Performance collapse is an intractable issue of Differentiable Architecture Search (DAS), where severe performance degradation of DAS happens when it trains on different search spaces or datasets. We theoretically analyze the issue from the information bottleneck (IB) perspective, and disclose that a solution to overcome this problem is to seek the bifurcation point of IB tradeoff between compression and prediction of the supernet. To this end, we propose a simple yet highly effective method, namely, Batch Entropy-decay Regularization (BER), to guide the learning of DAS, which restricts compression in DAS by imposing a penalty on the architecture parameters. Comprehensive theoretical analyses demonstrate that BER is able to completely resolve DAS's performance collapse issue. Compared with a number of state-of-the-art DAS variants, BER shows its overwhelmingly better performance on 7 search spaces (i.e., NAS-Bench-201, DARTS, S1-S4, MobileNet-like) and 5 popular datasets (i.e., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet1k, PASCAL VOC 2007, and MS COCO 2017).

Semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing imagery plays a critical role in applications such as disaster assessment. However, deploying large models on Autonomous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs) remains challenging due to inherent conflicts among accuracy, model size, and computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose FMC-ULite, a novel lightweight architecture designed to achieve a better balance between accuracy and efficiency for real-time processing. Our model incorporates four key innovations, including a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-based fusion module for enhanced edge feature extraction and noise suppression in the frequency domain, a simplified MobileNetV3-Large encoder that substantially reduces parameter count, a cross-layer feature fusion (CLFF) module to effectively integrate multi-scale semantic and detail information, and an attention-gated decoder with multi-scale dilated convolutions to prioritize critical disaster regions. Furthermore, an adaptive combined loss function is introduced to alleviate class imbalance. Experiments conducted on the RescueNet dataset show that our model achieves competitive accuracy compared to advanced lightweight methods under a comparable parameter budget, demonstrating its strong suitability for real-time disaster assessment using AAVs.

Defect recognition is an essential aspect of intelligent manufacturing, but it is a challenging task with noise and unpredictable uncertainties, where convolutional neural networks (CNNs) struggle to achieve good performance. The fuzzy neural network (FNN) emerges as a promising approach to handle uncertainties. However, conventional methods for designing FNNs are tedious and error-prone. A solution is to automatically search for efficient FNN, which can be achieved by neural architecture search (NAS). To achieve NAS for FNN, we propose an efficient classifier-assisted evolutionary multiobjective FNN framework for defect recognition. Considering the characteristics of FNN (e.g., difficult to train and prone to overfitting), we first construct the architecture search as a constrained multiobjective optimization problem, the network accuracy and the architecture size are two conflicting objectives, and the constraint is used to filter out low-quality architectures. Then, we design the search space to incorporate the fuzzy module and develop the corresponding architectural representation and evolutionary operators. Furthermore, the complex regression task of performance evaluation is transformed into a classification task, and a classifier is designed to simplify the performance evaluation process. Massive experiments on four defect recognition datasets (i.e., ELPV, CODEBRIM, MIXEDWM38, and WM-811K) show that the architectures can effectively handle inherent uncertainties from datasets. Our method achieves 94.77% accuracy on ELPV, 81.82% accuracy on CODEBRIM, 98.99% accuracy on MIXEDWM38, and 98.22% accuracy on WM-811K, respectively.

We consider the energy-constrained task allocation problem in large-scale Aerial Edge Computing (AEC) systems, which encompasses a series of tightly coupled decision-making processes, includingwhichtasks need to be processed by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs),howto allocate these tasks and balance energy across UAVs for delay-sensitive requirements. However, little attention has been devoted to exploring the above coupled decision-making problem in AEC with various resource and energy constraints, which is further complicated by energy dynamics (UAV battery states), task-specific consumption, and allocation-feedback balance. In this paper, we formulate a multi-dimensional joint optimization problem, simultaneously optimizing task allocation and energy rewarding to maximize long-term system rewards while balancing service quality and energy efficiency. To this end, we propose a green aerial edge computing framework where partial UAVs are equipped with energy harvesting modules to collect ambient energy. To circumvent the intractable computational complexity arising from the coupled energy states of massive UAVs, we design a distributed solution method based on the mean field game, which decouples the dense multi-agent interactions into a game between an individual UAV and the aggregate population state, thereby transforming the complex global optimization problem into a set of equivalent scalable subproblems. We develop an optimal energy valuation scheme to guide UAV behavior. Numerical results show that our mechanism can effectively ensure sustainable system operation while maintaining high quality of service for metaverse users, outperforming existing methods in both system sustainability and service responsiveness.

We consider the efficient resource allocation task in the blockchain-based mobile edge computing (MEC) system that requires decentralized transaction management to validate transactions between edge servers (ESs) and mobile devices (MDs). In such task allocation process (where MDs' resources are limited and privacy-sensitive), it is a significant challenge to guarantee individual rationality with satisfactory system stability while enabling flexible task offloading under various locality constraints (e.g., communication distance, bandwidth and delay). In this paper, we formulate the target problem as a blockchain-assisted task-resource matching model, and then propose a near optimal locality-aware resource allocation mechanism over smart contract to enable automatic and efficient transactions in MEC system. More specifically, for the service agents selection, we design the preference-based selection strategy to get highest estimated profit. For the flexible task offloading, we develop the minimum delay task graph partitioning algorithm to determine the optimal task offloading solution for MD under different resource bundles. For the task-resource matching, we propose a task-resource matching game (based on potential game) with the second lowest cost strategy to determine the matching of task-resource and decide the price of resource bundle. For the transaction verification and block allocation, we propose a social welfare-driven consensus mechanism to enable verified transaction and fair block allocation in a reward-free way. Strict theoretical analysis and extensive simulations demonstrate that our mechanism guarantees individual rationality, Nash Equilibrium, and stable near optimal solution.

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) in both academia and industry, their growing size and complexity have introduced significant challenges in terms of computational cost and deployment efficiency. To address these issues, a wide range of inference optimization techniques-including but not limited to model compression-have been proposed to accelerate LLM inference while preserving model performance. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of LLM inference acceleration strategies, analyzing them from multiple perspectives, including foundational principles, algorithmic techniques, real-world applications, and open research challenges. We begin by introducing core concepts underlying inference optimization and propose a new taxonomy that categorizes existing approaches, including quantization, pruning, distillation, efficient architectures, compilation, and hardware-aware methods. Following the lifecycle of LLM development and deployment, we examine how these techniques interact with model training, fine-tuning, and serving. Furthermore, we highlight key applications of efficient LLMs and discuss emerging trends and unresolved issues in the field. By synthesizing recent advances, this survey aims to provide actionable insights and practical guidance for researchers and practitioners working with scalable and efficient LLM systems.

Rumor blocking approaches in social networks aim to identify a small set of counter-rumor seed nodes and compete with rumor cascades to quickly stop the propagation of rumors. However, current rumor blocking methods assume complete knowledge of rumor node positions, which is often unattainable in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Uncertainty Rumor Blocking, where we address the uncertainty surrounding rumor node locations by considering a set of suspicious nodes, each associated with a probability indicating the likelihood of rumor propagation. As traditional node selection algorithms become inadequate under uncertain conditions, we propose a Graph Neural Network-based Inverse Reinforcement Learning (G-IRL) approach to effectively select counter-rumor seed nodes. Through comprehensive experimentation on three datasets, we demonstrate the consistent superiority of our G-IRL over state-of-the-art baseline methods for node selection in the context of uncertainty rumor containment.

Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) is a high-speed, parallel-search memory that enables fast lookups for both exact-match and wildcard-match rules. TCAM serves as the standard hardware implementation of flow tables in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) switches, delivering line-rate packet classification to enforce fine-grained forwarding policies. Due to its high-cost and power-hungry design, TCAM faces a scalability challenge in accommodating large-scale rule sets in modern backbone networks. Inspired by hierarchical cache architectures in modern memory systems, TCAM-based rule-caching systems incorporate Random Access Memory (RAM) as a cost-effective, large-capacity auxiliary memory. Specifically, TCAM caches heavy-hitting rules to capture most packets from hot flows, while RAM maintains the complete rule set to handle cache-miss packets. Meanwhile, an update strategy is employed to manage the replacement of cached rules between TCAM and RAM. However, prior rule-caching systems have either failed to eliminate cross-rule dependencies or have restricted their match patterns to prefix rules only. To address these limitations, we propose AWEsome-Cache, a unified framework designed to fundamentally eliminate cross-rule dependencies for wildcard rules with arbitrary match patterns. The key idea is to construct isolation rules for hot flows by specifying the minimum number of wildcard bits in their best-match rules, thereby eliminating overlaps with all direct dependent rules. AWEsome-Cache further develops efficient replacement algorithms for TCAM updates, enabling adaptation to dynamic traffic locality. Experimental evaluations on both prefix and non-prefix rule sets show that AWEsome-Cache achieves cache-hit rates comparable to state-of-the-art baselines while reducing TCAM occupancy by 75.9%.

We consider the collaborative inference acceleration task via cloud-edge-end collaboration, which involves a series of tightly coupled decision-making steps, includingwhichDNN model to be selected,how muchto compress model,howto partition model, andwhereto offload partitioned submodels. In practical deployments, these decisions jointly affect both fine-tuning and inference performance, and must jointly account for such aspects as the model being used, the computational resources and local datasets available at each device, as well as network latencies, which significantly increases the complexity of optimizing the problem. Yet, no existing studies focus on such joint optimization problem for these tightly coupled decisions. In this paper, we model this problem as a multi-dimensional optimization problem, jointly optimizing collaborative inference and fine-tuning by selecting the DNN model, compression level, partition strategy, and computational resource allocation, with the objective of minimizing the overall energy consumption of the learning-inference process, subject to accuracy and latency constraints. To this end, we propose an algorithmic framework called JQODI combining a time-energy tree diagram to represent the learning process, a dynamic programming solution strategy, and a data-driven theoretical approach to predict the expected total number of training epochs that meet the accuracy requirements. We prove that JQODI approximates the optimal solution with polynomial complexity. Numerical results demonstrate that JQODI surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both energy efficiency and latency.

Generative AI (GenAI) has become a research hotspot for the task of content creation and production, which suffers from the issue of high latency due to cloud transmission. One effective solution is to integrate serverless computing with mobile edge computing (MEC) to build a communication-efficient GenAI system, where serverless functions are executed via containers on edge servers. However, the nonnegligible latency of container deployment and cold starts degrades the quality of GenAI service. This issue becomes even more serious in dynamic MEC with mobile and uncertain users. In this paper, we study the provisioning of latency-sensitive query services in GenAI-enabled serverless MEC through dynamic utility maximization. While GenAI of users deployed in cloud refers to as primary GenAI, we deploy their GenAI replicas based on serverless functions in edge servers to maximize user service satisfaction (i.e., utility function). We first formulate a joint decision problem, i.e.,GenAIReplicaAllocation andPlacement (GRAP) problem, under various resource constraints. For this problem, we propose an approximation solver with a provable approximation ratio. Then, we consider an dynamic GRAP problem with uncertain values of users and stochastic request arrivals, and devise a performance-guaranteed online algorithm for a special case of the problem by assuming only a small subset of edge servers suffers significant utility degradation. Finally, we conduct theoretical analysis and experimentation to validate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mechanisms consistently outperform baseline methods in both service latency and user satisfaction.

Offloading a plethora of end workflows to edge servers in mobile edge computing (MEC) systems involves a series of coupled decision-making steps, includinghow muchedge resources will be allocated for each workflow,whichsubtasks will be offloaded, andhowto determine edge-end transaction prices to ensure system stability. Particularly, these decisions must jointly account for workflow characteristics, the resources available at each edge server, as well as local constraints (e.g., communication distance, task latency, and bandwidth conditions), which again increases the difficulty of optimizing the problem. However, no existing study addresses such joint optimization problems for these tightly coupled decisions. To fill this gap, a minimum-delay workflow partitioning algorithm is first designed to determine the optimal task offloading solution under various resource conditions. Based on this algorithm, two locality-based social welfare maximization models (basic and dynamic) are constructed. Specifically, for basic model, a multi-stage task matching game with the second lowest cost strategy is developed to determine the resource selection and pricing. For the dynamic model with uncertain requests, an online learning algorithm is introduced to track the dynamic valuations of mobile devices and to ensure that the resulting task allocation solution achieves an upper-bounded regret. Strict theoretical analysis demonstrates that our mechanism guarantees individual rationality, Nash Equilibrium, and stable approximation ratio. Simulation results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our mechanism, and show that the proposed mechanisms obtain at most 18% higher social welfare than existing studies.

Existing efforts to boost multimodal fusion of 3D anomaly detection (3D-AD) primarily concentrate on devising more effective multimodal fusion strategies. However, little attention was devoted to analyzing the role of multimodal fusion architecture (topology) design in contributing to 3D-AD. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap and present a systematic study on the impact of multimodal fusion architecture design on 3D-AD. This work considers the multimodal fusion architecture design at the intra-module fusion level, i.e., independent modality-specific modules, involving early, middle or late multimodal features with specific fusion operations, and also at the inter-module fusion level, i.e., the strategies to fuse those modules. In both cases, we first derive insights through theoretically and experimentally exploring how architectural designs influence 3D-AD. Then, we extend SOTA neural architecture search (NAS) paradigm and propose 3D-ADNAS to simultaneously search across multimodal fusion strategies and modality-specific modules for the first time. Extensive experiments show that 3D-ADNAS obtains consistent improvements in 3D-AD across various model capacities in terms of accuracy, frame rate, and memory usage, and it exhibits great potential in dealing with few-shot 3D-AD tasks.

The great success of graph neural networks (GNNs) in graph-structured data tasks benefits from the powerful structure learning abilities of their architectures. For complex datasets, too deep GNNs can suffer from over-smoothing problem, leading to degradation of prediction performance. Recently, a graph fusion architecture designed by domain experts mitigates the over-smoothing problem. However, this design paradigm is labor and computation-intensive. Drawing on the idea of neural architecture search, this paper proposes evolutionary graph fusion architecture search (EGFAS), which can automatically find graph fusion architecture with the capability to solve the over-smoothing problem. Specifically, we design a graph fusion architecture search space, which includes multiple aggregation functions and fusion operations. An efficient encoding method is used to represent candidate architectures. Furthermore, we propose a surrogate model to solve the expensive overhead of performance evaluation. Experiments on five benchmark datasets are carried out to confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithm. It is shown that the proposed method leads to better results comparing to the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of search effectiveness and adaptability to different datasets.

