Search

Chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) is vital for ensuring chip fabrication uniformity at nanometer scales. The emergence of a series of phenomenological CMP process models (Stine et al., 1997; Gbondo-Tugbawa, 2002; Xie, 2007; Vasilev, 2011) suggests that the existing model upgrade approach is largely based on a change in phenomenological model assumptions, demanding deep insights into complex process mechanisms and protracted period for accuracy improvements. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a decoupling regression strategy for model upgrades. This strategy employs a data-driven approach to enhance the coupling relationships within the model, facilitating continuous improvement of simulation accuracy based on the existing model. It is capable of achieving improvements in model accuracy even in scenarios where modelers lack insight into complex process mechanisms. We validate our method by upgrading the Density Step Height (DSH) model to the Extend-DSH model to address poor erosion predictions at the 28nm node. Comparing model predictions with silicon data reveals that the Extend-DSH model aligns better with the measured data, reducing the root mean square error from 159.31Å to 6.89Å and increasing the coefficient of determination from -0.83561 to 0.6058, showcasing the effectiveness of the proposed chip-level CMP model upgrade method grounded in the decoupling regression strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is devoted to electric arc furnace (EAF) modeling using a random differential equation based on the power balance equation. The proposed approach broadens and improves the model through the introduction of stochastic processes in place of existing coefficients. The paper presents a method which enables the estimation of EAF model coefficients with the help of measurement data - voltage and current waveforms recorded during the melting stage of an EAF work cycle. The estimation process is conducted with a Monte Carlo method and genetic algorithm, which is applied iteratively to each of the defined frames of the input signal. The estimated coefficients have been analyzed with respect to their time variability as well as the probability distributions of their values and increments. The results have been extensively visualized. Next, the identification of the stochastic processes representing the model coefficients has been carried out. Based on the previous results and autocorrelation functions, the density functions and parameters of discrete-time stochastic processes were identified. The paper presents solutions validated with statistical tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The NASA Dawn spacecraft visited asteroid 4 Vesta between 2011 and 2012 and dwarf planet 1 Ceres between 2015 and 2018 to investigate their surfaces through optical and hyperspectral imaging and their composition through gamma-ray and neutron spectroscopy. For the global mapping investigation of both proto-planets, geologic mappers employed Geographic Information System (GIS) software to map 15 quadrangles using optical and hyperspectral data and to produce views of the geologic evolution through individual maps and research papers. While geologic mapping was the core motivation of the mapping investigation, the project never aimed to produce homogeneous and consistent map representations. The chosen mapping approach and its implementation led to a number of inconsistencies regarding cartographic representation, including differential generalization through varying mapping scales, topologic inconsistencies, lack of semantic integrity, and scale consistency, and ultimately, to the management of reusable research data. Ongoing data acquisition during the mapping phase created additional challenges for the homogenization of mapping results and a potential derivation of a global map. This contribution reviews cartographic and data perspectives on the mapping investigation of Ceres and highlights (a) data sources, (b) the cartographic concept, (c) mapping conduct, and (d) dissemination as well as research-data management arrangements. It furthermore discusses decisions and experiences made during mapping and finishes with a set of recommendations from the viewpoint of the cartographic sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The online retail market shows a sharp increase in traffic during holiday sales. The ability to distinguish customers who will likely purchase is critical for provisioning traffic and for providing cost-effective promotions. This paper uniquely studies the browsing and purchasing behaviors of online shoppers during a yearly sale event in China, the world’s largest online marketplace. Based on 31 million action logs gathered from wide residential areas, we characterize the steps leading to purchases and determine their precursors. We investigate the effect of time (e.g., date, time of date), environment (e.g., platform, viewed category), and action (e.g., session time, clicks, sequence) on purchases. Action cues from shopping behaviors can be used for early detection. While most shoppers start with strong intentions to purchase, yet the moment of ordering comes rather impulsively within 30 seconds to several minutes of browsing. The predictive accuracy reaches as a high AUC of 0.924. The findings in this paper provide an understanding of traffic during mega sale events that can help online shops plan and provide a better user experience for upcoming shopping festivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph-based clustering plays an important role in the clustering area. Recent studies about graph neural networks (GNN) have achieved impressive success on graph-type data. However, in general clustering tasks, the graph structure of data does not exist such that GNN can not be applied to clustering directly and the strategy to construct a graph is crucial for performance. Therefore, how to extend GNN into general clustering tasks is an attractive problem. In this paper, we propose a graph auto-encoder for general data clustering, AdaGAE, which constructs the graph adaptively according to the generative perspective of graphs. The adaptive process is designed to induce the model to exploit the high-level information behind data and utilize the non-euclidean structure sufficiently. Importantly, we find that the simple update of the graph will result in severe degeneration, which can be concluded as better reconstruction means worse update. We provide rigorous analysis theoretically and empirically. Then we further design a novel mechanism to avoid the collapse. Via extending the generative graph models to general type data, a graph auto-encoder with a novel decoder is devised and the weighted graphs can be also applied to GNN. AdaGAE performs well and stably in different scale and type datasets. Besides, it is insensitive to the initialization of parameters and requires no pretraining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning models have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Adversarial attacks are imperceptible perturbations added to an image such that the deep learning model misclassifies the image with a high confidence. Existing adversarial defenses validate their performance using only the classification accuracy. However, classification accuracy by itself is not a reliable metric to determine if the resulting image is “adversarial-free”. This is a foundational problem for online image recognition applications where the ground-truth of the incoming image is not known and hence we cannot compute the accuracy of the classifier or validate if the image is “adversarial-free” or not. This paper proposes a novel privacy preserving framework for defending Black box classifiers from adversarial attacks using an ensemble of iterative adversarial image