Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for effective event-driven computation. However, CMOS-based SNN designs are limited by power consumption and complexity, while nonvolatile memory (NVM)-based SNN designs often lack biological characteristics and require active capacitive circuits to emulate neuronal dynamics. In this paper, we propose a thermally interplayed spin-orbit torque magnetic tunnel junction (TI-MTJ) macro that integrates core SNN functionalities. Our neuron array autonomously achieves leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) model within the TI-MTJ device, thus improving power efficiency and simplifying circuit structure. Additionally, the proposed synaptic array provides adaptive in-situ responses based on a simplified spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rule. To enhance biological plausibility, our macro incorporates real-time spike monitoring and inhibition mechanisms. A comprehensive device-circuit-algorithm co-optimization framework validates the high performance of the TI-MTJ macro, achieving a synaptic energy consumption of 6.07fJ per spike, an inference accuracy of 97.76% on the MNIST dataset, and an energy efficiency of 22.8TOPS/W.

Goal-conditioned humanoid locomotion in reinforcement learning (RL) remains challenging due to sparse reward signals and the single-goal overfitting problem. Although contrastive reinforcement learning (CRL) has achieved considerable success in this setting, it can suffer from pronounced estimation variance, since epistemic uncertainty is difficult to reduce given limited task-specific information and model capacity. Ensemble-based critics can partially alleviate this issue. However, sufficient ensemble diversity and accurate individual estimates are not necessarily guaranteed during training, resulting in unstructured exploration. To address these challenges, we propose Conditional Redundancy-Guided Evolutionary Contrastive Ensemble with Direct Preference Optimization weighting (CRECE-DPO), which augments CRL with a vectorized critic ensemble and refines the ensemble via an evolutionary algorithm guided by a tailored fitness metric. Specifically, we design a DPO-weighted conditional redundancy fitness score, to prune redundant representations while promoting effective exploration of the parameter space. Simulation results on challenging goal-conditioned benchmarks, including humanoid locomotion, demonstrate consistent improvements over CRL and other baselines.

Cognitive state detection holds significant research value in the field of human–computer interaction and neural engineering. However, existing works are insufficient in modeling the temporal dynamics of multimodal physiological signals, which leads to heterogeneous distribution differences in cross-modal feature interactions. In addition, domain shift issues under cross-subject and few-sample conditions restrict the model generalization performance. To cope with these problems, this work proposes a cognitive state detection framework that integrates Transformer-based multimodal feature interaction and self-training of pseudolabel optimization. First, the multihead attention mechanism is introduced to model the temporal evolution patterns across modalities, dynamically harmonizing cross-modal contributions to extract cognitive state-related shared features. Then, a dual-model cross-validation strategy is designed to filter high-quality pseudolabeled samples from the target domain for subsequent self-training, effectively avoiding the dependency on auxiliary modules in domain adaptation. Finally, Extensive experiments show that the proposed work significantly improves the recognition accuracy, and the designed pseudolabel optimization mechanism can be transferred to related tasks without increasing model complexity.

Computing-in-memory (CIM) macros based on static random access memory (SRAM) are meant to increase capacity while improving energy efficiency and reducing computing latency. However, traditional analog designs still face several key challenges, including long computing latency from separated computing phases, negative voltage fluctuations from massive parallel computing, and low bitcell density from additional transistors and capacitors for multiplication. On the other hand, only time-aligned inputs are supported in the works. To overcome the above challenges, this work proposes a buffer-free 7T-SRAM charge-domain CIM macro. It has four key features: 1) a compact 7T SRAM bitcell structure for high-energy efficiency; 2) a configurable input unit to support different sizes of input activations; 3) a time-row division (RD) strategy to support real-time processing and alleviate negative voltage fluctuations; and 4) a merging timing to conceal the input phase for high throughput. The fabricated 512-Kb SRAM-CIM macro in 40 nm achieves 79.3–290.4 Tops/W at 4-bit precision.

Virtual Production (VP) is a novel approach to filmmaking that blends real-time computer graphics, live-action footage, and cutting-edge technologies (such as LED volumes and game engines like Unreal Engine). As China’s higher education (HE) landscape continues to grow and diversify, Sino- foreign higher education institutions (SfHEIs) — partnerships between local Chinese universities and international institutions — have become increasingly prominent: They were created as an innovative solution to challenges such as insufficient domestic capacity, outdated curricula, regional imbalances, limited global engagement, and quality-assurance gaps, and have themselves become centers of pedagogical, research, and institutional innovation. This paper examines the experience of a team of students and faculty at an SfHEI who collaborated on a new approach to support VP, using in-camera virtual effects (ICVFX). The paper explores the background to the project, its core technical innovations, and the team dynamics. Parallel to the technical development work, an Open Educational Resource (OER) was also created. This OER contains not only the technical elements of the project, thus helping future VP/ICVFX workers, but also the team-development experiences. The paper will be of interest not only to the VP/ICVFX community, but also to SfHEI students and staff, and to the OER community.

