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Bi-Level Optimization (BLO) is originated from the area of economic game theory and then introduced into the optimization community. BLO is able to handle problems with a hierarchical structure, involving two levels of optimization tasks, where one task is nested inside the other. In machine learning and computer vision fields, despite the different motivations and mechanisms, a lot of complex problems, such as hyper-parameter optimization, multi-task and meta learning, neural architecture search, adversarial learning and deep reinforcement learning, actually all contain a series of closely related subproblms. In this paper, we first uniformly express these complex learning and vision problems from the perspective of BLO. Then we construct a best-response-based single-level reformulation and establish a unified algorithmic framework to understand and formulate mainstream gradient-based BLO methodologies, covering aspects ranging from fundamental automatic differentiation schemes to various accelerations, simplifications, extensions and their convergence and complexity properties. Last but not least, we discuss the potentials of our unified BLO framework for designing new algorithms and point out some promising directions for future research. A list of important papers discussed in this survey, corresponding codes, and additional resources on BLOs are publicly available at: https://github.com/vis-opt-group/BLO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel scalable reinforcement learning approach for simultaneous routing and spectrum access in wireless ad-hoc networks. In most previous works on reinforcement learning for network optimization, the network topology is assumed to be fixed, and a different agent is trained for each transmission node—this limits scalability and generalizability. Further, routing and spectrum access are typically treated as separate tasks. Moreover, the optimization objective is usually a cumulative metric along the route, e.g., number of hops or delay. In this paper, we account for the physical-layer signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) in a wireless network and further show that bottleneck objective such as the minimum SINR along the route can also be optimized effectively using reinforcement learning. Specifically, we propose a scalable approach in which a single agent is associated with each flow and makes routing and spectrum access decisions as it moves along the frontier nodes. The agent is trained according to the physical-layer characteristics of the environment using a novel rewarding scheme based on the Monte Carlo estimation of the future bottleneck SINR. It learns to avoid interference by intelligently making joint routing and spectrum allocation decisions based on the geographical location information of the neighbouring nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ride-sourcing services are now reshaping the way people travel by effectively connecting drivers and passengers through mobile internets. Online matching between idle drivers and waiting passengers is one of the most key components in a ride-sourcing system. The average pickup distance or time is an important measurement of system efficiency since it affects both passengers’ waiting time and drivers’ utilization rate. It is naturally expected that a more effective bipartite matching (with smaller average pickup time) can be implemented if the platform accumulates more idle drivers and waiting passengers in the matching pool. A specific passenger request can also benefit from a delayed matching since he/she may be matched with closer idle drivers after waiting for a few seconds. Motivated by the potential benefits of delayed matching, this paper establishes a two-stage framework which incorporates a combinatorial optimization and multi-agent deep reinforcement learning methods. The multi-agent reinforcement learning methods are used to dynamically determine the delayed time for each passenger request (or the time at which each request enters the matching pool), while the combinatorial optimization conducts an optimal bipartite matching between idle drivers and waiting passengers in the matching pool. Four tailored reinforcement learning methods, delayed multi-agent deep Q learning (Delayed-M-DQN), delayed multi-agent actor-critic (Delayed-M-A2C), delayed multi-agent Proximal Policy Optimization (Delayed-M-PPO), and delayed multi-agent actor-critic with experience replay (Delayed-M-ACER), are developed. Through extensive empirical experiments with a well-designed simulator, we show that the proposed framework is able to remarkably improve system performances, by well balancing the trade-off among pick-up time, matching time, successful matching rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning-based video streaming scheme for mobility-aware vehicular networks, e.g., vehicles on the highway. We consider infrastructure-assisted and mmWave-based scenarios in which the macro base station (MBS) cannot directly provide the streaming service to vehicles due to the short range of mmWave beams so that small mmWave base stations (mBSs) along the road deliver the desired videos to users. Motivated by the fact that a video stream consists of sequential chunks and smooth streaming has to be provided while users pass through multiple mBSs at high speed, the MBS proactively pushes some video chunks of the desired contents to mBSs. This is done to support vehicles that are currently covered and/or will be by each mBS. We formulate the dynamic video delivery scheme that adaptively determines 1) which content, 2) what quality and 3) how many chunks to be proactively delivered from the MBS to mBSs using Markov decision process (MDP). Since it is difficult for the MBS to track all the channel conditions and the network states have extensive dimensions, we adopt the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm for the DRL-based video delivery scheme. This paper finally shows that the DRL agentlearns a streaming policy that pursues high average quality while limiting packet drops, avoiding playback stalls, reducing quality fluctuations and saving backhaul usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the semiconductor manufacturing process is moving towards the 3 nm node, there is a crucial need to reduce the edge placement error (EPE) to ensure proper functioning of the integrated circuit (IC) devices. EPE is the most important metric that quantify the fidelity of fabricated patterns in multi-patterning processes, and it is the combination of overlay errors and critical dimension (CD) errors. Recent advances in machine learning have enabled many new possibilities to improve the performance and efficiency of EPE optimization techniques. In this paper, we conducted a survey of recent research work that applied machine learning/ deep learning techniques for the purposes of enhancing virtual overlay metrology, reducing overlay error, and improving mask optimization methods for EPE reduction. Thorough discussions about the objectives, datasets, input features, models, key findings, and limitations are