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Adversarial attacks have been extensively studied in recent years since they can identify the vulnerability of deep learning models before deployed. In this paper, we consider the black-box adversarial setting, where the adversary needs to craft adversarial examples without access to the gradients of a target model. Previous methods attempted to approximate the true gradient either by using the transfer gradient of a surrogate white-box model or based on the feedback of model queries. However, the existing methods inevitably suffer from low attack success rates or poor query efficiency since it is difficult to estimate the gradient in a high-dimensional input space with limited information. To address these problems and improve black-box attacks, we propose two prior-guided random gradient-free (PRGF) algorithms based on biased sampling and gradient averaging, respectively. Our methods can take the advantage of a transfer-based prior given by the gradient of a surrogate model and the query information simultaneously. Through theoretical analyses, the transfer-based prior is appropriately integrated with model queries by an optimal coefficient in each method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, in comparison with the alternative state-of-the-arts, both of our methods require much fewer queries to attack black-box models with higher success rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adversarial attacks have been extensively studied in recent years since they can identify the vulnerability of deep learning models before deployed. In this paper, we consider the black-box adversarial setting, where the adversary needs to craft adversarial examples without access to the gradients of a target model. Previous methods attempted to approximate the true gradient either by using the transfer gradient of a surrogate white-box model or based on the feedback of model queries. However, the existing methods inevitably suffer from low attack success rates or poor query efficiency since it is difficult to estimate the gradient in a high-dimensional input space with limited information. To address these problems and improve black-box attacks, we propose two prior-guided random gradient-free (PRGF) algorithms based on biased sampling and gradient averaging, respectively. Our methods can take the advantage of a transfer-based prior given by the gradient of a surrogate model and the query information simultaneously. Through theoretical analyses, the transfer-based prior is appropriately integrated with model queries by an optimal coefficient in each method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, in comparison with the alternative state-of-the-arts, both of our methods require much fewer queries to attack black-box models with higher success rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the reconstruction problem of video snapshot compressive imaging (SCI), which captures high-speed videos using a low-speed 2D sensor (detector). The underlying principle of SCI is to modulate sequential high-speed frames with different masks and then these encoded frames are integrated into a snapshot on the sensor and thus the sensor can be of low-speed. On one hand, video SCI enjoys the advantages of low-bandwidth, low-power and low-cost. On the other hand, applying SCI to large-scale problems (HD or UHD videos) in our daily life is still challenging and one of the bottlenecks lies in the reconstruction algorithm. Existing algorithms are either too slow (iterative optimization algorithms) or not flexible to the encoding process (deep learning based end-to-end networks). In this paper, we develop fast and flexible algorithms for SCI based on the plug-and-play (PnP) framework. In addition to the PnP-ADMM method, we further propose the PnP-GAP (generalized alternating projection) algorithm with a lower computational workload. We first employ the image deep denoising priors to show that PnP can recover a UHD color video with 30 frames from a snapshot measurement. Since videos have strong temporal correlation, by employing the video deep denoising priors, we achieve a significant improvement in the results. Furthermore, we extend the proposed PnP algorithms to the color SCI system using mosaic sensors, where each pixel only captures the red, green or blue channels. A joint reconstruction and demosaicing paradigm is developed for flexible and high quality reconstruction of color video SCI systems. Extensive results on both simulation and real datasets verify the superiority of our proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the stochastic optimization problem focusing on developing scalable parallel algorithms for deep learning tasks. Our solution involves a reformation of the objective function for stochastic optimization in neural network models, along with a novel parallel computing strategy, coined the weighted aggregating stochastic gradient descent (WASGD). Following a theoretical analysis on the characteristics of the new objective function, WASGD introduces a decentralized weighted aggregating scheme based on the performance of local workers. Without any center variable, the new method automatically gauges the importance of local workers and accepts them by their contributions. Furthermore, we have developed an enhanced version of the method, WASGD+, by (1) implementing a designed sample order and (2) upgrading the weight evaluation function. To validate the new method, we benchmark our pipeline against several popular algorithms including the state-of-the-art deep neural network classifier training techniques (e.g., elastic averaging SGD). Comprehensive validation studies have been conducted on four classic datasets: CIFAR-100, CIFAR-10, Fashion-MNIST, and MNIST. Subsequent results have firmly validated the superiority of the WASGD scheme in accelerating the training of deep architecture. Better still, the enhanced version, WASGD+, is shown to be a significant improvement over its prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For vehicle-to-network communications, handover (HO) management enables vehicles to maintain the connection with the network while transiting through coverage areas of different base stations (BSs). However, the high mobility of vehicles means shorter connection periods with each BS that leads to frequent HOs, hence raises the necessity for optimal HO decision making for high quality infotainment services. Machine learning is capable of capturing underlying pattern via data driven methods to find optimal solutions to complex problems, and much learning-based HO optimization research has been conducted focusing on specific network setups. However, attention still needs to be paid to the actual deployment aspect and standardized datasets or simulation environments for evaluation. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning-based HO algorithm using the input parameters that are configurable in the existing measurement report of cellular networks. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using the well-known network simulator ns-3 with its official LTE module. A realistic network setup in the city center of Glasgow (U.K.) is configured with vehicle trajectories generated by the routes mobility model using Google Maps Directions API. Evaluation results reveal that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the A3 RSRP baseline with an average of 25.72% packet loss reduction per HO, suggesting significant improvement in quality of service of phone call and video streaming, etc. The proposed algorithm also has a small implementation cost compared to some state-of-the-art and should be deployed by a software update to a local BS controller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an essential problem in computer vision, salient object detection (SOD) has attracted an increasing amount of research attention over the years. Recent advances in SOD are predominantly led by deep learning-based solutions (named deep SOD). To enable in-depth understanding of deep SOD, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey covering various aspects, ranging from algorithm taxonomy to unsolved issues. In particular, we first review deep SOD algorithms from different perspectives, including network architecture, level of supervision, learning paradigm, and object-/instance-level detection. Following that, we summarize and analyze existing SOD datasets and evaluation