VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Wei Liang 0006
dblp:22/849-6
· DBLP profile ↗
33ranked-venue papers
6as first author
27since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-0689-256XORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 15 · 2 first-author · 13 since 2021Computer networks · 10 · 1 first-author · 9 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 4 · 4 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 2 · 2 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 first-authorHuman-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 first-authorTheory of computation · 1 · 1 first-author
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | FedCD: Contrastive-distillation regularization for heterogeneous data in federated learning
Guodong Yi, Jianxu Zhang, Xinyu Zhang 0012, Wei Liang 0006, Xiaocui Li 0001 |
Pattern Recognit. | 5 |
| 2025 | Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via Local Reasoning and Correlation AnalysisabstractIn recent years, incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) has attracted considerable attention for its ability to acheieve effective clustering results through the integration of key information amidst missing view. However, the existing IMVC methods are still faced with 3 limitations: (1) They exhibit deficiencies in considering the weight distribution within views, (2) they ignore the varying contributions of different views to the common consistent representation, and (3) they struggle to sufficiently extract and recover the vital information within incomplete views. To address these limitations, we incorporates local reasoning and correlation analysis to design an incomplete multi-view clustering method(IMVCLRCA), which introduces a new strategy of feature learning and missing view recovery, fully exploiting local similarity and structural continuity within views and performing precise local reasoning recovery on missing data. By maximizing mutual information between views through contrastive learning, we achieve the consistent representation learning of multiple views. Furthermore, based on semantic consistency, we comprehensively consider the correlation between views, utilized a weight matrix to fuse cross-view data, and constructed a view with a correlation structure, ultimately obtaining a common consistent representation. We conduct extensive experiments on 4 public datasets including Caltech101-20, BBCSport, Scene-15, and LandUse-21. Experimental results demonstrate that IMVCLRCA has higher accuracy and robustness compared to the state-of-the-art IMVC methods. The anonymous code of this project is available on GitHub at https://github.com/ggg2111/2025WSDM-IMVCLRCA. Xiaocui Li 0001, Xinyu Zhang 0012, Yangtao Wang, Qingyu Shi 0001, Wei Liang 0006 |
WSDM | 6 |
| 2025 | Permutation-Invariant and Equivariant Multiagent Reinforcement Learning for Flexible Manufacturing in Industrial IoTabstractWith the advent of Industrial Internet-of-things (IIoT), flexible manufacturing has gained increasing attention. Continuous changes in market demand, real-time data collection and device interconnectivity have made the production process more dynamic and unpredictable, rendering traditional manufacturing scheduling methods inadequate in addressing these changes. This issue can be framed as a Dynamic Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem (DFJSP), which seeks to accommodate ever-evolving production scenarios and requirements by making real-time modifications and optimizing resource allocation. Traditional scheduling algorithms designed for static, single-environment scenarios are increasingly inadequate for handling the growing complexity of production environments. In this context, there is a pressing need for efficient and real-time scheduling algorithms. We propose a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithm to solve DFJSP, where each device is associated with a corresponding agent, allowing the algorithm to scale flexibly. The complexity and dynamics of scheduling problems introduce additional challenges and complexities in state representation and decision-making. We propose two solutions to alleviate this problem. First, we employ a Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (HGNN) to capture the relational dependencies between tasks and extract state features. Through multiple feature updates, each agent is enabled to make decisions based on global information. Furthermore, leveraging the inherent Permutation Invariance (PI) and Permutation Equivariance (PE) features of tasks in the waiting queue, we apply hypernetwork techniques to address the issue of dimensionality explosion caused by the excessive state space in scheduling environments. Experiments conducted under various scenario settings demonstrate that our scheduling method can significantly reduce task latency and improve resource utilization. Yangyan Zeng, Aidong Liu, Suzhen Huang, Xiaoqun Chen, Wei Liang 0006, Xiaokang Zhou |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 5 |
| 2025 | Decentralized Federated Graph Learning With Lightweight Zero Trust Architecture for Next-Generation Networking SecurityabstractThe rapid development and usage of digital technologies in modern intelligent systems and applications bring critical challenges on data security and privacy. It is essential to allow cross-organizational data sharing to achieve smart service provisioning, while preventing unauthorized access and data leak to ensure end users’ efficient and secure collaborations. Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising pathway to enable innovative collaboration across multiple organizations. However, more stringent security policies are needed to ensure authenticity of participating entities, safeguard data during communication, and prevent malicious activities. In this paper, we propose a Decentralized Federated Graph Learning (FGL) with Lightweight Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) model, named DFGL-LZTA, to provide context-aware security with dynamic defense policy update, while maintaining computational and communication efficiency in resource-constrained environments, for highly distributed and heterogeneous systems in next-generation networking. Specifically, with a re-designed lightweight ZTA, which leverages adaptive privacy preservation and reputation-based aggregation together to tackle multi-level security threats (e.g., data-level, model-level, and identity-level attacks), a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent is introduced to enable the real-time and adaptive security policy update and optimization based on contextual features. A hierarchical Graph Attention Network (GAT) mechanism is then improved and applied to facilitate the dynamic subgraph learning in local training with a layer-wise architecture, while a so-called sparse global aggregation scheme is developed to balance the communication efficiency and model robustness in a P2P manner. Experiments and evaluations conducted based on two open-source datasets and one synthetic dataset demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed model in terms of training performance, computational and communication efficiency, and model accuracy, compared with other four state-of-the-art methods for next-generation networking security in modern distributed learning systems. Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006, Kevin I-Kai Wang, Katsutoshi Yada, Laurence T. Yang, Jianhua Ma 0002, Qun Jin |
IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun. | 2 |
| 2025 | Information Theoretic Learning-Enhanced Dual-Generative Adversarial Networks With Causal Representation for Robust OOD GeneralizationabstractRecently, machine/deep learning techniques are achieving remarkable success in a variety of intelligent control and management systems, promising to change the future of artificial intelligence (AI) scenarios. However, they still suffer from some intractable difficulty or limitations for model training, such as the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue, in modern smart manufacturing or intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). In this study, we newly design and introduce a deep generative model framework, which seamlessly incorporates the information theoretic learning (ITL) and causal representation learning (CRL) in a dual-generative adversarial network (Dual-GAN) architecture, aiming to enhance the robust OOD generalization in modern machine learning (ML) paradigms. In particular, an ITL- and CRL-enhanced Dual-GAN (ITCRL-DGAN) model is presented, which includes an autoencoder with CRL (AE-CRL) structure to aid the dual-adversarial training with causality-inspired feature representations and a Dual-GAN structure to improve the data augmentation in both feature and data levels. Following a newly designed feature separation strategy, a causal graph is built and improved based on the information theory, which can enhance the causally related factors among the separated core features and further enrich the feature representation with the counterfactual features via interventions based on the refined causal relationships. The ITL is incorporated to improve the extraction of low-dimensional feature representations and learn the optimized causal representations based on the idea of "information flow." A dual-adversarial training mechanism is then developed, which not only enables the generator to expand the boundary of feature distribution in accordance with the optimized feature representation from AE-CRL, but also allows the discriminator to further verify and improve the quality of the augmented data for OOD generalization. Experiment and evaluation results based on an open-source dataset demonstrate the outstanding learning efficiency and classification performance of our proposed model for robust OOD generalization in modern smart applications compared with three baseline methods. Xiaokang Zhou, Xuzhe Zheng, Tian Shu, Wei Liang 0006, Kevin I-Kai Wang, Lianyong Qi, Shohei Shimizu, Qun Jin |
IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst. | 4 |
| 2024 | Multitask Correlation Constrained Topological Learning Toward Smart Prognostic and Health Management in IoTabstractDue to the high dependence of social development on electricity, the failure of energy system equipment often leads to inestimable losses. The use of Internet of Things (IoT) technology to collect real-time data from energy devices and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to prognostic faults in the devices becomes essential to achieve power system security. Although real-time data contains rich descriptions of relevant equipment faults and solutions, the complex data structure and severe imbalance of condition monitoring (CM) data may lead to poor performance of AI models. In this study, we propose a multitask correlation constrained topology learning model for smart prognostic and health management in IoT. In particular, the proposed model mainly includes a feature extraction module, a multitask topology network (MTTN) module, and a class balance loss (CBL) algorithm module. First, the Bi-LSTM is employed to extract word collocation features and numerical features of the data, focusing on the important semantic features in complex structured data. Second, the MTTN is constructed to efficiently utilize the topological dependency between multiple tasks. Finally, a CBL loss function is applied to enhance the focus on the minority classes. Experiment and evaluation results demonstrate that our model has superior learning efficiency and prediction performance, especially on extremely imbalanced data, which can correctly predict the faulty equipment, the fault cause and the fault severity level, providing a rapid and precise reference for advance repair or replacement of energy system equipment in IoT environments. Xuzhe Zheng, Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006, Kevin I-Kai Wang |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 3 |
| 2024 | Federated distillation and blockchain empowered secure knowledge sharing for Internet of medical Things
Xiaokang Zhou, Wang Huang, Wei Liang 0006, Zheng Yan 0002, Jianhua Ma 0002, Yi Pan 0001, Kevin I-Kai Wang |
Inf. Sci. | 3 |
| 2024 | Personalized Federated Learning With Model-Contrastive Learning for Multi-Modal User Modeling in Human-Centric MetaverseabstractWith the flourish of digital technologies and rapid development of 5G and beyond networks, Metaverse has become an increasingly hotly discussed topic, which offers users with multiple roles for diversified experience interacting with virtual services. How to capture and model users’ multi-platform or cross-space data/behaviors become essential to enrich people with more realistic and immersed experience in Metaverse-enabled smart applications over 5G and beyond networks. In this study, we propose a Personalized Federated Learning with Model-Contrastive Learning (PFL-MCL) framework, which may efficiently enhance the communication and interaction in human-centric Metaverse environments by making use of the large-scale, heterogeneous, and multi-modal Metaverse data. Differing from the conventional Federated Learning (FL) architecture, a multi-center aggregation structure to learn multiple global models based on the changes of dynamically updated local model weights, is developed in global, while a hierarchical neural network structure which includes a personalized module and a federated module to tackle both issues on data heterogeneity and model heterogeneity, is designed in local, so as to enhance the performance of PFL with unique characteristics of Metaverse data. In particular, a two-stage iterative clustering algorithm with a more precise initialization is developed to facilitate the personalized global aggregation with dynamically updated multiple aggregation centers. A