Trajectory Planning for Hopping Rover on Small Bodies Under Pre-Collision Attitude Adjustment Modulation

Abstract: A novel pre-collision attitude adjustment (PCAA) modulation based on angular velocity and quaternions control is developed to more controllable and reliably adjust the non-spherical hopping rover's trajectory on small bodies. This corresponds to a hopping trajectory planning (HTP) framework that addresses inherent technical challenges, including attitude-trajectory coupled features, hard-to-depicting near-truth gravity and continues dynamical contact models, difficult-to-predetermine collision times with the small bodies’ surface, and complex judgments regarding whether the period of attitude adjustment is sufficient in current hops. Two main contributions are proposed, focusing on modeling and planning. To achieve a more realistic modeling of the rover's motion, its attitude-trajectory coupling dynamic model is researched, including a ground-truth irregular gravity model and continuous dynamical contact model. Additionally, a collision detection method based on the local surface smoothing technique is proposed for rapid and exact switching between the ballistic and contact motions for the subsequent planning purpose. On the other hand, redundancy planning and binary event-trigger techniques are combined for handling unpredictable available dimensions of optimization variables of PCAA-based HTP, which arise from the indeterminate scale of collision times and potential deficiency in ballistic flight time required for completing attitude maneuvers. Specifically, the solution space is preset to guarantee the unchanging dimensions of the design variables, which are activated or deactivated by coupling binary event variables for each dimension. These newly introduced events are triggered by comparing the realistic rebound time of the current hop with the necessary time for attitude maneuver, which is accurately computed by designing a first-order sliding mode controller. This approach enables an equivalent and easily implementable version of the problem to be obtained. Logically and numerically, the application of PCAA modulation is found to significantly enlarge or contract the area of the reachable region of the hopping rover and contribute to improving the convergence and reducing the relative final position error of the hopping trajectory planning problem.


Building knowledge graphs from technical documents using named entity recognition and edge weight updating neural network with triplet loss for entity normalization

Abstract: Attempts to express information from various documents in graph form are rapidly increasing. The speed and volume in which these documents are being generated call for an automated process, based on machine learning techniques, for cost-effective and timely analysis. Past studies responded to such needs by building knowledge graphs or technology trees from the bibliographic information of documents, or by relying on text mining techniques in order to extract keywords and/or phrases. While these approaches provide an intuitive glance into the technological hotspots or the key features of the select field, there still is room for improvement, especially in terms of recognizing the same entities appearing in different forms so as to interconnect closely related technological concepts properly. In this paper, we propose to build a patent knowledge network using the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent filings for the semiconductor device sector by fine-tuning Huggingface’s named entity recognition (NER) model with our novel edge weight updating neural network. For the named entity normalization, we employ edge weight updating neural network with positive and negative candidates that are chosen by substring matching techniques. Experiment results show that our proposed approach performs very competitively against the conventional keyword extraction models frequently employed in patent analysis, especially for the named entity normalization (NEN) and document retrieval tasks. By grouping entities with named entity normalization model, the resulting knowledge graph achieves higher scores in retrieval tasks. We also show that our model is robust to the out-of-vocabulary problem by employing the fine-tuned BERT NER model.


Unravelling ancient drilling techniques: A case of pottery repair in the Early European Neolithic

Abstract: • Photogrammetric techniques detected diagnostic traces of drilling procedures. • Mixed use of drilling techniques for pottery repair observed at Méhtelek-Nádas. • Preference for repairing small or medium-sized open vessels unveils a regime of value. • Evidence of technical adaptation to vessels' damage state.


Targeted electronic health record-based recruitment strategy to enhance COVID-19 vaccine response clinical research study enrollment

Abstract: Efficient recruitment of eligible participants is a significant challenge for clinical research studies. This challenge was exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic when in-person recruitment was not an option. In 2020, the University of Minnesota was tasked, as part of the National Cancer Institute's Serological Sciences Network for COVID-19 (SeroNet), to recruit participants for a longitudinal serosurveillance clinical research study with a goal of characterizing the COVID-19 vaccine-elicited immune response among immunocompromised individuals, which necessitated reliance on non-traditional strategies for participant recruitment. To meet our enrollment target of 300 transplant patients, 300 cancer patients, 100 persons living with HIV, and 200 immunocompetent individuals, we utilized targeted electronic health record (EHR)-based recruitment in addition to traditional recruitment tools, which was an effective combination of recruitment strategies. A significant advantage of patient portal messaging or other digital recruitment strategies such as email communication is timing. We reached 85 % (769 out of 900) of our enrollment target within one year with a 14.3 % response rate to invitations to participate in our study. This achievement is perhaps more salient given the COVID-19 pandemic-related constraints within which we were operating. We demonstrated that the EHR can be leveraged to quickly identify potentially eligible study participants either via EHR communication or mail. We also illustrate how the online portal MyChart can be used to efficiently send targeted recruitment messages.


Sparse regularized correlation filter for UAV object tracking with adaptive contextual learning and keyfilter selection

Abstract: Recently, correlation filter has been widely applied in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking due to its high frame rates, robustness and low calculation resources. However, it is fragile because of two inherent defects, i.e, boundary effect and filter corruption. To handle them, in this work, we propose a novel ℓ1 regularization correlation filter with adaptive contextual learning and keyfilter selection for UAV tracking. Firstly, we adaptively detect the positions of effective contextual distractors by the aid of the distribution of local maximum values on the response map of current frame which is generated by using the previous correlation filter model. Next, we eliminate inconsistent labels for the tracked target by removing one on each distractor and develop a new score scheme for each distractor. Then, we can select the keyfilter from the filters pool by finding the maximal similarity between the target at the current frame and the target template corresponding to each filter in the filters pool. Finally, quantitative and qualitative experiments on three authoritative UAV datasets show that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art tracking methods based on correlation filter framework.


Dynamic receptive field adaptation for scene text recognition

Abstract: Scene text recognition methods of the Encoder–Decoder framework, generally assume that the proportion of characters in the same text instance are basically the same. However, this assumption does not always hold in the context of complex scene images. For adaptively revising the receptive field according to the different font in the scene text image, we propose a Dynamic Receptive Field Adaption Framework which consists of Memory Attention (MA) module and Dynamic Feature Adaptive (DFA) module. MA percepts the historical location information to adapt to the change of character position in the decoder. DFA selects the most distinguishing features from feature maps of different levels dynamically. Additionally, MA and DFA can be easily extended to the existing attention-based and transformer-based text recognition methods to improve their performance. With extension experiments on public benchmark datasets, including IIIT-5K, SVT, SVTP, CUTE80, RECTS, LSVT, and RCTW, our method has shown effectiveness and robustness.


RelJoin: Relative-cost-based Selection of Distributed Join Methods for Query Plan Optimization

Abstract: Selecting appropriate distributed join methods for logical join operations in a query plan is crucial for the performance of data-intensive scalable computing (DISC). Different network communication patterns in the data exchange phase generate varying network communication workloads and significantly affect the distributed join performance. However, most cost-based query optimizers focus on the local computing cost and do not precisely model the network communication cost. We propose a cost model for various distributed join methods to optimize join queries in DISC platforms. Our method precisely measures the network and local computing workloads in different execution phases, using information on the size and cardinality statistics of datasets and cluster join parallelism. Our cost model reveals the importance of the relative size of the joining datasets. We implement an efficient distributed join selection strategy, known as RelJoin in SparkSQL, which is an industry-prevalent distributed data processing framework. RelJoin uses runtime adaptive statistics for accurate cost estimation and selects optimal distributed join methods for logical joins to optimize the physical query plan. The evaluation results on the TPC-DS benchmark show that RelJoin performs best in 62 of the 97 queries and can reduce the average query time by 21% compared with other strategies.1


Experimental evaluation of RISC-V micro-architecture against fault injection attack

Abstract: Today, the use of embedded processors is increasing dramatically and they are used in all aspects from our daily life to security applications. Physical access to hardware has made the hardware security a major concern. Hardware attacks compromise the hardware security by physically accessing target devices. Among the available techniques for hardware attacks, Fault Injection Attacks (FIAs), such as clock glitching, are one of the most harmful types of non-invasive attacks that can disrupt the operation of an embedded system. Thus, it will be important and fundamental to evaluate embedded software programs before using them in critical applications and check their vulnerability against fault injection attacks. However, it is often difficult for software developers to assess vulnerabilities. In this paper, an easy-to-use platform is presented to facilitate the process of evaluating the vulnerability of programs running on embedded processors against clock glitching attacks. Our experimental results show the vulnerability window of RISC-V micro-architecture for different high-level C-functions. The results of this research can help the developers of embedded systems that are used in security applications to evaluate their system against clock glitching attacks with the least cost in a short time.


The evaluation of innovation ability of China's information technology application innovation enterprises based on cloud modeling

Abstract: This paper adopts the theoretical method of the cloud model to establish the evaluation index system. It tests it through examples, and the results show that the cloud model has a flexible conversion function in qualitative description and quantitative expression, and the evaluation results obtained can be visualized through graphs. It is concluded that the evaluation of the technology application innovation industry (ITAI) enterprise's innovation power by using the cloud modeling method can reflect the current level of the ITAI enterprise's innovation power more realistically, which is helpful to find out the innovation path of the ITAI enterprise.


