term temporal fairness in single-carrier and multi-carrier (OFDM) FD systems, with the goal of maximizing system utility (e.g. sum-rate). First, the feasible region of temporal demands is characterized for both long-term and short-term fairness. Subsequently, optimal temporal fair schedulers as well as practical low-complexity online algorithms are devised. Simulation results demonstrate that using SIC to mitigate IUI as well as having FD capability at users can improve FD throughput gains significantly especially, when user distribution is concentrated around a few hotspots.

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Opportunistic Temporal Fair Mode Selection and User Scheduling for Full-duplex Systems

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In-band full-duplex (FD) communications – enabled by recent advances in antenna and RF circuit design – has emerged as one of the promising techniques to improve data rates in wireless systems. One of the major roadblocks in enabling high data rates in FD systems is the inter-user interference (IUI) due to activating pairs of uplink and downlink users at the same time-frequency resource block. Opportunistic user scheduling has been proposed as a means to manage IUI and fully exploit the multiplexing gains in FD systems. In this paper, scheduling under long-term and short-term temporal fairness for single-cell FD wireless networks is considered. Temporal fair scheduling is of interest in delay-sensitive applications, and leads to predictable latency and power consumption. The feasible region of user temporal demand vectors is derived, and a scheduling strategy maximizing the system utility while satisfying long-term temporal fairness is proposed. Furthermore, a short-term temporal fair scheduling strategy is devised which satisfies user temporal demands over a finite window-length. It is shown that the strategy achieves optimal average system utility as the window-length is increased asymptotically. Subsequently, practical construction algorithms for long-term and short-term temporal fair scheduling are introduced. Simulations are provided to verify the derivations and investigate the multiplexing gains. It is observed that using successive interference cancellation at downlink users improves FD gains significantly in the presence of strong IUI.

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