The goal of this work is to adapt Segment Anything Models (SAM) into crack segmentation tasks via automatic label generation, thus eliminating manual annotation cost. In this regard, an intuitive approach is to extract edges of crack samples and generate labels via the dilation and erosion processes for fine-tuning SAM. However, this simple solution cannot guarantee the quality of generated labels, as crack regions will be corrupted due to the imperfect edge detection. To this end, this paper proposes CoGenSAM, a novel Codebook-interactive Generative Labeling framework that enables an annotation-free SAM fine-tuning. To achieve this, in the first stage, we pre-train a vector-quantized variational auto-encoder (VQVAE) by reconstructing the synthesized crack-like structures for learning crack-aware priors within the codebook. In the second stage, these priors help another VQVAE serve as the restoration model to restore the randomly corrupted structures into uncorrupted ones. Specifically, we propose the crack-aware contrastive-interaction to maximize the mutual information with the above priors via codebook interaction. Then, high-quality labels can be generated by restoring corrupted labels from edge detection, contributing to an annotation-free SAM fine-tuning. We collect a new dataset, Bridge2025, to address the limited availability of related bridge-oriented benchmarks. Experiments show that our performance is close to fully-supervised methods.

In recent years, a number of dynamic multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (DMOEAs) have been proposed for tackling dynamic multiobjective optimization problems (DMOPs). Most of DMOEAs adopt learning methods to extract search experiences from past environments, trying to predict a promising initial population in new environments. However, they often ignore the use of search experiences to guide the evolutionary trajectory in new environments, which is also important to accelerate their convergence. Thus, this paper proposes a historical search-guided evolutionary (HSGE) framework for tackling DMOPs, which designs a neural network-based pattern learning (NNPL) strategy and a historical direction-guided evolutionary (HDGE) strategy. First, the NNPL strategy trains a neural network to effectively extract search experiences from historical environments. Then, based on these search experiences, the HDGE strategy is designed to steer the evolutionary direction of population, aiming to speed up its convergence in new environments. After embedding four dynamic response mechanisms into the HSGE framework, the corresponding DMOEAs have shown superior performance over the original DMOEAs on most test DMOPs. Moreover, the experimental results also validate the advantages of HSGE over two state-of-the-art optimization frameworks for tackling DMOPs.

The Internet of Everything (IoE) is accelerating the demand for intelligent, low-latency, and highly reliable communication systems to support automation and real-time decision-making. In dense urban and industrial environments, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly utilized to extend network coverage, improve connectivity, and enable dynamic data collection. However, managing RIS-assisted UAV-enabled IoE networks poses significant challenges, including accurate signal prediction, high computational complexity, and decentralized task assignment. To address these issues, we propose a novel RIS-empowered UAV-based Dynamic Area of Coverage (DAC) architecture. In this framework, UAVs equipped with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) adaptively adjust the phase of reflected signals to optimize wireless channel conditions, suppress interference, and enhance signal quality.We formulate the Dynamic Area of Coverage with Location, Resource Allocation, and Trajectory Optimization (DAC-LRT) problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model, aiming to jointly optimize UAV positioning, power distribution, and trajectory control to maximize real-time downlink capacity and ensure energy efficiency. To solve the DAC-LRT problem in dynamic and large-scale IoE environments, we design a Multi-Agent Distributed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MAD3PG) algorithm. MAD3PG enables decentralized and adaptive policy learning by allowing UAVs to derive optimal actions directly from environmental observations. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving improvements of 82.92%, 78.02%, and 71.9% in downlink capacity, coverage ratio, average throughput, and spectral efficiency over Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C), and Greedy algorithms, respectively.

The partial domain adaptation (PDA) challenge is a prevalent issue in industrial fault diagnosis. Current PDA approaches primarily rely on adversarial learning for domain adaptation and use reweighting strategies to exclude source samples deemed outliers. However, the transferability of features diminishes from general feature extraction layers to higher task-specific layers in adversarial learning-based adaptation modules, leading to significant negative transfer in PDA settings. We term this issue the adaptation-discrimination paradox (ADP). Furthermore, reweighting strategies often suffer from unreliable pseudo-labels, compromising their effectiveness. In this work, we propose a novel PDA framework called Interactive Residual Domain Adaptation Networks (IRDAN), which introduces domain-wise models for each domain to provide a new perspective for the PDA challenge. Each domain-wise model is equipped with a residual domain adaptation (RDA) block to preserve the discriminative structure of each domain and mitigate the ADP. Additionally, we introduce a confident information flow via an interactive learning strategy, training the modules of IRDAN sequentially to avoid cross-interference. We also establish a reliable stopping criterion for selecting the best-performing model, ensuring practical usability in real-world applications. Experiments have demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed IRDAN.

Automated crack recognition has achieved remarkable progress in the past decades as a critical task in structure health monitoring, to ensure safety and durability in many industrial scenarios. However, imbalanced crack recognition remains challenging due to the scarcity of crack samples and the consequential limited diversity. To resolve this, Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has been gradually adopted to generate synthetic data and reduce reliance on large amounts of labeled crack samples. This paper assumes that a crack sample in the feature space can be regarded as a combination of crack and background semantics. Then, the decompose-compose feature augmentation framework (DeCo) is proposed to perform crack data synthesis in the feature space by randomly composing crack and background semantic-relevant features. Specifically, the contrastive learning-based decomposing loss is proposed to enforce two encoders to separately learn crack and background semantics from crack samples with the theoretical guarantee. After that, an effective cross-instance feature union strategy is proposed to synthesize diverse crack samples by composing the crack-relevant features from a crack sample and background-relevant features across other training samples. To address the limited availability of related benchmarks, we collect INPP2022 and IRC2022 datasets from real-world applications in nuclear power plants and road pavement. Experimental results show that DeCo performs favorably against state-of-the-art competitors in imbalanced crack recognition tasks.

Imitation learning (IL) shows its superiority in faster strategy optimization by leveraging expert demonstrations. However, as one of the powerful IL methods, behavior cloning (BC) suffers from covariate shift problems, where the agent’s policy drifts away from the expert’s, leading to compounding errors and decreased generalization performance. To this end, we propose Search-based Inverse Dynamics Imitation Learning, namely SIDIL, to enhance the robustness of imitation learning by augmenting expert demonstrations via trajectory perturbation and stitching. Specifically, SIDIL first employs a nearest-neighbor search method to find the closest points between expert and perturbed data, generating new actions near the expert data via a stitching strategy. By exploiting this, the agent can recover from deviations and complete tasks under a wider range of conditions. Experimental results on various robotic tasks show that SIDIL outperforms baseline algorithms with higher success rates across multiple tasks. Meanwhile, SIDIL is allowed to expand the attractive region around expert demonstrations by stitching states from expert demonstrations, enjoying a higher task completion success rate even for states outside the expert distribution. These results highlight our potential to enhance humanoid locomotion and dexterous robotic hand manipulation, making it particularly suitable for industrial manufacturing automation where adaptability, robustness, and safety are essential.

Offline imitation learning (IL) enables embodied agents of AI-driven automation control systems to acquire policies from demonstrations without interacting with the environment. However, collecting extensive expert demonstrations that rely on a manually designed reward function is labor-intensive, and even impractical for dynamic real-world settings. To mitigate the reliance on large amounts of reward-annotated expert data, previous works have made great efforts by leveraging both expert and suboptimal demonstrations. In this paper, we reveal that existing methods still suffer from suboptimal results for two reasons: (i) reward signals in suboptimal demonstrations are not reliable, due to these rewards derived from inexperienced annotators, thus can not reflect the actual rewards, and (ii) those suboptimal demonstrations, which are significantly distant from expert behaviors, result in low reconstructed rewards. Moreover, motivated by the recent diffusion-based foundation model, we propose Expert-Like Transition Imitation Learning (ELTIL), a novel generative trajectory augmentation method that effectively leverages diffusion models. ELTIL re-designs the reward function based on expert proximity, and then proposes amplified return conditioning for achieving high-quality trajectory generation. More specifically, instead of relying on environment-provided rewards or manually designed rewards, ELTIL first serves as a good reward labeler for transitions by measuring their distance to expert states. These re-designed rewards then serve as guidance in the diffusion process, with amplified returns contributing as conditioning values to bias generation toward expert-consistent behaviors. Extensive experiments on diverse D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that ELTIL consistently improves the performance and stability of reward learning and offline IL methods, maintaining reliability under varying noise levels, reward sparsity, and dataset distributions. These characteristics make ELTIL well-suited for deployment in robust and reliable automated control systems such as robotic manipulation and autonomous driving.

In this paper, we propose the PLS-FUSION, where P stands for point features, L for line features, and S for stereo vision. Together, these components form a tightly-coupled stereo visual-inertial Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system that leverages both point and line features to enhance the robustness and accuracy of tracking. Compared with the classic SLAM methods which only use the point features, we extract both the point features and the line features of the stereo camera in the front end and use a modified Line Segment Detector (LSD) algorithm of PL-VINS to improve the speed of extracting the line features. We use Plücker coordinates and orthonormal representation to represent the line features and add re-projection errors of the line features between the stereo camera in the back end. Our proposal has been tested with several popular datasets (EuRoC and TUMVI) and in the real world with our flight platform based on PX4 and QGroundControl (QGC). The experiments validate that PLS-FUSION has a more robust performance than state-of-the-art methods such as PL-VINS and VINS-FUSION.

The breakthrough development of single-cell RNA sequencing technology enables tissue heterogeneity analysis at single-cell resolution, where accurate cell type annotation is crucial for unlocking its full potential. To address three key challenges in current annotation methods-scarce labeled data, suboptimal graph topology, and missing cell state information-we propose scALGSL, an innovative framework integrating dynamic graph optimization with active learning. Our core contributions are threefold: (1) A graph-guided active learning mechanism adaptively selects high-value training samples, significantly alleviating label scarcity; (2) A learnable graph structure optimization module dynamically refines adjacency matrices to eliminate spurious connections caused by data sparsity; (3) A novel cell state auxiliary pathway extracts critical functional features via pre-trained models to enhance type discrimination. The systematic review showed that the average accuracy and f1 of scALGSL on the cancer dataset were 0.896 and 0.771, respectively, and it showed good robustness in cross-platform tasks. Integration of cell state information substantially boosts performance, while ablation studies validate the necessity of node selection and edge optimization modules. This framework provides a scalable solution for precise cell annotation, facilitating tumor microenvironment analysis and precision medicine applications.

The discovery of protein-protein interaction (PPI) sites is vital for exploring the principles of PPIs. Developing computational approaches to predict PPI sites can effectively compensate for biological experiments, which are mostly time-consuming and vulnerable-to-noise. In recent years, deep learning has been used to predict PPI sites, by considering the contextual information of target amino acid residues and using a local protein sequence to represent the targets. However, traditional deep-learning techniques, e.g., DNNs and CNNs, disregard important spatial hierarchies contained in the features of protein sequences, leading to their failure to effectively distinguish interaction sites from different residue regions. In this work, we design MSE-CapsPPISP, a new deep-learning model to address PPI site prediction with spatial hierarchies. The key idea of MSE-CapsPPISP is to take into account the hierarchical relationships between the features of protein sequences. We characterize the hierarchical relationships by designing a tailored Capsule Network, which is a novel type of neural network with vector neurons. Moreover, to make the network representation more robust, MSE-CapsPPISP uses multi-scale CNNs to extract multi-scale features of protein sequences and Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks to recalibrate the features. The validation results show that MSE-CapsPPISP outperforms the baseline CNNs-based architecture DeepPPISP and other existing competing schemes in the four key metrics of F1, MCC, AUROC, and AUPR.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) demonstrated remarkable performance in learning valid policies by benefiting from high-quality offline datasets. However, collecting such a dataset is labor-intensive, especially for humanoid locomotion. For this reason, many data augmentation techniques have been proposed to improve the quality of offline datasets through noise injection or data synthesis. However, existing data augmentation methods are noise-sensitive, resulting in limited capability in complex robotic environments. To address these issues, we propose guided amplified learning with Lipschitz constraint (GALC), a novel trajectory augmentation method that employs the reward-amplification-guided conditional diffusion model for noise-insensitive data augmentation. Specifically, we introduce a local Lipschitz continuity constraint to regulate the reverse denoising process from the offline dataset. Consequently, the exploration of the diffusion model can be restricted within the local continuity region of the original dataset, thereby generating high-reward trajectories. Moreover, the generated trajectories are also enforced to be noise-insensitive to perturbations, thus enjoying robustness. Notably, our proposed method can prevent the generation of unsafe actions that do not align with the environment dynamics. Extensive experiments on sparse reward scenarios and high-dimensional robotic tasks show that our proposed GALC achieves significant improvements in both the augmented trajectories and policy performance.

The widespread adoption of machine learning (ML) in privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance has amplified concerns surrounding data privacy, regulatory compliance, and generalization across data domains. Federated learning (FL) offers partial mitigation by enabling collaborative training without sharing raw data. However, current FL frameworks often fail to address key challenges, including vulnerabilities to semi-honest and colluding participants, inefficiencies in computation and communication for edge devices, and limited support for uncertainty-aware models like Gaussian Processes (GPs). This paper presentsF2GP, a secure federated framework for sparse GP approximation that addresses these gaps through two core innovations. First, a privacy-preserving support set selection algorithm based on one-shot federated$k$-means clustering improves model accuracy with minimal communication overhead. Second, a multi-party homomorphic encryption (HE) scheme secures the aggregation and inference process, ensuring robustness even when up to$M-1$participants collude with the server. We implement F2GP on a testbed of 15 NVIDIA Jetson Nano devices, emulating low-resource edge environments. The framework demonstrates practical scalability and achieves 15–20% better accuracy compared to non-secure distributed and centralized GP baselines, while maintaining sub-linear communication overhead. Evaluations across diverse datasets confirm F2GP's performance, resilient privacy, and suitability for uncertainty-aware inference. The code will be made available onhttps://gitee.com/SZU-AI4H/securedgp

The Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) integrates vehicles to the enormous realm of cyberspace which introduces some intelligence and convenience in the transportation sector. However, real-time traffic related information is exchanged over the open public internet among the vehicles and with other infrastructures. This exposes these networks to a myriad of security threats that can lead to accidents and congestions. Although many solutions have been developed over the recent past, most of them are inefficient while others are still susceptible to attacks. In this paper, we leverage on the k-valued modified bilinear inverse Diffie-Hellman problem and one-way hashing function to develop an efficient authentication protocol for IoVs. To demonstrate the robustness of its semantic security, we deploy the Real or Random (ROR) model. In addition, we execute extensive informal security anaysis to show that our scheme resists typical IoVs attacks such as forgery, privileged insider, and replay. Moreover, its performance evaluation shows that it incurs the lowest computation and communication overheads among its peers. Specifically, the proposed protocol reduces the transmission overheads by 8.5%, while increasing the supported security functionalities by 88.9%. It is therefor suitable for deployment in the IoV environment to mitigate the numerous security threats at relatively lower computation and energy costs.

Multimodal perception and fusion play a vital role in uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) object detection. Existing methods typically adopt global fusion strategies across modalities. However, due to illumination variation, the effectiveness of RGB and infrared modalities may differ across local regions within the same image, particularly in UAV perspectives where occlusions and dense small objects are prevalent, leading to suboptimal performance of global fusion methods. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive fine-grained fusion network for multimodal UAV object detection. First, we design a local feature consistency-based modality fusion module, which adaptively assigns local fusion weights according to the structural consistency of high-response regions across modalities, thereby enabling more effective aggregation of object-relevant features. Second, we introduce a mutual information-guided feature contrastive loss to encourage the preservation of modality-specific information during the early training phase. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the issue of object occlusion in UAV perspectives, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multimodal UAV object detection benchmarks. Code will be available at https://github.com/lingf5877/AFFNet.

The truck-drone collaborative delivery problem, modeled as a Traveling Salesman Problem with Drones (TSP-D), presents critical challenges in coordinating heterogeneous vehicles with distinct operational constraints. A key optimization opportunity lies in using trucks as mobile charging stations, enabling extended drone operations beyond battery limitations. While existing approaches struggle with scalability and inefficient exploration of this mobile charging paradigm, we propose a relational trajectory-entropy augmented (R-TEA) Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) framework that synergizes Relational Graph Convolutional Networks (R-GCN) with Trajectory-Entropy Reward (TER). Our method addresses three core challenges: 1) modeling spatiotemporal dependencies between trucks and drones via R-GCN’s relational inductive biases, including critical charging coordination; 2) escaping local optima via trajectory exploration that considers dynamic charging opportunities; and 3) balancing time-cost trade-offs via a compound reward design that accounts for charging efficiency. Extensive experiments on TSPLib and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate R-TEA’s superiority over heuristic, attention-based RL, and evolutionary baselines.

Edge computing improves the performance of Internet of Things (IoT) devices by moving cloud services closer to where these devices operate, thereby reducing delays and saving bandwidth. However, the IoT devices communicate wirelessly with edge servers, which creates a significant challenge in keeping the devices' locations private, especially when they use different methods. To address this, researchers have proposed various methods. However, these methods require a lot of computational power and storage, which makes them unsuitable for edge computing environments. To address these challenges, we propose a certificateless cryptography (CLC) and identity-based cryptography (IBC) based heterogeneous deniable authentication (CI-HDA) scheme. It enables an IoT device operating CLC to securely communicate with an edge server using IBC. The server verifies the devices authenticity without proving its participation to third parties, which ensures location privacy in edge computing environments. Additionally, our scheme supports batch verification, which enables the server to efficiently validate multiple authenticators simultaneously. The security of CI-HDA scheme is formally proven in the random oracle model, and performance evaluations demonstrate reduced computational and communication/storage overheads compared to existing methods. We also explored its application in military surveillance, which highlights its practicality in privacy-sensitive edge computing environments.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is a childhood cancer prevalent worldwide, which can prove fatal within weeks or months. However, current diagnosis models based on machine learning and deep learning methods fail to consider device noise (pixel-level perturbations) and rotation/translation (spatial-transformed perturbations), which can undermine the model's robustness. Adversarial training is a potential solution to this issue. This paper presents a hybrid perturbation adversarial training (HPAT) strategy that leverages two types of adversarial samples: pixel-level adversarial samples and spatial adversarial samples. This work generates these hybrid adversarial samples through Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) in couple with spatial transformation based on the Bayesian optimization (STBO) algorithm, respectively. This work introduced the Mixed Batch Normalization (MixBN) module to handle both adversarial samples and clean samples, alleviating the problem of clean accuracy degradation due to adversarial training. The proposed hybrid adversarial training strategy is tested on the public acute lymphoblastic leukemia dataset and found that it outperformed existing acute lymphoblastic cell classification models.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have substantially achieved high predictive accuracy in many vision tasks. However, we find that they are poorly calibrated for crack recognition tasks, as these DNNs tend to produce both under-confident and over-confident predictions in such safety-critical applications, thereby limiting their practical use in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a novel attack-inspired calibration loss (AICL) that explicitly regularizes class probabilities to be better confidence estimation. Specifically, we first propose the attack-inspired correctness estimation method (ACE) that aims to estimate the correctness degree of each sample via adversarial attacks. Then, we propose Correctness-aware Distribution Guidance, which starts from a distribution perspective that enforces the ordinal ranking of the predicted confidence referring to the estimated correctness degree. The proposed method can be conveniently implemented on top of any DNNs-based crack recognition model by serving as a plug-and-play loss function. To address the limited availability of related benchmarks, we collect a fully annotated dataset, namely, Bridge2024, which involves inconsistent cracks and noisy backgrounds in real-world bridges. Our AICL outperforms the state-of-art calibration methods on various benchmark datasets including CRACK2019, SDNET2018, and our BRIDGE2024.

The ability to autonomously explore and resolve tasks with minimal human guidance is crucial for the self-development of embodied intelligence. Although reinforcement learning methods can largely ease human effort, it's challenging to design reward functions for real-world tasks, especially for high-dimensional robotic control, due to complex relationships among joints and tasks. Recent advancements large language models (LLMs) enable automatic reward function design. However, approaches evaluate reward functions by re-training policies from scratch placing an undue burden on the reward function, expecting it to be effective throughout the whole policy improvement process. We argue for a more practical strategy in robotic autonomy, focusing on refining existing policies with policy-dependent reward functions rather than a universal one. To this end, we propose a novel reward-policy co-evolution framework where the reward function and the learned policy benefit from each other's progressive on-the-fly improvements, resulting in more efficient and higher-performing skill acquisition. Specifically, the reward evolution process translates the robot's previous best reward function, descriptions of tasks and environment into text inputs. These inputs are used to query LLMs to generate a dynamic amount of reward function candidates, ensuring continuous improvement at each round of evolution. For policy evolution, our method generates new policy populations by hybridizing historically optimal and random policies. Through an improved Bayesian optimization, our approach efficiently and robustly identifies the most capable and plastic reward-policy combination, which then proceeds to the next round of co-evolution. Despite using less data, our approach demonstrates an average normalized improvement of 95.3\% across various high-dimensional robotic skill learning tasks.

