Currently, image generation and synthesis have remarkably progressed with generative models. Despite photo-realistic results, intrinsic discrepancies are still observed in the frequency domain. The spectral discrepancy appeared not only in generative adversarial networks but in diffusion models. In this study, we propose a framework to effectively mitigate the disparity in frequency domain of the generated images to improve generative performance of both GAN and diffusion models. This is realized by spectrum translation for the refinement of image generation (STIG) based on contrastive learning. We adopt theoretical logic of frequency components in various generative networks. The key idea, here, is to refine the spectrum of the generated image via the concept of image-to-image translation and contrastive learning in terms of digital signal processing. We evaluate our framework across eight fake image datasets and various cutting-edge models to demonstrate the effectiveness of STIG. Our framework outperforms other cutting-edges showing significant decreases in FID and log frequency distance of spectrum. We further emphasize that STIG improves image quality by decreasing the spectral anomaly. Additionally, validation results present that the frequency-based deepfake detector confuses more in the case where fake spectrums are manipulated by STIG.

Mobile users are always demanding extended availability in their battery use. Together with enlarged battery capacity, fast charging is one approach that provides an improved user experience in battery use. Recently, device manufacturers have been developing a variety of fast charging techniques for mobile devices. However, the existing techniques severely reduce the charging power when the device is in use while charging. We experimentally demonstrate that the primary cause of the reduction in the charge speed during device use is to cope with the performance degradation incurred by heat generation. We then propose an adaptive charging scheme, called Always-on Quick Charging, which enables fast charging especially when the device is in use. The key idea of our approach is to adjust the charging power while ensuring that the heat generated by the charging does not affect the performance. The proposed scheme is implemented in Google's Pixel 2XL smartphone. The experiment with a real-world usage scenario shows that the charging speed of the proposed scheme is up to 2.4 times faster than the default scheme, while preserving device performance.

Predicting a click sequence in mobile applications improves the user experience in various ways. By predicting which button will be clicked next, one can predict how the application will work and how the device will operate. However, predicting the click sequence is difficult because of the problems involved in collecting click sequences in real application usage. More importantly, accurate predictions are extremely challenging. In this paper, we address these issues. We propose PathFinder, a scheme for collecting click events and based on them predicting the next click in the application. The clicks are collected with the Android Accessibility Service and the next click is predicted via long shortterm memory (LSTM). For the prediction, the base click sequence model is first generated from all users' data; then, a personalized model is trained with an individual click sequence. As training data considerably influences the performance of LSTM, several techniques are developed to enhance the quality of the training data. The experimental results for 100 popular applications showed that the coverage and accuracy of click sequence tracing were 95% and 96%, respectively. Furthermore, PathFinder predicted the top three buttons that would be clicked next with a 0.76 F-measure for 1775043 real click data.

Managing the power consumption of display-related components in mobile devices is difficult because of performance degradation. Therefore, eliminating hidden workloads, such as redundant frames, is preferable, as it directly reduces power without affecting the user experience. Our preliminary study shows that the default launcher of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and popular applications, such as Instagram and Pinterest, generate redundant frames. In this paper, we propose a scheme to optimize the power consumption of the smartphone's display-related components by preventing redundant frames generation. By analyzing the frame-generation process, we observe that redundant frame generation is possible in the current Android framework. We then propose a scheme that recognizes and prevents redundant frame generation before actual frame generation (i.e., frame rendering in the GPU). The proposed scheme utilizes a display list, which was introduced in recent Android smartphones for efficient frame generation. We implemented the proposed scheme on Nexus smartphones. On the Nexus 5, the proposed solution reduced the energy of the AOSP default launcher, Instagram, and Pinterest by 40, 35.4, and 39.6 percent, respectively. Furthermore, the experimental results with a general usage scenario showed that our scheme prevented about 35 percent of redundant frame generation with a false-positive rate of 1.8 percent.

Smartphones' surface temperature, also called skin temperature, can rapidly heat up in certain cases, and this causes a variety of safety problems. Therefore, the thermal management of smartphones should consider the skin temperature, and its accurate prediction is important. However, due to the complicated relationship among the many exothermic components in the device, predicting skin temperature is extremely difficult. In this paper, we develop a thermal prediction model that accurately predicts the skin temperature of a mobile device. In an experiment with smartphones, we show that the proposed model achieves an accuracy of 98%, with a ±0.4 °C margin of error. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to reveal the complex relationship between the various components inside of a smartphone and its skin temperature.