Swarm Self-supervised Hypergraph Embedding for Recommendation

Abstract: The information era brings both opportunities and challenges to information services. Confronting information overload, recommendation technology is dedicated to filtering personalized content to meet users’ requirements. The extremely sparse interaction records and their imbalanced distribution become a big obstacle to building a high-quality recommendation model. In this article, we propose a swarm self-supervised hypergraph embedding (SHE) model to predict users’ interests by hypergraph convolution and self-supervised discrimination. SHE builds a hypergraph with multiple interest clues to alleviate the interaction sparsity issue and performs interest propagation to embed CF signals in hybrid learning on the hypergraph. It follows an auxiliary local view by similar hypergraph construction and interest propagation to restrain unnecessary propagation between user swarms. Besides, interest contrast further inserts self-discrimination to deal with long-tail bias issue and enhance interest modeling, which aid recommendation by a multi-task learning optimization. Experiments on public datasets show that the proposed SHE outperforms the state-of-the-art models demonstrating the effectiveness of hypergraph-based interest propagation and swarm-aware interest contrast to enhance embedding for recommendation.


Distributional Learning for Network Alignment with Global Constraints

Abstract: Network alignment, pairing corresponding nodes across the source and target networks, plays an important role in many data mining tasks. Extensive studies focus on learning node embeddings across different networks in a unified space. However, these methods have not taken the large structural discrepancy between aligned nodes into account and, thus, are largely confined by the deterministic representations of nodes. In this work, we propose a novel network alignment framework highlighted by distributional learning and globally optimal alignment. By modeling the uncertainty of each node by Gaussian distribution, our framework builds similarity matrices on the Wasserstein distance between distributions and applies Sinkhorn operation, which learns the globally optimal mapping in an end-to-end fashion. We show that each integrated part of the framework contributes to the overall performance. Under a variety of experimental settings, our alignment framework shows superior accuracy and efficiency to the state-of-the-art.


Enhancing 6G network security: GANs for pilot contamination attack detection in massive MIMO systems

Abstract: Accurate channel estimation at the base station (BS) is crucial for reliable, high-throughput communication in massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. However, the process of estimating channel matrices in massive MIMO systems is prone to pilot contamination attacks. These attacks not only degrade the efficiency of channel estimation but also increase the probability of information leakage. In this paper, a method is being proposed for detecting pilot contamination signals using a deep learning model, namely a generative adversarial network (GAN), at the BS of a massive MIMO system. GAN comprises two interconnected models, the first model is the generator, which creates synthetic samples, and the second model is the discriminator, which distinguishes between real and generator-generated samples. Residual block-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) like ResNet and reverse ResNet are implemented as discriminator model of GAN for improving the detection of pilot-contaminated signals. The generator, structured as an autoencoder, generates artificial data resembling real data from noisy signals. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model effectively identifies the pilot-contaminated attacks; this effectiveness is evaluated through performance matrices called accuracy and loss function. Furthermore, the performance of the model is observed by varying the number of BS antennas and pilot lengths.


Using Neural and Graph Neural Recommender systems to Overcome Choice Overload: Evidence from a Music Education Platform

Abstract: The application of recommendation technologies has been crucial in the promotion of physical and digital content across numerous global platforms such as Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. Our study aims to investigate the advantages of employing recommendation technologies on educational platforms, with a particular focus on an educational platform for learning and practicing music. Our research is based on data from Tomplay, a music platform that offers sheet music with professional audio recordings, enabling users to discover and practice music content at varying levels of difficulty. Through our analysis, we emphasize the distinct interaction patterns on educational platforms like Tomplay, which we compare with other commonly used recommendation datasets. We find that interactions are comparatively sparse on educational platforms, with users often focusing on specific content as they learn, rather than interacting with a broader range of material. Therefore, our primary goal is to address the issue of data sparsity. We achieve this through entity resolution principles and propose a neural network (NN)-based recommendation model. Further, we improve this model by utilizing graph neural networks (GNNs), which provide superior predictive accuracy compared to NNs. Notably, our study demonstrates that GNNs are highly effective even for users with little or no historical preferences (cold-start problem). Our cold-start experiments also provide valuable insights into an independent issue, namely, the number of historical interactions needed by a recommendation model to gain a comprehensive understanding of a user. Our findings demonstrate that a platform acquires a solid knowledge of a user’s general preferences and characteristics with 50 past interactions. Overall, our study makes significant contributions to information systems research on business analytics and prescriptive analytics. Moreover, our framework and evaluation results offer implications for various stakeholders, including online educational institutions, education policymakers, and learning platform users.


A fully secure lattice-based signcryption with designated equality test in standard model

Abstract: In hospital information systems, large volumes of electronic diagnostic records (EDRs) take up most of the storage space. While cloud server providers can reduce the local storage burden on hospitals and provide data-sharing services, the potential threat of sensitive data leakage and non-traceability of diagnoses prevents hospitals from uploading patients' diagnostic records to remote cloud servers directly. Therefore, to address security and traceability issues, we propose a new construction of post-quantum secure signcryption scheme with a designated equality test based on lattices (LB-SCDET) in this paper. Our LB-SCDET scheme allows a designated tester to perform equality tests on signcrypt-ciphertexts of EDRs without leaking what the EDRs actually are. Compared to the recent LB-SCET scheme proposed by Le et al., our LB-SCDET scheme implements a designated mechanism and is secure against offline message recovery attacks (OMRA). The comparison shows that our scheme enjoys a higher level of security, albeit the ciphertext size is slightly larger. Finally, we prove the scheme to be secure under the hardness of the Learning-with-Errors problem and unidirectionality of the Short-Integer-Solution problem. To be of independent interest, we show that the LB-SCET scheme fails to achieve the claimed IND-CCA security.


A dynamic adaptive multi-view fusion graph convolutional network recommendation model with dilated mask convolution mechanism

Abstract: Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) has shown promise in recommendation systems. However, a critical issue known as the over-smoothing problem has been identified in GCN models. This problem arises as the number of layers in the model increases, leading to a decrease in model performance due to node representations becoming excessively similar. Various strategies have been proposed to combat this issue, like preserving node-specific information or introducing high-order neighbors. Unfortunately, these approaches overlook a crucial factor known as Visual Overlap Strength (VOS), which plays a significant role in the over-smoothing problem. VOS measures the extent of neighborhood overlap between nodes in the graph. To address the over-smoothing problem, this paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the issue and introduces the concept of VOS between nodes. We present a novel solution in the form of the Dynamic Adaptive Multi-view fusion GCN model with dilAted maSK convolution mechanism (DAMASK-GCN). This model dynamically adjusts the perceptual field of nodes, captures high-order information, and alleviates the impact of VOS through the utilization of dilated mask convolution and an adaptive attention fusion mechanism. Extensive experiments on six popular recommendation system datasets demonstrate DAMASK-GCN's effectiveness in reducing over-smoothing and outperforming existing GCN-based recommendation models.


A Kernel Measure of Dissimilarity between <i>M</i> Distributions

Abstract: Given M≥2 distributions defined on a general measurable space, we introduce a nonparametric (kernel) measure of multi-sample dissimilarity (KMD)—a parameter that quantifies the difference between the M distributions. The population KMD, which takes values between 0 and 1, is 0 if and only if all the M distributions are the same, and 1 if and only if all the distributions are mutually singular. Moreover, KMD possesses many properties commonly associated with f-divergences such as the data processing inequality and invariance under bijective transformations. The sample estimate of KMD, based on independent observations from the M distributions, can be computed in near linear time (up to logarithmic factors) using k-nearest neighbor graphs (for k≥1 fixed). We develop an easily implementable test for the equality of M distributions based on the sample KMD that is consistent against all alternatives where at least two distributions are not equal. We prove central limit theorems for the sample KMD, and provide a complete characterization of the asymptotic power of the test, as well as its detection threshold. The usefulness of our measure is demonstrated via real and synthetic data examples; our method is also implemented in an R package. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.


Fitting Latent Non-Gaussian Models Using Variational Bayes and Laplace Approximations

Abstract: Latent Gaussian models (LGMs) are perhaps the most commonly used class of models in statistical applications. Nevertheless, in areas ranging from longitudinal studies in biostatistics to geostatistics, it is easy to find datasets that contain inherently non-Gaussian features, such as sudden jumps or spikes, that adversely affect the inferences and predictions made using an LGM. These datasets require more general latent non-Gaussian models (LnGMs) that can handle automatically these non-Gaussian features. However, fast implementation and easy-to-use software are lacking, preventing the broad applicability of LnGMs. In this article, we derive variational Bayes algorithms for fast and scalable inference of LnGMs. The approximation leads to an LGM that downweights extreme events in the latent process, reducing their influence and leading to more robust inferences. It can be applied to a wide range of models, such as autoregressive processes for time series, simultaneous autoregressive models for areal data, and spatial Matérn models. To facilitate Bayesian inference, we introduce the ngvb package, where LGMs implemented in R-INLA can be easily extended to LnGMs by adding a single line of code. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.


