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Yan Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Yan Zhang.

At least 451 records · Page 25Linked to original sources

An Energy Balance Cluster Network Framework Based on SWIPT

Wireless NanoSensor Network (WNSN) is a brand-new type of sensor network with broad application prospects. In view of the limited energy of nano-nodes and unstable links in WNSNs, we propose an energy balance cluster network framework (EBCNF) based on Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT). The EBCNF framework extends the network lifetime of nanonodes and uses a clustering algorithm called EBACC (an energy balance algorithm for intra-cluster and inter-cluster nodes) to make the energy consumption of nodes more uniform. Simulation shows that the EBCNF framework can make the network energy consumption more uniform, reduce the error rate of data transmission and the average network throughput, and can be used as an effective routing framework for WNSNs.

cs.NI↗

Evolutionary Preference Learning via Graph Nested GRU ODE for Session-based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to predict the user next action based on the ongoing sessions. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in modeling the user preference evolution to capture the fine-grained user interests. While latent user preferences behind the sessions drift continuously over time, most existing approaches still model the temporal session data in discrete state spaces, which are incapable of capturing the fine-grained preference evolution and result in sub-optimal solutions. To this end, we propose Graph Nested GRU ordinary differential equation (ODE), namely GNG-ODE, a novel continuum model that extends the idea of neural ODEs to continuous-time temporal session graphs. The proposed model preserves the continuous nature of dynamic user preferences, encoding both temporal and structural patterns of item transitions into continuous-time dynamic embeddings. As the existing ODE solvers do not consider graph structure change and thus cannot be directly applied to the dynamic graph, we propose a time alignment technique, called t-Alignment, to align the updating time steps of the temporal session graphs within a batch. Empirical results on three benchmark datasets show that GNG-ODE significantly outperforms other baselines.

cs.IR↗

SAGA: Stochastic Whole-Body Grasping with Contact

The synthesis of human grasping has numerous applications including AR/VR, video games and robotics. While methods have been proposed to generate realistic hand-object interaction for object grasping and manipulation, these typically only consider interacting hand alone. Our goal is to synthesize whole-body grasping motions. Starting from an arbitrary initial pose, we aim to generate diverse and natural whole-body human motions to approach and grasp a target object in 3D space. This task is challenging as it requires modeling both whole-body dynamics and dexterous finger movements. To this end, we propose SAGA (StochAstic whole-body Grasping with contAct), a framework which consists of two key components: (a) Static whole-body grasping pose generation. Specifically, we propose a multi-task generative model, to jointly learn static whole-body grasping poses and human-object contacts. (b) Grasping motion infilling. Given an initial pose and the generated whole-body grasping pose as the start and end of the motion respectively, we design a novel contact-aware generative motion infilling module to generate a diverse set of grasp-oriented motions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which is a novel generative framework to synthesize realistic and expressive whole-body motions that approach and grasp randomly placed unseen objects. Code and models are available at https://jiahaoplus.github.io/SAGA/saga.html.

cs.CV↗

EgoBody: Human Body Shape and Motion of Interacting People from Head-Mounted Devices

Understanding social interactions from egocentric views is crucial for many applications, ranging from assistive robotics to AR/VR. Key to reasoning about interactions is to understand the body pose and motion of the interaction partner from the egocentric view. However, research in this area is severely hindered by the lack of datasets. Existing datasets are limited in terms of either size, capture/annotation modalities, ground-truth quality, or interaction diversity. We fill this gap by proposing EgoBody, a novel large-scale dataset for human pose, shape and motion estimation from egocentric views, during interactions in complex 3D scenes. We employ Microsoft HoloLens2 headsets to record rich egocentric data streams (including RGB, depth, eye gaze, head and hand tracking). To obtain accurate 3D ground truth, we calibrate the headset with a multi-Kinect rig and fit expressive SMPL-X body meshes to multi-view RGB-D frames, reconstructing 3D human shapes and poses relative to the scene, over time. We collect 125 sequences, spanning diverse interaction scenarios, and propose the first benchmark for 3D full-body pose and shape estimation of the social partner from egocentric views. We extensively evaluate state-of-the-art methods, highlight their limitations in the egocentric scenario, and address such limitations leveraging our high-quality annotations. Data and code are available at https://sanweiliti.github.io/egobody/egobody.html.

cs.CV↗

Towards Modern Card Games with Large-Scale Action Spaces Through Action Representation

