arXiv subjects

Bin Li

Publications and source records attributed to Bin Li.

At least 613 records · Page 34Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Task Allocation and Mobile Base Station Deployment in Wireless Powered Spatial Crowdsourcing

Wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising technology to prolong the lifetime of sensor and communication devices, i.e., workers, in completing crowdsourcing tasks by providing continuous and cost-effective energy supplies. In this paper, we propose a wireless powered spatial crowdsourcing (SC) framework which consists of two mutual dependent phases: task allocation phase and data crowdsourcing phase. In the task allocation phase, we propose a Stackelberg game based mechanism for the SC platform to efficiently allocate spatial tasks and wireless charging power to each worker. In the data crowdsourcing phase, the workers may have an incentive to misreport its real working location to improve its own utility, which manipulates the SC platform. To address this issue, we present a strategyproof deployment mechanism for the SC platform to deploy its mobile base station. We apply the Moulin's generalized median mechanism and analyze the worst-case performance in maximizing the SC platform's utility. Finally, numerical experiments reveal the effectiveness of the proposed framework in allocating tasks and charging power to workers while avoiding the dishonest worker's manipulation.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2019

High Dynamic Range Externally Time-gated Photon Counting Optical Time-domain Reflectometry

Single photon detector (SPD) has a maximum count rate due to its dead time, which results in that the dynamic range of photon counting optical time-domain reflectometry (PC-OTDR) de-creases with the length of monitored fiber. To further improve the dynamic range of PC-OTDR, we propose and demonstrate an externally time-gated scheme. The externally time-gated scheme is realized by using a high-speed optical switch, i.e. a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, to modulate the back-propagation optical signal, and to allow that only a certain segment of the fiber is monitored by the SPD. The feasibility of proposed scheme is first examined with theoretical analysis and simulation; then we experimentally demonstrate it with our experimental PC-OTDR testbed operating at 800 nm wavelength band. In our studies, a dynamic range of 30.0 dB is achieved in a 70 meters long PC-OTDR system with 50 ns external gates, corresponding to an improvement of 11.0 dB in dynamic range comparing with no gating operation. Furthermore, with the improved dynamic range, a successful identification of a 0.37 dB loss event is detected with 30-seconds accumulation, which could not be identified without gating operation. Our scheme paves an avenue for developing PC-OTDR systems with high dynamic range.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2019

CNN-based Steganalysis and Parametric Adversarial Embedding: a Game-Theoretic Framework

CNN-based steganalysis has recently achieved very good performance in detecting content-adaptive steganography. At the same time, recent works have shown that, by adopting an approach similar to that used to build adversarial examples, a steganographer can adopt an adversarial embedding strategy to effectively counter a target CNN steganalyzer. In turn, the good performance of the steganalyzer can be restored by retraining the CNN with adversarial stego images. A problem with this model is that, arguably, at training time the steganalizer is not aware of the exact parameters used by the steganograher for adversarial embedding and, vice versa, the steganographer does not know how the images that will be used to train the steganalyzer are generated. In order to exit this apparent deadlock, we introduce a game theoretic framework wherein the problem of setting the parameters of the steganalyzer and the steganographer is solved in a strategic way. More specifically, a non-zero sum game is first formulated to model the problem, and then instantiated by considering a specific adversarial embedding scheme setting its operating parameters in a game-theoretic fashion. Our analysis shows that the equilibrium solution of the non zero-sum game can be conveniently found by solving an associated zero-sum game, thus reducing greatly the complexity of the problem. Then we run several experiments to derive the optimum strategies for the steganographer and the staganalyst in a game-theoretic sense, and to evaluate the performance of the game at the equilibrium, characterizing the loss with respect to the conventional non-adversarial case. Eventually, by leveraging on the analysis of the equilibrium point of the game, we introduce a new strategy to improve the reliability of the steganalysis, which shows the benefits of addressing the security issue in a game-theoretic perspective.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2019

Diffusion and Auction on Graphs

Auction is the common paradigm for resource allocation which is a fundamental problem in human society. Existing research indicates that the two primary objectives, the seller's revenue and the allocation efficiency, are generally conflicting in auction design. For the first time, we expand the domain of the classic auction to a social graph and formally identify a new class of auction mechanisms on graphs. All mechanisms in this class are incentive-compatible and also promote all buyers to diffuse the auction information to others, whereby both the seller's revenue and the allocation efficiency are significantly improved comparing with the Vickrey auction. It is found that the recently proposed information diffusion mechanism is an extreme case with the lowest revenue in this new class. Our work could potentially inspire a new perspective for the efficient and optimal auction design and could be applied into the prevalent online social and economic networks.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2019

