Although collaborative edge computing (CEC) systems are beneficial in enhancing the performance of mobile edge computing (MEC), the issue of user privacy leakage becomes prominent during task offloading. To address this issue, we design a privacy-preservation-aware delay optimization task-offloading algorithm (PPDO) in a CEC system. By considering location and usage pattern privacy protection, we establish a privacy task model to interfere with the edge server and ensure user privacy. To address the extra delay arising from privacy protection, we subsequently leverage a Markov decision processing (MDP) policy-iteration-based algorithm to minimize delays without compromising privacy. To simultaneously accelerate the MDP operation, we develop an extension that improves the PPDO by optimizing the action set. Finally, a comprehensive simulation was conducted using the edge user allocation (EUA) dataset. The results demonstrated that PPDO achieves an optimal trade-off between privacy protection and delay with a minimum delay compared with existing algorithms. Moreover, we examined the advantages and disadvantages of improving PPDO.

API call sequence-based approaches are proven to have significant superiority in malware detection but generally overlook or evade two core issues: (i) ignoring parameters and return values that contain more fine-grained security semantic sensitive information (SSSI) and (ii) handling lengthy API call sequences roughly, causing the poor interpretability and incompleteness of program behavior semantics. To effectively overcome these issues, we propose SIa-CBc, a sensitive intent-assisted and crucial behavior-cognized malware detection method leveraging human brain cognitive theory, which consists of two key modules. (i) SIa divides the vast and heterogeneous SSSI space into a few categories, meanwhile representing the sensitive intents to assist API calls. (ii) CBc extracts crucial snippets from lengthy API call sequences via judgment and multi-step reasoning and further obtains their representations. The embedding representations from the previous two modules are concatenated as the input of ten representative baseline networks. Our experimental results indicate that SIa-CBc achieves an enhancement in malware detection accuracy ranging from 14.08% to 28.01%, reduces the average detection time per sample by 0.28 to 16.29 ms, and improves the defense against adversarial sample attacks by 4.86% to 55.04%. Moreover, SIa-CBc demonstrates outstanding performance compared to recent methods, not only limited to detection but also encompassing enhanced resilience to intricate adversarial tactics, thereby ensuring reliable protection without the need for frequent re-training. This underscores the model’s innovative approach in leveraging human brain cognitive theory-based techniques for heightened security efficacy.

Abstract Image captioning means generate descriptive sentences from a query image automatically. It has recently received widespread attention from the computer vision and natural language processing communities as an emerging visual task. Currently, both components have evolved considerably by exploiting object regions, attributes, attention mechanism methods, entity recognition with novelties, and training strategies. However, despite the impressive results, the research has not yet come to a conclusive answer. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of image captioning methods, from technical architectures to benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and comparison of state‐of‐the‐art methods. In particular, image captioning methods are divided into different categories based on the technique adopted. Representative methods in each class are summarized, and their advantages and limitations are discussed. Moreover, many related state‐of‐the‐art studies were quantitatively compared to determine the recent trends and future directions in image captioning. The ultimate goal of this work is to serve as a tool for understanding the existing literature and highlighting future directions in the area of image captioning for Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities may benefit from.

Since traditional machine learning methods are sensitive to skewed distribution and do not consider the characteristics in multiclass imbalance problems, the skewed distribution of multiclass data poses a major challenge to machine learning algorithms. To tackle such issues, we propose a new splitting criterion of the decision tree based on the one-against-all-based Hellinger distance (OAHD). Two crucial elements are included in OAHD. First, the one-against-all scheme is integrated into the process of computing the Hellinger distance in OAHD, thereby extending the Hellinger distance decision tree to cope with the multiclass imbalance problem. Second, for the multiclass imbalance problem, the distribution and the number of distinct classes are taken into account, and a modified Gini index is designed. Moreover, we give theoretical proofs for the properties of OAHD, including skew insensitivity and the ability to seek a purer node in the decision tree. Finally, we collect 20 public real-world imbalanced data sets from the Knowledge Extraction based on Evolutionary Learning (KEEL) repository and the University of California, Irvine (UCI) repository. Experimental and statistical results show that OAHD significantly improves the performance compared with the five other well-known decision trees in terms of Precision, F-measure, and multiclass area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (MAUC). Moreover, through statistical analysis, the Friedman and Nemenyi tests are used to prove the advantage of OAHD over the five other decision trees.