Variational quantum algorithms for simulation of Lindblad dynamics

Abstract: Abstract We introduce variational hybrid classical-quantum algorithms to simulate the Lindblad master equation and its adjoint for time-evolving Markovian open quantum systems and quantum observables. Our methods are based on a direct representation of density matrices and quantum observables as quantum superstates. We design and optimize low-depth variational quantum circuits that efficiently capture the unitary and non-unitary dynamics of the solutions. We benchmark and test the algorithms on different models and system sizes, showing their potential for utility with near-future hardware.


A Machine Learning–Based Readability Model for Gujarati Texts

Abstract: This study aims to develop a machine learning–based model to predict the readability of Gujarati texts. The dataset was 50 prose passages from Gujarati literature. Fourteen lexical and syntactic readability text features were extracted from the dataset using a machine learning algorithm of the unigram parts of speech tagger and three Python programming scripts. Two samples of native Gujarati speaking secondary and higher education students rated the Gujarati texts for readability judgment on a 10-point scale of “easy” to “difficult” with the interrater agreement. After dimensionality reduction, seven text features as the independent variables and the mean readability rating as the dependent variable were used to train the readability model. As the students' level of education and gender were related to their readability rating, four readability models for school students, university students, male students, and female students were trained with a backward stepwise multiple linear regression algorithm of supervised machine learning. The trained model is comparable across the raters’ groups. The best model is the university students’ readability rating model. The model is cross-validated. It explains 91% and 88% of the variance in readability ratings at training and cross-validation, respectively, and its effect size and power are large and high.


An Ensemble Strategy with Gradient Conflict for Multi-Domain Neural Machine Translation

Abstract: Multi-domain neural machine translation aims to construct a unified neural machine translation model to translate sentences across various domains. Nevertheless, previous studies have one limitation is the incapacity to acquire both domain-general and domain-specific representations concurrently. To this end, we propose an ensemble strategy with gradient conflict for multi-domain neural machine translation that automatically learns model parameters by identifying both domain-shared and domain-specific features. Specifically, our approach consists of (1) a parameter-sharing framework, where the parameters of all the layers are originally shared and equivalent to each domain, and (2) ensemble strategy, in which we design an Extra Ensemble strategy via a piecewise condition function to learn direction and distance-based gradient conflict. In addition, we give a detailed theoretical analysis of the gradient conflict to further validate the effectiveness of our approach. Experimental results on two multi-domain datasets show the superior performance of our proposed model compared to previous work.


Ordering cross-spread gathers

Abstract: Seismic processing on cross-spread gathers is a valuable but underexploited strategy. To do it properly, sources from a single source line and receivers from a single receiver line must be ordered in a physically sensible way, so that adjacent sources or receivers on a surface diagram are physically near each other. However, determining such an ordering is a challenge on irregularly acquired land data. I develop novel automatic ordering algorithms using tools from graph theory that minimize large gaps and preserve the sequential patterns found even in highly irregular acquisition. Java source code is available.


A survey of meta-heuristic algorithms in optimization of space scale expansion

Abstract: Optimization problem of space scale expansion widely exists in practical applications, such as transportation, logistics, scheduling, social networks, etc. According to different expansion directions, the problem of space scale expansion can be divided into three categories: expansion of decision space, expansion of objective space and simultaneous expansion of decision space and objective space. These three types of problems correspond to large-scale global optimization problem, multi/many-objective optimization problem, and large-scale multi/many-objective optimization problem, respectively. Driven by the above problems, meta-heuristic algorithms (MHAs) with scalable characteristics have received extensive attention in this field. This paper summarizes the research progress of MHAs for space scale expansion optimization from three perspectives. Starting from the key difficulties of the optimization problem, the challenges brought by the expansion of the space scale to the existing MHAs are emphatically analyzed. From the perspective of methodology, the optimization methods of MHAs are divided into three modules: simplify problem structure, improve algorithm performance and expand application fields. Based on the review of performance evaluation benchmark problems, the simulation degree of various test suites for different practical application problems is summarized. In addition, some remaining challenges and future research directions on optimization of space scale expansion are discussed and analyzed.


Intrusion detection based on phishing detection with machine learning

Abstract: Machine learning technique which uses artificial neural networks to learn representations. Phishing is a form of fraud in which the attacker tries to learn credential information from the websites. Web phishing is to steal sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by way of impersonating a authorized entity. The Hybrid Ensemble Feature Selection is a new feature selection method for machine learning-based phishing detection systems (HEFS). The first step of HEFS involves using a novel Cumulative Distribution Function gradient (CDF-g) algorithm to generate primary feature subsets, which are then fed into a data perturbation ensemble to generate secondary feature subsets. We present the results of our approach and compare them to a few previous studies, with the paper focusing primarily on phishing urls for detecting the unauthorised one by using phishing detection method.


Capturing natural position relationships: A neural differential equation approach

Abstract: The Transformer has emerged as the predominant model in Natural Language Processing due to its exceptional performance in various sequence modeling tasks, particularly in handling long-term dependencies. However, the traditional absolute and relative position encoding methods, which do not learn from data, tend to ignore the inherent structure of natural language sequences due to the position embedding layer at the input end of the Transformer model. This paper introduces a novel learnable neural Ordinary Differential Equation Position Encoding (ODEPE) method that can implicitly capture the natural position relationships within a sequence without requiring additional position embeddings. ODEPE can model continuous sequences and leverage differential equations to simulate the evolution of position information along the sequence, enabling position information to flow seamlessly between sequences. Additionally, a highly effective recurrent attention framework is proposed, which hybridizes attention with the ODEPE method to improve model performance. Compared to the Transformer-based sequence modeling network, our framework demonstrates a performance improvement of 24.0 points on the WikiText-103 dataset, while also achieving a performance improvement of 1.06 points on the Enwik8 dataset. This corresponds to an improvement of 4.9% and 0.17%, respectively.


Optimisation of classification methods to differentiate morphologically-similar pollen grains from FT-IR spectra

Abstract: A growing body of research is demonstrating the potential of Fourier-Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) to identify and differentiate morphologically similar pollen taxa. The Poaceae (grass) family is a large and complex with morphologically similar pollen grains. It is not possible to use traditional light microscopy to differentiate Poaceae species, or genus, based on pollen morphological characteristics. This research presents a study of five species from the Poaceae family found across a wide variety of different moorland vegetation communities, to test the extent to which FT-IR microspectroscopy can be used to separate and identify these species and develop statistical approaches for the analyses of these data. Moorland grasses are of particular importance to assess conservation status and baselines in fragile and scarce vegetation communities, whose vegetation composition in the past remains cryptic owing to low taxonomic resolution. Non-differentiated and second derivative spectra were combined with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) to determine whether species had different chemical compositions and would cluster. Decision trees and random forest were used to classify each species and demonstrated 100% successful classification rate. This success demonstrates that using FT-IR microspectroscopy alongside spectral pre-processing and multivariate analysis can successfully identify and separate these moorland Poaceae species and has the clear potential to improve taxonomic resolution and classification of fossil pollen records. This will improve our understanding of how past land-use practice has shaped upland communities, provide more detailed ecologically-relevant palaeoecological information, and be utilised for the restoration and conservation of upland habitats.


Adaptive multi-channel contrastive graph convolutional network with graph and feature fusion

Abstract: The domain of multi-view semi-supervised classification is an appealing topic in real-world applications. Due to the powerful capability of gathering information from neighbors, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has become a hotspot in the classification task. However, most of multi-view classification works based on GCN only assign weights for feature fusion, and directly consider the weighted sum of the adjacency matrices, ignoring the interaction and correlation among features. These may be problematic since aggregating the matrices from less relevant views may destroy the original topology space, leading to undesired performance. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, this paper presents an Adaptive Multi-Channel Graph Convolutional Network (AMC-GCN). To extract the interactive information, AMC-GCN designs a deep interactive feature integration network to incorporate consensus and complementary information. To fuse the graph structures, AMC-GCN exploits the relevance between views and imposes an adjacency matrix fusion network on constructing multiple GCN channels, thereby delivering discriminative information on graphs. To enhance the homogeneity of the framework, AMC-GCN applies a contrastive loss to joint learning during the optimization for classification. With these considerations, AMC-GCN exploits relevant and interactive information between views to promote graph and feature fusion. Substantial experimental results on real-world datasets verify the superiority of AMC-GCN.


Deep semi-supervised clustering based on pairwise constraints and sample similarity

Abstract: Semi-supervised clustering methods enhance the performance of completely unsupervised clustering tasks by incorporating pairwise relationship information from a subset of samples. However, previous methods based on pairwise constraints have struggled to effectively leverage available prior knowledge and fully exploit the similarity relationships between samples. To address these issues, this paper proposes an advanced approach called Deep Semi-Supervised Clustering based on Pairwise Constraints and Sample Similarity (DSCPS). Specifically, DSCPS consists of two training stages: the coarse clustering stage and the fine clustering stage. In the coarse clustering stage, DSCPS assigns probabilities to each sample indicating its belongingness to each cluster by computing the distance to the cluster centers. In the fine clustering stage, DSCPS introduces a predictor network in the clustering space to predict the class labels of each sample. Simultaneously, the thresholds for similarity and dissimilarity between samples are determined based on pairwise constraints. Finally, the encoder and prediction network are further optimized using sample similarity relationships and pairwise constraints as loss conditions, resulting in the final clustering results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DSCPS outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving the highest performance.