Mixed Precision Quantization (MPQ) has become an essential technique for optimizing neural network by determining the optimal bitwidth per layer. Existing MPQ methods, however, face a major hurdle: they require a computationally expensive search for quantization strategies on large-scale datasets. To resolve this issue, we introduce a novel approach that first searches for quantization strategies on small datasets and then generalizes them to large-scale datasets. This approach simplifies the process, eliminating the need for large-scale quantization fine-tuning and only necessitating model weight adjustment. Our method is characterized by three key techniques: sharpness-aware minimization for enhanced quantized model generalization, implicit gradient direction alignment to handle gradient conflicts among different optimization objectives, and an adaptive perturbation radius to accelerate optimization. It offers advantages such as no intricate computation of feature maps and high search efficiency. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results validate our approach. Using the CIFAR10 dataset (just 0.5\% the size of ImageNet training data) for MPQ policy search, we achieved equivalent accuracy on ImageNet with a significantly lower computational cost, while improving efficiency by up to 150\% over the baselines.

Mixed precision quantization (MPQ) is an effective quantization approach to achieve accuracy-complexity trade-off of neural network, through assigning different bit-widths to network activations and weights in each layer. The typical way of existing MPQ methods is to optimize quantization policies (i.e., bit-width allocation) in a gradient descent manner, termed as Differentiable MPQ (DMPQ). At the end of the search, the bit-width associated to the quantization parameters which has the largest value will be selected to form the final mixed precision quantization policy, with the implicit assumption that the values of quantization parameters reflect the operation contribution to the accuracy improvement. While much has been discussed about the MPQ’s improvement, the bit-width selection process has received little attention. We study this problem and argue that the magnitude of quantization parameters does not necessarily reflect the actual contribution of the bit-width to the task performance. Then, we propose a Shapley-based MPQ (SMPQ) method, which measures the bit-width operation’s direct contribution on the MPQ task. To reduce computation cost, a Monte Carlo sampling-based approximation strategy is proposed for Shapley computation. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that our SMPQ consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance than gradient-based competitors.

In neural architecture search (NAS), the relativistic predictor has recently emerged as an attractive technique to solve ranking issue for performance evaluation by predicting the relativistic ranking of architecture pair rather than the absolute performance of an architecture. However, it suffers from a significant cold-start issue, requiring a large amount of evaluated architectures to train an effective predictor on new datasets. In this paper, we propose a transferable relativistic predictor (TRP). Specifically, we construct a proxy dataset using the transferable cheaper-to-obtain performance estimation to softly label the rank between architectural pairs. The soft label with a smooth and easy-to-optimize loss function facilitates the learning of expressive and generalizable representations on the proxy dataset. Furthermore, we construct Chebyshev interpolation for correlation curve to adaptively determine the number of evaluated architectures required on each dataset. Extensive experimental results in different search spaces show the superior performance of TRP compared with state-of-the-art predictors. TRP requires only 54 and 73 evaluated architectures for a warm start on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 under the DARTS search space.

One-shot neural architecture search (NAS) trains an over-parameterized network (termed as supernet) that assembles all the architectures as its subnets by using weight sharing for computational budget reduction. However, there is an issue of multi-model forgetting during supernet training that some weights of the previously well-trained architecture will be overwritten by that of the newly sampled architecture which has overlapped structures with the old one. To overcome the issue, we propose an orthogonal gradient learning (OGL) guided supernet training paradigm, where the novelty lies in the fact that the weights of the overlapped structures of current architecture are updated in the orthogonal direction to the gradient space of these overlapped structures of all previously trained architectures. Moreover, a new approach of calculating the projection is designed to effectively find the base vectors of the gradient space to acquire the orthogonal direction. We have theoretically and experimentally proved the effectiveness of the proposed paradigm in overcoming the multi-model forgetting. Besides, we apply the proposed paradigm to two one-shot NAS baselines, and experimental results demonstrate that our approach is able to mitigate the multi-model forgetting and enhance the predictive ability of the supernet with remarkable efficiency on popular test datasets.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play a crucial role in next-generation mobile communication systems, serving as aerial base stations to provide services when ground base stations fail to meet coverage requirements. However, trajectory planning and power allocation for collaborative UAVs as Aerial Base Stations (UAV-ABSs) face several challenges, including energy limitations, flight time constraints, high optimization complexity due to dynamic environment interactions, and insufficient decision-making information. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm, namely Communication Actor Centralized Attention Critic Algorithm (CATEN), to jointly optimize the flight trajectory and power allocation strategies of UAV-ABSs. The proposed algorithm aims to maximize the number of users meeting Quality of Service (QoS) requirements while minimizing UAV-ABSs energy consumption. To achieve this, firstly, an information sharing mechanism is designed to improve the collaboration efficiency among UAV-ABSs. It leverages distributed storage, intelligent scheduling of UAV-ABSs interaction experiences, and gating units to enhance information screening and fusion. Secondly, a multihead attention critic network is proposed to capture correlations among UAV-ABSs from different subspaces. This allows the network to prioritize value information, reduce redundancy, and strengthen UAV-ABSs collaboration and decision-making capabilities. Simulation results demonstrate that CATEN achieves better performance in terms of the number of served users and energy consumption compared to existing algorithms, exhibiting good robustness and adaptability in dynamic environments.

With the continuous development of Internet technology, social networks have provided convenient conditions for information dissemination. The rapid dissemination of information has provided us with great convenience, but some criminals extensively spread rumors based on such convenience, adversely affecting social stability. In this context, two key challenges arise: the survivability of rumors, which refers to their persistence and long-term impact, and the dynamic viewpoint changes of individuals, which influence how rumors spread and diminish over time. This article proposes a dynamic-susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered (DSEIR) rumor propagation model based on human social behavior to solve the spread of rumors problem. This model considers the characteristics of rumors spread in social networks with the Markov chain and makes the simulation more authentic. To suppress rumor propagation, we introduce the concept of rumor survivability and propose a dynamic truth movement blocking strategy, which adapts to people’s evolving viewpoints to curb the influence of rumors effectively. Finally, we analyze the proposed model and blocking strategy in four real networks. The experimental results show that the proposed propagation model can authentically simulate the propagation of rumors in social networks and the proposed blocking strategy efficiently suppresses the rumor propagation. We have released our code here:https://github.com/gf9264/DSEIR.

Detecting foreground objects in video separation tasks is a challenging endeavor in complex environments. This paper presents a deep neural network architecture considering the features of spectral, spatial, and temporal at the same time. Under this framework, we designed a gated mechanism for attention and incorporated it into the Transformer architecture (GMAT). This model employs a gating mechanism to dynamically control and allocate attention across different features (wavelet features and raw features), learning how to balance their importance, emphasize or ignore certain features based on the current context. Additionally, in order to enhance features in video frame data and better focus on important features while ignoring unimportant ones in GMAT, we introduced an optical flow estimation method based on wavelet transform. Due to the advantage of wavelet transform in capturing motion features at different scales, its introduction enables a more comprehensive and detailed focus on finer features. We evaluated the GMAT on various videos from the CDNet2014 dataset, results of qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrating its significant improved for foreground detection over several recent video separation models.