personalized multi-modal fusion network is constructed to greatly reduce the computational cost and feature dimensions from the high-dimensional heterogeneous inputs for more efficient cross-modal fusion, based on a hierarchical shift-window attention mechanism and a newly designed bridge attention mechanism. A MCL scheme is then incorporated to speed up the model convergence with less communication overload between the local federated module and global model, while an embedding layer which effectively enables the delivered global model to better adapt to the local personality in each client is further integrated. Compared with five baseline methods, experiment and evaluation results based on two different real-world datasets demonstrate the excellent performance of our proposed PFL-MCL model in a fine-grain personalized training strategy, toward more efficient communication and networking among human-centric Metaverse enabled smart applications. Xiaokang Zhou, Qiuyue Yang, Xuzhe Zheng, Wei Liang 0006, Kevin I-Kai Wang, Jianhua Ma 0002, Yi Pan 0001, Qun Jin |
IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun. | 4 |
| 2024 | Adaptive Segmentation Enhanced Asynchronous Federated Learning for Sustainable Intelligent Transportation SystemsabstractThe proliferation of advanced embedded and communication technologies has facilitated the possibility of modern Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). The hierarchical nature of such large-scale and distributed systems brings obvious challenges in creating a scalable and sustainable computing environment, and hence the development and application of edge intelligence become critical. Federated learning (FL), as an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm, aims to offer secure knowledge sharing and effective learning across multiple devices. However, conventional FL may fall into trouble when facing large-scale and network-agnostic systems with fast moving devices and changing network attributes. In this study, we propose an Adaptive Segmentation enhanced Asynchronous Federated Learning (AS-AFL) model, aiming to improve the learning efficiency and reliability in sustainable ITS via a decentralized fashion. Specifically, a meta-learning based adaptive segmentation scheme is designed to automatically separate the client nodes (e.g., vehicles) into multiple edge groups according to their homogeneous attributes. An integrated aggregation mechanism is then developed to realize the horizontal FL among a group of similar client nodes via the so-called intra-group synchronous aggregation, while allowing the vertical FL across different groups via the so-called inter-group asynchronous aggregation. Experiment and evaluation results based on an open-source dataset demonstrate the outstanding learning and communication performance of our proposed model, compared with several conventional FL schemes in a distributed ITS application scenario. Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006, Akira Kawai, Kaoru Fueda, Jinhua She, Kevin I-Kai Wang |
IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst. | 2 |
| 2024 | Reconstructed Graph Neural Network With Knowledge Distillation for Lightweight Anomaly DetectionabstractThe proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies in modern smart society enables massive data exchange for offering intelligent services. It becomes essential to ensure secure communications while exchanging highly sensitive IoT data efficiently, which leads to high demands for lightweight models or algorithms with limited computation capability provided by individual IoT devices. In this study, a graph representation learning model, which seamlessly incorporates graph neural network (GNN) and knowledge distillation (KD) techniques, named reconstructed graph with global-local distillation (RG-GLD), is designed to realize the lightweight anomaly detection across IoT communication networks. In particular, a new graph network reconstruction strategy, which treats data communications as nodes in a directed graph while edges are then connected according to two specifically defined rules, is devised and applied to facilitate the graph representation learning in secure and efficient IoT communications. Both the structural and traffic features are then extracted from the graph data and flow data respectively, based on the graph attention network (GAT) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) techniques. These can benefit the GNN-based KD process in accordance with the more effective feature fusion and representation, considering both structural and data levels across the dynamic IoT networks. Furthermore, a lightweight local subgraph preservation mechanism improved by the graph attention mechanism and downsampling scheme to better utilize the topological information, and a so-called global information alignment defined based on the self-attention mechanism to effectively preserve the global information, are developed and incorporated in a refined graph attention based KD scheme. Compared with four different baseline methods, experiments and evaluations conducted based on two public datasets demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of our proposed model in improving the efficiency of knowledge transfer with higher classification accuracy but lower computational load, which can be deployed for lightweight anomaly detection in sustainable IoT computing environments. Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006, Kevin I-Kai Wang, Zheng Yan 0002, Laurence T. Yang, Qun Jin |
IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst. | 3 |
| 2023 | Federal learning edge network based sentiment analysis combating global COVID-19
Wei Liang 0006, Suzhen Huang, Guanghao Xiong, Ke Yan 0001, Xiaokang Zhou |
Comput. Commun. | 1 |
| 2023 | Edge-Enabled Two-Stage Scheduling Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Internet of EverythingabstractNowadays, the concept of Internet of Everything (IoE) is becoming a hotly discussed topic, which is playing an increasingly indispensable role in modern intelligent applications. These applications are known for their real-time requirements under limited network and computing resources, thus it becomes a highly demanding task to transform and compute tremendous amount of raw data in a cloud center. The edge–cloud computing infrastructure allows a large amount of data to be processed on nearby edge nodes and then only the extracted and encrypted key features are transmitted to the data center. This offers the potential to achieve an end–edge–cloud-based big data intelligence for IoE in a typical two-stage data processing scheme, while satisfying a data security constraint. In this study, a deep-reinforcement-learning-enhanced two-stage scheduling (DRL-TSS) model is proposed to address the NP-hard problem in terms of operation complexity in end–edge–cloud Internet of Things systems, which is able to allocate computing resources within an edge-enabled infrastructure to ensure computing task to be completed with minimum cost. A presorting scheme based on Johnson’s rule is developed and applied to preprocess the two-stage tasks on multiple executors, and a DRL mechanism is developed to minimize the overall makespan based on a newly designed instant reward that takes into account the maximal utilization of each executor in edge-enabled two-stage scheduling. The performance of our method is evaluated and compared with three existing scheduling techniques, and experimental results demonstrate the ability of our proposed algorithm in achieving better learning efficiency and scheduling performance with a 1.1-approximation to the targeted optimal IoE applications. Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006, Ke Yan 0001, Weimin Li 0001, Kevin I-Kai Wang, Jianhua Ma 0002, Qun Jin |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 2 |
