Accurate localization using visual information is a critical yet challenging task, especially in urban environments where nearby buildings and construction sites significantly degrade GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signal quality. This issue underscores the importance of visual localization techniques in scenarios where GNSS signals are unreliable. This paper proposes U-ViLAR, a novel uncertainty-aware visual localization framework designed to address these challenges while enabling adaptive localization using high-definition (HD) maps or navigation maps. Specifically, our method first extracts features from the input visual data and maps them into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space to enhance spatial consistency with the map input. Subsequently, we introduce: a) Perceptual Uncertainty-guided Association, which mitigates errors caused by perception uncertainty, and b) Localization Uncertainty-guided Registration, which reduces errors introduced by localization uncertainty. By effectively balancing the coarse-grained large-scale localization capability of association with the fine-grained precise localization capability of registration, our approach achieves robust and accurate localization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple localization tasks. Furthermore, our model has undergone rigorous testing on large-scale autonomous driving fleets and has demonstrated stable performance in various challenging urban scenarios.

This paper presents DriVerse, a generative model for simulating navigation-driven driving scenes from a single image and a future trajectory. Previous autonomous driving world models either directly feed the trajectory or discrete control signals into the generation pipeline, leading to poor alignment between the control inputs and the implicit features of the 2D base generative model, which results in low-fidelity video outputs. Some methods use coarse textual commands or discrete vehicle control signals, which lack the precision to guide fine-grained, trajectory-specific video generation, making them unsuitable for evaluating actual autonomous driving algorithms. DriVerse introduces explicit trajectory guidance in two complementary forms: it tokenizes trajectories into textual prompts using a predefined trend vocabulary for seamless language integration, and converts 3D trajectories into 2D spatial motion priors to enhance control over static content within the driving scene. To better handle dynamic objects, we further introduce a lightweight motion alignment module, which focuses on the inter-frame consistency of dynamic pixels, significantly enhancing the temporal coherence of moving elements over long sequences. We also propose an inference-time strategy to address issues caused by rapid vehicle heading changes. With minimal training and no need for additional data, DriVerse outperforms specialized models on future video generation tasks across both the nuScenes and Waymo datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/shalfun/DriVerse

Social images shared on social media are often associated with geo-tagged information and text descriptions. Given a set of keywords and a spatial location, geo-tagged social image search can retrieve top-k image objects that best match query parameters in terms of spatial distance and tag similarity of social images. However, due to improper parameter settings, users may notice that some expected images are missing and wonder why these objects do not appear in the query results. This paper studies the why-not top-k social image search question and proposes efficient query refinement algorithms, aiming to minimally modify users' initial queries to reintroduce missing objects. We first develop a baseline algorithm that traverses each possible query parameter sequentially to find the best refinement parameters. Then, we propose a fast search algorithm with two optimization strategies named lower ranking nodes pruning and early stop pruning, which can improve performance by quickly removing low-ranking social images. In addition, we propose an efficient boundary search algorithm that can determine the ranking of missing images at a low time cost. We also extend the proposed techniques to handle multiple missing images. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution is two orders of magnitude faster than baseline and is effective in a wide range of settings.

Manga is a fashionable Japanese-style comic form that is composed of black-and-white strokes and is generally displayed as raster images on digital devices. Typical mangas have simple textures, wide lines, and few color gradients, which are vectorizable natures to enjoy the merits of vector graphics, e.g., adaptive resolutions and small file sizes. In this paper, we propose MARVEL (MAnga’s Raster to VEctor Learning), a primitive-wise approach for vectorizing raster gray-level mangas by Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Unlike previous learning-based methods which predict vector parameters for an entire image, MARVEL introduces a new perspective that regards an entire manga as a collection of basic primitives—stroke lines, and designs a DRL model to decompose the target image into a primitive sequence for achieving accurate vectorization. To improve vectorization accuracies and decrease file sizes, we further propose a stroke accuracy reward to predict accurate stroke lines, and a pruning mechanism to avoid generating erroneous and repeated strokes. Extensive subjective and objective experiments show that our MARVEL can generate impressive results and reaches the state-of-the-art level.