Spatial Mixture Models with Learnable Deep Priors for Perceptual Grouping

Humans perceive the seemingly chaotic world in a structured and compositional way with the prerequisite of being able to segregate conceptual entities from the complex visual scenes. The mechanism of grouping basic visual elements of scenes into conceptual entities is termed as perceptual grouping. In this work, we propose a new type of spatial mixture models with learnable priors for perceptual grouping. Different from existing methods, the proposed method disentangles the attributes of an object into ``shape'' and ``appearance'' which are modeled separately by the mixture weights and the mixture components. More specifically, each object in the visual scene is fully characterized by one latent representation, which is in turn transformed into parameters of the mixture weight and the mixture component by two neural networks. The mixture weights focus on modeling spatial dependencies (i.e., shape) and the mixture components deal with intra-object variations (i.e., appearance). In addition, the background is separately modeled as a special component complementary to the foreground objects. Our extensive empirical tests on two perceptual grouping datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under most experimental configurations. The learned conceptual entities are generalizable to novel visual scenes and insensitive to the diversity of objects. Code is available at https://github.com/jinyangyuan/learnable-deep-priors.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Optimal Sampling for Dynamic Complex Networks with Graph-Bandlimited Initialization

Many engineering, social, and biological complex systems consist of dynamical elements connected via a large-scale network. Monitoring the network's dynamics is essential for a variety of maintenance and scientific purposes. Whilst we understand how to optimally sample a single dynamic element or a non-dynamic graph, we do not possess a theory on how to optimally sample networked dynamical elements. Here, we study nonlinear dynamic graph signals on a fixed complex network. We define the necessary conditions for optimal sampling in the combining time- and graph-domain to fully recover the networked dynamics. We firstly interpret the networked dynamics into a linearized matrix. Then, we prove that the dynamic signals can be sampled and fully recovered if the networked dynamics is stable and their initialization is bandlimited in the graph spectral domain. This new theory directly maps optimal sampling locations and rates to the graph properties and governing nonlinear dynamics. This can inform the optimal placement of experimental probes and sensors on dynamical networks as well as inform the design of each sensor's optimal sampling rate. We motivate the reader with two examples of recovering the networked dynamics for: social population growth and networked protein biochemical interactions with both bandlimited and arbitrary initialization.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

In Search of a Key Value Store with High Performance and High Availability

In recent year, the write-heavy applications is more and more prevalent. How to efficiently handle this sort of workload is one of intensive research direction in the field of database system. The overhead caused by write operation is mainly issued by two reasons: 1) the hardware level, i.e., the IO cost caused by logging. We can't remove this cost in short period 2) the dual-copy software architecture and serial replay. The born of log as database architecture is originated to overcome the software defect. But existing systems treating log as database either are built on top of special infrastructure such as infiniband or NVRam (Non-Volatile Random access memory) which is far from widely available or are constructed with the help of other system such as Dynamo which is lack of flexibility. In this paper we build only write-once key-value system called LogStore from scratch to support our instant messenger business. The key features of LogStore include: 1) a single thread per partition executing mode, which eliminates the concurrency overhead; 2) log as database to enable write-once feature and freshness on the standby. We achieve high availability by embedding replication protocol other than dependent on other infrastructure; 3) fine-grained and low overhead data buffer pool management to effectively minimize IO cost. According to our empirical evaluations LogStore has good performance in write operation, recovery and replication

cs.DB↗

arXiv2019

Text Guided Person Image Synthesis

This paper presents a novel method to manipulate the visual appearance (pose and attribute) of a person image according to natural language descriptions. Our method can be boiled down to two stages: 1) text guided pose generation and 2) visual appearance transferred image synthesis. In the first stage, our method infers a reasonable target human pose based on the text. In the second stage, our method synthesizes a realistic and appearance transferred person image according to the text in conjunction with the target pose. Our method extracts sufficient information from the text and establishes a mapping between the image space and the language space, making generating and editing images corresponding to the description possible. We conduct extensive experiments to reveal the effectiveness of our method, as well as using the VQA Perceptual Score as a metric for evaluating the method. It shows for the first time that we can automatically edit the person image from the natural language descriptions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Dynamics of quasi-static collapse process of a binary granular column

The dynamical behavior of the column that made up binary granular beads is investigated systematically by tracking the displacement of particles in the collapse process. An experimental setup is first devised to control the quasi-static collapse of a granular column, and then observe the trajectories of tracer particles by using an industrial camera controlled by the image acquisition program. It is found that there exist two zones in column: a sliding region in which particles are moving in a layered structure; a static region within which particles are stationary. According to this analytical result, a dynamical model is developed to predict the trajectory evolution of particles in the space-time. The calculating result for the trajectories of particles on the selected layers is well consistent with the experimental observation.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2019