purifiers whose performance is continuously validated in a loop using Bayesian uncertainties. The proposed approach can convert a single-step black box adversarial defense into an iterative defense and proposes three novel privacy preserving Knowledge Distillation (KD) approaches that use prior meta-information from various datasets to mimic the performance of the Black box classifier. Additionally, this paper proves the existence of an optimal distribution for the purified images that can reach a theoretical lower bound, beyond which the image can no longer be purified. Experimental results on six public benchmark datasets namely: 1) Fashion-MNIST, 2) CIFAR-10, 3) GTSRB, 4) MIO-TCD, 5) Tiny-ImageNet, and 6) MS-Celeb show that the proposed approach can consistently detect adversarial examples and purify or reject them against a variety of adversarial attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is a learning paradigm in machine learning and its aim is to leverage useful information contained in multiple related tasks to help improve the generalization performance of all the tasks. In this paper, we give a survey for MTL from the perspective of algorithmic modeling, applications and theoretical analyses. For algorithmic modeling, we give a definition of MTL and then classify different MTL algorithms into five categories, including feature learning approach, low-rank approach, task clustering approach, task relation learning approach and decomposition approach as well as discussing the characteristics of each approach. In order to improve the performance of learning tasks further, MTL can be combined with other learning paradigms including semi-supervised learning, active learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, multi-view learning and graphical models. When the number of tasks is large or the data dimensionality is high, we review online, parallel and distributed MTL models as well as dimensionality reduction and feature hashing to reveal their computational and storage advantages. Many real-world applications use MTL to boost their performance and we review representative works in this paper. Finally, we present theoretical analyses and discuss several future directions for MTL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an asset health index (HI) prediction methodology for high voltage transmission overhead lines (OHLs) using supervised machine learning and structured, unambiguous visual inspections. We propose a framework for asset HI predictions to determine the technical condition of individual OHL towers to improve grid reliability in a cost-effective manner. The paper focuses on asset HI prediction and the selection of the most parsimonious model. Based on the technical specifications and HI data, our methodology allows for the prediction of a HI for OHLs without HI data, and models asset aging behaviour. Technical specifications and the HI as defined in this paper are taken from the Estonian TSO periodical visual inspections implemented in 2018. The case study successfully demonstrates that the proposed methodology can predict tower HI values for a single OHL with nearly 80 percent accuracy without the need for additional measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cox proportional hazards model is a popular semi-parametric model for survival analysis. In this paper, we aim at developing a federated algorithm for the Cox proportional hazards model over vertically partitioned data (i.e., data from the same patient are stored at different institutions). We propose a novel algorithm, namely VERTICOX, to obtain the global model parameters in a distributed fashion based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) framework. The proposed model computes intermediary statistics and exchanges them to calculate the global model without collecting individual patient-level data. We demonstrate that our algorithm achieves equivalent accuracy for the estimation of model parameters and statistics to that of its centralized realization. The proposed algorithm converges linearly under the ADMM framework. Its computational complexity and communication costs are polynomially and linearly associated with the number of subjects, respectively. Experimental results show that VERTICOX can achieve accurate model parameter estimation to support federated survival analysis over vertically distributed data by saving bandwidth and avoiding exchange of information about individual patients. The source code for VERTICOX is available at: https://github.com/daiwenrui/VERTICOX. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chemical mechanical polishing/planarization (CMP) combines physical grinding and chemical reactions to planarize the wafer surface. The complex mechanism of CMP brings great challenges to the mechanism-based modeling process. The data-driven CMP modeling process is limited by insufficient datasets. At the same time, these two types of models generally have high computational complexity. In this paper, we introduce the group method of data handling (GMDH)-type polynomial network to build the CMP model to address the above challenges. We designed and manufactured the test chip using a 28nm process. The measurement data from the test chip shows that compared with the mechanism-based CMP model, the trained CMP model based on GMDH-type polynomial network has higher accuracy and lower computational complexity, with the average simulation speed being 115x faster. Experiments based on silicon data show that this modeling method has a small demand for data, and 20 randomly selected sets of data can meet the needs for modeling the current CMP process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a dynamic event data-based stability risk assessment method for power grids with high penetrations of inverter-based resources (IBRs). This method relies on obtaining the IBRs’ DQ admittance through dynamic event data and computing the system’s eigenvalues based on the admittance models. Two critical technologies are employed in this research, including time-domain and frequency-domain data fitting and $dq$ -frame voltage and current signal derivation. The first technology is key to obtaining the $s$ -domain expressions from the transient response data, and the $s$ -domain DQ admittance model from the frequency-domain measurements. The second technology is key to obtaining the $dq$ -frame voltage and current signals from either the three-phase instantaneous measurements or the phasor measurement unit (PMU) data. The method is illustrated using data generated from a Type-4 wind power plant modeled in PSCAD. This paper demonstrates the technical feasibility of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report analyzes the reproducibility of the article “Computing Planetary Interior Normal Modes with A Highly Parallel Polynomial Filtering Eigensolver” by Jia Shi et al. (Shi, 2018). To reproduce the results we perform different weak and strong scaling studies using a series of Mars models. All experimental runs were performed during the SC19 Student Cluster Competition on a four node Intel Skylake cluster. We show that the findings of the original article can be reproduced in a different environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With low voltage (LV) distribution networks increasingly being re-purposed beyond their original design specifications to accommodate low carbon technologies, the ability to accurately calculate their actual spare capacity is critical. Traditionally, within the Great Britain (GB) power system, there has been limited monitoring of LV distribution networks, making this difficult. This paper proposes a method for estimating spare capacity of unmonitored LV networks using demand data from customer Smart Meters. In particular, the proposed method infers existing LV network capacity, as