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Yang Cao

Publications and source records attributed to Yang Cao.

At least 271 records · Page 15Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

E-MLB: Multilevel Benchmark for Event-Based Camera Denoising

Event cameras, such as dynamic vision sensors (DVS), are biologically inspired vision sensors that have advanced over conventional cameras in high dynamic range, low latency and low power consumption, showing great application potential in many fields. Event cameras are more sensitive to junction leakage current and photocurrent as they output differential signals, losing the smoothing function of the integral imaging process in the RGB camera. The logarithmic conversion further amplifies noise, especially in low-contrast conditions. Recently, researchers proposed a series of datasets and evaluation metrics but limitations remain: 1) the existing datasets are small in scale and insufficient in noise diversity, which cannot reflect the authentic working environments of event cameras; and 2) the existing denoising evaluation metrics are mostly referenced evaluation metrics, relying on APS information or manual annotation. To address the above issues, we construct a large-scale event denoising dataset (multilevel benchmark for event denoising, E-MLB) for the first time, which consists of 100 scenes, each with four noise levels, that is 12 times larger than the largest existing denoising dataset. We also propose the first nonreference event denoising metric, the event structural ratio (ESR), which measures the structural intensity of given events. ESR is inspired by the contrast metric, but is independent of the number of events and projection direction. Based on the proposed benchmark and ESR, we evaluate the most representative denoising algorithms, including classic and SOTA, and provide denoising baselines under various scenes and noise levels. The corresponding results and codes are available at https://github.com/KugaMaxx/cuke-emlb.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Analyzing covariate clustering effects in healthcare cost subgroups: insights and applications for prediction

Healthcare cost prediction is a challenging task due to the high-dimensionality and high correlation among covariates. Additionally, the skewed, heavy-tailed, and often multi-modal nature of cost data can complicate matters further due to unobserved heterogeneity. In this study, we propose a novel framework for finite mixture regression models that incorporates covariate clustering methods to better account for the effects of clustered covariates on subgroups of the outcome, which enables a more accurate characterization of the complex distribution of the data. The proposed framework can be formulated as a convex optimization problem with an additional penalty term based on the prior similarity of the covariates. To efficiently solve this optimization problem, a specialized EM-ADMM algorithm is proposed that integrates the alternating direction multiplicative method (ADMM) into the iterative process of the expectation-maximizing (EM) algorithm. The convergence of the algorithm and the efficiency of the covariate clustering method are verified using simulation data, and the superiority of the approach over traditional regression techniques is demonstrated using two real Chinese medical expenditure datasets. Our empirical results provide valuable insights into the complex network graph of the covariates and can inform business practices, such as the design and pricing of medical insurance products.

stat.ME↗
arXiv2023

Cones: Concept Neurons in Diffusion Models for Customized Generation

Human brains respond to semantic features of presented stimuli with different neurons. It is then curious whether modern deep neural networks admit a similar behavior pattern. Specifically, this paper finds a small cluster of neurons in a diffusion model corresponding to a particular subject. We call those neurons the concept neurons. They can be identified by statistics of network gradients to a stimulation connected with the given subject. The concept neurons demonstrate magnetic properties in interpreting and manipulating generation results. Shutting them can directly yield the related subject contextualized in different scenes. Concatenating multiple clusters of concept neurons can vividly generate all related concepts in a single image. A few steps of further fine-tuning can enhance the multi-concept capability, which may be the first to manage to generate up to four different subjects in a single image. For large-scale applications, the concept neurons are environmentally friendly as we only need to store a sparse cluster of int index instead of dense float32 values of the parameters, which reduces storage consumption by 90\% compared with previous subject-driven generation methods. Extensive qualitative and quantitative studies on diverse scenarios show the superiority of our method in interpreting and manipulating diffusion models.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

From ORAN to Cell-Free RAN: Architecture, Performance Analysis, Testbeds and Trials