provided. In general, the results of the review work show a great potential of machine learning techniques in aiding the improvement of EPE in the field of semiconductor manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While early AutoML frameworks focused on optimizing traditional ML pipelines and their hyperparameters, a recent trend in AutoML is to focus on neural architecture search. In this paper, we introduce Auto-PyTorch, which brings together the best of these two worlds by jointly and robustly optimizing the network architecture and the training hyperparameters to enable fully automated deep learning (AutoDL). Auto-PyTorch achieves state-of-the-art performance on several tabular benchmarks by combining multi-fidelity optimization with portfolio construction for warmstarting and ensembling of deep neural networks (DNNs) and common baselines for tabular data. To thoroughly study our assumptions on how to design such an AutoDL system, we additionally introduce a new benchmark on learning curves for DNNs, dubbed LCBench, and run extensive ablation studies of the full Auto-PyTorch on typical AutoML benchmarks, eventually showing that Auto-PyTorch performs better than several state-of-the-art competitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In conventional multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems with frequency division duplexing (FDD), channel acquisition and precoder optimization processes have been designed separately although they are highly coupled. This paper studies an end-to-end design of downlink MU-MIMO systems which include pilot sequences, limited feedback, and precoding. To address this problem, we propose a novel deep learning (DL) framework which jointly optimizes the feedback information generation at users and the precoder design at a base station (BS). Each procedure in the MU-MIMO systems is replaced by intelligently designed multiple deep neural networks (DNN) units. At the BS, a neural network generates pilot sequences and helps the users obtain accurate channel state information. At each user, the channel feedback operation is carried out in a distributed manner by an individual user DNN. Then, another BS DNN collects feedback information from the users and determines the MIMO precoding matrices. A joint training algorithm is proposed to optimize all DNN units in an end-to-end manner. In addition, a training strategy which can avoid retraining for different network sizes for a scalable design is proposed. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DL framework compared to classical optimization techniques and other conventional DNN schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the diversity of power consumption patterns, the false positive rate (FPR) of data-driven electricity theft detection (ETD) methods is too high to meet practical needs, which severely restricts the engineering application of data-based methods. To reduce FPR of ETD methods based on advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), a deep neural network with low FPR (LFPR-DNN) is proposed in this paper. First, a deep model is constructed based on one-dimensional convolution and residual network, which can automatically extract features from consumption data. Then, a two-stage training scheme is used to train the network. In the first stage, the conventional gradient descent algorithm is used to update the network weights. To minimize the impact of data imbalance on detection performance, focal loss is used. Besides, grid search is used to optimize the hyper-parameters of the model. In the second stage, with FPR as the optimization objective, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to train the network. Finally, the proposed LFPR-DNN is verified by using the open Irish data set. Compared to other state-of-the-art classifiers, LFPR-DNN has the lowest FPR with 0.29% and the highest AUC with 99.42%. The FPR is reduced by an order of magnitude, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of vehicles (IoV) is a large information interaction network that collects information on vehicles, roads and pedestrians. One of the important uses of vehicle networks is to meet the entertainment needs of driving users through communication between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs). Due to the limited storage space of RSUs, determining the content cached in each RSU is a key challenge. With the development of 5G and video editing technology, short video systems have become increasingly popular. Current widely used cache update methods, such as partial file precaching and content popularity- and user interest-based determination, are inefficient for such systems. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a QoE-driven edge caching method for the IoV based on deep reinforcement learning. First, a class-based user interest model is established. Compared with the traditional file popularity- and user interest distribution-based cache update methods, the proposed method is more suitable for systems with a large number of small files. Second, a quality of experience (QoE)-driven RSU cache model is established based on the proposed class-based user interest model. Third, a deep reinforcement learning method is designed to address the QoE-driven RSU cache update issue effectively. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the stochastic optimization problem focusing on developing scalable parallel algorithms for deep learning tasks. Our solution involves a reformation of the objective function for stochastic optimization in neural network models, along with a novel parallel computing strategy, coined the weighted aggregating stochastic gradient descent (WASGD). Following a theoretical analysis on the characteristics of the new objective function, WASGD introduces a decentralized weighted aggregating scheme based on the performance of local workers. Without any center variable, the new method automatically gauges the importance of local workers and accepts them by their contributions. Furthermore, we have developed an enhanced version of the method, WASGD+, by (1) implementing a designed sample order and (2) upgrading the weight evaluation function. To validate the new method, we benchmark our pipeline against several popular algorithms including the state-of-the-art deep neural network classifier training techniques (e.g., elastic averaging SGD). Comprehensive validation studies have been conducted on four classic datasets: CIFAR-100, CIFAR-10, Fashion-MNIST, and MNIST. Subsequent results have firmly validated the superiority of the WASGD scheme in accelerating the training of deep architecture. Better still, the enhanced version, WASGD+, is shown to be a significant improvement over its prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an effective and novel multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL)-based method for solving the joint virtual network function (VNF) placement and routing (P&R), where multiple service requests with differentiated demands are delivered at the same time. The differentiated demands of the service requests are reflected by their delay- and cost-sensitive