arXiv subjects

Xu Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Xu Chen.

At least 469 records · Page 26Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Decoupled Variational Embedding for Signed Directed Networks

Node representation learning for signed directed networks has received considerable attention in many real-world applications such as link sign prediction, node classification and node recommendation. The challenge lies in how to adequately encode the complex topological information of the networks. Recent studies mainly focus on preserving the first-order network topology which indicates the closeness relationships of nodes. However, these methods generally fail to capture the high-order topology which indicates the local structures of nodes and serves as an essential characteristic of the network topology. In addition, for the first-order topology, the additional value of non-existent links is largely ignored. In this paper, we propose to learn more representative node embeddings by simultaneously capturing the first-order and high-order topology in signed directed networks. In particular, we reformulate the representation learning problem on signed directed networks from a variational auto-encoding perspective and further develop a decoupled variational embedding (DVE) method. DVE leverages a specially designed auto-encoder structure to capture both the first-order and high-order topology of signed directed networks, and thus learns more representative node embedding. Extensive experiments are conducted on three widely used real-world datasets. Comprehensive results on both link sign prediction and node recommendation task demonstrate the effectiveness of DVE. Qualitative results and analysis are also given to provide a better understanding of DVE.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Human Body Model Fitting by Learned Gradient Descent

We propose a novel algorithm for the fitting of 3D human shape to images. Combining the accuracy and refinement capabilities of iterative gradient-based optimization techniques with the robustness of deep neural networks, we propose a gradient descent algorithm that leverages a neural network to predict the parameter update rule for each iteration. This per-parameter and state-aware update guides the optimizer towards a good solution in very few steps, converging in typically few steps. During training our approach only requires MoCap data of human poses, parametrized via SMPL. From this data the network learns a subspace of valid poses and shapes in which optimization is performed much more efficiently. The approach does not require any hard to acquire image-to-3D correspondences. At test time we only optimize the 2D joint re-projection error without the need for any further priors or regularization terms. We show empirically that this algorithm is fast (avg. 120ms convergence), robust to initialization and dataset, and achieves state-of-the-art results on public evaluation datasets including the challenging 3DPW in-the-wild benchmark (improvement over SMPLify 45%) and also approaches using image-to-3D correspondences

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Category Level Object Pose Estimation via Neural Analysis-by-Synthesis

Many object pose estimation algorithms rely on the analysis-by-synthesis framework which requires explicit representations of individual object instances. In this paper we combine a gradient-based fitting procedure with a parametric neural image synthesis module that is capable of implicitly representing the appearance, shape and pose of entire object categories, thus rendering the need for explicit CAD models per object instance unnecessary. The image synthesis network is designed to efficiently span the pose configuration space so that model capacity can be used to capture the shape and local appearance (i.e., texture) variations jointly. At inference time the synthesized images are compared to the target via an appearance based loss and the error signal is backpropagated through the network to the input parameters. Keeping the network parameters fixed, this allows for iterative optimization of the object pose, shape and appearance in a joint manner and we experimentally show that the method can recover orientation of objects with high accuracy from 2D images alone. When provided with depth measurements, to overcome scale ambiguities, the method can accurately recover the full 6DOF pose successfully.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Dual Graph Embedding for Object-Tag LinkPrediction on the Knowledge Graph

Knowledge graphs (KGs) composed of users, objects, and tags are widely used in web applications ranging from E-commerce, social media sites to news portals. This paper concentrates on an attractive application which aims to predict the object-tag links in the KG for better tag recommendation and object explanation. When predicting the object-tag links, both the first-order and high-order proximities between entities in the KG propagate essential similarity information for better prediction. Most existing methods focus on preserving the first-order proximity between entities in the KG. However, they cannot capture the high-order proximities in an explicit way, and the adopted margin-based criterion cannot measure the first-order proximity on the global structure accurately. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named Dual Graph Embedding (DGE) that models both the first-order and high-order proximities in the KG via an auto-encoding architecture to facilitate better object-tag relation inference. Here the dual graphs contain an object graph and a tag graph that explicitly depict the high-order object-object and tag-tag proximities in the KG. The dual graph encoder in DGE then encodes these high-order proximities in the dual graphs into entity embeddings. The decoder formulates a skip-gram objective that maximizes the first-order proximity between observed object-tag pairs over the global proximity structure. With the supervision of the decoder, the embeddings derived by the encoder will be refined to capture both the first-order and high-order proximities in the KG for better link prediction. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that DGE outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Collaborative Adversarial Learning for RelationalLearning on Multiple Bipartite Graphs

