arXiv subjects

Jun Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Jun Zhao.

At least 433 records · Page 24Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

FTN: Foreground-Guided Texture-Focused Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (Re-ID) is a challenging task as persons are often in different backgrounds. Most recent Re-ID methods treat the foreground and background information equally for person discriminative learning, but can easily lead to potential false alarm problems when different persons are in similar backgrounds or the same person is in different backgrounds. In this paper, we propose a Foreground-Guided Texture-Focused Network (FTN) for Re-ID, which can weaken the representation of unrelated background and highlight the attributes person-related in an end-to-end manner. FTN consists of a semantic encoder (S-Enc) and a compact foreground attention module (CFA) for Re-ID task, and a texture-focused decoder (TF-Dec) for reconstruction task. Particularly, we build a foreground-guided semi-supervised learning strategy for TF-Dec because the reconstructed ground-truths are only the inputs of FTN weighted by the Gaussian mask and the attention mask generated by CFA. Moreover, a new gradient loss is introduced to encourage the network to mine the texture consistency between the inputs and the reconstructed outputs. Our FTN is computationally efficient and extensive experiments on three commonly used datasets Market1501, CUHK03 and MSMT17 demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Event Coreference Resolution via a Multi-loss Neural Network without Using Argument Information

Event coreference resolution(ECR) is an important task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and nearly all the existing approaches to this task rely on event argument information. However, these methods tend to suffer from error propagation from the stage of event argument extraction. Besides, not every event mention contains all arguments of an event, and argument information may confuse the model that events have arguments to detect event coreference in real text. Furthermore, the context information of an event is useful to infer the coreference between events. Thus, in order to reduce the errors propagated from event argument extraction and use context information effectively, we propose a multi-loss neural network model that does not need any argument information to do the within-document event coreference resolution task and achieve a significant performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Feature Distillation With Guided Adversarial Contrastive Learning

Deep learning models are shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. Though adversarial training can enhance model robustness, typical approaches are computationally expensive. Recent works proposed to transfer the robustness to adversarial attacks across different tasks or models with soft labels.Compared to soft labels, feature contains rich semantic information and holds the potential to be applied to different downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Guided Adversarial Contrastive Distillation (GACD), to effectively transfer adversarial robustness from teacher to student with features. We first formulate this objective as contrastive learning and connect it with mutual information. With a well-trained teacher model as an anchor, students are expected to extract features similar to the teacher. Then considering the potential errors made by teachers, we propose sample reweighted estimation to eliminate the negative effects from teachers. With GACD, the student not only learns to extract robust features, but also captures structural knowledge from the teacher. By extensive experiments evaluating over popular datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and STL-10, we demonstrate that our approach can effectively transfer robustness across different models and even different tasks, and achieve comparable or better results than existing methods. Besides, we provide a detailed analysis of various methods, showing that students produced by our approach capture more structural knowledge from teachers and learn more robust features under adversarial attacks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

MAT: Motion-Aware Multi-Object Tracking

Modern multi-object tracking (MOT) systems usually model the trajectories by associating per-frame detections. However, when camera motion, fast motion, and occlusion challenges occur, it is difficult to ensure long-range tracking or even the tracklet purity, especially for small objects. Although re-identification is often employed, due to noisy partial-detections, similar appearance, and lack of temporal-spatial constraints, it is not only unreliable and time-consuming, but still cannot address the false negatives for occluded and blurred objects. In this paper, we propose an enhanced MOT paradigm, namely Motion-Aware Tracker (MAT), focusing more on various motion patterns of different objects. The rigid camera motion and nonrigid pedestrian motion are blended compatibly to form the integrated motion localization module. Meanwhile, we introduce the dynamic reconnection context module, which aims to balance the robustness of long-range motion-based reconnection, and includes the cyclic pseudo-observation updating strategy to smoothly fill in the tracking fragments caused by occlusion or blur. Additionally, the 3D integral image module is presented to efficiently cut useless track-detection association connections with temporal-spatial constraints. Extensive experiments on MOT16 and MOT17 challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our MAT approach can achieve the superior performance by a large margin with high efficiency, in contrast to other state-of-the-art trackers.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Backscatter Communications