Accurate and timely 90-day survival prediction for critically ill COVID-19 patients is vital to optimize scarce ICU resources, yet single-source models often miss important pathophysiological cues. Emerging studies show that combining complementary modalities can reveal richer prognostic signatures than any modality in isolation. Motivated by this, we present DQU-CLIP, an advanced multimodal deep learning framework designed to overcome this limitation. Utilizing the CoCross dataset (comprising 171 ICU patients), our model integrates chest Xrays (CXRs) via a pre-trained Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) encoder with key clinical features, including Age, Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI), APACHE II, and SOFA scores, processed by a neural network. DQU-CLIP achieves a robust ROC-AUC of 0.85, significantly outperforming unimodal baselines (CXR-only: 0.78, Clinical-only: 0.72) and competing multimodal approaches. Extensive validation and ablation studies confirm the synergistic benefit of this fusion. Furthermore, interpretability analysis using Grad-CAM identified relevant lung regions in CXRs, while feature importance pinpointed SOFA and APACHE II scores as critical indicators of disease severity. By effectively unifying radiological and clinical evidence, DQU-CLIP provides a more reliable prognostic assessment.

Large kernels make standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs) great again over transformer architectures in various vision tasks. Nonetheless, recent studies meticulously designed around increasing kernel size have shown diminishing returns or stagnation in performance. Thus, the hidden factors of large kernel convolution that affect model performance remain unexplored. In this paper, we reveal that the key hidden factors of large kernels can be summarized as two separate components: extracting features at a certain granularity and fusing features by multiple pathways. To this end, we leverage the multi-path long-distance sparse dependency relationship to enhance feature utilization via the proposed Shiftwise (SW) convolution operator with a pure CNN architecture. In a wide range of vision tasks such as classification, segmentation, and detection, SW surpasses state-of-the-art transformers and CNN architectures, including SLaK and UniRepLKNet. More importantly, our experiments demonstrate that 3×3 convolutions can replace large convolutions in existing large kernel CNNs to achieve comparable effects, which may inspire follow-up works. Code and all the models at https://github.com/lidc54/shift-wiseConv.

To efficiently tackle problems with multiple conflicting objectives, several Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) algorithms utilize a universal policy network that takes preference weights as input to represent optimal policies for all different preferences. However, it is quite challenging to train such a universal policy as it is easy to forget or fail to learn skills for some preferences. To alleviate this issue, we propose an efficient Population-Based MORL (PB-MORL) method that trains multiple agents with universal policy networks using a shared replay buffer. Each agent is biased towards optimizing specific objectives by applying differentiated weights to the rewards sampled from the buffer. Therefore, the policy of each agent only needs to handle the specific part of the preference space rather than the entire space, simplifying the training task. Meanwhile, the experiences in the common buffer facilitate the information sharing among individuals, which can significantly reduce the number of interaction steps for training multiple agents. Experiments on both continuous and discrete tasks demonstrate the superiority of PB-MORL over several state-of-the-art MORL methods.

Enabling a high-degree-of-freedom robot to learn specific skills is a challenging task due to the complexity of robotic dynamics. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising solution; however, addressing such problems requires the design of multiple reward functions to account for various constraints in robotic motion. Existing approaches typically sum all reward components indiscriminately to optimize the RL value function and policy. We argue that this uniform inclusion of all reward components in policy optimization is inefficient and limits the robot's learning performance. To address this, we propose an Automated Hybrid Reward Scheduling (AHRS) framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs). This paradigm dynamically adjusts the learning intensity of each reward component throughout the policy optimization process, enabling robots to acquire skills in a gradual and structured manner. Specifically, we design a multi-branch value network, where each branch corresponds to a distinct reward component. During policy optimization, each branch is assigned a weight that reflects its importance, and these weights are automatically computed based on rules designed by LLMs. The LLM generates a rule set in advance, derived from the task description, and during training, it selects a weight calculation rule from the library based on language prompts that evaluate the performance of each branch. Experimental results demonstrate that the AHRS method achieves an average$\mathbf{6. 4 8 \%}$performance improvement across multiple high-degree-of-freedom robotic tasks.

Link Sign Prediction (LSP) in signed networks is a critical task with applications in recommendation systems, community detection, and social network analysis. Existing methods primarily rely on graph neural networks to exploit structural information, often neglecting the valuable insights from edge-level textual data. Furthermore, utilizing large language models (LLMs) for LSP faces challenges in reliability and interpreting graph structures. To address these issues, we propose a novel STLSP framework that integrates signed networks' \underline{S}tructural and \underline{T}extual information with LLMs for the \underline{LSP} task. STLSP leverages structural balance theory to generate node embeddings that capture positive and negative relationships. These embeddings are transformed into natural language representations through clustering techniques, allowing LLMs to utilize the structural context fully. By integrating these representations with edge text, STLSP improves the accuracy and reliability of the LSP task. Extensive experiments conducted on five real-world datasets demonstrate that STLSP outperformed state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an 8.7% improvement in terms of accuracy. Moreover, STLSP shows robust performance across various LLMs, making it adaptable to different computational environments. The code and data are publically available at https://github.com/sss483/STLSP.

Large vision models (LVM) based gait recognition has achieved impressive performance. However, existing LVM-based approaches may overemphasize gait priors while neglecting the intrinsic value of LVM itself, particularly the rich, distinct representations across its multi-layers. To adequately unlock LVM's potential, this work investigates the impact of layer-wise representations on downstream recognition tasks. Our analysis reveals that LVM's intermediate layers offer complementary properties across tasks, integrating them yields an impressive improvement even without rich well-designed gait priors. Building on this insight, we propose a simple and universal baseline for LVM-based gait recognition, termed BiggerGait. Comprehensive evaluations on CCPG, CAISA-B*, SUSTech1K, and CCGR_MINI validate the superiority of BiggerGait across both within- and cross-domain tasks, establishing it as a simple yet practical baseline for gait representation learning. All the models and code are available at https://github.com/ShiqiYu/OpenGait/.

This paper investigates the state synchronization probability (SSP) of a goal-oriented relay-assisted real-time state tracking system, where a source node monitors a discrete-time Markov chain and transmits state updates either directly to a destination or via a relay. The goal-oriented approach emphasizes timely and accurate delivery of semantically significant updates to support real-time decision-making. While relay-assisted communication improves coverage and reliability, its impact on SSP within a goal-oriented framework remains unexplored. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate SSP in such a system. In relay-assisted state tracking, possible simultaneous transmissions from the source and relay result in superimposed signals at the destination, necessitating Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) for decoding. Notably, decoding the source's packet depends on prior successful decoding of the relay's packet, even though the source carries the most recent state information. This dependency highlights SIC's critical role and motivates further exploration of its impact on SSP. To analyze SSP, we model the SIC-enabled relay-assisted system using a Markov chain and derive its theoretical expression. Results show that incorporating SIC significantly enhances SSP. Without SIC, interference from simultaneous transmissions can degrade performance, making relay-assisted schemes less effective than direct transmission. These findings highlight SIC's pivotal role in enabling efficient relay-assisted state tracking systems.

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have emerged as a promising substitution to antibiotics thanks to their boarder range of activities, less likelihood of drug resistance, and low toxicity. Traditional biochemical methods for AMP discovery are costly and inefficient. Deep generative models, including the long-short term memory model, variational autoencoder model, and generative adversarial model, have been widely introduced to expedite AMP discovery. However, these models tend to suffer from the lack of diversity in generating AMPs. The denoising diffusion probabilistic model serves as a good candidate for solving this issue. We proposed a three-stage Text-Guided Conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (TG-CDDPM) to generate novel and homologous AMPs. In the first two stages, contrastive learning and inferring models are crafted to create better conditions for guiding AMP generation, respectively. In the last stage, a pre-trained conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model is leveraged to enrich the peptide knowledge and fine-tuned to learn feature representation in downstream. TG-CDDPM was compared to the state-of-the-art generative models for AMP generation, and it demonstrated competitive or better performance with the assistance of text description as supervised information. The membrane penetration capabilities of the identified candidate AMPs by TG-CDDPM were also validated through molecular weight dynamics experiments.

Phage therapy has received great attention as a promising antimicrobial treatment, and its core technique, namely predicting phage-bacterium interactions (PBIs), is crucial for understanding infection mechanisms and optimizing therapeutic strategies. However, existing computational methods mainly focus on the species or higher taxonomic levels, and usually neglect the potential of deep embedding representations, limiting their ability to capture complex biological patterns inherent in sequences. This hinders the discovery of rich sequence features, and restricts the clinical application of phage therapy. To address these limitations, we propose a novel deep learning framework (called PBIP) for strain-level PBI prediction. In PBIP, we first identify strain-level interactions through biological infection experiments and sequencing of Klebsiella pneumoniae isolated from the clinical environment of Xiangya Hospital. Then, we utilize a pretrained unified representation model to convert protein sequences of phages and bacteria into deep embeddings. Next, we apply the synthetic minority oversampling technique to generate positive interactions in the embedding space to address the data imbalance issue. Subsequently, we design a deep neural network that uses a convolutional neural network to extract local features, a bi-directional gated recurrent unit to capture global features, and an attention module to highlight significant features. Finally, a fully connected layer integrates this information for PBI prediction. Experimental results show the superiority of PBIP over the state-of-the-art methods in predicting PBIs. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/a1678019300/PBIP.

Edge computing brings cloud services closer to Internet of Things (IoT) devices by processing data at the edge of the network, reducing latency and bandwidth usage. However, preserving the location privacy of IoT devices is a major challenge due to the heterogeneous, open wireless, and dynamic nature of the edge computing environments. The authentication process in this context may potentially disclose the device’s location, as IoT devices and edge server often rely on different security mechanisms. To address this concern, researchers have proposed various schemes to preserve location privacy. However, these schemes often incur high computational and communication overhead, making them unsuitable for IoT devices, which have limited processing power and storage capacity. In response to this challenge, we present a heterogeneous deniable authentication scheme based on certificateless cryptography (CLC) and public-key infrastructure (PKI), abbreviated as CP-HDA. This scheme enables an IoT device in a CLC to securely transmit messages to an edge server in a PKI. Using the CP-HDA scheme, the edge server can verify the legitimacy of the IoT device but cannot provide evidence to third parties regarding the device’s involvement in communication, thereby preserving the location privacy of the IoT device. It also supports batch verification, which enables faster verification of multiple deniable authenticators. The security of the CP-HDA scheme is formally proven in the random oracle model based on the assumption that the elliptic curve computational Diffie-Hellman problem is hard. In comparison to alternative schemes, our scheme enhances performance by reducing both computational and communication costs.

The Internet of Health Monitoring (IoHM) plays a vital role in Emergency Medical Package Delivery (EMPD) by enabling real-time monitoring and transmission of critical health data through interconnected devices in 6G networks. UAVs act as Aerial Base Stations (ABSs), facilitating data collection and transmission between GAI-IoHM devices and edge servers. This is crucial for efficient communication in 6G-enabled Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks (SAGIN). However, UAVs supporting EMPD face challenges related to limited energy and computational capacity, especially during task offloading to edge servers. To address these constraints, this paper proposes the integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) into UAVs for intelligent policy learning, enabling adaptive decision-making, real-time diagnostics, and efficient path planning under uncertainty. We present a novel multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL)-based joint optimization framework for cooperative task allocation, trajectory planning, and power management (CTATP) in a 6G-enabled SAGIN architecture. The problem is modeled as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) to capture dynamic and uncertain operational conditions. To solve this, we introduce the GAI-based Deep Deterministic Double Policy Gradient (GAI-DD3PG) algorithm, which leverages a generative actor-network to learn adaptive, energy-efficient control policies from latent action spaces. Simulations in urban emergency scenarios with 10–20 UAVs demonstrate GAI-DD3PG’s efficacy. Compared to Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), Multi-Agent Federated Reinforcement Learning (MAFRL), and Greedy heuristics, GAI-DD3PG achieves a 20% energy reduction, 15% higher delivery success rate,25% shorter trajectories, and 30% improved resource utilization. These results highlight its potential for reliable EMPD in complex 6G SAGIN environments.

Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) has become more important as a large number of diverse devices connect to the Internet of Things (IoT). Generally, training an effective NIDS requires a large amount of high-quality and centralized attack data. However, in real-world scenarios, it is difficult to centralize the distributed data for training NIDS in the IoT due to the privacy concerns and data format heterogeneity. To solve this problem, a novel NIDS combining federated learning and cost-sensitive learning is proposed, named FIDS-CL. Specifically, federated learning with dynamic weights aggregation tackles the problem of non-clusterable data, where multiple clients collaboratively enhance the overall performance while dynamically aggregating weights to maximize the retention of high-performing client models. Moreover, cost-sensitive learning is employed to alleviate the problem of class imbalance in NIDS by dynamically adjusting the gradient descent weights of different classes in the loss function, thereby emphasizing the importance of minority classes. Therefore, our method can effectively handle data imbalance while safeguarding data privacy of clients, which is more effective to detect network intrusions. The experiments conducted across various scenarios validate the superior detection capabilities and computational efficiency of FIDS-CL when compared to other state-of-the-art NIDSs.

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is one of the more sophisticated methods of homomorphic cryptography (HC). HC efficiently contacts the interacting parties in open IoT and light-weighted network environments. This approach is capable of analyzing encrypted data without decryption. The operations use private and public keys. Then, during the assessment or evaluation, users may access the original data. Before conducting tests or evaluations, the customer must first encrypt the data and then decrypt it. Since consumers use several main cycles for the whole operation, which creates noise and computation overheads, the growth rate of computation overheads has increased. The growing ratio of noise to computation rate can interrupt the whole system, resulting in machine instability, protection, and privacy concerns. To resolve the security and privacy issues, the proposed schemes used different hardness assumptions, such as over-integer, learning with error, ideal lattices, bootstrapping, etc. In this article, we presents a comprehensive review of HE and its many varieties. The numerous possible applications of HE are covered at a high level in order to highlight the extent to which HE is used in the IoT and other lighted-weighted intelligent industry environments in a variety of various domains.

This paper investigates the design of automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocols in age of information (AoI)-aware broadcast systems with heterogeneous users, including both direct and relay-assisted users. In this setup, a direct user receives status updates directly via a single-hop link, while a relay-assisted user can receive status updates through either a direct single-hop link or a two-hop relay-assisted link. While ARQ is commonly used to ensure reliable transmission in error-prone wireless networks, previous studies suggest that ARQ does not improve the average AoI in single-hop networks. However, its impact on AoI in systems with relays, particularly those involving heterogeneous users, remains unclear. We address this gap by analyzing the average AoI under different ARQ strategies, introducing a transmission limit k≥0 at the relay. Here, k=0, k=1, and k>1 correspond to non-relay, non-ARQ-at-relay, and truncated-ARQ-at-relay strategies, respectively. Utilizing a unified Markov chain framework that models the transmission processes for each user type, we derive the theoretical average AoI. Our results show that the direct user benefits most from non-relay and non-ARQ strategies, similar to single-hop systems. In contrast, the relay-assisted user achieves optimal performance with truncated-ARQ-at-relay, leveraging both direct and relay-assisted links. For the overall system, applying a non-ARQ-at-relay approach strikes a balance in AoI between the direct and relay-assisted users, leading to a more stable and lower system-wide average AoI.

With the expanding use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in a variety of applications, their safety has become a critical concern. UAVs are confronted with a variety of unforeseen circumstances during missions; in these instances, the UAVs need to autonomously locate a suitable landing site, plan flight routes, and avoid obstacles in unstructured environments. Due to the limitations of computing power and sensors, it is challenging to attain the goal. The aim of research study is to investigate the monocular emergency autonomous landing algorithm. This work concentrates specifically on extracting depth and vision information. A topology information extractor is designed to transform images into graphs and assess the connectivity of terrain. In addition, a depth information extractor is designed to compute the slope and roughness of the ground. A$3$D topology optimizer is designed to optimize the graph based on depth information and evaluate the landing suitability using a heuristic strategy. For action decision making, a 3D topology decision method based on Depth-Enhanced Graph Structure (DEGS) is proposed. In order to demonstrate the efficacy of DEGS, this study constructed a simulated scenario based on an actual scene. The results of the experiment indicate that DEGS outperforms its counterparts in terms of the accuracy of action prediction and landing success rate.Note to Practitioners—Using DEGS, this study proposes a novel method for emergency UAV landing on unknown fields. The proposed method is founded on the following fundamental concepts: First, the UAV first generates a DEGS of the unknown field. Second, the UAV then evaluates the landing risk and guides the UAVs in planning a safe landing trajectory. Third, the UAV implements the landing trajectory and lands safely on the unknown field using monocular aerial vision. Frame Sequential and Self-supervision Network (FSSN), a multi-scale vision-based Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) network, is proposed to estimate the depth map for real-time UAV flight phases. This method has been evaluated using simulations and real-world dataset of simulation images of monocular continuous frames and has shown to be effective in landing UAVs on unknown fields. A human-in-the-loop learning approach is proposed for updating DEGS with dynamic terrain classification that made the procedure feasible for unknown fields. In terms of landing success rate and action prediction accuracy, the results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of landing a UAV on unknown terrain in a safe and efficient manner, and it is particularly useful in emergency situations where the UAV does not have prior knowledge of the field.

Phage virion proteins (PVPs), which form the structural components of phages, are crucial for maintaining phage structures and infecting host bacteria. Identifying PVPs can lead to the development of novel therapeutic agents to combat bacterial infections, attracting great research attention in recent years. However, most of the existing methods for PVP identification heavily depend on the effectiveness of feature extraction and have no ability to precisely classify specific classes. In this article, we propose a bidirectional encoder representations-based Transformer model called BERTPVP for the identification and classification of PVPs. BERTPVP uses a stack of transformer encoders to effectively capture contextual information from the entire protein sequence through the multi-head self-attention mechanism. We firstly pre-train the model using the masked language modeling task to learn contextual information from phage protein sequences, which aids in understanding the significance and relevance of individual components in relation to the entire sequence. Subsequently, the pre-trained model is fine-tuned for PVP identification and classification tasks. Our experimental results show the superiority of the proposed BERTPVP over the state-of-the-art methods in identifying and classifying PVPs. Moreover, the ablation study demonstrates the necessity of the pre-training and fine-tuning components of BERTPVP in accelerating convergence and improving prediction performance.

The escalation of antibiotic resistance underscores the need for innovative approaches to combat bacterial infections. Phage therapy has emerged as a promising solution, wherein host determination plays an important role. Phage lysins, characterized by their specificity in targeting and cleaving corresponding host bacteria, serve as key players in this paradigm. In this study, we present a novel approach by leveraging genes of phage-encoded lytic enzymes for host prediction, culminating in the development of LHPre. Initially, gene fragments of phage-encoded lytic enzymes and their respective hosts were collected from the database. Second, DNA sequences were encoded using the Frequency Chaos Game Representation (FCGR) method, and pseudo samples were generated employing the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) model to address class imbalance. Finally, a prediction model was constructed using the Vision Transformer(Vit) model. Five-fold cross-validation results demonstrated that LHPre surpassed other state-of-the-art phage host prediction methods, achieving accuracies of 85.04%, 90.01%, and 93.39% at the species, genus, and family levels, respectively.

The existing constrained multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (CMOEAs) still have great room for improvement in balancing populations convergence, diversity and feasibility on complex constrained multiobjective optimization problems (CMOPs). Besides, their effectiveness deteriorates dramatically when facing the CMOPs with scaling-up objective space or search space. We are thus motivated to design a learning-aided CMOEA with promising problem-solving ability and scalability for various CMOPs. In the proposed solver, two learning models are respectively trained online on constrained-ignored task and feasibility-first task, which are then used to learn the two improvement-based vectors for enhancing the search by differential evolution. In addition, the union population of parent and child solutions is divided into multiple subsets with a hierarchical clustering based on cosine similarity. A comprehensive indicator, considering objective-based performance and constraint violation degree of a solution, is developed to select the representative solution from each cluster. The effectiveness of the proposed optimizer is verified by solving the CMOPs with various irregular Pareto fronts, the number of objectives ranging from 2 to 15, and the dimensionality of search space scaling up to 1000.

The widespread use of electronic devices has contributed to an increase in poor posture, particularly when it comes to the cervical spine, leading to various cervical vertebral pain disorders. In this article, we focus on accurately monitoring the motion status of the cervical spine using the accelerometers and gyroscope sensors embedded in earphones. Our aim is to gain a better understanding of cervical spine health. To address the individual differences among subjects, we introduce fuzzy rules to the Re-ISDA method, proposing a novel approach known as FuzRe-ISDA. Unlike traditional domain adaptation methods, the FuzRe-ISDA method offers flexibility in adjusting the contribution from different source domains. It takes into account the collective impact of multiple models on predicting new user behavior. Moreover, this method can quickly adapt to new users without requiring extensive datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our FuzRe-ISDA approach outperforms popular domain adaptation methods in terms of accuracy when predicting cervical motion. This highlights the effectiveness of our approach in addressing individual differences and improving the reliability of cervical spine motion prediction.

Deep Neuro-Fuzzy Systems (DNFS) have emerged as a hybrid machine learning approach that has found applications in a wide range of fields, including healthcare, transportation, and finance. However, we empirically demonstrate that DNFS is vulnerable to adversarial examples generated by various attack algorithms, raising numerous concerns about its reliability in security-critical scenarios. Existing defense mechanisms designed for DNNs often rely on specific knowledge of attacks and their parameters. Consequently, considering the diversity and uncertainty of potential attacking methods, designing defense strategies to enhance the robustness of DNN-based and DNFS-based models against multiple attacks still remains a challenging task. In this work, we propose a comprehensive defense mechanism, named Perturbation Destruction and Information Recovery (PDIR), for image classification tasks, that achieves practical robustness against multiple attacks. PDIR employs a combination of perturbation destruction through randomization and multiplication and information recovery using a pixel-to-pixel network. Experimental results demonstrate that PDIR outperforms state-of-the-art defenses such as JPEG, TVM, ADP, GAL, DVERGE, and TRS against both white-box and black-box attacks.

