Text-to-motion generation, which translates textual descriptions into human motions, has been challenging in accurately capturing detailed user-imagined motions from simple text inputs. This paper introduces StickMotion, an efficient diffusion-based network designed for multi-condition scenarios, which generates desired motions based on traditional text and our proposed stickman conditions for global and local control of these motions, respectively. We address the challenges introduced by the user-friendly stickman from three perspectives: 1) Data generation. We develop an algorithm to generate hand-drawn stickmen automatically across different dataset formats. 2) Multi-condition fusion. We propose a multi-condition module that integrates into the diffusion process and obtains outputs of all possible condition combinations, reducing computational complexity and enhancing StickMotion’s performance compared to conventional approaches with the self-attention module. 3) Dynamic supervision. We empower StickMotion to make minor adjustments to the stickman’s position within the output sequences, generating more natural movements through our proposed dynamic supervision strategy. Through quantitative experiments and user studies, sketching stickmen saves users about 51.5% of their time generating motions consistent with their imagination. Our codes, demos, and relevant data will be released in https:// github.com/InvertedForest/StickMotion.

The intensified concerns arising from the widespread adoption of deep learning have led to increased scrutiny of intellectual property protection in DNN models. Existing audio watermarking techniques, predominantly based on traditional signal processing methods, struggle to balance robustness, imperceptibility, and defense resistance in the face of evolving adversarial attacks. These limitations underscore the urgent need for more effective watermarking solutions in the audio domain. In this paper, we propose a dynamic audio watermarking framework that introduces an optimization-based approach to attach robust and adaptable triggers at arbitrary positions within audio signals, and innovatively integrates boundary sample selection driven by forgetting events and an adaptive watermark trigger embedding technique based on the SNR. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that our scheme preserves high model performance while maintaining remarkable stealthiness and robustness, offering a secure and reliable solution for safeguarding intellectual property in the audio domain and advancing the field of DNN watermarking.

Throughout index tuning, existing index advisors allocate tuning budget equally across all queries in the workload, even though a considerable portion of queries benefit negligible from index tuning, leading to high costs and inefficiency. This paper introduces a novel learning-based index advisor named GITEE, which increases tuning efficiency and effectiveness by intelligently guiding the exploration of the large search space on candidate index. Our solution consists of three components. First, we utilize execution plan and predicate information to accurately estimate the maximum improvement indexing can bring, which serves as preliminary knowledge for reasonable tuning budget allocation. Second, we filter out queries based on the impact of indexing on the individual queries and their influence on others, thereby reducing the number of candidate indexes. Third, we leverage a Monte Carlo Tree Search-based solution, guided by the knowledge, to accelerate the selection of high-quality index configurations within the valuable search space. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that GITEE achieves superior tuning performance compared to state-of-theart heuristic or learning-based index advisors, while reducing tuning overhead by 1-2 orders of magnitude.

Update-intensive workloads are prevalent in contemporary OLTP and AI/ML scenarios. An update operation typically involves deleting the old version of the target record and then inserting a new version. In this work, we demonstrate that an LSM-tree faces two issues when dealing with update-intensive workloads. Firstly, the deleted old versions are not promptly garbage collected until they merge with their new versions during compaction. This may lead to space waste and write amplification. Secondly, it is common for an update operation to modify only a small fraction of a data record, such as one of a hundred attributes. However, state-of-the-art LSM-trees fail to effectively utilize the incremental storage strategy, which involves storing only the updated fraction rather than the entire new version to enhance efficiency. In this paper, we propose two techniques, active and fast garbage collection, and adaptive incremental updating, to address these issues, respectively. Active and fast garbage collection probes the distribution of invalid data versions in an LSM-tree and performs garbage collection in a more promptly manner. Adaptive incremental updating applies different storage modes to the update operation to achieve balanced write and read amplification ratios as much as possible. Based on the techniques, we introduce SylphDB implemented based on the codebase of RocksDB and optimized for update-intensive workloads. Experimental results demonstrated that, compared to traditional LSM-tree based systems, SylphDB can improve the efficiency of garbage collection by 2× and reduce write amplification by 20%.