factors. We first construct a VNF P&R problem to jointly minimize a weighted sum of service delay and resource consumption cost, which is NP-complete. Then, the joint VNF P&R problem is decoupled into two iterative subtasks: placement subtask and routing subtask. Each subtask consists of multiple concurrent parallel sequential decision processes. By invoking the deep deterministic policy gradient method and multi-agent technique, an MADRL-P&R framework is designed to perform the two subtasks. The new joint reward and internal rewards mechanism is proposed to match the goals and constraints of the placement and routing subtasks. We also propose the parameter migration-based model-retraining method to deal with changing network topologies. Corroborated by experiments, the proposed MADRL-P&R framework is superior to its alternatives in terms of service cost and delay, and offers higher flexibility for personalized service demands. The parameter migration-based model-retraining method can efficiently accelerate convergence under moderate network topology changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of over-parameterized neural networks has drawn significant attention in recent years. It was shown that such systems behave like convex systems under various restricted settings, such as for two-layer neural networks, and when learning is only restricted locally in the so-called neural tangent kernel space around specialized initializations. However, there is a lack of powerful theoretical techniques that can analyze fully trained deep neural networks under general conditions. This paper considers this fundamental problem by investigating such overparameterized deep neural networks when fully trained. Specifically, we characterize a deep neural network by its features’ distributions and propose a metric to intuitively measure the usefulness of feature representations. Under certain regularizers that bounds the metric, we show deep neural networks can be reformulated as a convex optimization and the system can guarantee effective feature representations in terms of the metric. Our new analysis is more consistent with empirical observations that deep neural networks are capable of learning efficient feature representations. Empirical studies confirm that predictions of our theory are consistent with results observed in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online fault detection of insulators is a necessary requirement for the development of a smart grid, which directly affects the safety and reliability of power system operations. Breakage is an important factor causing insulator abnormalities, and a large number of image samples are often required for training to complete defect identification with the help of AI deep learning. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network ensemble implemented using small samples, data augmentation and transfer learning for insulator breakage detection. We used data augmentation to expand the small sample of 200 insulator images by 15 times to 3000 images, built a VGG16 transfer network, pre-trained the VGG16 network convolutional basis weights, and improved the training performance and efficiency of the model with freeze training and fine-tuning training. The training on 2700 images and testing results on 300 images show that the proposed method can achieve an accuracy of 0.9871 for insulator breakage recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the efficient movement control of multiple drone cells for communication coverage. Although many works have been developed to cope with this problem, but only few of them have investigated the three-dimensional (3-D) continuous movement control of multiple drone cells. In this paper, a problem of 3-D continuous movement control of multiple drone cells is formulated with an objective of maximizing the energy-efficient communication coverage of drone-cell networks while preserving the network connectivity. To mitigate this challenging problem, an energy-efficiency and continuous-movement-control algorithm (E $^2$ CMC), which is based on an emerging deep reinforcement learning method, is proposed. In E $^2$ CMC, an energy-efficiency reward function considering the energy consumption, the sum of quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of users as well as the coverage fairness is first designed. Next, E $^2$ CMC learns to adjust drone cells’ locations continuously by interacting with an environment in a sequence of observations, actions, and rewards. Furthermore, E $^2$ CMC will reduce the reward drastically as long as the networks are disconnected. Simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed learning algorithm on deploying multiple drone cells to provide the communication coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Point cloud based retrieval for place recognition is still a challenging problem since the drastic appearance changes of scenes due to seasonal or artificial changes in the environments. Existing deep learning based global descriptors for the retrieval task usually consume a large amount of computational resources ($e.g$., memory), which may not be suitable for the cases of limited hardware resources. In this paper, we develop an efficient point cloud learning network (EPC-Net) to generate global descriptors of point clouds for place recognition. While obtaining good performance, it can greatly reduce computational memory and inference time. First, we propose a lightweight but effective neural network module, called ProxyConv, to aggregate the local geometric features of point clouds. We leverage the adjacency matrix and proxy points to simplify the original edge convolution for lower memory consumption. Then, we design a lightweight grouped VLAD network to form global descriptors for retrieval. Compared with the original VLAD network, we propose a grouped fully connected layer to decompose the high-dimensional vectors into a group of low-dimensional vectors, which can reduce the number of parameters of the network and maintain the discrimination of the feature vector. Finally, we further develop a simple version of EPC-Net, called EPC-Net-L, which consists of two ProxyConv modules and one max pooling layer to aggregate global descriptors. By distilling the knowledge from EPC-Net, EPC-Net-L can obtain discriminative global descriptors for retrieval. Extensive experiments on the Oxford dataset and three in-house datasets demonstrate that our method achieves good results with lower parameters, FLOPs, GPU memory, and shorter inference time. Our code is available at https://github.com/fpthink/EPC-Net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to reduce the dependence on accumulated experience that is difficult to replicate for the human dispatchers to make power generation scheduling more automatically, quickly, and intelligently, higher requirements are placed on the level of the auxiliary decision-making system. In this paper, a short-term scheduling problem was treated as a regression task that concentrates on how to learn a reliable statistic model that concludes the intrinsic logic of the dispatching policy from