In this paper, we address the problem of detecting 3D ob-jects from multi-view images. Current query-based methods rely on global 3D position embeddings (PE) to learn the ge-ometric correspondence between images and 3D space. We claim that directly interacting 2D image features with global 3D PE could increase the difficulty of learning view trans-formation due to the variation of camera extrinsics. Thus we propose a novel method based on CAmera view Position Embedding, called CAPE. We form the 3D position embed-dings under the local camera-view coordinate system instead of the global coordinate system, such that 3D position em-bedding is free of encoding camera extrinsic parameters. Furthermore, we extend our CAPE to temporal modeling by exploiting the object queries of previous frames and encoding the ego motion for boosting 3D object detection. CAPE achieves the state-of-the-art performance (61.0% NDS and 52.5% mAP) among all LiDAR-free methods on nuScenes dataset. Codes and models are available.11Codes of Paddle3D and PyTorch Implementation.

Blockchain applications, especially DeFi, frequently require off-chain data through oracles. Distributed oracles have higher security, but the system is also more complex. This paper designs a unified formal description method for the communication process, security protocol, data aggregation and other related procedures and protocols of the oracle. This method has no ambiguity and has a high logical description ability. Therefore, it has good convertibility with Event-B and some other formal verification tools, as well as logic methods such as first-order logic, set theory, and CTL, which can provide a basis for technical personnel to establish formal models, protocol development, and implementation. The paper defines and analyzes this protocol description method and presents examples of some core protocols.

Smart contract is a trusted service provided on the blockchain, while cloud service is a traditional service mode with a large number of resources. The combination of the blockchain and cloud service is of great significance to the trusted expansion of services and the access to services inside and outside the blockchain. In this paper, we study the smart contract extension service in blockchain-cloud collaborative computing. The service module decoupling method of smart contract is proposed, and the parallel execution algorithm of smart contract service is designed, which improves the execution efficiency of smart contract service. Finally, this paper designs a secure data interaction method of smart contract and cloud service, which helps to maintain the data consistency between cloud computing and blockchain. The experimental results show that the proposed method can save at most 42.13% of the running time, and it can promote the data consistency between the cloud service and the blockchain.

Blockchain is an innovative application of distributed storage, consensus algorithm, encryption algorithm, and other computer technologies. The consensus algorithm is the key to keep consistent among blockchain nodes. In most existing consensus algorithms, the leader node is responsible for proposing new block and communicating with other nodes. The leader node is easy to be the target of malicious attackers. With the increase of the number of nodes, the throughput and scalability of the blockchain system are also unsatisfactory. To address such issues, we propose the AnonymousFox consensus algorithm, which is suitable for the consortium blockchain and private blockchain. First, we design an anonymous leader node sorting algorithm, which hides the identity of the leader node through a variety of encryption algorithms. It periodically changes the ordered leader list to hide the target of malicious attackers. In addition, we design a consensus algorithm based on the anonymous identity of the leader node. Through one-to-many message communication, the amount of messages is greatly reduced. The complexity of the algorithm is$O(n)$. It solves the problem of ordered replication of state machines when the leader node is anonymous. We analyze the algorithm, it ensures safety and liveness when the fault nodes are less than one-third of the total. We evaluate the throughput, latency, scalability, resource consumption, exception processing, smart contract, and blockchain network through experiments. The throughput of the proposed algorithm is 49.3% higher than that of the practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has high performance and scalability.