The Binary Space Partitioning-Tree Process

The Mondrian process represents an elegant and powerful approach for space partition modelling. However, as it restricts the partitions to be axis-aligned, its modelling flexibility is limited. In this work, we propose a self-consistent Binary Space Partitioning (BSP)-Tree process to generalize the Mondrian process. The BSP-Tree process is an almost surely right continuous Markov jump process that allows uniformly distributed oblique cuts in a two-dimensional convex polygon. The BSP-Tree process can also be extended using a non-uniform probability measure to generate direction differentiated cuts. The process is also self-consistent, maintaining distributional invariance under a restricted subdomain. We use Conditional-Sequential Monte Carlo for inference using the tree structure as the high-dimensional variable. The BSP-Tree process's performance on synthetic data partitioning and relational modelling demonstrates clear inferential improvements over the standard Mondrian process and other related methods.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2019

Binary Space Partitioning Forests

The Binary Space Partitioning~(BSP)-Tree process is proposed to produce flexible 2-D partition structures which are originally used as a Bayesian nonparametric prior for relational modelling. It can hardly be applied to other learning tasks such as regression trees because extending the BSP-Tree process to a higher dimensional space is nontrivial. This paper is the first attempt to extend the BSP-Tree process to a d-dimensional (d>2) space. We propose to generate a cutting hyperplane, which is assumed to be parallel to d-2 dimensions, to cut each node in the d-dimensional BSP-tree. By designing a subtle strategy to sample two free dimensions from d dimensions, the extended BSP-Tree process can inherit the essential self-consistency property from the original version. Based on the extended BSP-Tree process, an ensemble model, which is named the BSP-Forest, is further developed for regression tasks. Thanks to the retained self-consistency property, we can thus significantly reduce the geometric calculations in the inference stage. Compared to its counterpart, the Mondrian Forest, the BSP-Forest can achieve similar performance with fewer cuts due to its flexibility. The BSP-Forest also outperforms other (Bayesian) regression forests on a number of real-world data sets.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2019

WISERNet: Wider Separate-then-reunion Network for Steganalysis of Color Images

Until recently, deep steganalyzers in spatial domain have been all designed for gray-scale images. In this paper, we propose WISERNet (the wider separate-then-reunion network) for steganalysis of color images. We provide theoretical rationale to claim that the summation in normal convolution is one sort of "linear collusion attack" which reserves strong correlated patterns while impairs uncorrelated noises. Therefore in the bottom convolutional layer which aims at suppressing correlated image contents, we adopt separate channel-wise convolution without summation instead. Conversely, in the upper convolutional layers we believe that the summation in normal convolution is beneficial. Therefore we adopt united normal convolution in those layers and make them remarkably wider to reinforce the effect of "linear collusion attack". As a result, our proposed wide-and-shallow, separate-then-reunion network structure is specifically suitable for color image steganalysis. We have conducted extensive experiments on color image datasets generated from BOSSBase raw images and another large-scale dataset which contains 100,000 raw images, with different demosaicking algorithms and down-sampling algorithms. The experimental results show that our proposed network outperforms other state-of-the-art color image steganalytic models either hand-crafted or learned using deep networks in the literature by a clear margin. Specifically, it is noted that the detection performance gain is achieved with less than half the complexity compared to the most advanced deep-learning steganalyzer as far as we know, which is scarce in the literature.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2019

Rectangular Bounding Process

Stochastic partition models divide a multi-dimensional space into a number of rectangular regions, such that the data within each region exhibit certain types of homogeneity. Due to the nature of their partition strategy, existing partition models may create many unnecessary divisions in sparse regions when trying to describe data in dense regions. To avoid this problem we introduce a new parsimonious partition model -- the Rectangular Bounding Process (RBP) -- to efficiently partition multi-dimensional spaces, by employing a bounding strategy to enclose data points within rectangular bounding boxes. Unlike existing approaches, the RBP possesses several attractive theoretical properties that make it a powerful nonparametric partition prior on a hypercube. In particular, the RBP is self-consistent and as such can be directly extended from a finite hypercube to infinite (unbounded) space. We apply the RBP to regression trees and relational models as a flexible partition prior. The experimental results validate the merit of the RBP {in rich yet parsimonious expressiveness} compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2019

Selling Multiple Items via Social Networks

We consider a market where a seller sells multiple units of a commodity in a social network. Each node/buyer in the social network can only directly communicate with her neighbours, i.e. the seller can only sell the commodity to her neighbours if she could not find a way to inform other buyers. In this paper, we design a novel promotion mechanism that incentivizes all buyers, who are aware of the sale, to invite all their neighbours to join the sale, even though there is no guarantee that their efforts will be paid. While traditional sale promotions such as sponsored search auctions cannot guarantee a positive return for the advertiser (the seller), our mechanism guarantees that the seller's revenue is better than not using the advertising. More importantly, the seller does not need to pay if the advertising is not beneficial to her.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2019

