Learning with Dynamics: Autonomous Regulation of UAV Based Communication Networks with Dynamic UAV Crew

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based communication networks (UCNs) are a key component in future mobile networking. To handle the dynamic environments in UCNs, reinforcement learning (RL) has been a promising solution attributed to its strong capability of adaptive decision-making free of the environment models. However, most existing RL-based research focus on control strategy design assuming a fixed set of UAVs. Few works have investigated how UCNs should be adaptively regulated when the serving UAVs change dynamically. This article discusses RL-based strategy design for adaptive UCN regulation given a dynamic UAV set, addressing both reactive strategies in general UCNs and proactive strategies in solar-powered UCNs. An overview of the UCN and the RL framework is first provided. Potential research directions with key challenges and possible solutions are then elaborated. Some of our recent works are presented as case studies to inspire innovative ways to handle dynamic UAV crew with different RL algorithms.

On the Robustness of Domain Adaption to Adversarial Attacks

State-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) have been proved to have excellent performance on unsupervised domain adaption (UDA). However, recent work shows that DNNs perform poorly when being attacked by adversarial samples, where these attacks are implemented by simply adding small disturbances to the original images. Although plenty of work has focused on this, as far as we know, there is no systematic research on the robustness of unsupervised domain adaption model. Hence, we discuss the robustness of unsupervised domain adaption against adversarial attacking for the first time. We benchmark various settings of adversarial attack and defense in domain adaption, and propose a cross domain attack method based on pseudo label. Most importantly, we analyze the impact of different datasets, models, attack methods and defense methods. Directly, our work proves the limited robustness of unsupervised domain adaptation model, and we hope our work may facilitate the community to pay more attention to improve the robustness of the model against attacking.