| 2023 | Digital Twin Enhanced Federated Reinforcement Learning With Lightweight Knowledge Distillation in Mobile NetworksabstractThe high-speed mobile networks offer great potentials to many future intelligent applications, such as autonomous vehicles in smart transportation systems. Such networks provide the possibility to interconnect mobile devices to achieve fast knowledge sharing for efficient collaborative learning and operations, especially with the help of distributed machine learning, e.g., Federated Learning (FL), and modern digital technologies, e.g., Digital Twin (DT) systems. Typically, FL requires a fixed group of participants that have Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) data for accurate and stable model training, which is highly unlikely in real-world mobile network scenarios. In this paper, in order to facilitate the lightweight model training and real-time processing in high-speed mobile networks, we design and introduce an end-edge-cloud structured three-layer Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL) framework, incorporated with an edge-cloud structured DT system. A dual-Reinforcement Learning (dual-RL) scheme is devised to support optimizations of client node selection and global aggregation frequency during FL via a cooperative decision-making strategy, which is assisted by a two-layer DT system deployed in the edge-cloud for real-time monitoring of mobile devices and environment changes. A model pruning and federated bidirectional distillation (Bi-distillation) mechanism is then developed locally for the lightweight model training, while a model splitting scheme with a lightweight data augmentation mechanism is developed globally to separately optimize the aggregation weights based on a splitted neural network structure (i.e., the encoder and classifier) in a more targeted manner, which can work together to effectively reduce the overall communication cost and improve the non-IID problem. Experiment and evaluation results compared with three baseline methods using two different real-world datasets demonstrate the usefulness and outstanding performance of our proposed FRL model in communication-efficient model training and non-IID issue alleviation for high-speed mobile network scenarios. Xiaokang Zhou, Xuzhe Zheng, Xuesong Cui, Jiashuai Shi, Wei Liang 0006, Zheng Yan 0002, Laurence T. Yang, Shohei Shimizu, Kevin I-Kai Wang |
IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun. | 5 |
| 2023 | Hierarchical Federated Learning With Social Context Clustering-Based Participant Selection for Internet of Medical Things ApplicationsabstractThe proliferation in embedded and communication technologies made the concept of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) a reality. Individuals’ physical and physiological status can be constantly monitored, and numerous data can be collected through wearable and mobile devices. However, the silo of individual data brings limitations to existing machine learning approaches to correctly identify a user’s health status. Distributed machine learning paradigms, such as federated learning, offer a potential solution for privacy-preserving knowledge sharing without sending raw personal data. However, federated learning is vulnerable to harmful participants that can degrade the overall model quality by sharing low-quality data. Therefore, it is critical to select suitable participants to ensure the accuracy and efficiency of federated learning. In this article, a unique clustering-based approach is proposed to use social context data for participant selection. Different edge participant groups will be established, and group-specific federated learning will be performed. The models of various edge groups will be further aggregated to strengthen the robustness of the global model. The experimental results demonstrated that through participant selection, clustering-based hierarchical federated learning can achieve better results with less participants in two different IoMT applications for ECG and human motion monitoring. This shows the efficacy of the proposed method in improving federated learning performance and efficiency in various IoMT applications. Xiaokang Zhou, Xiaozhou Ye, Kevin I-Kai Wang, Wei Liang 0006, Nirmal-Kumar C. Nair, Shohei Shimizu, Zheng Yan 0002, Qun Jin |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. | 4 |
| 2023 | Bi-Dueling DQN Enhanced Two-Stage Scheduling for Augmented Surveillance in Smart EMSabstractSafety production surveillance is of great significance to industrial operation management. While augmented intelligence of things is demonstrating tremendous potential in industrial applications, the analyzed information offers lots of benefits to the higher level planning in the enterprise management systems, to further improve the operational efficiency. In this article, a video surveillance system with augmented intelligence of things is considered as a promising solution to enhance the operational efficiency of enterprises. However, the challenge is to process the surveillance video streams as soon as possible without ignoring any emergencies. This issue can be formulated as a two-stage scheduling problem, which is an NP-hard problem that can be integrated with higher level enterprise systems for operational efficiency improvement. An improved Deep Q-Network (DQN) model with a newly designed prioritized replay scheme, named Bi-Dueling DQN with Prioritized Replay, is proposed to solve this two-stage scheduling problem in a smart enterprise management system. A dense reward function based on a concrete state representation is designed to tackle the sparse reward challenge and to speed up the convergence in actual large-scale task scheduling process. A prioritized replay scheme is then developed to improve the sampling efficiency, so as to effectively reduce the training time in deep reinforcement learning for the optimal two-stage scheduling. The experiment results demonstrated that the proposed approach is able to provide an efficient scheduling policy to resolve the two-stage scheduling problem, while at the same time offering insight information to improve the performance of higher level smart enterprise management systems. Wei Liang 0006, Weiquan Xie, Xiaokang Zhou, Kevin I-Kai Wang, Jianhua Ma 0002, Qun Jin |
IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics | 1 |
| 2023 | Intelligent Containment Control With Double Constraints for Cloud-Based Collaborative ManufacturingabstractModern manufacturing process is commonly composed of multiple automated devices working together efficiently. Cloud-based manufacturing aims to achieve better efficiency by allowing the collaborative manufacturing across a group of automated robots. Cooperations between multiple robots can accomplish more complicated tasks that is beyond the capability of any individual one. However, it is of critical importance to control robots with different capabilities to work in harmony while ensuring safety and reliability during this process. In this paper, a double constrained containment mechanism is proposed to dispatch heterogeneous robots in a distributed containment control framework for smart manufacturing. Following a three-layer control framework, a cloud decision-making center is designed to realize the cloud-based collaborative manufacturing, which is more cost-effective than other commonly used containment mechanisms that only rely on information exchange among leader-robots. A projection-based containment control scheme is developed, which not only consider nonlinearities induced by position constraints and velocity constraints, but also can tackle dynamically changing communication topologies with uncertain communication delay, to efficiently navigate all follower-robots into a safe working zone formed by leaders. A theoretical stability analysis is conducted to prove the proposed mechanism can ensure all followers enter the target area while their positions and velocities remaining in the corresponding constraint sets. Experiment evaluation results under three application scenarios demonstrate the advantage of our method that can offer a more practical solution to other existing multi-robot containment control for cloud-based smart manufacturing, in considering both position and velocity constraints combined with switching topologies and communication delays. Xiaokang Zhou, Hailiang Hou, Wei Liang 0006, Kevin I-Kai Wang, Qun Jin |
IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics | 3 |
| 2023 | Distribution Bias Aware Collaborative Generative Adversarial Network for Imbalanced Deep Learning in Industrial IoTabstractThe impact of Internet of Things (IoT) has become increasingly significant in smart manufacturing, while deep generative model (DGM) is viewed as a promising learning technique to work with large amount of continuously generated industrial Big Data in facilitating modern industrial applications. However, it is still challenging to handle the imbalanced data when using conventional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based learning strategies. In this article, we propose a distribution bias aware collaborative GAN (DB-CGAN) model for imbalanced deep learning in industrial IoT, especially to solve limitations caused by distribution bias issue between the generated data and original data, via a more robust data augmentation. An integrated data augmentation framework is constructed by introducing a complementary classifier into the basic GAN model. Specifically, a conditional generator with random labels is designed and trained adversarially with the classifier to effectively enhance augmentation of the number of data samples in minority classes, while a weight sharing scheme is newly designed between two separated feature extractors, enabling the collaborative adversarial training among generator, discriminator, and classifier. An augmentation algorithm is then developed for intelligent anomaly detection in imbalanced learning, which can significantly improve the classification accuracy based on the correction of distribution bias using the rebalanced data. Compared with five baseline methods, experiment evaluations based on two real-world imbalanced datasets demonstrate the outstanding performance of our proposed model in tackling the distribution bias issue for multiclass classification in imbalanced learning for industrial IoT applications. Xiaokang Zhou, Yiyong Hu, Wei Liang 0006, Jianhua Ma 0002, Qun Jin |
IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics | 4 |
| 2023 | Graph Attention Network With Spatial-Temporal Clustering for Traffic Flow Forecasting in Intelligent Transportation SystemabstractWith the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G technologies, IoT devices deployed on roads are able to collect a large amount of traffic data at any time. Road networks can be easily constructed into a graph structure with spatial-temporal features, and how to use these spatial-temporal features for dynamic traffic flow forecasting has become a heated issue. Although existing studies bring in the consideration of periodicity to deal with spatial-temporal sequence dependence, the similarity of time-varying relationships among cross-spatial nodes has not been well discussed. In this paper, we propose a Graph Attention Network with Spatial-Temporal Clustering (GAT-STC), which considers the so-called recent-aware features and periodic-aware features, to improve the Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based traffic flow forecasting in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Specifically, for the recent-aware feature extraction, a distance-based Graph Attention Network (GAT) is improved and constructed to better utilize the hidden features of neighbor nodes within a reliable distance during the recent time interval, thus can effectively capture the dynamic changes in spatial feature representation. For the periodic-aware feature extraction, a spatial-temporal clustering algorithm, in which both features in terms of nodes’ current traffic states and similar trends in terms of their dynamic changes are taken into account, is developed and applied to achieve better learning efficiency. Experiments using three public traffic datasets demonstrate the higher accuracy and better efficiency of our proposed model for traffic flow forecasting, compared with five baseline methods in ITS. Tian Shu, Xiaokang Zhou, Xuzhe Zheng, Akira Kawai, Kaoru Fueda, Zheng Yan 0002, Wei Liang 0006, Kevin I-Kai Wang |
IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst. | 8 |