Open radio access network (ORAN) provides an open architecture to implement radio access network (RAN) of the fifth generation (5G) and beyond mobile communications. As a key technology for the evolution to the sixth generation (6G) systems, cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) can effectively improve the spectrum efficiency, peak rate and reliability of wireless communication systems. Starting from scalable implementation of CF-mMIMO, we study a cell-free RAN (CF-RAN) under the ORAN architecture. Through theoretical analysis and numerical simulation, we investigate the uplink and downlink spectral efficiencies of CF-mMIMO with the new architecture. We then discuss the implementation issues of CF-RAN under ORAN architecture, including time-frequency synchronization and over-the-air reciprocity calibration, low layer splitting, deployment of ORAN radio units (O-RU), artificial intelligent based user associations. Finally, we present some representative experimental results for the uplink distributed reception and downlink coherent joint transmission of CF-RAN with commercial off-the-shelf O-RUs.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2023

From Ember to Blaze: Swift Interactive Video Adaptation via Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Maximizing quality of experience (QoE) for interactive video streaming has been a long-standing challenge, as its delay-sensitive nature makes it more vulnerable to bandwidth fluctuations. While reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated great potential, existing works are either limited by fixed models or require enormous data/time for online adaptation, which struggle to fit time-varying and diverse network states. Driven by these practical concerns, we perform large-scale measurements on WeChat for Business's interactive video service to study real-world network fluctuations. Surprisingly, our analysis shows that, compared to time-varying network metrics, network sequences exhibit noticeable short-term continuity, sufficient for few-shot learning requirements. We thus propose Fiammetta, the first meta-RL-based bitrate adaptation algorithm for interactive video streaming. Building on the short-term continuity, Fiammetta accumulates learning experiences through offline meta-training and enables fast online adaptation to changing network states through a few gradient updates. Moreover, Fiammetta innovatively incorporates a probing mechanism for real-time monitoring of network states, and proposes an adaptive meta-testing mechanism for seamless adaptation. We implement Fiammetta on a testbed whose end-to-end network follows the real-world WeChat for Business traces. The results show that Fiammetta outperforms prior algorithms significantly, improving video bitrate by 3.6%-16.2% without increasing stalling rate.

cs.MM↗
arXiv2023

P3DC-Shot: Prior-Driven Discrete Data Calibration for Nearest-Neighbor Few-Shot Classification

Nearest-Neighbor (NN) classification has been proven as a simple and effective approach for few-shot learning. The query data can be classified efficiently by finding the nearest support class based on features extracted by pretrained deep models. However, NN-based methods are sensitive to the data distribution and may produce false prediction if the samples in the support set happen to lie around the distribution boundary of different classes. To solve this issue, we present P3DC-Shot, an improved nearest-neighbor based few-shot classification method empowered by prior-driven data calibration. Inspired by the distribution calibration technique which utilizes the distribution or statistics of the base classes to calibrate the data for few-shot tasks, we propose a novel discrete data calibration operation which is more suitable for NN-based few-shot classification. Specifically, we treat the prototypes representing each base class as priors and calibrate each support data based on its similarity to different base prototypes. Then, we perform NN classification using these discretely calibrated support data. Results from extensive experiments on various datasets show our efficient non-learning based method can outperform or at least comparable to SOTA methods which need additional learning steps.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Local Differential Privacy Image Generation Using Flow-based Deep Generative Models

Diagnostic radiologists need artificial intelligence (AI) for medical imaging, but access to medical images required for training in AI has become increasingly restrictive. To release and use medical images, we need an algorithm that can simultaneously protect privacy and preserve pathologies in medical images. To develop such an algorithm, here, we propose DP-GLOW, a hybrid of a local differential privacy (LDP) algorithm and one of the flow-based deep generative models (GLOW). By applying a GLOW model, we disentangle the pixelwise correlation of images, which makes it difficult to protect privacy with straightforward LDP algorithms for images. Specifically, we map images onto the latent vector of the GLOW model, each element of which follows an independent normal distribution, and we apply the Laplace mechanism to the latent vector. Moreover, we applied DP-GLOW to chest X-ray images to generate LDP images while preserving pathologies.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