Axie infinity is a complicated card game with a huge-scale action space. This makes it difficult to solve this challenge using generic Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. We propose a hybrid RL framework to learn action representations and game strategies. To avoid evaluating every action in the large feasible action set, our method evaluates actions in a fixed-size set which is determined using action representations. We compare the performance of our method with the other two baseline methods in terms of their sample efficiency and the winning rates of the trained models. We empirically show that our method achieves an overall best winning rate and the best sample efficiency among the three methods.

cs.AI↗

LFGCF: Light Folksonomy Graph Collaborative Filtering for Tag-Aware Recommendation

Tag-aware recommendation is a task of predicting a personalized list of items for a user by their tagging behaviors. It is crucial for many applications with tagging capabilities like last.fm or movielens. Recently, many efforts have been devoted to improving Tag-aware recommendation systems (TRS) with Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), which has become new state-of-the-art for the general recommendation. However, some solutions are directly inherited from GCN without justifications, which is difficult to alleviate the sparsity, ambiguity, and redundancy issues introduced by tags, thus adding to difficulties of training and degrading recommendation performance. In this work, we aim to simplify the design of GCN to make it more concise for TRS. We propose a novel tag-aware recommendation model named Light Folksonomy Graph Collaborative Filtering (LFGCF), which only includes the essential GCN components. Specifically, LFGCF first constructs Folksonomy Graphs from the records of user assigning tags and item getting tagged. Then we leverage the simple design of aggregation to learn the high-order representations on Folksonomy Graphs and use the weighted sum of the embeddings learned at several layers for information updating. We share tags embeddings to bridge the information gap between users and items. Besides, a regularization function named TransRT is proposed to better depict user preferences and item features. Extensive hyperparameters experiments and ablation studies on three real-world datasets show that LFGCF uses fewer parameters and significantly outperforms most baselines for the tag-aware top-N recommendations.

cs.IR↗

Service Modeling and Delay Analysis of Packet Delivery over a Wireless Link

For delay analysis of packet delivery over a wireless link, several novel ideas are introduced. One is to construct an equivalent $G/G/1$ non-lossy queueing model to ease the analysis, enabled by exploiting empirical models of packet error rate, packet service time and packet loss rate obtained from measurement. The second is to exploit a classical queueing theory result to approximate the mean delay. For estimating the delay distribution, the newly developed stochastic network calculus (SNC) theory is made use of, forming the third idea. To enable this SNC based analysis, a stochastic service curve characterization of the link is introduced, relying on a packet service time model obtained from the empirical models. The focused link is a 802.15.4 wireless link. Extensive experimental investigation under a wide range of settings was conducted. The proposed ideas are validated with the experiment results. The validation confirms that the proposed approaches, integrating both empirical and analytical modes, are effective for service modeling and delay analysis. This suggests an integrated approach, now found previously, for quantitative understanding of the delay performance of packet delivery over a wireless link.

cs.PF↗

PC-GANs: Progressive Compensation Generative Adversarial Networks for Pan-sharpening

The fusion of multispectral and panchromatic images is always dubbed pansharpening. Most of the available deep learning-based pan-sharpening methods sharpen the multispectral images through a one-step scheme, which strongly depends on the reconstruction ability of the network. However, remote sensing images always have large variations, as a result, these one-step methods are vulnerable to the error accumulation and thus incapable of preserving spatial details as well as the spectral information. In this paper, we propose a novel two-step model for pan-sharpening that sharpens the MS image through the progressive compensation of the spatial and spectral information. Firstly, a deep multiscale guided generative adversarial network is used to preliminarily enhance the spatial resolution of the MS image. Starting from the pre-sharpened MS image in the coarse domain, our approach then progressively refines the spatial and spectral residuals over a couple of generative adversarial networks (GANs) that have reverse architectures. The whole model is composed of triple GANs, and based on the specific architecture, a joint compensation loss function is designed to enable the triple GANs to be trained simultaneously. Moreover, the spatial-spectral residual compensation structure proposed in this paper can be extended to other pan-sharpening methods to further enhance their fusion results. Extensive experiments are performed on different datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.

eess.IV↗

Pay More Attention to History: A Context Modelling Strategy for Conversational Text-to-SQL

Conversational text-to-SQL aims at converting multi-turn natural language queries into their corresponding SQL (Structured Query Language) representations. One of the most intractable problems of conversational text-to-SQL is modelling the semantics of multi-turn queries and gathering the proper information required for the current query. This paper shows that explicitly modelling the semantic changes by adding each turn and the summarization of the whole context can bring better performance on converting conversational queries into SQLs. In particular, we propose two conversational modelling tasks in both turn grain and conversation grain. These two tasks simply work as auxiliary training tasks to help with multi-turn conversational semantic parsing. We conducted empirical studies and achieved new state-of-the-art results on the large-scale open-domain conversational text-to-SQL dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism significantly improves the performance of multi-turn semantic parsing.