Crack segmentation receives extensive attention in structure health monitoring for many industrial scenarios, e.g., bridges, highways, and nuclear power plants. The current deep learning-based crack segmentation models enjoy the ability to extract discriminative crack features by training with an extensive labeled crack dataset. However, collecting extensive crack samples with accurate annotations from experts for a new scenario is labor-intensive, thereby limiting the effectiveness of these deep models in practical applications. To address this problem, the existing Fourier-based augmentation adopts a vanilla amplitude fusion process, i.e., the portion of amplitude components is fixed or randomly selected, failing to guarantee augmented samples’ semantics consistency, and diversity concerning the original sample. To fill this, this article proposes a self-adaptive Fourier augmentation framework that efficiently synthesizes diverse crack samples for training crack segmentation models. Our proposed framework advances Fourier transformation in an adversarial learning manner, alternating between self-adaptive Fourier-based data augmentation and teacher–student learning. The former aims to guarantee the diversity and semantics consistency of Fourier-based augmented samples, while the latter progressively updates the student network by observing these augmented samples for extracting discriminative features via a knowledge distillation mechanism. It is worth noting that the proposed method is only applied in the training stage without extra computation and memory during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over the existing methods.

In the context of rapidly growing city road networks, understanding complex traffic patterns and implementing effective safety monitoring through advanced Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems (T-CPS) has become increasingly challenging. This involves understanding spatial relationships and non-linear temporal associations. Accurately predicting traffic in such scenarios, particularly for long-term sequences, is challenging due to the complexity of the data. Traditional ways of predicting traffic flow use a single fixed graph structure based on location. This structure does not consider possible correlations and cannot fully capture long-term temporal relationships among traffic flow data, thereby limiting the system ability to ensure safety and reliability. To address this challenge, we propose a novel traffic prediction framework called Attention-based Spatio-temporal Multi-scale Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network (ASTMGCNet). This study introduces a novel framework designed to improve prediction accuracy in dynamic urban traffic systems by effectively capturing complex spatio-temporal correlations through multi-scale feature extraction and attention mechanisms. ASTMGCNet records changing features of space and time by combining Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). Its design incorporates multi-scale feature extraction and dual attention mechanisms, effectively capturing informative patterns at different levels of detail. This strategic design allows ASTMGCNet to effectively capture complex spatio-temporal correlations within traffic sequences, enhancing prediction accuracy. We have tested this method on two different real-world datasets and found that ASTMGCNet predicts significantly better than other methods, demonstrating its potential to advance traffic flow prediction and improve safety and reliability in T-CPS applications.

We investigate the timely status update in linear multi-hop wireless networks, where a source tries to deliver status update packets to a destination through a sequence of half-duplex relays. Timeliness is measured by the age of information (AoI) metric. Maintaining a low AoI at the destination typically necessitates frequent transmission of update packets from the source. However, high packet transmission frequency in multi-hop scenarios can result in mutual wireless interference at intermediate relays. Specifically, when an intermediate relay receives wireless signals of a new packet from its previous node, simultaneous transmission of an old packet by its subsequent node to the next hop may cause wireless signals to interfere at the intermediate relay, conventionally leading to packet collision. A key motivation to solve this issue is that the intermediate relay has previously received the old packet (which can thus be forwarded to the subsequent node for further relaying). Hence, successive interference cancellation (SIC) can be employed to mitigate interference of the old packet and recover the new packet. This paper designs an SIC-enabled packet relaying scheme tailored to low AoI. Initially focusing on a three-hop network, we subsequently extend our approach to general multi-hop networks. We model the multi-hop relaying scheme using a Markov chain to derive the theoretical average AoI. Theoretical and simulation results indicate that the SIC-enabled packet relaying scheme significantly reduces the average AoI compared to the non-SIC approaches, owing to an increased packet transmission frequency at the source and the effectiveness of SIC techniques at the relays.

Reconstructing keyboard input through side-channel attacks has posed significant threats to user security. While conventional keystroke eavesdropping attacks have demonstrated effectiveness using side channels such as acoustic signals, they are usually shorter in range and can be significantly affected by environmental noises. In this paper, we proposeLaserKey, a novel keystroke eavesdropping technique that leverages the long-range and noise-resistant nature of lasers to achieve a more stealthy side-channel attack. We utilize laser sensors to accurately capture the subtle vibrations induced on laptop screens by keystrokes, and innovatively design a laser-driven deep learning-based keystroke recognition model with the inputs being the Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficien (MFCC), Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA), and amplitude features extracted from such vibration signals. Through systematic experiments, we demonstrate thatLaserKeyachieves a 92.2% single-key recognition accuracy. By combining multiple single-key recognition capabilities based on this, we then realize the end-to-end word-level recognition. Moreover, to mitigate the recognition errors caused by the changes in keystroke positions, we introduce a meta-learning based domain generalization approach for achieving robust laser position calibration. Results show thatLaserKeyachieves as low as 3% character error rate (CER) for word-level recognition, proving its effectiveness for long-range and high-accuracy keystroke eavesdropping, and highlighting the necessity for countermeasures in the future.

Material sensing holds significant potential in areas such as environmental awareness and security monitoring. While technologies like RFID, WIFI, and UWB offer potential solutions for portable, non-contact material identification, the need to place targets in fixed positions for identification has limited the flexibility of material sensing. In this article, we first innovatively apply the Range-Angle heatmap (RAheatmap) to effectively represent the distance, placement angle, and inherent material attributes to pave the way for precise material identification. Then propose an innovative system called Material-ID to utilize Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) millimeter wave (mmWave) radar for material sensing. Additionally, we endow the system with cross-domain adaptability to make it tailored to identify material reflection attributes and minimize the effects of variables such as distance and placement angle. The experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed system.

As the demand for efficient parcel delivery continues to grow in the logistics industry, optimizing multi-robot task assignment has become crucial for enhancing overall delivery performance. This paper addresses the precedence-constrained multi-truck multi-drone package delivery task assignment problem, where each truck coordinates with a drone to serve multiple dispersed customers under precedence constraints that specify the required order of service. While trucks deliver packages to designated customers, drones can simultaneously serve other customers, subject to their limited flight endurance and payload capacity. To tackle this challenge, a three-phase heuristic algorithm is proposed to minimize the total delivery time required to serve the last customer while ensuring all precedence constraints are satisfied. In the first phase, an extended minimum marginal cost algorithm is applied to quickly construct truck-only routes that comply with precedence constraints. In the second phase, a splitting algorithm combined with an endurance checking procedure is employed to generate hybrid truck–drone routes considering drone limitations. In the final phase, a variable neighborhood descent approach is introduced to further improve the solution by strategically perturbing the truck-only routes. Extensive simulations and experiments demonstrate that the proposed three-phase heuristic algorithm consistently achieves higher-quality solutions with reduced computation time compared with the widely used adaptive large neighborhood search method.

Recently, an emerging research direction called Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (ERL) has been proposed, which combines evolutionary algorithm with reinforcement learning (RL) for tackling the tasks of sequential decision making. However, the recently proposed ERL algorithms often suffer from two challenges: the inaccuracy of policy estimation caused by the overestimation bias in RL and the insufficiency of exploration caused by inefficient mutations. To alleviate these problems, we propose an Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning algorithm enhanced with Truncated variance and Distillation mutation, called ERL-TD. We utilize multiple Q-networks to evaluate state-action pairs, so that multiple networks can provide more accurate evaluations for state-action pairs, in which the variance of evaluations can be adopted to control the overestimation bias in RL. Moreover, we propose a new distillation mutation to provide a promising mutation direction, which is different from traditional mutation generating a large number of random solutions. We evaluate ERL-TD on the continuous control benchmarks from the OpenAI Gym and DeepMind Control Suite. The experiments show that ERL-TD shows excellent performance and outperforms all baseline RL algorithms on the test suites.

Distributed sparse Gaussian process (dGP) models provide an ability to achieve accurate predictive performance using data from multiple devices in a time efficient and scalable manner. The distributed computation of model, however, risks exposure of privately owned data to public manipulation. In this paper we propose a secure solution for dGP regression models using multi-key homomorphic encryption. Experimental results show that with a little sacrifice in terms of time complexity, we achieve a secure dGP model without deteriorating the predictive performance compared to traditional non-secure dGP models. We also present a practical implementation of the proposed model using several Nvidia Jetson Nano Developer Kit modules to simulate a real-world scenario. Thus, secure dGP model plugs the data security issues of dGP and provide a secure and trustworthy solution for multiple devices to use privately owned data for model computation in a distributed environment availing speed, scalability and robustness of dGP.

The Machine-Learning-as-a-Service (MLaaS) framework allows one to grab low-hanging fruit of machine learning techniques and data science, without either much expertise for this sophisticated sphere or provision of specific infrastructures. However, the requirement of revealing all training data to the service provider raises new concerns in terms of privacy leakage, storage consumption, efficiency, bandwidth, etc. In this paper, we propose a lightweight privacy-preserving MLaaS framework by combining Compressive Sensing (CS) and Generative Networks. It’s constructed on the favorable facts observed in recent works that general inference tasks could be fulfilled with generative networks and classifier trained on compressed measurements, since the generator could model the data distribution and capture discriminative information which are useful for classification. To improve the performance of the MLaaS framework, the supervised generative models of the server are trained and optimized with prior knowledge provided by the client. In order to prevent the service provider from recovering the original data as well as identifying the queried results, a noise-addition mechanism is designed and adopted into the compressed data domain. Empirical results confirmed its performance superiority in accuracy and resource consumption against the state-of-the-art privacy preserving MLaaS frameworks.

Natural products, abundant in biological activities, are synthesized by bacteria during secondary metabolism, yielding a plethora of antibiotics, anticancer drugs, and other potential therapeutics. These compounds are directed by biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs), which encode the necessary enzymes and regulatory elements for their production. With the rapid advancement of sequencing technology, the number of fully sequenced bacterial genomes has exponentially increased, providing researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to discover more BGCs. However, current identification methods are significantly constrained by their reliance on database quantity and predominantly utilize local features inherent in the BGC sequences. In this study, we introduce Biosynthetic Gene Clusters Catcher: GCN-BERT(BGCCGB), a deep learning model leveraging natural language processing for the identification of BGCs in bacterial genomes and classification of BGCs product types. Our approach represents BGCs as sequences represented by protein family (Pfam) identifiers and performs data augmentation on existing BGC data by introducing a synonym replacement method. Local and global features in BGCs sequences are then integrated by BERT and its self-attention mechanism, in conjunction with Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). The experiment results indicate that BGCCGB effectively learns the features of BGCs, localizes BGCs in bacterial genomes, and predicts the product types of BGCs. Notably, BGCCGB demonstrates a significant performance improvement over previous methods, with an average precision 6.9% in BGC identification. These enhancements underscore the potential of BGCCGB in advancing the discovery and understanding of natural products synthesized by bacteria.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in classification and regression tasks on RGB-based pathological inputs. The network’s prediction mechanism must be interpretable to establish trust in the clinical routine. One principal approach to interpretation is feature attribution. Feature attribution methods identify the importance of input features for the output prediction. Building on the Information Bottleneck Attribution (IBA) method, we recognize the RGB’s input regions with high mutual information with the network’s output for each prediction. IBA identifies input regions that have sufficient predictive information. In this paper, we introduce "IBATree", a novel approach that combines IBA with decision trees to enhance both the interpretability and accuracy of DNNs in cancer cell classification. Our method leverages the information bottleneck framework to inject noise into feature maps and then isolates the most informative features for model predictions while maintaining high classification performance. We evaluated our proposed approach on three datasets—CNMC, ISBI2016, and BreaKHis—demonstrating competitive accuracy and producing clear interpretations. This makes IBATree particularly suitable for clinical applications, where understanding the rationale behind predictions is crucial. Our results show that IBATree provides reliable predictions and valuable insights into feature importance, paving the way for its application in various biomedical domains.

The challenge of interpretability remains a significant barrier to adopting deep neural networks in healthcare domains. Although tree regularization aims to align a deep neural network’s decisions with a single axis-aligned decision tree, however, relying on one tree for all inputs often leads to sub-optimal performance and interoperability. To address this limitation, we propose an enhanced tree regularization method that integrates a post-hoc visual explainable model such as Grad-CAM. This approach guides the deep model to be well-approximated by decision trees tailored to the salient regions identified by Grad-CAM in the input space. We rigorously validate the effectiveness of this framework on two cancer cell datasets: CNMC, which focuses on acute lymphoblastic leukemia cells, and ISBI2016, which comprises benign and malignant skin lesions. The results demonstrate that the proposed method delivers simpler and more interpretable explanations without compromising accuracy, thereby advancing the interpretability of deep learning models in critical healthcare applications.

Cooperative co-evolution (CC) is a promising direction in solving large-scale multiobjective optimization problems (LMOPs). However, most existing methods of grouping decision variables face some difficulties when searching in the huge search space. Specifically, the methods of grouping decision variables can be classified into two types, i.e., high-consumption grouping methods and non-consumption grouping methods. On the one hand, the former ones divide the decision variables into different groups based on the correlation analysis between variables, which consume much evaluation. This way may lead to premature convergence within limited computational resources. On the other hand, the later ones allocate the decision variables into sub-groups based on some metrics, e.g., order and size, which consume no evaluation while may cause the search fall into local optima. To alleviate the above issues, this paper proposes a CC-based algorithm with a variable-importance grouping (VIG) method, called VICCA. Firstly, the decision variables are classified into several subgroups according to their importance quantified by a meta-gene construction method. Secondly, a CC strategy is designed to simultaneously optimize all subgroups of decision variables formed by VIG using the differential evolution operator, which aims to accelerate the convergence speed. Thirdly, a global evolutionary strategy is proposed to optimize original decision variable space by the competitive swarm optimizer, aiming to maintain the diversity. Finally, the experiments demonstrate that our proposed VICCA has the significant advantage in solving LMOPs when compared with state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms.

Path planning is the core of autonomous robot navigation, which helps the robot to find a collision-free path to the destination based on the environment information. Most current path planning methods only consider the path length, but the optimal path may deviate from the shortest when considering other environmental factors such as uneven terrain or regions with varying traversal costs. Similarly, in scenarios prioritizing energy efficiency, a sole focus on path length may lead to suboptimal solutions. In this paper, an improved Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm based on Decomposition (MOEA/D) with adaptive weight vector, external archive, and constrained update strategy namely the MOEA/D-EAWA is proposed. This algorithm not only considers the path length but also four additional objectives such as smoothness, traveling time, terrain (elevation), and speed limit (expected delay). In addition, MOEA/D-EAWA is better suited for such many-objective path planning problem which has an irregular, discrete, and sparse Pareto front. The simulation results from 90 map instances demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the existing approaches.

Crack segmentation datasets make great efforts to ob-tain the ground truth crack or non-crack labels as clearly as possible. However, it can be observed that ambiguities are still inevitable when considering the marginal non-crack re-gion, due to low contrast and heterogeneous texture. To solve this problem, we propose a novel clustering-inspired representation learning framework, which contains a two-phase strategy for automatic crack segmentation. In the first phase, a pre-process is proposed to localize the marginal non-crack region. Then, we propose an ambiguity-aware segmentation loss (Aseg Loss) that enables crack segmentation models to capture ambiguities in the above regions via learning segmentation variance, which allows us to further localize ambiguous regions. In the second phase, to learn the discriminative features of the above regions, we propose a clustering-inspired loss (CI Loss) that alters the supervision learning of these regions into an unsupervised clus-tering manner. We demonstrate that the proposed method could surpass the existing crack segmentation models on various datasets and our constructed CrackSeg5k dataset.

Learning behavior in legged robots presents a significant challenge due to its inherent instability and complex constraints. Recent research has proposed the use of a large language model (LLM) to generate reward functions in reinforcement learning, thereby replacing the need for manually designed rewards by experts. However, this approach, which relies on textual descriptions to define learning objectives, fails to achieve controllable and precise behavior learning with clear directionality. In this paper, we introduce a new video2reward method, which directly generates reward functions from videos depicting the behaviors to be mimicked and learned. Specifically, we first process videos containing the target behaviors, converting the motion information of individuals in the videos into keypoint trajectories represented as coordinates through a video2text transforming module. These trajectories are then fed into an LLM to generate the reward function, which in turn is used to train the policy. To enhance the quality of the reward function, we develop a video-assisted iterative reward refinement scheme that visually assesses the learned behaviors and provides textual feedback to the LLM. This feedback guides the LLM to continually refine the reward function, ultimately facilitating more efficient behavior learning. Experimental results on tasks involving bipedal and quadrupedal robot motion control demonstrate that our method surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art LLM-based reward generation methods by over 37.6% in terms of human normalized score. More importantly, by switching video inputs, we find our method can rapidly learn diverse motion behaviors such as walking and running.

Federated learning (FL) is emerging as a new privacy-preserving learning paradigm that allows multiple devices to collaborate in training a model without sharing their raw data, using a central server for coordination. However, device heterogeneity poses a challenge in FL, as participating devices often have different computing capacities. To address this issue, heterogeneous models need to be designed to accommodate different device computing capacities. The existing approach involves pre-designing multiple heterogeneous models and extracting sub-models from the server model. While such an approach effectively tackles device heterogeneity, it has several drawbacks such as high communication overhead and insufficient personalization. In each training round, the server distributes the entire model parameters to each device, and each device also transmits the entire model parameters to the server for aggregation. In this work, we propose FedPartial, a new framework that overcomes these challenges by introducing a partial model transmission and aggregation mechanism. The FedPartial framework eliminates the need for devices to transmit the entire model parameters in each training round while still benefiting from global model aggregation. Specifically, FedPartial divides the device model into two parts: the shallow part participates in the global aggregation of heterogeneous models, while the deep part remains on the device locally. By keeping the deep part of the model on the device, FedPartial reduces the communication overhead significantly and achieves a certain degree of personalization. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that FedPartial outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, particularly in more complex and statistically heterogeneous scenarios.

With recent progress in Internet of Things technology, it is becoming more and more commonplace to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for inconsiderable purposes. On the other hand, traditional all of these UAV networks adopt a susceptible open wireless communication, rendering these systems vulnerable to attacks like eavesdropping, tampering, interrupting, and forging. The most effective way to address these security challenges is through signcryption. However, current signcryption methods are computationally and bandwidth-intensive, making them unsuitable for UAVs with limited resources and ground stations (GS) handling a high volume of messages. To address these challenges, we propose a solution employing an identity-based online/offline signcryption scheme to secure communication from a UAV to GS, known as IOOSC-U2G. This scheme leverages elliptic curve cryptography without the need for time-intensive operations like bilinear pairing. During the online phase, the absence of point multiplication operations, already executed in the offline phase, significantly alleviates computational burdens. This optimization significantly reduces computational overhead throughout the entire signcryption process of messages. Moreover, the IOOSC-U2G scheme ensures the privacy of UAV identities during communication with GS. Additionally, the proposed scheme empowers the GS to verify multiple inputs at once through batch verification method. We demonstrate that within the random oracle model, the IOOSC-U2G scheme guarantees security, specifically confidentiality and unforgeability, relying on the computational hardness assumptions of the elliptic curve inverse Computational Diffie-Hellman problem and the elliptic Discrete Logarithm problem, respectively. Moreover, our scheme outperforms current methods, particularly in computational and communication efficiency.

The rapid advancement and wide application of the Internet of Things technology (IoT) have brought unprecedented convenience to people’s production and life. A great number of devices are connected to the IoT network to provide various services for people, which also makes the IoT more vulnerable to various cyber-attacks. This paper designs a novel IoT web attack detection architecture, which combines the powerful knowledge expression ability and high interpretability of symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) with the adaptive learning ability of connectionist AI to form a closed loop of knowledge embedding and extraction, effectively improve the detection ability of web attacks. The architecture solves the “black box” feature of deep learning models and can obtain knowledge from the trained detection model and add it to the training process of the new model to improve detection capabilities. It also uses the advantages of blockchain technology to realize intelligent sharing between different detection systems, solve the problem of difficult detection model updates and training data acquisition “bottlenecks”. To better detect web attacks, we propose a semi-supervised learning method based on an interpretable convolutional neural network (CNN) to reduce misjudgments during self-training and improve detection accuracy. Additionally, we propose a new feature method to extract the features of web logs in IoT devices, which can help the system to detect web attacks in IoT more quickly and accurately. Simulation results on two different datasets show that the proposed architecture and method can effectively detect web attacks in IoT and reduce the false positive rate.

Proper and effective toothbrushing technique is crucial for maintaining oral health. However, there are often limited opportunities for individuals to receive specific training in toothbrushing posture in their daily lives. In this article, we propose Hygiea+, a convenient, energy-efficient, and highly accurate toothbrushing monitoring system based on wrist-worn wearables. By leveraging inertial measurement units (IMUs) in wrist-worn devices for gesture sensing, Hygiea+ enables users to accurately and efficiently monitor their toothbrushing activities without any modifications to the toothbrush. We propose a number of novel techniques to achieve the goal of high sensing accuracy and energy efficiency. To reduce the energy consumption of continuous IMU sampling, we model the sensing problem as a Markov process and design a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP)-based adaptive sampling strategy to dynamically adjust the sampling frequency. To achieve high sensing accuracy, we first propose a novel signal preprocessing method to mitigate variations resulting from different toothbrush types and user habits. Then, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-based data distillation mechanism to extract key segments from continuous toothbrushing actions, thus reducing the impact of redundant data and noise. In the classification stage, we design an attention-based long short-term memory (AT-LSTM) network for fine-grained toothbrushing posture recognition. In addition, to address the accuracy degradation of new users, we adopt the common but effective fine-tuning method to alleviate the data collection burden on new users. Finally, we connect advanced large language models (LLMs) to provide users with necessary feedback on toothbrushing behavior and health recommendations. Extensive experiments using both manual and electric toothbrushes demonstrate Hygiea+ achieves up to 98.8% accuracy in toothbrushing posture recognition while maintaining superior energy efficiency.

