Semi-supervised semantic segmentation has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years. However, existing algorithms are based on convolutional neural networks, and directly applying them to Vision Transformers poses certain limitations due to conceptual disparities. To this end, we propose TokenSwap, a data augmentation technique designed explicitly for semi-supervised semantic segmentation with Vision Transformers. TokenSwap aligns well with the global attention mechanism by mixing images at the token level, enhancing the learning capability for contextual information among image patches and the utilization of unlabeled data. We further incorporate image augmentation and feature augmentation to promote the diversity of augmentation. Moreover, to enhance consistency regularization, we propose a dual-branch framework where each branch applies image and feature augmentation to the input image. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets, including Pascal VOC 2012, Cityscapes, and COCO. Results suggest that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms with notably observed accuracy improvement, especially under limited fine annotations.

The multicloud environments (MCE) represent a novel paradigm encompassing multiple infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, enabling users to tailor and optimize cloud services according to their specific requirements. This approach effectively addresses the limitations of a single cloud environment (SCE) regarding technical constraints, geographical coverage deficiencies, and cost-effectiveness concerns while catering to the increasingly diverse and expanding user demands. In MCE, users must employ appropriate strategies to efficiently allocate diverse tasks across multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) by leveraging the best available resources. Traditional scheduling algorithms are inadequate for addressing the complexities of such MCE. This study introduces a framework for the task scheduling procedure in MCE, treating independent task scheduling as a Markov decision process (MDP). We propose a novel agent environment framework that is designed based on the distinctive characteristics of MCE and enables independent task scheduling. Furthermore, we propose a task scheduling algorithm for MCE based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to optimize cost and makespan according to diverse user requirements. The simulation experiments are conducted using both simulated datasets and real-world datasets, demonstrating that our proposed algorithm surpasses the other five algorithms in terms of cost minimization and makespan optimization.

The encoder-decoder architecture is a prevailing paradigm for semantic segmentation. It has been discovered that aggregation of multi-stage encoder features plays a significant role in capturing discriminative pixel representation. In this work, we rethink feature reconstruction for scale alignment of multi-stage pyramidal features and treat it as a Query Update (Q-UP) task. Pixel-wise affinity scores are calculated between the high-resolution query map and low-resolution feature map to dynamically broadcast low-resolution pixel features to match a higher resolution. Unlike prior works (e.g. bilinear interpolation) that only exploit sub-pixel neighborhoods, Q-UP samples contextual information within a global receptive field via a data-dependent manner. To alleviate intra-category feature variance, we substitute source pixel features for feature reconstruction with their corresponding category prototype that is assessed by averaging all pixel features belonging to that category. Besides, a memory module is proposed to explore the capacity of category prototypes at the dataset level. We refer to the method as Category Prototype Transformer (CPT). We conduct extensive experiments on popular benchmarks. Integrating CPT into a feature pyramid structure exhibits superior performance for semantic segmentation even with low-resolution feature maps, e.g. 1/32 of the input size, significantly reducing computational complexity. Specifically, the proposed method obtains a compelling 55.5% mIoU with greatly reduced model parameters and computations on the challenging ADE20K dataset.

Anomaly detection has become a key focus in maintaining the stability and reliability of the cloud environment. Although with excellent feature extraction ability, deep learning-based anomaly detection methods entail a time-consuming training process. Broad learning system (BLS) provides an alternative supervised way for efficient training. However, due to the imbalance of the collected cloud computing data in which anomaly accounts for a low proportion, sufficient feature extraction from anomaly behaviors with BLS becomes a challenge. Moreover, the input generation of BLS only considers the independence of data, and the generalization of BLS in the correlation modeling of cloud computing data is limited. To tackle the above issues, we introduce an effective anomaly detector, CatBRS, an improved BLS with rebalance operations. Initially, we employ a hybrid resampling method of SMOTE-Tomek to mitigate data imbalance, retain non-synthetic samples for training, and involve synthetic samples in the input generation later. Subsequently, we extend BLS by refining the process of input generation. This enhanced system employs a simple recurrent architecture to model temporal dynamics. Additionally, it integrates an autoencoder-based model with metric learning to obtain category-constrained discriminant features. The improvement in BLS facilitates more comprehensive feature extraction. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of CatBRS on four benchmark datasets. CatBRS shows improvements of up to 3.81% in AUC and 6.09% in F1 compared to suboptimal baseline methods with a low training cost.