We introduce a novel system setup where a backscatter device operates in the presence of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). In particular, we study the bistatic backscatter communication (BackCom) system assisted by an IRS. The phase shifts at the IRS are optimized jointly with the transmit beamforming vector of the carrier emitter to minimize the transmit power consumption at the carrier emitter whilst guaranteeing a required BackCom performance. The unique channel characteristics arising from multiple reflections at the IRS render the optimization problem highly non-convex. Therefore, we jointly utilize the minorization-maximization algorithm and the semidefinite relaxation technique to present an approximate solution for the optimal IRS phase shift design. We also extend our analytical results to the monostatic BackCom system. Numerical results indicate that the introduction of the IRS brings about considerable reductions in transmit power, even with moderate IRS sizes, which can be translated to range increases over the non-IRS-assisted BackCom system.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Secrecy Rate Maximization for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided SWIPT Systems

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) are two promising techniques for providing enhanced wireless communication capability and sustainable energy supply to energy-constrained wireless devices. Moreover, the combination of the IRS and the SWIPT can create the "one plus one greater than two" effect. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless media, the IRS-aided SWIPT systems are vulnerable to eavesdropping. In this paper, we study the security issue of the IRS-aided SWIPT systems. The objective is to maximize the secrecy rate by jointly designing the transmit beamforming and artificial noise (AN) covariance matrix at a base station (BS) and reflective beamforming at an IRS, under transmit power constraint at the BS and energy harvesting (EH) constraints at multiple energy receivers. To tackle the formulated non-convex problem, we first employ an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to decouple the coupling variables. Then, reflective beamforming, transmit beamforming and AN covariance matrix can be optimized by using a penalty-based algorithm and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) method, respectively. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme over baseline schemes.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Towards Distributed Privacy-Preserving Prediction

In privacy-preserving machine learning, individual parties are reluctant to share their sensitive training data due to privacy concerns. Even the trained model parameters or prediction can pose serious privacy leakage. To address these problems, we demonstrate a generally applicable Distributed Privacy-Preserving Prediction (DPPP) framework, in which instead of sharing more sensitive data or model parameters, an untrusted aggregator combines only multiple models' predictions under provable privacy guarantee. Our framework integrates two main techniques to guarantee individual privacy. First, we introduce the improved Binomial Mechanism and Discrete Gaussian Mechanism to achieve distributed differential privacy. Second, we utilize homomorphic encryption to ensure that the aggregator learns nothing but the noisy aggregated prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework has comparable performance to the non-private frameworks and delivers better results than the local differentially private framework and standalone framework.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction in Federated Settings

This paper investigates distantly supervised relation extraction in federated settings. Previous studies focus on distant supervision under the assumption of centralized training, which requires collecting texts from different platforms and storing them on one machine. However, centralized training is challenged by two issues, namely, data barriers and privacy protection, which make it almost impossible or cost-prohibitive to centralize data from multiple platforms. Therefore, it is worthy to investigate distant supervision in the federated learning paradigm, which decouples the model training from the need for direct access to the raw data. Overcoming label noise of distant supervision, however, becomes more difficult in federated settings, since the sentences containing the same entity pair may scatter around different platforms. In this paper, we propose a federated denoising framework to suppress label noise in federated settings. The core of this framework is a multiple instance learning based denoising method that is able to select reliable instances via cross-platform collaboration. Various experimental results on New York Times dataset and miRNA gene regulation relation dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Local Differential Privacy and Its Applications: A Comprehensive Survey

With the fast development of Information Technology, a tremendous amount of data have been generated and collected for research and analysis purposes. As an increasing number of users are growing concerned about their personal information, privacy preservation has become an urgent problem to be solved and has attracted significant attention. Local differential privacy (LDP), as a strong privacy tool, has been widely deployed in the real world in recent years. It breaks the shackles of the trusted third party, and allows users to perturb their data locally, thus providing much stronger privacy protection. This survey provides a comprehensive and structured overview of the local differential privacy technology. We summarise and analyze state-of-the-art research in LDP and compare a range of methods in the context of answering a variety of queries and training different machine learning models. We discuss the practical deployment of local differential privacy and explore its application in various domains. Furthermore, we point out several research gaps, and discuss promising future research directions.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Developing a measure of online wellbeing and user trust