As a popular decentralized and distributed database exhibiting transparency and unforgeability, blockchain has received widespread attention. At the time of writing, its security hinges on classical cryptography, which maintains a high grade of security by exploiting the potentially excessive computational complexity of mathematical problems to be solved by state-of-the-art computers. However, as computational technology develops, this encryption philosophy is likely to be challenged and there is a risk of ’store now and decrypt later’ attacks. A compelling solution to this security threat is to intrinsically integrate blockchain with quantum technology. Against this background, we propose a quantum blockchain scheme relying on quantum secure direct communication (QSDC). Specifically, we conceive QSDC-based blockchain for identity verification, message encryption, and consensus. We also propose an optical network based realization of the proposed QSDC-aided blockchain using present-day technology. Our simulations quantify the benefits of the scheme, especially in terms of its resource utilization. This work provides a new prospect for the intrinsic fusion of quantum information technology and blockchain technology, paving the way for its rapid commercialization.

Distributed databases are widely used in various fields, such as financial services and e-commerce. These businesses generally exhibit characteristics of large-scale and rapid growth. However, these business systems often suffer from deadlocks that prevent them from operating normally for extended periods. Traditional deadlock detection methods face challenges in scalability and efficiency, especially as the number of nodes increases. Therefore, deadlock detection has always been a research area in distributed databases. In this paper, we introduce an efficient deadlock detection algorithm called HAWK, leveraging a H ierarchical A pproach based on W or K load modeling. Our algorithm addresses these issues by constructing a dynamic hierarchical detection tree that adapts to transaction patterns, significantly reducing time complexity and communication overhead. HAWK first models the workload and generates a predicted access graph (PAG), transforming the problem of partitioning detection task in the basic hierarchical detection into partition detection zone (DZ) in the PAG by a graph-cutting algorithm. Then, leveraging the properties of strongly connected components (SCCs) and deadlock cycles, the SCC-cut algorithm naturally partitions the system-wide deadlock detection into multiple non-intersecting detection zones, thereby enhancing detection efficiency. We used the greedy SCC-cut algorithm to perform a more fine-grained partitioning of the complex PAG. Finally, by periodically sampling and updating the hierarchical structure, the algorithm remains responsive to dynamic workload variations, ensuring efficient detection. Our approach outperforms both centralized and distributed methods, offering a more efficient and adaptive solution. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the HAWK algorithm, showing significant reductions in the duration of the deadlock and improved system throughput.

Low-rank approximation (LRA) is a powerful technique for seismic diffraction separation and imaging, providing higher-resolution images of subsurface discontinuities compared to traditional reflection imaging. However, in complex wavefields where reflections lack distinct low-rank characteristics, diffractions and reflections can overlap within the same eigenimages, making traditional LRA less effective for separation. To address this limitation, we propose a diffraction separation and imaging method based on multi-directional wavefield low-rank approximation (MDWLRA). The MDWLRA method employs multi-directional wavefield decomposition (MDWD) to divide complex wavefields into angular slices with similar dip angles. These slices are classified as either diffraction slices or reflection slices, with the latter containing mostly reflections and some residual diffractions. LRA is then applied to the reflection slices to separate the remaining diffractions from reflections. By reducing wavefield complexity using MDWD, reflections in the reflection slices exhibit clearer low-rank characteristics than those in the full wavefields, allowing for more effective separation using LRA. Numerical tests on synthetic data from the modified Sigsbee2A model and field data demonstrate that the MDWLRA method outperforms traditional methods, achieving more accurate separation with fewer leakages than traditional LRA, while also improving diffraction fidelity compared to the Curvelet-transform-based method.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) occupy a pivotal position in the contemporary societal landscape, with one of their widespread applications being the vehicle routing problem, renowned for its classification as an NP-hard challenge. Traditional algorithms often require considerable time to address such problems or can only provide approximate solutions. Recent progress in quantum computation, however, offer a promising alternative by utilizing the parallelism inherent in quantum mechanics. In this study, we propose to solve the vehicle routing problem using the Grover adaptive algorithm. Compared to classical algorithms and existing quantum methods, our innovative algorithm achieves a quadratic speedup, with a time complexity of$O(K\sqrt{\frac{N}{M}})$. Additionally, it is applicable to a broader range of real-world scenarios, as it can directly handle linear inequality constraints without introducing slack variables. Notably, the algorithm operates independently of classical optimizers and gradient-based methods, thereby circumventing potential challenges such as the “barren plateaus” phenomenon. Experimental results from four instances demonstrate the feasibility and correctness of the proposed approach, highlighting its capability to handle inequality constraints easily.