Recently, scene text detection has received significant attention due to its wide application. However, accurate detection in complex scenes of multiple scales, orientations, and curvature remains a challenge. Numerous detection methods adopt the Vatti clipping (VC) algorithm for multiple-instance training to address the issue of arbitrary-shaped text. Yet we identify several bias results from these approaches called the "shrinked kernel". Specifically, it refers to a decrease in accuracy resulting from an output that overly favors the text kernel. In this paper, we propose a new approach named Expand Kernel Network (EK-Net) with expand kernel distance to compensate for the previous deficiency, which includes three-stages regression to complete instance detection. Moreover, EK-Net not only realize the precise positioning of arbitrary-shaped text, but also achieve a trade-off between performance and speed. Evaluation results demonstrate that EK-Net achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance compared to other advanced methods, e.g., F-measure of 85.72% at 35.42 FPS on ICDAR 2015, F-measure of 85.75% at 40.13 FPS on CTW1500.

Recently, the multi-cloud environment (MCE) has increasingly become the preferred choice of users. As with the cloud environment, efficient workflow scheduling in a MCE remains crucial for identifying the cost efficiency and overall performance of the MCE. In MCE, the resources exhibit heterogeneity, complexity, and dynamism. Simultaneously, the intricate inter-task dependencies among workflow tasks, diverse Quality of Service (QoS) metrics for users, and multiple cloud service providers’ (CSPs) billing mechanisms significantly amplify the workflow scheduling challenge. Motivated by the application of reinforcement learning (RL) in workflow scheduling in a cloud environment, this paper proposes a scheduling algorithm that takes advantage of the asynchronous advantage actor–critic algorithm (A3C) to balance cost, makespan and resource utilization in workflow scheduling in a MCE. By analyzing the elements in the MCE, we design and define multiple agents in the MCE, and each cloud service provider will have an agent to record the state and update the local parameters. For the workflow task submitted by the user, the action is selected according to the initialization policy and submitted to the scheduling action to allocate the task to a designated virtual machine in the MCE so that each agent can more clearly perceive the environment change and adapt to the MCE. In contrast to the traditional A3C algorithm, we design a new critic network according to the data characteristics of real-world scientific workflows so that each agent is more suitable for real-world scientific workflow data. Through multiple sets of simulation experiments, the workflow scheduling algorithm based on the A3C algorithm in the MCE (MCWS-A3C) was compared with three benchmark methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method has better advantages than other methods in terms of cost, makespan, and resource utilization . Specifically, on the Montage_100 dataset, the average cost was reduced by 55.12% compared to other methods. The pioneering introduction of the A3C algorithm that adapts to the dynamic environment into the MCE brings more possibilities to address the issue of workflow scheduling in the MCE.

The anomaly detection techniques for cloud service focus on alerting the operation engineers about the anomalous running state. However, their shortcoming of anomaly interpretability is an obstacle to understanding and further removing the anomalies. To overcome the abovementioned challenge, we propose a tree-like attention-based detection framework CauseFormer that provides both the metric and sample interpretations. Firstly, we develop stepwise attention based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which imitates the rule-based tree formation process. This network block extracts the higher-order features and generates the metric contribution that can be regarded as metric interpretation. Meanwhile, we design the hyper-circle loss function rather than cross-entropy-based approaches to optimize the representation. Then we introduce the majority voting rule into the classifier. This neighbor classification criterion raises the alarms of anomalies and achieves the sample interpretation. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments in four datasets collected from cloud application cases. The experimental results reveal the superiority of CauseFormer in improving detection accuracy and embodying practical interpretability.

