Missing critical modalities in medical imaging poses significant challenges for AI-driven diagnostic systems, particularly in scenarios where limited modalities must suffice for downstream tasks. Existing approaches often fail to fully leverage privileged features available only at training or address the information gap between privileged and limited modalities, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a unified, dual-stage Disentanglement-AligNmenT framEwork (DANTE), which uses InformationTheoretic Regularization and Cross-Modal Reconstruction to decompose full-modality information into alignable and privileged-exclusive components. In the first stage, a self-supervised pre-training strategy based on cross-modal reconstruction acts as a proxy task to implicitly incentivize disentangled representations. In the second stage, we present an information-theoretic regularization to explicitly maximize the transfer of privileged knowledge through two novel modules: (1) a Mutual Alignment Module that employs multilevel bidirectional alignment between limited-modality features and alignable features, enhancing cross-modal representation consistency; (2) a Privileged Compaction Module that restricts the privileged-exclusive information flow, promoting the integration of task-relevant content into alignable representations. Experimental results on three challenging medical datasets demonstrate that DANTE achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating its effectiveness in leveraging privileged guidance under modality scarcity, and exhibits broad applicability across diverse medical imaging scenarios.

With the development of virtual reality, the practical requirements of the wearable haptic interface have been greatly emphasized. While passive haptic devices are commonly used in virtual reality, they lack generality and are difficult to precisely generate continuous force feedback to users. In this work, we present SmartSpring, a new solution for passive haptics, which is inexpensive, lightweight and capable of providing controllable force feedback in virtual reality. We propose a hybrid spring-linkage structure as the proxy and flexibly control the mechanism for adjustable system stiffness. By analyzing the structure and force model, we enable a smart transform of the structure for producing continuous force signals. We quantitatively examine the real-world performance of SmartSpring to verify our model. By asymmetrically moving or actively pressing the end-effector, we show that our design can further support rendering torque and stiffness. Finally, we demonstrate the SmartSpring in a series of scenarios with user studies and a just noticeable difference analysis. Experimental results show the potential of the developed haptic display in virtual reality.

Ordinary least-squares estimation is proved to be the best linear unbiased estimator according to the Gauss-Markov theorem. In the last two decades, however, some researchers criticized that least-squares was substantially inaccurate in fitting power-law distributions; such criticism has caused a strong bias in research community. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments to rebut that such criticism is complete nonsense. Specifically, we sample different sizes of discrete and continuous data from power-law models, showing that even though the long-tailed noises are sampled from power-law models, they cannot be treated as power-law data. We define the correct way to bin continuous power-law data into data points and propose an average strategy for least-squares to fit power-law distributions. Experiments on both simulated and real-world data show that our proposed method fits power-law data perfectly. We uncover a fundamental flaw in the popular method proposed by Clauset et al. [12]: it tends to discard the majority of power-law data and fit the long-tailed noises. Experiments also show that the reverse cumulative distribution function is a bad idea to plot power-law data in practice because it usually hides the true probability distribution of data. We hope that our research can clean up the bias about least-squares fitting power-law distributions.

Cloud-based services have been increasingly used to provide on-demand access to a large amount of computing requests, such as data, computing, resources, and so on, in which it is vitally important to correctly select and assign the right resources to a workload or application. This paper presents a novel online reverse auction scheme based on online algorithm for allocating the cloud computing services, which can help the cloud users and providers to build workflow applications in a cloud computing environment. The online reverse auction scheme consists of three parts: online algorithm design, competitive ratio calculation, and performance valuation. The online reverse auction-based algorithm is proposed for the cloud user agent to choose the final winners based on Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) mechanism and online algorithm (OA). The competitive analysis is applied to calculate the competitive ratio of the proposed algorithm compared with the offline algorithm. This analysis method is significant to measure the performance of proposed algorithm, without the assumption of the distribution of cloud providers’ bids. The results prove that the proposed online reverse auction-based algorithm is the appropriate mechanism because it allows the cloud user agent to make purchase decisions without knowing the future bids. The difference of auction rounds and transaction cost can impressively influence and improve the performance of the proposed reverse auction algorithm.

A gear position decision method used in automated mechanical transmission (AMT) is introduced. The algorithm of the method is composed of a driving environments and driver's intentions estimator, the shift schedules suit each typical driving environment and driver's intention situation, and an inference logic to determine the most proper gear position for the present situation. The estimator identifies the driving environment and features of driver's intentions, which are divided into some typical patterns. Based on the identified results, the gear position inference algorithm calculates out the best gear position at the moment. The method just simulates the course of a driver making a gear position decision when driving an automobile with manual transmission. The test results show that the automated mechanical transmission with the method gives less unnecessary shifting and more proper gear positions than that with the shift schedule algorithms, which calculate the gear positions only based on the automotive state parameters.