| 2022 | Hierarchical Adversarial Attacks Against Graph-Neural-Network-Based IoT Network Intrusion Detection SystemabstractThe advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies leads to a wide penetration and large-scale deployment of IoT systems across an entire city or even country. While IoT systems are capable of providing intelligent services, the large amount of data collected and processed in IoT systems also raises serious security concerns. Many research efforts have been devoted to design intelligent network intrusion detection system (NIDS) to prevent misuse of IoT data across smart applications. However, existing approaches may suffer from the issue of limited and imbalanced attack data when training the detection model, which make the system vulnerable especially for those unknown type attacks. In this study, a novel hierarchical adversarial attack (HAA) generation method is introduced to realize the level-aware black-box adversarial attack strategy, targeting the graph neural network (GNN)-based intrusion detection in IoT systems with a limited budget. By constructing a shadow GNN model, an intelligent mechanism based on a saliency map technique is designed to generate adversarial examples by effectively identifying and modifying the critical feature elements with minimal perturbations. A hierarchical node selection algorithm based on random walk with restart (RWR) is developed to select a set of more vulnerable nodes with high attack priority, considering their structural features, and overall loss changes within the targeted IoT network. The proposed HAA generation method is evaluated using the open-source data set UNSW-SOSR2019 with three baseline methods. Comparison results demonstrate its ability in degrading the classification precision by more than 30% in the two state-of-the-art GNN models, GCN and JK-Net, respectively, for NIDS in IoT environments. Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006, Weimin Li 0001, Ke Yan 0001, Shohei Shimizu, Kevin I-Kai Wang |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 2 |
| 2022 | Variational Few-Shot Learning for Microservice-Oriented Intrusion Detection in Distributed Industrial IoTabstractAlong with the popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) techniques with several computational paradigms, such as cloud and edge computing, microservice has been viewed as a promising architecture in large-scale application design and deployment. Due to the limited computing ability of edge devices in distributed IoT, only a small scale of data can be used for model training. In addition, most of the machine-learning-based intrusion detection methods are insufficient when dealing with imbalanced dataset under limited computing resources. In this article, we propose an optimized intra/inter-class-structure-based variational few-shot learning (OICS-VFSL) model to overcome a specific out-of-distribution problem in imbalanced learning, and to improve the microservice-oriented intrusion detection in distributed IoT systems. Following a newly designed VFSL framework, an intra/inter-class optimization scheme is developed using reconstructed feature embeddings, in which the intra-class distance is optimized based on the approximation during a variation Bayesian process, while the inter-class distance is optimized based on the maximization of similarities during a feature concatenation process. An intelligent intrusion detection algorithm is, then, introduced to improve the multiclass classification via a nonlinear neural network. Evaluation experiments are conducted using two public datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, especially in detecting novel attacks with extremely imbalanced data, compared with four baseline methods. Wei Liang 0006, Yiyong Hu, Xiaokang Zhou, Yi Pan 0001, Kevin I-Kai Wang |
IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics | 1 |
| 2022 | Federated Transfer Learning Based Cross-Domain Prediction for Smart ManufacturingabstractSmart manufacturing aims to support highly customizable production processes. Therefore, the associated machine intelligence needs to be quickly adaptable to new products, processes, and applications with limited training data while preserving data privacy. In this article, a new federated transfer learning framework, federated transfer learning for cross-domain prediction, is proposed to address the challenges of data scarcity and data privacy faced by most machine learning approaches in modern smart manufacturing with cross-domain applications. The framework architecture consists of a central server and several groups of smart devices, where each group handles a different application. The existing applications can share their knowledge through the central server as base models, while new applications can convert a base model to their target-domain models with limited application-specific data using a transfer learning technique. Meanwhile, the federated learning scheme is deployed within a group to further enhance the accuracy of the application-specific model. The integrated framework allows model sharing across the central server and different smart devices without exposing any raw data and, hence, protects the data privacy. Two public datasets, COCO and PETS2009, which represent the source and target applications, are employed for evaluations. The simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms two state-of-the-art machine learning approaches by achieving better learning efficiency and accuracy. Kevin I-Kai Wang, Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006, Zheng Yan 0002, Jinhua She |
IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics | 3 |
| 2022 | Intelligent Small Object Detection for Digital Twin in Smart Manufacturing With Industrial Cyber-Physical SystemsabstractRecently, along with several technological advancements in cyber-physical systems, the revolution of Industry 4.0 has brought in an emerging concept named digital twin (DT), which shows its potential to break the barrier between the physical and cyber space in smart manufacturing. However, it is still difficult to analyze and estimate the real-time structural and environmental parameters in terms of their dynamic changes in digital twinning, especially when facing detection tasks of multiple small objects from a large-scale scene with complex contexts in modern manufacturing environments. In this article, we focus on a small object detection model for DT, aiming to realize the dynamic synchronization between a physical manufacturing system and its virtual representation. Three significant elements, including equipment, product, and operator, are considered as the basic environmental parameters to represent and estimate the dynamic characteristics and real-time changes in building a generic DT system of smart manufacturing workshop. A hybrid deep neural network model, based on the integration of MobileNetv2, YOLOv4, and Openpose, is constructed to identify the real-time status from physical manufacturing environment to virtual space. A learning algorithm is then developed to realize the efficient multitype small object detection based on the feature integration and fusion from both shallow and deep layers, in order to facilitate the modeling, monitoring, and optimizing of the whole manufacturing process in the DT system. Experiments and evaluations conducted in three different use cases demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of our proposed method, which can achieve a higher detection accuracy for DT in smart manufacturing. Xiaokang Zhou, Xuesong Xu, Wei Liang 0006, Shohei Shimizu, Laurence T. Yang, Qun Jin |
IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics | 3 |
| 2021 | Deep-Learning-Enhanced Multitarget Detection for End-Edge-Cloud Surveillance in Smart IoTabstractAlong with the rapid development of cloud computing, IoT, and AI technologies, cloud video surveillance (CVS) has become a hotly discussed topic, especially when facing the requirement of real-time analysis in smart applications. Object detection usually plays an important role for environment monitoring and activity tracking in surveillance system. The emerging edge-cloud computing paradigm provides us an opportunity to deal with the continuously generated huge amount of surveillance data in an on-site manner across IoT systems. However, the detection performance is still far away from satisfactions due to the complex surveilling environment. In this study, we focus on the multitarget detection for real-time surveillance in smart IoT systems. A newly designed deep neural network model called A-YONet, which is constructed by combining the advantages of YOLO and MTCNN, is proposed to be deployed in an end-edge-cloud surveillance system, in order to realize the lightweight training and feature learning with limited computing sources. An intelligent detection algorithm is then developed based on a preadjusting scheme of anchor box and a multilevel feature fusion mechanism. Experiments and evaluations using two data sets, including one public data set and one homemade data set obtained in a real surveillance system, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in enhancing training efficiency and detection precision, especially for multitarget detection in smart IoT application developments. Xiaokang Zhou, Xuesong Xu, Wei Liang 0006, Zheng Yan 0002 |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 3 |
| 2021 | CNN-RNN Based Intelligent Recommendation for Online Medical Pre-Diagnosis SupportabstractThe rapidly developed Health 2.0 technology has provided people with more opportunities to conduct online medical consultation than ever before. Understanding contexts within different online medical communications and activities becomes a significant issue to facilitate patients' medical decision making process. As a subcategory of machine learning, neural networks have drawn increasing attentions in natural language processing applications. In this article, we focus on modeling and analyzing the patient-physician-generated data based on an integrated CNN-RNN framework, in order to deal with the situation that patients' online inquiries are usually not very long. A so-called DP-CRNN algorithm is developed with a newly designed neural network structure, to extract and highlight the combination of semantic and sequential features in terms of patient's inquiries. An intelligent recommendation method is then proposed to provide patients with automatic clinic guidance and pre-diagnosis suggestions, in which a clustering mechanism is utilized to refine the learning process with more precise diagnosis scope and more representative features. Experiments based on the collected real world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model and method for intelligent pre-diagnosis service in online medical environments. Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006 |
IEEE ACM Trans. Comput. Biol. Bioinform. | 3 |
| 2021 | Deep Correlation Mining Based on Hierarchical Hybrid Networks for Heterogeneous Big Data RecommendationsabstractThe advancement of several significant technologies, such as artificial intelligence, cyber intelligence, and machine learning, has made big data penetrate not only into the industry and academic field but also our daily life along with a variety of cyber-enabled applications. In this article, we focus on a deep correlation mining method in heterogeneous big data environments. A hierarchical hybrid network (HHN) model is constructed to describe multitype relationships among different entities, and a series of measures are defined to quantify the internal correlations within one specific layer or external correlations between different layers. An intelligent router based on deep reinforcement learning framework is designed to generate optimal actions to route across the HHN. An improved random walk with the restart-based algorithm is then developed with the intelligent router, based on the hierarchical influence across network associated with multiple correlations. An intelligent recommendation mechanism is finally designed and applied to support users' collaboration works in scholarly big data environments. Experiments based on DBLP and ResearchGate data show the practicability and usefulness of our model and method. Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006, Kevin I-Kai Wang, Laurence T. Yang |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. | 2 |
| 2021 | Variational LSTM Enhanced Anomaly Detection for Industrial Big DataabstractWith the increasing population of Industry 4.0, industrial big data (IBD) has become a hotly discussed topic in digital and intelligent industry field. The security problem existing in the signal processing on large scale of data stream is still a challenge issue in industrial internet of things, especially when dealing with the high-dimensional anomaly detection for intelligent industrial application. In this article, to mitigate the inconsistency between dimensionality reduction and feature retention in imbalanced IBD, we propose a variational long short-term memory (VLSTM) learning model for intelligent anomaly detection based on reconstructed feature representation. An encoder-decoder neural network associated with a variational reparameterization scheme is designed to learn the low-dimensional feature representation from high-dimensional raw data. Three loss functions are defined and quantified to constrain the reconstructed hidden variable into a more explicit and meaningful form. A lightweight estimation network is then fed with the refined feature representation to identify anomalies in IBD. Experiments using a public IBD dataset named UNSW-NB15 demonstrate that the proposed VLSTM model can efficiently cope with imbalance and high-dimensional issues, and significantly improve the accuracy and reduce the false rate in anomaly detection for IBD according to F1, area under curve (AUC), and false alarm rate (FAR). Xiaokang Zhou, Yiyong Hu, Wei Liang 0006, Jianhua Ma 0002, Qun Jin |
IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics | 3 |