PrivateRec: Differentially Private Training and Serving for Federated News Recommendation

Collecting and training over sensitive personal data raise severe privacy concerns in personalized recommendation systems, and federated learning can potentially alleviate the problem by training models over decentralized user data.However, a theoretically private solution in both the training and serving stages of federated recommendation is essential but still lacking.Furthermore, naively applying differential privacy (DP) to the two stages in federated recommendation would fail to achieve a satisfactory trade-off between privacy and utility due to the high-dimensional characteristics of model gradients and hidden representations.In this work, we propose a federated news recommendation method for achieving a better utility in model training and online serving under a DP guarantee.We first clarify the DP definition over behavior data for each round in the life-circle of federated recommendation systems.Next, we propose a privacy-preserving online serving mechanism under this definition based on the idea of decomposing user embeddings with public basic vectors and perturbing the lower-dimensional combination coefficients. We apply a random behavior padding mechanism to reduce the required noise intensity for better utility. Besides, we design a federated recommendation model training method, which can generate effective and public basic vectors for serving while providing DP for training participants. We avoid the dimension-dependent noise for large models via label permutation and differentially private attention modules. Experiments on real-world news recommendation datasets validate that our method achieves superior utility under a DP guarantee in both training and serving of federated news recommendations.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2022

Graph Analysis in Decentralized Online Social Networks with Fine-Grained Privacy Protection

Graph analysts cannot directly obtain the global structure in decentralized social networks, and analyzing such a network requires collecting local views of the social graph from individual users. Since the edges between users may reveal sensitive social interactions in the local view, applying differential privacy in the data collection process is often desirable, which provides strong and rigorous privacy guarantees. In practical decentralized social graphs, different edges have different privacy requirements due to the distinct sensitivity levels. However, the existing differentially private analysis of social graphs provide the same protection for all edges. To address this issue, this work proposes a fine-grained privacy notion as well as novel algorithms for private graph analysis. We first design a fine-grained relationship differential privacy (FGR-DP) notion for social graph analysis, which enforces different protections for the edges with distinct privacy requirements. Then, we design algorithms for triangle counting and k-stars counting, respectively, which can accurately estimate subgraph counts given fine-grained protection for social edges. We also analyze upper bounds on the estimation error, including k-stars and triangle counts, and show their superior performance compared with the state-of-the-arts. Finally, we perform extensive experiments on two real social graph datasets and demonstrate that the proposed mechanisms satisfying FGR-DP have better utility than the state-of-the-art mechanisms due to the finer-grained protection.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2022

Evolving Decomposed Plasticity Rules for Information-Bottlenecked Meta-Learning

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are typically confined to accomplishing pre-defined tasks by learning a set of static parameters. In contrast, biological neural networks (BNNs) can adapt to various new tasks by continually updating the neural connections based on the inputs, which is aligned with the paradigm of learning effective learning rules in addition to static parameters, e.g., meta-learning. Among various biologically inspired learning rules, Hebbian plasticity updates the neural network weights using local signals without the guide of an explicit target function, thus enabling an agent to learn automatically without human efforts. However, typical plastic ANNs using a large amount of meta-parameters violate the nature of the genomics bottleneck and potentially deteriorate the generalization capacity. This work proposes a new learning paradigm decomposing those connection-dependent plasticity rules into neuron-dependent rules thus accommodating $Θ(n^2)$ learnable parameters with only $Θ(n)$ meta-parameters. We also thoroughly study the effect of different neural modulation on plasticity. Our algorithms are tested in challenging random 2D maze environments, where the agents have to use their past experiences to shape the neural connections and improve their performances for the future. The results of our experiment validate the following: 1. Plasticity can be adopted to continually update a randomly initialized RNN to surpass pre-trained, more sophisticated recurrent models, especially when coming to long-term memorization. 2. Following the genomics bottleneck, the proposed decomposed plasticity can be comparable to or even more effective than canonical plasticity rules in some instances.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2022

