Indoor localization is crucial for applications such as navigation, asset tracking, and emergency response. Fingerprint-based methods that use RSSI are widely adopted; however, they fail under large environmental changes. Unmanned Vehicles (UVs) equipped with high precision sensors are able to collect fingerprints, serving as a promising way by forming a Vehicular Crowdsensing (VCS) campaign. In this paper, we propose “BRAVE”, a Bayesian RL Approach for VCS under Environment changing, while introducing a new metric “Calibration Benefit” to explicitly quantify how effectively a learned trajectory updates those regions of the fingerprint database that have changed and matter most for localization. Specifically, we propose a spatial-temporal Bayesian Network(BN) for change detection, a region rearrangement method for fewer restarts, and an optimistic strategy to balance the exploration and exploitation trade-offs in optimizing calibration benefit. Extensive results on two real-world datasets from SML Center (Shanghai) and Haopu Fashion City (Shanghai) demonstrate that BRAVE outperforms eight baselines and the derived dataset has better localization accuracy compared with the original dataset.

Regularizing continual learning techniques is important for anticipating algorithmic behavior under new realizations of data. We introduce a new approach to continual learning by imposing the properties of a parabolic partial differential equation (PDE) to regularize the expected behavior of the loss over time. This class of parabolic PDEs has a number of favorable properties that allow us to analyze the error incurred through forgetting and the error induced through generalization. Specifically, we do this through imposing boundary conditions where the boundary is given by a memory buffer. By using the memory buffer as a boundary, we can enforce long term dependencies by bounding the expected error by the boundary loss. Finally, we illustrate the empirical performance of the method on a series of continual learning tasks.

Regularizing neural networks is important for anticipating model behavior in regions of the data space that are not well represented. In this work, we propose a regularization technique for enforcing a level of smoothness in the mapping between the input space and the loss. We specify the level of regularity by requiring that the loss of the network satisfies an elliptic operator over the data domain. To do this, we modify the usual empirical risk minimization objective such that we instead minimize a new objective that satisfies an elliptic operator over points within the domain. This allows us to use existing theory on elliptic operators to anticipate the behavior of the error for points outside the training set. We propose a tractable computational method that approximates the behavior of the elliptic operator while being computationally efficient. Finally, we analyze the properties of the proposed regularization to understand the performance on common problems of distribution shift and group imbalance. Numerical experiments empirically confirm the promise of the proposed regularization technique.

Despite the remarkable performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), they remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which can compromise their safety mechanisms. Existing studies often rely on brute-force optimization or manual design, failing to uncover potential risks in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose a novel jailbreak attack framework, ICRT, inspired by heuristics and biases in human cognition. Leveraging the simplicity effect, we employ cognitive decomposition to reduce the complexity of malicious prompts. Simultaneously, relevance bias is utilized to reorganize prompts, enhancing semantic alignment and inducing harmful outputs effectively. Furthermore, we introduce a ranking-based harmfulness evaluation metric that surpasses the traditional binary success-or-failure paradigm by employing ranking aggregation methods such as Elo, HodgeRank, and Rank Centrality to comprehensively quantify the harmfulness of generated content. Experimental results show that our approach consistently bypasses mainstream LLMs’ safety mechanisms and generates high-risk content.

McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations (MV-SDEs) provide a mathematical description of the behavior of an infinite number of interacting particles by imposing a dependence on the particle density. We study the influence of explicitly including distributional information in the parameterization of the SDE. We propose a series of semi-parametric methods for representing MV-SDEs, and corresponding estimators for inferring parameters from data based on the properties of the MV-SDE. We analyze the characteristics of the different architectures and estimators, and consider their applicability in relevant machine learning problems. We empirically compare the performance of the different architectures and estimators on real and synthetic datasets for time series and probabilistic modeling. The results suggest that explicitly including distributional dependence in the parameterization of the SDE is effective in modeling temporal data with interaction under an exchangeability assumption while maintaining strong performance for standard Itô-SDEs due to the richer class of probability flows associated with MV-SDEs.