To improve the accuracy of network attack detection, recent work has proposed deep learning (DL) based detectors. Nonetheless, conventional DL-based solutions are computation-intensive and have to be deployed on high-performance x86 servers, which is inefficient for large-scale networks. Unlike x86 servers, current programmable switches (e.g., P4 switches) support a throughput of Tbps and enable programmable logic in networks, indicating a promising alternative. Therefore, we present Soterv2, an intelligent in-network solution deployed on programmable switches. Soterv2 utilizes a two-phase detection manner. In the first phase, we build a P4 program running on the switch's Tofino ASIC to filter malicious packets from the massive traffic. Then, a DL-based inspection is conducted on the switch's CPU, thoroughly detecting the filtered packets. To improve the filtering performance, we propose to embed the rule-based machine learning model, decision tree, in a single match-action table in the P4 program. We also design a lightweight DL model, Branch Convolution Net, running on a multi-core fashion to speed up the thorough detection. Besides, Soterv2 enables the coordination of distributed switches, covering the detection in a large-scale network. Experiments demonstrate that Soterv2 behaves stably in eight network scenarios of different traffic rates (40/100Gbps) and fulfills per-flow detection in 0.03s.

The design of effective multimodal feature fusion strategies is the key task for multimodal learning, which often requires huge computational costs with extensive expertise. In this paper, we seek to enhance multimodal learning via hierarchical fusion architecture search with inconsistency mitigation. Different from previous works, our Hierarchical Fusion Multimodal Neural Architecture Search (HF-MNAS) considers the inconsistency in modalities and labels, and fine-grained exploitation in multi-level fusion architectures. Specifically, it disentangles the hierarchical fusion problem into two-level (macro- and micro-level) search spaces. In the macro-level search space, the high-level and low-level features are extracted and then connected in a fine-grained way, where the inconsistency mitigation module is designed to minimize discrepancies between modalities and labels in cell outputs. In the micro-level search space, we find that different intermediate nodes in the cells exhibit different importance degrees. Then, we propose an importance-based node selection mechanism to form the optimal cells for feature fusion. We evaluate HF-MNAS on a series of multimodal classification tasks. Empirical evidence shows that HF-MNAS achieves competitive trade-off performance across accuracy, search time, and inference speed. In particular, HF-MNAS consumes minimal computational cost compared with state-of-the-art MNASs. Furthermore, we theoretically and experimentally verify that the modality-label inconsistency deteriorates the overall fusion performance of models such as accuracy and F1 score, and demonstrate that the proposed inconsistency mitigation module could effectively mitigate this phenomenon.

Ensuring the safety and reliability of Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems (T-CPS) is critical. However, the increasing interconnectedness of T-CPS exposes them to sophisticated cyberattacks, necessitating robust intrusion detection systems (IDS) to safeguard against evolving threats. This paper aims to enhance the security of T-CPS by addressing two key challenges: effective anomaly detection and handling imbalanced datasets in intrusion detection tasks. In this paper, we propose ReMeNet (Reconstruction Memory Network), a novel intrusion detection model that combines a memory module with a GAN-based architecture to enhance anomaly detection and data reconstruction. To address the challenge of imbalanced datasets, we incorporate a Vector Quantized Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (VQ-WGAN) to generate additional samples for underrepresented attack categories, thereby balancing the dataset and improving detection performance. Experimental evaluation on the UNSW-NB15 dataset demonstrates that ReMeNet achieves an accuracy of 91.70%, and an F1-score of 91.63% which outperforms Random Forest by 8.02% and EC-GAN by 3.01%. The results show that ReMeNet effectively handles imbalanced data, improving detection rates across all attack categories in T-CPS.

Integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and autonomous vehicles within the crowdsensing paradigm offers a promising approach to collecting environment-relevant data over large spatial areas, particularly in disaster-stricken or high-risk regions. However, deploying crowdsensing systems in emergency response scenarios presents substantial challenges. The lack of prior environmental knowledge complicates the selection of optimal sensing locations and strategy optimization, often relying on costly trial-and-error methods. Additionally, realtime decision-making is critical in such scenarios, requiring the rapid identification of optimal deployment strategies. Yet, the absence of prior knowledge further complicates the assessment of the optimality of these strategies. This gap remains inadequately addressed in existing research. To address this, we present the first framework that frames these challenges as a rapid online strategy optimization problem for mobile agent-based crowdsensing systems operating in unknown environments during emergency response scenarios. We propose DGap-UCB, a novel approach within the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework, which efficiently identifies the optimal sensing strategy with highconfidence guarantees. Leveraging the Upper-Confidence Bound (UCB) technique, DGap-UCB iteratively refines strategy selection based on reward feedback. To accelerate learning, we introduce a gap-confidence pair (Δt, δt)-based Quick Stopping Criterion, enabling rapid and high-confidence identification of the optimal strategy. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of DGap-UCB over stateof-the-art techniques

Mobile edge computation (MEC) is envisioned as a prospective approach for processing the computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks of smart mobile devices (SMDs) through offloading them to base stations (BSs) nearby. In fact, efficient task offloading mechanisms are crucial to accomplish an MEC system. The key challenge is to make on-spot decisions upon the arrival of each task and at the same time achieve truthfulness of each SMD. The challenge further escalates, when the unique characteristics of an MEC system, such as locality constraint, delay constraint, etc., are explicitly considered. To solve the challenge, we present a truthful online combinatorial auction-based mechanism (TOCA) for task offloading in an MEC system. Specifically, we first devise the candidate offloading scheme determination algorithm, aiming to determine the candidate offloading schemes of an SMD upon the arrival of its task. Next, we devise the winning offloading scheme selection and pricing algorithm based on the online primal-dual optimization framework, to decide the winning scheme among the SMD's candidate offloading schemes and calculate its payment. By solid theoretical analysis, we verify that TOCA achieves truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency and a smaller competitive ratio. Trace-driven simulation studies validate the effectiveness and efficacy of TOCA.

Unlike traditional edge caching paradigms, similarity edge caching enables the retrieval of similar content from local caches to fulfill user requests, reducing reliance on remote data centers and improving system performance. Although several pioneering works have contributed to similarity edge caching, most focus on single-edge nodes and/or static environment settings, which are impractical for real-world applications. To address this gap, we investigate the similarity caching problem in dynamic cooperative edge networks, where a set of edge nodes cooperatively serve requests generated from arbitrary distributions with similar content over fluctuating transmission links. This presents a significant challenge, as it requires balancing content similarity with delivery latency over the transmission network and learning the environment in real-time to optimize caching policies. We frame this problem within an adversarial Multi-Armed Bandit framework to accommodate the continuously changing operational environment. To solve this, we propose an online learning-based approach named MABSCP, which dynamically updates caching policies based on real-time feedback to minimize the service cost of edge caching networks. To enhance implementation efficiency, we devise both an offline compact strategy construction method and an online Gibbs sampling method. Finally, trace-driven simulation results demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms several existing methods in terms of system performance.

