Live streaming has been increasingly popular worldwide, with gift-giving emerging as a pivotal revenue stream for many streamers. While prior research has delved into the influence of streamers’ emotions and viewer-streamer interaction on viewers’ gift-giving behaviors, we suggest that peer viewers also play an essential role. In line with the principles of social influence and herding theory, the behaviors of peer viewers and the size of the viewing group are integral factors shaping individual behaviors. Hence, in the context of lives streaming, we focus on examining the impact of peer viewers’ gift-giving behaviors and the audience size on the gift-giving behaviors of individual viewers, respectively. Additionally, we examine the moderating role of viewers’ identities. We collected data from a popular live streaming platform in China and employed a panel regression model based on a sample of 651,678 viewers. This study contributes to the gift-giving literature by revealing the influence of peer viewers on focal viewers’ likelihood of gifting, gifting frequency and gifting value, and the moderating effect of viewers’ identities. Overall, these results have significant implications for both the theoretical understanding of social influence and herding in online setting, as well as the practical implications for future live streaming management. Future research could delve deeper into understanding the impact of various types of live streaming content and cultural differences on individual’s gift-giving behavior.

Large-scale deployed cameras in the automated container terminal (ACT) area helps on-site staff better identify unexpected yet emergency events by monitoring port personnel trajectories. Rainy weather isacommon yet typical problem which may significantly deteriorate trajectory extraction performance. To tackle the problem, the study proposes an ensemble framework to extract personnel trajectory from port-like surveillance videos under varied rainy weather scenarios. Firstly, the proposed framework learns fine-grained personnel features with the help of the object query and transformer encoder-decoder module from the input port-like image sequences, and thus obtains port personnel locations from the input low-visibility images. Secondly, the personnel positions are further associated in a frame-by-frame manner with the help of neighboring kinematic movement information and feature information. Finally, a memory mechanism is introduced in the proposed framework to suppress personnel trajectory discontinuity outlier. In that manner, we can obtain accurate yet consistent personnel trajectories, and each person is assigned with a unique ID. We verified the proposed model performance on three port-like rainy videos involving with interferences of rain, rain streak and fog. Experimental results show that the proposed port personnel trajectory extraction framework can obtain satisfied performance considering that the average multi-target accuracy (MOTA), the average value of judging the same target (${\mathbf{IDF}}_{\mathbf{1}}$), average recall rate (IDR) and average precision (IDP) were larger than 92%.

The finite inverted beta mixture model (IBMM) has been proven to be efficient in modeling positive vectors. Under the traditional variational inference framework, the critical challenge in Bayesian estimation of the IBMM is that the computational cost of performing inference with large datasets is prohibitively expensive, which often limits the use of Bayesian approaches to small datasets. An efficient alternative provided by the recently proposed stochastic variational inference (SVI) framework allows for efficient inference on large datasets. Nevertheless, when using the SVI framework to address the non-Gaussian statistical models, the evidence lower bound (ELBO) cannot be explicitly calculated due to the intractable moment computation. Therefore, the algorithm under the SVI framework cannot directly use stochastic optimization to optimize the ELBO, and an analytically tractable solution cannot be derived. To address this problem, we propose an extended version of the SVI framework with more flexibility, namely, the extended SVI (ESVI) framework. This framework can be used in many non-Gaussian statistical models. First, some approximation strategies are applied to further lower the ELBO to avoid intractable moment calculations. Then, stochastic optimization with noisy natural gradients is used to optimize the lower bound. The excellent performance and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified in real data evaluation.

With the rapid development of the internet worldwide, network security issues are becoming increasingly prominent. Network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) play a vital role in ensuring computer network security due to their ability to identify potential network threats. Despite considerable research efforts, deploying NIDSs on resource-constrained devices has been challenging. To reduce the imposed computational cost and model storage requirements, in this paper, we propose a novel lightweight NIDS model. In this model, patterns of normal and malicious actions are learned via a finite Dirichlet mixture model (DMM) in the context of the extended stochastic variational inference (ESVI) framework. With the proposed method, both the parameter estimation and model selection processes can be simultaneously addressed in a unified Bayesian framework. A great number of experiments conducted on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed model not only achieves comparable classification performance to that of detection models based on several well-studied finite mixture modeling, traditional machine learning (ML) and promising deep learning (DL) algorithms but also significantly reduces the required training and detection time. Extensive experimental results validate that the proposed model is a feasible and efficient lightweight intrusion detection model.