Manga is a world popular comic form originated in Japan, which typically employs black-and-white stroke lines and geometric exaggeration to describe humans' appearances, poses, and actions. In this paper, we propose MangaGAN, the first method based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for unpaired photo-to-manga translation. Inspired by the drawing process of experienced manga artists, MangaGAN generates geometric features and converts each facial region into the manga domain with a tailored multi-GANs architecture. For training MangaGAN, we collect a new data-set from a popular manga work with extensive features. To produce high-quality manga faces, we propose a structural smoothing loss to smooth stroke-lines and avoid noisy pixels, and a similarity preserving module to improve the similarity between domains of photo and manga. Extensive experiments show that MangaGAN can produce high-quality manga faces preserving both the facial similarity and manga style, and outperforms other reference methods.

Quick Response (QR) code is one of the most worldwide used two-dimensional codes. Traditional QR codes appear as random collections of black-and-white modules that lack visual semantics and aesthetic elements, which inspires the recent works to beautify the appearances of QR codes. However, these works adopt fixed generation algorithms and therefore can only generate QR codes with a pre-defined style. In this paper, combining the Neural Style Transfer technique, we propose a novel end-to-end method, named ArtCoder, to generate the stylized QR codes that are personalized, diverse, attractive, and scanning-robust. To guarantee that the generated stylized QR codes are still scanning-robust, we propose a Sampling-Simulation layer, a module-based code loss, and a competition mechanism. The experimental results show that our stylized QR codes have high-quality in both the visual effect and the scanning-robustness, and they are able to support the real-world application.

Quick Response (QR) code is a popular form of matrix barcodes that are widely used to tag online links on print media (e.g., posters, leaflets, and books). However, standard QR codes typically appear as noise-like black/white squares (named modules) which seriously disrupt the attractiveness of their carriers. In this paper, we propose StyleCode-Net, a method to generate novel art-style QR codes which can better match the entire style of their carriers to improve the visual quality. For endowing QR codes with artistic elements, a big challenge is that the scanning-robustness must be preserved after transforming colors and textures. To address these issues, we propose a module-based deformable convolutional mechanism (MDCM) and a dynamic target mechanism (DTM) in StyleCode-Net. MDCM can extract the features of black and white modules of QR codes respectively. Then, the extracted features are fed to DTM to balance the scanning-robustness and the style representation. Extensive subjective and objective experiments show that our art-style QR codes have reached the state-of-the-art level in both visual quality and scanning-robustness, and these codes have the potential to replace standard QR codes in real-world applications.

BACKGROUND: Accurate prediction of binding between class I human leukocyte antigen (HLA) and neoepitope is critical for target identification within personalized T-cell based immunotherapy. Many recent prediction tools developed upon the deep learning algorithms and mass spectrometry data have indeed showed improvement on the average predicting power for class I HLA-peptide interaction. However, their prediction performances show great variability over individual HLA alleles and peptides with different lengths, which is particularly the case for HLA-C alleles due to the limited amount of experimental data. To meet the increasing demand for attaining the most accurate HLA-peptide binding prediction for individual patient in the real-world clinical studies, more advanced deep learning framework with higher prediction accuracy for HLA-C alleles and longer peptides is highly desirable. RESULTS: We present a pan-allele HLA-peptide binding prediction framework-MATHLA which integrates bi-directional long short-term memory network and multiple head attention mechanism. This model achieves better prediction accuracy in both fivefold cross-validation test and independent test dataset. In addition, this model is superior over existing tools regarding to the prediction accuracy for longer ligand ranging from 11 to 15 amino acids. Moreover, our model also shows a significant improvement for HLA-C-peptide-binding prediction. By investigating multiple-head attention weight scores, we depicted possible interaction patterns between three HLA I supergroups and their cognate peptides. CONCLUSION: Our method demonstrates the necessity of further development of deep learning algorithm in improving and interpreting HLA-peptide binding prediction in parallel to increasing the amount of high-quality HLA ligandome data.

The cover image is based on the Original Article Verification Algebra for Multi-Tenant Applications in VaaS Architecture by Kan Luo et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1763.