Learn a Prior for RHEA for Better Online Planning

Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms (RHEA) are a class of online planning methods for real-time game playing; their performance is closely related to the planning horizon and the search time allowed. In this paper, we propose to learn a prior for RHEA in an offline manner by training a value network and a policy network. The value network is used to reduce the planning horizon by providing an estimation of future rewards, and the policy network is used to initialize the population, which helps to narrow down the search scope. The proposed algorithm, named prior-based RHEA (p-RHEA), trains policy and value networks by performing planning and learning iteratively. In the planning stage, the horizon-limited search assisted with the policy network and value network is performed to improve the policies and collect training samples. In the learning stage, the policy network and value network are trained with the collected samples to learn better prior knowledge. Experimental results on OpenAI Gym MuJoCo tasks show that the performance of the proposed p-RHEA is significantly improved compared to that of RHEA.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Can We Achieve Fresh Information with Selfish Users in Mobile Crowd-Learning?

The proliferation of smart mobile devices has spurred an explosive growth of mobile crowd-learning services, where service providers rely on the user community to voluntarily collect, report, and share real-time information for a collection of scattered points of interest. A critical factor affecting the future large-scale adoption of such mobile crowd-learning applications is the freshness of the crowd-learned information, which can be measured by a metric termed ``age-of-information'' (AoI). However, we show that the AoI of mobile crowd-learning could be arbitrarily bad under selfish users' behaviors if the system is poorly designed. This motivates us to design efficient reward mechanisms to incentivize mobile users to report information in time, with the goal of keeping the AoI and congestion level of each PoI low. Toward this end, we consider a simple linear AoI-based reward mechanism and analyze its AoI and congestion performances in terms of price of anarchy (PoA), which characterizes the degradation of the system efficiency due to selfish behavior of users. Remarkably, we show that the proposed mechanism achieves the optimal AoI performance asymptotically in a deterministic scenario. Further, we prove that the proposed mechanism achieves a bounded PoA in general stochastic cases, and the bound only depends on system parameters. Particularly, when the service rates of PoIs are symmetric in stochastic cases, the achieved PoA is upper-bounded by $1/2$ asymptotically. Collectively, this work advances our understanding of information freshness in mobile crowd-learning systems.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Sequential Bayesian Detection of Spike Activities from Fluorescence Observations

Extracting and detecting spike activities from the fluorescence observations is an important step in understanding how neuron systems work. The main challenge lies in that the combination of the ambient noise with dynamic baseline fluctuation, often contaminates the observations, thereby deteriorating the reliability of spike detection. This may be even worse in the face of the nonlinear biological process, the coupling interactions between spikes and baseline, and the unknown critical parameters of an underlying physiological model, in which erroneous estimations of parameters will affect the detection of spikes causing further error propagation. In this paper, we propose a random finite set (RFS) based Bayesian approach. The dynamic behaviors of spike sequence, fluctuated baseline and unknown parameters are formulated as one RFS. This RFS state is capable of distinguishing the hidden active/silent states induced by spike and non-spike activities respectively, thereby \emph{negating the interaction role} played by spikes and other factors. Then, premised on the RFS states, a Bayesian inference scheme is designed to simultaneously estimate the model parameters, baseline, and crucial spike activities. Our results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can gain an extra $12\%$ detection accuracy in comparison with the state-of-the-art MLSpike method.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2019

High-dimensional Metric Combining for Non-coherent Molecular Signal Detection

In emerging Internet-of-Nano-Thing (IoNT), information will be embedded and conveyed in the form of molecules through complex and diffusive medias. One main challenge lies in the long-tail nature of the channel response causing inter-symbol-interference (ISI), which deteriorates the detection performance. If the channel is unknown, we cannot easily achieve traditional coherent channel estimation and cancellation, and the impact of ISI will be more severe. In this paper, we develop a novel high-dimensional non-coherent scheme for blind detection of molecular signals. We achieve this in a higher-dimensional metric space by combining different non-coherent metrics that exploit the transient features of the signals. By deducing the theoretical bit error rate (BER) for any constructed high-dimensional non-coherent metric, we prove that, higher dimensionality always achieves a lower BER in the same sample space. Then, we design a generalised blind detection algorithm that utilizes the Parzen approximation and its probabilistic neural network (Parzen-PNN) to detect information bits. Taking advantages of its fast convergence and parallel implementation, our proposed scheme can meet the needs of detection accuracy and real-time computing. Numerical simulations demonstrate that our proposed scheme can gain 10dB BER compared with other state of the art methods.

cs.LG↗