| 2021 | Siamese Neural Network Based Few-Shot Learning for Anomaly Detection in Industrial Cyber-Physical SystemsabstractWith the increasing population of Industry 4.0, both AI and smart techniques have been applied and become hotly discussed topics in industrial cyber-physical systems (CPS). Intelligent anomaly detection for identifying cyber-physical attacks to guarantee the work efficiency and safety is still a challenging issue, especially when dealing with few labeled data for cyber-physical security protection. In this article, we propose a few-shot learning model with Siamese convolutional neural network (FSL-SCNN), to alleviate the over-fitting issue and enhance the accuracy for intelligent anomaly detection in industrial CPS. A Siamese CNN encoding network is constructed to measure distances of input samples based on their optimized feature representations. A robust cost function design including three specific losses is then proposed to enhance the efficiency of training process. An intelligent anomaly detection algorithm is developed finally. Experiment results based on a fully labeled public dataset and a few labeled dataset demonstrate that our proposed FSL-SCNN can significantly improve false alarm rate (FAR) and F1 scores when detecting intrusion signals for industrial CPS security protection. Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006, Shohei Shimizu, Jianhua Ma 0002, Qun Jin |
IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics | 2 |
| 2020 | Deep-Learning-Enhanced Human Activity Recognition for Internet of Healthcare ThingsabstractAlong with the advancement of several emerging computing paradigms and technologies, such as cloud computing, mobile computing, artificial intelligence, and big data, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have been applied in a variety of fields. In particular, the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) is becoming increasingly important in human activity recognition (HAR) due to the rapid development of wearable and mobile devices. In this article, we focus on the deep-learning-enhanced HAR in IoHT environments. A semisupervised deep learning framework is designed and built for more accurate HAR, which efficiently uses and analyzes the weakly labeled sensor data to train the classifier learning model. To better solve the problem of the inadequately labeled sample, an intelligent autolabeling scheme based on deep Q-network (DQN) is developed with a newly designed distance-based reward rule which can improve the learning efficiency in IoT environments. A multisensor based data fusion mechanism is then developed to seamlessly integrate the on-body sensor data, context sensor data, and personal profile data together, and a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based classification method is proposed to identify fine-grained patterns according to the high-level features contextually extracted from the sequential motion data. Finally, experiments and evaluations are conducted to demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of the proposed method using real-world data. Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006, Kevin I-Kai Wang, Hao Wang 0003, Laurence T. Yang, Qun Jin |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 2 |
| 2019 | Social Recommendation With Large-Scale Group Decision-Making for Cyber-Enabled Online ServiceabstractAlong with the development of several emerging computing paradigms and information communication technologies, it is said that cyber computing technology is playing an increasingly important role across cyber-related systems and applications. In this article, we focus on cyber-social computing and propose a computational model that integrates large-scale group decision-making (LSGDM) into social recommendations for cyber-enabled online services. As a concrete application example, a graph model is built to describe the LSGDM problem among researchers in scholarly big data environments. Following the basic profiling to describe decision-makers within scholarly networks, measures are defined to evaluate one researcher's academic performance and research outcome and further quantify correlations between them based on their collaboration relationships in a constructed network model. A two-stage large-scale decision-making solution is then proposed for social recommendations: A network partition algorithm is developed based on the identification of experts along with their influence extending to a group of researchers, and a random walk with the restart-based algorithm is improved to calculate the weighted decisions for group decision aggregation and alternative ranking. Experiments using the real-world data demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of our proposed model and method, which can provide the target researcher with more reliable recommendations. Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006, Suzhen Huang, Miao Fu |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. | 2 |
| 2019 | Multi-Modality Behavioral Influence Analysis for Personalized Recommendations in Health Social Media EnvironmentabstractRecently, health social media have engaged more and more people to share their personal feelings, opinions, and experience in the context of health informatics, which has drawn increasing attention from both academia and industry. In this paper, we focus on the behavioral influence analysis based on heterogeneous health data generated in social media environments. An integrated deep neural network (DNN)-based learning model is designed to analyze and describe the latent behavioral influence hidden across multiple modalities, in which a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based framework is used to extract the time-series features within a certain social context. The learned features based on cross-modality influence analysis are then trained in a SoftMax classifier, which can result in a restructured representation of high-level features for online physician rating and classification in a data-driven way. Finally, two algorithms within two representative application scenarios are developed to provide patients with personalized recommendations in health social media environments. Experiments using the real world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model and method. Xiaokang Zhou, Wei Liang 0006, Kevin I-Kai Wang, Shohei Shimizu |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. | 2 |
| 2018 | Modeling of cross-disciplinary collaboration for potential field discovery and recommendation based on scholarly big data
Wei Liang 0006, Xiaokang Zhou, Suzhen Huang, Chunhua Hu 0001, Xuesong Xu, Qun Jin |
Future Gener. Comput. Syst. | 1 |
| 2017 | A data intensive heuristic approach to the two-stage streaming scheduling problem
Wei Liang 0006, Chunhua Hu 0001, Min Wu 0002, Qun Jin |
J. Comput. Syst. Sci. | 1 |
| 2016 | Analyzing of research patterns based on a temporal tracking and assessing model
Wei Liang 0006, Qun Jin, Zixian Lu, Min Wu 0002, Chunhua Hu 0001 |
Pers. Ubiquitous Comput. | 1 |