well as losses, across scenarios where only a limited number of customers have Smart Meters installed. Typical daily load profiles across customers with Smart Meters are learned using a Dirichlet sampled Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Learned profiles are then applied to all unmetered customers to estimate network parameters. Method accuracy is assessed by comparing estimations with simulated, fully observed, LV network models. The method is also compared to benchmark models for establishing unobserved demand profiles. Overall, results in the paper show that the proposed method outperforms benchmark models in terms of accurately assessing substation headroom, particularly in scenarios where only 10–50% of customers have Smart Meters installed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data quality plays an important role during the training stage of machine/deep learning models. The annotation hinges on the experiences of domain experts. To acquire the expert’s knowledge in the context of machine learning, manual data labeling, a tedious and time-consuming task in supervised learning, should be given a top priority. However, the domain experts in the line of plentiful manual annotation may easily get distracted or fatigued after long-time work, causing judgment errors, mislabeling, etc. The pattern recognition of wafer defect map is investigated in this paper, the primary goal of which is to train the convolutional neural network (CNN) model through a very limited number of manually labeled data so that the trained model is capable of performing pseudo labeling. Subsequently, a self-assured adaptive ensemble learner in terms of a series of shallow neural networks is proposed to filter wafer map samples with untrusted pseudo-labels. In the result, the amount of human annotations is significantly reduced by 61% for training a highly accurate classifier. A minimum number of manually labeled data is suggested while the equally high classification performance of wafer defect pattern is maintained. For the evaluation purpose, the proposed self-assured learning is compared with the confidence learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies instance-dependent Positive and Unlabeled (PU) classification, where whether a positive example will be labeled (indicated by $s$ s ) is not only related to the class label $y$ y , but also depends on the observation $\mathbf {x}$ x . Therefore, the labeling probability on positive examples is not uniform as previous works assumed, but is biased to some simple or critical data points. To depict the above dependency relationship, a graphical model is built in this paper which further leads to a maximization problem on the induced likelihood function regarding $P(s,y|\mathbf {x})$ P (s , y | x) . By utilizing the well-known EM and Adam optimization techniques, the labeling probability of any positive example $P(s=1|y=1,\mathbf {x})$ P (s = 1 | y = 1 , x) as well as the classifier induced by $P(y|\mathbf {x})$ P (y | x) can be acquired. Theoretically, we prove that the critical solution always exists, and is locally unique for linear model if some sufficient conditions are met. Moreover, we upper bound the generalization error for both linear logistic and non-linear network instantiations of our algorithm, with the convergence rate of expected risk to empirical risk as $\mathcal {O}(1/\sqrt{k}+1/\sqrt{n-k}+1/\sqrt{n})$ O (1 / k + 1 / n - k + 1 / n) ($k$ k and $n$ n are the sizes of positive set and the entire training set, respectively). Empirically, we compare our method with state-of-the-art instance-independent and instance-dependent PU algorithms on a wide range of synthetic, benchmark and real-world datasets, and the experimental results firmly demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over the existing PU approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) wireless communication systems are fundamental in many intelligent transportation applications, e.g., traffic load control, driverless vehicle, and collision avoidance. Hence, developing appropriate V2V communication systems and standardization require realistic V2V propagation channel models. However, most existing V2V channel modeling studies focus on car-to-car channels; only a few investigate truck-to-car (T2C) or truck-to-truck (T2T) channels. In this paper, a hybrid geometry-based stochastic model (GBSM) is proposed for T2X (T2C or T2T) channels in freeway environments. Next, we parameterize this GBSM from the extensive channel measurements. We extract the multipath components (MPCs) by using a joint maximum likelihood estimation (RiMAX) and then determine the cluster types based on their evolution patterns. We classify the determined clusters into line-of-sight, single-bounce reflections from static interaction objects (IOs), single-bounce reflections from mobile IOs, multiple-bounce reflections, and density multipath components (DMCs). Particularly, we model multiple-bounce reflections as double clusters following the COST 273/COST2100 method. This paper presents the complete parameterization of the channel model. We validate this model by comparing the delay spread and the angular spreads of arrival/departure obtained from the proposed model with the measurement data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vanilla Few-shot Learning (FSL) learns to build a classifier for a new concept from one or very few target examples, with the general assumption that source and target classes are sampled from the same domain. Recently, the task of Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL) aims at tackling the FSL where there is a huge domain shift between the source and target datasets. Extensive efforts on CD-FSL have been made via either directly extending the meta-learning paradigm of vanilla FSL methods, or employing massive unlabeled target data to help learn models. In this paper, we notice that in the CD-FSL task, the few labeled target images have never been explicitly leveraged to inform the model in the training stage. However, such a labeled target example set is very important to bridge the huge domain gap. Critically, this paper advocates a more practical training scenario for CD-FSL. And our key insight is to utilize a few labeled target data to guide the learning of the CD-FSL model. Technically, we propose a novel Generalized Meta-learning based Feature-Disentangled Mixup network, namely GMeta-FDMixup. We make three key contributions of utilizing GMeta-FDMixup to address CD-FSL. Firstly, we present two mixup modules – mixup-P and mixup-M that help facilitate utilizing the unbalanced and disjoint source and target datasets. These two novel modules enable diverse image generation for training the model on the source domain. Secondly, to narrow the domain gap explicitly, we contribute a novel feature disentanglement module that learns to decouple the domain-irrelevant and domain-specific features. By stripping the domain-specific features, we alleviate the negative effects caused by the domain inductive bias. Finally, we repurpose a new contrastive learning module, dubbed ConL. ConL prevents the model from only capturing category-related features via introducing contrastive loss. Thus, the generalization ability on novel categories is improved. Extensive experimental results on two benchmarks show the superiority of our setting and the effectiveness of our method. Code and models will be released. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsupervised spectral feature selection (USFS) methods could output interpretable and discriminative results by embedding a Laplacian regularizer in the framework of sparse feature selection to keep the local similarity of the training samples. To do this, USFS methods usually construct the Laplacian matrix using either a general-graph or a hyper-graph on the original data. Usually, a general-graph could measure the relationship between two samples while a hyper-graph could measure the relationship among no less than two samples. Obviously, the general-graph is a special case of the hyper-graph and the hyper-graph may capture more complex structure of samples than the general graph. However, in previous USFS methods, the construction of the Laplacian matrix is separated from the process of feature selection. Moreover, the original data usually contain noise. Each of them makes difficult to output reliable feature selection models. In this paper, we propose a novel feature selection method by dynamically constructing a hyper-graph based Laplacian matrix in the framework of sparse feature selection. Experimental results on real datasets showed that our proposed method outperformed the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both clustering and segmentation tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a linear regression model for scalar-valued responses and two-way functional (bivariate) predictors. Our motivation stems from the quality evaluation of products based on optical emission spectroscopy data from virtual metrology of semiconductor manufacturing. We focus on multivariate cases where the smoothness and shapes of the data vary significantly across variables. We propose a two-step solution to this problem, consisting of decomposition and prediction. First, we decompose the two-way functional data into pairs of component functions using functional singular value decomposition. Next, we build functional linear models for the decomposed functional variables and obtain the final predictor by averaging the models. Results from numerical studies, including simulation studies and real data analysis, demonstrate the promising empirical properties of the proposed approach, especially when the number of predictors is large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of data sources and models in the mobility and transport domain strongly proliferated in the last decade. Most formats have been created to enable specific and innovative applications. On the other hand, the available data models present a certain degree of complexity in terms of their integration and management due to partial overlaps, and in most cases, they could be exploited alternatively to implement the same smart and latest innovative solutions. This paper offers an overview of data models, standards and their relationships. A second contribution highlights any possible exploitation of data models for implementing operational processes for city transportation management and for the feeding of simulation and optimization processes that produce other data results in other data models. The final goal in most cases is the monitoring and control of city transport conditions, as well as the tactic and strategic planning of city infrastructure. This work was developed in the context of the CN MOST, a national center of sustainable mobility in Italy, and it is based on exploiting the Snap4City platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an opportunity in modern power systems to explore the demand flexibility by incentivizing consumers with dynamic prices. In this paper, we quantify demand flexibility using an efficient tool called time-varying elasticity, whose value may change depending on the prices and decision dynamics. This tool is particularly useful for evaluating the demand response potential and system reliability. Recent empirical evidences have highlighted some abnormal features when studying demand flexibility, such as delayed responses and vanishing elasticities after price spikes. Existing methods fail to capture these complicated features because they heavily rely on some predefined (often over-simplified) regression expressions. Instead, this paper proposes a model-free methodology to automatically and accurately derive the optimal estimation pattern. We further develop a two-stage estimation process with Siamese long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Here, a LSTM network encodes the price response, while the other network estimates the time-varying elasticities. In the case study, the proposed framework and models are validated to achieve higher overall estimation accuracy and better description for various abnormal features when compared with the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semiconductor manufacturing plays a crucial role in the world’s economic growth and technology development and is the backbone of the high value-added electronic device manufacturing industry. In this paper, a new anomaly detection framework by means of data visualization is proposed for semiconductor manufacturing. Firstly, t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) in unsupervised learning is used to transform the high-dimensional raw trace data, corresponding to normal wafers, into a two-dimensional map, with the purpose of visually observing the distribution of normal wafers. The t-SNE algorithm cannot be used at run time for a new test sample since it requires the whole dataset for the embedding transformation, and is computationally very expensive. The Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network is then applied as a regressor for the real-time t-SNE embedding of a new test data. The envelope of t-SNE score estimates for a set of normal wafers is circumscribed and used as the 2D control boundary based on the Delaunay Triangulation (D.T.). A new test sample with its MLP estimated embedding points outside the D.T boundary is identified as defective. Lastly, a real-world dataset in semiconductor manufacturing is used to illustrate the proposed data visualization tool for anomaly detection. The experimental results show that a multilayer perceptron in combination with t-SNE and Delaunay Triangulation performs very well for data visualization and automated detection of anomalies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has seen growing importance being attached to the Completely Independent Spanning Trees (CISTs). The CISTs can facilitate many network functionalities, and the existence and construction schemes of CISTs in various networks can be an indicator of the network's robustness. In this paper, we establish the number of CISTs that can be constructed in the line graph of the complete graph $K_n$ K n (denoted $L(K_n)$ L (K n) , for $n\geq 4$ n ≥ 4 ), and present an algorithm to construct the optimal (i.e., maximal) number of CISTs in $L(K_n)$ L (K n) . The $L(K_n)$ L (K n) is a special class of SWCube [13], an architectural model proposed for data center networks. Our construction algorithm is also implemented to verify its validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RDF is being increasingly considered in a broad range of information management scenarios. Governments, large corporations, startups, and other organizations around the world are using RDF as a data model to represent and share knowledge. However, there is still a long evolutionary track with multiple challenges for RDF reaching the scale of the most recent Big Data intensive applications (e.g., Smart Cities, Sensor Networks, eHealth, Internet of Things). In this survey, we review the usage of NoSQL databases to the storage of large RDF graphs by rehearsing the latest surveys and expanding their findings by updating proposals and bringing light to aspects such as model mapping between RDF and NoSQL, triple indexing and partitioning, graph fragmentation and data caching. Moreover, we explain how the surveyed works extended the RDF capabilities so the datasets can benefit of the characteristics of scalability, schemaless data, and better overall performance of NoSQL databases. The survey summarizes the current state of art, discusses open problems, and proposes