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Xiaofei Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaofei Wang.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

A Comprehensive Study on the Robustness of Image Classification and Object Detection in Remote Sensing: Surveying and Benchmarking

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found widespread applications in interpreting remote sensing (RS) imagery. However, it has been demonstrated in previous works that DNNs are vulnerable to different types of noises, particularly adversarial noises. Surprisingly, there has been a lack of comprehensive studies on the robustness of RS tasks, prompting us to undertake a thorough survey and benchmark on the robustness of image classification and object detection in RS. To our best knowledge, this study represents the first comprehensive examination of both natural robustness and adversarial robustness in RS tasks. Specifically, we have curated and made publicly available datasets that contain natural and adversarial noises. These datasets serve as valuable resources for evaluating the robustness of DNNs-based models. To provide a comprehensive assessment of model robustness, we conducted meticulous experiments with numerous different classifiers and detectors, encompassing a wide range of mainstream methods. Through rigorous evaluation, we have uncovered insightful and intriguing findings, which shed light on the relationship between adversarial noise crafting and model training, yielding a deeper understanding of the susceptibility and limitations of various models, and providing guidance for the development of more resilient and robust models

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Fine-grained Spatio-Temporal Distribution Prediction of Mobile Content Delivery in 5G Ultra-Dense Networks

The 5G networks have extensively promoted the growth of mobile users and novel applications, and with the skyrocketing user requests for a large amount of popular content, the consequent content delivery services (CDSs) have been bringing a heavy load to mobile service providers. As a key mission in intelligent networks management, understanding and predicting the distribution of CDSs benefits many tasks of modern network services such as resource provisioning and proactive content caching for content delivery networks. However, the revolutions in novel ubiquitous network architectures led by ultra-dense networks (UDNs) make the task extremely challenging. Specifically, conventional methods face the challenges of insufficient spatio precision, lacking generalizability, and complex multi-feature dependencies of user requests, making their effectiveness unreliable in CDSs prediction under 5G UDNs. In this paper, we propose to adopt a series of encoding and sampling methods to model CDSs of known and unknown areas at a tailored fine-grained level. Moreover, we design a spatio-temporal-social multi-feature extraction framework for CDSs hotspots prediction, in which a novel edge-enhanced graph convolution block is proposed to encode dynamic CDSs networks based on the social relationships and the spatio features. Besides, we introduce the Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) to further capture the temporal dependency. Extensive performance evaluations with real-world measurement data collected in two mobile content applications demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution, which can improve the prediction area under the curve (AUC) by 40.5% compared to the state-of-the-art proposals at a spatio granularity of 76m, with up to 80% of the unknown areas.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2023

EdgeMatrix: A Resource-Redefined Scheduling Framework for SLA-Guaranteed Multi-Tier Edge-Cloud Computing Systems

With the development of networking technology, the computing system has evolved towards the multi-tier paradigm gradually. However, challenges, such as multi-resource heterogeneity of devices, resource competition of services, and networked system dynamics, make it difficult to guarantee service-level agreement (SLA) for the applications. In this paper, we propose a multi-tier edge-cloud computing framework, EdgeMatrix, to maximize the throughput of the system while guaranteeing different SLA priorities. First, in order to reduce the impact of physical resource heterogeneity, EdgeMatrix introduces the Networked Multi-agent Actor-Critic (NMAC) algorithm to re-define physical resources with the same quality of service as logically isolated resource units and combinations, i.e., cells and channels. In addition, a multi-task mechanism is designed in EdgeMatrix to solve the problem of Joint Service Orchestration and Request Dispatch (JSORD) for matching the requests and services, which can significantly reduce the optimization runtime. For integrating above two algorithms, EdgeMatrix is designed with two time-scales, i.e., coordinating services and resources at the larger time-scale, and dispatching requests at the smaller time-scale. Realistic trace-based experiments proves that the overall throughput of EdgeMatrix is 36.7% better than that of the closest baseline, while the SLA priorities are guaranteed still.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2023

Computation Offloading with Multiple Agents in Edge-Computing-Supported IoT

With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the birth of various new IoT devices, the capacity of massive IoT devices is facing challenges. Fortunately, edge computing can optimize problems such as delay and connectivity by offloading part of the computational tasks to edge nodes close to the data source. Using this feature, IoT devices can save more resources while still maintaining the quality of service. However, since computation offloading decisions concern joint and complex resource management, we use multiple Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents deployed on IoT devices to guide their own decisions. Besides, Federated Learning (FL) is utilized to train DRL agents in a distributed fashion, aiming to make the DRL-based decision making practical and further decrease the transmission cost between IoT devices and Edge Nodes. In this article, we first study the problem of computation offloading optimization and prove the problem is an NP-hard problem. Then, based on DRL and FL, we propose an offloading algorithm that is different from the traditional method. Finally, we studied the effects of various parameters on the performance of the algorithm and verified the effectiveness of both the DRL and FL in the IoT system.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2023

