Search

Dependency-aware jobs, such as the big data analytic workflows, are commonly executed on the cloud. They are compiled to directed acyclic graphs, with tasks linked in regarding the dependency. The cloud scheduler, which maintains a large number of resources, is responsible to execute tasks in parallel. To resolve the complex dependencies, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based schedulers are widely applied. However, we find that the DRL-based schedulers are vulnerable to the perturbations in the input jobs and may generate falsified decisions to benefit a particular job while delaying the others. By perturbation, we mean a slight adjustment to the job's node features or dependencies, while not changing its functionality. In this paper, we first explore the vulnerability of DRL-based schedulers to job perturbations without accessing the information of the DRL models used in the scheduler. We devise the black-box perturbation system, in which, a proxy model is trained to mimic the DRL-based scheduling policy. We show that the high-faith proxy model can help to craft effective perturbations. The DRL-based schedulers can be as high as 60% likely to be badly affected by the perturbations. Then, we investigate the solution to improve the robustness of DRL-based schedulers to such perturbations. We propose an adversarial training framework to force the neural model to adapt to the perturbation patterns during training so as to eliminate the potential damage during applications. Experiments show that the adversarial-trained scheduler is more robust, reducing the chance of being affected to 3-fold less and the potential bad effects halved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, hyperbolic deep neural networks (HDNNs) have been gaining momentum as the deep representations in the hyperbolic space provide high fidelity embeddings with few dimensions, especially for data possessing hierarchical structure. Such a hyperbolic neural architecture is quickly extended to different scientific fields, including natural language processing, single-cell RNA-sequence analysis, graph embedding, financial analysis, and computer vision. The promising results demonstrate its superior capability, significant compactness of the model, and a substantially better physical interpretability than its counterpart in the euclidean space. To stimulate future research, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the literature around the neural components in the construction of HDNN, as well as the generalization of the leading deep approaches to the hyperbolic space. It also presents current applications of various tasks, together with insightful observations and identifying open questions and promising future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dynamically weighted directed network (DWDN) is frequently encountered in various big data-related applications like a terminal interaction pattern analysis system (TIPAS) concerned in this study. It consists of large-scale dynamic interactions among numerous nodes. As the involved nodes increase drastically, it becomes impossible to observe their full interactions at each time slot, making a resultant DWDN High Dimensional and Incomplete (HDI). An HDI DWDN, in spite of its incompleteness, contains rich knowledge regarding involved nodes’ various behavior patterns. To extract such knowledge from an HDI DWDN, this paper proposes a novel Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based Nonnegative Latent-factorization of Tensors (ANLT) model. It adopts three-fold ideas: a) building a data density-oriented augmented Lagrangian function for efficiently handling an HDI tensor's incompleteness and nonnegativity; b) splitting the optimization task in each iteration into an elaborately designed subtask series where each one is solved based on the previously solved ones following the ADMM principle to achieve fast convergence; and c) theoretically proving that its convergence is guaranteed with its efficient learning scheme. Experimental results on six DWDNs from real applications demonstrate that the proposed ANLT outperforms state-of-the-art models significantly in both computational efficiency and prediction accuracy for missing links of an HDI DWDN. Hence, this study proposes a novel and efficient approach to large-scale DWDN representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, hyperbolic deep neural networks (HDNNs) have been gaining momentum as the deep representations in the hyperbolic space provide high fidelity embeddings with few dimensions, especially for data possessing hierarchical structure. Such a hyperbolic neural architecture is quickly extended to different scientific fields, including natural language processing, single-cell RNA-sequence analysis, graph embedding, financial analysis, and computer vision. The promising results demonstrate its superior capability, significant compactness of the model, and a substantially better physical interpretability than its counterpart in the euclidean space. To stimulate future research, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the literature around the neural components in the construction of HDNN, as well as the generalization of the leading deep approaches to the hyperbolic space. It also presents current applications of various tasks, together with insightful observations and identifying open questions and promising future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dynamically weighted directed network (DWDN) is frequently encountered in various big data-related applications like a terminal interaction pattern analysis system (TIPAS) concerned in this study. It consists of large-scale dynamic interactions among numerous nodes. As the involved nodes increase drastically, it becomes impossible to observe their full interactions at each time slot, making a resultant DWDN High Dimensional and Incomplete (HDI). An HDI DWDN, in spite of its incompleteness, contains rich knowledge regarding involved nodes’ various behavior patterns. To extract such knowledge from an HDI DWDN, this paper proposes a novel Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based Nonnegative Latent-factorization of Tensors (ANLT) model. It adopts three-fold ideas: a) building a data density-oriented augmented Lagrangian function for efficiently handling an HDI tensor's incompleteness and nonnegativity; b) splitting the optimization task in each iteration into an elaborately designed subtask series where each one is solved based on the previously solved ones following the ADMM principle to achieve fast convergence; and c) theoretically proving that its convergence is guaranteed with its efficient learning scheme. Experimental results on six DWDNs from real applications demonstrate that the proposed ANLT outperforms state-of-the-art models significantly in both computational efficiency and prediction accuracy for missing links of an HDI DWDN. Hence, this study proposes a novel and efficient approach to large-scale DWDN representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heterogeneity in recently published knowledge graph embedding models’ implementations, training, and evaluation has made fair and thorough comparisons difficult. To assess the reproducibility of previously published results, we re-implemented and evaluated 21 models in the PyKEEN software package. In this paper, we outline which results could be reproduced with their reported hyper-parameters, which could only be reproduced with alternate hyper-parameters, and which could not be reproduced at all, as well as provide insight as to why this might be the case. We then performed a large-scale benchmarking on four datasets with several thousands of experiments and 24,804 GPU hours of computation time. We present insights gained as to best practices, best configurations for each model, and where improvements could be made over previously published best configurations. Our results highlight that the combination of model architecture, training approach, loss function, and the explicit modeling of inverse relations is crucial for a model’s performance and is not only determined by its architecture. We provide evidence that several architectures can obtain results competitive to the state of the art when configured carefully. We have made all code, experimental configurations, results, and analyses available at https://github.com/pykeen/pykeen and https://github.com/pykeen/benchmarking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent developments of neural network (NN) models have led to a series of record-breaking achievements in many applications, the lack of sufficiently good datasets remains a problem for some applications. For such a problem, we can however exploit a large number of unstructured text corpora as an external knowledge to complement the training data, and most prevailing neural network solutions employ word embedding methods for such purposes. In this paper, we propose LDA-Reg, a novel knowledge driven regularization framework based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) as an alternative to the word embedding methods to adaptively utilize abundant external knowledge and to interpret the NN model. For the joint learning of the parameters, we propose EM-SGD, an effective update method