metrics. Then, we benchmark a large group of representative SOD models, and provide detailed analyses of the comparison results. Moreover, we study the performance of SOD algorithms under different attribute settings, which has not been thoroughly explored previously, by constructing a novel SOD dataset with rich attribute annotations covering various salient object types, challenging factors, and scene categories. We further analyze, for the first time in the field, the robustness of SOD models to random input perturbations and adversarial attacks. We also look into the generalization and difficulty of existing SOD datasets. Finally, we discuss several open issues of SOD and outline future research directions. All the saliency prediction maps, our constructed dataset with annotations, and codes for evaluation are publicly available at https://github.com/wenguanwang/SODsurvey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When imaging through a semi-reflective medium such as glass, the reflection of another scene can often be found in the captured images. It degrades the quality of the images and affects their subsequent analyses. In this paper, a novel deep neural network approach for solving the reflection problem in imaging is presented. Traditional reflection removal methods not only require long computation time for solving different optimization functions, their performance is also not guaranteed. As array cameras are readily available in nowadays imaging devices, we first suggest in this paper a multiple-image based depth estimation method using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed network avoids the depth ambiguity problem due to the reflection in the image, and directly estimates the depths along the image edges. They are then used to classify the edges as belonging to the background or reflection. Since edges having similar depth values are error prone in the classification, they are removed from the reflection removal process. We suggest a generative adversarial network (GAN) to regenerate the removed background edges. Finally, the estimated background edge map is fed to another auto-encoder network to assist the extraction of the background from the original image. Experimental results show that the proposed reflection removal algorithm achieves superior performance both quantitatively and qualitatively as compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The proposed algorithm also shows much faster speed compared to the existing approaches using the traditional optimization methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns the deployment problem of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with mobile robotic sensor nodes for spatiotemporal monitoring. The proposed approach, deep reinforced learning tree (DRLT), utilizes deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to improve the efficiency of searching the most informative sampling locations. The parameterized sampling locations in an infinite horizon space are modeled according to their spatiotemporal correlations and subject to various constraints, including field estimation error and information gain. And the model-based information gain can be calculated efficiently over an infinite horizon. In this manner, the effectiveness of the sampling locations is learned through DRLT during the exploration by the robotic sensors. Then DRLT can instruct the robotic sensors to avoid unnecessary sampling locations in future iterations. Also, it is proved in this paper that the proposed algorithm is capable of searching for the near-optimal sampling locations effectively and guaranteeing a minimum field estimation error. Simulation based on national oceanic and atmospheric administration (NOAA) datasets is presented, which demonstrates the significant enhancements made by the proposed algorithm. Compared with the traditional approaches, such as the information theory-based greedy approach or random sampling, the proposed method shows a superior performance with regard to both estimation error and planning efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning methods have achieved attractive performance in dynamic MR cine imaging. However, most of these methods are driven only by the sparse prior of MR images, while the important low-rank (LR) prior of dynamic MR cine images is not explored, which may limit further improvements in dynamic MR reconstruction. In this paper, a learned singular value thresholding (Learned-SVT) operator is proposed to explore low-rank priors in dynamic MR imaging to obtain improved reconstruction results. In particular, we put forward a model-based unrolling sparse and low-rank network for dynamic MR imaging, dubbed as SLR-Net. SLR-Net is defined over a deep network flow graph, which is unrolled from the iterative procedures in the iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm (ISTA) for optimizing a sparse and LR-based dynamic MRI model. Experimental results on a single-coil scenario show that the proposed SLR-Net can further improve the state-of-the-art compressed sensing (CS) methods and sparsity-driven deep learning-based methods with strong robustness to different undersampling patterns, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Besides, SLR-Net has been extended to a multi-coil scenario, and achieved excellent reconstruction results compared with a sparsity-driven multi-coil deep learning-based method under a high acceleration. Prospective reconstruction results on an open real-time dataset further demonstrate the capability and flexibility of the proposed method on real-time scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the first time, a deep learning (DL) algorithm is presented to study the effect of the source of variability on the performance of semiconductor nanodevice. This paper reports the possibility of an alternative solution of device simulation in order to optimize the source variation. It is based on the statistical distribution of work function fluctuation (WKF) on the metal gate depending on the orientation and location of metal grains. It has been revealed that the WKF of a metal gate can lead to different fluctuations in electrical characteristics. Therefore, an emerging DL algorithm, artificial neural network (ANN) is utilized to identify the appropriate WKF patterns on the metal gate that can reduce the impact of characteristic fluctuation, i.e., $\sigma V_{TH}, \sigma I_{ON}$ and $\sigma I_{OFF}$ , simultaneously. The application of the DL-ANN algorithm to multichannel gate-all-around silicon nanosheet MOSFETs is explored to suppress the effect of WKF on the characteristic fluctuation. Consequently, it can be further utilized to investigate the implication of WKF for the process variation, modeling the nanodevices and analysis of circuit design. Notably, this technique can be extended to study the diverse random sources and process variation effects for emerging nano-CMOS devices and can effectively accelerate the device simulation and optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A deep learning assisted sum-product detection algorithm (DL-SPDA) for faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling is proposed in this paper. The proposed detection algorithm works on a modified factor graph which concatenates a neural network function node to the variable nodes of the conventional FTN factor graph to approach the maximum a posterior probabilities (MAP) error performance. In specific, the neural network performs as a function node in the modified factor graph to deal with the residual intersymbol interference (ISI) that is not considered by the conventional detector with a limited complexity. We modify the updating rule in the conventional sum-product algorithm so that the neural network assisted detector can be complemented to a turbo equalization receiver. Furthermore, we propose a compatible training technique to improve the detection performance of the proposed DL-SPDA with turbo equalization. In particular, the neural network is optimized in terms of the mutual information between the transmitted sequence and the extrinsic information. We also investigate the maximum-likelihood bit error rate (BER) performance of a finite length coded FTN system. Simulation results show that the error performance of the proposed algorithm approaches the MAP performance, which is consistent with the analytical BER. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To meet the execution requirements of delay-sensitive services in vehicular edge computing (VEC) networks, vehicular services need to be offloaded to edge computing nodes. For complex, large-scale services, the services need to be migrated if the services are not completed before the vehicles leave the coverage of edge computing nodes. Trust and resource matching between areas thus become major problems. This paper studies the decision model of vehicular service offloading and migration. First, software-defined network (SDN) technology is introduced into the traditional network architecture, and a two-layer distributed SDN-controlled VEC network architecture is designed, which is divided into a domain control layer and an area control layer. In this framework, we use the consortium blockchain as a carrier to share network topology information between SDN controllers to prevent information leakage. We then established a service offloading and migration optimization problem model to minimize service execution delay, reduce energy consumption and maximize the throughput of the blockchain system. We describe the problem model as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), introduce a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm named asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) and design a dynamic service offloading and migration algorithm (DSOMA) based on A3C to solve the problem. Simulation results show that DSOMA can increase the throughput of the blockchain system, and DSOMA is superior to the deep Q-learning (DQN) algorithm and greedy offloading algorithm in reducing service execution delay and system energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have unlocked numerous sensing applications, which are expected to add billions of dollars to the world economy in the next decade. To further improve the Quality-of-Service in these applications, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project has considered the use of terrestrial cellular networks to support UAV sensing services, also known as the cellular Internet of UAVs. In this paper, we consider a cellular Internet of UAVs, where the sensory data can be transmitted either to the base station via cellular links, or to the mobile devices by underlay UAV-to-Device (U2D) communications. To evaluate the freshness of the sensory data, the concept of age of information (AoI) is adopted, in which a lower AoI implies fresher data. Since UAVs’ AoIs are determined by their trajectories during sensing and transmission, we investigate the AoI minimization problem for UAVs by designing their trajectories. This problem is a Markov decision problem with an infinite state-action space, and thus we utilize multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to approximate the state-action space. Then, we propose a multi-UAV trajectory design algorithm to solve this problem. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can achieve a lower AoI than a greedy algorithm, policy gradient algorithm, and overlay U2D scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defocus blur detection (DBD), which has been widely applied to various fields, aims to detect the out-of-focus or in-focus pixels from a single image. Despite the fact that the deep learning based methods applied to DBD have outperformed the hand-crafted feature based methods, the performance cannot still meet our requirement. In this paper, a novel network is established for DBD. Unlike existing methods which only learn the projection from the in-focus part to the ground-truth, both in-focus and out-of-focus pixels, which are completely and symmetrically complementary, are taken into account. Specifically, two symmetric branches are designed to jointly estimate the probability of focus and defocus pixels, respectively. Due to their complementary constraint, each layer in a branch is affected by an attention obtained from another branch, effectively learning the detailed information which may be ignored in one branch. The feature maps from these two branches are then passed through a unique fusion block to simultaneously get the two-channel output measured by a complementary loss. Additionally, instead of estimating only one binary map from a specific layer, each layer is encouraged to estimate the ground truth to guide the binary map estimation in its linked shallower layer followed by a top-to-bottom combination strategy, gradually exploiting the global and local information. Experimental results on released datasets demonstrate that our proposed method remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral image (HSI) clustering is a challenging task due to the complex characteristics in HSI data, such as spatial-spectral structure, high-dimension, and large spectral variability. In this paper, we propose a novel deep spatial-spectral subspace clustering network (DS3C-Net), which explores spatial-spectral information via the multi-scale auto-encoder and collaborative constraint. Considering the structure correlations of HSI, the multi-scale auto-encoder is first designed to extract spatial-spectral features with different-scale pixel blocks which are selected as the inputs. Then, the collaborative constrained self-expressive layers are introduced between the encoder and decoder, to capture the self-expressive subspace structures. By designing a self-expressiveness similarity constraint, the proposed network is trained collaboratively, and the affinity matrices of the feature representation are learned in an end-to-end manner. Based on the affinity matrices, the spectral clustering algorithm is utilized to obtain the final HSI clustering result. Experimental results on three widely used hyperspectral image datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore optimization-based and data-driven solutions in a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided multi-user mobile edge computing (MEC) system, where the user equipment (UEs) can partially offload their computation tasks to the access point (AP). We aim at maximizing the total completed task-input bits (TCTB) of all UEs with limited energy budgets during a given time slot, through jointly optimizing the RIS reflecting coefficients, the AP’s receive beamforming vectors, and the UEs’ energy partition strategies for local computing and offloading. A three-step block coordinate descending (BCD) algorithm is first proposed to effectively solve the non-convex TCTB maximization problem with guaranteed convergence. In order to reduce the computational complexity and facilitate lightweight online implementation of the optimization algorithm, we further construct two deep learning architectures. The first one takes channel state information (CSI) as input, while the second one exploits the UEs’ locations only for online inference. The two data-driven approaches are trained using data samples generated by the BCD algorithm via supervised learning. Our simulation results reveal a close match between the performance of the optimization-based BCD algorithm and the low-complexity learning-based architectures, all with superior performance to existing schemes in both cases with perfect and imperfect input features. Importantly, the location-only deep learning method is shown to offer a particularly practical and robust solution alleviating the need for CSI estimation and feedback when line-of-sight (LoS) direct links exist between UEs and the AP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of vehicles (IoV) is a large information interaction network that collects information on vehicles, roads and pedestrians. One of the important uses of vehicle networks is to meet the entertainment needs of driving users through communication between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs). Due to the limited storage space of RSUs, determining the content cached in each RSU is a key challenge. With the development of 5G and video editing technology, short video systems have become increasingly popular. Current widely used cache update methods, such as partial file precaching and content popularity- and user interest-based determination, are inefficient for such systems. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a QoE-driven edge caching method for the IoV based on deep reinforcement learning. First, a class-based user interest model is established. Compared with the traditional file popularity- and user interest distribution-based cache update methods, the proposed method is more suitable for systems with a large number of small files. Second, a quality of experience (QoE)-driven RSU cache model is established based on the proposed class-based user interest model. Third, a deep reinforcement learning method is designed to address the QoE-driven RSU cache update issue effectively. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear spectral unmixing is the practice of decomposing the mixed pixel into a linear combination of the constituent endmembers and the estimated abundances. This paper focuses on unsupervised spectral unmixing where the endmembers are unknown a priori. Conventional approaches use either geometrical- or statistical-based approaches. In this paper, we address the challenges of spectral unmixing with unsupervised deep learning models, in specific, the autoencoder models, where the decoder serves as the endmembers and the hidden layer output serves as the abundances. In several recent attempts, part-based autoencoders have been designed to solve the unsupervised spectral unmixing problem. However, the performance has not been satisfactory. In this paper, we first discuss some important findings we make on issues with part-based autoencoders. By proof of counterexample, we show that all existing part-based autoencoder networks with nonnegative and tied encoder and decoder are inherently defective by making these inappropriate assumptions on the network structure. As a result, they are not suitable for solving the spectral unmixing problem. We propose a so-called untied denoising autoencoder with sparsity, in which the encoder and decoder of the network are independent, and only the decoder of the network is enforced to be nonnegative. Furthermore, we make two critical additions to the network design. First, since denoising is an essential step for spectral unmixing, we propose to incorporate the denoising capacity into the network optimization in the format of a denoising constraint rather than cascading another denoising preprocessor in order to avoid the introduction of additional reconstruction error. Second, to be more robust to the inaccurate estimation of a number of endmembers, we adopt an $l_{21}$ -norm on the encoder of the network to reduce the redundant endmembers while decreasing the reconstruction error simultaneously. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, especially for highly noisy data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider maximum-likelihood (ML) MIMO detection under one-bit quantized observations and binary symbol constellations. This problem is motivated by the recent interest in adopting coarse quantization in massive MIMO systems—as an effective way to scale down the hardware complexity and energy consumption. Classical MIMO detection techniques consider unquantized observations, and many of them are not applicable to the one-bit MIMO case. We develop a new non-convex optimization algorithm for the one-bit ML MIMO detection problem, using a strategy called homotopy optimization. The idea is to transform the ML problem into a sequence of approximate problems, from easy (convex) to hard (close to ML), and with each problem being a gradual modification of its previous. Then, our attempt is to iteratively trace the solution path of these approximate problems. This homotopy algorithm is well suited to the application of deep unfolding, a recently popular approach for turning certain model-based algorithms into data-driven, and performance enhanced, ones. While our initial focus is on one-bit MIMO detection, the proposed technique also applies naturally to the classical unquantized MIMO detection. We performed extensive simulations and show that the proposed homotopy algorithms, both non-deep and deep, have satisfactory bit-error probability performance compared to many state-of-the-art algorithms. Also, the deep homotopy algorithm has attractively low computational complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Device-to-device (D2D) and full-duplex (FD) have been widely recognized as spectrum efficient techniques in the fifth-generation (5G) networks. By combining them, the FD-D2D aided underlaying networks (FN) has exhibited considerable technical advantages in terms of both spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). Considering the fact that the performance of FN may be severely affected by users’ workload, the workload-driven FN (WFN) must be investigated. In this paper, a deep learning based transmit power allocation (TPA) method is proposed for automatically determining the optimal transmit powers of co-spectrum cellular users (CUs) and D2D users (DUs) relying on a deep neural network. Unlike the conventional transmit-power-control schemes, in which complex optimization problems must be addressed in an iterative manner (it usually requires a relative longer computational time), the proposed scheme enables each DU to determine its transmit power with a relatively shorter time. Furthermore, an improved iterative subspace-pursuit algorithm, as the performance benchmark, is formulated for WFN. In addition, to reflect the influence imposed by the workload, the penalty-based statistical sum-date-rate (PSS) can be employed as the performance metric of WFN. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme is capable of achieving a PSS comparable with that of the traditional iterative-based algorithms even under heavy-workload scenarios, but the computational complexity of the former can be significantly reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the handover (HO), and power allocation problem in a two-tier heterogeneous network (HetNet), which consists of a macro base station, and some millimeter-wave (mmWave) small base stations. We establish an HO management, and power allocation scheme to maximize the overall throughput while reducing the HO frequency. In particular, considering the interrelationship among decisions made by different user equipments (UEs), we first model the HO, and power allocation problem as a fully cooperative multi-agent task, in which all agents, i.e., UEs, have the same target. Then, to solve the multi-agent task, and get decentralized policies for each UE, we develop a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm based on the proximal policy optimization (PPO) method, by introducing the centralized training with decentralized execution framework. That is, we use global information to train policies for each UE, and after the training is finished, each UE obtains a decentralized policy, which can be implemented only based on each UE's local observation. Specially, we introduce the counterfactual baseline to address the credit assignment problem in centralized learning. Due to the centralized training, the decentralized polices learned by multi-agent PPO (MAPPO) can work more cooperatively. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that our method can achieve better performance comparing with other existing works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning and blockchain-based energy framework for smart grids, entitled DeepCoin. The DeepCoin framework uses two schemes, a blockchain-based scheme and a deep learning-based scheme. The blockchain-based scheme consists of five phases: setup phase, agreement phase, creating a block phase and consensus-making phase, and view change phase. It incorporates a novel reliable peer-to-peer energy system that is based on the practical Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm and it achieves high throughput. In order to prevent smart grid attacks, the proposed framework makes the generation of blocks using short signatures and hash functions. The proposed deep learning-based scheme is an intrusion detection system (IDS), which employs recurrent neural networks for detecting network attacks and fraudulent transactions in the blockchain-based energy network. We study the performance of the proposed IDS on three different sources the CICIDS2017 dataset, a power system dataset, and a web robot (Bot)-Internet of Things (IoT) dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conebeam CT using a circular trajectory is quite often used for various applications due to its relative simple geometry. For conebeam geometry, Feldkamp, Davis and Kress algorithm is regarded as the standard reconstruction method, but this algorithm suffers from so-called conebeam artifacts as the cone angle increases. Various model-based iterative reconstruction methods have been developed to