Multi-task Learning of Histology and Molecular Markers for Classifying Diffuse Glioma

Most recently, the pathology diagnosis of cancer is shifting to integrating molecular makers with histology features. It is a urgent need for digital pathology methods to effectively integrate molecular markers with histology, which could lead to more accurate diagnosis in the real world scenarios. This paper presents a first attempt to jointly predict molecular markers and histology features and model their interactions for classifying diffuse glioma bases on whole slide images. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical multi-task multi-instance learning framework to jointly predict histology and molecular markers. Moreover, we propose a co-occurrence probability-based label correction graph network to model the co-occurrence of molecular markers. Lastly, we design an inter-omic interaction strategy with the dynamical confidence constraint loss to model the interactions of histology and molecular markers. Our experiments show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in classifying diffuse glioma,as well as related histology and molecular markers on a multi-institutional dataset.

eess.IV↗
arXiv2023

One for All: Unified Workload Prediction for Dynamic Multi-tenant Edge Cloud Platforms

Workload prediction in multi-tenant edge cloud platforms (MT-ECP) is vital for efficient application deployment and resource provisioning. However, the heterogeneous application patterns, variable infrastructure performance, and frequent deployments in MT-ECP pose significant challenges for accurate and efficient workload prediction. Clustering-based methods for dynamic MT-ECP modeling often incur excessive costs due to the need to maintain numerous data clusters and models, which leads to excessive costs. Existing end-to-end time series prediction methods are challenging to provide consistent prediction performance in dynamic MT-ECP. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework with global pooling and static content awareness, DynEformer, to provide a unified workload prediction scheme for dynamic MT-ECP. Meticulously designed global pooling and information merging mechanisms can effectively identify and utilize global application patterns to drive local workload predictions. The integration of static content-aware mechanisms enhances model robustness in real-world scenarios. Through experiments on five real-world datasets, DynEformer achieved state-of-the-art in the dynamic scene of MT-ECP and provided a unified end-to-end prediction scheme for MT-ECP.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2023

Handling Trade-Offs in Speech Separation with Sparsely-Gated Mixture of Experts

Employing a monaural speech separation (SS) model as a front-end for automatic speech recognition (ASR) involves balancing two kinds of trade-offs. First, while a larger model improves the SS performance, it also requires a higher computational cost. Second, an SS model that is more optimized for handling overlapped speech is likely to introduce more processing artifacts in non-overlapped-speech regions. In this paper, we address these trade-offs with a sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. Comprehensive evaluation results obtained using both simulated and real meeting recordings show that our proposed sparsely-gated MoE SS model achieves superior separation capabilities with less speech distortion, while involving only a marginal run-time cost increase.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2023

When Computing Power Network Meets Distributed Machine Learning: An Efficient Federated Split Learning Framework

In this paper, we advocate CPN-FedSL, a novel and flexible Federated Split Learning (FedSL) framework over Computing Power Network (CPN). We build a dedicated model to capture the basic settings and learning characteristics (e.g., training flow, latency and convergence). Based on this model, we introduce Resource Usage Effectiveness (RUE), a novel performance metric integrating training utility with system cost, and formulate a multivariate scheduling problem that maxi?mizes RUE by comprehensively taking client admission, model partition, server selection, routing and bandwidth allocation into account (i.e., mixed-integer fractional programming). We design Refinery, an efficient approach that first linearizes the fractional objective and non-convex constraints, and then solves the transformed problem via a greedy based rounding algorithm in multiple iterations. Extensive evaluations corroborate that CPN-FedSL is superior to the standard and state-of-the-art learning frameworks (e.g., FedAvg and SplitFed), and besides Refinery is lightweight and significantly outperforms its variants and de facto heuristic methods under a variety of settings.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2023

Collaborative Learning-Based Scheduling for Kubernetes-Oriented Edge-Cloud Network

Kubernetes (k8s) has the potential to coordinate distributed edge resources and centralized cloud resources, but currently lacks a specialized scheduling framework for edge-cloud networks. Besides, the hierarchical distribution of heterogeneous resources makes the modeling and scheduling of k8s-oriented edge-cloud network particularly challenging. In this paper, we introduce KaiS, a learning-based scheduling framework for such edge-cloud network to improve the long-term throughput rate of request processing. First, we design a coordinated multi-agent actor-critic algorithm to cater to decentralized request dispatch and dynamic dispatch spaces within the edge cluster. Second, for diverse system scales and structures, we use graph neural networks to embed system state information, and combine the embedding results with multiple policy networks to reduce the orchestration dimensionality by stepwise scheduling. Finally, we adopt a two-time-scale scheduling mechanism to harmonize request dispatch and service orchestration, and present the implementation design of deploying the above algorithms compatible with native k8s components. Experiments using real workload traces show that KaiS can successfully learn appropriate scheduling policies, irrespective of request arrival patterns and system scales. Moreover, KaiS can enhance the average system throughput rate by 15.9% while reducing scheduling cost by 38.4% compared to baselines.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2023