which incorporates Expectation Maximization (EM) and Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to update parameters iteratively. Moreover, we also devise a lazy update and sparse update method for the high-dimensional inputs and sparse inputs respectively. We validate the effectiveness of our regularization framework through an extensive experimental study over real world and standard benchmark datasets. The results show that our proposed framework not only achieves significant improvement over state-of-the-art word embedding methods but also learns interpretable and significant topics for various tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph learning has emerged as a promising technique for multi-view clustering due to its efficiency of learning a unified graph from multiple views. Previous multi-view graph learning methods mainly try to exploit the multi-view consistency to boost learning performance. However, these methods ignore the prevalent multi-view diversity which may be induced by noise, corruptions, or even view-specific attributes. In this paper, we propose to simultaneously and explicitly leverage the multi-view consistency and the multi-view diversity in a unified framework. The consistent parts are further fused to our target graph with a clear clustering structure, on which the cluster label to each instance can be directly allocated without any postprocessing such as $k$ k -means in classical spectral clustering. In addition, our model can automatically assign suitable weight for each view based on its clustering capacity. By leveraging the subtasks of measuring the diversity of graphs, integrating the consistent parts with automatically learned weights, and allocating cluster label to each instance in a joint framework, each subtask can be alternately boosted by utilizing the results of the others towards an overall optimal solution. Extensive experimental results on several benchmark multi-view datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in comparison to several state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge graph embedding is an effective way to represent knowledge graph, which greatly enhance the performances on knowledge graph completion tasks, e.g., entity or relation prediction. For knowledge graph embedding models, designing a powerful loss framework is crucial to the discrimination between correct and incorrect triplets. Margin-based ranking loss is a commonly used negative sampling framework to make a suitable margin between the scores of positive and negative triples. However, this loss can not ensure ideal low scores for the positive triplets and high scores for the negative triplets, which is not beneficial for knowledge completion tasks. In this paper, we present a double limit scoring loss to separately set upper bound for correct triplets and lower bound for incorrect triplets, which provides more effective and flexible optimization for knowledge graph embedding. Upon the presented loss framework, we present several knowledge graph embedding models including TransE-SS, TransH-SS, TransD-SS, ProjE-SS and ComplEx-SS. The experimental results on link prediction and triplet classification show that our proposed models have the significant improvement compared to state-of-the-art baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely acknowledged that the success of deep learning is built upon large-scale training data and tremendous computing power. However, the data and computing power are not always available for many real-world applications. In this paper, we address the machine learning problem where it lacks training data and limits computing power. Specifically, we investigate domain adaptation which is able to transfer knowledge from one labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, so that we do not need much training data from the target domain. At the same time, we consider the situation that the running environment is confined, e.g., in edge computing the end device has very limited running resources. Technically, we present the Faster Domain Adaptation (FDA) protocol and further report two paradigms of FDA: early stopping and amid skipping. The former accelerates domain adaptation by multiple early exit points. The latter speeds up the adaptation by wisely skip several amid neural network blocks. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks verify that our method is able to achieve the comparable and even better accuracy but employ much less computing resources. To the best of our knowledge, there are very few works which investigated accelerating knowledge adaptation in the community. This work is expected to inspire the topic for more discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special section focus on military and government systems applications. Organizations in this sectors seek to stay on the leading edge of warfare, communications development, smart infrastructure configuration, and efficient and effective service delivery through the design of complex systems. These complex systems are referred to as System of Systems (SoS) and are defined by the internal and external integration of individual systems and subsystems working together to create newcapabilities that could not otherwise be achieved by individual systems. Due to advances in technology and engineering and the proliferation of available information, the complexity of systems continues to increase. Engineering managers and systems engineers are faced with having to integrate multiple complex systems, in which different constituents and configurations, both legacy and new, are integrated to accomplish emergent national security and humanitarian missions, as well as delivery of citizen-centered services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an injected current sensitivity (ICS) based multi-phase load flow (LF) methodology with minimal Jacobian computation for the three-phase unbalanced distribution system with multiple Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). In the proposed approach, first, a generalized bus admittance and Jacobian matrix have been formulated that include various distribution system components such as lines, shunt capacitors, voltage control devices such as regulators, different transformer connections, and load models. Second, DERs are modeled as a PV bus and incorporated into the proposed LF algorithm by formulating a reactive power injection-based sensitivity matrix that iteratively computes its net power injections. Unlike the traditional Jacobian matrix-based LF methods where an update of Jacobian (size and element) is required for each PV bus, this method does not require any update, hence, making it faster and more flexible to include a large number of DERs. From the various tests performed on the standard IEEE three-phase distribution network and their derivatives, it has been observed that the proposed approach is accurate, efficient, computationally less complex, and scalable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an accurate and efficient model to represent the corona effect and frequency dependence of line parameters in electromagnetic transient simulations. The new method, named the voltage and frequency dependent line model (VFDLM), can be seen as a more general case of the well-known frequency-dependent (FD) or wideband (WB) line models, wherein the characteristic admittance and propagation function are considered voltage- and frequency-dependent parameters. The time domain traveling wave equations are solved using recursive convolutions and rational approximation through vector fitting (VF). Since the model can be represented by Norton equivalents, it is totally compatible with EMT-type programs. The model is validated through comparisons with three field measurement data available in the literature, and good agreement could be observed between them, showing that the VFDLM is a stable, efficient, and accurate approach to represent the corona effect in EMT-type programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, large offshore wind power plants have been installed far from the shore, using long HVAC three-core armored cables to export power. Its high capacitance may contribute to the appearance of unwanted phenomena, such as overvoltages or resonances at low frequencies. To adequately assess these problems, detailed and reliable cable models are required to develop time-domain/frequency-domain analyses on this type of cables. This paper presents, for the first time in the literature, an assessment on the performance of 3D finite element method-based (3D-FEM) models for developing frequency-domain analyses on three-core armored cables, confronting simulation results with experimental measurements found in the literature for three real cables. To this aim, a simplified ultra-shortened 3D-FEM model is proposed to reduce the simulation time during frequency sweeps, through which relevant aspects never analyzed before with frequency-domain 3D-FEM simulations are addressed, such as total losses, induced sheath current, magnetic field around the power cable, positive and zero sequence harmonic impedances, as well as resonant frequencies. Also, a time-domain example derived from the frequency-domain analysis is provided. Remarkable results are obtained