This paper describes the first stage of the ongoing development of two scales to measure online wellbeing and trust, based on the results of a series of workshops with younger and older adults. The first, the Online Wellbeing Scale includes subscales covering both psychological, or eudaimonic, wellbeing and subjective, or hedonic, wellbeing, as well as digital literacy and online activity; the overall aim is to understand how a user's online experiences affect their wellbeing. The second scale, the Trust Index includes three subscales covering the importance of trust to the user, trusting beliefs, and contextual factors; the aim for this scale is to examine trust in online algorithm-driven systems. The scales will be used together to aid researchers in understanding how trust (or lack of trust) relates to overall wellbeing online. They will also contribute to the development of a suite of tools for empowering users to negotiate issues of trust online, as well as in designing guidelines for the inclusion of trust considerations in the development of online algorithm-driven systems. The next step is to release the prototype scales developed as a result of this pilot in a large online study in to validate the measures.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Attacks to Federated Learning: Responsive Web User Interface to Recover Training Data from User Gradients

Local differential privacy (LDP) is an emerging privacy standard to protect individual user data. One scenario where LDP can be applied is federated learning, where each user sends in his/her user gradients to an aggregator who uses these gradients to perform stochastic gradient descent. In a case where the aggregator is untrusted and LDP is not applied to each user gradient, the aggregator can recover sensitive user data from these gradients. In this paper, we present a new interactive web demo showcasing the power of local differential privacy by visualizing federated learning with local differential privacy. Moreover, the live demo shows how LDP can prevent untrusted aggregators from recovering sensitive training data. A measure called the exp-hamming recovery is also created to show the extent of how much data the aggregator can recover.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

A novel random access scheme for M2M communication in crowded asynchronous massive MIMO systems

A new random access scheme is proposed to solve the intra-cell pilot collision for M2M communication in crowded asynchronous massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The proposed scheme utilizes the proposed estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique enhanced (ESPRIT-E) method to estimate the effective timing offsets, and then active UEs obtain their timing errors from the effective timing offsets for uplink message transmission. We analyze the mean squared error of the estimated effective timing offsets of UEs, and the uplink throughput. Simulation results show that, compared to the exiting random access scheme for the crowded asynchronous massive MIMO systems, the proposed scheme can improve the uplink throughput and estimate the effective timing offsets accurately at the same time.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Clustering and Power Allocation for UAV-assisted NOMA-VLC Systems: A Swarm Intelligence Approach

Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) visible light communications (VLC) exposes many potentials over VLC and NOMA-VLC systems. In this circumstance, user grouping is of importance to reduce the NOMA decoding complexity when the number of users is large; however, this issue has not been considered in the existing study. In this paper, we aim to maximize the weighted sum-rate of all the users by jointly optimizing UAV placement, user grouping, and power allocation in downlink NOMA-VLC systems. We first consider an efficient user clustering strategy, then apply a swarm intelligence approach, namely Harris Hawk Optimization (HHO), to solve the joint UAV placement and power allocation problem. Simulation results show outperformance of the proposed algorithm in comparison with four alternatives: OMA, NOMA without pairing, NOMA-VLC with fixed UAV placement, and random user clustering.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Quarantine Fatigue: first-ever decrease in social distancing measures after the COVID-19 outbreak before reopening United States