Asymmetric Differential Privacy

Differential privacy (DP) is getting attention as a privacy definition when publishing statistics of a dataset. This paper focuses on the limitation that DP inevitably causes two-sided error, which is not desirable for epidemic analysis such as how many COVID-19 infected individuals visited location A. For example, consider publishing misinformation that many infected people did not visit location A, which may lead to miss decision-making that expands the epidemic. To fix this issue, we propose a relaxation of DP, called asymmetric differential privacy (ADP). We show that ADP can provide reasonable privacy protection while achieving one-sided error. Finally, we conduct experiments to evaluate the utility of proposed mechanisms for epidemic analysis using a real-world dataset, which shows the practicality of our mechanisms.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2022

Application of Data Encryption in Chinese Named Entity Recognition

Recently, with the continuous development of deep learning, the performance of named entity recognition tasks has been dramatically improved. However, the privacy and the confidentiality of data in some specific fields, such as biomedical and military, cause insufficient data to support the training of deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose an encryption learning framework to address the problems of data leakage and inconvenient disclosure of sensitive data in certain domains. We introduce multiple encryption algorithms to encrypt training data in the named entity recognition task for the first time. In other words, we train the deep neural network using the encrypted data. We conduct experiments on six Chinese datasets, three of which are constructed by ourselves. The experimental results show that the encryption method achieves satisfactory results. The performance of some models trained with encrypted data even exceeds the performance of the unencrypted method, which verifies the effectiveness of the introduced encryption method and solves the problem of data leakage to a certain extent.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2022

Experimental Performance Evaluation of Cell-free Massive MIMO Systems Using COTS RRU with OTA Reciprocity Calibration and Phase Synchronization

Downlink coherent multiuser transmission is an essential technique for cell-free massive multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) systems, and the availability of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter is a basic requirement. To avoid CSI feedback in a time-division duplex system, the uplink channel parameters should be calibrated to obtain the downlink CSI due to the radio frequency circuit mismatch of the transceiver. In this paper, a design of a reference signal for over-the-air reciprocity calibration is proposed. The frequency domain generated reference signals can make full use of the flexible frame structure of the fifth generation (5G) new radio, which can be completely transparent to commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) remote radio units (RRUs) and commercial user equipments. To further obtain the calibration of multiple RRUs, an interleaved RRU grouping with a genetic algorithm is proposed, and an averaged Argos calibration algorithm is also presented. We develop a cell-free massive MIMO prototype system with COTS RRUs, demonstrate the statistical characteristics of the calibration error and the effectiveness of the calibration algorithm, and evaluate the impact of the calibration delay on the different cooperative transmission schemes.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2022

Towards Data-Efficient Detection Transformers

Detection Transformers have achieved competitive performance on the sample-rich COCO dataset. However, we show most of them suffer from significant performance drops on small-size datasets, like Cityscapes. In other words, the detection transformers are generally data-hungry. To tackle this problem, we empirically analyze the factors that affect data efficiency, through a step-by-step transition from a data-efficient RCNN variant to the representative DETR. The empirical results suggest that sparse feature sampling from local image areas holds the key. Based on this observation, we alleviate the data-hungry issue of existing detection transformers by simply alternating how key and value sequences are constructed in the cross-attention layer, with minimum modifications to the original models. Besides, we introduce a simple yet effective label augmentation method to provide richer supervision and improve data efficiency. Experiments show that our method can be readily applied to different detection transformers and improve their performance on both small-size and sample-rich datasets. Code will be made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/encounter1997/DE-DETRs}.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