when comparing computed values and measurements, presenting the simplified ultra-shortened 3D-FEM model as a valuable tool for the frequency-domain analysis of these cables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long short-term memory (LSTM) is a type of powerful deep neural network that has been widely used in many sequence analysis and modeling applications. However, the large model size problem of LSTM networks make their practical deployment still very challenging, especially for the video recognition tasks that require high-dimensional input data. Aiming to overcome this limitation and fully unlock the potentials of LSTM models, in this paper we propose to perform algorithm and hardware co-design towards high-performance energy-efficient LSTM networks. At algorithm level, we propose to develop fully decomposed hierarchical Tucker (FDHT) structure-based LSTM, namely FDHT-LSTM, which enjoys ultra-low model complexity while still achieving high accuracy. In order to fully reap such attractive algorithmic benefit, we further develop the corresponding customized hardware architecture to support the efficient execution of the proposed FDHT-LSTM model. With the delicate design of memory access scheme, the complicated matrix transformation can be efficiently supported by the underlying hardware without any access conflict in an on-the-fly way. Our evaluation results show that both the proposed ultra-compact FDHT-LSTM models and the corresponding hardware accelerator achieve very high performance. Compared with the state-of-the-art compressed LSTM models, FDHT-LSTM enjoys both order-of-magnitude reduction (more than $1000 \times$ 1000 × ) in model size and significant accuracy improvement (0.6% to 12.7%) across different video recognition datasets. Meanwhile, compared with the state-of-the-art tensor decomposed model-oriented hardware TIE, our proposed FDHT-LSTM architecture achieve $2.5\times$ 2. 5 × , $1.46\times$ 1. 46 × and $2.41\times$ 2. 41 × increase in throughput, area efficiency and energy efficiency, respectively on LSTM-Youtube workload. For LSTM-UCF workload, our proposed design also outperforms TIE with $1.9\times$ 1. 9 × higher throughput, $1.83\times$ 1. 83 × higher energy efficiency and comparable area efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain technologies can enable secure computing environments among mistrusting parties. Permissioned blockchains are particularly enlightened by companies, enterprises, and government agencies due to their efficiency, customizability, and governance-friendly features. Obviously, seamlessly fusing blockchain and cloud computing can significantly benefit permissioned blockchains; nevertheless, most blockchains implemented on clouds are originally designed for loosely-coupled networks where nodes communicate asynchronously, failing to take advantages of the closely-coupled nature of cloud servers. In this paper, we propose an innovative cloud-oriented blockchain – CloudChain, which is a modularized three-layer system composed of the network layer, consensus layer, and blockchain layer. CloudChain is based on a shared-memory model where nodes communicate synchronously by direct memory accesses. We realize the shared-memory model with the Remote Direct Memory Access technology, based on which we propose a shared-memory consensus algorithm to ensure presistence and liveness, the two crucial blockchain security properties countering Byzantine nodes. We also implement a CloudChain prototype based on a RoCEv2-based testbed to experimentally validate our design, and the results verify the feasibility and efficiency of CloudChain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As deep neural networks (DNNs) continue to find applications in ever more domains, the exact nature of the neural network architecture becomes an increasingly sensitive subject, due to either intellectual property protection or risks of adversarial attacks. While prior work has explored aspects of the risk associated with model leakage, exactly which parts of the model are most sensitive and how one infers the full architecture of the DNN when nothing is known about the structure a priori are problems that have been left unexplored. In this paper we address this gap, first by presenting a schema for reasoning about model leakage holistically, and then by proposing and quantitatively evaluating DeepSniffer, a novel learning-based model extraction framework that uses no prior knowledge of the victim model. DeepSniffer is robust to architectural and system noises introduced by the complex memory hierarchy and diverse run-time system optimizations. Taking GPU platforms as a showcase, DeepSniffer performs model extraction by learning both the architecture-level execution features of kernels and the inter-layer temporal association information introduced by the common practice of DNN design. We demonstrate that DeepSniffer works experimentally in the context of an off-the-shelf Nvidia GPU platform running a variety of DNN models and that the extracted models significantly improve attempts at crafting adversarial inputs. The DeepSniffer project has been released in https://github.com/xinghu7788/DeepSniffer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging privacy-preserving paradigm that enables multiple participants collaboratively to train a global model without uploading raw data. Considering heterogeneous computing and communication capabilities of different participants, asynchronous FL can avoid the stragglers effect in synchronous FL and adapts to scenarios with vast participants. Both staleness and non-IID data in asynchronous FL would reduce the model utility. However, there exists an inherent contradiction between the solutions to the two problems. That is, mitigating the staleness requires to select less but consistent gradients while coping with non-IID data demands more comprehensive gradients. To address the dilemma, this paper proposes a two-stage weighted $K$ K asynchronous FL with adaptive learning rate (WKAFL). By selecting consistent gradients and adjusting learning rate adaptively, WKAFL utilizes stale gradients and mitigates the impact of non-IID data, which can achieve multifaceted enhancement in training speed, prediction accuracy and training stability. We also present the convergence analysis for WKAFL under the assumption of unbounded staleness to understand the impact of staleness and non-IID data. Experiments implemented on both benchmark and synthetic FL datasets show that WKAFL has better overall performance compared to existing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clinically oriented deep learning algorithms, combined with large-scale medical datasets, have significantly promoted computer-aided diagnosis. To address increasing ethical and privacy issues, Federated Learning (FL) adopts a distributed paradigm to collaboratively train models, rather than collecting samples from multiple institutions for centralized training. Despite intensive research on FL, two major challenges are still existing when applying FL in the real-world medical scenarios, including the performance degradation (i.e., retrogress) after each communication and the intractable class imbalance. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel personalized FL framework to tackle these two problems. For the retrogress problem, we first devise a Progressive Fourier Aggregation (PFA) at the server side to gradually integrate parameters of client models in the frequency domain. Then, at the client side, we design a Deputy-Enhanced Transfer (DET) to smoothly transfer global knowledge to the personalized local model. For the class imbalance problem, we propose the Conjoint Prototype-Aligned (CPA) loss to facilitate the balanced optimization of the FL framework. Considering the inaccessibility of private local data to other participants in FL, the CPA loss calculates the global conjoint objective based on global imbalance, and then adjusts the client-side local training through the prototype-aligned refinement to eliminate the imbalance gap with such a balanced goal. Extensive experiments are performed on real-world dermoscopic and prostate MRI FL datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our FL framework in real-world medical scenarios, by outperforming state-of-the-art FL methods with a large margin. The source code is available at https://github.com/CityU-AIM-Group/PRR-Imbalance https://github.com/CityU-AIM-Group/PRR-Imbalance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a wind farm, the interactions between turbines caused by wakes can significantly reduce the power output of the wind farm. Cooperative control among the turbines has the potential to improve the power output. However, existing centralized power optimization methods are computationally expensive and does not scale well for large wind farms, limiting their practical use in real-time control for time-varying wind conditions and turbine configuration (with adding or maintaining of turbines). To address this problem, this paper proposes a fully distributed power optimization method for wind farms using alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The proposed method allows the wind farm power output to be optimized in fully distributed manner with turbine-to-turbine message