As real-time analytics become increasingly important, more organizations are deploying Hybrid Transactional/An-alytical Processing (HTAP) systems. The HTAP systems, based on a primary/backup replication architecture, usually support real-time read-only queries on backup nodes for the data recently generated by OLTP applications on the primary node. This work is based on the observation that real-time analytical applications often require access to only a fraction of the latest modifications from OLTP applications. However, the state-of-the-art parallel log replay approaches treat all replicated transaction logs equally and replay the entire transaction logs with the same priority which does not take consideration into the OLAP query access pattern. This design can result in increased response latency for real-time applications. This paper presents AETS, an Adaptive Epoch-based Two-Stage log replay framework that implements epoch-based log replay and table group transaction commit. Simultaneously, AETS also takes full account of the table access priority in real-time HTAP workload log replay. It aims to make the data required by analytical queries visible more quickly. Furthermore, AETS includes a two-phase parallel log replay algorithm called TPLR, which achieves lower overhead compared to state-of-the-art algorithms through careful design. We also offer an adaptive fine-grained thread resource allocation method that considers changes in table access patterns over time under thread resource constraints. Our experimental results show that AETS significantly reduces visibility delay for real-time queries. And the results also show that AETS achieves significant replay throughput improvement.

With the rise of new 3D representations like NeRF and 3D Gaussian splatting, creating realistic 3D scenes is easier than ever before. However, the incompatibility of these 3D representations with existing editing software has also introduced unprecedented challenges to 3D editing tasks. Although recent advances in text-to-image generative models have made some progress in 3D editing, these methods either lack precision or require users to manually specify the editing areas in 3D space, complicating the editing process. To overcome these issues, we propose Edit3D, an innovative 3D editing method designed to enhance editing quality. Specifically, we propose a multi-turn editing framework and introduce an attention-driven open-set segmentation (ADSS) technique within this framework. ADSS allows for more precise segmentation of parts, which enhances the editing precision and minimizes interference with pixels in areas that are not being edited. Additionally, we propose a fine-tuning phase, intended to further improve the overall editing quality without compromising the training efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that Edit3D effectively adjusts 3D scenes based on textual instructions. Through continuous and multiple turns of editing, it achieves more intricate combinations, enhancing the diversity of 3D editing effects. Code is available at https://github.com/PeterouZh/Edit3D.

Flow table capacity in programmable switches is constrained due to the limited on-chip hardware resource. The current mainstream approach is to cache only the popular rules in hardware. By taking advantage of traffic locality, the majority of packets can be forwarded directly after matching the rules cached in hardware and the remaining missed packets are handled by software that accommodates the full flow table. Existing works focus on selecting the cache entries for a single-stage flow table to achieve a high cache hit-rate, which cannot adapt to multi-stage flow tables. Due to hardware constraints as well as service requirements, it is often necessary to decompose a single-stage flow table to a multi-stage flow table or directly create multiple stages of tables in hardware. For the first time, we abstract and model the multi-stage flow table caching problem and prove the NP-hardness of the Optimal Multi-stage Flow table Caching (OMFC). Further, we propose a Greedy Caching Algorithm (GCA) for OMFC, which considers both the rule popularity across multiple stages of flow tables and entry popularity within the same stage of flow table when determining the content and size of the multi-stage flow tables. The simulation results show that GCA achieves a l0~30% higher cache hit-rate than the existing algorithms.

