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Various stakeholders, such as researchers, government agencies, businesses, and research laboratories require a large volume of reliable scientific research outcomes including research articles and patent data to support their work. These data are crucial for a variety of application, such as advancing scientific research, conducting business evaluations, and undertaking policy analysis. However, collecting such data is often a time-consuming and laborious task. Consequently, many users turn to using openly accessible data for their research. However, these existing open dataset releases typically suffer from lack of relationship between different data sources and a limited temporal coverage. To address this issue, we present a new open dataset, the Intelligent Innovation Dataset (IIDS), which comprises six interrelated datasets spanning nearly 120 years, encompassing paper information, paper citation relationships, patent details, patent legal statuses, and funding information. The extensive contextual and extensive temporal coverage of the IIDS dataset will provide researchers and practitioners and policy maker with comprehensive data support, enabling them to conduct in-depth scientific research and comprehensive data analyses.

Video analytics is widespread in various applications serving our society. Recent advances of content enhancement in video analytics offer significant benefits for the bandwidth saving and accuracy improvement. However, existing content-enhanced video analytics systems are excessively computationally expensive and provide extremely low throughput. In this paper, we present region-based content enhancement, that enhances only the important regions in videos, to improve analytical accuracy. Our system, RegenHance, enables high-accuracy and high-throughput video analytics at the edge by 1) a macroblock-based region importance predictor that identifies the important regions fast and precisely, 2) a region-aware enhancer that stitches sparsely distributed regions into dense tensors and enhances them efficiently, and 3) a profile-based execution planer that allocates appropriate resources for enhancement and analytics components. We prototype RegenHance on five heterogeneous edge devices. Experiments on two analytical tasks reveal that region-based enhancement improves the overall accuracy of 10-19% and achieves 2-3x throughput compared to the state-of-the-art frame-based enhancement methods.

The rising popularity of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has sparked a significant increase in research dedicated to evaluating these models. However, current evaluation studies predominantly concentrate on the ability of models to comprehend and reason within a unimodal (vision-only) context, overlooking critical performance evaluations in complex multimodal reasoning tasks that integrate both visual and text contexts. Furthermore, tasks that demand reasoning across multiple modalities pose greater challenges and require a deep understanding of multimodal contexts. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive assessment framework named MM-InstructEval, which integrates a diverse array of metrics to provide an extensive evaluation of the performance of various models and instructions across a broad range of multimodal reasoning tasks with vision-text contexts. MM-InstructEval enhances the research on the performance of MLLMs in complex multimodal reasoning tasks, facilitating a more thorough and holistic zero-shot evaluation of MLLMs. We firstly utilize the "Best Performance" metric to determine the upper performance limit of each model across various datasets. The "Mean Relative Gain" metric provides an analysis of the overall performance across different models and instructions, while the "Stability" metric evaluates their sensitivity to variations. Historically, the research has focused on evaluating models independently or solely assessing instructions, overlooking the interplay between models and instructions. To address this gap, we introduce the "Adaptability" metric, designed to quantify the degree of adaptability between models and instructions. Evaluations are conducted on 31 models (23 MLLMs) across 16 multimodal datasets, covering 6 tasks, with 10 distinct instructions. The extensive analysis enables us to derive novel insights., Comment: Under review, the new version of MM-BigBench: arXiv:2310.09036

High-definition (HD) cameras for surveillance and road traffic have experienced tremendous growth, demanding intensive computation resources for real-time analytics. Recently, offloading frames from the front-end device to the back-end edge server has shown great promise. In multi-stream competitive environments, efficient bandwidth management and proper scheduling are crucial to ensure both high inference accuracy and high throughput. To achieve this goal, we propose BiSwift, a bi-level framework that scales the concurrent real-time video analytics by a novel adaptive hybrid codec integrated with multi-level pipelines, and a global bandwidth controller for multiple video streams. The lower-level front-back-end collaborative mechanism (called adaptive hybrid codec) locally optimizes the accuracy and accelerates end-to-end video analytics for a single stream. The upper-level scheduler aims to accuracy fairness among multiple streams via the global bandwidth controller. The evaluation of BiSwift shows that BiSwift is able to real-time object detection on 9 streams with an edge device only equipped with an NVIDIA RTX3070 (8G) GPU. BiSwift improves 10%$\sim$21% accuracy and presents 1.2$\sim$9$\times$ throughput compared with the state-of-the-art video analytics pipelines., Comment: Accepted by 2024 IEEE INFOCOM