Relational learning aims to make relation inference by exploiting the correlations among different types of entities. Exploring relational learning on multiple bipartite graphs has been receiving attention because of its popular applications such as recommendations. How to make efficient relation inference with few observed links is the main problem on multiple bipartite graphs. Most existing approaches attempt to solve the sparsity problem via learning shared representations to integrate knowledge from multi-source data for shared entities. However, they merely model the correlations from one aspect (e.g. distribution, representation), and cannot impose sufficient constraints on different relations of the shared entities. One effective way of modeling the multi-domain data is to learn the joint distribution of the shared entities across domains.In this paper, we propose Collaborative Adversarial Learning (CAL) that explicitly models the joint distribution of the shared entities across multiple bipartite graphs. The objective of CAL is formulated from a variational lower bound that maximizes the joint log-likelihoods of the observations. In particular, CAL consists of distribution-level and feature-level alignments for knowledge from multiple bipartite graphs. The two-level alignment acts as two different constraints on different relations of the shared entities and facilitates better knowledge transfer for relational learning on multiple bipartite graphs. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets have shown that the proposed model outperforms the existing methods.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Joint Multi-User DNN Partitioning and Computational Resource Allocation for Collaborative Edge Intelligence

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising supporting architecture providing a variety of resources to the network edge, thus acting as an enabler for edge intelligence services empowering massive mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices with AI capability. With the assistance of edge servers, user equipments (UEs) are able to run deep neural network (DNN) based AI applications, which are generally resource-hungry and compute-intensive, such that an individual UE can hardly afford by itself in real time. However the resources in each individual edge server are typically limited. Therefore, any resource optimization involving edge servers is by nature a resource-constrained optimization problem and needs to be tackled in such realistic context. Motivated by this observation, we investigate the optimization problem of DNN partitioning (an emerging DNN offloading scheme) in a realistic multi-user resource-constrained condition that rarely considered in previous works. Despite the extremely large solution space, we reveal several properties of this specific optimization problem of joint multi-UE DNN partitioning and computational resource allocation. We propose an algorithm called Iterative Alternating Optimization (IAO) that can achieve the optimal solution in polynomial time. In addition, we present rigorous theoretic analysis of our algorithm in terms of time complexity and performance under realistic estimation error. Moreover, we build a prototype that implements our framework and conduct extensive experiments using realistic DNN models, whose results demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

An Edge Computing-based Photo Crowdsourcing Framework for Real-time 3D Reconstruction

Image-based three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction utilizes a set of photos to build 3D model and can be widely used in many emerging applications such as augmented reality (AR) and disaster recovery. Most of existing 3D reconstruction methods require a mobile user to walk around the target area and reconstruct objectives with a hand-held camera, which is inefficient and time-consuming. To meet the requirements of delay intensive and resource hungry applications in 5G, we propose an edge computing-based photo crowdsourcing (EC-PCS) framework in this paper. The main objective is to collect a set of representative photos from ubiquitous mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices at the network edge for real-time 3D model reconstruction, with network resource and monetary cost considerations. Specifically, we first propose a photo pricing mechanism by jointly considering their freshness, resolution and data size. Then, we design a novel photo selection scheme to dynamically select a set of photos with the required target coverage and the minimum monetary cost. We prove the NP-hardness of such problem, and develop an efficient greedy-based approximation algorithm to obtain a near-optimal solution. Moreover, an optimal network resource allocation scheme is presented, in order to minimize the maximum uploading delay of the selected photos to the edge server. Finally, a 3D reconstruction algorithm and a 3D model caching scheme are performed by the edge server in real time. Extensive experimental results based on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our EC-PCS system over the existing mechanisms.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Leveraging the Power of Prediction: Predictive Service Placement for Latency-Sensitive Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is emerging to support delay-sensitive 5G applications at the edge of mobile networks. When a user moves erratically among multiple MEC nodes, the challenge of how to dynamically migrate its service to maintain service performance (i.e., user-perceived latency) arises. However, frequent service migration can significantly increase operational cost, incurring the conflict between improving performance and reducing cost. To address these mis-aligned objectives, this paper studies the performance optimization of mobile edge service placement under the constraint of long-term cost budget. It is challenging because the budget involves the future uncertain information (e.g., user mobility). To overcome this difficulty, we devote to leveraging the power of prediction and advocate predictive service placement with predicted near-future information. By using two-timescale Lyapunov optimization method, we propose a T-slot predictive service placement (PSP) algorithm to incorporate the prediction of user mobility based on a frame-based design. We characterize the performance bounds of PSP in terms of cost-delay trade-off theoretically. Furthermore, we propose a new weight adjustment scheme for the queue in each frame named PSP-WU to exploit the historical queue information, which greatly reduces the length of queue while improving the quality of user-perceived latency. Rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive evaluations using realistic data traces demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed predictive schemes.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