Competitive opinion maximization (COM) aims to determine some individuals (i.e., seed nodes) from social networks, propagating the desired opinions toward a target entity to their neighbors through social relationships when facing with its competitors (components) and maximize the opinion spread after the specific time. Current studies on COM are still in its infancy, while the only work merely considers the scenario that the strategy of competitors is known but ignores the unknown scenario. In addition, previous studies on COM cannot easily address the situation where some users might dynamically change their opinions. To address the COM issue, we investigate the multistage COM and propose a brand-new Q-learning-based opinion maximization framework (QOMF). Our QOMF consists of two components: dynamic opinion propagation and seeding process. We formulate the COM problem by maximizing relative effective opinions. To produce a dynamic opinion series more realistically, we design an opinion propagation model by joining the activation process and a dynamic opinion process. Moreover, we also verify that the opinion propagation model can reach convergence within finite iterations. To acquire the seed nodes, we design a multistage Q-learning seeding scheme by considering known and unknown competitor strategies, respectively. Experimental results on three real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the benchmarks on reaching relatively effective opinions.

With advances in the edge computing (EC) and federated learning (FL) technologies in jointcloud, the edge FL service market has emerged recently and it requires trading edge resources between model requesters and data owners to complete FL tasks, which needs to incentivize sufficient data owners to participate in model training tasks. However, the limitations of resource trading and incentive design for edge FL service market have not been well addressed. In this paper, we propose a two-level blockchain-aided resource trading mechanism for encouraging appropriate edge servers to compete for dynamic FL tasks from the market while incentivizing data owners to participate in the FL tasks. At the upper level, we apply the deep learning-based reverse auction to model the dynamics of the task server selection process, with the aim of maximizing the total social welfare of the edge FL service market, where the edge server, as a seller, considers not only the data contribution of edge devices but also the cost of using blockchain when bidding. At the lower level, the edge servers offer rewards in exchange for the data owners’ participation, while the parameter aggregation is completed through the blockchain in a decentralized manner, which improves the FL’s robustness. Then, we utilize the Stackelberg game to model the dynamic process that the data owners compete for the servers’ revenue. We conduct extensive simulation experiments and the experimental results show that the proposed mechanism is able to get maximized social welfare and provide effective insights and strategies for the resource trading in the edge FL market to complete the federated training.

Telemedicine Monitoring (TM) integrates mobile communication technology and Internet of Things (IoT) technology for health monitoring and data management. Amidst the escalating demand for telemedicine, traditional cloud computing struggles to guarantee real-time performance and data privacy. To address these challenges, we systematically survey the application of fog and edge computing technologies in TM systems. We focus on the following key aspects: (1) We delve into the theoretical foundations of fog and edge computing, underscoring their salient advantages including low latency, location awareness, high mobility, and more. (2) We elaborate on the architecture of a TM system hinged on fog and edge computing. (3) We outline key challenges facing fog/edge computing-based TM systems, including bandwidth limitations, low latency, data security, privacy, heterogeneity, and reliability. (4) We discuss the need for future advancements in the realms of security defense capability, system adaptability, and convergence of scheduling algorithms to refine the construction of the TM system and stimulate the development of telemedicine.

UAV-enabled multi-access edge computing (MEC) is expanding possibilities for integrated space-air-ground networks, especially in the 5G era and beyond. In this scenario, tasks from mobile users (MUs) are offloaded to nearby UAVs for execution, with results returned upon completion. However, the unpredictable mobility of MUs, coupled with dynamic network conditions and fluctuating resource availability, can degrade the reliability of communication links, leading to increased delivery latency, particularly for tasks involving large computational results. To meet stringent QoS requirements, adaptive task migration across UAVs is essential to minimize latency. To address this issue, in this paper, we first investigateComputationTaskMiGration (CTMiG) problem in UAV-enabled dynamic MEC networks, focusing on joint optimization of task-serving (offloading and migration) decisions to reduce latency for all MUs. We propose the ILCTS algorithm, an imitation learning-based joint optimization method that adaptively adjusts scheduling strategies in response to environmental changes. An improved PPO algorithm is first proposed to train a policy and generate expert data, followed by generative adversarial imitation learning to imitate the data and continuously explore new ones through online learning to enhance the policy. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves superior performance in training accuracy and average latency compared to other representative methods.

Wireless-powered multi-access edge computing (WP-MEC), as a promising computing paradigm with the great potential for breaking through the power limitations of wireless devices, is facing the challenges of reliable task offloading and charging power allocation. Towards this end, we formulate a joint optimization problem of wireless charging and computation offloading in socially-aware D2D-assisted WP-MEC to maximize the utility, characterized by wireless devices’ residual energy and the strength of social relationship. To address this problem, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach with hybrid actor-critic networks including three actor networks and one critic network as well as with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) updating policy. Further, to prevent the policy collapse, we adopt the PPO-clip algorithm which limits the update steps to enhance the stability of algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieved superior convergence performance and, meanwhile, improves the average utility efficiently compared to other baseline approaches.

Weight quantization is an effective technique to compress deep neural networks for their deployment on edge devices with limited resources. Traditional loss-aware quantization methods commonly use the quantized gradient to replace the full-precision gradient. However, we discover that the gradient error will lead to an unexpected zig-zagging-like issue in the gradient descent learning procedures, where the gradient directions rapidly oscillate or zig-zag, and such issue seriously slows down the model convergence. Accordingly, this paper proposes a one-step forward and backtrack way for loss-aware quantization to get more accurate and stable gradient direction to defy this issue. During the gradient descent learning, a one-step forward search is designed to find the trial gradient of the next-step, which is adopted to adjust the gradient of current step towards the direction of fast convergence. After that, we backtrack the current step to update the full-precision and quantized weights through the current-step gradient and the trial gradient. A series of theoretical analysis and experiments on benchmark deep models have demonstrated the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed method, and our method especially outperforms others on the convergence performance.

Recently, visual sensors have been deployed almost everywhere, generating substantial volumes of surveillance video data in smart cities. Anomaly detection aims to detect anomalous events for smart surveillance video analytics. However, exsiting methods rely on manually designed architectures to learn and extract feature representations, which is inefficient and labor intensive. To address this bottleneck, in this work, we propose a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method (AdNAS), which aims to automatically find optimal architecture for anomaly detection in surveillance video. First, we design search space for anomaly detection task, which contains various convolutional operators and a weight-sharing supernet. Moreover, we we present a differentiable strategy to facilitate the deployment of latency-aware architectures across a range of edge platforms in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments show that our AdNAS achieves competitive performance in several benchmarks, especially achieving highest mean Average Precision (mAP) on the fire dataset-1 for anomaly detection task.