The popularity of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has triggered a recent surge in research efforts dedicated to evaluating these models. Nevertheless, existing evaluation studies of MLLMs primarily focus on the comprehension and reasoning of unimodal (vision) content, neglecting performance evaluations in the domain of multimodal (vision-language) content understanding. Beyond multimodal reasoning, tasks related to multimodal content comprehension necessitate a profound understanding of multimodal contexts, achieved through the multimodal interaction to obtain a final answer. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive assessment framework called MM-BigBench, which incorporates a diverse range of metrics to offer an extensive evaluation of the performance of various models and instructions across a wide spectrum of diverse multimodal content comprehension tasks. Consequently, our work complements research on the performance of MLLMs in multimodal comprehension tasks, achieving a more comprehensive and holistic evaluation of MLLMs. To begin, we employ the Best Performance metric to ascertain each model's performance upper bound on different datasets. Subsequently, the Mean Relative Gain metric offers an assessment of the overall performance of various models and instructions, while the Stability metric measures their sensitivity. Furthermore, previous research centers on evaluating models independently or solely assessing instructions, neglecting the adaptability between models and instructions. We propose the Adaptability metric to quantify the adaptability between models and instructions. Our paper evaluates a total of 20 language models (14 MLLMs) on 14 multimodal datasets spanning 6 tasks, with 10 instructions for each task, and derives novel insights. Our code will be released at https://github.com/declare-lab/MM-BigBench., Comment: Underview

The quality of the video stream is key to neural network-based video analytics. However, low-quality video is inevitably collected by existing surveillance systems because of poor quality cameras or over-compressed/pruned video streaming protocols, e.g., as a result of upstream bandwidth limit. To address this issue, existing studies use quality enhancers (e.g., neural super-resolution) to improve the quality of videos (e.g., resolution) and eventually ensure inference accuracy. Nevertheless, directly applying quality enhancers does not work in practice because it will introduce unacceptable latency. In this paper, we present AccDecoder, a novel accelerated decoder for real-time and neural-enhanced video analytics. AccDecoder can select a few frames adaptively via Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to enhance the quality by neural super-resolution and then up-scale the unselected frames that reference them, which leads to 6-21% accuracy improvement. AccDecoder provides efficient inference capability via filtering important frames using DRL for DNN-based inference and reusing the results for the other frames via extracting the reference relationship among frames and blocks, which results in a latency reduction of 20-80% than baselines., Comment: Accepted by 2023 IEEE INFOCOM

Communication is supposed to improve multi-agent collaboration and overall performance in cooperative Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, such improvements are prevalently limited in practice since most existing communication schemes ignore communication overheads (e.g., communication delays). In this paper, we demonstrate that ignoring communication delays has detrimental effects on collaborations, especially in delay-sensitive tasks such as autonomous driving. To mitigate this impact, we design a delay-aware multi-agent communication model (DACOM) to adapt communication to delays. Specifically, DACOM introduces a component, TimeNet, that is responsible for adjusting the waiting time of an agent to receive messages from other agents such that the uncertainty associated with delay can be addressed. Our experiments reveal that DACOM has a non-negligible performance improvement over other mechanisms by making a better trade-off between the benefits of communication and the costs of waiting for messages., Comment: AAAI'23

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been introduced in communication networks and services to improve efficiency via self-optimization. Cooperative intelligence (CI), also known as collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence, is expected to become an integral element in next-generation networks because it can aggregate the capabilities and intelligence of multiple devices. However, privacy issues may intimidate, obstruct, and hinder the deployment of CI in practice because collaboration heavily relies on data and information sharing. Additional practical constraints in communication (e.g., limited bandwidth) further limit the performance of CI. To overcome these challenges, we propose PP-MARL, an efficient privacy-preserving learning scheme based on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). We apply and evaluate our scheme in two communication-related use cases: mobility management in drone-assisted communication and network control with edge intelligence. Simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme can achieve efficient and reliable collaboration with 1.1-6 times better privacy protection and lower overheads (e.g., 84-91% reduction in bandwidth) than state-of-the-art approaches.