a Reference Architecture (RA). For the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey where the focus is solely on papers that use one or more NoSQL systems for the RDF persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial crowdsensing is a special kind of crowdsourcing which allocates tasks to workers in some special places where workers can sense data for them. Due to the lack of priori information about the quality of workers and the ground truth, selecting the most suitable workers, which can guarantee the quality of the sensing tasks, remains a great challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel framework which can choose the most reliable workers among available workers under constraint budget. We model the quality of workers through two factors, bias and variance, which describe the continuous feature of sensing tasks. Our framework first allocate some calibration tasks to calibrate the bias and then iteratively estimate the workers variance more and more accurately. To choose more reliable workers, we face the exploration and exploitation dilemma. Therefore, we design a novel Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithm which based on Upper Confidence Bounds (UCB) scheme and combined with a weighted data aggregation scheme to estimate a more accurate ground truth of a sensing task. Futhermore, a dynamic budget allocation algorithm is designed to achieve global optimization. Then, we prove the expected sensing error can be bounded according to the regret bound of the MAB. In simulation experiments, we compare our algorithm with several baselines with real-world data set and it shows the effectiveness in inferring the ground truth with limited budget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In current semiconductor manufacturing, limited raw trace data pertaining to defective wafers make fault detection (FD) assignments extremely difficult due to the data imbalance in wafer classification. To mitigate, this paper proposes using a variational autoencoder (VAE) as a data augmentation strategy for resolving data imbalance of temporal raw trace data. A VAE with few defective samples is first trained. By means of extracting the latent variables that characterize the distribution of the defective samples, we make use of the statistical randomness of the latent variables to generate synthesized defective samples via the decoder scheme in the trained VAE. Two data representations and VAE modeling strategies, concatenation of multiple and individual raw trace data as the input of the VAE during the training stage, are investigated. A real-data plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) process having only few defective samples is used to illustrate the performance enhancement to wafer classification arising from the proposed data augmentation framework. Based on the computational comparisons between noted classification models, the proposed generative VAE model via the individual strategy enables the adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) classifier to achieve perfect performances in every metrics if the 80% and 100% over-sampling ratios are adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the prevalence of online social platforms, social recommendation has emerged as a promising direction that leverages the social network among users to enhance recommendation performance. However, the available social relations among users are usually extremely sparse and noisy, which may lead to inferior recommendation performance. To alleviate this problem, this paper novelly exploits the implicit higher-order social influence and dependencies among users to enhance social recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding method for general bipartite graphs, which defines inter-class message passing between explicit relations and intra-class message passing between implicit higher-order relations via a novel sequential modelling paradigm. Inspired by recent advances in self-attention-based sequential modelling, the proposed model features a self-attentive representation learning mechanism for implicit user-user relations. Moreover, this paper also explores the inductive embedding learning for social recommendation problems to improve the recommendation performance in cold-start settings. The proposed inductive learning paradigm for social recommendation enables embedding inference for those cold-start users and items (unseen during training) as long as they are linked to existing nodes in the original network. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method and suggest that higher-order implicit relationship among users is beneficial to improving social recommendation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supporting parallel multi-priority data streams is vital for maintaining the quality of service (QoS) in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. Hence, the European telecommunications standard institute (ETSI) has defined four packet types, with varying priority levels, to be used as broadcast packets in such communication. This paper studies the medium access control (MAC) layer performance of IEEE 802.11p and cellular-V2X (C-V2X) Mode 4 using discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) based models, while considering parallel multi-priority data streams. The overall model consists of four queue models with their respective traffic generators, which are appropriately linked with the DTMCs modeling the MAC layer operations of IEEE 802.11p and C-V2X Mode 4. Closed-form solutions for the steady-state probabilities of the models are obtained, which are then utilized to derive expressions for key performance indicators at the MAC layer. Numerical results are provided to draw insights on the MAC layer performance of the two technologies. IEEE 802.11p is comparatively superior in average delay, and at maintaining fairness among multi-priority data streams, whereas C-V2X Mode 4 exhibits better collision resolution, which leads to its higher throughput. The paper also includes design insights on possible performance enhancements for future releases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) based fault detection approaches need a large amount of data for the model learning. However, in a real-world system, it is very difficult and expensive to obtain massive labeled fault data. In addition, the working conditions of a motor are usually variable, conventional fault diagnosis models with weak generalization ability can only be used for fault detection under constant working condition. The performance of traditional AI based approaches decreases when the working condition changes. To this end, a novel deep Gaussian process (GP) kernel transfer based few-shot learning method (RNGPT) is proposed in this paper for the fault detection of electric machines. First, a deep residual network (ResNet) is used to extract the features of the raw data. Then, the encoded latent feature vector is fed into the GP with kernel transfer ability to make the motor fault detection and classification. The proposed method uses much less data than the traditional AI based method to achieve fault diagnosis under variable working condition, and does not cause an overfitting problem. Experimental results of two case studies demonstrate that the proposed RNGPT model can accurately and effectively detect motor faults with limited labeled data under different working conditions. Experimental results of RNGPT with radial basis function (RBF) kernel model on simulation data present that the fault detection accuracy of the proposed method is about 16% higher than the conventional deep learning methods, 6% higher than other few-shot learning based methods in 5-shot and 4% higher in 1-shot. Finally, experimental on a real-world dataset, the RNGPT-RBF model still