While computing task offloading in mobile edge computing (MEC) has been extensively studied, existing research has primarily focused on the mobility-awareness arising from opportunistic contact between edge devices. However, in a crowdsourced MEC system, it is essential to incentivize edge users to relocate for offloading tasks to crowdsourced edge devices. This movement-aware task offloading is particularly important for the crowdsourced system operation and has not yet been thoroughly explored. Moreover, the situation becomes more complex when users are socially connected and D2D-enabled, yet few works have considered these characteristics in combination, particularly from an economic incentive perspective. Therefore, a new incentive framework is needed to analyze the economic issues comprehensively. In this work, we focus on designing a truthful incentive mechanism, where socially-connected D2D users can be incentivized to move around for offloading tasks. To truthfully elicit private information, we model the resource allocation between edge devices and users as a multi-seller multi-buyer double auction mechanism with realistic MEC constraints, such as delay and storage limitation. Theoretically, we show that the proposed mechanism is computationally efficient and achieves desirable economic properties, including truthfulness, individual rationality, and budget balance. Simulations demonstrate that the mechanism achieves good system efficiency, with a performance improvement of 20% compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

This study presents a systematic literature review on blockchain-based authentication in smart environments that include smart city, smart home, smart grid, smart healthcare, smart farming and smart transportation. The review incorporated 39 articles presenting blockchain solutions for security and privacy issues through authentication mechanisms in these smart environments. Guided by three research questions to determine the main issues in smart environment, the availability of blockchain-based authentication solutions and identified research gaps and future research endeavors, this review used PRISMA method to provide insights on the use of blockchain-based authentication schemes. The research gap is that blockchain solutions are mostly at the proposal, and sometimes conceptual stage is in the reviewed articles. In addition, solutions presented in smart environments require exploration into blockchain. The findings show similar situational issues across different smart environments and the flexibility and adaptability of blockchain to provide solutions to the identified issues pertaining to security and privacy. More clearly, the authentication problem posed across different smart environments can be adapted to blockchain technology provided that it is combined with other technologies to increase efficiency, despite the existence of large-scale authentication mechanisms. Now, blockchain still has the unique, distributed feature of converting the current database into blockchain databases. This review guided future research directions which could further contribute to the sustainable management of smart environments.

In autonomous transportation, the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup-delivery and time windows (VRPSPDTW) plays a crucial role in enhancing transportation efficiency, thereby garnering significant research attention over the past decade. However, due to the increased complexity of VRPSPDTW, traditional heuristic algorithms have been inadequate in solving this problem. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a multitask-based evolutionary algorithm (MBEA) with knowledge transfer designed specifically for solving VRPSPDTW in autonomous transportation. MBEA tackles large-scale VRPSPDTW instances by utilizing multiple auxiliary tasks to aid the optimization process. Initially, MBEA generates$k$different auxiliary tasks by randomly selecting a subset of customers from the original VRPSPDTW. Subsequently, an evolutionary multitasking approach is employed to generate offspring solutions. This enables the transfer of valuable routing information among tasks, facilitating the evolutionary search for the original VRPSPDTW. Experimental studies conducted on a practical test suite of large-scale VRPSPDTW instances validate the superiority of our proposed algorithm over several recently proposed approaches.Note to Practitioners—The vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup-delivery and time windows (VRPSPDTW) is prevalent in autonomous transportation and finds application in various industrial sectors. It arises when manufacturing companies need to collect scrap products from customers for recycling purposes or deliver purchased commodities within specified time windows. However, traditional optimization methods face challenges in effectively addressing these problems due to their large-scale requirements and the necessity to provide satisfactory service. Thus, this paper proposes a multitask-based evolutionary algorithm with knowledge transfer that aims to obtain optimal solutions for VRPSPDTW. Our algorithm utilizes multiple auxiliary tasks to facilitate the optimization process for the original large-scale VRPSPDTW. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in dealing with practical large-scale VRPSPDTW within a reasonable time frame.

Multiobjective multitasking optimization (MTO) needs to solve a set of multiobjective optimization problems simultaneously, and tries to speed up their solution by transferring useful search experiences across tasks. However, the quality of transfer solutions will significantly impact the transfer effect, which may even deteriorate the optimization performance with an improper selection of transfer solutions. To alleviate this issue, this article suggests a new multiobjective multitasking evolutionary algorithm (MMTEA) with decomposition-based transfer selection, called MMTEA-DTS. In this algorithm, all tasks are first decomposed into a set of subproblems, and then the transfer potential of each solution can be quantified based on the performance improvement ratio of its associated subproblem. Only high-potential solutions are selected to promote knowledge transfer. Moreover, to diversify the transfer of search experiences, a hybrid transfer evolution method is designed in this article. In this way, more diverse search experiences are transferred from high-potential solutions across different tasks to speed up their convergence. Three well-known benchmark suites suggested in the competition of evolutionary MTO and one real-world problem suite are used to verify the effectiveness of MMTEA-DTS. The experiments validate its advantages in solving most of the test problems when compared to five recently proposed MMTEAs.

Protein methylation is one of the most important reversible post-translational modifications (PTMs), playing a vital role in the regulation of gene expression. Protein methylation sites serve as biomarkers in cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, influencing various aspects of normal cell biology and pathogenesis. Nonetheless, the majority of existing computational methods for predictingprotein methylation sites(PMSP) have been constructed based on protein sequences, with few methods leveraging the topological information of proteins. To address this issue, we propose an innovative framework for predicting Methylation Sites using Graphs (GraphMethySite) that employs graph convolution network in conjunction with Bayesian Optimization (BO) to automatically discover the graphical structure surrounding a candidate site and improve the predictive accuracy. In order to extract the most optimal subgraphs associated with methylation sites, we extend GraphMethySite by coupling it with a hybrid Bayesian optimization (together named GraphMethySite$^+$) to determine and visualize the topological relevance among amino-acid residues. We evaluated our framework on two extended protein methylation datasets, and empirical results demonstrate that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art methylation prediction methods.

Crack detection has attracted extensive attention in an intelligent transportation system (ITS). Despite the substantial progress of deep learning technology on crack recognition tasks, due to the various limitations in traffic, equipment, and time, it is hard to collect copious samples for training deep models. Considering this, implicitly semantic data augmentation (ISDA) tries to augment the training set in the feature space. However, when applying it to crack recognition tasks, our empirical studies reveal that those poor-classified augmented samples have little semantic relevance to the crack class, resulting in a non-negligible negative effect on training deep models. Since the augmented features follow the multivariate normal distribution, it is computationally inefficient to explicitly sample those features and filter out the hard-classified augmented features. To this end, we propose the implicit gradient-modulated semantic data augmentation (IGMSDA) for addressing the above problems. Concretely, this paper first proposes gradient-modulated (GM) loss to dynamically modulate the gradient of those poor-classified augmented samples by reshaping the standard cross-entropy loss. And then, in the feature space, we derive an upper bound of the expected GM loss on the augmented training set to avoid the costly explicit sampling process. Experiments show that IGMSDA improves the generalization performance of the existing deep models on crack recognition datasets.

Mobile edge caching is promising to improve content delivery and alleviate backbone burden by caching contents at the network edges. The commercial deployment relies on a comprehensive understanding of the economic interactions involved. This paper studies the edge caching enabled Internet ecosystem including a Content Provider (CP), a Global ISP (G-ISP) providing backbone services, a Local ISP (L-ISP) providing access services, and End-Users (EUs). The CP serves EUs via Internet servers or L-ISP's edge cache. We formulate their multi-tiered interactions as a three-stage dynamic game. In Stage I, CP determines edge cache storage to purchase from L-ISP and cache access fee to charge EUs. In Stage II, G-ISP and L-ISP determine backbone and access prices. In Stage III, EUs decide whether to choose edge cache services, considering cache hit probability, cache access fee, and backbone access prices. We analyze the subgame perfect equilibrium by elaborately designing five cases of EUs' choices, five regions of ISPs' pricing, and three patterns of CP's caching, undercooperativeandcompetitiveISP pricing scenarios. Our analysis demonstrates that adopting edge caching leads to win-win outcomes for all parties involved. Furthermore, we find that competitive pricing is more advantageous for CP's profit when cache costs are low, while cooperative pricing is more beneficial when cache costs are high.

Energy-efficiency is one of the most important design criteria for mobile systems, such as smartphones and tablets. But current mobile systems always over-provision resources to satisfy users. The root cause is that, we have no knowledge on how much of system performance/energy will exactly satisfy users. Psychophysics defines the quantified link between physical stimuli and human-perceived stimuli. So, we will leverage psychophysics to study the quantified correlation between computer architecture resources (i.e., physical stimuli) and user satisfaction (i.e., human-perceived stimuli). We then exploit such correlation to precisely apportion resources to operate tasks and accurately satisfy users. Benefiting from our precisely-defined user satisfaction criteria and well-designed algorithms, we can reduce energy consumption of computer architectures by up to 42.9% without harming user experience. To the best of our knowledge, we for the first time theoretically and accurately model such substantial correlation. Our work opens a new research domain for fundamentally improving mobiles’ energy-efficiency.

The advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has significantly transformed the dynamic between humans and devices, as well as device-to-device interactions. This paradigm shift has led to profound changes in human lifestyles and production processes. Through the interconnectedness of numerous sensors and controllers via networks, the IoT facilitates the seamless integration of humans with diverse devices, leading to substantial economic advantages. Nevertheless, the burgeoning IoT industry and the rapid proliferation of various IoT devices have also introduced a multitude of security vulnerabilities. Cyber attackers frequently exploit cyber attacks to compromise IoT devices, jeopardizing user privacy and property security, thereby posing a grave menace to the overall security of the IoT ecosystem. In this paper, we propose a novel IoT Web attack detection system based on a joint embedded prediction architecture (JEPA), which effectively alleviates the security issues faced by IoT. It can obtain high-level semantic features in IoT traffic data through non-generative self-supervised learning. These features can more effectively distinguish normal data from attack data and help improve the overall detection performance of the system. Moreover, we propose a feature interaction module based on a dual-branch network, which effectively fuses low-level features and high-level features, and comprehensively aggregates global features and local features. Simulation results on multiple datasets show that our proposed system has better detection performance and robustness.

The annotation of Open Reading Frames (ORFs) is a crucial step in gene annotation, as it precisely delineates the specific regions of expressed genes. However, small Open Reading Frames (smORFs), in comparison to ORFs, are shorter in length, exhibit lower expression abundance, and are more challenging to predict. Particularly in the presence of noise in prokaryotic data and limited availability of positive sample data, the difficulty of prediction is amplified. Therefore, it is necessary to study smORF prediction methods. However, current machine learning models use limited data for modeling and overlook the existence of undiscovered positive samples within the negative samples. Additionally, they do not incorporate prior knowledge that can be calibrated to enhance the 3-nt periodicity. This work utilizes a multimodal VAE for data dimensionality reduction and employs a GAN to generate latent vectors for data augmentation. It incorporates PU learning to leverage unknown samples and combines Riboseq data from experiments with and without antibiotic treatment. Additionally, an adversarial training mechanism is employed to enhance the model’s robustness.

Transcription factors (TFs) are crucial proteins that regulate gene transcription by binding to specific sites on DNA, known as transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs). Identifying TFBSs enables the design of drugs to modulate gene expression, making it important for drug design and gene therapy. While deep learning-based methods have been proposed for predicting TFBSs, there is room for improvement. This study introduces TFBSnet, a novel deep learning-based technique that accurately predicts TFBSs by extracting diverse feature data from DNA sequences and utilizing a convolutional neural network (CNN) combined with SKNet. Experimental results show that TFBSnet outperforms existing methods. It also demonstrates accurate prediction of TF binding sites in human cells without label data and exceptional performance in predicting TFBSs in plant cells using 265 TFs in Arabidopsis. Ablation analysis highlights the integration of different features and advanced feature extraction by SKNet as contributors to TFBSnet's superior predictive capability.

Identifying the substrates of ubiquitin protein ligase (E3) and deubiquitinases (DUB) contributes to the discovery of potential therapeutic targets for diseases. However, experimental identification of E3/DUB-substrate interactions is costly and time-consuming. Current computational methods for predicting E3/DUB-substrate interactions rely heavily on specific domain knowledge and involve complex and diverse biological data processing. To address this challenge, we proposed a deep learning prediction model, named Deep-USIpred, which predicts E3/DUB-substrate interactions using protein sequences. The proposed Deep-USIpred model encodes protein sequences with a pretrained model and utilizes 1DCNN-BNN deep learning algorithm to make a robust prediction model. We evaluated the performance of the proposed model on real datasets, and our experimental results show that it can achieve excellent prediction performance on the tasks of ESI and DSI. Our proposed method provides a promising alternative for the prediction of E3/DUB-substrate interactions, which has the potential to accelerate drug discovery for various diseases. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/PGTSING/Deep-USIpred.

Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) is a retina disorder that affects premature infants with lower weights. If the patient cannot get the treatment in time when the illness reaches the last stage, irreversible vision loss will be caused. Nevertheless, there has been relatively little consideration given to the segmentation of the ridge, the key clinical characteristic of the illness. Additionally, existing research has not adequately addressed several segmentation issues, such as fragmentary topology, class imbalance, and false positives. This paper proposes a Densely Dilated U-Net (DD-UNet) improved from U-Net to tackle these challenges. Furthermore, the post-processing techniques based on the spatial relationship between vessels and ridges, along with the relative pixel counts of ridges and false positive results is integrated to mitigate false positive results in the predicted ridge. To enhance the precision of thin vessel, a sliding window sampling method is introduced for refined training. Compared with the state-of-the-art models in medical image segmentation, DD-UNet performs well in curvilinear structure segmentation of fundus image. For instance, our DD-UNet outperforms the Attention U-Net by 6.26% in terms of sensitivity and exhibits a 1.85% higher dice score in ridge segmentation.

The super data transmission capability and connectivity of wireless technologies have promoted the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) era. However, the distinct characteristics of IoT devices make them vulnerable to malicious attacks such as hackers and viruses. This paper designs a novel IoT intrusion detection architecture that combines knowledge extraction and sharing, which can extract human understandable knowledge from the trained deep learning model and apply it to the training process of the detection model. The obtained knowledge can also be shared with other detection systems based on the blockchain, which will effectively improve the intrusion detection capabilities of the IoT and realize collective learning. In addition, we propose a CNN-based semi-supervised learning method under the constraints of rules, which can effectively alleviate the catas-trophic interference generated during the self-training process and improve detection accuracy. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed architecture and method.

With the increasingly sophisticated algorithms of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), it is difficult for mobile terminals with limited resources to exploit the performance of SLAM algorithms fully. Traditional deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approaches have offloaded SLAM tasks to servers. However, existing solutions suffer from low data efficiency and poor generalization problems. This paper proposes a novel approach based on recent advances in rewardless active inference for SLAM back-end optimization. Specifically, the reward function is replaced with simple rewardless guidance in active inference. In addition, instead of simply considering the SLAM task as a whole, we delve into the sub-tasks of back-end optimization of SLAM for offloading and resource allocation. Simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed scheme.

Cracks are usually curve-like structures that are the focus of many computer-vision applications (e.g., road safety inspection and surface inspection of the industrial facilities). The existing pixel-based crack segmentation methods rely on time-consuming and costly pixel-level annotations. And the object-based crack detection methods exploit the horizontal box to detect the crack without considering crack orientation, resulting in scale variation and intra-class variation. Considering this, we provide a new perspective for crack detection that models the cracks as a series of sub-cracks with the corresponding orientation. However, the vanilla adaptation of the existing oriented object detection methods to the crack detection tasks will result in limited performance, due to the boundary discontinuity issue and the ambiguities in sub-crack orientation. In this paper, we propose a first-of-its-kind oriented sub-crack detector, dubbed as CrackDet, which is derived from a novel piecewise angle definition, to ease the boundary discontinuity problem. And then, we propose a multi-branch angle regression loss for learning sub-crack orientation and variance together. Since there are no related benchmarks, we construct three fully annotated datasets, namely, ORC, ONPP, and OCCSD, which involve various cracks in road pavement and industrial facilities. Experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art crack detectors.

The emergence of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has promoted the development of synthesized high-fidelity views of the intricate real world. However, it is still a very demanding task to repaint the content in NeRF. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that can take RGB images as input and alter the 3D content in neural scenes. Our work leverages existing diffusion models to guide changes in the designated 3D content. Specifically, we semantically select the target object and a pre-trained diffusion model will guide the NeRF model to generate new 3D objects, which can improve the editability, diversity, and application range of NeRF. Experiment results show that our algorithm is effective for editing 3D objects in NeRF under different text prompts, including editing appearance, shape, and more. We validate our method on both real-world datasets and synthetic-world datasets for these editing tasks. Please visit https://repaintnerf.github.io for a better view of our results.

As the research and applications of large language model (LLM) become increasingly sophisticated, it is difficult for resource-limited mobile terminals to run large-model inference tasks efficiently. Traditional deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based approaches have been used to offload LLM inference tasks to servers. However, existing solutions suffer from data inefficiency, insensitivity to latency requirements, and non-adaptability to task load variations. In this paper, we propose an active inference with rewardless guidance algorithm using expected future free energy for offloading decisions and allocating resources for the LLM inference task offloading and resource allocation problem of cloud-edge networks systems. Experimental results show that our proposed method has superior performance over mainstream DRLs, improves in data utilization efficiency, and is more adaptable to changing task load scenarios.

Recently proposed split learning (SL) is a promising distributed machine learning paradigm that enables machine learning without accessing the raw data of the clients. SL can be viewed as one specific type of serial federation learning. However, deploying SL on resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices still has some limitations, including high communication costs and catastrophic forgetting problems caused by imbalanced data distribution of devices. In this article, we design and implement IoTSL, which is an efficient distributed learning framework for efficient cloud-edge collaboration in IoT systems. IoTSL combines generative adversarial networks (GANs) and differential privacy techniques to train local data-based generators on participating devices, and generate data with privacy protection. On the one hand, IoTSL pretrains the global model using the generative data, and then fine-tunes the model using the local data to lower the communication cost. On the other hand, the generated data is used to impute the missing classes of devices to alleviate the commonly seen catastrophic forgetting phenomenon. We use three common data sets to verify the proposed framework. Extensive experimental results show that compared to the conventional SL, IoTSL significantly reduces communication costs, and efficiently alleviates the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon.

Information freshness, characterized by Age of Information (AoI), is important for sensor applications involving timely status updates. In many cases, the wireless signals from one sensor can be received by multiple access points (APs). This article investigates the average AoI for cooperative APs (Co-APs), in which they can share information through a wired backbone network. We first study a basic backbone-assisted Co-AP system where APs share only decoded packets. Experimental results on software-defined radios (SDRs) indicate that Co-AP significantly improves the average AoI performance over a single-AP system. Next, we investigate an improved Co-AP system, called Soft-Co-AP. In addition to sharing decoded packets, Soft-Co-AP shares and collects soft information of packets that the APs fail to decode for further joint decoding. A critical issue in Soft-Co-AP is determining the number of quantization bits that represent the soft information (each soft bit) shared over the backbone. While more quantization bits per soft bit improves the joint decoding performance, it leads to higher backbone delay. We experimentally study the average AoI of Soft-Co-AP by evaluating the tradeoff between the backbone delay and the number of quantization bits. SDR experiments show that when the number of sensors is large, Soft-Co-AP further reduces the average AoI by 12% compared with Co-AP. Interestingly, good average AoI performance is usually achieved when the number of quantization bits per soft bit is neither too large nor too small.

Prokaryotic viruses, also known as bacteriophages, play crucial roles in regulating microbial communities and have the potential for phage therapy applications. Accurate prediction of phage-host interactions is essential for understanding the dynamics of these viruses and their impacts on bacterial populations. Numerous computational methods have been developed to tackle this challenging task. However, most existing prediction models can be constrained due to the substantial number of unknown interactions in comparison to the constrained diversity of available training data. To solve the problem, we introduce a model for prokaryotic virus host prediction with graph contrastive augmentation (PHPGCA). Specifically, we construct a comprehensive heterogeneous graph by integrating virus-virus protein similarity and virus-host DNA sequence similarity information. As the backbone encoder for learning node representations in the virus-prokaryote graph, we employ LGCN, a state-of-the-art graph embedding technique. Additionally, we apply graph contrastive learning to augment the node representations without the need for additional labels. We further conducted two case studies aimed at predicting the host range of multi-species phages, helping to understand the phage ecology and evolution.

Interactions between transcription factor and target gene form the main part of gene regulation network in human, which are still complicating factors in biological research. Specifically, for nearly half of those interactions recorded in established database, their interaction types are yet to be confirmed. Although several computational methods exist to predict gene interactions and their type, there is still no method available to predict them solely based on topology information. To this end, we proposed here a graph-based prediction model called KGE-TGI and trained in a multi-task learning manner on a knowledge graph that we specially constructed for this problem. The KGE-TGI model relies on topology information rather than being driven by gene expression data. In this paper, we formulate the task of predicting interaction types of transcript factor and target genes as a multi-label classification problem for link types on a heterogeneous graph, coupled with solving another link prediction problem that is inherently related. We constructed a ground truth dataset as benchmark and evaluated the proposed method on it. As a result of the 5-fold cross experiments, the proposed method achieved average AUC values of 0.9654 and 0.9339 in the tasks of link prediction and link type classification, respectively. In addition, the results of a series of comparison experiments also prove that the introduction of knowledge information significantly benefits to the prediction and that our methodology achieve state-of-the-art performance in this problem.