extensive historical dispatching experience. In this way, since Kullback-Leibler distance can better measure the distance between two distributions, we designed a novel GAN-based learning method for the scheduling task. Also, we proposed a feasible framework that combines the stage of learning, decision-making, and deployment to support the practical implementation of the proposed algorithm. In the experiment, a real case that takes short-term scheduling tasks on a regional large-scale power system is considered in our experiments. As a result, the comparison of several methods further shows the superiority of the proposed GAN-based method under our implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new deep learning (DL) based model-free robust method for bulk system on-line load restoration with high penetration of wind power. Inspired by the iterative calculation of the two-stage robust load restoration model, the deep neural network (DNN) and deep convolutional neural network (CNN) are respectively designed to find the worst-case system condition of a load pickup decision and evaluate the corresponding security. In order to find the optimal result within a limited number of checks, a load pickup checklist generation (LPCG) algorithm is developed to ensure the optimality. Then, the fast robust load restoration strategy acquisition is achieved based on the designed one-line strategy generation (OSG) algorithm. The proposed method finds the optimal result in a model-free way, holds the robustness to handle uncertainties, and provides real-time computation. It can completely replace conventional robust optimization and supports on-line robust load restoration which better satisfies the changeable restoration process. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using the IEEE 30-bus system and the IEEE 118-bus system, showing high computational efficiency and considerable accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of mobile edge computing (MEC) into an ultra-dense network (UDN) can provide ubiquitous task offloading services to computation-demanding users leveraging densely deployed micro base stations. The conventional multi-user task offloading strategies are performed centrally, where a central node makes global task offloading decisions on server selection and resource allocation. In practice, the deployment becomes prohibitively complex with the increasing number of users as it involves high communication overhead and complex global optimization operations. In this paper, we develop a novel decentralized task offloading strategy in UDN, enabling users to independently make local task offloading decisions. We formulate the associated optimization problem to minimize the long-term average task delay among all users. On this basis, we develop a novel calibrated contextual bandit learning (CCBL) algorithm, where users can learn the computational delay functions of micro base stations and predict the task offloading decisions of other users in a decentralized manner. The convergence of the proposed CCBL algorithm is verified via the approachability theory. Moreover, we transfer the target of calibrated learning from all micro base stations to a single user and propose a user-oriented CCBL algorithm to further decrease the computational complexity and increase the convergence rate. Simulation results illustrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing decentralized algorithms and approaches the centralized one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the three-dimensional (3D) path planning problem for cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) taking into account the impact of 3D antenna radiation patterns. The cellular-connected UAV has a mission to travel from an initial location to a destination. In this process, there is a trade-off between the flight time and the expected communication outages duration, which requires planning a suitable route to avoid the weak coverage region. However, as the existing cellular networks are primarily designed for ground coverage, the communication coverage in the sky tends to be intermittent and irregular due to the potential for severe interference and obstructions (such by buildings), which brings great challenges to 3D path planning. To address this challenge, we first construct a 3D coverage map that stores the expected outage probability over each locations. We then propose a multi-step dueling DDQN (multi-step D3QN) based algorithm to design the local optimal UAV path by leveraging the constructed coverage map. In this algorithm, the UAV acts as the agent to learn the appropriate action to complete the flight mission. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for connectivity-aware UAV path planning and the superiority of 3D path design over its 2D counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider an underwater linear network, where an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) gathers data from a set of underwater devices. The AUV monitors a set of physical processes, where the status of each process can be sensed by one or more devices and each device is capable of sensing one or more processes. The AUV needs to maintain freshness of its information status about the monitored processes. To quantify the freshness of the information at the AUV, we consider the concept of the age of information (AoI), which represents the amount of time elapsed since the most recently delivered update information was generated. A framework is proposed to optimize the AUV's linear movement trajectory and scheduling of process status updates with the objective of minimizing the normalized weighted sum of the average AoI of the monitored physical processes. The formulated optimization problem is a non-convex mixed integer problem, which cannot be solved by the standard optimization techniques. We develop a solution approach based on the technique of deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Specifically, we leverage an actor-critic DRL approach to find the optimum locations and stopping time of the data gathering points. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed framework maintains robustness under different scenarios and provides better performance when compared with baseline and $K$ -means clustering approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the fast topology optimization methods for rotating machines based on deep learning. The cross-sectional image of electric motors and their performances obtained during a multi-objective topology optimization based on the finite-element method and genetic algorithm (GA) is used for training of the convolutional neural network (CNN). Two different approaches are proposed: 1) CNN trained by preliminary optimization with a small population for GA is used for the main optimization with a large population and 2) CNN is used for screening of torque performances in the optimization with respect to the motor efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing the exposure to X-ray radiation while maintaining a clinically acceptable image quality is desirable in various CT applications. To realize low-dose CT (LdCT) imaging, model-based iterative reconstruction (MBIR) algorithms are widely adopted, but they require proper prior knowledge assumptions in the sinogram and/or image domains and involve tedious manual optimization of multiple parameters. In this paper, we propose a deep learning (DL)-based strategy for MBIR to simultaneously address prior knowledge design and MBIR parameter selection in one optimization framework. Specifically, a parameterized plug-and-play alternating direction method of multipliers (3pADMM) is proposed for the general penalized weighted least-squares model, and then, by adopting the basic idea of DL, the parameterized plug-and-play (3p) prior and the related parameters are optimized simultaneously in a single framework using a large number of training data. The main contribution of this paper is that the 3p prior and the related parameters in the proposed 3pADMM framework can be supervised and optimized simultaneously to achieve robust LdCT reconstruction performance. Experimental results obtained on clinical patient datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve promising gains over existing algorithms for LdCT image reconstruction in terms of noise-induced artifact suppression and edge detail preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A system to perform video analytics is proposed using a dynamically tuned convolutional network. Videos are fetched from cloud storage, preprocessed, and a model for supporting classification is developed on these video streams using cloud-based infrastructure. A key focus in this paper is on tuning hyper-parameters associated with the deep learning algorithm used to construct the model. We further propose an automatic video object classification pipeline to validate the system. The mathematical model used to support hyper-parameter tuning improves performance of the proposed pipeline, and outcomes of various parameters on system’s performance is compared. Subsequently, the parameters that contribute toward the most optimal performance are selected for the video object classification pipeline. Our experiment-based validation reveals an accuracy and precision of 97% and 96%, respectively. The system proved to be scalable, robust, and customizable for a variety of different applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neural networks (NNs) have become the go-to tool for solving many real-world recognition and classification tasks with massive and complex data sets. These networks require large data sets for training, which is usually performed on GPUs and CPUs in either a cloud or edge computing setting. No matter where the training is performed, it is subject to tight power/energy and data storage/transfer constraints. While these issues can be mitigated by replacing SRAM/DRAM with nonvolatile memories (NVMs) which offer near-zero leakage power and high scalability, the massive weight updates performed during training shorten NVM endurance and engender high write energy. In this paper, an NVM-friendly NN training approach is proposed. Weight update is redesigned to reduce bit flips in NVM cells. Moreover, two techniques, namely, filter exchange and bitwise rotation, are proposed to respectively balance writes to different weights and to different bits of one weight. The proposed techniques are integrated and evaluated in Caffe. Experimental results show significant power savings and endurance improvements, while maintaining high inference accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a unified deep neural network (DNN)-based precoder for two-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks with five objectives: data transmission, energy harvesting, simultaneous wireless information and power transfer, physical layer (PHY) security, and multicasting. First, a rotation-based precoder is developed to solve the above problems independently. Rotation-based precoding is a new precoding and power allocation scheme that beats existing solutions for PHY security and multicasting and is reliable in different antenna settings. Next, a DNN-based precoder is designed to unify the solution for all objectives. The proposed DNN concurrently learns the solutions given by conventional methods, i.e., analytical or rotation-based solutions. A binary vector is designed as an input feature to distinguish the objectives. Numerical results demonstrate that, compared to the conventional solutions, the proposed DNN-based precoder reduces on-the-fly computational complexity more than an order of magnitude while reaching near-optimal performance (99.45% of the averaged optimal solutions). The new precoder is also more robust to the variations of the numbers of antennas at the receivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the problem of wireless service provisioning through a rotary-wing UAV which can serve as an aerial base station (BS) to communicate with multiple ground terminals (GTs) in a boost demand area. Our objective is to optimize the UAV control for maximizing the UAV.s energy efficiency, in which both aerodynamic energy and communication energy are considered while ensuring the communication requirements for each GT and backhaul link between the UAV and the terrestrial BS. The mobility of the UAV and GTs lead to time-varying channel conditions that make the environment dynamic. We formulate a nonconvex optimization for controlling the UAV considering the practical angle-dependent Rician fading channels between the UAV and GTs, and between the UAV and the terrestrial BS. Traditional optimization approaches are not able to handle the dynamic environment and high complexity of the problem in real-time. We propose to use a deep reinforcement learning-based approach namely Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) to solve the formulated nonconvex problem of UAV control with continuous action space that takes into account the real-time of the environment including time-varying UAV-ground channel conditions, available onboard energy of the UAV, and the communication requirement of the GTs. However, the DDPG method may not achieve good performance in an unstable environment and will face a large number of hyperparameters. We extend our approach to use the Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) method that can improve the performance of the UAV compared to the DDPG method in such a dynamic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The security-constrained optimal power flow (SCOPF) is fundamental in power systems and connects the automatic primary response (APR) of synchronized generators with the short-term schedule. Every day, the SCOPF problem is repeatedly solved for various inputs to determine robust schedules given a set of contingencies. Unfortunately, the modeling of APR within the SCOPF problem results in complex large-scale mixed-integer programs, which are hard to solve. To address this challenge, leveraging the wealth of available historical data, this paper proposes a novel approach that combines deep learning and robust optimization techniques. Unlike recent machine-learning applications where the aim is to mitigate the computational