has the highest fault diagnosis accuracy in 5-shot (99.39 $ \pm $ 0.09%) and 1-shot (98.55 $ \pm $ 0.16%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosthetic discrete controller relies on finite state machines to switch between a set of predefined task-specific controllers. Therefore the prosthesis can only perform a limited number of discrete locomotion tasks and need hours to tune the parameters for each user. In contrast, the continuous controller treats a gait cycle in a unified way. Thus it is expected to better facilitate normative biomechanics by providing a gait predictive model to contribute a non-switching controller that supports a continuum of tasks. Furthermore, a better method is to train a personalized trajectory prediction model suitable for personal characteristics according to personal walking data. This paper proposes a Gaussian process enhanced Fourier series (GPEFS) method to construct a gait prediction model that represents the human locomotion as a continuous function of phase, speed and slope. Firstly the joint trajectories are transformed into the Fourier coefficient space by least square method. Then the relationship between each Fourier coefficient and task input can be learned by multiple Gaussian process regression (GPRs) model respectively. Compared with directly using GPR to fit the joint trajectory under multi task, our method greatly reduces the computational burden, so as to meet the real-time application scenario. In addition, in Fourier coefficient space, the difference in all tasks between the Fourier coefficient of personal data and the one of statistical data follows the same trend. Therefore, a personalized prediction model is built to predict an individual’s kinematics over a continuous range of slopes and speeds given only one personalized task at level ground and normal speed. The experimental results show that the gait prediction model and the personalized prediction model are feasible and effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at proposing an unsupervised hierarchical nonparametric Bayesian framework for modeling axial data (i.e., observations are axes of direction) that can be partitioned into multiple groups, where each observation within a group is sampled from a mixture of Watson distributions with an infinite number of components that are allowed to be shared across different groups. First, we propose a hierarchical nonparametric Bayesian model for modeling grouped axial data based on the hierarchical Pitman-Yor process mixture model of Watson distributions. Then, we demonstrate that by setting the discount parameters of the proposed model to 0, another hierarchical nonparametric Bayesian model based on hierarchical Dirichlet process can be derived for modeling axial data. To learn the proposed models, we systematically develop a closed-form optimization algorithm based on the collapsed variational Bayes (CVB) inference. Furthermore, to ensure the convergence of the proposed learning algorithm, an annealing mechanism is introduced to the framework of CVB inference, leading to an averaged collapsed variational Bayes inference strategy. The merits of the proposed models for modeling grouped axial data are demonstrated through experiments on both synthetic data and real-world applications involving gene expression data clustering and depth image analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event logs that are recorded by information systems provide a valuable starting point for the analysis of processes in various domains, reaching from healthcare, through logistics, to e-commerce. Specifically, behavioral patterns discovered from an event log enable operational insights, even in scenarios where process execution is rather unstructured and shows a large degree of variability. While such behavioral patterns capture frequently recurring episodes of a process’ behavior, they are not limited to sequential behavior but include notions of concurrency and exclusive choices. Existing algorithms to discover behavioral patterns are context-agnostic, though. They neglect the context in which patterns are observed, which severely limits the granularity at which behavioral regularities are identified. In this paper, we therefore present an approach to discover contextual behavioral patterns. Contextual patterns may be frequent solely in a certain partition of the event log, which enables fine-granular insights into the aspects that influence the conduct of a process. Moreover, we show how to analyze the discovered contextual behavioral patterns in terms of causal relations between context information and the patterns, as well as correlations between the patterns themselves. A complete analysis methodology leveraging all the tools presented in the paper and supplemented by interpretations guidelines is also provided. Finally, experiments with real-world event logs demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques in obtaining fine-granular process insights. [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]

Machine learning research, particularly in genomics, is often based on wide shaped datasets, i.e. datasets having a large number of features, but a small number of samples. Such configurations raise the possibility of chance influence (the increase of measured accuracy due to chance correlations) on the learning process and the evaluation results. Prior research underlined the problem of generalization of models obtained based on such data. In this paper, we investigate the influence of chance on prediction and show its significant effects on wide shaped datasets. First, we empirically demonstrate how significant the influence of chance in such datasets is by showing that prediction models trained on thousands of randomly generated datasets can achieve high accuracy. This is the case even when using cross-validation. We then provide a formal analysis of chance influence and design formal chance influence estimators based on the dataset parameters, namely its sample size, the number of features, the number of classes and the class distribution. Finally, we provide an in-depth discussion of the formal analysis including applications of the findings and recommendations on chance influence mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competition between Points of Interest (POIs) refers to the situation in which two POIs directly or indirectly provide similar services to secure businesses. A large portion of prior studies on competition analysis focuses on mining textual data, e.g., news articles and social comments. However, the increasing availability of human mobility and mobile query data enables a new paradigm for analyzing the competitive relationships among POIs, which remains largely unexplored. To this end, in this paper, we attempt to mine large-scale online map search query data for better understanding POI competitive relationships. Based on a co-query POI graph built from the map search query data, we develop a novel neural graphlet-based prediction framework to predict the competitive relationships among POIs. A unique perspective of our model is to infer latent POI competitive relationships by integrating multiple distinct factors, e.g., graphlet structure, geographical distance, and regional features, reflected in map search query data and POI data. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, and show that our framework outperforms all baselines with a significant margin in all evaluation metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evaluation of the state of transformer oil-immersed insulation based on the traditional methods becomes unreliable due to the nonuniform aging effect. To address this issue, a novel model for accessing the aging information of transformer oil-immersed insulation at the hotspot is proposed. In this article, frequency-domain spectroscopy (FDS) is selected as the carrier for characterizing the aging states of oil-immersed insulation. The multiobjective function for reversing the FDS of the hotspot is constructed based on the dielectric response equivalent circuit. Then, the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm with the multiconstraint scheme is proposed to solve the multiobjective function, by which the FDS data of the transformer hotspot region are acquired. The verification results indicate that the average standard deviation between the computed FDS of the hotspot region and the measured data is less than 0.26. The contribution of this article is in the exploration of the proposed model as a potential tool to extract the FDS data of the hotspot region. This will promote a more reliable aging evaluation of the transformer oil-immersed paper insulation at the hotspot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time series classification models have been garnering significant importance in the research community. However, not much research has been done on generating adversarial samples for these models. These adversarial samples can become a security concern. In this paper, we propose utilizing an adversarial transformation network (ATN) on a distilled model to attack various time series classification models. The proposed attack on the classification model utilizes a distilled model as a surrogate that mimics the behavior of the attacked classical time series classification models. Our proposed methodology is applied onto 1-nearest neighbor dynamic time warping (1-NN DTW) and a fully convolutional network (FCN), all of which are trained on 42 University of California Riverside (UCR) datasets. In this paper, we show both models were susceptible to attacks on all 42 datasets. When compared to Fast Gradient Sign Method, the proposed attack generates a larger faction of successful adversarial black-box attacks. A simple defense mechanism is successfully devised to reduce the fraction of successful adversarial samples. Finally, we recommend future researchers that develop time series classification models to incorporating adversarial data samples into their training data sets to improve resilience on adversarial samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates that false data injection (FDI) attacks are extremely limited in their ability to cause physical consequences on $N-1$ reliable power systems operating with real-time contingency analysis (RTCA) and security constrained economic dispatch (SCED). Prior work has shown that FDI attacks can be designed via an attacker-defender bi-level linear program (ADBLP) to cause physical overflows after re-dispatch using DCOPF. In this paper, it is shown that attacks designed using DCOPF fail to cause overflows on $N-1$ reliable systems because the system response modeled is inaccurate. An ADBLP that accurately models the system response is proposed to find the worst-case physical consequences, thereby modeling a strong attacker with system level knowledge. Simulation results on the synthetic Texas system with 2000 buses show that even with the new enhanced attacks, for systems operated conservatively due to $N-1$ constraints, the designed attacks only lead to post-contingency overflows. Moreover, the attacker must control a large portion of measurements and physically create a contingency in the system to cause consequences. Therefore, it is conceivable but requires an extremely sophisticated attacker to cause physical consequences on $N-1$ reliable power systems operated with RTCA and SCED. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless powered IoT network, where a rotary-wing UAV adopts fly-hover-communicate protocol to successively visit IoT devices in demand. During the hovering periods, the UAV works on full-duplex mode to simultaneously collect data from the target device and charge other devices within its coverage. Practical propulsion power consumption model and non-linear energy harvesting model are taken into account. We formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to jointly optimize three objectives: maximization of sum data rate, maximization of total harvested energy and minimization of UAV’s energy consumption over a particular mission period. These three objectives are in conflict with each other partly and weight parameters are given to describe associated importance. Since IoT devices keep gathering information from the physical surrounding environment and their requirements to upload data change dynamically, online path planning of the UAV is required. In this paper, we apply deep reinforcement learning algorithm to achieve online decision. An extended deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm is proposed to learn control policies of UAV over multiple objectives. While training, the agent learns to produce optimal policies under given weights conditions on the basis of achieving timely data collection according to the requirement priority and avoiding devices’ data overflow. The verification results show that the proposed MODDPG (multi-objective DDPG) algorithm achieves joint optimization of three objectives and optimal policies can be adjusted according to weight parameters among optimization objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image reconstruction for positron emission tomography (PET) is challenging because of the ill-conditioned tomographic problem and low counting statistics. Kernel methods address this challenge by using kernel representation to incorporate image prior information in the forward model of iterative PET image reconstruction. Existing kernel methods construct the kernels commonly using an empirical process, which may lead to unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we describe the equivalence between the kernel representation and a trainable neural network model. A deep kernel method is then proposed by exploiting a deep neural network to enable automated learning of an improved kernel model and is directly applicable to single subjects in dynamic PET. The training process utilizes available image prior data to form a set of robust kernels in an optimized way rather than empirically. The results from computer simulations and a real patient dataset demonstrate that the proposed deep kernel method can outperform the existing kernel method and neural network method for dynamic PET image reconstruction. [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]

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]

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a related but different well-labeled source domain to a new unlabeled target domain. Most existing UDA methods require access to the source data, and thus are not applicable when the data are confidential and not shareable due to privacy concerns. This paper aims to tackle a realistic setting with only a classification model available trained over, instead of accessing to, the source data. To effectively utilize the source model for adaptation, we propose a novel approach called Source HypOthesis Transfer (SHOT), which learns the feature extraction module for the target domain by fitting the target data features to the frozen source classification module (representing classification hypothesis). Specifically, SHOT exploits both information maximization and self-supervised learning for the feature extraction module learning to ensure the target features are implicitly aligned with the features of unseen source data via the same hypothesis. Furthermore, we propose a new labeling transfer strategy, which separates the target data into two splits based on the confidence of predictions (labeling information), and then employ semi-supervised learning to improve the accuracy of less-confident predictions in the target domain. We denote