Transcription factors (TFs) are DNA binding proteins involved in the regulation of gene expression. They exist in all organisms and activate or repress transcription by binding to specific DNA sequences. Traditionally, TFs have been identified by experimental methods that are time-consuming and costly. In recent years, various computational methods have been developed to identify TF to overcome these limitations. However, there is a room for further improvement in the predictive performance of these tools in terms of accuracy. We report here a novel computational tool, TFnet, that provides accurate and comprehensive TF predictions from protein sequences. The accuracy of these predictions is substantially better than the results of the existing TF predictors and methods. Especially, it outperforms comparable methods significantly when sequence similarity to other known sequences in the database drops below 40%. Ablation tests reveal that the high predictive performance stems from innovative ways used in TFnet to derive sequence Position-Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM) and encode inputs.

The recognition of protein-protein interaction sites (PPIs) is beneficial for the interpretation of protein functions and the development of new drugs. Traditional biological experiments to identify PPI sites are expensive and inefficient, leading to the generation of various computational methods to predict PPIs. However, the accurate prediction of PPI sites remains a big challenge due to the existence of the sample imbalance issue. In this work, we design a novel model that combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with Batch Normalization to predict PPI sites, and employ an oversampling technique Borderline-SMOTE to address the sample imbalance issue. In particular, to better characterize the amino acid residues on the protein chains, we employ a sliding window approach for feature extraction of target residues and their contextual residues. We verify the effectiveness of our method by comparing our method with the existing state-of-the-art schemes. The performance validations of our method on three public datasets achieve accuracies of 88.6%, 89.9%, and 86.7%, respectively, all showing improved accuracies compared with the existing schemes. Moreover, the ablation experiment results suggest that Batch Normalization can greatly improve the generalization and the prediction stability of our model.

Phages are the functional viruses that infect bacteria and they play important roles in microbial communities and ecosystems. Phage research has attracted great attention due to the wide applications of phage therapy in treating bacterial infection in recent years. Metagenomics sequencing technique can sequence microbial communities directly from an environmental sample. Identifying phage sequences from metagenomic data is a vital step in the downstream of phage analysis. However, the existing methods for phage identification suffer from some limitations in the utilization of the phage feature for prediction, and therefore their prediction performance still need to be improved further. In this article, we propose a novel deep neural network (called MetaPhaPred) for identifying phages from metagenomic data. In MetaPhaPred, we first use a word embedding technique to encode the metagenomic sequences into word vectors, extracting the latent feature vectors of DNA words. Then, we design a deep neural network with a convolutional neural network (CNN) to capture the feature maps in sequences, and with a bi-directional long short-term memory network (Bi-LSTM) to capture the long-term dependencies between features from both forward and backward directions. The feature map consists of a set of feature patterns, each of which is the weighted feature extracted by a convolution filter with convolution kernels in the CNN slide along the input feature vectors. Next, an attention mechanism is used to enhance contributions of important features. Experimental results on both simulated and real metagenomic data with different lengths demonstrate the superiority of the proposed MetaPhaPred over the state-of-the-art methods in identifying phage sequences.

In recent years, vaccine safety incidents have occurred frequently. To protect vaccine safety, researchers have proposed to use blockchain to secure the vaccine circulation process. Technically, blockchain has some limitations in solving vaccine and other supply chain problems, such as large on-chain storage consumption and low throughput. To better alleviate these restrictions, we propose an improved, blockchain-based, storage-efficient vaccine safety protection scheme in this work. Specifically, we first model the vaccine circulation process. We then design a system to protect vaccine circulation using blockchain, cloud, and cryptographic mechanisms. The proposed system leverages the cloud to implement the vaccine circulation model. Correspondingly, it uses the blockchain to store circulating data certificates and signatures. We evaluated the proposed conceptual model using a consortium blockchain. The experimental results show that the proposed system is efficient.

Clinical evidence began to accumulate, suggesting that circRNAs can be novel therapeutic targets for various diseases and play a critical role in human health. However, limited by the complex mechanism of circRNA, it is difficult to quickly and large-scale explore the relationship between disease and circRNA in the wet-lab experiment. In this work, we design a new computational model MGRCDA on account of the metagraph recommendation theory to predict the potential circRNA-disease associations. Specifically, we first regard the circRNA-disease association prediction problem as the system recommendation problem, and design a series of metagraphs according to the heterogeneous biological networks; then extract the semantic information of the disease and the Gaussian interaction profile kernel (GIPK) similarity of circRNA and disease as network attributes; finally, the iterative search of the metagraph recommendation algorithm is used to calculate the scores of the circRNA-disease pair. On the gold standard dataset circR2Disease, MGRCDA achieved a prediction accuracy of 92.49% with an area under the ROC curve of 0.9298, which is significantly higher than other state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, among the top 30 disease-related circRNAs recommended by the model, 25 have been verified by the latest published literature. The experimental results prove that MGRCDA is feasible and efficient, and it can recommend reliable candidates to further wet-lab experiment and reduce the scope of the experiment.

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) have shown promising performance for solving expensive optimization problems (EOPs) whose true evaluations are computationally or physically expensive. However, most existing SAEAs only focus on the problems with low dimensionality and they rarely consider solving large-scale EOPs (LSEOPs). To fill this research gap, this article proposes an ensemble surrogate-based coevolutionary optimizer for tackling LSEOPs. First, some local surrogate models are trained with low-dimensional data subsets by using feature selection on the large-scale decision variables, a part of which are used to build a selective ensemble surrogate for better approximating the target LSEOP. Then, a coevolutionary optimizer guided by the ensemble surrogate is designed by running two populations to cooperatively solve the target LSEOP and the simplified auxiliary problem. The information of offspring from the two populations is shared to facilitate the coevolution process, which can exploit the searching experience from the simplified auxiliary problem to help solving the target LSEOP. Finally, an effective infill selection criterion is used to update the ensemble surrogate and enhance its approximate performance. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, a number of well-known benchmark problems are used and the experimental results validate our superior performance over nine state-of-the-art SAEAs on most cases.

This work aims to develop a framework of automatic medical fraud detection (AMFD) which can be deployed in healthcare industry. To address the issue that the medical fraud labels are insufficient in both size and classes for training a good AMFD model, this work proposes a novel Variational AutoEncoder-based Relational Model (VAERM) which can simultaneously exploit Patient-Doctor relational network and one-class fraud labels to improve the fraud detection. Then, the proposed VAERM coupled with active learning strategy can assist healthcare industry experts to conduct cost-effective fraud investigation. Finally, we propose an online model updating method to reduce the computation and memory requirement while preserving the predictive performance. The proposed framework is tested in a real world dataset and it empirically outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both automatic fraud detection and fraud investigation tasks.

Recent decades have witnessed great advancements in multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) for multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs). However, these progressively improved MOEAs have not necessarily been equipped with scalable and learnable problem-solving strategies for new and grand challenges brought by the scaling-up MOPs with continuously increasing complexity from diverse aspects, mainly, including expensive cost of function evaluations, many objectives, large-scale search space, time-varying environments, and multitask. Under different scenarios, divergent thinking is required in designing new powerful MOEAs for solving them effectively. In this context, research studies on learnable MOEAs with machine learning techniques have received extensive attention in the field of evolutionary computation. This article begins with a general taxonomy of scaling-up MOPs and learnable MOEAs, followed by an analysis of the challenges that these MOPs pose to traditional MOEAs. Then, we synthetically overview recent advances of learnable MOEAs in solving various scaling-up MOPs, focusing primarily on four attractive directions (i.e., learnable evolutionary discriminators for environmental selection, learnable evolutionary generators for reproduction, learnable evolutionary evaluators for function evaluations, and learnable evolutionary transfer modules for sharing or reusing optimization experience). The insight of learnable MOEAs is offered to readers as a reference to the general track of the efforts in this field.

With the continuous improvement of hardware computing power, edge computing of industrial data has been gradually applied. In the past decade, the promotion of edge computing has also greatly improved the efficiency of industrial production. Compared with the conventional cloud computing, it not only saves the bandwidth consumption of data transmission, but also ensures the terminal data security to a certain extent. However, the continuous update of attack types also put forward new requirements for the privacy protection of industrial edge computing. So it should fundamentally solve the risk of industrial data leakage in the process of deep model training in edge terminal. In this article, we propose a new federated edge learning framework based on hybrid differential privacy and adaptive compression for industrial data processing. Specifically, it first completes the adaptive gradient compression preparation, then constructs the industrial federated learning model, and finally makes use of adaptive differential privacy model to optimize, so as to complete the privacy protection towards the transmission of gradient parameters in industrial environment. By optimizing the hybrid differential privacy and adaptive compression, we can better prevent the terminal data privacy against inference attacks. The experimental results show that this method is very effective in the industrial edge computing situation, and it also opens up a new direction for the effect of differential privacy in federated learning.

For emerging industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), intelligent anomaly detection is a key step to build smart industry. Especially, explosive time-series data pose enormous challenges to the information mining and processing for modern industry. How to identify and detect the multidimensional industrial time-series anomaly is an important issue. However, most of the existing studies fail to handle with large amounts of unlabeled data, thus generating the undesirable results. In this article, we propose a novel integrated deep generative model, which is built by generative adversarial networks based on bidirectional long short-term memory and attention mechanism (AMBi-GAN). The structure for the generator and the discriminator is the bidirectional long short-term memory with attention mechanism, which can capture time-series dependence. Reconstruction loss and generation loss test the input of sample training space and random latent space. Experimental results show that the detection performance of our proposed AMBi-GAN has the potential to improve the detection accuracy of industrial multidimensional time-series anomaly toward IIoT in the era of artificial intelligence.

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which is an extension of traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), ensures the provision of safe and efficient vehicular communications. However, the burgeoning IoV faces several challenges in terms of traffic information security and vehicle identity privacy during wireless transmission. Generally, vehicles move faster on the highway necessitating the use of reliable technology to communicate with infrastructure on the roadside efficiently and securely. Lately, researchers have proposed several different message dissemination methods for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. However, they suffer from different concerns (i.e., security weaknesses, computationally heavy, and high communication/storage overhead); therefore, they are unreliable for delay-sensitive communications. To cope with this, we come up with an enhanced certificateless and identity-based offline/online heterogeneous signcryption (CIOOHSC) protocol for V2I communications in edge computing-based IoV to simultaneously achieve confidentiality, integrity, authentication, non-repudiation, and identity anonymity in a logically single step. The CIOOHSC protocol allows a vehicle in certificateless cryptography to transmit a message to an edge node in identity-based cryptography. In the online phase, there are no point multiplication operations as they are already carried out in the offline phase. This reduces the computational load considerably in the online phase. Furthermore, our protocol enables the edge node to aggregate multiple messages and process them simultaneously to boost performance. The CIOOHSC protocol’s security is proved in the random oracle model under the hard problems’ assumptions. Our protocol outperforms recent similar schemes in terms of computational complexity, communication/storage overhead, and average transmission delay, according to the performance evaluation findings.

Recently we have witnessed the rise of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) and the shift of sensing paradigm from cloud-centric to the edge-centric, which effectively improves the sensing capability of intelligence transportation systems. To improve the real-time sensing performance, in this work we propose an ensemble sensing based scheme to solve the time-constraint synchronized inference problem and achieve robust inference with heterogeneous IoT devices in intelligence transportation systems. We design and implement Ensen, which incorporates various novel techniques such as customized DNN model design, KD-based model training, and dynamic deep ensemble management, etc., to achieve improved accuracy and maximize the computational resource usage of the whole sensing group. Extensive evaluations on different types of common IoT devices have shown that Ensen achieves a robust performance and can be easily extended to different types of convolutional neural networks.

Drone logistics delivery is a potential booster to redefine the logistics system efficiency, which has been a new special hot research field. Among that, how to optimize drone trajectory data and find optimal delivery path is a crucial problem. However, most existing studies fail to derive the feasible trajectory data due to underestimating drone energy consumption and delivery multi-variant constraints for air transportation. In this paper, we propose a novel self-driven learning procedure, named attention-based pointer network (A-Ptr-Net) model, which can solve drone delivery trajectory optimization problem. The generated A-Ptr-Net model coupled with attention mechanism is effective on adapting to the new drone trajectory data automatically, regardless of explicit distance matrix. We go into developing the convex function constraints related to drone nonlinear energy consumption, customer demand and service time windows, which is applied on A-Ptr-Net model for optimizing the drone logistics delivery. Numerical experiments indicate that the proposed method performs significantly better than classical heuristics for drone trajectory analysis and optimization.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being used in many challenging and diversified applications. Meanwhile, UAV’s ability of autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance becomes more and more critical. This paper focuses on filling up the gap between deep reinforcement learning (DRL) theory and practical application by involving attention mechanism and hierarchical mechanism to solve some severe problems encountered in the practical application of DRL. More specifically, in order to improve the robustness of DRL, we use averaged estimation function instead of the normal value estimation function. Then, we design a recurrent network and a temporal attention mechanism to improve the performance of the algorithm. Third, we propose a hierarchical framework to improve its performance on long-term tasks. Some realistic simulation environments, as well as the real-world, are used to evaluate the proposed UAV autonomous navigation method. The results demonstrate that our DRL-based navigation method performs well in different environments and outperforms the original DrQ algorithm.

As the recent rise of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), the sensing capability of vehicles has become crucial in realizing sophisticated intelligent transportation services. Collaborative sensing, an important approach to extend the sensing coverage of individual vehicles, has become an essential component of connected vehicle systems. However, due to challenges such as privacy concerns, frequent communication interruptions, customized models, and limited available data, the application of collaborative sensing in current ITS systems is still limited. In this paper, we propose BSL, a novel multi-exit split learning-based collaborative inference system. The key innovation of BSL is the introduction of multi-exit to the split network, enabling network training and collaborative inference between distributed device nodes and the cloud in a split manner. Specifically, BSL allows the device node to dynamically collaborate with the cloud by introducing the edge mode and collaboration mode, ensuring that intelligent services provided to the device will be sustained even if the communication is interrupted, which is crucial in ITS systems. We have implemented the system and evaluated it with public dataset on different embedded devices. The results demonstrate the promising performance of BSL.

This paper investigates the information freshness of two-way relay networks (TWRNs) operated with physical-layer network coding (PNC). Information freshness is quantified by age of information (AoI), defined as the time elapsed since the generation time of the latest received information update. PNC reduces the communication latency of TWRNs by turning superimposed electromagnetic waves into network-coded messages so that end users can send update packets to each other more frequently via the relay. While sending update packets more frequently has the potential to reduce AoI, how to handle packet corruption in TWRNs has not been investigated. Specifically, if an old packet is corrupted in any hop of a TWRN, one needs to decide whether to drop or to retransmit the old packet, e.g., a new packet has more recent information but may take more time to be delivered. Therefore, we study the average AoI with and without automatic repeat request (ARQ) in PNC-enabled TWRNs. Interestingly, our analysis shows that neither the non-ARQ scheme nor the pure ARQ scheme achieves a good average AoI. Hence, we put forth an uplink-lost-then-drop (ULTD) protocol that combines packet drop and ARQ. Experiments on software-defined radios indicate that ULTD significantly outperforms non-ARQ and pure ARQ schemes in terms of average AoI, especially when the two end users have imbalanced channel conditions. We believe the insight of ULTD on TWRNs generally applies to other two-hop networks: to achieve high information freshness, when packets are corrupted in the first hop, new packets should be generated and sent (i.e., old packets are discarded); when packets are corrupted in the second hop, old packets should be retransmitted until they are successfully received.

Ubiquitylation is a critical post-translational modification (PTM) process that performs a critical role in a wide range of biological functions and is closely related to hallmarks of cancer, such as DNA damage response and oxidative stress. Over the past several years, deep learning have been widely employed in protein ubiquitylation site prediction tools. However, existing deep learning tools have a common feature that they treat protein sequences as input without considering spatial information of protein. This work exploits the three-dimensional structural protein to develop a novel graph-driven ubiquitylation site predictive model (GraphUbiquSite) combing capsule module to improve predictive accuracy. According to the experimental results on Protein Lysine Modification Database (PLMD), the proposed model can archive better performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.

The discovery of protein-protein interaction sites (PPIs) is vital for exploring the principle of PPI and understanding the nature of life activities. Developing computational approaches to predict PPIs can effectively compensate for the shortcomings of biological experiments, which are mostly time-consuming and vulnerable to noise. In recent years, deep learning has been used to develop PPIs prediction models. Most of them consider the contextual information of the target amino acid residues and use a local protein sequence to represent the targets. However, the traditional deep-learning techniques, e.g., deep neural networks (DNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), disregard the important spatial hierarchies contained in the features of protein sequences, leading to their failure to effectively distinguish the interaction sites from different residue regions. In this work, we design MSE-CapsPPISP, a new deep-learning model to address the PPIs prediction with spatial hierarchies. The key idea of MSE-CapsPPISP is to take into account the hierarchical relationships between the features of protein sequences. We characterize the hierarchical relationships by designing a tailored Capsule Network (CapsNet) model, which is a novel type of neural network with vector neurons. Moreover, to make the network representation more robust, MSE-CapsPPISP uses multi-scale CNNs to extract multi-scale features of protein sequences and Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks to recalibrate the features. The validation results show that our MSE-CapsPPISP outperforms the baseline CNNs-based architecture DeepPPISP and other competing schemes in the PPIs prediction task.

Despite the substantial progress of deep models for crack recognition, due to the inconsistent cracks in varying sizes, shapes, and noisy background textures, there still lacks the discriminative power of the deeply learned features when supervised by the cross-entropy loss. In this paper, we propose the geometry-aware guided loss (GAGL) that enhances the discrimination ability and is only applied in the training stage without extra computation and memory during inference. The GAGL consists of the feature-based geometry-aware projected gradient descent method (FGA-PGD) that approximates the geometric distances of the features to the class boundaries, and the geometry-aware update rule that learns an anchor of each class as the approximation of the feature expected to have the largest geometric distance to the corresponding class boundary. Then the discriminative power can be enhanced by minimizing the distances between the features and their corresponding class anchors in the feature space. To address the limited availability of related benchmarks, we collect a fully annotated dataset, namely, NPP2021, which involves inconsistent cracks and noisy backgrounds in real-world nuclear power plants. Our proposed GAGL outperforms the state of the arts on various benchmark datasets including CRACK2019, SDNET2018, and our NPP2021.

Wireless systems are upgraded to use green energy (e.g., solar, wind, and tide energy) such that the greenhouse gas emission can be neutralized. This work incorporates the on-grid energy into a green coordinated multi-point (CoMP) system to handle the volatile arrival of green energy. In the green CoMP, the long-term weighted throughput maximization problem is investigated by expecting a non-positive consumption of the long-term on-grid energy. Motivated by the capacity-achieving property and simple implementation, an online zero-forcing dirty paper precoder is proposed to update the precoding matrices by combining statistical learning with the Lyapunov learning. A tradeoff relation is theoretically established to show that the long-term weighted throughput approaches the $\mathcal{O}(V)$ -neighbor of optimal value while the long-term consumed on-grid energy increases at a rate of $\mathcal{O}\left( {{{\log }^2}(V)/\sqrt V } \right)$, where V is an introduced control parameter. Numerical results are used to verify the performance of the online zero-forcing dirty paper precoder.

Recent studies show that introducing phonetic information into multi-task learning could significantly improve the performance of speaker embedding extraction. However, benefits of such architectures usually depend largely on the availibility of a well-matched dataset, and domain or language mismatch would result in obvious dropdown in performance. Meanwhile, the utilization of these massive mismatched data and application of these auxiliary tasks may bring many rich features that could be exploited. In this paper, we propose a phoneme-aware adaptation network with discrepancy minimization and dynamically-classified vector for text-independent speaker verification to address these abovementioned challenges. More specifically, our method first utilize the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as part of the total loss function to solve the mismatch between training data of the speaker subnet and the phoneme subnet. And then we use a dynamically-classified vector-guided softmax loss (DV-Softmax), which could adaptively emphasize different high-quality features and dynamically change their weights, to guide the discriminative speaker embedding. Experimental results on VoxCeleb1 data set confirmed its superiority against the other state-of-the-art phoneme adaptation methods, providing approximately 15% relative improvements in equal error rate (EER).

MOTIVATION: Interaction between transcription factor (TF) and its target genes establishes the knowledge foundation for biological researches in transcriptional regulation, the number of which is, however, still limited by biological techniques. Existing computational methods relevant to the prediction of TF-target interactions are mostly proposed for predicting binding sites, rather than directly predicting the interactions. To this end, we propose here a graph attention-based autoencoder model to predict TF-target gene interactions using the information of the known TF-target gene interaction network combined with two sequential and chemical gene characters, considering that the unobserved interactions between transcription factors and target genes can be predicted by learning the pattern of the known ones. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed model is the first attempt to solve this problem by learning patterns from the known TF-target gene interaction network. RESULTS: In this paper, we formulate the prediction task of TF-target gene interactions as a link prediction problem on a complex knowledge graph and propose a deep learning model called GraphTGI, which is composed of a graph attention-based encoder and a bilinear decoder. We evaluated the prediction performance of the proposed method on a real dataset, and the experimental results show that the proposed model yields outstanding performance with an average AUC value of 0.8864 +/- 0.0057 in the 5-fold cross-validation. It is anticipated that the GraphTGI model can effectively and efficiently predict TF-target gene interactions on a large scale. AVAILABILITY: Python code and the datasets used in our studies are made available at https://github.com/YanghanWu/GraphTGI.