Deep learning has emerged in many practical applications, such as vascular segmentation, emotion recognition, and target detection. Moreover, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), representative techniques of deep learning, have been used to solve face recognition. However, the current design of CNNs for face recognition is highly dependent on domain knowledge and needs a large amount of trial and error. In this paper, we propose a new method based on the brain storm optimization algorithm to tackle the network structure and training parameters selection problem of CNN for face detection. In our method, an efficient mixed-length encoding strategy is designed to represent the CNN network information and the model training parameters. Specifically, convolutional layers, pooling layers, and fully connected layers can be designed automatically, and then an optimal set of selection results can be obtained. A series of experimental results show that the architecture by our method achieves higher accuracy (98.7%) compared to the state-of-the-art results on the FDDB dataset, as well as competitive results (accuracy = 94.3%, 92.5%, and 84.9%) on the WIDER FACE dataset.

Performance predictors are used to reduce architecture evaluation costs in neural architecture search, which however suffers from a large amount of budget consumption in annotating substantial architectures trained from scratch. Hence, how to leverage existing annotated architectures to train a generalized predictor to find the optimal architecture on unseen target search spaces becomes a new research topic. To solve this issue, we propose a Single-Domain Generalized Predictor (SDGP), which aims to make the predictor only trained on a single source search space but perform well on target search spaces. In meta-learning, we firstly adopt feature extractor in learning the domain-invariant features of the architectures. Then, a neural predictor is trained to map the architectures to the accuracy of the candidate architectures over the target domain simulated on the source search space. Moreover, a novel multi-head attention driven regularizer is designed to regulate the predictor to further improve the generalization ability of the predictor for the feature extractor. A series of experimental results have shown that the proposed predictor outperforms the state-of-the-art predictors in generalization and achieves significant performance gains in finding the optimal architectures with test error 2.40% on CIFAR-10 and 23.20% on ImageNet1k within 0.01 GPU days.

Neural networks (NNs) are widely used in classification-based networking analysis to help traffic transmission and system security. However, there are heterogeneous network devices (e.g., switches and routers) in a network. Manually customizing NNs with specific device requirements (e.g., max allowed running latency) can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. Furthermore, the diverse data characteristics of different networking classification tasks add to the burden of NN customization. This paper introduces Loong, a neural architecture search (NAS) based system that automatically generates NNs for various networking tasks and devices. Loong includes a neural operation embedding module, which embeds candidate neural operations into the layer to be designed. Then, the layer-wise training is used to generate a task-specific NN layer by layer. This layer-wise scheme simultaneously trains and selects candidate neural operations using gradient feedback. Finally, only the important operations are selected to form the layer, maximizing accuracy. By incorporating multiple objectives, including deployment memory and running latency of devices, into the training and selection of NNs, Loong is able to customize NNs for heterogeneous network devices. Experiments show that Loong's NNs outperform 13 manual-designed and NAS-based NNs, with a 4.11% improvement in F1-score. Additionally, Loong's NNs achieve faster (7.92X) speeds on commodity devices.

In multi-objective evolutionary neural architecture search (NAS), existing predictor-based methods commonly suffer from the rank disorder issue that a candidate high-performance architecture may have a poor ranking compared with the worse architecture in terms of the trained predictor.To alleviate the above issue, we aim to train a Pareto-wise end-to-end ranking classifier to simplify the architecture search process by transforming the complex multi-objective NAS task into a simple classification task. To this end, a classifier-based Pareto evolution approach is proposed, where an online classifier is trained to directly predict the dominance relationship between the candidate and reference architectures. Besides, an adaptive clustering method is designed to select reference architectures for the classifier, and an α-domination assisted approach is developed to address the imbalance issue of positive and negative samples. The proposed approach is compared with a number of state-of-the-art NAS methods on widely-used test datasets, and computation results show that the proposed approach is able to alleviate the rank disorder issue and outperforms other methods. Especially, the proposed method is able to find a set of promising network architectures with different model sizes ranging from 2M to 5M under diverse objectives and constraints.

Defect recognition is an important task in intelligent manufacturing. Due to the subjectivity of human annotation, the collected defect data usually contains a lot of noise and unpredictable uncertainties, which have a great negative influence on defect recognition. It is a significant challenge to discover an effective defect recognition model with satisfactory uncertainty processing ability. A natural way is to automatically search for an efficient deep model, which can be realized by neural architecture search (NAS). To achieve this, we propose an efficient fuzzy NAS framework for defect recognition, where the searched architecture can effectively handle uncertain information from the given datasets. Specifically, we first design a fuzzy search space and the related encoding strategy for fuzzy NAS. Then, we propose a comparator-based evolutionary search approach, where an online end-to-end comparator is learned to directly determine the selection of candidate architectures from the evolutionary population. The comparator works in an end-to-end way and it transforms the complex ranking problem of evaluating architectures into a simple classification task, which overcomes the rank disorder issue suffered from traditional performance predictors. A series of experimental results demonstrate that the architecture with fewer #Params (1.22 M) search by fuzzy neural architecture search framework for defect recognition method achieves higher accuracy (92.26%) compared to the state-of-the-art results (i.e., DARTS-PV) on the ELPV dataset, as well as competitive results (accuracy = 76.4%, #Params = 1.04 M) on the CODEBRIM dataset. Experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method in handling uncertain problems.

Traditional routing algorithms cannot dynamically change network environments due to the limited information for routing decisions. Meanwhile, they are prone to performance bottlenecks in the face of increasingly complex business requirements. Some approaches, such as deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have been proposed to address the routing problems. However, they hardly utilize the information about the network environment fully. The Knowledge Defined Networking (KDN) architecture inspires us to develop new learning mechanisms adapted to the dynamic characteristics of the network topology. In this paper, we propose an effective scheme to solve the routing optimization problem by adding a graph neural network (GNN) structure to DRL, called Message Passing Deep Reinforcement Learning (MPDRL). MPDRL uses the characteristics of GNN to interact with the network topology environment and extracts exploitable knowledge through the message passing process of information between links in the topology. The goal is to achieve the load balance of network traffic and improve network performance. We have conducted experiments on three Internet Service Provider (ISP) network topologies. The evaluation results show that MPDRL obtains better network performance than the baseline algorithms.

Real-time video analytics on edge devices has gained increasing attention across a wide range of business areas. However, edge devices usually have limited computing resources. Consequently, conventional approaches to video analytics either deploy simplified models on the edge (resulting in low accuracy) or transmit video content to the cloud (resulting in high latency and network overheads) to enable deep learning inference (e.g., object detection). In this paper, we introduce ParaLoupe, a novel real-time video analytics system that parallelizes deep learning inference in the edge cluster with task-oriented mini models. These mini models do not attain State-of-the-Art accuracy individually, but collectively can achieve much better accuracy-latency tradeoff than State-of-the-Art models. To achieve this, ParaLoupe crops multiple single-object patches from a given video frame. These single-object patches are then sent to multiple edge devices for parallel inference with specifically designed mini models. A patch-based task scheduling algorithm is further proposed to leverage the computing resources of the edge cluster to meet the service-level objectives. Our experimental results on real-world datasets show that ParaLoupe significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving up to 14.1× inference speedup with accuracy on par with state-of-the-art models, or improving accuracy up to 45.1% under the same latency constraints.