Anomaly detection is indispensable for achieving higher availability and reliability in the cloud computing. The traditional autoencoder-based method only models the historical normal samples and then identifies the current online anomaly samples by the fixed threshold of anomaly score. Although more advances have been made in recent years, two main challenges remain: (i) ignoring the historical anomaly samples, (ii) poor self-adaptive ability for online detection. To address the above challenges, we propose a unified detector, namely BroadCAE, which integrates autoencoder with contrastive learning and broad network. Specifically, the reconstruction loss is first replaced by contrastive loss, which equally formulates both normal and anomaly samples. These samples belonging to the same class become closer in a lower-dimensional space. Conversely, different classes of samples are far away from each other. Next, we apply the anomaly-score-based pseudo thresholds to train the dynamic threshold selection, which generates the threshold according to the coming sample. The broad network in dynamic threshold selection takes the place of the deep network, which overcomes catastrophic forgetting and adapts to new online samples. Finally, validation experiments are conducted on four benchmark datasets. Our BroadCAE outperforms the comparative baseline methods by averaging over 4% of the f1-score.

Vision transformers have achieved leading performance on various visual tasks yet still suffer from high computational complexity. The situation deteriorates in dense prediction tasks like semantic segmentation, as high-resolution inputs and outputs usually imply more tokens involved in computations. Directly removing the less attentive tokens has been discussed for the image classification task but can not be extended to semantic segmentation since a dense prediction is required for every patch. To this end, this work introduces a Dynamic Token Pruning (DToP) method based on the early exit of tokens for semantic segmentation. Motivated by the coarse-to-fine segmentation process by humans, we naturally split the widely adopted auxiliary-loss-based network architecture into several stages, where each auxiliary block grades every token’s difficulty level. We can finalize the prediction of easy tokens in advance without completing the entire forward pass. Moreover, we keep k highest confidence tokens for each semantic category to uphold the representative context information. Thus, computational complexity will change with the difficulty of the input, akin to the way humans do segmentation. Experiments suggest that the proposed DToP architecture reduces on average 20% ∼ 35% of computational cost for current semantic segmentation methods based on plain vision transformers without accuracy degradation. The code is available through the following link: https://github.com/zbwxp/Dynamic-Token-Pruning.

Text classification is playing an increasingly important role in natural language processing (NLP). Most research adopts deep structure neural networks to achieve text classification tasks. However, deep structure networks often suffer from time-consuming trainning process and hardware dependence. In this paper, a flat network called broad learning system (BLS) is employed to derive a novel learning method — node slicing broad learning system (NSBLS). Firstly, one-to-one correspondence between the words and the feature node groups is established to obtain a feature layer with rich words, on the basic of which the enhancement layer is generated representing the global information. Then we activate some nodes in the feature node groups, compact them with the enhancement layer and use ridge regression to obtain multiple outputs. Finally, an intergration BLS layer is used to correct and combine the multiple outputs to get the final output. The experiment shows that NSBLS has good performance on several datasets.

Current scene segmentation methods suffer from cumbersome model structures and high computational complexity, impeding their applications to real-world scenarios that require real-time processing. This paper proposes a novel Efficient Pyramid Representation Network (EPRNet), which strikes an innovative record on segmentation accuracy, model lightness and inference efficiency. Unlike existing methods delivering transfer learning based on pixel features of limited receptive fields encoded by shallow image classification backbones, EPRNet distributes multi-scale representations throughout the feature encoding flow to quickly enlarge and enrich receptive fields. Specifically, we introduce an extremely lightweight and efficient Multi-scale Processing Unit (MPU) that encodes multi-scale features through parallel convolutions of different kernels. By combining MPU and residual learning, we propose a core Pyramid Representation Module (PRM) to correctly acquire and aggregate region-based contexts in both shallow and deep layers. In this way, EPRNet can encode discriminative and comprehensive representations of multi-scale objects with a compact structure. We conduct extensive experiments on Cityscapes and CamVid datasets, demonstrating the superiority. Without any extra and coarse labeled data, EPRNet obtains mIoU 73.9% on the Cityscapes test set with only 0.9 million parameters at a speed of 42 FPS.