cs.CL↗

Compositional Human-Scene Interaction Synthesis with Semantic Control

Synthesizing natural interactions between virtual humans and their 3D environments is critical for numerous applications, such as computer games and AR/VR experiences. Our goal is to synthesize humans interacting with a given 3D scene controlled by high-level semantic specifications as pairs of action categories and object instances, e.g., "sit on the chair". The key challenge of incorporating interaction semantics into the generation framework is to learn a joint representation that effectively captures heterogeneous information, including human body articulation, 3D object geometry, and the intent of the interaction. To address this challenge, we design a novel transformer-based generative model, in which the articulated 3D human body surface points and 3D objects are jointly encoded in a unified latent space, and the semantics of the interaction between the human and objects are embedded via positional encoding. Furthermore, inspired by the compositional nature of interactions that humans can simultaneously interact with multiple objects, we define interaction semantics as the composition of varying numbers of atomic action-object pairs. Our proposed generative model can naturally incorporate varying numbers of atomic interactions, which enables synthesizing compositional human-scene interactions without requiring composite interaction data. We extend the PROX dataset with interaction semantic labels and scene instance segmentation to evaluate our method and demonstrate that our method can generate realistic human-scene interactions with semantic control. Our perceptual study shows that our synthesized virtual humans can naturally interact with 3D scenes, considerably outperforming existing methods. We name our method COINS, for COmpositional INteraction Synthesis with Semantic Control. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zkf1997/COINS.

cs.CV↗

IAM: A Comprehensive and Large-Scale Dataset for Integrated Argument Mining Tasks

Traditionally, a debate usually requires a manual preparation process, including reading plenty of articles, selecting the claims, identifying the stances of the claims, seeking the evidence for the claims, etc. As the AI debate attracts more attention these years, it is worth exploring the methods to automate the tedious process involved in the debating system. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive and large dataset named IAM, which can be applied to a series of argument mining tasks, including claim extraction, stance classification, evidence extraction, etc. Our dataset is collected from over 1k articles related to 123 topics. Near 70k sentences in the dataset are fully annotated based on their argument properties (e.g., claims, stances, evidence, etc.). We further propose two new integrated argument mining tasks associated with the debate preparation process: (1) claim extraction with stance classification (CESC) and (2) claim-evidence pair extraction (CEPE). We adopt a pipeline approach and an end-to-end method for each integrated task separately. Promising experimental results are reported to show the values and challenges of our proposed tasks, and motivate future research on argument mining.

cs.CL↗

Med-DANet: Dynamic Architecture Network for Efficient Medical Volumetric Segmentation

For 3D medical image (e.g. CT and MRI) segmentation, the difficulty of segmenting each slice in a clinical case varies greatly. Previous research on volumetric medical image segmentation in a slice-by-slice manner conventionally use the identical 2D deep neural network to segment all the slices of the same case, ignoring the data heterogeneity among image slices. In this paper, we focus on multi-modal 3D MRI brain tumor segmentation and propose a dynamic architecture network named Med-DANet based on adaptive model selection to achieve effective accuracy and efficiency trade-off. For each slice of the input 3D MRI volume, our proposed method learns a slice-specific decision by the Decision Network to dynamically select a suitable model from the predefined Model Bank for the subsequent 2D segmentation task. Extensive experimental results on both BraTS 2019 and 2020 datasets show that our proposed method achieves comparable or better results than previous state-of-the-art methods for 3D MRI brain tumor segmentation with much less model complexity. Compared with the state-of-the-art 3D method TransBTS, the proposed framework improves the model efficiency by up to 3.5x without sacrificing the accuracy. Our code will be publicly available soon.

eess.IV↗

Digital Twin Assisted Task Offloading for Aerial Edge Computing and Networks

Considering the user mobility and unpredictable mobile edge computing (MEC) environments, this paper studies the intelligent task offloading problem in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled MEC with the assistance of digital twin (DT). We aim at minimizing the energy consumption of the entire MEC system by jointly optimizing mobile terminal users (MTUs) association, UAV trajectory, transmission power distribution and computation capacity allocation while respecting the constraints of mission maximum processing delays. Specifically, double deep Q-network (DDQN) algorithm stemming from deep reinforcement learning is first proposed to effectively solve the problem of MTUs association and UAV trajectory. Then, the closed-form expression is employed to handle the problem of transmission power distribution and the computation capacity allocation problem is further addressed via an iterative algorithm. Numerical results show that our proposed scheme is able to converge and significantly reduce the total energy consumption of the MEC system compared to the benchmark schemes.