Downlink precoding in massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems involves high-dimensional sparse matrix calculations, which poses challenges to existing architectures. Computing-in-memory (CIM) has significant advantages in handling large-scale parallel operations, but sparse computing for wireless communication remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel CIM accelerator based on magnetic random access memory (MRAM) leveraging adaptive multi-sparse mode technology for optimized sparse matrix multiplication in MIMO communication systems. This architecture represents the first application of CIM technology for processing sparse matrices in MIMO precoding tasks, minimizing storage requirements and enhancing parallel processing speed. Experimental results demonstrate that, for a 32×256×8 MIMO downlink precoding task with 90% sparsity, the symbol error rate is reduced to 0.1% at a signal-to-noise ratio of 20dB, achieving 8.35× reduction in storage overhead, 39.4× power saving and 9.85× speedup. These results position our accelerator as a promising candidate for processing sparse data in 5G massive MIMO systems.

Deep learning-based single-image super-resolution (SISR) technology focuses on enhancing low-resolution (LR) images into high-resolution (HR) ones. Although significant progress has been made, challenges remain in computational complexity and quality, particularly in remote sensing image processing. To address these issues, we propose our Omni-Scale RWKV Super-Resolution (OmniRWKVSR) model which presents a novel approach that combines the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) architecture with feature extraction techniques such as Visual RWKV Spatial Mixing (VRSM) and Visual RWKV Channel Mixing (VRCM), aiming to overcome the limitations of existing methods and achieve superior SISR performance. Our work demonstrates the ability to provide effective solutions for high-quality image reconstruction. Under the 4x Super-Resolution tasks, compared to the MambaIR model, we achieved an average improvement of 0.26% in PSNR and 0.16% in SSIM.

Multimodal knowledge graphs (MMKGs) have gained widespread adoption across various domains. However, existing transformer-based methods for MMKG representation learning primarily focus on enhancing representation performance, while overlooking time and memory costs, which reduces model efficiency. To tackle these limitations, we introduce a multimodal lightweight transformer (MLFormer) model, which not only ensures robust representation capabilities but also considerably improves computational efficiency. We find that the self-attention mechanism in transformers leads to substantial performance overheads. As a result, we optimize the traditional MMKGE model in two aspects: modality processing and modality fusion, by incorporating a filter gate and Fourier transform. Our experimental results on real-world multimodal knowledge graph completion datasets demonstrate that MLFormer achieves significant improvements in computational efficiency while maintaining competitive performance.

Lateral walking gait phase recognition and prediction are the premise of hip exoskeleton application in lateral resistance walk exercise. We presented a fusion network with stacked denoise autoencoder and meta learning (SDA-NN-ML) to recognize gait phase and predict gait percentage from IMU signals. Experiments were conducted to detect the four lateral walking gait phases and predict their percentage across different speeds. The performance of SDA-NN-ML and Support Vector Machine (SVM), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) were evaluated. The cross-subject recognition accuracy of SDA-NN-ML (89.94%) decreased by 4.62% compared to the training accuracy, which outperformed SVM (8.60%), AdaBoost (5.61%), and LSTM (7.12%). For real-time and cross-subject prediction of gait phase percentage, the RMSE of SDA-NN-ML (0.2043) outperformed that of a single regression network (0.2426). With a signal noise ratio of 100:30, the cross-subject recognition accuracy decreased by a mere 5.70%, while the prediction result (RMSE) of SDA-NN-ML increased by 0.0167 when compared to the noise-free results. SDA-NN-ML demonstrates a stable multi-step-ahead prediction ability with an accuracy higher than 82.50% and an RMSE of less than 0.23 when the ahead time is less than 200 ms. The results demonstrated that the proposed method has high accuracy and robust performance in lateral walking gait recognition and prediction.