A Graph Neural Network with Context Filtering and Feature Correction for Conversational Emotion Recognition

Abstract: Conversational emotion recognition represents an important machine-learning problem with a wide variety of deployment possibilities. The key challenge in this area is how to properly capture the key conversational aspects that facilitate reliable emotion recognition, including utterance semantics, temporal order, informative contextual cues, speaker interactions as well as other relevant factors. In this paper, we present a novel Graph Neural Network approach for conversational emotion recognition at the utterance level. Our method addresses the outlined challenges and represents conversations in the form of graph structures that naturally encode temporal order, speaker dependencies, and even long-distance context. To efficiently capture the semantic content of the conversations, we leverage the zero-shot feature-extraction capabilities of pre-trained large-scale language models and then integrate two key contributions into the graph neural network to ensure competitive recognition results. The first is a novel context filter that establishes meaningful utterance dependencies for the graph construction procedure and removes low-relevance and uninformative utterances from being used as a source of contextual information for the recognition task. The second contribution is a feature-correction procedure that adjusts the information content in the generated feature representations through a gating mechanism to improve their discriminative power and reduce emotion-prediction errors. We conduct extensive experiments on four commonly used conversational datasets, i.e., IEMOCAP, MELD, Dailydialog, and EmoryNLP, to demonstrate the capabilities of the developed graph neural network with context filtering and error-correction capabilities. The results of the experiments point to highly promising performance, especially when compared to state-of-the-art competitors from the literature.


Topological equivalence classification and enumeration of n-input linearly separable Boolean functions

Abstract: A perceptron, as an “artificial neuron”, plays a crucial role in the research of neural networks. As a mathematical model of linearly separable Boolean functions, perceptron neurons can realize any nonlinearly separable Boolean function. Linearly separable Boolean functions can be divided into a smaller number of the same functional classes. These functional classes are equivalent to the core basic units (AND, NOT, OR, and other components) that make up the circuit. Therefore, the research on the classification problem of linearly separable Boolean functions is very important. In this study, a novel algorithm, called a topological equivalence classification algorithm, is proposed for classifying balanced linearly separable Boolean functions. By the proposed algorithm, the total number of the topological equivalence classes and the number of balanced linearly separable Boolean functions in each of the topological equivalence classes are obtained. According to the one-to-one correspondence between n-input balanced linearly separable Boolean functions and n-1-input linearly separable Boolean functions, we get the topological classification of linearly separable Boolean functions. As for n=9, the accurate results of classification and counting the number of linearly separable Boolean functions are obtained: There are 53,063,448 topological equivalence classes, and the total number of linearly separable Boolean functions is 144,380,202,286,068,288.


Applied geochemistry for the discrimination between mafic and ultramafic rocks in Cu-Ni-PGE-bearing layered complexes: A case study at the la Jovita-Las Águilas belt, Sierra Grande de San Luis, Argentina

Abstract: The Virorco intrusive body is comprised in La Jovita-Las Águilas mafic-ultramafic belt, Sierra Grande de San Luis, Argentina. The ultramafic rocks of this belt carry a base metal sulphide mineralization and platinum group minerals. Macroscopic description of mafic and ultramafic rocks, done by the mining exploration companies, can not differentiate the mineral percentages. Therefore, considering the geochemical composition of the already classified mafic-ultramafic rocks of surface samples from the mentioned belt, we established compositional ranges of geochemical parameters (MgO, Al2O3, Na2O, Sr and Cr) for both mafic and ultramafic rocks. Linking the geochemical data of drill cores made by Castillian Resources Corp. company over the Virorco body, with the mentioned ranges, it was possible to discriminate between mafic and ultramafic rocks present in such drill cores. This provides a useful prospecting tool to identify the mafic and ultramafic units that carry the mineralization and to correlate mineralized units from the different drill cores. This method can be applied, not only on the bodies of the mentioned belt, but in other similar deposits elsewhere. The methodology proposed in the present contribution was validated by the Machine Learning algorithm Random Forrest with a 91% success rate.


Local centric energy estimate model for clean and affordable power generation in a solar integrated passenger vehicle

Abstract: Clean energy generation from Vehicle Integrated Photovoltaic (VIPV) technology is prudent to foster future smart transportation in passenger cars. A VIPV vehicle remits a reliable energy generation scenario in static and dynamic modes. The estimation of irradiance hovering over a vehicle's surface exposure metrics is based on the diurnal sun-path at the local centric coordinate system (LCCS). By inferring the locations' analemma curve, the irradiance patterns can be derived. Literature reports that the irradiance patterns on a parked static vehicle (PSV) are unexplored till date, particularly under southern Indian conditions. In this study, we propose an LCCS for a static vehicle to understand the irradiance over the vehicle when parked in two different cardinal orientations at Vellore (12.9717° N, 79.1654° E), India. Further, experiments were conducted over a PSV facing due south of the location to validate the theoretical claims and factual irradiance patterns. The results reveal that theoretical observations and energy estimates were in proximity with experimental measurements by a deviation of <15 %. An estimated solar potential energy yield of up to 1.66 to 2.09 kWh per day can be attained from a PSV when integrated with thin-film flexible solar modules over the lateral surfaces.


Granular fuzzy rule-based model construction under the collaboration of multiple organizations

Abstract: In the real world, phenomena are often observed and recorded by multiple organizations which results in multiple sources of data. When dealing with such data, the centralized modeling approach aims to achieve collaborative modeling by fusing multiple sources of data into a single data set, which may pose challenges to data privacy. Unlike centralized modeling, the distributed modeling approach can effectively solve the privacy issue. However, modeling approaches based on this idea still suffer from either low prediction accuracy or high communication costs. In this study, we propose a collaborative modeling strategy for multi-source data based on fuzzy rule-based models (FRBMs) to balance the needs of both model prediction accuracy and efficiency. First, we adopt the concept and algorithm of collaborative fuzzy clustering (CFC) to improve prediction accuracy and reduce communication costs by improving the CFC algorithm. Then, we construct a granular FRBM for multi-source data based on the principle of justifiable granularity (PJG) by integrating local models into a more robust and perfect global model. Finally, we improve the performance evaluation index of the existing granular FRBM and propose two model optimization schemes to further improve the performance of the model. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and publicly available data sets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.


Semi-supervised generative adversarial networks for improved colorectal polyp classification using histopathological images

Abstract: Early and accurate detection of dysplasia in colorectal polyps can improve prognosis and increase survival chances. Recently, automated learning-based approaches using histopathological images have been adopted for improved classification of polyps. The supervised learning approaches do not provide a reliable classification performance due to limited annotated samples. But, in unsupervised learning, some hidden features are extracted from the unlabeled data which may not be effective in discriminating the complex patterns of the dataset. A generative adversarial network (GAN) is proposed in this work based on a semi-supervised framework for colorectal polyp classification using histopathological images. Our framework learns the discriminating features in an adversarial manner from the limited labeled and huge unlabeled data. In the supervised mode, the discriminator of the proposed model is trained to classify the real histopathological images, whereas, in the unsupervised mode, it tries to discriminate between real and fake images, similar to the classical GAN network. By training in unsupervised mode, the discriminator can identify and extract the subtle features from unlabeled images, to develop a generalized robust model. Our technique yielded classification accuracies of 87.50% and 76.25% using 25% and 50% majority voting schemes, respectively, on the UniToPatho dataset.


A provably stable neural network Turing Machine with finite precision and time

Abstract: We introduce a neural stack architecture with a differentiable parameterized stack operator approximating stack push and pop operations. We prove the stability of this stack architecture for arbitrarily many stack operations, showing that the state of the neural stack still closely resembles the state of a discrete stack. Using the neural stack with a recurrent neural network, we devise a neural network Pushdown Automaton (nnPDA). A new theoretical bound shows that an nnPDA can recognize any PDA using only finite precision state neurons in finite time. By using two neural stacks to construct a neural tape together with a recurrent neural network, we define a neural network Turing Machine (nnTM). Just like the neural stack, we show these architectures are also stable. Furthermore, we show the nnTM is Turing complete. It requires finite precision state neurons with an arbitrary number of stack neurons to recognize any TM in finite time, thus providing a new and much stronger computational upper bound for neural networks that are Turing complete.


Enhancing logistic chaotic map for improved cryptographic security in random number generation

Abstract: The use of chaotic maps for cryptography is advantageous due to their desirable characteristics, including complexity, unpredictability, sensitivity to initial values and control parameters, and ergodicity. However, most chaos-based systems have limitations that make them impractical, such as low efficiency, insufficient security, and small keyspace. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes an enhanced logistic map (ELM), a one-dimensional digital chaotic map based on the logistic map and anterior perturbation method. The ELM map leverages perturbations of chaotic states, leading to enhanced randomness, data distribution, and low correlation, with improved security properties. The ELM map is simple yet capable of generating large chaotic behavior. The findings show that the ELM map is highly secure and can be used in various cryptographic applications. A new pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) is also proposed based on a combination of ELM chaotic maps. The resulting PRNG is highly dependent on the chaotic properties of the maps and the combination rule. Statistical analysis shows that the proposed method is statistically secure, highlighting the potential of the ELM map for other cryptographic applications.