Exploring Sequence Feature Alignment for Domain Adaptive Detection Transformers

Detection transformers have recently shown promising object detection results and attracted increasing attention. However, how to develop effective domain adaptation techniques to improve its cross-domain performance remains unexplored and unclear. In this paper, we delve into this topic and empirically find that direct feature distribution alignment on the CNN backbone only brings limited improvements, as it does not guarantee domain-invariant sequence features in the transformer for prediction. To address this issue, we propose a novel Sequence Feature Alignment (SFA) method that is specially designed for the adaptation of detection transformers. Technically, SFA consists of a domain query-based feature alignment (DQFA) module and a token-wise feature alignment (TDA) module. In DQFA, a novel domain query is used to aggregate and align global context from the token sequence of both domains. DQFA reduces the domain discrepancy in global feature representations and object relations when deploying in the transformer encoder and decoder, respectively. Meanwhile, TDA aligns token features in the sequence from both domains, which reduces the domain gaps in local and instance-level feature representations in the transformer encoder and decoder, respectively. Besides, a novel bipartite matching consistency loss is proposed to enhance the feature discriminability for robust object detection. Experiments on three challenging benchmarks show that SFA outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptive object detection methods. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/encounter1997/SFA.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2022

CHES: a space-borne astrometric mission for the detection of habitable planets of the nearby solar-type stars

The Closeby Habitable Exoplanet Survey (CHES) mission is proposed to discover habitable-zone Earth-like planets of the nearby solar-type stars ($\sim 10~\mathrm{pc}$ away from our solar system) via micro-arcsecond relative astrometry. The major scientific objectives of CHES are: to search for Earth Twins or terrestrial planets in habitable zones orbiting 100 FGK nearby stars; further to conduct a comprehensive survey and extensively characterize the nearby planetary systems. The primary payload is a high-quality, low-distortion, high-stability telescope. The optical subsystem is a coaxial three-mirror anastigmat (TMA) with a $1.2 \mathrm{~m}$-aperture, $0.44^{\circ} \times 0.44^{\circ}$ field of view and $500 \mathrm{~nm}-900 \mathrm{~nm}$ working waveband. The camera focal plane is composed of 81 MOSAIC scientific CMOS detectors each with $4 \mathrm{~K} \times 4 \mathrm{~K}$ pixels. The heterodyne laser interferometric calibration technology is employed to ensure micro-arcsecond level (1 $μ$as) relative astrometry precision to meet the requirements for detection of Earth-like planets. CHES satellite operates at the Sun-Earth L2 point and observes the entire target stars for 5 years. CHES will offer the first direct measurements of true masses and inclinations of Earth Twins and super-Earths orbiting our neighbor stars based on micro-arcsecond astrometry from space. This will definitely enhance our understanding of the formation of diverse nearby planetary systems and the emergence of other worlds for solar-type stars, and finally to reflect the evolution of our own solar system.

astro-ph.EP↗
arXiv2022

HDPView: Differentially Private Materialized View for Exploring High Dimensional Relational Data

How can we explore the unknown properties of high-dimensional sensitive relational data while preserving privacy? We study how to construct an explorable privacy-preserving materialized view under differential privacy. No existing state-of-the-art methods simultaneously satisfy the following essential properties in data exploration: workload independence, analytical reliability (i.e., providing error bound for each search query), applicability to high-dimensional data, and space efficiency. To solve the above issues, we propose HDPView, which creates a differentially private materialized view by well-designed recursive bisected partitioning on an original data cube, i.e., count tensor. Our method searches for block partitioning to minimize the error for the counting query, in addition to randomizing the convergence, by choosing the effective cutting points in a differentially private way, resulting in a less noisy and compact view. Furthermore, we ensure formal privacy guarantee and analytical reliability by providing the error bound for arbitrary counting queries on the materialized views. HDPView has the following desirable properties: (a) Workload independence, (b) Analytical reliability, (c) Noise resistance on high-dimensional data, (d) Space efficiency. To demonstrate the above properties and the suitability for data exploration, we conduct extensive experiments with eight types of range counting queries on eight real datasets. HDPView outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in these evaluations.

cs.DB↗