reduce the cone-beam artifacts, but these algorithms usually require multiple applications of computational expensive forward and backprojections. In this paper, we develop a novel deep learning approach for accurate conebeam artifact removal. In particular, our deep network, designed on the differentiated backprojection domain, performs a data-driven inversion of an ill-posed deconvolution problem associated with the Hilbert transform. The reconstruction results along the coronal and sagittal directions are then combined using a spectral blending technique to minimize the spectral leakage. Experimental results under various conditions confirmed that our method generalizes well and outperforms the existing iterative methods despite significantly reduced runtime complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a node-classified redundant decoding (NC-RD) algorithm based on the received sequence’s channel reliability for high-density parity-check (HDPC) codes. Two preprocessing steps are proposed prior decoding. The variable nodes of the parity-check matrix are firstly classified by the $k$ -median algorithm based on the number of shortest cycles associated with each variable node before decoding. Then, by searching among the automorphism group of the HDPC codes, we generate a list of permutations for bit positions by computing and sorting the permutation reliability metrics. The redundant decoder conducts the message-passing decoding according to the sorted permutations, which limit the unreliable information propagation for each permutation. Besides proposing a list decoding algorithm on top of the NC-RD algorithm to augment the decoder’s performance, we show that the NC-RD algorithm can be transformed into a neural network system. More specifically, multiplicative tuneable weights are attached to the decoding messages to optimize the decoding performance. Simulation results of BCH codes over the AWGN channels show that the NC-RD algorithm provides a performance gain compared to the random redundant decoding algorithm. Additional decoding performance gain can be obtained by both the list decoding method and the neural network “learned” NC-RD algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vehicular edge computing is considered an enabling technology for intelligent and connected vehicles since the optimization of communication and computing on edge has a significant impact on driving safety and efficiency. In this paper, with the road traffic assignment to “proactively” reshape the spatiotemporal distribution of resource demands, we investigate the joint service migration and mobility optimization problem for vehicular edge computing. The goal is to meet the service delay requirements of vehicular edge computing with minimum migration cost and travel time. As service migration and mobility optimization are coupled, the joint scheduling problem suffers from the curse of dimensionality, which cannot be solved in real time by centralized algorithms. To this end, a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) algorithm is proposed to maximize the composite utility of communication, computing, and route planning in a distributed way. In the MADRL algorithm, a two-branch convolution based deep Q-network is constructed to coordinate migration action and routing action. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is scalable and substantially reduces service delay, migration cost and travel time as compared with the existing baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As urban traffic condition is diverse and complicated, applying reinforcement learning to reduce traffic congestion becomes one of the hot and promising topics. Especially, how to coordinate the traffic light controllers of multiple intersections is a key challenge for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Most existing MARL studies are based on traditional $Q$ -learning, but unstable environment leads to poor learning in the complicated and dynamic traffic scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-agent recurrent deep deterministic policy gradient (MARDDPG) algorithm based on deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm for traffic light control (TLC) in vehiclar networks. Specifically, the centralized learning in each critic network enables each agent to estimate the policies of other agents in the decision-making process and each agent can coordinate with each other, alleviating the problem of poor learning performance caused by environmental instability. The decentralized execution enables each agent to make decisions independently. We share parameters in actor networks to speed up the training process and reduce the memory footprint. The addition of LSTM is beneficial to alleviate the instability of the environment caused by partial observable state. We utilize surveillance cameras and vehicular networks to collect status information for each intersection. Unlike previous work, we have not only considered the vehicle but also considered the pedestrians waiting to pass through the intersection. Moreover, we also set different priorities for buses and ordinary vehicles. The experimental results in a vehicular network show that our method can run stably in various scenarios and coordinate multiple intersections, which significantly reduces vehicle congestion and pedestrian congestion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless virtual reality (VR) is predicted to become a killer application in 5G and beyond, which provides an immersive experience and revolutionizes the way people communicate. It is well-known that rendering is the key performance bottleneck in wireless VR systems, especially for VR games. However, real-time rendering and data correlation are ignored by most researchers. In this paper, we propose an adaptive VR framework that enables high-quality wireless VR in future mmWave-enabled wireless networks with mobile edge computing (MEC), where real-time VR rendering tasks can be offloaded to MEC servers adaptively and the caching capability of MEC servers enables further performance improvement. First, we formulate the addressed problem to maximize the quality of experience (QoE) of the users, where association, adaptive offloading mode selection, and caching policy are jointly optimized. Considering the high complexity of the addressed problem, we then propose a distributed learning approach consisting of an offline training phase and an online running phase, which maintains scalability and adaptation capability. The offline phase is based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) while the latter utilizes game theory. At last, simulation results show the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the other baseline algorithms in terms of QoE utility values, latency, and convergence time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) process usually suffers from drift and shift in the Run-to-Run material removal process due to the wear and replacement of the polishing pad, lacking of in-suit measurements of the product quality of interest and other environment variations. This paper proposed a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based run-to-run (R2R) controller for the CMP process. Firstly, deep reinforcement learning is effectively utilized as a training algorithm of the R2R controller, which is a model-free controller to take a decision with infinite horizon information and thus improves the control performance; Secondly, a novel policy network is embeded to the DRL model, which divides the network into linear and nonlinear part explicitly to improve the prediction performance of the R2R controller on process changes. Finally, a special reward function is proposed to improve the training of the R2R controller, which trades off between target tracing and fluctuations of production parameters. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is validated on a CMP process. The testing results illustrate that the DRL-based R2R controller can precisely trace the desired target of material removal rate (MRR) and is very effective to control various process variations online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) for sensing services, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) transmit their sensory data to terrestrial mobile devices over the unlicensed spectrum. However, the interference from surrounding terminals is uncontrollable due to the opportunistic channel access. In this paper, we consider a cellular Internet of UAVs to guarantee the Quality-of-Service (QoS), where the sensory data can be transmitted to the mobile devices either by UAV-to-Device (U2D) communications over cellular networks, or directly through the base station (BS). Since UAVs’ sensing and transmission may influence their trajectories, we study the trajectory design problem for UAVs in consideration of their sensing and transmission. This is a Markov decision problem (MDP) with a large state-action space, and thus, we utilize multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to approximate the state-action space, and then propose a multi-UAV trajectory design algorithm to solve this problem. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can achieve a higher total utility than policy gradient algorithm and single-agent algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fifth generation of wireless communications (5G) promises massive increases in traffic volume and data rates, as well as improved reliability in voice calls. Jointly optimizing beamforming, power control, and interference coordination in a 5G wireless network to enhance the communication performance to end users poses a significant challenge. In this paper, we formulate the joint design of beamforming, power control, and interference coordination as a non-convex optimization problem to maximize the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and solve this problem using deep reinforcement learning. By using the greedy nature of deep Q-learning to estimate future rewards of actions and using the reported coordinates of the users served by the network, we propose an algorithm for voice bearers and data bearers in sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency bands, respectively. The algorithm improves the performance measured by SINR and sum-rate capacity. In realistic cellular environments, the simulation results show that our algorithm outperforms the link adaptation industry standards for sub-6 GHz voice bearers. For data bearers in the mmWave frequency band, our algorithm approaches the maximum sum rate capacity, but with less than 4% of the required run time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The catenary support components (CSCs) are the most important devices in high-speed railways to support contact lines for powering trains. To estimate the states of CSCs, it is very necessary to locate their positions in a monitoring system based on computer vision. Considering the application scenarios and characteristics of CSCs, an automatic and quick positioning system is designed in this paper to simultaneously position the multiscale CSCs with 12 categories. In the system, an effective framework called CSCs network (CSCNET) is presented, which cascades the coarse positioning network and the fine positioning network to reduce multiscale differences between different CSCs. In the coarse positioning network, a new unsupervised clustering algorithm based on the relative positioning information is proposed to classify the catenary images. Then, a convolutional neural network (CNN) classification network is trained to extract the structural features of catenary images and generate the proposal regions with labels. In the fine positioning network, a modified CNN positioning framework is applied to obtain the accurate positions of CSCs based on the coarse positioning results. Due to the special lightweight structure with a classification network, the relative position information is applied and makes the CSCNET sensitive to small-scale components. The experimental results from some high-speed railway lines in China show that the proposed system has obvious advantages in the CSCs positioning. The mean average precision and frames per second of CSCNET reach 0.837 and 2.17, respectively. Compared with some popular convolutional networks [faster region-based CNN (Faster R-CNN), etc.] and a typical positioning method, the proposed system significantly improves the AP without increasing the computational time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposed by Maddah-Ali and Niesen, a coded caching scheme has been verified to alleviate the load of networks efficiently. Recently, a new technique called placement delivery array (PDA) was proposed to characterize the coded caching scheme. In this paper, we consider a caching system in the scope of ultra dense networks (UDNs). Each base station (BS) has a finite cache and stores some contents. We propose an efficient coded content caching scheme called double coded caching to make the transmission robust to in-and-out wireless network quality. Then the dynamic caching and multicast scheduling are considered to jointly minimize the average delay and power of the content-centric wireless networks. This stochastic optimization problem can be formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown transition probabilities and large state space. We propose a deep reinforcement learning approach to deal with the decision problem. Our algorithm uses a variational auto-encoder (VAE) neural network to approximate the state sufficiently, and uses a weighted double Q-learning scheme to reduce variance and overestimation of the Q function. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed double coded caching scheme increases the probability of the successful transmission, and the caching and scheduling policy can effectively reduce the delay and the power consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video-based human action recognition is currently one of the most active research areas in computer vision. Various research studies indicate that the performance of action recognition is highly dependent on the type of features being extracted and how the actions are represented. Since the release of the Kinect camera, a large number of Kinect-based human action recognition techniques have been proposed in the literature. However, there still does not exist a thorough comparison of these Kinect-based techniques under the grouping of feature types, such as handcrafted versus deep learning features and depth-based versus skeleton-based features. In this paper, we analyze and compare 10 recent Kinect-based algorithms for both cross-subject action recognition and cross-view action recognition using six benchmark datasets. In addition, we have implemented and improved some of these techniques and included their variants in the comparison. Our experiments show that the majority of methods perform better on cross-subject action recognition than cross-view action recognition, that the skeleton-based features are more robust for cross-view recognition than the depth-based features, and that the deep learning features are suitable for large datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with Microwave Power Transfer (MPT) capability provide a practical means to deploy a large number of wireless powered sensing devices into areas with no access to persistent power supplies. The UAV can charge the sensing devices remotely and harvest their data. A key challenge is online MPT and data collection in the presence of on-board control of a UAV (e.g., patrolling velocity) for preventing battery drainage and data queue overflow of the devices, while up-to-date knowledge on battery level and data queue of the devices is not available at the UAV. In this paper, an on-board deep Q-network is developed to minimize the overall data packet loss of the sensing devices, by optimally deciding the device to be charged and interrogated for data collection, and the instantaneous patrolling velocity of the UAV. Specifically, we formulate a Markov Decision Process (MDP) with the states of battery level and data queue length of devices, channel conditions, and waypoints given the trajectory of the UAV; and solve it optimally with Q-learning. Furthermore, we propose the on-board deep Q-network that enlarges the state space of the MDP, and a deep reinforcement learning based scheduling algorithm that asymptotically derives the optimal solution online, even when the UAV has only outdated knowledge on the MDP states. Numerical results demonstrate that our deep reinforcement learning algorithm reduces the packet loss by at least 69.2%, as compared to existing non-learning greedy algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shortage of training samples remains one of the main obstacles in applying the neural networks to the hyperspectral