The thermal issue for mobile devices becomes critical as the devices' performance increases to handle complicated applications. Conventional thermal management limits the performance of the entire device, degrading the quality of both foreground and background applications. This is not desirable because the quality of the foreground application, i.e., the frames per second (FPS), is directly affected, whereas users are generally not aware of the performance of background applications. In this paper, we propose an app-oriented thermal management scheme that specifically restricts background applications to preserve the FPS of foreground applications. For efficient thermal management, we developed a model that predicts the heat contribution of individual applications based on hardware utilization. The proposed system gradually limits system resources for each background application according to its heat contribution. The scheme was implemented on a Galaxy S8+ smartphone, and its usefulness was validated with a thorough evaluation.

Extending battery lifetime is an important issue for mobile devices. While extensive attempts have been made at the software level, optimization often risks hampering user experience. One fundamental method to increase battery lifetime is to improve the efficiency of the battery itself. We argue that the multi-cell battery system, which is widely used for enhancing battery efficiency in the electric vehicle (EV) field, can solve this issue. However, due to the hardware constraints and device usage characteristics, battery advancements in the EV field are not directly applicable to mobile devices. In this paper, we propose BattMan, a multi-cell battery management system for mobile devices, for the enhancement of battery efficiency. We develop an accurate battery cell model to estimate the expected battery lifetime considering the recovery effect, the rate capacity effect, and battery aging. We also propose a multi-cell scheduling algorithm to maximize the overall battery lifetime. We implemented BattMan on recent smartphones and evaluated its impact on battery lifetime. The experimental results show that a two-cell configuration of the proposed system increases battery lifetime by an average of between 14-19%, depending on cell aging, in real usage scenarios over a single-cell battery of the same overall capacity. We hope the proposed multi-cell battery scheme opens up a new direction towards battery lifetime improvement in mobile devices.

Mobile data offloading through WiFi is an essential requirement to reduce cellular network traffic. While extensive attempts have been made at mobile data offloading, previous studies have rarely addressed practical issues, such as dealing with diverse user contexts. In this paper, we propose a personalized data offloading scheme to provide maximum throughput within the cellular budget in daily life. We propose an adaptive policy that considers a user's mobility patterns, cellular budget, and network usage for applications. The proposed system employs an adaptive model to predict the throughput of WiFi APs and the network usage of smartphones. Among the three types of predictor model (i.e., spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal), the system automatically chooses the optimal model for each mobile user without user intervention. The experimental results from 10 mobile users show that the proposed system provides 29% higher throughput than previous systems and minimizes extra data charges.

Energy accounting is an essential requirement for optimizing energy consumption on mobile devices. State-of-the-art approaches consider application processes and threads as the sole components of energy consumption. In this framework, the energy consumption of system services is unclear and has not been comprehensively studied. In this paper, we suggest that the energy consumption of system services should be investigated to understand the behavior of applications. We propose a fine-grained energy tracing scheme, EnTrack, to enhance the accuracy of energy tracing by identifying and incorporating the energy portions consumed by system services. We implemented EnTrack on the Android platform and validated its functionality and usefulness. In addition, practical usage cases of EnTrack, which uses it as an energy behavior analysis tool, were introduced. The case studies demonstrated that EnTrack enables an understanding of fine-grained energy consumption, especially in system services, which have previously been concealed.

Quality improvement in mobile applications should be based on the consideration of several factors, such as users' diversity in spatio-temporal usage, as well as the device's resource usage, including battery life. Although application tuning should consider this practical issue, it is difficult to ensure the success of this process during the development stage due to the lack of information about application usage. This paper proposes a user interaction-based profiling system to overcome the limitations of development-level application debugging. In our system, the analysis of both device behavior and energy consumption is possible with fine-grained process-level application monitoring. By providing fine-grained information, including user interaction, system behavior, and power consumption, our system provides meaningful analysis for application tuning. The proposed method does not require the source code of the application and uses a web-based framework so that users can easily provide their usage data. Our case study with a few popular applications demonstrates that the proposed system is practical and useful for application tuning.