passing over a mesh network, guarantees the implemented control actions satisfy the control constraints of all turbines, and provably converges to a stationary point of the wind farm power optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly reduce the computation time with hardly sacrificing the power gain compared with centralized method and thus is computationally efficient for real-time power optimization of large wind farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High renewable energy penetration increases the electricity seasonal imbalance in the long-term timescale. Power system planning needs to consider the optimal configuration of various flexibility resources and electricity balance in different timescales. The coupling of multiple timescales largely increases the computation complexity of the power system planning problem. Thus, this paper presents an efficient source-grid-storage co-planning model which incorporates a year-round hourly operation simulation. To improve the computation efficiency of the planning model, from the temporal scale, a self-adaptive compact panorama time series (CPTS) model is applied, which greatly reduces the number of variables related to short-term decisions. From the spatial scale, a network-constrained relaxed clustered unit commitment (NC-RCUC) model is introduced, which significantly reduces the number of variables related to unit commitment decisions. Case studies on the modified Garver’s 6-node system and HRP-38 system prove the validation and efficiency of the proposed model (“HRP” stands for high renewable penetration). The studies on the China power grid in 2035 demonstrate the future planning results of generation, transmission and storage in China power systems based on the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate solar photovoltaic (PV) generation forecast is critical to the reliable and economic operation of a modern power system. In practice, due to various faulty issues in the sensor, communication, or database system, the historical and online measurement data may not be always complete, and the missing data could dramatically degrade the forecasting model's accuracy. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an integrated missing-data tolerant model for probabilistic PV power generation forecasting. Taking historical PV generations as input, this model is based on a recursive long short-term memory network (Rec-LSTM), which can provide multi-step ahead forecasting of the probability distribution of PV generation. The unobserved input data will be imputed recursively based on the model output at the previous time step. During the training process, the imputations and forecasting values are iteratively updated by the negative log-likelihood loss function. As a salient advantage, this method can deal with data missing scenarios at both offline and online stages. Numerical experiments are conducted on two one-year datasets from Australia and Singapore, respectively. Probabilistic forecasting for both large-scale and small-scale building-level PV power generation is tested at the time resolution of 15 mins. Testing results show the proposed method can achieve superior probabilistic prediction accuracy as well as strong robustness under various data missing scenarios, compared to other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new smooth model is proposed in this paper to eliminate the non-differentiability of several types of limits in power flow models. The proposed smooth model accurately represents power system static models with limits as a continuously differentiable function. Analytic results are developed to show that each solution of the proposed smooth model is arbitrarily close to a solution of the corresponding original power flow model with limits. The proposed smooth model includes a wide range of devices with physical limits, such as generators, transformers, HVDCs, phase shifters, and shunts. In addition, it is shown that every generic static bifurcation in the original model is transformed into a saddle-node bifurcation in the smoothed model. Hence, the search for bifurcations in voltage stability assessment can be greatly simplified. Several numerical studies of the proposed smooth model on a 9241-bus power system and on a 13659-bus power system have shown promising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intrinsic image decomposition is the task of mapping image to albedo and shading. Classical approaches derive methods from spatial models. The modern literature stresses evaluation, by comparing predictions to human judgements (“lighter”, “same as”, “darker”). The best modern intrinsic image methods train a map from image to albedo using images rendered from computer graphics models and example human judgements. This approach yields practical methods, but obtaining rendered images can be inconvenient. Furthermore, the approach cannot explain how a one could learn to recover intrinsic images without geometric, surface and illumination models, as people and animals appear to do. This paper describes a method that learns intrinsic image decomposition without seeing human annotations, rendered data, or ground truth data. Instead, the method relies on paradigms – spatial models of albedo and of shading. Rather than finding the “best” albedo and shading for an image via optimization, our approach trains a neural network on synthetic images. The synthetic images are constructed by multiplying albedos and shading fields sampled from our models. The network is subject to a novel smoothing procedure that ensures good behavior at short scales on real images. An averaging procedure ensures that reported albedo and shading are largely equivariant – different crops and scalings of an image will report the same albedo and shading at shared points. This averaging procedure controls long scale error. The standard evaluation for an intrinsic image method is a WHDR score. Our method achieves WHDR scores competitive with those of strong recent methods allowed to see training WHDR annotations, rendered data, and ground truth data. Our method produces albedo and shading maps with attractive qualitative properties – for example, albedo fields do not suppress wood grain and represent narrow grooves in surfaces well. Because our method is unsupervised, we can compute estimates of the test/train variance of WHDR scores; these are quite large, and suggest is unsafe to rely small differences in reported WHDR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When viewing omnidirectional images (ODIs), viewers can access different viewports via head movement (HM), which sequentially forms head trajectories in spatial-temporal domain. Thus, head trajectories play a key role in modeling human attention on ODIs. In this paper, we establish a large-scale dataset collecting 21,600 head trajectories on 1,080 ODIs. By mining our dataset, we find two important factors influencing head trajectories, i.e., temporal dependency and subject-specific variance. Accordingly, we propose a novel approach integrating hierarchical Bayesian inference into long short-term memory (LSTM) network for head trajectory prediction on ODIs, which is called HiBayes-LSTM. In HiBayes-LSTM, we develop a mechanism of Future Intention Estimation (FIE), which captures the temporal correlations from previous, current and estimated future information, for predicting viewport transition. Additionally, a training scheme called Hierarchical Bayesian inference (HBI) is developed for modeling inter-subject uncertainty in HiBayes-LSTM. For HBI, we introduce a joint Gaussian distribution in a hierarchy, to approximate the posterior distribution over network weights. By sampling subject-specific weights from the approximated posterior distribution, our HiBayes-LSTM approach can yield diverse viewport transition among different subjects and obtain multiple head trajectories. Extensive experiments validate that our HiBayes-LSTM approach significantly outperforms 9 state-of-the-art approaches for trajectory prediction on ODIs, and then it is successfully applied to predict saliency on ODIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pretrained deep models hold their learnt knowledge in the form of model parameters. These parameters act as “memory” for the trained models and help them generalize well on unseen data. However, in absence of training data, the utility of a trained model is merely limited to either inference or better initialization towards a target task. In this paper, we go further and extract synthetic data by leveraging the learnt model parameters. We dub them Data Impressions, which act as proxy to the training data and can be used to realize a variety of tasks. These are useful in scenarios where only the pretrained models are available and the training data is not shared (e.g., due to privacy or sensitivity concerns). We show the applicability of data impressions in solving several computer vision tasks such as unsupervised domain adaptation, continual learning as well as knowledge distillation. We also study the adversarial robustness of lightweight models trained via knowledge distillation using these data impressions. Further, we demonstrate the efficacy of data impressions in generating data-free Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAPs) with