Truth discovery is an effective tool for discovering the truth from a multitude of data points of varying quality, which inherently involves privacy concerns. While existing studies have predominantly focused on protecting workers’ submitted sensing data using local differential privacy (LDP), they overlook a crucial aspect of real-world scenarios: workers are likely to provide more accurate data for tasks they perceive as important, resulting in submissions that more closely approximate the truth for these tasks. Moreover, the prevalent use of the Laplace mechanism for noise addition, due to the inherent randomness and unboundedness of the Laplace distribution, might lead to excessive noise, potentially compromising the accuracy of truth discovery and yielding a noisy approximation of the truth. To address these limitations, we propose a Gaussian distribution-based truth discOvery approach under Local Differential privacy (GOLD). The algorithm’s core innovation lies in its comprehensive utilization of Gaussian distribution for both task importance and worker quality after adding Laplacian noise. Workers first apply Laplacian noise to their data locally, after which the problem is formalized as a constraint optimization task, deriving an iterative equation for the noisy truth. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the GOLD algorithm rigorously adheres to local differential privacy requirements while achieving high truth accuracy and low time complexity. Empirical validation on two real datasets reveals that, compared to state-of-the-art algorithms, the GOLD algorithm improves the truth accuracy by at least 20%.

Task allocation, a core component of mobile crowd-sensing systems, facilitates the collection, analysis, and sharing of diverse data. While existing studies often employ planar Laplacian (PL) distribution to achieve Geo-indistinguishability (Geo-I) for worker location protection, the randomness and boundlessness of PL distribution, coupled with greedy allocation strategies, often lead to excessive noise and incomplete task assignments. Moreover, these approaches typically overlook the equilibrium between worker and server benefits. To address these challenges under Geo-I, we present the Kitty approach, which adopts Q-learning to achieve superior task allocation after formalizing a constrained optimization problem that maximizes profits for both parties. Kitty operates through three key mechanisms: 1) formalizing a constrained optimization problem based on a comprehensive analysis of both parties’ profits and a pre-defined equilibrium parameter, 2) implementing adaptive adjustment of the Q-learning greedy parameter to balance exploration and exploitation, and 3) designing two conflict resolution strategies to mitigate potential distance conflicts after location perturbation. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that Kitty outperforms the state-of-the-art by at least 15% in average travel distance reduction and 1% in task completion rate improvement.

Abstract Traditional knowledge distillation relies on high‐capacity teacher models to supervise the training of compact student networks. To avoid the computational resource costs associated with pretraining high‐capacity teacher models, teacher‐free online knowledge distillation methods have achieved satisfactory performance. Among these methods, feature fusion methods have effectively alleviated the limitations of training without the strong guidance of a powerful teacher model. However, existing feature fusion methods often focus primarily on end‐layer features, overlooking the efficient utilization of holistic knowledge loops and high‐level information within the network. In this article, we propose a new feature fusion‐based mutual learning method called Diversify Feature Enhancement and Fusion for Online Knowledge Distillation (DFEF). First, we enhance advanced semantic information by mapping multiple end‐of‐network features to obtain richer feature representations. Next, we design a self‐distillation module to strengthen knowledge interactions between the deep and shallow network layers. Additionally, we employ attention mechanisms to provide deeper and more diversified enhancements to the input feature maps of the self‐distillation module, allowing the entire network architecture to acquire a broader range of knowledge. Finally, we employ feature fusion to merge the enhanced features and generate a high‐performance virtual teacher to guide the training of the student model. Extensive evaluations on the CIFAR‐10, CIFAR‐100, and CINIC‐10 datasets demonstrate that our proposed method can significantly enhance performance compared to state‐of‐the‐art feature fusion‐based online knowledge distillation methods. Our code can be found at https://github.com/JSJ515-Group/DFEF-Liu .

Abstract Monocular depth estimation (MDE) has made great progress with the development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, these approaches suffer from essential shortsightedness due to the utilization of insufficient feature-based reasoning. To this end, we propose an effective parallel CNNs and Transformer model for MDE via dual attention (PCTDepth). Specifically, we use two stream backbones to extract features, where ResNet and Swin Transformer are utilized to obtain local detail features and global long-range dependencies, respectively. Furthermore, a hierarchical fusion module (HFM) is designed to actively exchange beneficial information for the complementation of each representation during the intermediate fusion. Finally, a dual attention module is incorporated for each fused feature in the decoder stage to improve the accuracy of the model by enhancing inter-channel correlations and focusing on relevant spatial locations. Comprehensive experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that the proposed model consistently outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods.

Cloud providers host various services for tenants’ requests (e.g., software-as-a-service) and seek to serve as many requests as possible for revenue maximization. Considering a large number of requests, the previous works on fine-grained request scheduling may lead to poor system scalability (or high schedule overhead) and break tenant isolation. In this article, we design a tenant-grained request scheduling framework to conquer the above two disadvantages. We formulate the tenant-grained request scheduling problem as an integer linear programming and prove its NP-hardness. We consider two complementary cases: the offline case (where we know all request demands in advance), and the online case (where we have to make immediate scheduling decisions for requests arriving online). A normalization-based algorithm with an approximation factor of$ {O}(1)$is proposed to solve the offline problem and a primal-dual-based algorithm with a competitive ratio of$[(1-\epsilon), {O}(\log 3\cdot n+\log (1/\epsilon))]$is designed for the online scenario, where$\epsilon \in (0,1)$and$n$is the number of racks in the cloud. We also discuss how to integrate our proposed algorithms with the previous (fine-grained) request scheduling mechanism. Extensive simulation and experiment results show that our algorithms can obtain significant performance gains, e.g., the online algorithm reduces the scheduler's overhead more than$90\%$and achieves tenant isolation, while obtaining similar network performance (e.g., throughput) compared with the fine-grained request scheduling methods.

Deep neural network approaches have made remarkable progress in many machine learning tasks. However, the latest research indicates that they are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. An adversary can easily mislead the network models by adding well-designed perturbations to the input. The cause of the adversarial examples is unclear. Therefore, it is challenging to build a defense mechanism. In this paper, we propose an image-to-image translation model to defend against adversarial examples. The proposed model is based on a conditional generative adversarial network, which consists of a generator and a discriminator. The generator is used to eliminate adversarial perturbations in the input. The discriminator is used to distinguish generated data from original clean data to improve the training process. In other words, our approach can map the adversarial images to the clean images, which are then fed to the target deep learning model. The defense mechanism is independent of the target model, and the structure of the framework is universal. A series of experiments conducted on MNIST and CIFAR10 show that the proposed method can defend against multiple types of attacks while maintaining good performance.

In the cloud environment, it brings better reliability and robustness with geographically distributed datacenters. As the growth of large-scale applications in geo-distributed cloud systems, the resource demand from different areas increases violently, and researchers pay more attention to meet as many cloud users' VM demands as possible by using limited cloud resources. However, there exist many issues for cloud users in existing works, such as the VM demands being refused and high response latency. In this paper, we present a cloud system model for the cloud provider to dynamically expand the scale of geo-distributed date centers. In our model, the cloud provider rents hardware resources from other resource owners (ROs), who have redundant resources and are willing to lease them. Since the ROs possess vast resources and spread all over the global, our system model can deploy more cloud users' VMs and effectively reduce the bandwidth cost. We propose an optimization problem for the cloud provider to maximize the profit, and carefully solve it in different conditions. Our simulation results show that our system model and algorithms can effectively improve the user satisfaction and the total revenue and reduce the average latency of users' requests.