Summary This paper proposes an algebraic system, verification algebra (VA), for reducing the number of component combinations to be verified in multi‐tenant architecture (MTA). MTA is a design architecture used in SaaS (Software‐as‐a‐Service) where a tenant can customize its applications by integrating services already stored in the SaaS databases or newly supplied services. Similar to SaaS, VaaS (Verification‐as‐a‐Service) is a verification service in a cloud that leverages the computing power offered by a cloud environment with automated provisioning, scalability and service composition. In VaaS architecture, however, there is a challenging problem called ‘combinatorial explosion’ that it is difficult to verify a large number of compositions constructed by both quantities of components and various combination structures even with computing resources in cloud. This paper proposes rules to emerge combinations status for future verification, on the basis of the existing results. Both composition patterns and properties are considered and analysed in VA rules.

The published online cover has been updated.

In the past few years ridesharing has largely reshaped the transportation marketplace. It is envisioned as a promising solution to transportation-related problems in metropolitan cities, such as traffic congestion and air pollution. In the current ridesharing research, social ridesharing, which makes use of social relations among drivers and riders to address safety issues, and dynamic pricing are two active directions with important business implications. Simultaneously optimizing social cohesion and revenue is vital to a commercial ridesharing platform's sustainable development, which, however, has not been previously studied. In this paper, we first present a new pricing scheme that better incentivizes drivers and riders to participate in ridesharing, and then propose a novel type of Price-aware Top-$k$Matching (PTkM) queries which retrieve the top-$k$vehicles for a rider's request by taking into account both social relations and revenue. We design an efficient algorithm with a set of powerful pruning techniques to tackle this problem. Moreover, we propose a novel index tailored to our problem to further speed up query processing. Extensive experimental results on real datasets show that our proposed algorithms achieve desirable performance for real-world deployment.

This paper aims at high-accuracy 3D object detection in autonomous driving scenario. We propose Multi-View 3D networks (MV3D), a sensory-fusion framework that takes both LIDAR point cloud and RGB images as input and predicts oriented 3D bounding boxes. We encode the sparse 3D point cloud with a compact multi-view representation. The network is composed of two subnetworks: one for 3D object proposal generation and another for multi-view feature fusion. The proposal network generates 3D candidate boxes efficiently from the birds eye view representation of 3D point cloud. We design a deep fusion scheme to combine region-wise features from multiple views and enable interactions between intermediate layers of different paths. Experiments on the challenging KITTI benchmark show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by around 25% and 30% AP on the tasks of 3D localization and 3D detection. In addition, for 2D detection, our approach obtains 14.9% higher AP than the state-of-the-art on the hard data among the LIDAR-based methods.

Learning image similarity plays a critical role in real-world multimedia information retrieval applications, especially in Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) tasks, in which an accurate retrieval of visually similar objects largely relies on an effective image similarity function. Crafting a good similarity function is very challenging because visual contents of images are often represented as feature vectors in high-dimensional spaces, for example, via bag-of-words (BoW) representations, and traditional rigid similarity functions, for example, cosine similarity, are often suboptimal for CBIR tasks. In this article, we address this fundamental problem, that is, learning to optimize image similarity with sparse and high-dimensional representations from large-scale training data, and propose a novel scheme of Sparse Online Learning of Image Similarity (SOLIS). In contrast to many existing image-similarity learning algorithms that are designed to work with low-dimensional data, SOLIS is able to learn image similarity from large-scale image data in sparse and high-dimensional spaces. Our encouraging results showed that the proposed new technique achieves highly competitive accuracy as compared to the state-of-the-art approaches but enjoys significant advantages in computational efficiency, model sparsity, and retrieval scalability, making it more practical for real-world multimedia retrieval applications.

Jialei Wang, Ji Wan, Yongdong Zhang, Steven Hoi. Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2015.