Identifying wind turbines from multiresolution and multibackground remote sensing imagery

Abstract: The wind energy industry has expanded in recent years. Promotion of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is expected to further increase the scale of the wind energy industry. Determining the location and quantity of wind turbines is crucial for monitoring the development status of the wind energy industry and evaluating wind energy production. In this study, we propose a method for simultaneously detecting and positioning wind turbines in remote sensing images, namely, Wind Turbine YOLO (WT-YOLO), based on the You Only Look Once version 5 model (YOLOv5). The wind turbine hub, base, and shadow hub are treated as key points in the proposed method. Regression terms are incorporated into the head of the YOLOv5 basic framework to predict the location of these three key points. The base point is utilized to determine the exact position of the wind turbine. A multibackground and multiresolution wind-turbine image dataset is constructed by sampling high-resolution images from Google Earth. The WT-YOLO method outperforms existing methods in both wind turbine detection and positioning on different types of land cover backgrounds and multiresolution images of the constructed dataset. In the spatial resolution range of 0.6 m to 5.4 m, WT-YOLO exhibits enhanced wind-turbine detection, where the average precision (AP) is 5.92 % to 15.43 % higher than that of existing wind-turbine detection methods. Wind-turbine positioning by WT-YOLO has a mean distance error (MDE) that is 16.06 m to 21.59 m lower than that of existing wind-turbine positioning methods. A comparative analysis showed that the shadow and the three key points are effective features for wind-turbine detection. The proposed WT-YOLO model can support detection, positioning and counting for wind turbines worldwide.


Camera-aware re-identification feature for multi-target multi-camera tracking

Abstract: Multi-target multi-camera tracking is an important research topic in intelligent surveillance to achieve re-identification (Re-ID) of moving targets across different cameras. However, Re-ID faces significant challenges owing to variations in cameras/viewpoints, making it difficult to learn discriminative feature representations for targets captured from different cameras/viewpoints. A new pipeline is introduced by balancing the across-cameras sample feature space in camera-aware Re-ID framework. Specifically, different sampling strategies play a crucial role on the performance under the same baseline and identify the feature discrepancy between cameras/viewpoints as a crucial factor. This proposed sampling strategy is called camera equalization sampling to learn enhanced feature disparities, which balances cameras under identity rather than randomly sampling in a batch. The sampled images are combined with non visual cues(cameras position encoding) to reduce intra class variance. For the mechanism of camera equalization sampling, the improved camera centric loss function can better reduce the negative impact of individual samples and provide stable learnable features.Our proposed method consists of three modules. (i) Camera equalization (CE) ensures that each batch collects at least one image from each camera for every identity, thereby enabling robust features. (ii) Camera position embedding (CPE) mitigates the scene bias caused by different cameras/viewpoints by encoding camera indices. (iii) Camera Center triplet loss(CCL) based on CE improves higher robustness to outliers and noisy labels. We demonstrated the proposed method's effectiveness on popular datasets such as DukeMTMC-reID, Market-1501, and MSMT17, achieving state-of-the-art performance.


Service application model design for users using fuzzy semantic ontology model in cloud computing

Abstract: In an era marked by the widespread adoption of cloud services, individuals and businesses face the daunting task of navigating a complex landscape to make informed choices. The inherent opacity of the cloud service environment underscores the need for methods that can effectively handle imprecise information. This research presents a novel and superior approach to aid customers in selecting the most suitable cloud services. Our work introduces a distinctive fuzzy decision-making paradigm, surpassing current methodologies. We leverage an innovative analytic hierarchy process technique to quantify the semantic similarity between concepts and employ a fuzzy ontology to elucidate the uncertain relationships among database items, facilitating precise service matching. Furthermore, we present a multi-faceted evaluation framework for ranking cloud services. To substantiate the efficacy of our similarity matching based on the fuzzy ontology, we conduct comprehensive testing. The results of our experiments provide compelling evidence of the viability and effectiveness of the proposed method. This research offers a valuable contribution to the challenging realm of cloud service selection, empowering individuals and organizations to make well-informed decisions amidst the cloud service abundance.


Multi-scale fusion public gathering recognition based on residual network

Abstract: With the rapid economic development and high concentration of urban population, people’s income level and quality of life continue to improve, resulting in more and more crowded scenes caused by people going out. Especially in urban commercial centers, transportation hubs, sports venues during important events, tourist attractions, etc., crowd gatherings occur frequently. However, accidents involving crowd gatherings in public places occur frequently, causing heavy casualties and property losses. Therefore, for crowd recognition, this paper proposes a new method to accurately estimate the number of dense crowds. In this method, a density map with accurate pedestrian locations is first generated using the focal inverse distance transform and used as ground truth labels for network training. Then, a multi-scale feature fusion algorithm based on residual network is designed, combining spatial and channel attention mechanisms to improve the accuracy and stability of crowd density estimation. In dense crowds, the phenomenon of overlapping and occlusion of people is very common and serious, making it difficult for existing pedestrian detection methods to distinguish each individual and accurately count the flow of people. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a density map-based method that uses a local maximum detection strategy and a K-nearest neighbor algorithm to convert the density map into the corresponding dense head bounding box. This method can effectively reduce the impact of occlusion and improve the accuracy of people counting. In order to further improve the estimation accuracy, a pattern recognition density peak clustering algorithm is introduced to study the clustered crowds. By treating the head bounding box as an element point, the distance between each element point is calculated, and the density of each point is calculated. Then perform clustering to find the cluster center with the highest density in each class. Finally, by comparing the density of each cluster center with the corresponding density threshold and adopting the corresponding decision-making method, the accuracy of people counting is further improved.


GDJN: Global density joined network for abnormal event detection in surveillance videos

Abstract: Detecting abnormal events in surveillance involves identifying unexpected behavior through video analysis. This involves recognizing patterns or deviations from normal behavior and taking actions to mitigate potential risks. However, the distribution of data can change over time, leading to concept drift, which can make it challenging to accurately detect abnormal events. To address this issue, a new approach using a global density network (GDN) has been proposed. The GDN allows for more efficient identification of object distributions in surveillance videos, leading to improved accuracy in abnormal event detection. The proposed method combines features extracted by a backbone network with a global density joined network (GDJN), which refines density features using dilated convolutional networks. A multistage long short-term memory (LSTM) network is then used to classify abnormal events. The experimental results are conducted on two datasets, UMN and UCSD Ped2. The achieved F1 scores were 93.42 and 94.46 respectively, with corresponding AUC values of 93.5 and 94.8.


Evolutionary U-Net for lung cancer segmentation on medical images

Abstract: Patients with lung cancer can only be diagnosed and treated surgically. Early detection of lung cancer through medical imaging could save numerous lives. Adding advanced techniques to conventional tests that offer high accuracy in diagnosing lung cancer is essential. U-Net has excelled in diversified tasks involving the segmentation of medical image datasets. A significant challenge remains in determining the ideal combination of hyper parameters for designing an optimized U-Net for detailed image segmentation. In our work, we suggested a technique for automatically generating evolutionary U-Nets to detect and segregate lung cancer anomalies. We used three distinct datasets, namely the LIDC-IRDC Dataset, Luna 16 Dataset, and Kaggle Dataset, for training the proposed work on lung images. Our results, examined with six distinct evaluation criteria used for medical image segmentation, consistently demonstrated the highest performance. More specifically, the GA-UNet outperforms conventional approaches in terms of an impressive accuracy rate of 97.5% and a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 92.3%.


Addressing Heterogeneity in Federated Learning with Client Selection via Submodular Optimization

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) has been proposed as a privacy-preserving distributed learning paradigm, which differs from traditional distributed learning in two main aspects: the systems heterogeneity, meaning that clients participating in training have significant differences in systems performance including CPU frequency, dataset size, and transmission power, and the statistical heterogeneity, indicating that the data distribution among clients exhibits Non-Independent Identical Distribution. Therefore, the random selection of clients will significantly reduce the training efficiency of FL. In this article, we propose a client selection mechanism considering both systems and statistical heterogeneity, which aims to improve the time-to-accuracy performance by trading off the impact of systems performance differences and data distribution differences among the clients on training efficiency. First, client selection is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem that jointly optimizes systems and statistical performance. Then, we generalize it to a submodular maximization problem with knapsack constraint, and propose the Iterative Greedy with Partial Enumeration (IGPE) algorithm to greedily select the suitable clients. Then, the approximation ratio of IGPE is analyzed theoretically. Extensive experiments verify that the time-to-accuracy performance of the IGPE algorithm outperforms other compared algorithms in a variety of heterogeneous environments.


Question-response representation with dual-level contrastive learning for improving knowledge tracing

Abstract: Question-response representation (aka. embedding) lies at the core for knowledge tracing, which is pivotal to model students' evolving knowledge states for predicting their future performance. Existing efforts typically learn question-response representations in a supervised manner, thus inevitably neglecting to excavate implicit information existed in student-question-concept connections and suffering from the issue of data sparsity due to rare student-question interactions. Inspired by the recent success of self-supervised learning, in this paper, we propose a Question-Response representation with dual-level Contrastive Learning (QRCL) for improving knowledge tracing, to address the aforementioned problems. Our approach comprehensively considers three types of views for obtaining question-response representations: the native fold views derived from native interaction between students and questions, the augmented fold views generated by contrastive augmentation with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), and the co-response relation views acquired by means of correlation among questions. By using delicately designed contrastive rules, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are adopted as backbone to encode the information from each view for better generating question-response representation. Extensive experimental results conducted on five datasets clearly show our proposed method has the capability in effectively predicting students' performances.