CBA: Contextual Background Attack against Optical Aerial Detection in the Physical World

Patch-based physical attacks have increasingly aroused concerns. However, most existing methods focus on obscuring targets captured on the ground, and some of these methods are simply extended to deceive aerial detectors. They smear the targeted objects in the physical world with the elaborated adversarial patches, which can only slightly sway the aerial detectors' prediction and with weak attack transferability. To address the above issues, we propose to perform Contextual Background Attack (CBA), a novel physical attack framework against aerial detection, which can achieve strong attack efficacy and transferability in the physical world even without smudging the interested objects at all. Specifically, the targets of interest, i.e. the aircraft in aerial images, are adopted to mask adversarial patches. The pixels outside the mask area are optimized to make the generated adversarial patches closely cover the critical contextual background area for detection, which contributes to gifting adversarial patches with more robust and transferable attack potency in the real world. To further strengthen the attack performance, the adversarial patches are forced to be outside targets during training, by which the detected objects of interest, both on and outside patches, benefit the accumulation of attack efficacy. Consequently, the sophisticatedly designed patches are gifted with solid fooling efficacy against objects both on and outside the adversarial patches simultaneously. Extensive proportionally scaled experiments are performed in physical scenarios, demonstrating the superiority and potential of the proposed framework for physical attacks. We expect that the proposed physical attack method will serve as a benchmark for assessing the adversarial robustness of diverse aerial detectors and defense methods.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Building Resilient Web 3.0 with Quantum Information Technologies and Blockchain: An Ambilateral View

Web 3.0 pursues the establishment of decentralized ecosystems based on blockchain technologies to drive the digital transformation of physical commerce and governance. Through consensus algorithms and smart contracts in blockchain, which are based on cryptography technologies, digital identity, digital asset management, decentralized autonomous organization, and decentralized finance are realized for secure and transparent digital economy services in Web 3.0 for promoting the integration of digital and physical economies. With the rapid realization of quantum devices, Web 3.0 is being developed in parallel with the deployment of quantum cloud computing and quantum Internet. In this regard, quantum computing first disrupts the original cryptographic systems that protect data security while reshaping modern cryptography with the advantages of quantum computing and communication. Therefore, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of blockchain-based Web 3.0 and its quantum and post-quantum enhancement from the ambilateral perspective. On the one hand, some post-quantum migration methods, and anti-quantum signatures offer potential ways to achieve unforgeable security under quantum attack for the internal technologies of blockchain. On the other hand, some quantum/post-quantum encryption and verification algorithms improve the external performance of the blockchain, enabling a decentralized, valuable, secure blockchain system. Finally, we discuss the future directions toward developing a provable secure decentralized digital ecosystem.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2023

Contextual adversarial attack against aerial detection in the physical world

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been extensively utilized in aerial detection. However, DNNs' sensitivity and vulnerability to maliciously elaborated adversarial examples have progressively garnered attention. Recently, physical attacks have gradually become a hot issue due to they are more practical in the real world, which poses great threats to some security-critical applications. In this paper, we take the first attempt to perform physical attacks in contextual form against aerial detection in the physical world. We propose an innovative contextual attack method against aerial detection in real scenarios, which achieves powerful attack performance and transfers well between various aerial object detectors without smearing or blocking the interested objects to hide. Based on the findings that the targets' contextual information plays an important role in aerial detection by observing the detectors' attention maps, we propose to make full use of the contextual area of the interested targets to elaborate contextual perturbations for the uncovered attacks in real scenarios. Extensive proportionally scaled experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed contextual attack method, which demonstrates the proposed method's superiority in both attack efficacy and physical practicality.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Elastic Integrative Analysis of Randomized Trial and Real-World Data for Treatment Heterogeneity Estimation

We propose a test-based elastic integrative analysis of the randomized trial and real-world data to estimate treatment effect heterogeneity with a vector of known effect modifiers. When the real-world data are not subject to bias, our approach combines the trial and real-world data for efficient estimation. Utilizing the trial design, we construct a test to decide whether or not to use real-world data. We characterize the asymptotic distribution of the test-based estimator under local alternatives. We provide a data-adaptive procedure to select the test threshold that promises the smallest mean square error and an elastic confidence interval with a good finite-sample coverage property.