At present, city logistics mostly adopts a two-echelon dispatching model which combines distribution centers located in suburbs and fixed satellites located in urban areas for distribution. However, both expensive rental fees and daily changes of customer demand in metropolitan areas make dispatching route generated by fixed satellites inefficient. Moreover, the existing mobile depot model needs a large investment for facilities. In this paper, we propose a two-echelon city dispatching model with mobile satellites (2ECD-MS) which locations of mobile satellites change according to demands of customers to ensure the efficiency of delivery routes in every day. A cluster-based variable neighborhood search scheduling algorithm is proposed to determine locations of mobile satellites and dispatching routes of trucks and tricycles. Then, the 2ECD-MS is extended to 2ECD-MS-TDD to allow trucks dispatching directly (TDD) for further cost reduction. Experimental results show that the 2ECD-MS significantly reduces the total cost against the model using fixed satellites mode by 3.5% while the 2ECD-MS-TDD further reduces the total cost against the 2ECD-MS significantly by 3.25% in 54 cases with different customer scales, geographical scopes, and distribution types. These show the superiority of the proposed methods in cost reduction for city logistics in comparison to the traditional fixed model.

Recently, a two-echelon city dispatching model with mobile satellites (2ECD-MS) has been proposed to reduce costs effectively. However, in addition to costs, speeds of delivery to customers are increasingly demanding in urban dispatching. This work extends 2ECD-MS to 2ECD-MS-CS by adopting the crowd-shipping model in the second-echelon dispatching, which uses occasional drivers of private vehicles to deliver parcels to improve the delivery speed. Furthermore, existing works generally consider the optimization from a single aspect, e.g., the delivery company. However, the sustainable development of a logistics company must also focus on other subjects in logistics activities, such as customers and delivery employees. So, we define a multi-objective model considering company cost, customer satisfaction, and income satisfaction of crowd-shippers simultaneously. The multi-objective optimization problem of 2ECD-MS-CS is solved by a multi-directional evolutionary algorithm (MDEA). In MDEA, multiple neighborhood operators are designed and combined with the multi-directional search strategy to fully explore the Pareto Front. Finally, we generate 40 new 2ECD-MS-CS instances based on existing common vehicle routing datasets. Experimental results show that 2ECD-MS-CS reduces the average cost by 3.4% and improves the delivery speed by 42% against 2ECD-MS in 40 instances with different customer scales, numbers of mobile satellites, and geographic scopes. The proposed MDEA outperforms several popular multi-objective optimization algorithms in both convergence and diversity. These illustrate the advantages of 2ECD-MS-CS especially in terms of delivery speed and the effectiveness of the proposed MDEA.

Semantic segmentation plays a critical role in scene understanding for self-driving vehicles. A line of efforts has proven that global context matters in urban scene segmentation due to massive scale changes. However, we find that existing methods suffer from local ambiguities when dissipating continuous local context, i.e. scrambling to a huge receptive field of global cues by coarse pooling. To this end, this paper proposes a new Context Aggregation Module (CAM) that consists of two primary components: context encoding using no coarse pooling but encoder-decoders with appropriate sampling scales and gated fusion that extends gate attention mechanism to balance different-scale context during feature fusion. Weeding out coarse pooling and applying the encoder-decoder inherits the merits of exploring global context while avoiding the drawback of losing local contextual continuity. We then construct a Context Aggregation Network (CANet) and conduct extensive evaluations on challenging autonomous driving benchmarks of Cityscapes, CamVid and BDD100K. Consistently improved results evidence the effectiveness. Notably, we attain competitive mIoU 82.7% on Cityscapes and optimal mIoU 80.5% on CamVid.