Rule-based fine-grained IP geolocation methods are hard to generalize in computer networks which do not follow hypothetical rules. Recently, deep learning methods, like multi-layer perceptron (MLP), are tried to increase generalization capabilities. However, MLP is not so suitable for graph-structured data like networks. MLP treats IP addresses as isolated instances and ignores the connection information, which limits geolocation accuracy. In this work, we research how to increase the generalization capability with an emerging graph deep learning method -- Graph Neural Network (GNN). First, IP geolocation is re-formulated as an attributed graph node regression problem. Then, we propose a GNN-based IP geolocation framework named GNN-Geo. GNN-Geo consists of a preprocessor, an encoder, messaging passing (MP) layers and a decoder. The preprocessor and encoder transform measurement data into the initial node embeddings. MP layers refine the initial node embeddings by modeling the connection information. The decoder maps the refined embeddings to nodes' locations and relieves the convergence problem by considering prior knowledge. The experiments in 8 real-world IPv4/IPv6 networks in North America, Europe and Asia show the proposed GNN-Geo clearly outperforms the state-of-art rule-based and learning-based baselines. This work verifies the great potential of GNN for fine-grained IP geolocation., Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (TNSE). This is the author's version which has not been fully edited and content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TNSE.2023.3266752

In this work we describe a hyperbolic model with cell-cell repulsion with a dynamics in the population of cells. More precisely, we consider a population of cells producing a field (which we call "pressure") which induces a motion of the cells following the opposite of the gradient. The field indicates the local density of population and we assume that cells try to avoid crowded areas and prefer locally empty spaces which are far away from the carrying capacity. We analyze the well-posedness property of the associated Cauchy problem on the real line. We start from bounded initial conditions and we consider some invariant properties of the initial conditions such as the continuity, smoothness and monotonicity. We also describe in detail the behavior of the level sets near the propagating boundary of the solution and we find that an asymptotic jump is formed on the solution for a natural class of initial conditions. Finally, we prove the existence of sharp traveling waves for this model, which are particular solutions traveling at a constant speed, and argue that sharp traveling waves are necessarily discontinuous. This analysis is confirmed by numerical simulations of the PDE problem.

With the rapid development of autonomous driving, collision avoidance has attracted attention from both academia and industry. Many collision avoidance strategies have emerged in recent years, but the dynamic and complex nature of driving environment poses a challenge to develop robust collision avoidance algorithms. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a decentralized framework named RACE: Reinforced Cooperative Autonomous Vehicle Collision AvoidancE. Leveraging a hierarchical architecture we develop an algorithm named Co-DDPG to efficiently train autonomous vehicles. Through a security abiding channel, the autonomous vehicles distribute their driving policies. We use the relative distances obtained by the opponent sensors to build the VANET instead of locations, which ensures the vehicle's location privacy. With a leader-follower architecture and parameter distribution, RACE accelerates the learning of optimal policies and efficiently utilizes the remaining resources. We implement the RACE framework in the widely used TORCS simulator and conduct various experiments to measure the performance of RACE. Evaluations show that RACE quickly learns optimal driving policies and effectively avoids collisions. Moreover, RACE also scales smoothly with varying number of participating vehicles. We further compared RACE with existing autonomous driving systems and show that RACE outperforms them by experiencing 65% less collisions in the training process and exhibits improved performance under varying vehicle density.