labeling transfer as SHOT++ if the predictions are obtained by SHOT. Extensive experiments on both digit classification and object recognition tasks show that SHOT and SHOT++ achieve results surpassing or comparable to the state-of-the-arts, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approaches for various visual domain adaptation problems. Code will be available at https://github.com/tim-learn/SHOT-plus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domain adaptation aims at extracting knowledge from auxiliary source domains to assist the learning task in a target domain. In classification problems, since the distributions of the source and target domains are different, directly using source data to build a classifier for the target domain may hamper the classification performance on the target data. Fortunately, in many tasks, there can be some features that are transferable, i.e., the source and target domains share similar properties. On the other hand, it is common that the source data contain noisy features which may degrade the learning performance in the target domain. This issue, however, is barely studied in existing works. In this paper, we propose to find a feature subset that is transferable across the source and target domains. As a result, the domain discrepancy measured on the selected features can be reduced. Moreover, we seek to find the most discriminative features for classification. To achieve the above goals, we formulate a new sparse learning model that is able to jointly reduce the domain discrepancy and select informative features for classification. We develop two optimization algorithms to address the derived learning problem. Extensive experiments on real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a computation-efficient stochastic dynamic programming algorithm for solving energy storage price arbitrage considering variable charge and discharge efficiencies. We formulate the price arbitrage problem using stochastic dynamic programming and model real-time prices as a Markov process. Then we propose an analytical solution algorithm using a piecewise linear approximation of the value-to-go function. Our solution algorithm achieves extreme computation performance and solves the proposed arbitrage problem for one operating day in less than one second on a personal computer. We demonstrate our approach using historical price data from four price zones in New York Independent System Operator, with case studies comparing the performance of different stochastic models and storage settings. Our results show that the proposed method captures 50% to 90% of arbitrage profit compared to perfect price forecasts. In particular, our method captures more than 80% of arbitrage profit in three out of the four price zones when considering batteries with more than two-hour duration and realistic degradation cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wide variety of inverter control settings for solar photovoltaics (PV) causes the accurate knowledge of these settings to be difficult to obtain in practice. This paper addresses the problem of determining inverter reactive power control settings from net load advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) data. The estimation is first cast as fitting parameterized control curves. We argue for an intuitive and practical approach to preprocess the AMI data, which exposes the setting to be extracted. We then develop a more general approach with a data-driven reactive power disaggregation algorithm, reframing the problem as a maximum likelihood estimation for the native load reactive power. These methods form the first approach for reconstructing reactive power control settings of solar PV inverters from net load data. The constrained curve fitting algorithm is tested on 701 loads with behind-the-meter (BTM) PV systems with identical control settings. The settings are accurately reconstructed with mean absolute percentage errors between 0.425% and 2.870%. The disaggregation-based approach is then tested on 451 loads with variable BTM PV control settings. Different configurations of this algorithm reconstruct the PV inverter reactive power timeseries with root mean squared errors between 0.173 and 0.198 kVAR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Czochralski (CZ) process is the core technology for producing semiconductor silicon monocrystalline (SMC), and it is a complex batch process. However, the crystal growth rate and crystal diameter, which are key quality indicators, are difficult to detect directly online, and the offline calculation process lags seriously, which easily causes blind crystal quality control. Therefore, this paper proposes a data-driven and mechanism-based hybrid model for semiconductor SMC quality variables prediction in the CZ process. Firstly, a data-driven model JITL-SAE-ELM based on just-in-time learning (JITL) fine-tuning strategy is proposed. This model is used to solve the nonlinear and time-varying relationship of the energy transfer process in the CZ process that cannot be accurately described by traditional mechanism models. Here, the SAE-ELM model integrates a stacked autoencoder (SAE) and an extreme learning machine (ELM), which are used to deeply capture the nonlinear and time-varying features of process data. Secondly, according to the hydrodynamics and geometric behavior, a crystal pulling dynamic mechanism model based on the crystal growth mechanism is constructed, which avoids the complicated heat transfer link. Further, considering the unmodeled dynamics caused by model parameter uncertainty during the combination of the energy transfer model and crystal pulling dynamic mechanism model, a crystal diameter compensation model SAE-ELM was developed to improve the prediction accuracy of the CZ process hybrid model. Finally, an industrial data experiment based on a CZ monocrystal furnace illustrates the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital twin (DT) has emerged as a promising technology to create digital replicas of physical vehicles to facilitate driving in Internet of Vehicles (IoV). However, due to the uneven distribution of vehicles in the networks and the dynamics of heterogeneous wireless links, how to optimize the connection along the vehicle's trip between the vehicle and its DT to achieve the lowest cost (i.e., delay and energy consumption) is a fundamental challenge. In this paper, we investigate the joint network selection and power level allocation problem in the data synchronization issue between vehicles and DTs in the heterogeneous access networks. In order to better use the information shared by DT to facilitate the data synchronization process, we propose a learning-based heterogeneous network selection scheme in DT empowered IoV. First, we consider the data divided into blocks and model the data synchronization problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to minimize the long-term cost in terms of the delay and energy consumption. Based on the information obtained from the digital twin communications, we develop an actor-critic learning approach to solve the MDP problem with the block-level state method, and obtain the optimal network selection strategy for the vehicles. In addition, we explore the capability of digital twins by applying transfer learning. The vehicles are divided into two types, i.e., learner vehicles and expert vehicles, so that the knowledge can be transferred from the expert vehicles to the learner vehicles to effectively improve the learning efficiency and decrease the data synchronization latency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our scheme can effectively find the optimal network selection policy and achieve the fast convergence and better performance compared with existing related approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]