HFEL: Joint Edge Association and Resource Allocation for Cost-Efficient Hierarchical Federated Edge Learning

Federated Learning (FL) has been proposed as an appealing approach to handle data privacy issue of mobile devices compared to conventional machine learning at the remote cloud with raw user data uploading. By leveraging edge servers as intermediaries to perform partial model aggregation in proximity and relieve core network transmission overhead, it enables great potentials in low-latency and energy-efficient FL. Hence we introduce a novel Hierarchical Federated Edge Learning (HFEL) framework in which model aggregation is partially migrated to edge servers from the cloud. We further formulate a joint computation and communication resource allocation and edge association problem for device users under HFEL framework to achieve global cost minimization. To solve the problem, we propose an efficient resource scheduling algorithm in the HFEL framework. It can be decomposed into two subproblems: \emph{resource allocation} given a scheduled set of devices for each edge server and \emph{edge association} of device users across all the edge servers. With the optimal policy of the convex resource allocation subproblem for a set of devices under a single edge server, an efficient edge association strategy can be achieved through iterative global cost reduction adjustment process, which is shown to converge to a stable system point. Extensive performance evaluations demonstrate that our HFEL framework outperforms the proposed benchmarks in global cost saving and achieves better training performance compared to conventional federated learning.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

Network Massive MIMO Transmission Over Millimeter-Wave and Terahertz Bands: Mobility Enhancement and Blockage Mitigation

Mobility and blockage are two critical challenges in wireless transmission over millimeter-wave (mmWave) and Terahertz (THz) bands. In this paper, we investigate network massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission for mmWave/THz downlink in the presence of mobility and blockage. Considering the mmWave/THz propagation characteristics, we first propose to apply per-beam synchronization for network massive MIMO to mitigate the channel Doppler and delay dispersion effects. Accordingly, we establish a transmission model. We then investigate network massive MIMO downlink transmission strategies with only the statistical channel state information (CSI) available at the base stations (BSs), formulating the strategy design problem as an optimization problem to maximize the network sum-rate. We show that the beam domain is favorable to perform transmission, and demonstrate that BSs can work individually when sending signals to user terminals. Based on these insights, the network massive MIMO precoding design is reduced to a network sum-rate maximization problem with respect to beam domain power allocation. By exploiting the sequential optimization method and random matrix theory, an iterative algorithm with guaranteed convergence performance is further proposed for beam domain power allocation. Numerical results reveal that the proposed network massive MIMO transmission approach with the statistical CSI can effectively alleviate the blockage effects and provide mobility enhancement over mmWave and THz bands.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Personalized Federated Learning for Intelligent IoT Applications: A Cloud-Edge based Framework

Internet of Things (IoT) have widely penetrated in different aspects of modern life and many intelligent IoT services and applications are emerging. Recently, federated learning is proposed to train a globally shared model by exploiting a massive amount of user-generated data samples on IoT devices while preventing data leakage. However, the device, statistical and model heterogeneities inherent in the complex IoT environments pose great challenges to traditional federated learning, making it unsuitable to be directly deployed. In this article we advocate a personalized federated learning framework in a cloud-edge architecture for intelligent IoT applications. To cope with the heterogeneity issues in IoT environments, we investigate emerging personalized federated learning methods which are able to mitigate the negative effects caused by heterogeneity in different aspects. With the power of edge computing, the requirements for fast-processing capacity and low latency in intelligent IoT applications can also be achieved. We finally provide a case study of IoT based human activity recognition to demonstrate the effectiveness of personalized federated learning for intelligent IoT applications.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Knowledge Distillation for Mobile Edge Computation Offloading