The multi-objective optimization problem has been encountered in numerous fields such as high-speed train head shape design, overlapping community detection, power dispatch, and unmanned aerial vehicle formation. To address such issues, current approaches focus mainly on problems with regular Pareto front rather than solving the irregular Pareto front. Considering this situation, we propose a many-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition with dynamic resource allocation (MaOEA/D-DRA) for irregular optimization. The proposed algorithm can dynamically allocate computing resources to different search areas according to different shapes of the problem’s Pareto front. An evolutionary population and an external archive are used in the search process, and information extracted from the external archive is used to guide the evolutionary population to different search regions. The evolutionary population evolves with the Tchebycheff approach to decompose a problem into several subproblems, and all the subproblems are optimized in a collaborative manner. The external archive is updated with the method of shift-based density estimation. The proposed algorithm is compared with five state-of-the-art many-objective evolutionary algorithms using a variety of test problems with irregular Pareto front. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm out-performs these five algorithms with respect to convergence speed and diversity of population members. By comparison with the weighted-sum approach and penalty-based boundary intersection approach, there is an improvement in performance after integration of the Tchebycheff approach into the proposed algorithm.

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a population-based stochastic optimization technique that can be applied to solve optimization problems. However, there are some defects for PSO, such as easily trapping into local optimum, slow velocity of convergence. This paper presents the simple butterfly particle swarm optimization algorithm with the fitness-based adaptive inertia weight and the opposition-based learning average elite strategy (SBPSO) to accelerate convergence speed and jump out of local optimum. SBPSO has the advantages of the simple butterfly particle swarm optimizer to increase the probability of finding the global optimum in the course of searching. Moreover, SBPSO benefits from the simple particle swarm (sPSO) to accelerate convergence speed. Furthermore, SBPSO adopts the opposition-based learning average elite to enhance the diversity of the particles in order to jump out of local optimum. Additionally, SBPSO generates the fitness-based adaptive inertia weight ω to adapt to the evolution process. Eventually, SBPSO presents a approach of random mutation location to enhance the diversity of the population in case of the position out of range. Experiments have been conducted with eleven benchmark optimization functions. The results have demonstrated that SBPSO outperforms than that of the other five recent proposed PSO in obtaining the global optimum and accelerating the velocity of convergence.

Summary With the increasingly growing amount of service requests from the world‐wide customers, the cloud systems are capable of providing services while meeting the customers' satisfaction. Recently, to achieve the better reliability and performance, the cloud systems have been largely depending on the geographically distributed data centers. Nevertheless, the dollar cost of service placement by service providers (SP) differ from the multiple regions. Accordingly, it is crucial to design a request dispatching and resource allocation algorithm to maximize net profit. The existing algorithms are either built upon energy‐efficient schemes alone, or multi‐type requests and customer satisfaction oblivious. They cannot be applied to multi‐type requests and customer satisfaction‐aware algorithm design with the objective of maximizing net profit. This paper proposes an ant‐colony optimization‐based algorithm for maximizing SP's net profit (AMP) on geographically distributed data centers with the consideration of customer satisfaction. First, using model of customer satisfaction, we formulate the utility (or net profit) maximization issue as an optimization problem under the constraints of customer satisfaction and data centers. Second, we analyze the complexity of the optimal requests dispatchment problem and rigidly prove that it is an NP‐complete problem. Third, to evaluate the proposed algorithm, we have conducted the comprehensive simulation and compared with the other state‐of‐the‐art algorithms. Also, we extend our work to consider the data center's power usage effectiveness. It has been shown that AMP maximizes SP net profit by dispatching service requests to the proper data centers and generating the appropriate amount of virtual machines to meet customer satisfaction. Moreover, we also demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach when it accommodates the impacts of dynamically arrived heavy workload, various evaporation rate and consideration of power usage effectiveness. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

SUMMARY It is well known that data centers are consuming a large amount of energy that incurs significant financial and environmental costs. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in utilizing green energy for data centers, where green energy sources include solar and wind. This paper studies the crucial problem of maximizing the utilization of green energy through scheduling complex jobs in data centers in order to reduce the use of traditional brown energy. However, it is highly challenging for data centers to make use of green energy. First, the availability of typical green energy is variable to dynamic changes of natural environments, for example, weather. Second, although predictions can be made for the future availability of green energy, it is inevitable that such predictions have errors. Third, jobs are associated with strict deadlines, and it is required that jobs are completed before their deadlines. Finally, because the reliability in a data center relies upon temperature, the awareness of temperature should be taken into account while maximizing the green energy. In this paper, we consider online scheduling of jobs whose arrivals to the data center system dynamically. In addition, we explicitly take the power consumption of switches into account when scheduling jobs onto computing nodes. Two solar energy‐aware algorithms called SEEDMin and SEEDMax have been proposed. Then, we extend SEED to RSEED with the awareness of reliability. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, comprehensive simulations have been conducted, and the proposed algorithms are compared with other state‐of‐art algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that both SEEDMin and SEEDMax can significantly increase the utilization of solar energy without violating job deadlines and overall energy budget. The amount of solar energy utilized by SEEDMin and SEEDMax is 33.4%and35.3% larger than that of two traditional scheduling algorithms, MinMin and MinMax, respectively. Also, it can be seen that RSEED greatly improves the reliability by decreasing the temperature. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.