better fooling rates. Extensive experiments performed on benchmark datasets demonstrate competitive performance achieved using data impressions in absence of original training data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional Deep Neural Network (DNN) security is mostly related to the well-known adversarial input example attack. Recently, another dimension of adversarial attack, namely, attack on DNN weight parameters, has been shown to be very powerful. As a representative one, the Bit-Flip-based adversarial weight Attack (BFA) injects an extremely small amount of faults into weight parameters to hijack the executing DNN function. Prior works of BFA focus on un-targeted attack that can hack all inputs into a random output class by flipping a very small number of weight bits stored in computer memory. This paper proposes the first work of targeted BFA based (T-BFA) adversarial weight attack on DNNs, which can intentionally mislead selected inputs to a target output class. The objective is achieved by identifying the weight bits that are highly associated with classification of a targeted output through a class-dependent vulnerable weight bit searching algorithm. Our proposed T-BFA performance is successfully demonstrated on multiple DNN architectures for image classification tasks. For example, by merely flipping 27 out of 88 million weight bits of ResNet-18, our T-BFA can misclassify all the images from ’Hen’ class into ’Goose’ class (i.e., 100% attack success rate) in ImageNet dataset, while maintaining 59.35% validation accuracy. Moreover, we successfully demonstrate our T-BFA attack in a real computer prototype system running DNN computation, with Ivy Bridge-based Intel i7 CPU and 8GB DDR3 memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces versatile filters to construct efficient convolutional neural networks that are widely used in various visual recognition tasks. Considering the demands of efficient deep learning techniques running on cost-effective hardware, a number of methods have been developed to learn compact neural networks. Most of these works aim to slim down filters in different ways, e.g., investigating small, sparse or quantized filters. In contrast, we treat filters from an additive perspective. A series of secondary filters can be derived from a primary filter with the help of binary masks. These secondary filters all inherit in the primary filter without occupying more storage, but once been unfolded in computation they could significantly enhance the capability of the filter by integrating information extracted from different receptive fields. Besides spatial versatile filters, we additionally investigate versatile filters from the channel perspective. Binary masks can be further customized for different primary filters under orthogonal constraints. We conduct theoretical analysis on network complexity and an efficient convolution scheme is introduced. Experimental results on benchmark datasets and neural networks demonstrate that our versatile filters are able to achieve comparable accuracy as that of original filters, but require less memory and computation cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3D neural networks are widely used in real-world applications (e.g., AR/VR headsets, self-driving cars). They are required to be fast and accurate; however, limited hardware resources on edge devices make these requirements rather challenging. Previous work processes 3D data using either voxel-based or point-based neural networks, but both types of 3D models are not hardware-efficient due to the large memory footprint and random memory access. In this paper, we study 3D deep learning from the efficiency perspective. We first systematically analyze the bottlenecks of previous 3D methods. We then combine the best from point-based and voxel-based models together and propose a novel hardware-efficient 3D primitive, Point-Voxel Convolution (PVConv). We further enhance this primitive with the sparse convolution to make it more effective in processing large (outdoor) scenes. Based on our designed 3D primitive, we introduce 3D Neural Architecture Search (3D-NAS) to explore the best 3D network architecture given a resource constraint. We evaluate our proposed method on six representative benchmark datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance with 1.8-23.7× measured speedup. Furthermore, our method has been deployed to the autonomous racing vehicle of MIT Driverless, achieving larger detection range, higher accuracy and lower latency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As deep learning models are usually massive and complex, distributed learning is essential for increasing training efficiency. Moreover, in many real-world application scenarios like healthcare, distributed learning can also keep the data local and protect privacy. Recently, the asynchronous decentralized parallel stochastic gradient descent (ADPSGD) algorithm has been proposed and demonstrated to be an efficient and practical strategy where there is no central server, so that each computing node only communicates with its neighbors. Although no raw data will be transmitted across different local nodes, there is still a risk of information leak during the communication process for malicious participants to make attacks. In this paper, we present a differentially private version of asynchronous decentralized parallel SGD framework, or A(DP) $^2$ 2 SGD for short, which maintains communication efficiency of ADPSGD and prevents the inference from malicious participants. Specifically, Rényi differential privacy is used to provide tighter privacy analysis for our composite Gaussian mechanisms while the convergence rate is consistent with the non-private version. Theoretical analysis shows A(DP) $^2$ 2 SGD also converges at the optimal $\mathcal {O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ O (1 / T) rate as SGD. Empirically, A(DP) $^2$ 2 SGD achieves comparable model accuracy as the differentially private version of Synchronous SGD (SSGD) but runs much faster than SSGD in heterogeneous computing environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional salient object detection models cannot differentiate the importance of different salient objects. Recently, two works have been proposed to detect saliency ranking by assigning different degrees of saliency to different objects. However, one of these models cannot differentiate object instances and the other focuses more on sequential attention shift order inference. In this paper, we investigate a practical problem setting that requires simultaneously segment salient instances and infer their relative saliency rank order. We present a novel unified model as the first end-to-end solution, where an improved Mask R-CNN is first used to segment salient instances and a saliency ranking branch is then added to infer the relative saliency. For relative saliency ranking, we build a new graph reasoning module by combining four graphs to incorporate the instance interaction relation, local contrast, global contrast, and a high-level semantic prior, respectively. A novel loss function is also proposed to effectively train the saliency ranking branch. Besides, a new dataset and an evaluation metric are proposed for this task, aiming at pushing forward this field of research. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model is more effective than previous methods. We also show an example of its practical usage on adaptive image retargeting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capturing the directions of light by light field cameras powers next-generation immersive multimedia applications. A critical problem in taking advantage of the rich visual information in light field images is depth estimation. Conventional light field depth estimation methods build a cost volume that measures the photo-consistency of pixels refocused to a range of depths, and the highest consistency indicates the correct depth. This strategy works well in most regions but usually generates blurry edges in the estimated depth map due to occlusions. Recent work shows that integrating occlusion models to light field depth estimation can largely reduce blurry edges. However, existing occlusion handling methods rely on complex edge-aided processing and post-refinement, and this reliance limits the resultant depth accuracy and impacts on the computational performance. In this paper, we propose a novel occlusion-aware vote cost (OAVC) which is able to accurately preserve edges in the depth map. Instead of using photo-consistency as an indicator of the correct depth, we construct a novel cost from a new perspective that counts the number of refocused pixels whose deviations from the central-view pixel are less than a small threshold, and utilizes that number to select the correct depth. The pixels from occluders are thus excluded in determining the correct depth. Without the use of any explicit occlusion handling methods, the proposed method can inherently preserve edges and produces high-quality depth estimates. Experimental results show that the proposed OAVC outperforms state-of-the-art light field depth estimation methods in terms of depth estimation accuracy and computational complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction, whose