burden of exact solvers, the proposed method predicts directly the SCOPF implementable solution. Feasibility is enforced in two steps. First, during training, a Lagrangian dual method penalizes violations of physical and operations constraints, which are iteratively added as necessary to the machine-learning model by a Column-and-Constraint-Generation Algorithm (CCGA). Second, another different CCGA restores feasibility by finding the closest feasible solution to the prediction. Experiments on large test cases show that the method results in significant time reduction for obtaining feasible solutions with an optimality gap below 0.1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adversarial attacks have been extensively studied in recent years since they can identify the vulnerability of deep learning models before deployed. In this paper, we consider the black-box adversarial setting, where the adversary needs to craft adversarial examples without access to the gradients of a target model. Previous methods attempted to approximate the true gradient either by using the transfer gradient of a surrogate white-box model or based on the feedback of model queries. However, the existing methods inevitably suffer from low attack success rates or poor query efficiency since it is difficult to estimate the gradient in a high-dimensional input space with limited information. To address these problems and improve black-box attacks, we propose two prior-guided random gradient-free (PRGF) algorithms based on biased sampling and gradient averaging, respectively. Our methods can take the advantage of a transfer-based prior given by the gradient of a surrogate model and the query information simultaneously. Through theoretical analyses, the transfer-based prior is appropriately integrated with model queries by an optimal coefficient in each method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, in comparison with the alternative state-of-the-arts, both of our methods require much fewer queries to attack black-box models with higher success rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning-based approaches to delineating 3D structure depend on accurate annotations to train the networks. Yet in practice, people, no matter how conscientious, have trouble precisely delineating in 3D and on a large scale, in part because the data is often hard to interpret visually and in part because the 3D interfaces are awkward to use. In this paper, we introduce a method that explicitly accounts for annotation inaccuracies. To this end, we treat the annotations as active contour models that can deform themselves while preserving their topology. This enables us to jointly train the network and correct potential errors in the original annotations. The result is an approach that boosts performance of deep networks trained with potentially inaccurate annotations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parallelism and data reuse are the most critical issues for the design of hardware acceleration in a deep learning processor. Besides, abundant on-chip memories and precise data management are intrinsic design requirements because most of deep learning algorithms are data-driven and memory-bound. In this paper, we propose a compiler-architecture co-design scheme targeting a reconfigurable and algorithm-oriented array processor, named ReAAP. Given specific deep neural networks, the proposed co-design scheme is effective to perform parallelism and data reuse optimization on compute-intensive layers for guiding reconfigurable computing in hardware. Especially, the systemic optimization is performed in our proposed domain-specific compiler to deal with the intrinsic tensions between parallelism and data locality, for the purpose of automatically mapping diverse layer-level workloads onto our proposed reconfigurable array architecture. In this architecture, abundant on-chip memories are software-controlled and its massive data access is precisely handled by compiler-generated instructions. In our experiments, the ReAAP is implemented on an embedded FPGA platform. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed co-design scheme is effective to integrate software flexibility with hardware parallelism for accelerating diverse deep learning workloads. As a whole system, ReAAP achieves a consistently high utilization of hardware resource for accelerating all the diverse compute-intensive layers in ResNet, MobileNet, and BERT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social network stores and disseminates a tremendous amount of user shared images. Deep hashing is an efficient indexing technique to support large-scale social image retrieval, due to its deep representation capability, fast retrieval speed and low storage cost. Particularly, unsupervised deep hashing has well scalability as it does not require any manually labelled data for training. However, owing to the lacking of label guidance, existing methods suffer from severe semantic shortage when optimizing a large amount of deep neural network parameters. Differently, in this paper, we propose a Dual-level Semantic Transfer Deep Hashing (DSTDH) method to alleviate this problem with a unified deep hash learning framework. Our model targets at learning the semantically enhanced deep hash codes by specially exploiting the user-generated tags associated with the social images. Specifically, we design a complementary dual-level semantic transfer mechanism to efficiently discover the potential semantics of tags and seamlessly transfer them into binary hash codes. On the one hand, instance-level semantics are directly preserved into hash codes from the associated tags with adverse noise removing. Besides, an image-concept hypergraph is constructed for indirectly transferring the latent high-order semantic correlations of images and tags into hash codes. Moreover, the hash codes are obtained simultaneously with the deep representation learning by the discrete hash optimization strategy. Extensive experiments on two public social image retrieval datasets validate the superior performance of our method compared with state-of-the-art hashing methods. The source codes of our method can be obtained at https://github.com/research2020-1/DSTDH [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When imaging through a semi-reflective medium such as glass, the reflection of another scene can often be found in the captured images. It degrades the quality of the images and affects their subsequent analyses. In this paper, a novel deep neural network approach for solving the reflection problem in imaging is presented. Traditional reflection removal methods not only require long computation time for solving different optimization functions, their performance is also not guaranteed. As array cameras are readily available in nowadays imaging devices, we first suggest in this paper a multiple-image based depth estimation method using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed network avoids the depth ambiguity problem due to the reflection in the image, and directly estimates the depths along the image edges. They are then used to classify the edges