Finding hierarchy of clusters

Abstract: In this work a novel hierarchical clustering technique is proposed which can be used to find a hierarchical structure of data items in a dataset. The emphasis is on maintaining consistency of the clusters at each level in the hierarchy as well as to have a natural number of clusters at each level. We propose a method by using Cluster Number Assisted k-Means (CNAK) to find the possible natural numbers of clusters for that dataset. Next, we find the association between clusters at different levels. We propose three criteria and use them to remove the insignificant levels to obtain a final hierarchical structure. This method can be used to find the number of clusters at each of the different levels, the clusters at those levels and their association with clusters at adjacent levels. Naïve Hierarchical k-means algorithm uses a pre-determined branching factor at all the levels. In most traditional agglomerative and divisive clustering, at each different level of the hierarchical structure, exactly one node is split into several nodes for the next lower level. Either this number is the same for each parent or decided independently. Clusters with multiple parents are not allowed in traditional hierarchical clustering. However, in reality a cluster may naturally have multiple parents. Experimentation have been carried out on multiple datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.


DARS: Decentralized Article Retrieval System

Abstract: DARS is a decentralized article retrieval system designed to bring the community together for parallel and distributed extraction of article content from the web. The system is comprised of three types of components: web crawlers to extract the links from website pages, web scrapers to extract article information from the web pages identified as articles, and a retrieval core to manage the extraction process. To attain decentralization, multiple such systems can be deployed in different locations. When a client queries one of the nodes, the returned information can be an aggregate of data from multiple nodes. The system is flexible and can be adapted to extract different types of information in a decentralized manner.


Brightness and contrast corrections for stereocorrelation

Abstract: Stereocorrelation (SC) is a versatile experimental method increasingly used to measure 3D surface displacements in complex mechanical tests. However, convergence issues may arise when gray-level conservation is no longer validated, particularly when local specular reflections are observed. Brightness and contrast corrections (BCCs) are added to the Global Stereocorrelation framework, including different spatial regularization strategies. A challenging experimental test case was chosen for validation purposes where extreme brightness and contrast changes were observed. An impact test on laminated glass was monitored with two high-speed cameras. It is shown that BCCs significantly improve the robustness and convergence rate for both calibration and kinematic measurements. Moreover, the numerical implementation cost into a finite element stereocorrelation code is negligible.


<scp>ArieL</scp> : Adversarial Graph Contrastive Learning

Abstract: Contrastive learning is an effective unsupervised method in graph representation learning. The key component of contrastive learning lies in the construction of positive and negative samples. Previous methods usually utilize the proximity of nodes in the graph as the principle. Recently, the data-augmentation-based contrastive learning method has advanced to show great power in the visual domain, and some works have extended this method from images to graphs. However, unlike the data augmentation on images, the data augmentation on graphs is far less intuitive and it is much harder to provide high-quality contrastive samples, which leaves much space for improvement. In this work, by introducing an adversarial graph view for data augmentation, we propose a simple but effective method, Adversarial Graph Contrastive Learning ( ArieL ), to extract informative contrastive samples within reasonable constraints. We develop a new technique called information regularization for stable training and use subgraph sampling for scalability. We generalize our method from node-level contrastive learning to the graph level by treating each graph instance as a super-node. ArieL consistently outperforms the current graph contrastive learning methods for both node-level and graph-level classification tasks on real-world datasets. We further demonstrate that ArieL is more robust in the face of adversarial attacks.


Information-aware Multi-view Outlier Detection

Abstract: With the development of multi-view learning, multi-view outlier detection has received increasing attention in recent years. However, the current research still faces two challenges: (1) The current research lacks theoretical analysis tools for multi-view outliers. (2) Most current multi-view outlier detection algorithms are based on shallow structural assumptions of the data, such as cluster assumptions and subspace assumptions, thus they are not suitable for more complex data distributions. In addressing these two issues, this article proposes three occurrence mechanisms of multi-view outlier, which serve as foundational theoretical analysis tools for multi-view outliers. Utilizing proposed mechanisms, we analyze the impact of multi-view outliers and the information structure of multi-view data and validate our findings through experiments. Finally, we propose a novel algorithm referred to as Information-Aware Multi-View Outlier Detection (IAMOD). In contrast to other methods, IAMOD focuses on the information structure of multi-view data without relying on shallow structural assumptions. By learning a compact representation of the sample that is semantically rich and non-redundant, IAMOD can accurately identify multi-view outliers by comparing the consistency of the representations’ neighbors and views. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art multi-view outlier detection methods.


High-resolution spatiotemporal assessment of solar potential from remote sensing data using deep learning

Abstract: Spatiotemporal assessment of solar potential is one of the most promising solutions to find suitable locations for future photovoltaic systems’ placement. However, accurate assessment of solar potential on large areas can be challenging due to missing data or computational complexity. In this paper, a fully convolutional neural network based method for high-resolution spatiotemporal assessment of solar potential by using remote sensing data is presented. The method is trained and validated on the area of 32 km2 of the Maribor city, Slovenia, and tested on the 6 different locations in Slovenia and Germany. The proposed method was tested against the simulation algorithm, which utilized isotropic Liu Jordan diffuse model or anisotropic Perez model with sky view factor based shading. On average, a normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) of 6.06% and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 4.29% was achieved in test locations against the simulation based on Liu-Jordan model. When training the fully convolutional neural network models against the ground truth, generated with more advanced Perez diffuse model, the average NRMSE was 8.37% and MAPE of 10.90% was achieved across all test locations. Additionally, it was shown that the proposed method can assess solar potential in high-resolution from the input in lower resolution with higher accuracy than the simulation algorithm, while being up to 1500-times faster.


Improved modeling and fast in-field calibration of optical flow sensor for unmanned aerial vehicle position estimation

Abstract: To better reveal the principle of off-the-shelf OFS that used for UAV position estimation, two measurement models are derived, namely the continuous-time and discrete-time models. Then the intrinsic equivalence of these two models is also proven. Based on these two models, a calibration method for OFS is introduced, which only makes use of in-situ rotation to determine the OFS’s parameters including its focal length and installation angles with respect to the UAV. Furthermore, an OFS-based UAV position estimation algorithm is presented, which stems from the proposed discrete-time model. The proposed OFS models, calibration method, and position estimation algorithm form a full solution for UAV displacement measurement via OFS, and its feasibility and effectiveness is verified through flight tests on a quadcopter UAV in outdoor environment.


LPIPS-AttnWav2Lip: Generic audio-driven lip synchronization for talking head generation in the wild

Abstract: Researchers have shown a growing interest in Audio-driven Talking Head Generation. The primary challenge in talking head generation is achieving audio-visual coherence between the lips and the audio, known as lip synchronization. This paper proposes a generic method, LPIPS-AttnWav2Lip, for reconstructing face images of any speaker based on audio. We used the U-Net architecture based on residual CBAM to better encode and fuse audio and visual modal information. Additionally, the semantic alignment module extends the receptive field of the generator network to obtain the spatial and channel information of the visual features efficiently; and match statistical information of visual features with audio latent vector to achieve the adjustment and injection of the audio content information to the visual information. To achieve exact lip synchronization and to generate realistic high-quality images, our approach adopts LPIPS Loss, which simulates human judgment of image quality and reduces instability possibility during the training process. The proposed method achieves outstanding performance in terms of lip synchronization accuracy and visual quality as demonstrated by subjective and objective evaluation results.


Verifiable (t, n) Secret Image Sharing Scheme Based on Slim Turtle Shell Matrix

Abstract: As Internet technology advances rapidly, safeguarding confidential messages has become an increasingly pressing concern. Among the various schemes available, secret image sharing (SIS) has gained considerable attention. Particularly, the (t, n) secret sharing scheme offers robust protection for hidden secret messages. However, it remains challenging to expand the quality of t and n while maintaining acceptable image quality for the share images and enhancing security features. To address these challenges, we have developed a variant turtle shell known as the slim turtle shell, which we incorporate into our innovative (t, n)-SIS scheme. The slim turtle shell technique not only facilitates the creation of meaningful shares but also ensures that the resulting meaningful shares maintain a high level of visual quality, thanks to its impressive embedding capabilities. Additionally, we have devised two authentication mechanisms to validate the integrity of both shares and secret images. These mechanisms facilitate the detection of tampering during the secret message extraction and verification phase, should the integrity be compromised. Empirical results from our experiments demonstrate an impressive embedding capacity of 1,572,864 bits in our proposed scheme, coupled with an average PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of 45.80 dB. Furthermore, our scheme demonstrates superior authentication capabilities when compared to other existing schemes.