Mobile edge computation (MEC) has recently emerged as a promising computing paradigm for supporting latency-sensitive mobile applications. Due to the limited resources of the edge servers (ESs), efficient resource allocation mechanisms are key to realize the MEC paradigm. In such a resource allocation process, it is a significant challenge to guarantee truthfulness while enabling flexible task offloading and satisfying the locality constraint. To address such a challenge, we propose a truthful auction-based resource allocation mechanism with flexible task offloading (TARFO) in an MEC system. Specifically, we first design the minimum delay task graph partitioning algorithm, aiming at calculating the minimum completion time and the task offloading solutions under different resource profiles. Based on this algorithm, for each smart mobile device (SMD), we further determine the set of feasible non-dominated resource profiles and the corresponding task offloading solutions. We next propose an efficient primal-dual approximation winning bid selection algorithm to determine the set of the winning bids and a critical value based pricing algorithm to calculate the payments of the winning bids. Strict theoretical analysis demonstrates TARFO can ensure truthfulness, individual rationality, computational efficiency and a smaller approximation ratio. Simulation results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of TARFO.

Live video streaming has grown dramatically in recent years. A key challenge is achieving high video quality of experience (QoE) in low-rate networks. To tackle this problem, recent streaming approaches strategically drop video frames, thus reducing the bandwidth required. However, these methods are usually designed for video on demand (VoD) services and perform poorly in live video streaming. In this paper, we design a new live video streaming approach, Reparo, which aims to improve users' QoE in low-rate networks. On the upload client side, Reparo discards video frames such that they are never encoded or transmitted. To decide which frames should be dropped, we design a real-time Video Frame Discarding (VFD) model, which strives to minimize the impact on video quality while maximizing bandwidth savings. To complement this, Reparo further proposes a modified adaptive bitrate algorithm and two encoding modes, targeting low-frame-rate encoding. On the server side, Reparo then recovers the dropped frames using a lightweight Video Frame Interpolation Deep Neural Network (VFI-DNN). Experimental results show that, compared with vanilla DASH, Reparo reaches an SSIM gain of 0.018, or reduces bandwidth consumption by 30.86%. With an average bandwidth of 0.974Mbps, it improves QoE by 18.13% on average compared to DASH.

Regular expressions (REs) offer one-shot solutions for many networking tasks, e.g., network intrusion detection. However, REs purely rely on expert knowledge and cannot utilize labeled data for better accuracy. Today, neural networks (NNs) have shown superior accuracy and flexibility, thanks to their ability to learn from rich labeled data. Nevertheless, NNs are often incompetent in cold-start scenarios and too complex for deployment on network devices. In this paper, we propose Metis, a general framework that converts REs to network device affordable models for superior accuracy and throughput by taking advantage of REs' expert knowledge and NNs' learning ability. In Metis, we convert REs to byte-level recurrent neural networks (BRNNs) without training. The BRNNs preserve expert knowledge from REs and offer adequate accuracy in cold-start scenarios. When rich labeled data is available, the performance of BRNNs can be improved by training. Furthermore, we design a semi-supervised knowledge distillation to transform the BRNNs into pooling soft random forests (PSRFs) that can be deployed on network devices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method to employ model inference as an alternative to RE matching in network scenarios. We collect network traffic data on our campus for three weeks and evaluate Metis on them. Experimental results show that Metis is more accurate than original REs and other baselines, achieving superior throughput when deployed on network devices.

With the rapid development of network function virtualization (NFV), more and more enterprises and operators are seeking network service provisioning via service chains of virtual network functions (VNFs), instead of depending on proprietary hardware appliances. Following this trend, an NFV market is emerging, where users can procure different VNF instances (VNFIs) and their combinations from multiple network service providers (NSPs) in a pay-as-you-go way. In such a procurement process, how to guarantee truthfulness while enabling flexible resource provisioning in form of VNFIs is a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a truthful reverse combinatorial auction-based mechanism to solve the combinatorial VNFI procurement problem. To support flexible resource provisioning, this mechanism allows NSPs to be multi-minded, and determine the provisioning VNFIs according to the auction results. Specifically, we design a heuristic algorithm to determine the winning bids in polynomial time. Furthermore, we devise a critical-payment-based pricing algorithm to induce NSPs to disclose their real costs, aiming to achieve truthfulness. Rigorous theoretical analysis shows the proposed mechanism can guarantee truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency. Simulation results also verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed mechanism.

Misinformation and rumors can spread rapidly and widely through online social networks, seriously endangering social stability. Therefore, rumor blocking on social networks has become a hot research topic. In the existing research, when users receive two opposing opinions, they tend to believe the one arrives first. In this article, we argue that users will dialectically trust the information based on their own opinions rather than the rule of first-come-first-listen. We propose a confidence-based opinion adoption (CBOA) model, which considers the opinion and confidence according to the traditional linear threshold (LT) model. Based on this model, we propose the directed graph convolutional network (DGCN) method to select the$k$most influential positive cascade nodes to suppress the propagation of rumors. Finally, we verify our method on four real network datasets. The experimental results show that our method can sufficiently suppress the propagation of rumors and obtains smaller number of rumor nodes than the baseline algorithms.

In real-world applications, a specific class of multiobjective optimization problems, such as the cloud service allocation problem (CSAOPs), possess the characteristic of variable-length and mixed variables, termed as variable multiobjective optimization problems (VMMOPs). Unfortunately, little research has been reported to solve them. To fill the gap, we propose a tailored enhanced decomposition-based algorithm to handle the VMMOPs. Specifically, a variable-length coding structure is designed to flexibly represent the solutions of VMMOPs. In order to facilitate the solution generation, a simple dimensionality incremental learning strategy is developed to choose representative solutions for the training of two learning models. The one is the fast-clustering-based histogram model, which is built for the sampling of solutions in the continuous decision space, while the other one is the incremental learning-based histogram model, designed to sample solutions in discrete decision space. Following the traditional constructor of the DTLZ test suite and the features of CSAOPs, we present a test suite of VMMOPs for the verification of the performance of the methods in handling VMMOPs. Experimental results on a number of benchmark problems and two real CSAOPs have shown the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed method in handling VMMOPs.

This article proposes an adaptive localized decision variable analysis approach under the decomposition-based framework to solve the large-scale multiobjective and many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs). Its main idea is to incorporate the guidance of reference vectors into the control variable analysis and optimize the decision variables using an adaptive strategy. Especially, in the control variable analysis, for each search direction, the convergence relevance degree of each decision variable is measured by a projection-based detection method. In the decision variable optimization, the grouped decision variables are optimized with an adaptive scalarization strategy, which is able to adaptively balance the convergence and diversity of the solutions in the objective space. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with a suite of test problems with 2-10 objectives and 200-1000 variables. Experimental results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm on the large-scale multiobjective and MaOPs.