Indoor localization is drawing more and more attentions due to the growing demand of various location-based services, where fingerprinting is a popular data driven techniques that does not rely on complex measurement equipment, yet it requires site surveys which is both labor-intensive and time-consuming. Vehicular crowdsensing (VCS) with unmanned vehicles (UVs) is a novel paradigm to navigate a group of UVs to collect sensory data from certain point-of-interests periodically (PoIs, i.e., coverage holes in localization scenarios). In this paper, we formulate the multi-floor indoor fingerprint collection task with periodical PoI coverage requirements as a constrained optimization problem. Then, we propose a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) based solution, “MADRL-PosVCS”, which consists of a primal-dual framework to transform the above optimization problem into the unconstrained duality, with adjustable Lagrangian multipliers to ensure periodic fingerprint collection. We also propose a novel intrinsic reward mechanism consists of the mutual information between a UV’s observations and environment transition probability parameterized by a Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) for exploration, and a elevator-based reward to allow UVs to go cross different floors for collaborative fingerprint collections. Extensive simulation results on three real-world datasets in SML Center (Shanghai), Joy City (Hangzhou) and Haopu Fashion City (Shanghai) show that MADRL-PosVCS achieves better results over four baselines on fingerprint collection ratio, PoI coverage ratio for collection intervals, geographic fairness and average moving distance.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) crowdsensing (UCS) is an emerging data collection paradigm to provide reliable and high quality urban sensing services, with age-of-information (AoI) requirement to measure data freshness in real-time applications. In this paper, we explicitly consider the case to ensure that the attained AoI always stay within a specific threshold. The goal is to maximize the total amount of collected data from diverse Point-of-Interests (PoIs) while minimizing AoI and AoI threshold violation ratio under limited energy supplement. To this end, we propose a decentralized multi-agent deep reinforcement learning framework called “DRL-UCS($\text {AoI}_{th}$)” for multi-UAV trajectory planning, which consists of a novel transformer-enhanced distributed architecture and an adaptive intrinsic reward mechanism for spatial cooperation and exploration. Extensive results and trajectory visualization on two real-world datasets in Beijing and San Francisco show that, DRL-UCS($\text {AoI}_{th}$) consistently outperforms all nine baselines when varying the number of UAVs, AoI threshold and generated data amount in a timeslot.

With the popularity of drones and driverless cars, vehicular crowdsensing (VCS) becomes increasingly widely-used by taking advantage of their high-precision sensors and durability in harsh environments. Since abrupt sensing tasks usually cannot be prepared beforehand, we need a generic control logic fit-for-use all tasks which are similar in nature, but different in their own settings like Point-of-Interest (PoI) distributions. The objectives include to simultaneously maximize the data collection amount, geographic fairness, and minimize the energy consumption of all vehicles for all tasks, which usually cannot be explicitly expressed in a closed-form equation, thus not tractable as an optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based centralized control, distributed execution framework for multi-task-oriented VCS, called "DRL-MTVCS". It includes an asynchronous architecture with spatiotemporal state information modeling, multi-task-oriented value estimates by adaptive normalization, and auxiliary vehicle action exploration by pixel control. We compare with three baselines, and results show that DRL-MTVCS outperforms all others in terms of energy efficiency when varying different numbers of tasks, vehicles, charging stations and sensing range.

A novel method is proposed to minimize the torque ripple of a switched reluctance motor (SRM) that is the first choice to be used in the electric vehicle. Based on the analysis of the phase plane of the flux linkage, the phase plane-based variable structure control (PPBVSC) is applied to preprocess the flux linkage deviation. On the other hand, an adjustable flux reference is used to replace the constant reference which is widely used in the conventional direct torque control (DTC). The improved control system overcomes the high torque ripple of the SRM during the commutation. Simulation results prove that the control scheme discussed in this paper reduces the torque ripple of the SRM greatly, and by which the torque ripple coefficient is only 0.041.