MOTIVATION: Identifying the target genes of transcription factors (TFs) is of great significance for biomedical researches. However, using biological experiments to identify TF-target gene interactions is still time consuming, expensive and limited to small scale. Existing computational methods for predicting underlying genes for TF to target is mainly proposed for their binding sites rather than the direct interaction. To bridge this gap, we in this work proposed a deep learning prediction model, named HGETGI, to identify the new TF-target gene interaction. Specifically, the proposed HGETGI model learns the patterns of the known interaction between TF and target gene complemented with their involvement in different human disease mechanisms. It performs prediction based on random walk for meta-path sampling and node embedding in a skip-gram manner. RESULTS: We evaluated the prediction performance of the proposed method on a real dataset and the experimental results show that it can achieve the average area under the curve of 0.8519 ± 0.0731 in fivefold cross validation. Besides, we conducted case studies on the prediction of two important kinds of TF, NFKB1 and TP53. As a result, 33 and 32 in the top-40 ranking lists of NFKB1 and TP53 were successfully confirmed by looking up another public database (hTftarget). It is envisioned that the proposed HGETGI method is feasible and effective for predicting TF-target gene interactions on a large scale. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/PGTSING/HGETGI. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Machine learning (ML) algorithms are essential components in autonomous driving. In most existing connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), a large amount of driving data collected from multiple vehicles are sent to a central server for unified training. However, data privacy and security have become crucial during the data-sharing process. Federated learning (FL) for data security has arisen nowadays, and it can improve the data privacy of distribute machine learning. However, the malicious attackers can still be able to attack the training process. Due to the complete reliance on the central server, FL is very fragile. To address the above problem, we propose Bift: 1) a fully decentralized ML system combined with FL and 2) blockchain to provide a privacy-preserving ML process for CAVs. Bift enables distributed CAVs to train ML models locally using their own driving data and then to upload the local models to get a better global model. More importantly, Bift provides a consensus algorithm named Proof of Federated Learning to resist possible adversaries. We evaluate the performance of Bift and demonstrate that Bift is scalable and robust, and can defend against malicious attacks.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being used in different emerging domains for accomplishing many critical tasks. However, due to the various constraints, such as battery life, computational resources, etc., a UAV under a mission (M-UAV) often needs assistance from an edge/cloud server that is reachable from the M-UAV’s location. A connection between an M-UAV and edge server can be established via an access point or AP. Therefore, before sharing any sensitive information with the edge server, it is essential for an M-UAV to determine the legitimacy of the selected AP. Recently, some works in this direction indicate that a rogue UAV (R-UAV) can successfully mimic a legitimate AP for intercepting the communication channel. Hence, there should be a robust detection mechanism in place for addressing such a threat scenario. In this article, considering one of the emerging domains—the Internet of Vehicle (IoV) networks, at first, we show that communication in the IoV networks can get benefit from the presence of M-UAVs. However, as the link between the M-UAV and edge server can be intercepted by an R-UAV, the adversary may access the sensitive information from the IoV networks. Followed by this, we propose atiming-basedalgorithm for identifying the presence of rogue APs (or R-UAVs) in the channel. The M-UAV executes the timing-based algorithm, and the detection methoddoes notrequire any auxiliary hardware or any modification to the network protocols for meeting the objective. Supported by an extensive evaluation study, we show that without any rigid restriction on the M-UAV’s speed (e.g., by limiting it to almost static) the proposed approach significantly enhances the detection accuracy (at least by a margin of 29.7% and 16.65%) compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Password is one of the most well-known authentication methods in accessing many Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The usage of passwords, however, inherits several drawbacks and emerging vulnerabilities in the IoT platform. However, many solutions have been proposed to tackle these limitations. Most of these defense strategies suffer from a lack of computational power and memory capacity and do not have immediate cover in the IoT platform. Motivated by this consideration, the goal of this article is fivefold. First, we analyze the feasibility of implementing a honeyword-based defense strategy to prevent the latest developed server-side threat on the IoT domain’s password. Second, we perform thorough cryptanalysis of a recently developed honeyword-based method to evaluate its advancement in preventing the threat and explore the best possible way to incorporate it in the IoT platform. Third, we verify that we can add a honeyword-based solution to the IoT infrastructure by ensuring specific guidelines. Fourth, we propose a generic attack model, namely,matching attackutilizing the compromised password file to perform the security check of any legacy-UI approach for meeting the all essential flatness security criterion. Last, we compare the matching attack’s performance with the corresponding one of a benchmark technological methods over the legacy-UI model and confirm that our attack has 5%–22% more vulnerable than others.

Colonoscopy screening is one of the most effective diagnostic tools for detecting intestinal diseases, such as bleeding, polyp, Meckel’s diverticulum, and ulcer. However, the missed rate of manual detection is high due to the lack of experience or fatigue among clinicians. To address this issue, this work proposed a novel autodiagnosis framework built on Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) systems, which can be deployed among multiple hospitals in a distributed fusion. This work presents a two-stage knowledge distillation (TSKD) method coupled with Bayesian optimization (BO) that can exploit distributed colonoscopy data to learn a compact diagnostic model achieving a good tradeoff between predictive performance and resource consumption (e.g., memory and computation). The proposed framework is extensively evaluated in real-world data sets in comparison with its counterparts. A prototype of on-site diagnostic device is implemented to demonstrate the potential for real-world deployment.

With unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies advanced rapidly, many applications have emerged in cities. However, those applications do not widely spread as the safety consideration hinders the UAV from integrating into the civilian environment. This work focuses on investigating the UAV emergency landing problem which is a critical safety functionality of UAV. This work proposed a graph convolution network (GCN)-based decision network to learn by imitating the human pilots’ landing strategy. To alleviate the needs of a large amount of real-world data for model training, the proposed model allows to be trained in a simulated environment and then transferred to the real-world scenario due to the separation of domain-specific terrain classes and domain-independent topological structures among down-looking camera images. The GCN-based decision network can be coupled with a topological heuristic to improve the performance of action prediction in an emergency situation. To evaluate the proposed method, this work implemented a simulation environment for collecting data and testing the UAV emergency landing. The empirical results in both simulated and real-world scenarios show that the proposed methods can outperform the state-of-the-art counterparts in terms of predictive accuracy and success landing rate.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an indispensable part of everyday life, enabling a variety of emerging services and applications. However, the presence of rogue IoT devices has exposed the IoT to untold risks with severe consequences. The first step in securing the IoT is detecting rogue IoT devices and identifying legitimate ones. Conventional approaches use cryptographic mechanisms to authenticate and verify legitimate devices’ identities. However, cryptographic protocols are not available in many systems. Meanwhile, these methods are less effective when legitimate devices can be exploited or encryption keys are disclosed. Therefore, noncryptographic IoT-device identification and rogue device detection become efficient solutions to secure existing systems and will provide additional protection to systems with cryptographic protocols. Noncryptographic approaches require more effort and are not yet adequately investigated. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on machine learning technologies for the identification of IoT devices along with the detection of compromised or falsified ones from the viewpoint of passive surveillance agents or network operators. We classify the IoT-device identification and detection into four categories: 1) device-specific pattern recognition; 2) deep learning-enabled device identification; 3) unsupervised device identification; and 4) abnormal device detection. Meanwhile, we discuss various ML-related enabling technologies for this purpose. These enabling technologies include learning algorithms, feature engineering on network traffic traces and wireless signals, incremental learning, and abnormality detection.

Abnormal event detection with the lowest latency is an indispensable function for safety-critical systems, such as cyber defense systems. However, as systems become increasingly complicated, conventional sequential event detection methods become less effective, especially when we need to define indicator metrics from complicated data manually. Although deep neural networks (DNNs) have been used to handle heterogeneous data, the theoretic assurability and explainability are still insufficient. This article provides a holistic framework for the quickest and sequential detection of abnormalities and time-dependent abnormal events. We explore the latent space characteristics of zero-bias neural networks considering the classification boundaries and abnormalities. We then provide a novel method to convert zero-bias DNN classifiers into performance-assured binary abnormality detectors. Finally, we provide a sequential quickest detection (QD) scheme that provides the theoretically assured lowest abnormal event detection delay under false alarm constraints using the converted abnormality detector. We verify the effectiveness of the framework using real massive signal records in aviation communication systems and simulation. Codes and data are available athttps://github.com/pcwhy/AbnormalityDetectionInZbDNN.

Sign language (SL) is used by hearing impaired and deaf people. The WiFi-based sign language recognition (SLR) technology has attracted much attention due to its contactless nature and wide applications. Most previous SLR works are designed to recognize a single isolated sign word in data samples. However, such assumption is not realistic in practical applications, such as, in daily communication, deaf people usually express their mind through a phrase (a.k.a. a group of words) rather than an isolated word. Compared with the previous works, the sign words in a phrase have variety of length, sequential patterns, and combinations in realistic communications between deaf people. Therefore, it is challenging in exploiting the WiFi signals to accurately capture the unique patterns of SL in the previous natural setting. In this article, we propose Wi-Phrase, a multigesture context-awareness SLR system. Wi-Phrase exploits WiFi signals to translate SL to the English phrase. To achieve this, Wi-Phrase employs principal component analysis (PCA) projection to filter out the noise and convert cleaned WiFi signals to spectrogram. Then, we propose a novel Residual-MultiHead model that exploit residual learn structure to obtain local patterns of phrases and adopt multihead block to capture the global context information of phrase. To prove the advanced nature of our model, we design a WiFi-based SL phrase data set of 40 categories for experiments. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that Wi-Phrase achieves an accurate phrase recognition accuracy of 95.03%. In future, we envision Wi-Phrase could be widely used as the phrase command control system for deaf people in IoT devices.

The studies of Unmanned Air/Ground Vehicle (UAV/UGV) cooperative detection systems have received much attention due to their wide applications in the disaster rescue, target tracking, intelligent surveillance, and automatical package delivery missions. UAVs provide a broad view and have a fast speed in the air, while UGVs have sufficient load capacity and can serve as repeater stations on the ground. The path planning of a UAV/UGV cooperative system is an important but difficult issue, which aims to plan paths for both the UAVs and the UGVs in the system to cooperatively complete a mission. In this article, we consider the path planning problem of the UAV/UGV cooperative system for illegal urban building detection, by taking the limits of UGV speed, UAV load power, and UAV/UGV communication restriction into consideration. To solve this problem, we first model the path planning problem as a constraint optimization problem which tries to minimize an overall execution time for completing the illegal urban building detection tasks, and then propose a two-level memetic algorithm (called Two-MA) to solve the path planning problems of both the UAV and the UGV. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data sets show the superiority of the proposed Two-MA over several states-of-the-art algorithms in solving the path planning problems of the UAV and UGV for illegal urban building detection tasks. Note to Practitioners—This article was motivated by the task of detecting illegal buildings in cities by unmanned vehicles. Previous works mainly focus on path planning of either UAVs or UGVs in this task. This article proposes a new approach using an Unmanned Air/Ground Vehicle (UAV/UGV) cooperative system for detecting illegal buildings in parks, by taking the limits of UGV speed, UAV load power, and UAV/UGV communication restriction into consideration. This cooperative system consists of a UAV, UGV, and control center. The UAV equipped with cameras takes aerial photography in the air, and can transmit collected photos to the control center. The UGV executes loading and transportation on the ground, and can serve as takeoff and landing platforms for the UAV. The control center executes computationally intensive tasks such as data transmission and processing, task scheduling, and vehicle coordination. To quickly complete all detection tasks, a memetic algorithm is proposed for path planning of both the UAV and the UGV. The simulated results show that the proposed algorithm enables the UAV/UGV cooperative system to visit all buildings in cities with a minimum task execution time.

Generally, decomposition-based evolutionary algorithms in many-objective optimization (MaOEA/Ds) have widely used reference vectors (RVs) to provide search directions and maintain diversity. However, their performance is highly affected by the matching degree on the shapes of the RVs and the Pareto front (PF). To address this problem, this article proposes a self-guided RV (SRV) strategy for MaOEA/Ds, aiming to extract RVs from the population using a modified k -means clustering method. To give a promising clustering result, an angle-based density measurement strategy is used to initialize the centroids, which are then adjusted to obtain the final clusters, aiming to properly reflect the population's distribution. Afterward, these centroids are extracted to obtain adaptive RVs for self-guiding the search process. To verify the effectiveness of this SRV strategy, it is embedded into three well-known MaOEA/Ds that originally use the fixed RVs. Moreover, a new strategy of embedding SRV into MaOEA/Ds is discussed when the RVs are adjusted at each generation. The simulation results validate the superiority of our SRV strategy, when tackling numerous many-objective optimization problems with regular and irregular PFs.

Dynamic multiobjective optimization problems (DMOPs) aim to optimize multiple (often conflicting) objectives that are changing over time. Recently, there are a number of promising algorithms proposed based on transfer learning methods to solve DMOPs. However, it is very challenging to reduce the negative effect in transfer learning and find more effective transferred solutions. To fill this research gap, this article proposes a clustering-based transfer (CBT) learning method to solve DMOPs. When the environment changes, two novel operations (clustering-based selection (CBS) and CBT) are used to guide knowledge transfer. Specifically, CBS aims to find a population with nondominated solutions and dominated solutions as the training data for the new environment. Then, CBT further collects the previous Pareto-optimal solutions and some noise solutions as the training data for the previous environment. Two training data sets from different environments are, respectively, divided into multiple clusters and transfer learning is conducted on two similar clusters with high probability to reduce the negative effect, which can train an accurate prediction model to identify the promising solutions for the new environment. Empirical studies have been conducted on 14 benchmark DMOPs and one real-life path planning problem of unmanned air/ground vehicles, which validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Especially, our method can significantly reduce negative transfer on 12 out of 14 cases when compared with direct transfer learning.

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) have become very popular for tackling computationally expensive multiobjective optimization problems (EMOPs), as the surrogate models in SAEAs can approximate EMOPs well, thereby reducing the time cost of the optimization process. However, with the increased number of decision variables in EMOPs, the prediction accuracy of surrogate models will deteriorate, which inevitably worsens the performance of SAEAs. To deal with this issue, this article suggests an ensemble surrogate-based framework for tackling EMOPs. In this framework, a global surrogate model is trained under the entire search space to explore the global area, while a number of surrogate submodels are trained under different search subspaces to exploit the subarea, so as to enhance the prediction accuracy and reliability. Moreover, a new infill sampling criterion is designed based on a set of reference vectors to select promising samples for training the models. To validate the generality and effectiveness of our framework, three state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms [nondominated sorting genetic algorithm III (NSGA-III), multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition with differential evolution (MOEA/D-DE) and reference vector-guided evolutionary algorithm (RVEA)] are embedded, which significantly improve their performance for solving most of the test EMOPs adopted in this article. When compared to some competitive SAEAs for solving EMOPs with up to 30 decision variables, the experimental results also validate the advantages of our approach in most cases.

Auscultation is an important tool for diagnosing respiratory-related diseases. Unfortunately, the quality of auscultation is limited by the professional level of the doctor and the environment of the auscultation. Some studies have focused on automated auscultation techniques. However, existing approaches suffer from two challenges: 1) the models cannot learn from data distributed among multiple hospitals and 2) the predictions of the models are difficult to interpret for physicians. To address this issue, this article proposes a novel explainable respiratory sound analysis framework with fuzzy decision tree regularization. This framework develops an ensemble knowledge distillation technique to learn distributed data and achieves good performance in terms of model efficiency and accuracy. Fuzzy decision trees are used to explain the predictions of the model and produce decision rules that can be well accepted by physicians. The effectiveness of this framework is thoroughly validated on the Respiratory Sound database and compared with other existing approaches.

Stroke has become a leading cause of death and long-term disability in the world with no effective treatment. Deep learning-based approaches have the potential to outperform existing stroke risk prediction models, but they rely on large well-labeled data. Due to the strict privacy protection policy in health-care systems, stroke data is usually distributed among different hospitals in small pieces. In addition, the positive and negative instances of such data are extremely imbalanced. Transfer learning can solve small data issue by exploiting the knowledge of a correlated domain, especially when multiple source of data are available. In this work, we propose a novel Hybrid Deep Transfer Learning-based Stroke Risk Prediction (HDTL-SRP) scheme to exploit the knowledge structure from multiple correlated sources (i.e., external stroke data, chronic diseases data, such as hypertension and diabetes). The proposed framework has been extensively tested in synthetic and real-world scenarios, and it outperforms the state-of-the-art stroke risk prediction models. It also shows the potential of real-world deployment among multiple hospitals aided with 5 G/B5G infrastructures.

The papers in this special section focus on artificial intelligence-drive applications for synthetic biology that promote human well being. Synthetic biology is an important branch of biological science, which is different and even completely opposite from traditional research direction on biology. It is obvious that synthetic biology will promote the next biotechnology revolution. At present, related researches are not limited in the painstaking splicing of genes, but have begun to construct genetic codes in order to construct new organisms using synthetic genetic factors. Specially, it is estimated that synthetic biology will have excellent application prospects in many fields, including the production of more effective vaccines, new drugs, biology based manufacturing, the production of sustainable energy, the biological treatment of environmental pollution, and biosensors that can detect toxic chemicals. In this way, synthetic biology is expected to make rapid progress in the next few years.

Visual classification algorithms based-on Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have been widely adopted in autonomous vehicle design. However, DNN suffers from adversarial attacks including pixel attacks and patch attacks, and its adoption may introduce new vulnerability into such security-critical scenarios. Existing defense techniques only focus on defending against one category, either pixel attacks or patch attacks, but does not translate to the other. Hence, the design of a practical comprehensive real-time defense algorithm for DNN-based classifiers presents a challenging task in this adversarial context. This paper attempts to address the abovementioned problem by combining Compressive Sensing with Generative neural networks (CSG) to construct an efficient defense framework, in conjunction with the proposal of a classifier-aware adversarial training way. Extensive experiments have been conducted using the LISA road sign dataset to evaluate the performance of CSG. The results show its superiority in comprehensively defending adversarial examples generated using attacks including CW-L2, FGSM and Sticker, compared with other state-of-the-art defense techniques.

With the rapid development of intelligent transportation systems, there is an increasing demand for a variety of vehicular services, such as automated driving assistance, emergency alert, infotainment, etc. However, in some situations (e.g., remote areas or maritime scenarios), the terrestrial networks alone cannot serve the vehicular applications very well due to the infrastructure deployment and maintenance issues. Satellite networks have become an effective supplement to terrestrial networks, which complement well in terms of coverage, flexibility, reliability, and availability. In this paper, we consider the low orbit multi-beam satellite-terrestrial networks to serve for vehicles. We model this problem as a cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning process, where each beam acts as an agent, and the global bandwidth is cooperatively shared among all the agents. A multi-agent actor-critic method with attention mechanism is proposed to allocate resources for vehicles with strict delay requirements and minimum bandwidth consumption. When allocating bandwidth, the channel efficiency, the angle of the beams and the priorities of requests in different regions are also considered. Centralized training and distributed execution is performed in the training of the agents. Extensive simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, where all the agents can well cooperative to achieve efficient resource allocation on-demand for the vehicles under strictly limited bandwidth resources.

Many real systems are represented in form of multiplex networks composed of a set of nodes, multiple layers of links, and coupling node relationships across all layers. These systems are very vulnerable to damages during both attacks and recoveries due to potential node cascading failures (NCFs). Although some progress has recently been made in studying network robustness and resilience, the comprehensive impacts of coupling node relationships and community structures on NCFs remain unclear. Accordingly, in this article, we study the robustness and resilience of multiplex networks in the presence of NCFs caused by coupling node relationships and community structures. We first model the failure processes of multiplex networks during both attacks and recoveries as node-community cascading failures (called NCCFs), and then theoretically demonstrate the fragility of multiplex networks to random node damages under NCCFs. Subsequently, to improve network robustness and resilience, we adopt a node protection strategy and propose a cost-aware constrained optimization problem. Finally, we devise a degree-based simulated annealing algorithm for solving this optimization problem. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real multiplex networks show that NCCFs make networks more vulnerable to unpredictable damage than classical NCFs. The results also show the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the state-of-the-art algorithms in improving network robustness and resilience.

Following the roadmap of carbon neutrality, wireless communication systems are upgrading to use green energy that comes from renewable sources, e.g., sun, tide, and wind. Due to the volatile arrival of green energy, the on-grid energy is used as a backup for a green coordinated multiple point system. In this work, a weighted sum-rate maximization problem in thegreencoordinated multiple point system is investigated by expecting non-positive consumption of the on-grid energy in the long term. Motivated by the capacity-achieving property and simple implementation, an online zero-forcing dirty paper precoder is proposed to update the precoding matrices by combining statistical learning with the Lyapunov learning technique. A tradeoff relation is theoretically established to show that the long-term weighted sum rate approaches the${\mathcal{ O}}(V)$-neighbor of optimal value while the long-term on-grid energy increases at a rate of${\mathcal{ O}}({\scriptstyle {}^{\scriptstyle \log ^{2}(V)}}\hspace {-0.224em}/\hspace {-0.112em}{\scriptstyle \sqrt {V}})$, where$V$is an introduced control parameter. Numerical results are used to verify the performance of the proposed online adaptive precoder.