Nowadays, cloud co-location is often used for data centers to improve the utilization of computing resources. However, batch jobs in a Co-location Datacenter (CLD) are vulnerable to failures due to the competition for limited resources with online service jobs. Such failed batch jobs would be rescheduled and failed repeatedly, resulting in the waste of computing resources and instability of the computing clusters. Therefore, we propose a method to accurately predict the potential failures of batch jobs for CLD. The core of the proposed method is STLF (SMOTE Tomek and LightGBM [5] Framework), which is divided into three parts. First, we use the co-feature extraction method to generate Co-located Feature Dataset (CLFD). Then SMOTE Tomek is used to oversampling the CLFD to ensure that the classifier can learn more minority features. Finally, we use LightGBM classifier to predict batch jobs' failure. The performance experiments conducted on the Ali Trace 2018 dataset show that our proposed STLF significantly outperforms the existing popular classifiers in terms of the ROC curve, the area under the ROC curve (AUC), precision, and recall.

In Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments, the user virtual machine is the user’s private property. However, in the case of privacy protection, how to ensure the security of files in the user virtual machine and the user virtual machine’s behavior does not affect other virtual machines; it is a major challenge. This paper presents a trusted measurement model based on dynamic policy and privacy protection in IaaS security domain, called TMMDP. The model first proposed a measure architecture, where it defines the trusted measurement of the user virtual machine into the trust of files in the virtual machine and trusted network behavior. The trusted measure was detected through the front-end and back-end modules. It then describes in detail the process of the trusted measurement in the two modules. Because the front-end module is in the guest virtual machine, it also describes the protocol to ensure the integrity of the module. Finally, the model proved to address security challenges of the user virtual machine in IaaS environments by a security analysis.

Interoperability between heterogeneous objects of Internet of Things (IoT) and massive data generated in the course of processing bring enormous challenges to application development of Internet of Things. To accommodate changeful application requirements of Internet of Things, a cloud-based development platform for services and bundles is proposed. On the basis of the analysis of cloud-based development, web services and Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) bundles, the design principles and architecture of our platform are specified. After key designs are introduced, our prototype implementation and its evaluation are presented. Our targeted prototype provides a collaborative platform and highly available storage in cloud, both of which are proved to be feasible.

Semantic similarity between ontological concepts plays an important role in service discovery and composition. In this paper, using the ontological relation, a novel intuitionistic fuzzy set model is proposed to interpret concepts on the ontology with three intuitionistic fuzzy sets of different weights, and an effective similarity measure of which is selected to calculate the concept similarity. The model successfully translates all the semantic information of a concept into mathematical expressions of intuitionistic fuzzy sets, thus concept similarity is easily calculated. It is designed to handle not only simple ontologies where only atomic concepts are presented, but also complex ones where concepts could inherit from multiple concepts and have semantic relations other than is-a with other concepts. The experimental result has shown that the model is effective, and it's easy to implement.

Embedded browser is an important component to support Ubiquitous Computing in Information Appliances. How to develop an uCLinux-based embedded browser remains to be a big challenge and quite demanding. This paper uses Konqueror/embedded as a prototype. Based on the interactivity between the bottom network connection layers, it proposes a theory to turn the multi-process mechanism into multi-threads one and implements successfully on uCLinux, which provides us a methodology of how to transplant a concurrent system from normal Linux to uCLinux.

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), a technology existing for years, has potential uses in a variety of applications. Though not without issues and challenges, RFID is a promising technology which analysts expect to become ubiquitous in the coming years, helping organizations solve problems in supply chain management, security, personal identification, and asset tracking. The purpose of this paper is to applying RFID technology in production control in a discrete manufacturing system, which needs control the production process in real time in order to improve the management level of production efficiency and quality. In particular, we build a RAMS (RFID Activity Monitor System), for sanitary ware manufacturing, which is connected to the existing ERP System by database so as to satisfy real time control requirement.