Multi-view Graph Learning is popular in recommendations due to its ability to capture relationships and connections across multiple views. Existing multi-view graph learning methods generally involve constructing graphs of views and performing information aggregation on view representations. Despite their effectiveness, they face two data limitations: Multi-focal Multi-source data noise and multi-source Data Sparsity. The former arises from the combination of noise from individual views and conflicting edges between views when information from all views is combined. The latter occurs because multi-view learning exacerbate the negative influence of data sparsity because these methods require more model parameters to learn more view information. Motivated by these issues, we propose MMGCL, a meta knowledge-enhanced multi-view graph contrastive learning framework for recommendations. To tackle the data noise issue, MMGCL extract meta knowledge to preserve important information from all views to form a meta view representation. It then rectifies every view in multi-learning frameworks, thus simultaneously removing the view-private noisy edges and conflicting edges across different views. To address the data sparsity issue, MMGCL performs meta knowledge transfer contrastive learning optimization on all views to reduce the searching space for model parameters and add more supervised signal. Besides, we have deployed MMGCL in a real industrial recommender system in China, and we further evaluate it on three benchmark datasets and a practical industry online application. Extensive experiments on these datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art recommendation performance of MMGCL.

Stereo image super-resolution (SR) exploits the stereo feature information from cross-view image pairs for image resolution. This paper focuses on how to effectively exploit the disparity information between stereo viewpoints and proposes a cross-scale parallax-attention network (CSPAN) for stereo image SR. Specifically, a novel cross-scale parallax attention module (CPAM) is developed to explore cross-scale parallax prior. Moreover, instead of the widely used upsampling module based on the sub-pixel layer, we present a novel cascade dynamic upsampling module (CDUM), which not only dynamically generates the upsampling filters according to the input content, but also restores the high frequency details in a coarse-to-fine manner. Especially, nonlinear activation free blocks (NAFBlocks) are used as the feature extraction module in our network, which further improves the performance of our model. Extensive experiments on Mid- dlebury, KITTI 2012 and KITTI 2015 demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms many competitive stereo SR methods in both PSNR and SSIM. Code is available at https://github.com/DoragonKuesuto/CSPAN.

Recently, super-resolution (SR) performance has been improved by the stereo images since the beneficial information could be provided by another view. Transformer has shown significant performance gains for computer vision tasks, while it needs huge computing resources and training time. To alleviate this problem, we introduce an efficient Transformer feature extraction block, which can efficiently capture long-range pixel interactions with lower resource consumption. There are many kinds of cross-view interaction modules for stereo image SR, and they all have limitations of SR performance in their own models. To address the aforementioned challenge, we first propose the strong-weak cross-view interaction mechanism, which consists of strong cross-view interaction module and weak cross-view interaction module. Benefiting from the proposed mechanism, the SR performance can be improved significantly with a negligible increment of computing cost. We integrate the efficient Transformer feature extraction module and the strong-weak cross-view interaction mechanism into a unified framework named strong-weak cross-view interaction network (SWCVIN), and extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results.

Cold-start has become critical for recommendations, especially for sparse user-item interactions. Recent approaches based on meta-learning succeed in alleviating the issue, owing to the fact that these methods have strong generalization, so they can fast adapt to new tasks under cold-start settings. However, these meta-learning-based recommendation models learned with single and spase ratings are easily falling into the meta-overfitting, since the one and only rating$r_{ui}$to a specific item$i$cannot reflect a user's diverse interests under various circumstances(e.g., time, mood, age, etc), i.e. if$r_{ui}$equals to 1 in the historical dataset, but$r_{ui}$could be 0 in some circumstance. In meta-learning, tasks with these single ratings are called Non-Mutually-Exclusive(Non-ME) tasks, and tasks with diverse ratings are called Mutually-Exclusive(ME) tasks. Fortunately, a meta-augmentation technique is proposed to relief the meta-overfitting for meta-learning methods by transferring Non-ME tasks into ME tasks by adding noises to labels without changing inputs. Motivated by the meta-augmentation method, in this paper, we propose a cross-domain meta-augmentation technique for content-aware recommendation systems (MetaCAR) to construct ME tasks in the recommendation scenario. Our proposed method consists of two stages: meta-augmentation and meta-learning. In the meta-augmentation stage, we first conduct domain adaptation by a dual conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) with a multi-view information bottleneck constraint, and then apply the learned CVAE to generate ratings for users in the target domain. In the meta-learning stage, we introduce both the true and generated ratings to construct ME tasks that enables the meta-learning recommendations to avoid meta-overfitting. Experiments evaluated in real-world datasets show the significant superiority of MetaCAR for coping with the cold-start user issue over competing baselines including cross-domain, content-aware, and meta-learning-based recommendations.