With the rapid development of vehicular networks, there is an increasing demand for extensive networking, computing and caching resources. In fact, vehicular networks are nonstationary, and how to allocate multiple resources effectively and efficiently for dynamic vehicular networks is extremely important, however, really challenging. In this paper, we propose a general framework that can enable fast-adaptive edge resource allocation for dynamic vehicular environment. Specifically, we model the dynamics of the vehicular environment as a series of related Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We combine hierarchical reinforcement learning with meta learning, which makes our proposed framework available to quickly adapt to a new environment by only fine-tuning the top-level master network, and meanwhile the low-level sub-networks can make the right resource allocation policy. The extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which can quickly adapt to different scenarios. This is consistent with the real-world situations and can significantly improve the performance of resource allocation in dynamic vehicular networks.

In recent years, with the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), various applications based on IoT have become more and more popular in industrial and living sectors. However, the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) as a popular application protocol used in various IoT applications faces a variety of security vulnerabilities. This article proposes a novel HTTP anomaly detection framework based on edge intelligence (EI) for IoT. In this framework, both clustering and classification methods are used to quickly and accurately detect anomalies in the HTTP traffic for IoT. Unlike the existing works relying on a centralized server to perform anomaly detection, with the recent advances in EI, the proposed framework distributes the entire detection process to different nodes. Moreover, a data processing method is proposed to divide the detection fields of HTTP data, which can eliminate redundant data and extract features from the fields of an HTTP header. Simulation results show that the proposed framework can significantly improve the speed and accuracy of HTTP anomaly detection, especially for unknown anomalies.

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), people access many applications through smartphones for controlling smart devices. Therefore, such a centralized node must follow a robust access control mechanism so that an intruder cannot control the connected devices. Recent reports suggest that password can be used as an authentication factor for accessing the smart setups. However, this static information can be compromised under the light of different machine learning (ML)-empowered attack mechanisms. Alarmingly, different sensors used in the IoT setup can also expose this static information to the adversaries. Password-based authentication that uses a challenge-response strategy is an effective solution for handling such threat scenarios. In this article, at first, we show that no existing usable challenge-response protocol is safe to be used in the public area network. Following this, we propose a challenge-response protocol that is more secure to use in the public domain. By using eight classifiers, we show that a learning-based threat specific to our protocol has a marginal impact on the method's security standard. The discussion in this article also suggests that the proposed protocol has usability and security advantages compared to the existing state of the art (e.g., reduces the number of interactions between the user and verifier by a factor of 0.5).

With the exponential growth in the number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, the cloud-centric computing paradigm can hardly meet the increasingly high requirements for low latency, high bandwidth, ease of availability, and more intelligent services. Therefore, a distributed and decentralized computing architecture is imperative, where edge-centric computing, such as fog computing and mist computing, has been recently proposed. Edge-centric computing resources can be managed locally and personally rather than being administered by a remote centralized third party. However, security and privacy issues are the main challenges due to the absence of trust between the IoT devices and edge computing nodes (ECNs). A blockchain, as a decentralized, trustless, and immutable public ledger, can well solve the trust-absence issue. In this article, we first elaborate on the security and privacy issues of edge-computing-enabled IoT, and then present the key characteristics of blockchains, which make blockchains well suited for the edge-centric IoT scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a general framework for blockchain-based edge-computing-enabled IoT scenarios that specifies the step-by-step procedure of a single transaction between an IoT end and an ECN. In addition, we design a smart contract within a private blockchain network that exploits the state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm, asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C), to allocate the edge computing resources, which exemplifies how artificial intelligence (AI) can be combined with blockchains. We further discuss the benefits of the convergence of AI and blockchains. Finally, simulation results are presented.

The development of Internet of Things (IoT) brings new changes to various fields. Particularly, industrial IoT (IIoT) is promoting a new round of industrial revolution. With more applications of IIoT, privacy protection issues are emerging. Especially, some common algorithms in IIoT technology, such as deep models, strongly rely on data collection, which leads to the risk of privacy disclosure. Recently, differential privacy has been used to protect user-terminal privacy in IIoT, so it is necessary to make in-depth research on this topic. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive survey on the opportunities, applications, and challenges of differential privacy in IIoT. We first review related papers on IIoT and privacy protection, respectively. Then, we focus on the metrics of industrial data privacy, and analyze the contradiction between data utilization for deep models and individual privacy protection. Several valuable problems are summarized and new research ideas are put forward. In conclusion, this survey is dedicated to complete comprehensive summary and lay foundation for the follow-up research on industrial differential privacy.

Deep learning (DL) has been utilized pervasively in the Internet of Things (IoT). One typical application of DL in IoT is device identification from wireless signals, namely, noncryptographic device identification (NDI). However, learning components in NDI systems have to evolve to adapt to operational variations, such a paradigm is termed as incremental learning (IL). Various IL algorithms have been proposed and many of them require dedicated space to store the increasing amount of historical data, and therefore, they are not suitable for IoT or mobile applications. Besides, conventional IL schemes can not provide satisfying performance when historical data are not available. In this article, we address the IL problem in NDI from a new perspective, first, we provide a new metric to measure the degree of topological maturity of DNN models from the degree of conflict of class-specific fingerprints. We discover that an important cause for performance degradation in IL-enabled NDI is owing to the conflict of devices’ fingerprints. Second, we also show that the conventional IL schemes can lead to low topological maturity of DNN models in NDI systems. Thirdly, we propose a new channel separation-enabled IL (CSIL) scheme without using historical data, in which our strategy can automatically separate devices’ fingerprints in different learning stages and avoid potential conflict. Finally, We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed framework using real data from automatic-dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B), an application of IoT in aviation. The proposed framework has the potential to be applied to accurate identification of IoT devices in a variety of IoT applications and services. Data and code available at IEEE Dataport (DOI: 10.21227/1bxc-ke87) andhttps://github.com/pcwhy/CSIL.

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides applications and services that would otherwise not be possible. However, the open nature of IoT makes it vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. Especially, identity spoofing attacks, where an adversary passively listens to the existing radio communications and then mimic the identity of legitimate devices to conduct malicious activities. Existing solutions employ cryptographic signatures to verify the trustworthiness of received information. In prevalent IoT, secret keys for cryptography can potentially be disclosed and disable the verification mechanism. Noncryptographic device verification is needed to ensure trustworthy IoT. In this article, we propose an enhanced deep learning framework for IoT device identification using physical-layer signals. Specifically, we enable our framework to report unseen IoT devices and introduce the zero-bias layer to deep neural networks to increase robustness and interpretability. We have evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed framework using real data from automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B), an application of IoT in aviation. The proposed framework has the potential to be applied to the accurate identification of IoT devices in a variety of IoT applications and services.

Distributed deep learning deployed in an edge computing environment is a promising approach for extracting accurate information from raw sensor data from Internet of Things (IoT). But the distributed training suffers from heavy communication overheads between a master node and multiple compute nodes due to frequent transmission of gradients, which limits the training efficiency of the distributed deep learning. In this article, we propose a novel algorithm named ProbComp-LPAC (ProbComp: probability compression and LPAC: layer parameters adaptive compression), which can reduce the communication overhead and improve the training efficiency of the distributed deep learning. ProbComp-LPAC adopts a probability equation to select the gradients and uses different compression rates in different layers of deep neural networks. Comparing with other methods, such as adaptive compression (AdaComp) and lazily aggregated quantized compression (LAQ), the performance of ProbComp-LPAC is not only faster in the training speed but also higher in the accuracy of the test.

This article puts forth a new channel coding paradigm for multi-source information streams with Age of Information (AoI) requirements. The recently introduced AoI metric characterizes the freshness of information, defined as the time elapsed since the generation of the last successfully received update. We study a setup in which a large number of sensors want to send update information to a common monitor with the help of aggregators. Specifically, an aggregator collects update packets from sensors and forwards them to the monitor. Conventional block codes (such as LDPC codes) that encode and decode each update packet separately do not perform well in such an information aggregation and update scenario. When update packets suffer from packet loss, we show that block codes lead to high instantaneous AoI because a sensor waits for a long time for the next update opportunity. This article investigates stream-based codes to tackle this problem. A distinguishing feature of stream-based codes is the joint encoding of update packets from different sensors, and a series of coded packets are sent continuously like a stream. Different update packets are then jointly decoded using multiple coded packets from the stream. A key challenge with AoI requirements is the joint design of error corrections of old packets and fast decodings of new packets. We design a practical encoding-decoding scheme and a sliding decoding window mechanism to control the decoding complexity. We evaluate two AoI metrics, average AoI and bounded AoI. In particular, bounded AoI corresponds to an AoI threshold that the instantaneous AoI is below a large percentage of the time. Experimental results on software-defined radio show that stream-based codes significantly outperform block codes in both average AoI and bounded AoI under varying channel conditions. Overall, stream-based codes provide a viable channel coding solution to multi-source information streams with timely update requirements.

The global alignment of biological networks (GABN) aims to find an optimal alignment between proteins across species, such that both the biological structures and the topological structures of the proteins are maximally conserved. The research on GABN has attracted great attention due to its applications on species evolution, orthology detection and genetic analyses. Most of the existing methods for GABN are difficult to obtain a good tradeoff between the conservation of the biological structures and topological structures. In this paper, we propose a multi-neighborhood learning method for solving GABN (called as CLMNA). CLMNA first models GABN as an optimization of a weighted similarity which evaluates the conserved biological and topological similarities of an alignment, and then it combines a first-proximity, second-proximity and individual-aware proximity learning algorithm to solve the modeled problem. Finally, systematic experiments on 10 pairs of biological networks across 5 species show the superiority of CLMNA over the state-of-the-art network alignment algorithms. They also validate the effectiveness of CLMNA as a refinement method on improving the performance of the compared algorithms.

In a collaborative air-ground robotic system, the large-scale terrain mapping using aerial images is important for the ground robot to plan a globally optimal path. However, it is a challenging task in a novel and dynamic field without historical human supervision. To alleviate the reliance on human intervention, this article presents a novel framework that integrates active learning and generative adversarial networks (GANs) to effectively exploit small human-labeled data for terrain mapping. In order to model the diverse terrain patterns, this article designs two novel diversity-sensitive GAN models which can capture fine-grained terrain classes among aerial image patches. The proposed approaches are tested in two real-world scenarios using our collaborative air-ground robotic platform. The empirical results show that our methods can outperform their counterparts in the predictive accuracy of terrain classification, visual quality of terrain mapping, and average length of the planned ground path. In practice, the proposed terrain mapping framework is especially valuable when the budget in time or labor cost is very limited.

Emerging evidence indicates that circular RNA (circRNA) has been an indispensable role in the pathogenesis of human complex diseases and many critical biological processes. Using circRNA as a molecular marker or therapeutic target opens up a new avenue for our treatment and detection of human complex diseases. The traditional biological experiments, however, are usually limited to small scale and are time consuming, so the development of an effective and feasible computational-based approach for predicting circRNA-disease associations is increasingly favored. In this study, we propose a new computational-based method, called IMS-CDA, to predict potential circRNA-disease associations based on multisource biological information. More specifically, IMS-CDA combines the information from the disease semantic similarity, the Jaccard and Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity of disease and circRNA, and extracts the hidden features using the stacked autoencoder (SAE) algorithm of deep learning. After training in the rotation forest (RF) classifier, IMS-CDA achieves 88.08% area under the ROC curve with 88.36% accuracy at the sensitivity of 91.38% on the CIRCR2Disease dataset. Compared with the state-of-the-art support vector machine and K -nearest neighbor models and different descriptor models, IMS-CDA achieves the best overall performance. In the case studies, eight of the top 15 circRNA-disease associations with the highest prediction score were confirmed by recent literature. These results indicated that IMS-CDA has an outstanding ability to predict new circRNA-disease associations and can provide reliable candidates for biological experiments.

This article proposes a Bayesian method to acquire the estimation of human impedance and motion intention in a human-robot collaborative task. Combining with the prior knowledge of human stiffness, estimated stiffness obeying Gaussian distribution is obtained by Bayesian estimation, and human motion intention can be also estimated. An adaptive impedance control strategy is employed to track a target impedance model and neural networks are used to compensate for uncertainties in robotic dynamics. Comparative simulation results are carried out to verify the effectiveness of estimation method and emphasize the advantages of the proposed control strategy. The experiment, performed on Baxter robot platform, illustrates a good system performance.

Traditional reproduction operators in many-objective evolutionary algorithms (MaOEAs) seem to not be so effective to tackle many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs). This is mainly because the population size cannot be set to an arbitrarily large value if the computational efficiency is of concern. In such a case, the distance between the parents becomes remarkably large and, consequently, it is not easy to reproduce a superior offspring in high-dimensional objective space. To alleviate this problem, an elite gene-guided (EGG) reproduction operator is proposed to tackle MaOPs in this article. In this operator, an elite gene pool is built by collecting the knee points from the current population. Then, the offspring is produced by exchanging the genes with this elite gene pool under an exchange rate, aiming to reserve more promising genes into the next generation. In order to provide new genes for the population, other genes will be disturbed under a disturbance rate. The settings and functional analysis of the exchange rate and disturbance rate are studied using several experiments. The proposed EGG operator is easy to implement and can be embedded to any MaOEA. As examples, we show the embedding of the proposed EGG operator into four competitive MaOEAs, that is, MOEA/D, NSGA-III, θ -DEA, and SPEA2-SDE provide some advantages over simulated binary crossover, differential evolution, and an evolutionary path-based reproduction operator on solving a number of benchmark problems with 3 to 15 objectives.

This article suggests a multimodal multiobjective evolutionary algorithm with dual clustering in decision and objective spaces. One clustering is run in decision space to gather nearby solutions, which will classify solutions into multiple local clusters. Nondominated solutions within each local cluster are first selected to maintain local Pareto sets, and the remaining ones with good convergence in objective space are also selected, which will form a temporary population with more than${N}$solutions (${N}$is the population size). After that, a second clustering is run in objective space for this temporary population to get${N}$final clusters with good diversity in objective space. Finally, a pruning process is repeatedly run on the above clusters until each cluster has only one solution, which removes the most crowded solution in decision space from the most crowded cluster in objective space each time. This way, the clustering in decision space can distinguish all Pareto sets and avoid the loss of local Pareto sets, while that in objective space can maintain diversity in objective space. When solving all the benchmark problems from the competition of multimodal multiobjective optimization in the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2019, the experiments validate our advantages to maintain diversity in both objective and decision spaces.

This article studies information freshness in information update systems with nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA). Information freshness is characterized by age of information (AoI), defined as the time elapsed since the generation of the last successfully received update. Conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) systems, say time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems, lead to high average AoI when a large number of users take turns to transmit their latest samples to a common receiver over a wireless medium. In contrast to OMA, NOMA allows multiple users to transmit simultaneously. Although NOMA could lead to higher packet error rates (PER) due to the wireless interference among users, we show that higher PERs do not always lead to a higher average AoI. Specifically, our experiments on software-defined radio indicate that NOMA with conventional multiuser decoding (MUD) techniques leads to higher PERs but lower average AoI than OMA does in the high SNR regime. Furthermore, to improve the AoI performance in the medium SNR regime, we combine MUD with physical-layer network coding (PNC), a technique that turns wireless interference into useful network-coding information. PNC works well even when the SNRs of different NOMA users do not differ much. This article is the first attempt to apply PNC to information update systems. Experiments show that the combined use of PNC and MUD reduces the average AoI significantly in a practical network setting. Overall, PNC-enabled NOMA is a promising solution to information update systems.

An approximate logic neural model (ALNM) is a novel single-neuron model with plastic dendritic morphology. During the training process, the model can eliminate unnecessary synapses and useless branches of dendrites. It will produce a specific dendritic structure for a particular task. The simplified structure of ALNM can be substituted by a logic circuit classifier (LCC) without losing any essential information. The LCC merely consists of the comparator and logic NOT, AND, and OR gates. Thus, it can be easily implemented in hardware. However, the architecture of ALNM affects the learning capacity, generalization capability, computing time and approximation of LCC. Thus, a Pareto-based multiobjective differential evolution (MODE) algorithm is proposed to simultaneously optimize ALNM's topology and weights. MODE can generate a concise and accurate LCC for every specific task from ALNM. To verify the effectiveness of MODE, extensive experiments are performed on eight benchmark classification problems. The statistical results demonstrate that MODE is superior to conventional learning methods, such as the backpropagation algorithm and single-objective evolutionary algorithms. In addition, compared against several commonly used classifiers, both ALNM and LCC are capable of obtaining promising and competitive classification performances on the benchmark problems. Besides, the experimental results also verify that the LCC obtains the faster classification speed than the other classifiers.

Small molecule is a kind of low molecular weight organic compound with variety of biological functions. Studies have indicated that small molecules can inhibit a specific function of a multifunctional protein or disrupt protein-protein interactions and may have beneficial or detrimental effect against diseases. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play crucial roles in cellular biology, which makes it possible to develop miRNA as diagnostics and therapeutic targets. Several drug-like compound libraries were screened successfully against different miRNAs in cellular assays further demonstrating the possibility of targeting miRNAs with small molecules. In this review, we summarized the concept and functions of small molecule and miRNAs. Especially, five aspects of miRNA functions were exhibited in detail with individual examples. In addition, four disease states that have been linked to miRNA alterations were summed up. Then, small molecules related to four important miRNAs miR-21, 122, 4644 and 27 were selected for introduction. Some important publicly accessible databases and web servers of the experimentally validated or potential small molecule-miRNA associations were discussed. Identifying small molecule targeting miRNAs has become an important goal of biomedical research. Thus, several experimental and computational models have been developed and implemented to identify novel small molecule-miRNA associations. Here, we reviewed four experimental techniques used in the past few years to search for small-molecule inhibitors of miRNAs, as well as three types of models of predicting small molecule-miRNA associations from different perspectives. Finally, we summarized the limitations of existing methods and discussed the future directions for further development of computational models.

Crowdsourced mobile edge caching and sharing (Crowd-MECS) is emerging as a promising content delivery paradigm by employing a large crowd of existing edge devices (EDs) to cache and share popular contents. The successful technology adoption of Crowd-MECS relies on a comprehensive understanding of the complicated economic interactions and strategic decision making of different stakeholders in the ecosystem. In this article, we focus on studying the economic and strategic interactions between one content provider (CP) and a large crowd of EDs, where the CP designs the incentive scheme for EDs to cache and share contents, and EDs decide whether to cache and share contents for the CP. We formulate their interactions as a two-stage Stackelberg game. In Stage I, the CP decides the ratio of revenue (as incentives) shared with EDs who choose to cache and share contents, aiming at maximizing its own profit. In Stage II, EDs choose to beagentswho cache and share contents, and meanwhile gain a certain revenue from the CP, orrequesterswho do not cache but request contents in the on-demand fashion. We first analyze the EDs’ best responses and prove the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium in Stage II by using the nonatomic game theory. Then, we identify the piecewise structure and the unimodal feature of the CP’s profit function, based on which we design a tailored low-complexity 1-D search algorithm to achieve the optimal revenue sharing ratio for the CP in Stage I. The simulation results show that both the CP’s profit and the EDs’ total welfare can be improved significantly (e.g., by 120% and 50%, respectively,) by using the proposed Crowd-MECS system, comparing with the non-MEC system where the CP serves all EDs directly.

The radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies, which have been widely adopted in different Internet of Things (IoT) applications, are the fundamental building block for achieving smart factories, smart logistics, smart stores, etc. Besides knowing the ID of tags, the relative location information of different tags is of great importance since it contains the spatial relationship among different tags, which is essential for many object localization applications beyond the capacity of absolute localization approaches. In this article, we proposeTagSort, an RFID-based sorting system that exploits the physical layer information, i.e., the phase of RFID wireless signals to achieve the relative localization of different tags. Several novel filtering and peak detection algorithms are proposed to achieve accurate and robust detection of the order of tags. Extensive evaluation shows promising results (over 95% accuracy) and makeTagSorta promising system for future RFID sorting systems, thus enabling a variety of IoT applications and services.

Found in recent research, tumor cell invasion, proliferation, or other biological processes are controlled by circular RNA. Understanding the association between circRNAs and diseases is an important way to explore the pathogenesis of complex diseases and promote disease-targeted therapy. Most methods, such as k-mer and PSSM, based on the analysis of high-throughput expression data have the tendency to think functionally similar nucleic acid lack direct linear homology regardless of positional information and only quantify nonlinear sequence relationships. However, in many complex diseases, the sequence nonlinear relationship between the pathogenic nucleic acid and ordinary nucleic acid is not much different. Therefore, the analysis of positional information expression can help to predict the complex associations between circRNA and disease. To fill up this gap, we propose a new method, named iCDA-CGR, to predict the circRNA-disease associations. In particular, we introduce circRNA sequence information and quantifies the sequence nonlinear relationship of circRNA by Chaos Game Representation (CGR) technology based on the biological sequence position information for the first time in the circRNA-disease prediction model. In the cross-validation experiment, our method achieved 0.8533 AUC, which was significantly higher than other existing methods. In the validation of independent data sets including circ2Disease, circRNADisease and CRDD, the prediction accuracy of iCDA-CGR reached 95.18%, 90.64% and 95.89%. Moreover, in the case studies, 19 of the top 30 circRNA-disease associations predicted by iCDA-CGR on circRDisease dataset were confirmed by newly published literature. These results demonstrated that iCDA-CGR has outstanding robustness and stability, and can provide highly credible candidates for biological experiments.

Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) play an irreplaceable role in biological activities of organisms. Although many high-throughput methods are used to identify PPIs from different kinds of organisms, they have some shortcomings, such as high cost and time-consuming. To solve the above problems, computational methods are developed to predict PPIs. Thus, in this paper, we present a method to predict PPIs using protein sequences. First, protein sequences are transformed into Position Weight Matrix (PWM), in which Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm is used to extract features. Then Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to reduce the dimension of features. At last, Weighted Extreme Learning Machine (WELM) classifier is employed to predict PPIs and a series of evaluation results are obtained. In our method, since SIFT and WELM are used to extract features and classify respectively, we called the proposed method SIFT-WELM. When applying the proposed method on three well-known PPIs datasets of Yeast, Human and Helicobacter.pylori, the average accuracies of our method using five-fold cross validation are obtained as high as 94.83, 97.60 and 83.64 percent, respectively. In order to evaluate the proposed approach properly, we compare it with Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier and other recent-developed methods in different aspects. Moreover, the training time of our method is greatly shortened, which is obviously superior to the previous methods, such as SVM, ACC, PCVMZM and so on.

The studies on signed networks have received a great attention due to their capabilities on presenting conflicting relationships, which reflect the potential conflicts and tensions of complex systems. To further understand those conflicts and tensions, many methods have been proposed for computing the global structural balance (GSB) of signed networks, which aim to discover the most balanced state of the networks with the least number of unbalanced links. However, most of them request full access to all information (structures, signs, and balance states) of links, which are usually sensitive and private. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving GSB computation (PGSBC) framework, which aims to compute the GSB while preserving the privacy of the networks. The PGSBC first protects the sensitive information (structures, signs, and balance states) of links by using encryption techniques (the homomorphic cryptosystem and the random disturbances) and then computes the GSB of the signed networks on the encrypted structures. In the PGSBC, a balance-aware energy function is adopted to evaluate the balance degree of a clustering, while a fast two-level greedy algorithm (called as HM-Louvain) is presented to discover the most balanced clustering of signed networks. Simulation results on 11 LFR benchmark networks and 10 real signed networks show that the proposed framework can effectively compute the GSB of the networks while preserving the privacy of links’ sensitive information.

The robust controllability (RC) of a complex system tries to select a set of dominating entities for the functional control of this entire system without uncertain disturbances, and the research on RC will help to understand the system's underlying functions. In this article, we introduce the control cost in signed networks and present a cost-aware robust control (CRC) problem in this scenario. The aim of CRC is to minimize the cost to control a set of dominating nodes and transform a set of unbalanced links into balanced ones, such that the signed network can be robustly controlled without uncertain unbalanced factors (like nodes and links). To solve this problem, we first model CRC as a constrained combination optimization problem, and then present a memetic algorithm with some problem-specific knowledge (like the neighbors of nodes, the constraints of CRC, and the fast computation of the cost under each optimization) to solve this problem on signed networks. The extensive experiments on both real social and biological networks assess that our algorithm outperforms several state-of-the-art RC algorithms.

Cloud storage security has gained considerable research efforts with the wide adoption of cloud computing. As a security mechanism, researchers have been investigating cloud storage auditing schemes that enable a user to verify whether the cloud keeps the user's outsourced data undamaged. However, existing schemes have usability issues in compatibility with existing real world cloud storage applications, error-tolerance, and efficiency. To mitigate this usability gap, this article proposes a new general cloud storage auditing scheme that is more usable. The proposed scheme uses the idea of integrating linear error correcting codes and linear homomorphic authentication schemes together. This integration uses only one additional block to achieve error tolerance and authentication simultaneously. To demonstrate the power of the general construction, we also propose one detailed scheme based on the proposed general construction using the Reed Solomon code and the universal hash based MAC authentication scheme, both of which are implemented over the computation-efficient Galois field GF(28). We also show that the proposed scheme is secure under the standard definition. Moreover, we implemented and open-sourced the proposed scheme. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is orders of magnitude more efficient than the state-of-the-art scheme.

Oral health has significant impact on people’s over-all well-being. While many activity recognition systems exist in the literature, accurately sensing toothbrushing activities remains an unsolved challenging problem due to the diversity of tooth-brushing habits among different users and subtle distinctions between different brushing actions. In this work, we propose Hygiea, an energy-efficient and highly-accurate toothbrushing monitoring system which exploits IMU-based wrist-worn gesture sensing using unmodified toothbrushes. To address toothbrushing variety, Hygiea incorporates a number of novel signal preprocessing techniques to automatically transform the sensory input during arbitrary toothbrushing activities to the consistent user coordinate system. To distinguish different brushing actions, Hygiea leverages an emerging deep learning model (e.g., AT-LSTM) to achieve fine-grained activity recognitions. Moreover, a POMDP model is incorporated for sampling control to balance activity detection and energy efficiency. Extensive real-world experiments show that the Hygiea system achieves a 11.7% accuracy gain compared to the state-of-the-art while maintaining energy-efficiency and zero modification on the toothbrushes.

Containers are becoming the de facto platform for cloud computing. While cloud security has been a major concern, Intel SGX provisions powerful protection guarantees that can be used for containers. However, this technology does not come for free. For example, limited Enclave Page Cache (EPC) challenges the migration design of SGX-enabled containers.We note that previous security protocols are problematic concerning migration of SGX-enabled containers, which will lead to the failure of measures to prevent fork/fallback attacks. In this paper, we propose the migration of SGX-enabled containers and explore the challenges of deploying and migrating SGX-enabled containers considering both EPC resources and persistent storage. To our best knowledge, we are the first to design and implement such a framework for the SGX-enabled container migration that is easy, flexible and lightweight to deploy. We evaluate the proposed framework by migrating SGX-enabled Sqlite3 container and the experimental result shows that the proposed framework has about 15% overhead, which is acceptable due to its security advantage.

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) methylation is a type of posttranscriptional modifications occurring in all kingdoms of life. It is strongly related to important biological process, thus making it linked to a number of human diseases. Owing to the development of high-throughput sequencing technology, plenty of achievement had been obtained in RNA methylation research recently. Meanwhile, various computational models have been developed to analyze and mining increasing RNA methylation data. In this review, we first made a brief introduction about eight types of most popular RNA methylation, the biological functions of RNA methylation, the relationship between RNA methylation and disease and five important RNA methylation-related diseases. The research of RNA methylation is based on sequencing data processing, and effective bioinformatics techniques can benefit better understanding of RNA methylation. We further introduced seven publicly available RNA methylation-related databases, and some important publicly available RNA-methylation-related Web servers and software for RNA methylation site identification, differential analysis and so on. Furthermore, we provided detailed analysis of the state-of-the-art computational models used in these Web servers and software. We also analyzed the limitations of these models and discussed the future directions of developing computational models for RNA methylation research.

With wide adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) across the world, the IoT devices are facing more and more intensive computation task nowadays. However, the IoT devices are usually limited by their computing capability and battery lifetime. Mobile edge computing provides new opportunities for developments of IoT, since edge computing servers which are close to devices can provide more powerful computing resources. The IoT devices can offload the intensive computing tasks to edge computing servers, while saving their own computing resources and reducing energy consumption. However, the benefits come at the cost of higher latency, mainly due to additional transmission time, and it may be unacceptable for many IoT applications. In this paper, we try to find a tradeoff between the energy consumption and latency, in order to satisfy user demands of various IoT applications. We formalize the problem into a constrained multiobjective optimization problem and find the optimal solutions by a modified fast and elitist nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II). To improve the performance of the algorithm, we propose a novel problem-specific encoding scheme and genetic operators in the proposed modified NSGA-II. We also conduct extensive simulation experiments to evaluate the proposed algorithm and its sensitivity under certain major parameters. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can find a large number of optimal solutions to adjust the corresponding offloading decision according to the real-world situation.

Fetal heart rate (FHR) is very significant to evaluate the status of fetus. However, based on traditional classification criteria is not accurate. With the rapid development of computer information technology, computer technology is vital for the analysis of FHR in electronic fetal monitoring (EFM). FHR is divided into three classes as: 1) normal; 2) suspicious; and 3) abnormal. Through the cooperation with the hospital, we got 4473 records, including 3012 normal, 1024 suspicious, 437 abnormal records by our EFM system. In order to improve the accuracy of fetal status assessment, high 1-D FHR records are divided into ten d-window segments, and then use convolutional neural network (CNN) to process the data in parallel. Finally, we use the voting method to determine the class of FHR records. We also made a comparative experiment, the feature extraction method based on basic statistics is used to extract the features of FHR. And then the features were applied as the input to support vector machine (SVM) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) to classify. According to the results of the experiment, the accuracy of classification of SVM, MLP, and CNN are 79.66%, 85.98%, and 93.24%, respectively.

The design of unified, efficient, and lightweight cryptographic platform for resource-constrained on-board devices such as sensors, microcontrollers, and actuators in the context of Internet of Vehicles remains an open and challenging problem, for both academic and industry. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is considered as a promising encryption algorithm for the next generation communications, as it could provide the same strong security level using relatively smaller key size when compared to the currently used Rivest–Shamir–Adleman algorithm. However, traditional ECCs have the disadvantage of using a fixed curve, making it very easy to be intensively analyzed while being hard to construct a united platform for on-board devices with processors of different instruction lengths. To mitigate the above problem, this paper suggests a dynamic scalable elliptic curve cryptosystem. To synchronize the curve in use, a curve list of different security levels is generated and preserved on both parties. Since both parties randomly choose the curve and the prime number, a extra security level could be provided, so that the security level can still remain the same even using smaller key sizes, while the computation efficiency will be enhanced and the power consumption will be reduced, which is especially suitable for the application in on-board embedded devices. Detailed experimental results illustrate that the presented scheme improves the efficiency by 30% in average when compared with traditional ECC implementations on a similar security level. Therefore, the proposed scalable ECC scheme as a unified cryptographic platform is more economic for these on-board devices in vehicles.

Complex systems are often characterized by complex networks with links and entities. However, in many complex systems such as protein-protein interaction networks, recommender systems, and online communities, their links are hard to reveal directly, but they can be inaccurately observed by multiple data collection platforms or by a data collection platform at different times. Then, the links of the systems are inferred by the integration of the collected observations. As those data collection platforms are usually distributed over a large area and in different fields, their observations are unreliable and sensitive to the potential structures of the systems. In this paper, we consider the link inference problem in network data with community structures, in which the reliability of data collection platforms is unknown a priori and the link errors and reliability of platforms' observations are heterogeneous to the underlying community structures of the systems. We propose an expectation maximization algorithm for link inference in a network system with community structures (EMLIC). The EMLIC algorithm is also used to infer the link errors and reliability of platforms' observations in different communities. Experimental results on both synthetic data and eight real-world network data demonstrate that our algorithm is able to achieve lower link errors than the existing reliable link inference algorithms when the network data have community structures.

Recently, more and more users and enterprises have entrusted data storage and platform construction to proxy cloud service provider (PCSP) through cloud technology. Under this background, the attribute-based encryption (ABE) mechanism is an alternative to fill the drawbacks of the traditional encryption through flexible fine-grained access policy and collusion prevention. However, there exist some security issues when the access policy and file need to be updated in practical applications. And the ABE has the problems of excessive computation and storage costs. In this article, an efficient ciphertext-policy ABE scheme with policy update and file update is proposed in cloud computing. The ciphertext components generated by first encryption can be shared when the policy update and file update happens. It reduces the storage and communication costs of the client, and the computational cost of the PCSP. Moreover, the proposed scheme is proved to be secure under the assumption of decision q-parallel bilinear Diffie–Hellman exponent (BDHE). Finally, experimental simulation shows that the proposed scheme is highly efficient in terms of policy update and file update.

The rise of mobile crowd sensing has brought privacy issues into a sharp view. In this paper, our goal is to achieve the predictable privacy-preserving mobile crowd sensing, which we envision to have the capability to quantify the privacy protections, and simultaneously allowing application users to predict the utility loss at the same time. TheSalusalgorithm is first proposed to protect the private data against the data reconstruction attacks. To understand privacy protection, we quantify the privacy risks in terms of private data leakage under reconstruction attacks. To predict the utility, we provide accurate utility predictions for various crowd sensing applications using Salus. The risk assessments can be generally applied to different type of sensors on the mobile platform, and the utility prediction can also be used to support various applications that use data aggregators such as average, histogram, and classifiers. Finally, we propose and implement the$P^{3}$application framework. Both measurement results using online datasets and real-world case studies show that the$P^{3}$provides accurate risk assessments and utility estimations, which makes it a promising framework to support future privacy-preserving mobilecrowd sensing applications.

Motivation: It has been shown that microRNAs (miRNAs) play key roles in variety of biological processes associated with human diseases. In Consideration of the cost and complexity of biological experiments, computational methods for predicting potential associations between miRNAs and diseases would be an effective complement. Results: This paper presents a novel model of Inductive Matrix Completion for MiRNA-Disease Association prediction (IMCMDA). The integrated miRNA similarity and disease similarity are calculated based on miRNA functional similarity, disease semantic similarity and Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity. The main idea is to complete the missing miRNA-disease association based on the known associations and the integrated miRNA similarity and disease similarity. IMCMDA achieves AUC of 0.8034 based on leave-one-out-cross-validation and improved previous models. In addition, IMCMDA was applied to five common human diseases in three types of case studies. In the first type, respectively, 42, 44, 45 out of top 50 predicted miRNAs of Colon Neoplasms, Kidney Neoplasms, Lymphoma were confirmed by experimental reports. In the second type of case study for new diseases without any known miRNAs, we chose Breast Neoplasms as the test example by hiding the association information between the miRNAs and Breast Neoplasms. As a result, 50 out of top 50 predicted Breast Neoplasms-related miRNAs are verified. In the third type of case study, IMCMDA was tested on HMDD V1.0 to assess the robustness of IMCMDA, 49 out of top 50 predicted Esophageal Neoplasms-related miRNAs are verified. Availability and implementation: The code and dataset of IMCMDA are freely available at https://github.com/IMCMDAsourcecode/IMCMDA. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, with its advantages such as battery-free tags, low cost, and scalability, has been playing an important role in many application domains, such as large-scale storage systems, supermarkets, construction sites, etc. Many of those application scenarios also require indoor positioning technologies, for example, warehouse goods positioning, item positioning in production assembly lines, and worker positioning in construction sites. However,indoor positioning using RFID faces accuracy degradation in dynamic environments, especially when tracking randomly moving targets. In this paper, we proposePSOTrack, a continuous RFID-based tracking system for random moving targets in unconstrained indoor environments. InPSOTrack, a data preprocessed, and an optimized particle swarm optimization algorithm is applied to determine the initial position, after that a dynamic correction method for trajectory prediction is proposed for continuous tracking. Results show that the proposed algorithm effectively improves the positioning accuracy and is able to achieve 1 m localization accuracy in dynamic indoor environments, which makes it a promising technology to support future pervasive RFID-based tracking applications.

Understanding users’ social relationships plays an important role in many disciplines, including marketing, management science, and so on and is the fundamental context information required in many context-aware applications. However, despite significant research progress in social learning, sensing and reconstructing the off-line social structures in an accurate and nonobtrusive way is still a challenging open problem. In this paper, we propose SODAR, an off-line SOcial colocation Detection And network Reconstruction system, a social learning system that exploits wireless probes emitted by the smartphones carried by users to learn and infer their social relationships and reconstruct their off-line social structures. The probe capturing and filtering mechanisms collects high-quality wireless probe information, and the passive localization techniques are used to process the data and detect colocation events, which are used for the novel social representation learning. The learned social representation vector for each user contains rich social information and can be used to determine the social distances for each pair of users. With projection and clustering techniques, the off-line social structures can be visualized and reconstructed. We implemented the system and deployed the system to different indoor spaces covering more than 1000 m2. The evaluation results show that the SODAR system is able to reliably learn social representations for each user and effectively reconstruct the off-line social structures.

The multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) based on decomposition transforms a multiobjective optimization problem into a set of aggregated subproblems and then optimizes them collaboratively. Since these subproblems usually have different degrees of difficulty, resource allocation (RA) strategies have been reported to enhance performance, attempting to dynamically assign proper amounts of computational resources for the solution of each of these subproblems. However, existing schemes for decomposition-based MOEAs fully rely on the relative improvement of the aggregated functions to do this. This paper proposes a diversity-enhanced RA strategy for this kind of MOEA, depending on both relative improvement on aggregated function value and solution density around each subproblem to assign computational resources. Thus, one subproblem surrounded with fewer solutions in its neighboring area and more relative improvement on the aggregated function value will be allocated a higher probability for evolution. Our experimental results show the advantages of our proposed strategy over two popular RA strategies available for decomposition-based MOEAs, on tackling a set of complicated benchmark problems.

While location is one of the most important context information in mobile and pervasive computing, large-scale deployment of indoor localization system remains elusive. In this work, we propose MPiLoc, a multi-floor indoor localization system that utilizes data contributed by smartphone users through participatory sensing for automatic floor plan and radio map construction. Our system does not require manual calibration, prior knowledge, or infrastructure support. The key novelty of MPiLoc is that it clusters and merges walking trajectories annotated with sensor and signal strengths to derive a map of walking paths annotated with radio signal strengths in multi-floor indoor environments. We evaluate MPiLoc over five different indoor areas. Evaluation shows that our system can derive indoor maps for various indoor environments in multi-floor settings and achieve an average localization error of 1.82 m.

Self interacting proteins (SIPs) play an important role in various aspects of the structural and functional organization of the cell. Detecting SIPs is one of the most important issues in current molecular biology. Although a large number of SIPs data has been generated by experimental methods, wet laboratory approaches are both time-consuming and costly. In addition, they yield high false negative and positive rates. Thus, there is a great need for in silico methods to predict SIPs accurately and efficiently. In this study, a new sequence-based method is proposed to predict SIPs. The evolutionary information contained in Position-Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM) is extracted from of protein with known sequence. Then, features are fed to an ensemble classifier to distinguish the self-interacting and non-self-interacting proteins. When performed on Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Human SIPs data sets, the proposed method can achieve high accuracies of 86.86 and 91.30 percent, respectively. Our method also shows a good performance when compared with the SVM classifier and previous methods. Consequently, the proposed method can be considered to be a novel promising tool to predict SIPs.

The selection of swarm leaders (i.e., the personal best and global best), is important in the design of a multiobjective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm. Such leaders are expected to effectively guide the swarm to approach the true Pareto optimal front. In this paper, we present a novel external archive-guided MOPSO algorithm (AgMOPSO), where the leaders for velocity update are all selected from the external archive. In our algorithm, multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs) are transformed into a set of subproblems using a decomposition approach, and then each particle is assigned accordingly to optimize each subproblem. A novel archive-guided velocity update method is designed to guide the swarm for exploration, and the external archive is also evolved using an immune-based evolutionary strategy. These proposed approaches speed up the convergence of AgMOPSO. The experimental results fully demonstrate the superiority of our proposed AgMOPSO in solving most of the test problems adopted, in terms of two commonly used performance measures. Moreover, the effectiveness of our proposed archive-guided velocity update method and immune-based evolutionary strategy is also experimentally validated on more than 30 test MOPs.

The growth of mobile cloud computing (MCC) is challenged by the need to adapt to the resources and environment that are available to mobile clients while addressing the dynamic changes in network bandwidth. Big data can be handled via MCC. In this paper, we propose a model of computation partitioning for stateful data in the dynamic environment that will improve the performance. First, we constructed a model of stateful data streaming and investigated the method of computation partitioning in a dynamic environment. We developed a definition of direction and calculation of the segmentation scheme, including single-frame data flow, task scheduling, and executing efficiency. We also defined the problem for a multiframe data flow calculation segmentation decision that is optimized for dynamic conditions and provided an analysis. Second, we proposed a computation partitioning method for single-frame data flow. We determined the data parameters of the application model, the computation partitioning scheme, and the task and work order data stream model. We followed the scheduling method to provide the optimal calculation for data frame execution time after computation partitioning and the best computation partitioning method. Third, we explored a calculation segmentation method for single-frame data flow based on multiframe data using multiframe data optimization adjustment and prediction of future changes in network bandwidth. We were able to demonstrate that the calculation method for multiframe data in a changing network bandwidth environment is more efficient than the calculation method with the limitation of calculations for single-frame data. Finally, our research verified the effectiveness of single-frame data in the application of the data stream and analyzed the performance of the method to optimize the adjustment of multiframe data. We used a MCC platform prototype system for face recognition to verify the effectiveness of the method.

Passive indoor localization for smartphones requires no explicit cooperation of the smartphone and enables a new spectrum of applications such as passive user tracking, mobility monitoring, social pattern analysis, etc. However, existing passive localization methods either achieve coarse-grained localization accuracy or require expensive infrastructure support. In this paper, we present Pallas, a self-bootstrapping system for fine-grained passive indoor localization using non-intrusive WiFi monitors. Pallas uses off-the-shelf access point hardware to opportunistically capture WiFi packets to infer the location of smartphones in the indoor environment. The key novelty of Pallas lies in that the passive fingerprint database for localization is automatically constructed and updated without any active participation of WiFi devices or manual calibration. To achieve this, Pallas first identifies passive landmarks that are present in WiFi RSS traces. Given the knowledge of the indoor floor plan and the location of WiFi monitors, Pallas statistically maps the collected RSS traces to specific indoor pathways. With sufficient mapping opportunistically detected, Pallas is able to bootstrap a fine-grained passive fingerprint database and build Gaussian processes for localization automatically without requiring any additional calibration effort.