as belonging to the background or reflection. Since edges having similar depth values are error prone in the classification, they are removed from the reflection removal process. We suggest a generative adversarial network (GAN) to regenerate the removed background edges. Finally, the estimated background edge map is fed to another auto-encoder network to assist the extraction of the background from the original image. Experimental results show that the proposed reflection removal algorithm achieves superior performance both quantitatively and qualitatively as compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The proposed algorithm also shows much faster speed compared to the existing approaches using the traditional optimization methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human pose recovery in videos is usually conducted by matching 2-D image features and retrieving relevant 3-D human poses. In the retrieving process, the mapping between images and poses is critical. Traditional methods assume this mapping relationship as local joint detection or global joint localization, which limits recovery performance of these methods since this two tasks are actually unified. In this paper, we propose a novel pose recovery framework by simultaneously learning the tasks of joint localization and joint detection. To obtain this framework, multiple manifold learning is used and the shared parameter is calculated. With them, multiple manifold regularizers are integrated and generalized eigendecomposition is utilized to achieve parameter optimization. In this way, pose recovery is boosted by both global mapping and local refinement. Experimental results on two popular datasets demonstrates that the recovery error has been reduced by 10%–20%, which proves the performance improvement of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Limited angle reconstruction is a typical ill-posed problem in computed tomography (CT). Given incomplete projection data, images reconstructed by conventional analytical algorithms and iterative methods suffer from severe structural distortions and artifacts. In this paper, we proposed a self-augmented multi-stage deep-learning network (Sam’s Net) for end-to-end reconstruction of limited angle CT. With the merit of the alternating minimization technique, Sam’s Net integrates multi-stage self-constraints into cross-domain optimization to provide additional constraints on the manifold of neural networks. In practice, a sinogram completion network (SCNet) and artifact suppression network (ASNet), together with domain transformation layers constitute the backbone for cross-domain optimization. An online self-augmentation module was designed following the manner defined by alternating minimization, which enables a self-augmented learning procedure and multi-stage inference manner. Besides, a substitution operation was applied as a hard constraint for the solution space based on the data fidelity and a learnable weighting layer was constructed for data consistency refinement. Sam’s Net forms a new framework for ill-posed reconstruction problems. In the training phase, the self-augmented procedure guides the optimization into a tightened solution space with enriched diverse data distribution and enhanced data consistency. In the inference phase, multi-stage prediction can improve performance progressively. Extensive experiments with both simulated and practical projections under 90-degree and 120-degree fan-beam configurations validate that Sam’s Net can significantly improve the reconstruction quality with high stability and robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is appealing but challenging to achieve real-time deep neural network (DNN) inference on mobile devices, because even the powerful modern mobile devices are considered as “resource-constrained” when executing large-scale DNNs. It necessitates the sparse model inference via weight pruning, i.e., DNN weight sparsity, and it is desirable to design a new DNN weight sparsity scheme that can facilitate real-time inference on mobile devices while preserving a high sparse model accuracy. This paper designs a novel mobile inference acceleration framework GRIM that is General to both convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and that achieves Real-time execution and high accuracy, leveraging fine-grained structured sparse model Inference and compiler optimizations for Mobiles. We start by proposing a new fine-grained structured sparsity scheme through the Block-based Column-Row (BCR) pruning. Based on this new fine-grained structured sparsity, our GRIM framework consists of two parts: (a) the compiler optimization and code generation for real-time mobile inference; and (b) the BCR pruning optimizations for determining pruning hyperparameters and performing weight pruning. We compare GRIM with Alibaba MNN, TVM, TensorFlow-Lite, a sparse implementation based on CSR, PatDNN, and ESE (a representative FPGA inference acceleration framework for RNNs), and achieve up to $14.08\times$ 14. 08 × speedup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a powerful statistical signal modeling technique, sparse representation has been widely used in various image restoration (IR) applications. The sparsity-based methods have achieved leading performance in the past few decades. However, in recent years it has been surpassed by other methods, especially the recent deep learning based methods. In this paper, we address the question that whether sparse representation can be competitive again. The way we answer this question is to redesign it with a deep architecture. To be specific, we propose an end-to-end deep architecture that follows the process of the sparse representation based IR. In particular, we learn a sparse convolutional dictionary to replace the traditional dictionary, and a convolutional neural network (CNN) denoising prior to replace the image prior. Through end-to-end training, the parameters in convolutional dictionary and CNN denoiser can be jointly optimized. Experimental results on several representative IR tasks, including image denoising, deblurring and super-resolution, demonstrate that the proposed deep network can achieve superior performance against state-of-the-art model-based and learning-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tackles the joint user association (UA) and power control (PC) problem for dynamic heterogeneous networks (HetNets), where the number of active users varies over time. Since the joint UA and PC problem is a mixed-integer problem, it is challenging to develop a joint UA and PC algorithm that closely achieves the optimal proportional fairness (PF) performance while satisfying the tight computation time budget of recent 3GPP standards. Although previous studies have reduced the computation time on the UA and PC by employing a fully-connected-neural network (FCN), the FCN architecture is not generally applicable to dynamic HetNets because of a varying number of users. In pursuit of scalable neural network design, we propose an unsupervised learning-based UA and PC algorithm using a recurrent neural network (RNN). Notably, in the