Bayesian estimation of parameters in the Dirichlet mixture process of the Beta-Liouville distribution (i.e., the infinite Beta-Liouville mixture model) has recently gained considerable attention due to its modeling capability for proportional data. However, applying the conventional variational inference (VI) framework cannot derive an analytically tractable solution since the variational objective function cannot be explicitly calculated. In this paper, we adopt the recently proposed extended VI framework to derive the closed-form solution by further lower bounding the original variational objective function in the VI framework. This method is capable of simultaneously determining the model's complexity and estimating the model's parameters. Moreover, due to the nature of Bayesian nonparametric approaches, it can also avoid the problems of underfitting and overfitting. Extensive experiments were conducted on both synthetic and real data, generated from two real-world challenging applications, namely, object detection and text categorization, and its superior performance and effectiveness of the proposed method have been demonstrated.

Applications of deep learning to electronic design automation (EDA) have recently begun to emerge, although they have mainly been limited to processing of regular structured data such as images. However, many EDA problems require processing irregular structures, and it can be non-trivial to manually extract important features in such cases. In this paper, a high performance graph convolutional network (GCN) model is proposed for the purpose of processing irregular graph representations of logic circuits. A GCN classifier is firstly trained to predict observation point candidates in a netlist. The GCN classifier is then used as part of an iterative process to propose observation point insertion based on the classification results. Experimental results show the proposed GCN model has superior accuracy to classical machine learning models on difficult-to-observation nodes prediction. Compared with commercial testability analysis tools, the proposed observation point insertion flow achieves similar fault coverage with an 11% reduction in observation points and a 6% reduction in test pattern count.

R-tree is an important spatial data structure used in EDA as well as other fields. Although there has been a huge literature of parallel R-tree query, as far as we know, our work is the first successful one to parallelize R-tree query on the GPU. We also propose the first R-tree construction method on the GPU. Unlike the other parallel construction methods, our method does not depend on a partition algorithm and guarantees the same quality as the sequential construction. Experiments show that more than 30× speedup on R-tree query and more than 20× speedup on R-tree construction are achieved.

Simultaneous escape routing on dense circuit boards is a very challenging task and a great amount of manual effort is still needed in order to achieve high routability. In this paper, we present a new simultaneous escape routing algorithm which is based upon a novel boundary routing approach. Our algorithm can solve complicated escape problems in a very short time. For a set of industrial escape problems, our algorithm successfully solved all of them while Cadence Allegro PCB router was only able to complete the routing of half of the problems. In addition, we propose a clustering strategy targeting at large escape routing problems. Experimental results show that this clustering strategy can significantly cut down the runtime of our router when solving large problems.

Breadth-first search (BFS) has wide applications in electronic design automation (EDA) as well as in other fields. Researchers have tried to accelerate BFS on the GPU, but the two published works are both asymptotically slower than the fastest CPU implementation. In this paper, we present a new GPU implementation of BFS that uses a hierarchical queue management technique and a three-layer kernel arrangement strategy. It guarantees the same computational complexity as the fastest sequential version and can achieve up to 10 times speedup.

Simultaneous escape routing on dense circuit boards is a very challenging task and great amount of manual effort is still needed in order to achieve high routability. In this paper, we present a new simultaneous escape routing algorithm which is based upon a novel boundary routing approach. Our algorithm can solve complicated escape problems in very short time. For a set of industrial escape problems, our algorithm successfully solved all of them while Cadence Allegro PCB router was only able to complete the routing of half of the problems.

Routing for high-speed boards is largely a time-consuming manual task today. The ordered escape routing problem is one of the key problems in board-level routing, and Boolean satisfiability (SAT) based approach [1] is the only solution to this problem so far. In this paper, we first solve the major deficiency of the original SAT formulation so that the escape problem is completely resolved. Then we propose two techniques to extend SAT approach for large-scale problems. Experimental results on industrial benchmarks show that our methods perform well in terms of both speed and routability.

Routing for high-speed boards is largely a time-consuming manual task today. In this work we consider the ordered escape routing problem which is a key problem in board-level routing. All existing approaches to this problem cannot guarantee to find a routing solution even if one exists. We present an algorithm to exactly solve this problem based on Boolean satisfiability. Experimental results on escape routing problems from industry show that our algorithm performs well.

Increasing buffer number for future technology makes traditional one-pass-flow (timing driven placement is followed by buffer insertion and legalization) failed, since accommodation for buffers significantly disturbs original design. This paper exploits the delicate relationship between buffer insertion and timing driven placement, and proposes a novel method to incorporate buffer insertion during timing driven placement. Experimental results show that this incorporation not only ensures design convergence, but also benefits timing behavior and alleviates buffer explosion