goal is to predict the probability of the user to click on an item, has become increasingly significant in the recommender systems. Recently, some deep learning models with the ability to automatically extract the user interest from his/her behaviors have achieved great success. In these work, the attention mechanism is used to select the user interested items in historical behaviors, improving the performance of the CTR predictor. Normally, these attentive modules can be jointly trained with the base predictor by using gradient descents. In this paper, we regard user interest modeling as a feature selection problem, which we call user interest selection. For such a problem, we propose a novel approach under the framework of the wrapper method, which is named Meta-Wrapper. More specifically, we use a differentiable module as our wrapping operator and then recast its learning problem as a continuous bilevel optimization. Moreover, we use a meta-learning algorithm to solve the optimization and theoretically prove its convergence. Meanwhile, we also provide theoretical analysis to show that our proposed method 1) efficiencies the wrapper-based feature selection, and 2) achieves better resistance to overfitting. Finally, extensive experiments on three public datasets manifest the superiority of our method in boosting the performance of CTR prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enhancing the visibility in extreme low-light environments is a challenging task. Under nearly lightless condition, existing image denoising methods could easily break down due to significantly low SNR. In this paper, we systematically study the noise statistics in the imaging pipeline of CMOS photosensors, and formulate a comprehensive noise model that can accurately characterize the real noise structures. Our novel model considers the noise sources caused by digital camera electronics which are largely overlooked by existing methods yet have significant influence on raw measurement in the dark. It provides a way to decouple the intricate noise structure into different statistical distributions with physical interpretations. Moreover, our noise model can be used to synthesize realistic training data for learning-based low-light denoising algorithms. In this regard, although promising results have been shown recently with deep convolutional neural networks, the success heavily depends on abundant noisy-clean image pairs for training, which are tremendously difficult to obtain in practice. Generalizing their trained models to images from new devices is also problematic. Extensive experiments on multiple low-light denoising datasets – including a newly collected one in this work covering various devices – show that a deep neural network trained with our proposed noise formation model can reach surprisingly-high accuracy. The results are on par with or sometimes even outperform training with paired real data, opening a new door to real-world extreme low-light photography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing video rain removal methods mainly focus on rain streak removal and are solely trained based on the synthetic data, which neglect more complex degradation factors, e.g., rain accumulation, and the prior knowledge in real rain data. Thus, in this paper, we build a more comprehensive rain model with several degradation factors and construct a novel two-stage video rain removal method that combines the power of synthetic videos and real data. Specifically, a novel two-stage progressive network is proposed: recovery guided by a physics model, and further restoration by adversarial learning. The first stage performs an inverse recovery process guided by our proposed rain model. An initially estimated background frame is obtained based on the input rain frame. The second stage employs adversarial learning to refine the result, i.e., recovering the overall color and illumination distributions of the frame, the background details that are failed to be recovered in the first stage, and removing the artifacts generated in the first stage. Furthermore, we also introduce a more comprehensive rain model that includes degradation factors, e.g., occlusion and rain accumulation, which appear in real scenes yet ignored by existing methods. This model, which generates more realistic rain images, will train and evaluate our models better. Extensive evaluations on synthetic and real videos show the effectiveness of our method in comparisons to the state-of-the-art methods. Our datasets, results and code are available at: https://github.com/flyywh/Recurrent-Multi-Frame-Deraining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile-Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to meet the ever-increasing computation demands of smart applications. To provide satisfactory computation performance, it is of significant importance to conduct computation offloading in IoV. In this paper, we investigate a multi-vehicle IoV system assisted by MECs with limited computation resources, where vehicles with complex applications can offload their subtasks to MEC servers. Applications are modeled as interdependent subtasks with general random task graphs, different from existing works with independent ones. To maximize the average logarithmic data processing rate (LDPR), the computation offloading problem is formulated as a time-average optimization with long-term constraints, which results from variable vehicle number, various applications and time-varying communication channels. To reduce the cooperation overhead, we propose a multi-agent Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm (Ly-MAPPO) which requires local observation only to solve the subproblems achieved by Lyapunov optimization technique in real time. In addition, to improve the performance of the Ly-MAPPO algorithm, Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN) is introduced to extract inter-dependencies between subtasks. Extensive simulations show that the GCN embedded Ly-MAPPO outperforms other baseline algorithms, e.g., greedy algorithm and gene algorithm, etc., for different traffic loads and computation resources in MEC servers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the problem of minimising latency in computation offloading with digital twin (DT) wireless edge networks for industrial Internet-of-Things (IoT) environment via ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC) links. The considered DT-aided edge networks provide a powerful computing framework to enable computation-intensive services, where the DT is used to model the computing capacity of edge servers and optimise the resource allocation of the entire system. The objective function is comprised of local processing latency, URLLC-based transmission latency and edge processing latency, subject to both communication and computation resources budgets. In this regard, the minimum latency is obtained by jointly optimising the transmit power, user association, offloading portions, the processing rate of users and edge servers. The formulated problem is highly complicated due to complex non-convex constraints and strong coupling variables. To deal with this computationally intractable problem, we propose an iterative algorithm which decomposes the original problem into three sub-problems and resolve this problem in the fashion of alternating optimisation approach combined with an inner convex approximation framework. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in reducing the latency compared with other benchmark schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of point of interest (POI) recommendation aims to recommend unvisited places to users based on their check-in history. A major challenge in POI recommendation is data sparsity, because a user typically visits only a very small number of POIs among all available POIs. In this paper, we propose AUC-MF to address the POI recommendation problem by maximizing Area Under the ROC curve (AUC). AUC has been widely used for measuring classification performance with imbalanced data distributions. To optimize AUC, we transform the recommendation task to a classification problem, where the visited locations are positive examples and the unvisited are negative ones. We define a new lambda for AUC to utilize the LambdaMF model, which combines the lambda-based method and matrix factorization model in collaborative filtering. Many studies have shown that geographic information plays an important role in POI recommendation. In this study, we focus on two levels geographic information: local similarity and global similarity. We further show that AUC-MF can be easily extended to incorporate geographical contextual information for POI recommendation. Specifically, we propose two novel methods to incorporate geographical information in AUC-MF. Different from most existing models where the contextual information are incorporated into the objective function, the incorporation of contextual information in AUC-MF is a refinement of the model and a sampling strategy. The sampling strategy could speedup convergence and the refining of recommendations is independent of training of the model. This mechanism also enables AUC-MF to be able produce recommendations refined towards different contextual information, with