SGF3D: Similarity-guided fusion network for 3D object detection

Abstract: The representation of pseudo point cloud can significantly improve the precision of 3D object detection. However, existing pseudo point cloud-based methods typically fuse the processed features through coarse concatenation, which ignores the consistency between the point cloud and pseudo point cloud features. The inconsistency of features in different modal data can lead to detection bias. In this paper, we propose a novel pseudo point cloud-based network called SGF3D, which utilizes a cross-modal attention module cross-modal attention fusion (CMAF) to fuse point cloud and pseudo point cloud features. It can better learn the cross-modal similarity of output features, enabling the detection box to fit better with the target. We also designed a region of interest (RoI) head similarity attention head (SAH) to utilize the overlooked similarity to optimize training without increasing the complexity of the network. By using CMAF and SAH, the proposed method can obtain more accurate bounding boxes. Extensive experiments on KITTI dataset demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve competitive results. Training code and well trained weights are available at https://github.com/ChunZheng2022/SGF3D.


Hydrophobicity-Based Grading of Industrial Composite Insulators Images Using Cross Attention Vision Transformer With Knowledge Distillation

Abstract: The hydrophobic property of composite insulators is a crucial attribute that prevents the accumulation of significant water content on the surface and ensures smooth operation and prevention of power line surges. However, since the weathering effect gradually reduces the hydrophobicity, periodic monitoring is necessary to ensure the smooth operation of the powerline. Efficient machine learning-based analysis of the composite insulator (CI) images collected by the spray method can potentially achieve very high efficacy. However, inconsistency in the shape and size of droplets, the intricate pattern of the droplets, the lack of color variation of the images, etc. pose a challenge to the prevalent computer vision techniques for categorizing the CIs. This treatise explored a novel, efficient deep learning paradigm, termed cross attention vision transformer (CA-ViT) for grading the CI images. The CA-ViT uses both small and large patches to blend spatial features corresponding to a different scale. The network uses a token fusion module to effectively combine the tokens obtained from small and large patches and understand the visual pattern, and characterize droplets of different shapes and sizes by exchanging cross-attentions, which demonstrates its ability to precisely detect small and large droplets, and accurately classify the droplet images. Further, the work also introduces a knowledge distillation strategy to reduce the computational run time of the model. Exhaustive experimental results have confirmed that our proposed work surpasses state-of-the-art methods.


Machine Learning Informed Diagnosis for Congenital Heart Disease in Large Claims Data Source

Abstract: With an increasing interest in using large claims databases in medical practice and research, it is a meaningful and essential step to efficiently identify patients with the disease of interest. This study aims to establish a machine learning (ML) approach to identify patients with congenital heart disease (CHD) in large claims databases. We harnessed data from the Quebec claims and hospitalization databases from 1983 to 2000. The study included 19,187 patients. Of them, 3,784 were labeled as true CHD patients using a clinician developed algorithm with manual audits considered as the gold standards. To establish an accurate ML-empowered automated CHD classification system, we evaluated ML methods including Gradient Boosting Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine, Decision tree, and compared them to regularized logistic regression. The Area Under the Precision Recall Curve was used as the evaluation metric. External validation was conducted with an updated data set to 2010 with different subjects. Among the ML methods we evaluated, Gradient Boosting Decision Tree led the performance in identifying true CHD patients with 99.3% Area Under the Precision Recall Curve, 98.0% for sensitivity, and 99.7% for specificity. External validation returned similar statistics on model performance. This study shows that a tedious and time-consuming clinical inspection for CHD patient identification can be replaced by an extremely efficient ML algorithm in large claims database. Our findings demonstrate that ML methods can be used to automate complicated algorithms to identify patients with complex diseases.


An attachment recognition method based on semi-supervised video segmentation for tidal stream turbines

Abstract: Tidal stream turbine (TST) is a reliable machine for converting tidal stream energy to electric energy. However, the efficiency of power generation will be severely affected by the increasing marine attachment on TST blades. Accurate identification of attachments is very important for their removal. This paper proposes a semi-supervised video segmentation network (SVSN) to recognize attachments in underwater video sources. To alleviate the labeling burden, only a small number of video frames need manual annotation, and sufficient labeled data are collected by a data augmentation algorithm. For utilizing the remaining video frames, these unlabeled data and the labeled data are used to train the SVSN based on semi-supervised adversarial learning. In this way, these two kinds of data benefit from each other, making the network to learn general features for better generalization ability. The SVSN includes a generator and a discriminator. The generator is a modified SegNet to obtain initial segmentation maps. The discriminator, a simple fully convolutional network, provides pixel-wise confidence maps for the semi-supervised adversarial learning. Besides, it enhances the generator segmentation quality via considering object boundary areas. Experimental results demonstrate that precise attachment recognition and fast uncertainty estimation can be accomplished under harsh submerged conditions.


Image encryption algorithm based on a new 3D chaotic system using cellular automata

Abstract: Cryptography and steganography are usual methods for safe transfer of information, which encryption algorithms turn original images into unreadable noise-like images. This paper presents a novel symmetric cryptosystem designed for the transmission of RGB color images through open channels and our goal is to provide a secure cryptography algorithm against cropping and noise attacks. The encryption algorithm is based on a suitable 3D hybrid chaotic system, with high Lyapunov exponent value, leveraging the advantages of common chaos maps while addressing their inherent limitations. To further enhance security, a novel pixel shuffle operator is employed to eliminate any potential neighborhood relations between image pixels. The encryption process incorporates reversible second-order cellular automata, which are applied to the outputs of the chaotic system. Key generation is achieved through the utilization of irreversible cellular automata. The resulting key space is large enough to resist brute-force attacks and performs a high level of sensitivity. Experimental results, including analysis of histograms, entropies, and pixel correlations, confirm the effectiveness of the proposed image encryption scheme, and prove its resilient against statistical attacks and a remarkable resistance against data loss attacks.


Top-tuning: A study on transfer learning for an efficient alternative to fine tuning for image classification with fast kernel methods

Abstract: The impressive performance of deep learning architectures is associated with a massive increase in model complexity. Millions of parameters need to be tuned, with training and inference time scaling accordingly, together with energy consumption. But is massive fine-tuning always necessary? In this paper, focusing on image classification, we consider a simple transfer learning approach exploiting pre-trained convolutional features as input for a fast-to-train kernel method. We refer to this approach as top-tuning since only the kernel classifier is trained on the target dataset. In our study, we perform more than 3000 training processes focusing on 32 small to medium-sized target datasets, a typical situation where transfer learning is necessary. We show that the top-tuning approach provides comparable accuracy with respect to fine-tuning, with a training time between one and two orders of magnitude smaller. These results suggest that top-tuning is an effective alternative to fine-tuning in small/medium datasets, being especially useful when training time efficiency and computational resources saving are crucial.


Motion-to-Matching: A Mixed Paradigm for 3D Single Object Tracking

Abstract: 3D single object tracking with LiDAR points is an important task in the computer vision field. Previous methods usually adopt the matching-based or motion-centric paradigms to estimate the current target status. However, the former is sensitive to the similar distractors and the sparseness of point clouds due to relying on appearance matching, while the latter usually focuses on short-term motion clues (eg. two frames) and ignores the long-term motion pattern of target. To address these issues, we propose a mixed paradigm with two stages, named MTM-Tracker, which combines motion modeling with feature matching into a single network. Specifically, in the first stage, we exploit the continuous historical boxes as motion prior and propose an encoder-decoder structure to locate target coarsely. Then, in the second stage, we introduce a feature interaction module to extract motion-aware features from consecutive point clouds and match them to refine target movement as well as regress other target states. Extensive experiments validate that our paradigm achieves competitive performance on large-scale datasets (70.9% in KITTI and 51.70% in NuScenes). The code will be open soon at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/LeoZhiheng/MTM-Tracker.git</uri> .


Dual-Branch Multitask Fusion Network for Offline Chinese Writer Identification

Abstract: Chinese characters are complex and contain discriminative information, meaning that their writers have the potential to be recognized using less text. In this study, offline Chinese writer identification based on a single character was investigated. To extract comprehensive features to model Chinese characters, explicit and implicit information as well as global and local features are of interest. A dual-branch multitask fusion network is proposed that contains two branches for global and local feature extraction simultaneously, and introduces auxiliary tasks to help the main task. Content recognition, stroke number estimation, and stroke recognition are considered as three auxiliary tasks for explicit information. The main task extracts implicit information of writer identity. The experimental results validated the positive influences of auxiliary tasks on the writer identification task, with the stroke number estimation task being most helpful. In-depth research was conducted to investigate the influencing factors in Chinese writer identification, with respect to character complexity, stroke importance, and character number, which provides a systematic reference for the actual application of neural networks in Chinese writer identification.


High-performance montgomery modular multiplier with NTT and negative wrapped convolution

Abstract: Modular multiplication plays a crucial role in modern cryptography. Montgomery modular multiplication(MMM), one of the most classic and practical modular multiplication algorithms, has been widely used in cryptographic algorithms such as RSA, Diffie–Hellman algorithm, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography. In this paper, we incorporate negative wrapped convolution (NWC) into the FFT-based Montgomery modular multiplication to avoid the issue of zero-padding and use carry-save arithmetics for parallel computation. By utilizing coefficient pairs (pos_part and neg_part), we reconstruct the final result and eliminate the restrictions imposed by nega-cyclic parts. Moreover, Karatsuba-like algorithm is introduced for building fine-grained large integer multipliers. We have modified the parameter specifications for our design to meet requirements from diverse application scenarios. We implement the design on Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA under different conditions and compare the results with the state-of-the-art MMM designs. The comparisons confirm that our design has the following characteristics: low latency for process, competitive area-latency-product(ALP), efficient DSP usage, and constant delay, which enhances security against timing attacks.