stat.ME↗
arXiv2022

When Quantum Information Technologies Meet Blockchain in Web 3.0

With the drive to create a decentralized digital economy, Web 3.0 has become a cornerstone of digital transformation, developed on the basis of computing-force networking, distributed data storage, and blockchain. With the rapid realization of quantum devices, Web 3.0 is being developed in parallel with the deployment of quantum cloud computing and quantum Internet. In this regard, quantum computing first disrupts the original cryptographic systems that protect data security while reshaping modern cryptography with the advantages of quantum computing and communication. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a quantum blockchain-driven Web 3.0 framework that provides information-theoretic security for decentralized data transferring and payment transactions. First, we present the framework of quantum blockchain-driven Web 3.0 with future-proof security during the transmission of data and transaction information. Next, we discuss the potential applications and challenges of implementing quantum blockchain in Web 3.0. Finally, we describe a use case for quantum non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and propose a quantum deep learning-based optimal auction for NFT trading to maximize the achievable revenue for sufficient liquidity in Web 3.0. In this way, the proposed framework can achieve proven security and sustainability for the next-generation decentralized digital society.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2022

Speech separation with large-scale self-supervised learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods such as WavLM have shown promising speech separation (SS) results in small-scale simulation-based experiments. In this work, we extend the exploration of the SSL-based SS by massively scaling up both the pre-training data (more than 300K hours) and fine-tuning data (10K hours). We also investigate various techniques to efficiently integrate the pre-trained model with the SS network under a limited computation budget, including a low frame rate SSL model training setup and a fine-tuning scheme using only the part of the pre-trained model. Compared with a supervised baseline and the WavLM-based SS model using feature embeddings obtained with the previously released 94K hours trained WavLM, our proposed model obtains 15.9% and 11.2% of relative word error rate (WER) reductions, respectively, for a simulated far-field speech mixture test set. For conversation transcription on real meeting recordings using continuous speech separation, the proposed model achieves 6.8% and 10.6% of relative WER reductions over the purely supervised baseline on AMI and ICSI evaluation sets, respectively, while reducing the computational cost by 38%.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2022

Simulating realistic speech overlaps improves multi-talker ASR

Multi-talker automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been studied to generate transcriptions of natural conversation including overlapping speech of multiple speakers. Due to the difficulty in acquiring real conversation data with high-quality human transcriptions, a naïve simulation of multi-talker speech by randomly mixing multiple utterances was conventionally used for model training. In this work, we propose an improved technique to simulate multi-talker overlapping speech with realistic speech overlaps, where an arbitrary pattern of speech overlaps is represented by a sequence of discrete tokens. With this representation, speech overlapping patterns can be learned from real conversations based on a statistical language model, such as N-gram, which can be then used to generate multi-talker speech for training. In our experiments, multi-talker ASR models trained with the proposed method show consistent improvement on the word error rates across multiple datasets.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2022

Global Adaptive Generative Adjustment

Many traditional signal recovery approaches can behave well basing on the penalized likelihood. However, they have to meet with the difficulty in the selection of hyperparameters or tuning parameters in the penalties. In this article, we propose a global adaptive generative adjustment (GAGA) algorithm for signal recovery, in which multiple hyperpameters are automatically learned and alternatively updated with the signal. We further prove that the output of our algorithm directly guarantees the consistency of model selection and signal estimate. Moreover, we also propose a variant GAGA algorithm for improving the computational efficiency in the high-dimensional data analysis. Finally, in the simulated experiment, we consider the consistency of the outputs of our algorithms, and compare our algorithms to other penalized likelihood methods: the Adaptive LASSO, the SCAD and the MCP. The simulation results support the efficiency of our algorithms for signal recovery, and demonstrate that our algorithms outperform the other algorithms.

stat.ML↗
arXiv2022

Self-supervised learning with bi-label masked speech prediction for streaming multi-talker speech recognition

Self-supervised learning (SSL), which utilizes the input data itself for representation learning, has achieved state-of-the-art results for various downstream speech tasks. However, most of the previous studies focused on offline single-talker applications, with limited investigations in multi-talker cases, especially for streaming scenarios. In this paper, we investigate SSL for streaming multi-talker speech recognition, which generates transcriptions of overlapping speakers in a streaming fashion. We first observe that conventional SSL techniques do not work well on this task due to the poor representation of overlapping speech. We then propose a novel SSL training objective, referred to as bi-label masked speech prediction, which explicitly preserves representations of all speakers in overlapping speech. We investigate various aspects of the proposed system including data configuration and quantizer selection. The proposed SSL setup achieves substantially better word error rates on the LibriSpeechMix dataset.

eess.AS↗