Edge computation offloading allows mobile end devices to put execution of compute-intensive task on the edge servers. End devices can decide whether offload the tasks to edge servers, cloud servers or execute locally according to current network condition and devices' profile in an online manner. In this article, we propose an edge computation offloading framework based on Deep Imitation Learning (DIL) and Knowledge Distillation (KD), which assists end devices to quickly make fine-grained decisions to optimize the delay of computation tasks online. We formalize computation offloading problem into a multi-label classification problem. Training samples for our DIL model are generated in an offline manner. After model is trained, we leverage knowledge distillation to obtain a lightweight DIL model, by which we further reduce the model's inference delay. Numerical experiment shows that the offloading decisions made by our model outperforms those made by other related policies in latency metric. Also, our model has the shortest inference delay among all policies.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

AxeChain: A Secure and Decentralized blockchain for solving Easily-Verifiable problems

While Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely used consensus mechanism for blockchain, it received harsh criticism due to its massive waste of energy for meaningless hash calculation. Some studies have introduced Proof-of-Stake to address this issue. However, such protocols widen the gap between rich and poor and in the worst case lead to an oligopoly, where the rich control the entire network. Other studies have attempted to translate the energy consumption of PoW into useful work, but they have many limitations, such as narrow application scope, serious security issues and impractical incentive model. In this paper, we introduce AxeChain, which can use the computing power of blockchain to solve practical problems raised by users without greatly compromising decentralization or security. AxeChain achieves this by coupling hard problem solving with PoW mining. We model the security of AxeChain and derive a balance curve between power utilization and system security. That is, under the reasonable assumption that the attack power does not exceed 1/3 of the total power, 1/2 of total power can be safely used to solve practical problems. We also design a novel incentive model based on the amount of work involved in problem solving, balancing the interests of both the users and miners. Moreover, our experimental results show that AxeChain provides strong security guarantees, no matter what kind of problem is submitted.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

Age of Processing: Age-driven Status Sampling and Processing Offloading for Edge Computing-enabled Real-time IoT Applications

The freshness of status information is of great importance for time-critical Internet of Things (IoT) applications. A metric measuring status freshness is the age-of-information (AoI), which captures the time elapsed from the status being generated at the source node (e.g., a sensor) to the latest status update.However, in intelligent IoT applications such as video surveillance, the status information is revealed after some computation intensive and time-consuming data processing operations, which would affect the status freshness. In this paper, we propose a novel metric, age-of-processing (AoP), to quantify such status freshness, which captures the time elapsed of the newest received processed status data since it is generated. Compared with AoI, AoP further takes the data processing time into account. Since an IoT device has limited computation and energy resource, the device can choose to offload the data processing to the nearby edge server under constrained status sampling frequency.We aim to minimize the average AoP in a long-term process by jointly optimizing the status sampling frequency and processing offloading policy. We formulate this online problem as an infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) with average reward criterion. We then transform the CMDP problem into an unconstrained Markov decision process (MDP) by leveraging a Lagrangian method, and propose a Lagrangian transformation framework for the original CMDP problem. Furthermore, we integrate the framework with perturbation based refinement for achieving the optimal policy of the CMDP problem. Extensive numerical evaluations show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the benchmarks, with an average AoP reduction up to 30%.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

HierTrain: Fast Hierarchical Edge AI Learning with Hybrid Parallelism in Mobile-Edge-Cloud Computing

Nowadays, deep neural networks (DNNs) are the core enablers for many emerging edge AI applications. Conventional approaches to training DNNs are generally implemented at central servers or cloud centers for centralized learning, which is typically time-consuming and resource-demanding due to the transmission of a large amount of data samples from the device to the remote cloud. To overcome these disadvantages, we consider accelerating the learning process of DNNs on the Mobile-Edge-Cloud Computing (MECC) paradigm. In this paper, we propose HierTrain, a hierarchical edge AI learning framework, which efficiently deploys the DNN training task over the hierarchical MECC architecture. We develop a novel \textit{hybrid parallelism} method, which is the key to HierTrain, to adaptively assign the DNN model layers and the data samples across the three levels of edge device, edge server and cloud center. We then formulate the problem of scheduling the DNN training tasks at both layer-granularity and sample-granularity. Solving this optimization problem enables us to achieve the minimum training time. We further implement a hardware prototype consisting of an edge device, an edge server and a cloud server, and conduct extensive experiments on it. Experimental results demonstrate that HierTrain can achieve up to 6.9x speedup compared to the cloud-based hierarchical training approach.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