Image similarity search plays a key role in many multimediaapplications, where multimedia data (such as images and videos) areusually represented in high-dimensional feature space. In thispaper, we propose a novel Sparse Online Metric Learning (SOML)scheme for learning sparse distance functions from large-scalehigh-dimensional data and explore its application to imageretrieval. In contrast to many existing distance metric learningalgorithms that are often designed for low-dimensional data, theproposed algorithms are able to learn sparse distance metrics fromhigh-dimensional data in an efficient and scalable manner. Ourexperimental results show that the proposed method achieves betteror at least comparable accuracy performance than thestate-of-the-art non-sparse distance metric learning approaches, butenjoys a significant advantage in computational efficiency andsparsity, making it more practical for real-world applications.

Learning effective feature representations and similarity measures are crucial to the retrieval performance of a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system. Despite extensive research efforts for decades, it remains one of the most challenging open problems that considerably hinders the successes of real-world CBIR systems. The key challenge has been attributed to the well-known ``semantic gap'' issue that exists between low-level image pixels captured by machines and high-level semantic concepts perceived by human. Among various techniques, machine learning has been actively investigated as a possible direction to bridge the semantic gap in the long term. Inspired by recent successes of deep learning techniques for computer vision and other applications, in this paper, we attempt to address an open problem: if deep learning is a hope for bridging the semantic gap in CBIR and how much improvements in CBIR tasks can be achieved by exploring the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for learning feature representations and similarity measures. Specifically, we investigate a framework of deep learning with application to CBIR tasks with an extensive set of empirical studies by examining a state-of-the-art deep learning method (Convolutional Neural Networks) for CBIR tasks under varied settings. From our empirical studies, we find some encouraging results and summarize some important insights for future research.

Binary representation for large scale nearest neighbor search received more and more concern recently. Although binary codes can be directly used as indices of the hash tables, correlations between the bits may lead to non-uniform codes distribution and reduce the performance of the hash table. In this paper, we propose a data driven multi-index hashing method for exact nearest neighbor search in Hamming space. By exploring the statistics properties of the dataset, we can separate the correlated bits into different segments during the process of building multiple hash tables, and thus make binary codes distributed as uniformly as possible in each hash table. Experiments conducted on a huge amount of binary codes extracted from the UK Bench dataset show that our method can achieve significant acceleration in searching speed for large scale dataset.

Portraits, also known as images of people, constitute an important part of consumer photos. Existing methods manage portraits based on either explicit objectives, e.g., a specified person or event, or aesthetics, i.e., the aesthetic quality of portraits. This paper presents a novel system for personalized portraits ranking. First, four kinds of personalized features, i.e., composition, clothing style, affection and social relationship are proposed to quantify users' intent. Then, example-based and sketch-based user interfaces (UI) are developed, which are capable of capturing users' personal intent hardly described by queries or aesthetics. Finally, portraits ranking is implemented by combing these features together with the developed user interfaces. Experimental results show that the system performs well in providing personalized preferences and the proposed features are effective for portraits ranking. From the user study, our system gets promising results.

BACKGROUND: The binding between antigenic peptides (epitopes) and the MHC molecule is a key step in the cellular immune response. Accurate in silico prediction of epitope-MHC binding affinity can greatly expedite epitope screening by reducing costs and experimental effort. RESULTS: Recently, we demonstrated the appealing performance of SVRMHC, an SVR-based quantitative modeling method for peptide-MHC interactions, when applied to three mouse class I MHC molecules. Subsequently, we have greatly extended the construction of SVRMHC models and have established such models for more than 40 class I and class II MHC molecules. Here we present the SVRMHC web server for predicting peptide-MHC binding affinities using these models. Benchmarked percentile scores are provided for all predictions. The larger number of SVRMHC models available allowed for an updated evaluation of the performance of the SVRMHC method compared to other well- known linear modeling methods. CONCLUSION: SVRMHC is an accurate and easy-to-use prediction server for epitope-MHC binding with significant coverage of MHC molecules. We believe it will prove to be a valuable resource for T cell epitope researchers.