Distributed shared buffer (DSB) is a well-known solution to support multi-master database systems. DSB involves controlling access to shared data among different nodes through a distributed shared buffer and lock-based cache coherence protocols. Existing DSB implementations resolve conflicts at the page level and lack the flexibility required by modern cloud database systems. Authors present HyBuffer which mixes rows and pages in the distributed shared buffer. It enables multiple masters to independently modify different rows on the same page, thereby enhancing concurrency and performance. HyBuffer adopts the hybrid design to track the location information of cached data. A centralized node maintains page locations indicating which masters have cached which pages, and the record locations of a cached page are maintained by the master which has cached this page. This design eliminates the need to redistribute metadata when dynamically adding or removing masters. Experimental results demonstrate that HyBuffer achieves better scalability and performance compared to existing approaches.

Pan-sharpening is a common image-fusion method. To improve the quality of fused images, a multilevel deep learning Pan-sharpening method is proposed in this paper. In the training phase, we introduce Coupled Sparse Denoising Autoencorder (CSDA) to reconstruct high-Resolution (HR) multispectral (MS) image from low-Resolution (LR) MS image and HR Panchromatic (Pan) image. CSDA has four networks including LM-HP network, HR-MS network, feature mapping network and fine-tuning network. The hidden features in LM-HP network and HR-MS network as well as the mapping function between the two features are learned through joint optimization. In LM-HP and HR-MS networks, the hidden features of image patch pairs are extracted by the sparse autoencoder. A sparse denoising autoencoder is used to build the nonlinear mapping between the extracted features. In the testing phase, the LR-MS and HR-Pan images patches are fed to the CSDA network to reconstruct the fused HR-MS image. The experimental results show that the proposed method is better than the traditional pans-sharpening methods.

Most traditional compressive sensing (CS) reconstruction methods suffer from the intensive computation caused by iterations. This paper aims at presenting a non-iterative algorithm to reconstruct hyperspectral images (HSI) from patch-based compressively sensed measurements. Our method contains two residual convolutional neural networks. One is reconstruction network for compressive sensing reconstruction and the other is deblocking network for removing the blocky effect, which is caused by patch-based sampling. The reconstruction network can efficiently reconstruct all the bands of HSI jointly, thus the spectral correlation is well preserved. In addition, the deblock performance is enhanced by combining more patches into a larger patch in the deblocking network. Experimental results verify that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art compressive sensing reconstruction methods with patch-based CS measurement.

Recently, the dictionary-aided sparse regression (SR) method for hyperspectral unmixing has received much attention in the field of remote sensing. However, under the assumption that each pixel in the hyperspectral scene can be viewed as a combination of endmembers in the spectral library, most of SR methods ignore the spectral signature mismatches between an actual spectral signature and its corresponding endmember in spectral library. To overcome this problem, we proposed a joint optimizing unmixing model called DSPCSR which includes dictionary sparse pruning and collaborative sparse regression. By exploiting the sparse property of spectral mismatch error and the collaborative sparse property of the abundance matrix, the DSPCSR can provide good robustness and performance. Experiments on the synthetic and real datasets show that the proposed DSPCSR can achieve better performance compared with several state-of-art algorithms.

Anomaly detection in hyperspectral images aims to separate the abnormal pixels from the background, and becomes an important application of hyperspectral data processing. Anomaly detection based on Low-Rank and Sparse Representation (LRASR) can detect abnormal pixels accurately. However, with the growth of the hyperspectral data volumes, this algorithm consumes a huge amount of time and computational resources, and needs to be improved accordingly. Spark is a distributed big data processing platform, and is applicable for complex iterative calculations, because of its powerful in-memory computation and efficient task scheduling. Based on Spark, this paper proposes a distributed and parallel LRASR (called DP-LRASR), which first segments hyperspectral images using narrow dependency of resilient distributed datasets, and afterwards, a parallel clustering algorithm is employed to improve the efficiency, remarkably. Experimental results demonstrate that DP-LRASR achieves a good speedup with high scalability, in the premise of remarkable detection accuracy.