DeepCP: Deep Learning Driven Cascade Prediction Based Autonomous Content Placement in Closed Social Network

Online social networks (OSNs) are emerging as the most popular mainstream platform for content cascade diffusion. In order to provide satisfactory quality of experience (QoE) for users in OSNs, much research dedicates to proactive content placement by using the propagation pattern, user's personal profiles and social relationships in open social network scenarios (e.g., Twitter and Weibo). In this paper, we take a new direction of popularity-aware content placement in a closed social network (e.g., WeChat Moment) where user's privacy is highly enhanced. We propose a novel data-driven holistic deep learning framework, namely DeepCP, for joint diffusion-aware cascade prediction and autonomous content placement without utilizing users' personal and social information. We first devise a time-window LSTM model for content popularity prediction and cascade geo-distribution estimation. Accordingly, we further propose a novel autonomous content placement mechanism CP-GAN which adopts the generative adversarial network (GAN) for agile placement decision making to reduce the content access latency and enhance users' QoE. We conduct extensive experiments using cascade diffusion traces in WeChat Moment (WM). Evaluation results corroborate that the proposed DeepCP framework can predict the content popularity with a high accuracy, generate efficient placement decision in a real-time manner, and achieve significant content access latency reduction over existing schemes.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

The first light curve modeling and orbital period change investigation of nine contact binaries around the short period cut-off

In this paper, we present the first light curve synthesis and orbital period change analysis of nine contact binaries around the short period limit. It is found that all these systems are W-subtype contact binaries. One of them is a medium contact system while the others are shallow contact ones. Four of them manifest obvious O'Connell effect explained by a dark spot or hot spot on one of the component stars. Third light was detected in three systems. By investigating orbital period variations, we found that four of the targets display a secular period decrease while the others exhibit a long-term period increase. The secular period decrease is more likely caused by angular momentum loss while the long-term period increase is due to mass transfer from the less massive component to the more massive one. Based on the statistic of 19 ultrashort period contact binaries with known orbital period changes, we found that seven of them display long-term decrease (three of them also exhibit cyclic variations), ten of them manifest long-term increase while two of them only show cyclic variation and that most of them are shallow contact binaries supporting the long timescale angular momentum loss theory suggested by Stepien. For the three deep contact systems, we found that they are probably triple systems. The tertiary companion plays an essential role during their formation and evolution.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2020

Convergence of Edge Computing and Deep Learning: A Comprehensive Survey

Ubiquitous sensors and smart devices from factories and communities are generating massive amounts of data, and ever-increasing computing power is driving the core of computation and services from the cloud to the edge of the network. As an important enabler broadly changing people's lives, from face recognition to ambitious smart factories and cities, developments of artificial intelligence (especially deep learning, DL) based applications and services are thriving. However, due to efficiency and latency issues, the current cloud computing service architecture hinders the vision of "providing artificial intelligence for every person and every organization at everywhere". Thus, unleashing DL services using resources at the network edge near the data sources has emerged as a desirable solution. Therefore, edge intelligence, aiming to facilitate the deployment of DL services by edge computing, has received significant attention. In addition, DL, as the representative technique of artificial intelligence, can be integrated into edge computing frameworks to build intelligent edge for dynamic, adaptive edge maintenance and management. With regard to mutually beneficial edge intelligence and intelligent edge, this paper introduces and discusses: 1) the application scenarios of both; 2) the practical implementation methods and enabling technologies, namely DL training and inference in the customized edge computing framework; 3) challenges and future trends of more pervasive and fine-grained intelligence. We believe that by consolidating information scattered across the communication, networking, and DL areas, this survey can help readers to understand the connections between enabling technologies while promoting further discussions on the fusion of edge intelligence and intelligent edge, i.e., Edge DL.

cs.NI↗