The performance of decomposition-based algorithms is sensitive to the Pareto front shapes since their reference vectors preset in advance are not always adaptable to various problem characteristics with no a priori knowledge. For this issue, this article proposes an adaptive reference vector reinforcement learning (RVRL) approach to decomposition-based algorithms for industrial copper burdening optimization. The proposed approach involves two main operations, that is: 1) a reinforcement learning (RL) operation and 2) a reference point sampling operation. Given the fact that the states of reference vectors interact with the landscape environment (quite often), the RL operation treats the reference vector adaption process as an RL task, where each reference vector learns from the environmental feedback and selects optimal actions for gradually fitting the problem characteristics. Accordingly, the reference point sampling operation uses estimation-of-distribution learning models to sample new reference points. Finally, the resultant algorithm is applied to handle the proposed industrial copper burdening problem. For this problem, an adaptive penalty function and a soft constraint-based relaxing approach are used to handle complex constraints. Experimental results on both benchmark problems and real-world instances verify the competitiveness and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Conventional multiobjective optimization algorithms (MOEAs) with or without preferences are successful in solving multi- and many-objective optimization problems. However, a strong hypothesis underlying their performance is that MOEAs are able to find a representative solution set to cover the entire Pareto-optimal front (PF) and decision makers are able to conveniently and precisely articulate their preference, which is not always easy to fulfill in practice. Accordingly, it is suggested that representative solutions in the naturally interesting regions of the PF rather than the whole PF should be targeted. A large body of research has been proposed to search or identify the knees or knee regions over the past decades. Therefore, this article aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the research on knee-oriented optimization. We start with a discussion of the importance and basic concepts of the knees, followed by a summary of knee-oriented benchmarks and indicators. After that, knee-oriented frameworks and techniques, and real-world applications are presented. Finally, potential challenges are pointed out and a few promising future lines of research are suggested. The survey offers a new perspective to develop MOEAs for solving multi- and many-objective optimization problems.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) emerges as an appealing paradigm to provide time-sensitive computing services for industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. How to guarantee truthfulness and budget-balance under locality constraints is an important issue to the allocation and pricing design of the MEC system. In this paper, we propose a truthful combinatorial double auction mechanism, which integrates the padding concept and the efficient pricing strategy to guarantee desirable properties in constrained MEC environments. This mechanism takes into account the locality characteristics of the MEC systems, where mobile devices (MDs) only offload tasks to edge servers (ESs) in the proximity with various requirements, and ESs only serve their neighboring MDs with limited resources. To be specific, for allocation, a linear programming (LP)-based padding method is used to obtain the near-optimal solution in the polynomial time. For pricing, a critical-value-based pricing strategy and a VCG-based pricing strategy are designed for MDs and ESs to achieve truthfulness and budget-balance. Our theoretical analysis confirms that TCDA is able to hold a set of desirable economic properties, including truthfulness, individual rationality, and budget-balance. Furthermore, simulation results validate the theoretical analysis, and verify the effectiveness and efficiency of TCDA.

In brain storm optimization (BSO), the convergent operation utilizes a clustering strategy to group the population into multiple clusters, and the divergent operation uses this cluster information to generate new individuals. However, this mechanism is inefficient to regulate the exploration and exploitation search. This article first analyzes the main factors that influence the performance of BSO and then proposes an orthogonal learning framework to improve its learning mechanism. In this framework, two orthogonal design (OD) engines (i.e., exploration OD engine and exploitation OD engine) are introduced to discover and utilize useful search experiences for performance improvements. In addition, a pool of auxiliary transmission vectors with different features is maintained and their biases are also balanced by the OD decision mechanism. Finally, the proposed algorithm is verified on a set of benchmarks and is adopted to resolve the quantitative association rule mining problem considering the support, confidence, comprehensibility, and netconf. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is very powerful in optimizing complex functions. It not only outperforms previous versions of the BSO algorithm but also outperforms several famous OD-based algorithms.

The brain storm optimization (BSO) algorithm is a new and promising swarm intelligence paradigm, based on the emerging intelligence of the human brain storming process. However, BSO is ineffective to deal with the large data sets because its clustering and idea updating operations are computationally expensive. Aiming at this issue, we propose a parallelized brain storm optimizer based on Spark framework called PLBSO. The basic idea is to parallelize the complex operations of population clustering and idea updating in BSO so as to reduce the computation cost. Especially, the generation process of new ideas is modified to make BSO more suitable for parallelism. In addition, a new parallelized algorithm called PBAR based on PLBSO is proposed for association rule mining. The performance of PLBSO is evaluated over serialized BSO on complex multimodal benchmarks. Results show that, compared with serialized BSO, PLBSO can acquire a 350% speedup approximately while keeping similar accuracy. Finally, PBAR is adopted to resolve the association rule mining problem on a transactional dataset taken from IBM SPSS modeler. The encouraging results prove the validity of our algorithms.

The brain storm optimization (BSO) algorithm is a new and promising swarm intellgience paradigm, inspired from the behaviors of the human process of brainstorming. The noverty of BSO lies in the clustering mechanism where the ideas are clustered into a set of groups and each idea learns from experiences of one inter-cluster or two intra-cluster neighbors. However, this mechanism is inefficient to deal with complex optimiaiton problems. In this paper, we propose an improved BSO algorithm called OSBSO using orthogonal experimental design (OED) strategy, which aims to discover useful search experiences for improving the convergence and solution accurancy. In OSBSO, two new clustering procedures are developed, i.e., orthogonal initialization and orthogonal clustering. The orthogonal initialization aims to improve the uniformity of the initial cluster centers in the objective space instead of the decision space, which can enhance the convergence performance. The orthogonal clustering uses the information between inter- cluster and intra-cluster indviduals to alleviate the evolution stagnation of clusters. Experiments are conducted on a set of the CEC2017 benchmark functions and the results verify the effectivenss and efficiency of OSBSO.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) networks planning (RNP) is a challenging task on how to deploy RFID readers under certain constraints. Existing RNP models are usually derived from the flat and centralized-processing framework identified by vertical integration within a set of objectives which couple different types of control variables. This paper proposes a two-level RNP model based on the hierarchical decoupling principle to reduce computational complexity, in which the costefficient planning at the top levels is modeled with a set of discrete control variables (i.e., switch states of readers), and the quality of service objectives at the bottom level are modeled with a set of continuous control variables (i.e., physical coordinate and radiate power). The model of the objectives at the two levels is essentially a multiobjective problem. In order to optimize this model, this paper proposes a specific multiobjective artificial bee colony optimizer called H-MOABC, which is based on performance indicators with reinforcement learning and orthogonal Latin squares approach. The proposed algorithm proves to be competitive in dealing with two-objective and three-objective optimization problems in comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms. In the experiments, H-MOABC is employed to solve the two scalable real-world RNP instances in the hierarchical decoupling manner. Computational results shows that the proposed H-MOABC is very effective and efficient in RFID networks optimization.

This paper proposes a novel optimization scheme by hybridizing an artificial bee colony optimizer (HABC) with a bee life-cycle mechanism, for both stationary and dynamic optimization problems. The main innovation of the proposed HABC is to develop a cooperative and population-varying scheme, in which individuals can dynamically shift their states of birth, foraging, death, and reproduction throughout the artificial bee colony life cycle. That is, the bee colony size can be adjusted dynamically according to the local fitness landscape during algorithm execution. This new characteristic of HABC helps to avoid redundant search and maintain diversity of population in complex environments. A comprehensive experimental analysis is implemented that the proposed algorithm is benchmarked against several state-of-the-art bio-inspired algorithms on both stationary and dynamic benchmarks. Then the proposed HABC is applied to the real-world applications including data clustering and image segmentation problems. Statistical analysis of all these tests highlights the significant performance improvement due to the life-cycle mechanism and shows that the proposed HABC outperforms the reference algorithms.