In this work, we discuss a cell-cell repulsion population dynamic model based on a hyperbolic Keller-Segel equation with two populations. This model can well describe the cell growth and dispersion in the cell co-culture experiment in the work of Pasquier et al. \cite{Pasquier2011}. With the notion of solutions integrated along the characteristics, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the solution and the segregation property of the two species. From a numerical perspective, we can also observe that the model admits a competitive exclusion (the results are different from the corresponding ODE model). More importantly, our model shows the complexity of the short term (6 days) co-cultured cell distribution depending on the initial distribution of each species. Through numerical simulations, the impact of the initial distribution on the population ratio lies in the initial total cell number and our study shows that the population ratio is not impacted by the law of initial distribution. We also find that a fast dispersion rate gives a short-term advantage while the vital dynamic contributes to a long-term population advantage.

The notion of socioeconomic status (SES) of a person or family reflects the corresponding entity's social and economic rank in society. Such information may help applications like bank loaning decisions and provide measurable inputs for related studies like social stratification, social welfare and business planning. Traditionally, estimating SES for a large population is performed by national statistical institutes through a large number of household interviews, which is highly expensive and time-consuming. Recently researchers try to estimate SES from data sources like mobile phone call records and online social network platforms, which is much cheaper and faster. Instead of relying on these data about users' cyberspace behaviors, various alternative data sources on real-world users' behavior such as mobility may offer new insights for SES estimation. In this paper, we leverage Smart Card Data (SCD) for public transport systems which records the temporal and spatial mobility behavior of a large population of users. More specifically, we develop S2S, a deep learning based approach for estimating people's SES based on their SCD. Essentially, S2S models two types of SES-related features, namely the temporal-sequential feature and general statistical feature, and leverages deep learning for SES estimation. We evaluate our approach in an actual dataset, Shanghai SCD, which involves millions of users. The proposed model clearly outperforms several state-of-art methods in terms of various evaluation metrics., Comment: 9 pages, double column, IEEE ICCCN 2019

In this paper, we consider a nonlocal advection model for two populations on a bounded domain. The first part of the paper is devoted to the existence and uniqueness of solutions and the associated semi-flow properties. Here we use the notion of solution integrated along the characteristics. Next, by proving segregation property, we construct an energy functional to investigate the asymptotic behavior of the solution. In order to get some compactness of the positive orbit, we use the narrow convergence in the space of Young measures. By using this idea, we get a description of the asymptotic behavior of the solution in the space of Young measures. The last section of the paper is devoted to numerical simulations, which confirm and complement our theoretical results.

In this paper, we consider a stochastic epidemic model with time delay and general incidence rate. We first prove the existence and uniqueness of the global positive solution. By using the Krylov-Bogoliubov method, we obtain the existence of invariant measures. Furthermore , we study a special case where the incidence rate is bilinear with distributed time delay. When the basic reproduction number R0 < 1, the analysis of the asymptotic behavior around the disease-free equilibrium E0 is provided while when R0 > 1, we prove that the invariant measure is unique and ergodic. The numerical simulations also validate our analytical results., Comment: This article is a total of 20 pages and contains 5 figures

Mobile-edge cloud computing is a new paradigm to provide cloud computing capabilities at the edge of pervasive radio access networks in close proximity to mobile users. Aiming at provisioning flexible on-demand mobile-edge cloud service, in this paper we propose a comprehensive framework consisting of a resource-efficient computation offloading mechanism for users and a joint communication and computation (JCC) resource allocation mechanism for network operator. Specifically, we first study the resource-efficient computation offloading problem for a user, in order to reduce user's resource occupation by determining its optimal communication and computation resource profile with minimum resource occupation and meanwhile satisfying the QoS constraint. We then tackle the critical problem of user admission control for JCC resource allocation, in order to properly select the set of users for resource demand satisfaction. We show the admission control problem is NP-hard, and hence develop an efficient approximation solution of a low complexity by carefully designing the user ranking criteria and rigourously derive its performance guarantee. To prevent the manipulation that some users may untruthfully report their valuations in acquiring mobile-edge cloud service, we further resort to the powerful tool of critical value approach to design truthful pricing scheme for JCC resource allocation. Extensive performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed schemes can achieve superior performance for on-demand mobile-edge cloud computing., Comment: Xu Chen,Wenzhong Li,Sanglu Lu,Zhi Zhou,and Xiaoming Fu, "Efficient Resource Allocation for On-Demand Mobile-Edge Cloud Computing," IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, June 2018