images classification. To fuse the spatial and spectral information, pixel patches are often utilized to train a model, which may further aggregate this problem. In the existing works, an artificial neural network (ANN) model supervised by centerloss (ANNC) was introduced. Training merely with spectral information, the ANNC yields discriminative spectral features suitable for the subsequent classification tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN)-based spatial feature fusion (CSFF) algorithm, which allows a smart integration of spatial information to the spectral features extracted by ANNC. As a critical part of CSFF, a CNN-based discriminant model is introduced to estimate whether two pixels belong to the same class. At the testing stage, by applying the discriminant model to the pixel pairs generated by a test pixel and each of its neighbors, the local structure is estimated and represented as a customized convolutional kernel. The spectral–spatial feature is generated by a convolutional operation between the estimated kernel and the corresponding spectral features within a local region. The final label is determined by classifying the resulting spectral–spatial feature. Without increasing the number of training samples or involving pixel patches at the training stage, the CSFF framework achieves the state of the art by declining 20%–50% classification failures in experiments on three well-known hyperspectral images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel sparse signal recovery algorithm called the trainable iterative soft thresholding algorithm (TISTA). The proposed algorithm consists of two estimation units: a linear estimation unit and a minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimator based shrinkage unit. The error variance required in the MMSE shrinkage unit is precisely estimated from a tentative estimate of the original signal. The remarkable feature of the proposed scheme is that TISTA includes adjustable variables that control step size and the error variance for the MMSE shrinkage function. The variables are adjusted by standard deep learning techniques. The number of trainable variables of TISTA is nearly equal to the number of iteration rounds and is much smaller than that of known learnable sparse signal recovery algorithms. This feature leads to highly stable and fast training processes of TISTA. Computer experiments show that TISTA is applicable to various classes of sensing matrices, such as Gaussian matrices, binary matrices, and matrices with large condition numbers. Numerical results also demonstrate that, in many cases, TISTA provides significantly faster convergence than approximate message passing (AMP) and the learned iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm and also outperforms orthogonal AMP in the NMSE performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neural networks with rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation functions (a.k.a. ReLU networks) have achieved great empirical success in various domains. Nonetheless, existing results for learning ReLU networks either pose assumptions on the underlying data distribution being, e.g., Gaussian, or require the network size and/or training size to be sufficiently large. In this context, the problem of learning a two-layer ReLU network is approached in a binary classification setting, where the data are linearly separable and a hinge loss criterion is adopted. Leveraging the power of random noise perturbation, this paper presents a novel stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm, which can provably train any single-hidden-layer ReLU network to attain global optimality, despite the presence of infinitely many bad local minima, maxima, and saddle points in general. This result is the first of its kind, requiring no assumptions on the data distribution, training/network size, or initialization. Convergence of the resultant iterative algorithm to a global minimum is analyzed by establishing both an upper bound and a lower bound on the number of non-zero updates to be performed. Moreover, generalization guarantees are developed for ReLU networks trained with the novel SGD leveraging classic compression bounds. These guarantees highlight a key difference (at least in the worst case) between reliably learning a ReLU network as well as a leaky ReLU network in terms of sample complexity. Numerical tests using both synthetic data and real images validate the effectiveness of the algorithm and the practical merits of the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy efficiency (EE) and spectrum efficiency (SE) have received significant attentions on optimizing the network performance in cognitive radio networks. In this paper, an EE+SE tradeoff based target is considered for the primary users (PUs) and the secondary users (SUs). First of all, considering the orthogonal frequency division multiple access-based resource allocation (RA) for the underlying SUs, we formulate an objective function through minimizing a weighted sum of the secondary interference power, where the network performance of both PUs and SUs are guaranteed by the constraints on quality of service, power consumption and data rate. However, it is a NP-hard problem. In order to solve it, we propose a damped three dimensional (D3D) message-passing algorithm (MPA) based on deep learning. Specifically, a feed-forward neural network is devised and an analogous back propagation algorithm is developed to learn the optimal parameters of the D3D-MPA. To improve the computational efficiency of the allocation and the learning, a suboptimal RA scheme is deduced based on a damped two dimensional MPA. Finally, simulation results are provided to confirm the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neuro-inspired architectures based on synaptic memory arrays have been proposed for on-chip acceleration of weighted sum and weight update in machine/deep learning algorithms. In this paper, we developed NeuroSim, a circuit-level macro model that estimates the area, latency, dynamic energy, and leakage power to facilitate the design space exploration of neuro-inspired architectures with mainstream and emerging device technologies. NeuroSim provides flexible interface and a wide variety of design options at the circuit and device level. Therefore, NeuroSim can be used by neural networks (NNs) as a supporting tool to provide circuit-level performance evaluation. With NeuroSim, an integrated framework can be built with hierarchical organization from the device level (synaptic device properties) to the circuit level (array architectures) and then to the algorithm level (NN topology), enabling instruction-accurate evaluation on the learning accuracy as well as the circuit-level performance metrics at the run-time of online learning. Using multilayer perceptron as a case-study algorithm, we investigated the impact of the “analog” emerging nonvolatile memory (eNVM)’s “nonideal” device properties and benchmarked the tradeoffs between SRAM, digital, and analog eNVM-based architectures for online learning and offline classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic segmentation tasks can be well modeled by Markov Random Field (MRF). This paper addresses semantic segmentation by incorporating high-order relations and mixture of label contexts into MRF. Unlike previous works that optimized MRFs using iterative algorithm, we solve MRF by proposing a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), namely Deep Parsing Network (DPN), which enables deterministic end-to-end computation in a single forward pass. Specifically, DPN extends a contemporary CNN to model unary terms and additional layers are devised to approximate the mean field (MF) algorithm for pairwise terms. It has several appealing properties. First, different from the recent works that required many iterations of MF during back-propagation, DPN is able to achieve high performance by approximating one iteration of MF. Second, DPN represents various types of pairwise terms, making many existing models as its special cases. Furthermore, pairwise terms in DPN provide a unified framework to encode rich contextual information in high-dimensional data, such as images and videos. Third, DPN makes MF easier to be parallelized and speeded up, thus enabling efficient inference. DPN is thoroughly evaluated on standard semantic image/video segmentation benchmarks, where a single DPN model yields state-of-the-art segmentation