Learning Global and Multi-granularity Local Representation with MLP for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract: Sequential recommendation aims to predict the next item of interest to users based on their historical behavior data. Usually, users’ global and local preferences jointly affect the final recommendation result in different ways. Most existing works use transformers to globally model sequences, which makes them face the dilemma of quadratic computational complexity when dealing with long sequences. Moreover, the scope setting of the user’s local preference is usually static and single, and cannot cover richer multi-level local semantics. To this end, we proposed a parallel architecture for capturing global representation and M ulti-granularity L ocal dependencies with M LP for sequential Rec ommendation ( MLM4Rec ). For global representation, we utilize modified MLP-Mixer to capture global information of user sequences due to its simplicity and efficiency. For local representation, we incorporate convolution into MLP and propose a multi-granularity local awareness mechanism for capturing richer local semantic information. Moreover, we introduced a weight pooling method to adaptively fuse local-global representations instead of directly concatenation. Our model has the advantages of low complexity and high efficiency thanks to its simple MLP structure. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. Our code is available here 1 .


SCTrans: Self-align and cross-align transformer for few-shot segmentation

Abstract: Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) refers to train a segmentation model that can be generalized to novel categories with limited labeled images. One challenge of FSS is spatial inconsistency between support and query images, e.g., appearance and texture. Most existing methods are only committed to utilizing the semantic-level prototypes of support images to guide mask predictions. These methods, nevertheless, only focus on the most discriminate regions of the object rather than holonomic feature representations. Besides, another question exists that the lack of interaction between paired support and query images. In this paper, we propose a self-align and cross-align transformer (SCTrans) to remedy the above limitations. Specifically, we design a feature fusion module (FFM) to incorporate low-level information from the query branch into mid-level semantic features, boosting the semantic representations of query images. In addition, a feature alignment module is designed to bidirectionally propagate semantic information from support to query images conditioned on more representative support and query features, increasing both intra-class similarities and inter-class differences. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i show that our SCTrans significantly advances the state-of-the-art methods.


Sequential auction for cloud manufacturing resource trading: A deep reinforcement learning approach to the lot-sizing problem

Abstract: Cloud manufacturing is a rapidly growing trend in modern manufacturing, which has transformed the traditional operations and value chain structure of enterprises. It is crucial to develop a rational and effective trading mechanism of cloud manufacturing resources to meet the ever-increasing demands in this new environment. This paper proposes a sequential auction-based paradigm for the trading of manufacturing resources. The main challenge of the design of the paradigm is to determine the dynamic lot size of resources allocated to each auction considering the uncertainty of arriving demands. To achieve this, we first develop a competitive game model to identify optimal bidding strategies of arrived customers and estimate the expected revenue for each round with the given lot size. Secondly, we construct a Markov decision process (MDP) model to characterize the dynamics of the arrival of stochastic demand and the inventory transition of the manufacturing resources in sequential auctions. Lastly, we leverage a data-driven approach by integrating machine learning with an offline deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach. Specifically, we employ a long short-term memory (LSTM) model to predict forthcoming demands in the environment and develop the deep Q-network (DQN) learning algorithm to optimize lot-sizing policy by interacting with the well-learned LSTM environment model. Our simulation experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach and some management insights are given.


EFDCNet: Encoding fusion and decoding correction network for RGB-D indoor semantic segmentation

Abstract: Semantic segmentation is a crucial task in vision measurement systems that involves understanding and segmenting different objects and regions within an image. Over the years, numerous RGB-D semantic segmentation methods have been developed, leveraging the encoder-decoder architecture to achieve outstanding performance. However, existing methods have two main problems that constrain further performance improvement. Firstly, in the encoding stage, existing methods have a weak ability to fuse cross-modal information, and low-quality depth maps can easily lead to poor feature representation. Secondly, in the decoding stage, the upsampling of high-level semantic information may cause the loss of contextual information, and low-level features from the encoder may bring noises to the decoder through skip connections. To solve these issues, we propose a novel Encoding Fusion and Decoding Correction Network (EFDCNet) for RGB-D indoor semantic segmentation. First, in the encoding stage of EFDCNet, we focus on extracting valuable information from low-quality depth maps, and employ a channel-wise filter to select informative depth features. Additionally, we establish the global dependencies between RGB and depth features via the self-attention mechanism to enhance the cross-modal feature interactions, extracting discriminant and powerful features. Then, in the decoding stage of EFDCNet, we use the highest-level information as semantic guidance to compensate for the upsampling information and filter out noise from the low-level encoder features propagated through the skip connections to the decoder. Extensive experiments conducted on two widely-used RGB-D indoor semantic segmentation datasets demonstrate that the proposed EFDCNet surpasses the performance of relevant state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ Mark9010/EFDCNet


The Computational Method for Supporting Thai VerbNet Construction

Abstract: VerbNet is a lexical resource for verbs that has many applications in natural language processing tasks, especially ones that require information about both the syntactic behavior and the semantics of verbs. This article presents an attempt to construct the first version of a Thai VerbNet corpus via data enrichment of the existing lexical resource. This corpus contains the annotation at both the syntactic and semantic levels, where verbs are tagged with frames within the verb class hierarchy and their arguments are labeled with the semantic role. We discuss the technical aspect of the construction process of Thai VerbNet and survey different semantic role labeling methods to make this process fully automatic. We also investigate the linguistic aspect of the computed verb classes and the results show the potential in assisting semantic classification and analysis. At the current stage, we have built the verb class hierarchy consisting of 28 verb classes from 112 unique concept frames over 490 unique verbs using our association rule learning method on Thai verbs.


Leveraging pervasive computing for ambient intelligence: A survey on recent advancements, applications and open challenges

Abstract: The advent of pervasive computing and ambient intelligence has opened up new possibilities for the development of intelligent systems that can adapt to the needs of their users. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of recent advancements in this field, focusing on the different techniques, tools, and applications that have been developed to leverage the benefits of pervasive computing for ambient intelligence. We discuss the various challenges and opportunities that arise when designing such systems and provide a critical evaluation of the current state-of-the-art. In particular, we examine the role of machine learning, data analytics, and context awareness in the development of intelligent systems, and we investigate the impact of these technologies on the quality of life of their users. The paper also presents a discussion on the open challenges in this field, such as ensuring user privacy, security, and trust, designing effective user interfaces, and dealing with the complexity of large-scale systems. Finally, we conclude with an outlook on the future of ambient intelligence and its potential impact on society, and we highlight some of the emerging research directions that are likely to shape the field in the coming years.


Autoregressive Feature Extraction with Topic Modeling for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis of Arabic as a Low-resource Language

Abstract: This paper proposes an approach for aspect-based sentiment analysis of Arabic social data, especially the considerable text corpus generated through communications on X (formerly known as Twitter) for expressing opinions in Arabic-language tweets during the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed approach examines the performance of several pre-trained predictive and autoregressive language models; namely, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and XLNet, along with topic modeling algorithms; namely, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), for aspect-based sentiment analysis of online Arabic text. In addition, Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) deep learning model is used to classify the extracted aspects from online reviews. Obtained experimental results indicate that the combined XLNet-NMF model outperforms other implemented state-of-the-art methods through improving the feature extraction of unstructured social media text with achieving values of 0.946 and 0.938, for average sentiment classification accuracy and F-measure, respectively.


Memory backtracking strategy: An evolutionary updating mechanism for meta-heuristic algorithms

Abstract: The search domain of meta-heuristic algorithms is always constantly changing, which make it difficult to adapt the diverse optimization issues. To overcome above issue, an evolutionary updating mechanism called Memory Backtracking Strategy (MBS) is proposed, which contains thinking stage, recall stage, and memory stage. Overall, the adoption of the MBS enhances the efficiency of MHSs by incorporating group memory, clue recall, and memory forgetting mechanisms. These strategies improve the algorithm's ability to explore the search space, optimize the search process, and escape local optima. MBS will be applied to three different types of MHS algorithms: evolutionary based (LSHADE_SPACMA), physical based (Stochastic Fractal Search, SFS), and biological based (Marine Predators Algorithmnm, MPA) to demonstrate the universality of MBS. In the experimental section including 57 engineering problems, algorithm complexity analysis, CEC2020 Friedman ranking, convergence curve, Wilcoxon statistical, and box plot. Among them, 21 algorithms participated in the Friedman experiment, including MBS_LSHADE_SPACMA ranked first, LSHADE_SPACMA ranked second, MBS_MPA ranked 6th, MPA ranked 8th, MBS_SFS ranked 9th and SFS ranked 12th. Combined with the analysis of "MBS testing analysis" and the experimental results of engineering problems, it has proven that MBS has universality and good ability to improve optimization algorithm performance. The source codes of the proposed MBS (MBS_MPA) can be accessed by https://github.com/luchenghao2022/Memory-Backtracking-Strategy