Cold-start issues have been more and more challenging for providing accurate recommendations with the fast increase of users and items. Most existing approaches attempt to solve the intractable problems via content-aware recommendations based on auxiliary information and/or cross-domain recommendations with transfer learning. Their performances are often constrained by the extremely sparse user-item interactions, unavailable side information, or very limited domain-shared users. Recently, meta-learners with meta-augmentation by adding noises to labels have been proven to be effective to avoid overfitting and shown good performance on new tasks. Motivated by the idea of meta-augmentation, in this paper, by treating a user's preference over items as a task, we propose a so-called Diverse Preference Augmentation framework with multiple source domains based on meta-learning (referred to as MetaDPA) to i) generate diverse ratings in a new domain of interest (known as target domain) to handle overfitting on the case of sparse interactions, and to ii) learn a preference model in the target domain via a meta-learning scheme to alleviate cold-start issues. Specifically, we first conduct multi-source domain adaptation by dual conditional variational autoencoders and impose a Multi-domain InfoMax (MDI) constraint on the latent representations to learn domain-shared and domain-specific preference properties. To avoid overfitting, we add a Mutually-Exclusive (ME) constraint on the output of decoders to generate diverse ratings given content data. Finally, these generated diverse ratings and the original ratings are introduced into the meta-training procedure to learn a preference meta-learner, which produces good generalization ability on cold-start recommendation tasks. Experiments on real-world datasets show our proposed MetaDPA clearly outperforms the current state-of-the-art baselines.

Nowadays, going out and participating in group activities is an indispensable part of human life, and group recommendation systems are needed to provide suggestions. In practice, group recommendation faces serious sparsity issues due to the lack of group-item interaction data, and the key challenge is to aggregate group member preference for group decision making. Conventional group recommendations applied a predefined strategy to aggregate the preferences of group members, which cannot model the group decision making process and do not address the data sparsity problem well. In this paper, we introduce knowledge graph into group recommendation as side information, and propose a novel end-to-end method named knowledge graph-based attentive group recommendation (KGAG) to solve the data sparsity and preference aggregation problems. Specifically, a graph convolution network (GCN) is employed to capture abundant structure information of items and users in knowledge graph to overcome the sparsity problem. Besides, to learn knowledge-aware group representation for inferring the group decision better, we capture the user-item connectivity and user-user connectivity in knowledge graph, and then adopt attention mechanism to learn the influence of each member according to user-user interaction in group and the candidate item, for member preference aggregation. Additionally, the attention mechanism can provide interpretability to group recommendation. Moreover, we extend the margin loss to our KGAG which forces the prediction score of positive item to be a distance larger than that of negative item. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed KGAG and verify the efficacy of each component of KGAG.

Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has been the core ingredient of modern models, triggering the surge of deep learning in super-resolution (SR). Despite the great success of these CNN-based methods which are prone to be deeper and heavier, it is impracticable to directly apply these methods for some low-budget devices due to the superfluous computational overhead. To alleviate this problem, a novel lightweight SR network named progressive feature fusion network (PFFN) is developed to seek for better balance between performance and running efficiency. Specifically, to fully exploit the feature maps, a novel progressive attention block (PAB) is proposed as the main building block of PFFN. The proposed PAB adopts several parallel but connected paths with pixel attention, which could significantly increase the receptive field of each layer, distill useful information and finally learn more discriminative feature representations. In PAB, a powerful dual attention module (DAM) is further incorporated to provide the channel and spatial attention mechanism in fairly lightweight manner. Besides, we construct a pretty concise and effective upsampling module with the help of multi-scale pixel attention, named MPAU. All of the above modules ensure the network can benefit from attention mechanism while still being lightweight enough. Furthermore, a novel training strategy following the cosine annealing learning scheme is proposed to maximize the representation ability of the model. Comprehensive experiments show that our PFFN achieves the best performance against all existing lightweight state-of-the-art SR methods with less number of parameters and even performs comparably to computationally expensive networks.

Smart devices without an interactive UI (e.g., a smart bulb) typically rely on specific provisioning schemes to connect to wireless networks. Among all the provisioning schemes, SmartCfg is a popular technology to configure the connection between smart devices and wireless routers. Although the SmartCfg technology facilitates the Wi-Fi configuration, existing solutions seldom take into serious consideration the protection of credentials and therefore introduce security threats against Wi-Fi credentials.

The paper expatiates on the progressing complete digitization process of university education resources along with the rapid development of E-Business. The process led to two aspects of immense influence: the first is the influence of CIO mechanism on the university management mechanism where full-time president assistant will be appointed CIO in order to plan informational development strategies and make corresponding manpower & financial support report for the decision-making tier; the second is the influence of E-Learning based on digitization study under the context of E-Business on traditional teaching in order that the teacher-centered teaching mode will be replaced by the new student-centered teaching mode.