accuracies on PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes dataset and CamVid dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compressive sensing (CS) has proved effective for tomographic reconstruction from sparsely collected data or under-sampled measurements, which are practically important for few-view computed tomography (CT), tomosynthesis, interior tomography, and so on. To perform sparse-data CT, the iterative reconstruction commonly uses regularizers in the CS framework. Currently, how to choose the parameters adaptively for regularization is a major open problem. In this paper, inspired by the idea of machine learning especially deep learning, we unfold the state-of-the-art “fields of experts”-based iterative reconstruction scheme up to a number of iterations for data-driven training, construct a learned experts’ assessment-based reconstruction network (LEARN) for sparse-data CT, and demonstrate the feasibility and merits of our LEARN network. The experimental results with our proposed LEARN network produces a superior performance with the well-known Mayo Clinic low-dose challenge data set relative to the several state-of-the-art methods, in terms of artifact reduction, feature preservation, and computational speed. This is consistent to our insight that because all the regularization terms and parameters used in the iterative reconstruction are now learned from the training data, our LEARN network utilizes application-oriented knowledge more effectively and recovers underlying images more favorably than competing algorithms. Also, the number of layers in the LEARN network is only 50, reducing the computational complexity of typical iterative algorithms by orders of magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we seek to improve deep neural networks by generalizing the pooling operations that play a central role in the current architectures. We pursue a careful exploration of approaches to allow pooling to learn and to adapt to complex and variable patterns. The two primary directions lie in: (1) learning a pooling function via (two strategies of) combining of max and average pooling, and (2) learning a pooling function in the form of a tree-structured fusion of pooling filters that are themselves learned. In our experiments every generalized pooling operation we explore improves performance when used in place of average or max pooling. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed pooling operations provide a boost in invariance properties relative to conventional pooling and set the state of the art on several widely adopted benchmark datasets. These benefits come with only a light increase in computational overhead during training (ranging from additional 5 to 15 percent in time complexity) and a very modest increase in the number of model parameters (e.g., additional 1, 9, and 27 parameters for mixed, gated, and 2-level tree pooling operators, respectively). To gain more insights about our proposed pooling methods, we also visualize the learned pooling masks and the embeddings of the internal feature responses for different pooling operations. Our proposed pooling operations are easy to implement and can be applied within various deep neural network architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the great success of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision, this paper proposes a complex-valued CNN (CV-CNN) specifically for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image interpretation. It utilizes both amplitude and phase information of complex SAR imagery. All elements of CNN including input-output layer, convolution layer, activation function, and pooling layer are extended to the complex domain. Moreover, a complex backpropagation algorithm based on stochastic gradient descent is derived for CV-CNN training. The proposed CV-CNN is then tested on the typical polarimetric SAR image classification task which classifies each pixel into known terrain types via supervised training. Experiments with the benchmark data sets of Flevoland and Oberpfaffenhofen show that the classification error can be further reduced if employing CV-CNN instead of conventional real-valued CNN with the same degrees of freedom. The performance of CV-CNN is comparable to that of existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of overall classification accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In developing a signal separation algorithm, an obvious challenge relates to the ways in which the photon measurements from dual-tracer positron emission tomography (PET) are overlapped. Aside from this issue, the ill-conditioning and the noisy measures are still obstacles to achieve accurate and robust result. In this paper, we develop a novel approach from a data-driven perspective that separates dynamic dual-tracer PET signals into individual-tracer components explicitly with a simultaneous-injection single-scan. Our approach is divided into two phases: training and reconstruction. In the training phase, our proposed framework will learn the potential relationship of different frames for dynamic dual-tracer PET data. In the reconstruction phase, given the sinogram of a dual tracer, the PET activity map of an individual tracer can be obtained directly. Experiments on Monte Carlo simulation data sets are conducted as validation. The experimental results have demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed approach by comparing with the ground truth of the individual-tracer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autoencoders are deep learning architectures that learn feature representation by minimizing the reconstruction error. Using an autoencoder as baseline, this paper presents a novel formulation for a class sparsity based supervised encoder, termed as CSSE. We postulate that features from the same class will have a common sparsity pattern/support in the latent space. Therefore, in the formulation of the autoencoder, a supervision penalty is introduced as a joint-sparsity promoting l2,1 -norm. The formulation of CSSE is derived for a single hidden layer and it is applied for multiple hidden layers using a greedy layer-by-layer learning approach. The proposed CSSE approach is applied for learning face representation and verification experiments are performed on the LFW and PaSC face databases. The experiments show that the proposed approach yields improved results compared to autoencoders and comparable results with state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an automated algorithm for rapidly and effectively detecting cars directly from large-volume 3-D point clouds. Rather than using low-order descriptors, a multilayer feature generation model is created to obtain high-order feature representations for 3-D local patches through deep learning techniques. To handle cars with different levels of incompleteness caused by data acquisition ways and occlusions, a hierarchical visibility estimation model is developed to augment Hough voting. Considering scale and orientation variations in the azimuth direction, a set of multiscale Hough forests is constructed to rotationally cast votes to estimate cars' centroids. Quantitative assessments show that the proposed algorithm achieves average completeness, correctness, quality, and F1-measure of 0.94, 0.96, 0.90, and 0.95, respectively, in detecting 3-D cars. Comparative studies also demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other four existing algorithms in accurately and completely detecting 3-D cars from large-scale 3-D point clouds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We comment on a paper describing an algorithm for image set classification. Following the general practice in computer vision research, the performance of the algorithm was evaluated on benchmarks in order to support the claim of its advantage over other algorithms in the literature. We have examined the reported data of experiences on two datasets, and found that many numbers are not a possible answer regardless how the random partitions were selected and regardless how the algorithms performed in each partition. Our finding suggests that the experimental results in the paper (“Deep Reconstruction Models for Image Set Classification”, IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 713–727, April 2015) has serious flaws to the extent that all the experimental results should be re-examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]