minimum computational cost. Experiments on two datasets show that the proposed AUC-MF outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly in terms of recommendation accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work we study the distance distribution computation problem. It has been widely used in many real-world applications, e.g., human genome clustering, cosmological model analysis, and parameter tuning. The straightforward solution for the exact distance distribution computation problem is unacceptably slow due to (i) massive data size, and (ii) expensive distance computation. In this paper, we propose a novel method to compute approximate distance distributions with error bound guarantees. Furthermore, our method is generic to different distance measures. We conduct extensive experimental studies on three widely used distance measures with real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the sampling-based solution (without error guarantees) by up to three orders of magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the boosting of neural networks, recommendation methods become significantly improved by their powerful ability of prediction and inference. Existing neural-network based recommender systems (NN-RSs) usually first employ matrix embedding (ME) as a pre-process to learn users’ and items’ representations (latent vectors), then input these representations to a specific modified neural network framework to make accurate Top-k recommendations. Obviously, the performance of ME has a significant effect on RS models. However, most NN-RSs focus on accuracy by building representations from the direct user-item interactions (e.g., user-item rating matrix), while ignoring the underlying relatedness between users and items (e.g., users who rate the same ratings for the same items should be embedded into similar representations), which is an ideological disadvantage. On the other hand, ME models directly employ inner products as a default loss function metric that cannot project users and items into a proper latent space, which is a methodological disadvantage. In this paper, we propose a supervised collaborative representation learning model - Magnetic Metric Learning (MML) - to map users and items into a unified latent vector space, enhancing the representation learning for NN-RSs. First, MML utilizes dual triplets to model not only the observed relationships between users and items, but also the underlying relationships between users as well as items to overcome the ideological disadvantage. Specifically, a modified metric-based dual loss function is proposed in MML to gather similar entities and disperse the dissimilar ones. With MML, we can easily compare all the relationships (user to user, item to item, user to item) according to the weighted metric, which overcomes the methodological disadvantage. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets with large item space. The results demonstrate that MML can learn a proper unified latent space for representations from the user-item matrix with high accuracy and effectiveness, and lead to a performance gain over the state-of-the-art RS models by an average of 17 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Short text clustering has far-reaching effects on semantic analysis, showing its importance for multiple applications such as corpus summarization and information retrieval. However, it inevitably encounters the severe sparsity of short text representations, making the previous clustering approaches still far from satisfactory. In this paper, we present a novel attentive representation learning model for shot text clustering, wherein cluster-level attention is proposed to capture the correlations between text representations and cluster representations. Relying on this, the representation learning and clustering for short texts are seamlessly integrated into a unified model. To further ensure robust model training for short texts, we apply adversarial training to the unsupervised clustering setting, by injecting perturbations into the cluster representations. The model parameters and perturbations are optimized alternately through a minimax game. Extensive experiments on four real-world short text datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over several strong competitors, verifying that robust adversarial training yields substantial performance gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human behaviors in recommendation systems are driven by many high-level, complex, and evolving intentions behind their decision making processes. In order to achieve better performance, it is important for recommendation systems to be aware of user intentions besides considering the historical interaction behaviors. However, user intentions are seldom fully or easily observed in practice, so that the existing works are incapable of fully tracking and modeling user intentions, not to mention using them effectively into recommendation. In this paper, we present the Intention-Aware Sequential Recommendation (ISRec) method, for capturing the underlying intentions of each user that may lead to her next consumption behavior and improving recommendation performance. Specifically, we first extract the intentions of the target user from sequential contexts, then take complex intent transition into account through the message-passing mechanism on an intention graph, and finally obtain the future intentions of this target user from inference on the intention graph. The sequential recommendation for a user will be made based on the predicted user intentions, offering more transparent and explainable intermediate results for each recommendation. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method against several state-of-the-art baselines in sequential recommendation in terms of different metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In vehicular networks, authentication technology provides a basic security means to achieve trusted communication between legitimate vehicles. Revocation checking for vehicle certificates is an indispensable procedure in the process of authentication to protect vehicular networks from attacks by non-legitimate vehicles. However, revocation checking introduces procedures that requires additional time to process which challenges latency-sensitive applications in vehicular networks. This challenge grows more evidently when considering the factor of privacy preservation. In this paper, we propose to offload partial revocation task to network edges to lighten the revocation process in vehicles. Particularly, we design a method to achieve decentralized Global Certificate Revocation List (GCRL) management in network edges using permissioned blockchain technologies. In the method, both tamper-proof property and quick synchronization of the GCRL are guaranteed. Besides, our method can detect illegal revocation behaviours by validation in vehicles. Finally, we build a prototype of our proposed solution based on Hyperledger Fabric, and compare with Proof-of-Work scheme in terms of blockchain synchronization latency performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a model fusion method (MFM) is proposed for online state of charge (SOC) and state of power (SOP) co-estimation of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) in electric vehicles (EVs). Firstly, a particle swarm optimization-genetic algorithm (PSO-GA) method is cooperated with a 2-RCCPE fractional-order model (FOM) to construct battery open-circuit voltage (OCV)-SOC curve, which only relies on a part of dynamic load profile without the prior knowledge of an initial SOC. Secondly, a dual extended Kalman filter (DEKF) algorithm based on a 1-RC model is employed to identify the model parameters and estimate battery SOC with the extracted OCV-SOC curve. Furthermore, battery polarization dynamics in a SOP prediction window is analyzed from two aspects: (1) self-recovery; and (2) current excitation. They are separately simulated using 2-RCCPE FOM and 1-RC model, and then integrated through a model fusion for online SOP estimation, which enables an analytical expression of battery peak charge/discharge current in a prediction window without weakening the nonlinear characteristic of FOM. Experimental results demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed MFM for online discharge SOP estimation, where the mean absolute error and root mean square error are only 0.288 W and 0.35 W, respectively, under the urban dynamometer driving schedule profile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile edge computing (MEC) and millimeter wave (mmWave) communications are capable of significantly reducing the network's delay and enhancing its capacity. In this paper we investigate a mmWave and device-to-device (D2D) assisted MEC system, in which user A carries out some computational tasks and shares the results with user B with the aid of a base station (BS). We assume partial offloading model and the task can be partitioned into two portions: the first part is computed locally at user A, while the second part is transmitted to the BS and computed by the MEC server. The computational results are then sent to user B through a D2D link and via the link from the BS to user B, respectively. To support computation offloading, both the users and the BS are equipped with multiple antennas and employ analog and digital (A/D) hybrid beamforming. Moreover, we propose a novel two-timescale joint hybrid beamforming and task allocation algorithm to reduce the system latency whilst cut down the required signaling overhead. Specifically, the high-dimensional analog beamforming matrices are updated in a frame-based manner based on the channel state information (CSI) samples, where each frame consists of a number of time slots, while the low-dimensional digital beamforming matrices and the offloading ratio are optimized more frequently relied on the low-dimensional effective channel matrices in each time slot. A stochastic successive convex approximation (SSCA) based algorithm is developed to design the long-term analog beamforming matrices. As for the short-term variables, the digital beamforming matrices are optimized relying on the innovative penalty-concave convex procedure (penalty-CCCP) for handling the mmWave non-linear transmit power constraint, and the offloading ratio can be obtained via the derived closed-form solution. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing the benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Control- and user-plane separation (CUPS) and network slicing are two key technologies to support increasing network traffic and diverse wireless services. However, the benefit of CUPS in decoupling the network coverage and data service functions has not been fully utilized to facilitate network slicing. In this paper, we present a novel CUPS-based end-to-end (CUPS-E2E) network slicing scheme. First, the base stations (BS) are classified into control BSs (CBS) that provide control plane (CP) coverage and traffic BSs (TBS) that deliver user plane (UP) traffic. Next, upon CBSs and TBSs being virtualized, we define four typical end-to-end (E2E) network slices: one for CP coverage, one for high-throughput services, one for computation-intensive services, and the other for delay-sensitive services. The utilities of the four E2E network slices are defined based on their coverage, throughput, computing capability and delay requirements, respectively. Then, a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based algorithm is employed to maximize the long-term sum-utility of the four E2E network slices by jointly optimizing the allocation of communication and computing resources to the four network slices and the activation of virtual TBSs, while meeting the service requirements of all users. Simulation results show that our proposed CUPS-E2E network slicing scheme in conjunction with a DDPG-based sum-utility maximization algorithm can support the CP wide-coverage and massive access requirements as well as the UP high-throughput, computation-intensive and delay-sensitive services simultaneously, and outperforms the existing E2E network slicing schemes in terms of the sum-utility, coverage percentage, throughput and delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accuracy of artificial intelligence (AI) models is crucial for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). However, in reality, model training under less frequent weather faces the problem of insufficient sampling. Also, in the real world, weather, sunlight, etc., can only change with the speed of the real-time clock, so the traditional sampling process is very slow. Moreover, currently, collective learning, which can make up the limited experience and computing power of a single vehicle, is always introduced to cases where the data from participants have the same structure, wasting massive heterogeneous data from vehicles of different brands. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a quantum collective learning and many-to-many matching game-based scheme in the metaverse for CAVs. The environment is simulated in the metaverse, which has its own time clock system, thereby expanding sample size and speeding up the sampling process. And we quantify the quality of intelligence in collective learning from the perspective of feature diversity. It is the cornerstone of collective learning between heterogeneous vehicles, facilitating maximum utilization of data with different structures. Then, we formulate the distributed vehicles selection problem as a many-to-many matching game and use Gale–Shapely algorithm to solve it. Also, we formulate the spectrum resource allocation problem as a discrete Markov decision process (MDP) and adopt a quantum-inspired reinforcement learning (QRL) algorithm to find the optimal policy to achieve the high revenue of the system. In simulations, the performance of the proposed scheme is compared with existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To improve the viewer’s Quality of Experience (QoE) and optimize computer graphics applications, 3D model quality assessment (3D-QA) has become an important task in the multimedia area. Point cloud and mesh are the two most widely used digital representation formats of 3D models, the visual quality of which is quite sensitive to lossy operations like simplification and compression. Therefore, many related studies such as point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) and mesh quality assessment (MQA) have been carried out to measure the visual quality of distorted 3D models. However, most previous studies utilize full-reference (FR) metrics, which indicates they can not predict the quality level in the absence of the reference 3D model. Furthermore, few 3D-QA metrics consider color information, which significantly restricts their effectiveness and scope of application. In this paper, we propose a no-reference (NR) quality assessment metric for colored 3D models represented by both point cloud and mesh. First, we project the 3D models from 3D space into quality-related geometry and color feature domains. Then, the 3D natural scene statistics (3D-NSS) and entropy are utilized to extract quality-aware features. Finally, a support vector regression (SVR) model is employed to regress the quality-aware features into visual quality scores. Our method is validated on the colored point cloud quality assessment database (SJTU-PCQA), the Waterloo point cloud assessment database (WPC), and the colored mesh quality assessment database (CMDM). The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms most compared NR 3D-QA metrics with competitive computational resources and greatly reduces the performance gap with the state-of-the-art FR 3D-QA metrics. The code of the proposed model is publicly available now at https://github.com/zzc-1998/NR-3DQA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are gaining higher commercial values in computer vision applications, e.g., image classification, video analytics, etc. This calls for urgent demands of the intellectual property (IP) protection of DNN models. In this paper, we present a novel watermarking scheme to achieve the ownership verification of DNN architectures. Existing works all embedded watermarks into the model parameters while treating the architecture as public property. These solutions were proven to be vulnerable by an adversary to detect or remove the watermarks. In contrast, we claim the model architectures as an important IP for model owners, and propose to implant watermarks into the architectures. We design new algorithms based on Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to generate watermarked architectures, which are unique enough to represent the ownership, while maintaining high model usability. Such watermarks can be extracted via side-channel-based model extraction techniques with high fidelity. We conduct comprehensive experiments on watermarked CNN models for image classification tasks and the experimental results show our scheme has negligible impact on the model performance, and exhibits strong robustness against various model transformations and adaptive attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, angular margin-based methods have become the mainstream approach for unconstrained face recognition with remarkable success. However, robust face recognition still remains a challenge, as the face is subject to variations in pose, age, expression, occlusion, and illumination, especially in unconstrained scenarios. Since the training dataset are always collected in unconstrained scenarios, it is inevitable that there’re significant number of hard examples in the training process. In this paper, we design a hard example selection function to effectively identify hard examples in the training procedure with the supervision of angular margin-based losses. Furthermore, a novel Intra-class Hard Example Mining (IHEM) loss function is proposed, which penalizes the cosine distance between the hard examples and their class centers to enhance the discriminative power of face representations. To ensure high performance for face recognition, we combine the supervision of angular margin-based loss and IHEM loss for model training. Specifically, during the training procedure, the angular margin-based loss guarantees the power of feature discrimination for face recognition, while the IHEM loss further encourages the intra-class compactness of hard example. Extensive results demonstrate the superiority of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]