By the emergence of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China, and its rapid outbreak worldwide, the infectious illness has changed our everyday travel patterns. In this research, our team investigated the changes in the daily mobility pattern of people during the pandemic by utilizing an integrated data panel. To incorporate various aspects of human mobility, the team focused on the Social Distancing Index (SDI) which was calculated based on five basic mobility measures. The SDI patterns showed a plateau stage in the beginning of April that lasted for about two weeks. This phenomenon then followed by a universal decline of SDI, increased number of trips and reduction in percentage of people staying at home. We called the observation Quarantine Fatigue. The Rate of Change (ROC) method was employed to trace back the start date of quarantine fatigue which was indicated to be April 15th. Our analysis showed that despite the existence of state-to-state variations, most states started experiencing a quarantine fatigue phenomenon during the same period. This observation became more important by knowing that none of the states had officially announced the reopening until late April showing that people decided to loosen up their social distancing practices before the official reopening announcement. Moreover, our analysis indicated that official reopening led to a rapid decline in SDI, raising the concern of a second wave of outbreak. The synchronized trend among states also emphasizes the importance of a more nationwide decision-making attitude for the future as the condition of each state depends on the nationwide behavior.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Blockchain-Based Differential Privacy Cost Management System

Privacy preservation is a big concern for various sectors. To protect individual user data, one emerging technology is differential privacy. However, it still has limitations for datasets with frequent queries, such as the fast accumulation of privacy cost. To tackle this limitation, this paper explores the integration of a secured decentralised ledger, blockchain. Blockchain will be able to keep track of all noisy responses generated with differential privacy algorithm and allow for certain queries to reuse old responses. In this paper, a demo of a proposed blockchain-based privacy management system is designed as an interactive decentralised web application (DApp). The demo created illustrates that leveraging on blockchain will allow the total privacy cost accumulated to decrease significantly.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

'I Just Want to Hack Myself to Not Get Distracted': Evaluating Design Interventions for Self-Control on Facebook

Beyond being the world's largest social network, Facebook is for many also one of its greatest sources of digital distraction. For students, problematic use has been associated with negative effects on academic achievement and general wellbeing. To understand what strategies could help users regain control, we investigated how simple interventions to the Facebook UI affect behaviour and perceived control. We assigned 58 university students to one of three interventions: goal reminders, removed newsfeed, or white background (control). We logged use for 6 weeks, applied interventions in the middle weeks, and administered fortnightly surveys. Both goal reminders and removed newsfeed helped participants stay on task and avoid distraction. However, goal reminders were often annoying, and removing the newsfeed made some fear missing out on information. Our findings point to future interventions such as controls for adjusting types and amount of available information, and flexible blocking which matches individual definitions of 'distraction'.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Blockchain for Future Smart Grid: A Comprehensive Survey

The concept of smart grid has been introduced as a new vision of the conventional power grid to figure out an efficient way of integrating green and renewable energy technologies. In this way, Internet-connected smart grid, also called energy Internet, is also emerging as an innovative approach to ensure the energy from anywhere at any time. The ultimate goal of these developments is to build a sustainable society. However, integrating and coordinating a large number of growing connections can be a challenging issue for the traditional centralized grid system. Consequently, the smart grid is undergoing a transformation to the decentralized topology from its centralized form. On the other hand, blockchain has some excellent features which make it a promising application for smart grid paradigm. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive survey on application of blockchain in smart grid. As such, we identify the significant security challenges of smart grid scenarios that can be addressed by blockchain. Then, we present a number of blockchain-based recent research works presented in different literatures addressing security issues in the area of smart grid. We also summarize several related practical projects, trials, and products that have been emerged recently. Finally, we discuss essential research challenges and future directions of applying blockchain to smart grid security issues.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Enabling Cross-chain Transactions: A Decentralized Cryptocurrency Exchange Protocol

Inspired by Bitcoin, many different kinds of cryptocurrencies based on blockchain technology have turned up on the market. Due to the special structure of the blockchain, it has been deemed impossible to directly trade between traditional currencies and cryptocurrencies or between different types of cryptocurrencies. Generally, trading between different currencies is conducted through a centralized third-party platform. However, it has the problem of a single point of failure, which is vulnerable to attacks and thus affects the security of the transactions. In this paper, we propose a distributed cryptocurrency trading scheme to solve the problem of centralized exchanges, which can achieve trading between different types of cryptocurrencies. Our scheme is implemented with smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain and deployed on the Ethereum test network. We not only implement transactions between individual users, but also allow transactions between multiple users. The experimental result proves that the cost of our scheme is acceptable.

cs.CR↗