cs.IT↗

Incentivizing Proof-of-Stake Blockchain for Secured Data Collection in UAV-Assisted IoT: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach

The Internet of Things (IoT) can be conveniently deployed while empowering various applications, where the IoT nodes can form clusters to finish certain missions collectively. In this paper, we propose to employ unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to assist the clustered IoT data collection with blockchain-based security provisioning. In particular, the UAVs generate candidate blocks based on the collected data, which are then audited through a lightweight proof-of-stake consensus mechanism within the UAV-based blockchain network. To motivate efficient blockchain while reducing the operational cost, a stake pool is constructed at the active UAV while encouraging stake investment from other UAVs with profit sharing. The problem is formulated to maximize the overall profit through the blockchain system in unit time by jointly investigating the IoT transmission, incentives through investment and profit sharing, and UAV deployment strategies. Then, the problem is solved in a distributed manner while being decoupled into two layers. The inner layer incorporates IoT transmission and incentive design, which are tackled with large-system approximation and one-leader-multi-follower Stackelberg game analysis, respectively. The outer layer for UAV deployment is undertaken with a multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient approach. Results show the convergence of the proposed learning process and the UAV deployment, and also demonstrated is the performance superiority of our proposal as compared with the baselines.

cs.NI↗

A Formal Specification of Operating System based on ARINC 653

In this paper, by using the formal language \emph{Circus}, we give a formal specification of an operating system based on ARINC 653 standard. Our specification includes interrupt handling, time and memory management, partition and process scheduling, system call response and related APEX services. Especially, the concurrent behaviours of partitions and processes are also specified.

cs.LO↗

A Universal Framework for Reconstructing Complex Networks and Node Dynamics from Discrete or Continuous Dynamics Data

Many dynamical processes of complex systems can be understood as the dynamics of a group of nodes interacting on a given network structure. However, finding such interaction structure and node dynamics from time series of node behaviours is tough. Conventional methods focus on either network structure inference task or dynamics reconstruction problem, very few of them can work well on both. This paper proposes a universal framework for reconstructing network structure and node dynamics at the same time from observed time-series data of nodes. We use a differentiable Bernoulli sampling process to generate a candidate network structure, and use neural networks to simulate the node dynamics based on the candidate network. We then adjust all the parameters with a stochastic gradient descent algorithm to maximize the likelihood function defined on the data. The experiments show that our model can recover various network structures and node dynamics at the same time with high accuracy. It can also work well on binary, discrete and continuous time-series data, and the reconstruction results are robust against noise and missing information.

physics.soc-ph↗

Giant atoms with time-dependent couplings

We study the decay dynamics of a two-level giant atom that is coupled to a waveguide with time-dependent coupling strengths. In the non-Markovian regime where the retardation effect cannot be ignored, we show that the dynamics of the atom depends on the atom-waveguide coupling strengths at an earlier time. This allows one to tailor the decay dynamics of the giant atom and even realize a stationary population revival with appropriate coupling modulations. Moreover, we demonstrate the possibility of simulating the quantum Zeno and quantum anti-Zeno effects in the giant-atom model with periodic coupling quenches. These results have potential applications in quantum information processing and quantum network engineering.

quant-ph↗

Multi-wavelength Variation Phenomena of PKS 0735+178 on Diverse Timescale

BL Lac object PKS 0735+178 showed some complex multi-wavelength variation phenomena in the previous studies, especially for its color behavior. Bluer-when-brighter, redder-when-brighter and achromatic behavior were all found to be possible long-term trends of PKS 0735+178. In this work, we collected the long-term multi-wavelength data of PKS 0735+178, and also performed a multi-color optical monitoring on intraday timescale. The intraday variability was detected on one night. On the long timescale, a possible 22-day time lag was found between the $R$ and $γ$-ray bands. The results of the cross-correlation analysis exhibited strong correlations between various optical bands on both intraday and long timescale. However, only a mild correlation was found between the long-term $γ$-ray and $R$-band light curves, which could be interpreted by the different emission mechanisms of the $γ$-ray and optical emissions. PKS 0735+178 showed a significant harder-when-brighter in the $γ$-ray band, which is consistent with the observed optical bluer-when-brighter trend on both long-term and intraday timescales. We found that the HWB and BWB trends will be enhanced during the active states, especially for the historical low state. Such phenomenon indicates a special activity-dependent color behavior of PKS 0735+178, and it could be well interpreted by the jet emission model.

astro-ph.GA↗