RNN-based UA, we relax the combinatorial UA variable into a low-dimensional continuous variable, the length of which is invariant to the number of users. The optimality loss in the variable relaxation is upper-bounded by the negligibly small duality gap. Through extensive experiments, we show that the proposed scheme has a 10% higher PF performance than conventional optimization-based methods with the same number of flops and closely achieves the optimal PF performance for various numbers of users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The flow fluctuations in the highly dynamic Internet of Vehicles (IoV) make the IoV difficult to provide reliable and scalable wireless network services for the emerging applications in the 5 G and beyond era. The software-defined networks (SDN) could feasibly manage and optimize the network according to the network load. Controller placement is a critical problem in SDN to achieve its robustness and flexibility with the changes of network status. Motivated by the advantages of SDN and Mobile-edge computing (MEC), this paper aims at enhancing the performance of IoV with the assistance of these two. Specifically, we consider a three-layer hierarchical SDN control plane for the IoV, where the SDN controllers are placed at the edge of networks. Under this framework, we investigate a multi-objective optimization problem on controller placement problem including delay, load balancing, and path reliability. To efficiently solve the formulated NP-hard problems, we develop an algorithm based on multi-agent deep Q-learning networks (MADQN) because of its advantages for large-scale combinatorial optimization. At last, we use multi-process technology to accelerate the operation of the algorithm, so as to complete the algorithm iteration faster. Numerical results show that the proposed methods achieve better performances than three baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sparsity-constrained optimization problems are common in machine learning, such as sparse coding, low-rank minimization and compressive sensing. However, most of previous studies focused on constructing various hand-crafted sparse regularizers, while little work was devoted to learning adaptive sparse regularizers from given input data for specific tasks. In this paper, we propose a deep sparse regularizer learning model that learns data-driven sparse regularizers adaptively. Via the proximal gradient algorithm, we find that the sparse regularizer learning is equivalent to learning a parameterized activation function. This encourages us to learn sparse regularizers in the deep learning framework. Therefore, we build a neural network composed of multiple blocks, each being differentiable and reusable. All blocks contain learnable piecewise linear activation functions which correspond to the sparse regularizer to be learned. Furthermore, the proposed model is trained with back propagation, and all parameters in this model are learned end-to-end. We apply our framework to multi-view clustering and semi-supervised classification tasks to learn a latent compact representation. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art multi-view learning models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph matching involves combinatorial optimization based on edge-to-edge affinity matrix, which can be generally formulated as Lawler's quadratic assignment problem (QAP). This paper presents a QAP network directly learning with the affinity matrix (equivalently the association graph) whereby the matching problem is translated into a constrained vertex classification task. The association graph is learned by an embedding network for vertex classification, followed by Sinkhorn normalization and a cross-entropy loss for end-to-end learning. We further improve the embedding model on association graph by introducing Sinkhorn based matching-aware constraint, as well as dummy nodes to deal with unequal sizes of graphs. To our best knowledge, this is one of the first network to directly learn with the general Lawler's QAP. In contrast, recent deep matching methods focus on the learning of node/edge features in two graphs respectively. We also show how to extend our network to hypergraph matching, and matching of multiple graphs. Experimental results on both synthetic graphs and real-world images show its effectiveness. For pure QAP tasks on synthetic data and QAPLIB benchmark, our method can perform competitively and even surpass state-of-the-art graph matching and QAP solvers with notable less time cost. We provide a project homepage at http://thinklab.sjtu.edu.cn/project/NGM/index.html. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fast and accurate MRI image reconstruction from undersampled data is crucial in clinical practice. Deep learning based reconstruction methods have shown promising advances in recent years. However, recovering fine details from undersampled data is still challenging. In this paper, we introduce a novel deep learning based method, Pyramid Convolutional RNN (PC-RNN), to reconstruct images from multiple scales. Based on the formulation of MRI reconstruction as an inverse problem, we design the PC-RNN model with three convolutional RNN (ConvRNN) modules to iteratively learn the features in multiple scales. Each ConvRNN module reconstructs images at different scales and the reconstructed images are combined by a final CNN module in a pyramid fashion. The multi-scale ConvRNN modules learn a coarse-to-fine image reconstruction. Unlike other common reconstruction methods for parallel imaging, PC-RNN does not employ coil sensitive maps for multi-coil data and directly model the multiple coils as multi-channel inputs. The coil compression technique is applied to standardize data with various coil numbers, leading to more efficient training. We evaluate our model on the fastMRI knee and brain datasets and the results show that the proposed model outperforms other methods and can recover more details. The proposed method is one of the winner solutions in the 2019 fastMRI competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vehicular edge computing is considered an enabling technology for intelligent and connected vehicles since the optimization of communication and computing on edge has a significant impact on driving safety and efficiency. In this paper, with the road traffic assignment to “proactively” reshape the spatiotemporal distribution of resource demands, we investigate the joint service migration and mobility optimization problem for vehicular edge computing. The goal is to meet the service delay requirements of vehicular edge computing with minimum migration cost and travel time. As service migration and mobility optimization are coupled, the joint scheduling problem suffers from the curse of dimensionality, which cannot be solved in real time by centralized algorithms. To this end, a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) algorithm is proposed to maximize the composite utility of communication, computing, and route planning in a distributed way. In the MADRL algorithm, a two-branch convolution based deep Q-network is constructed to coordinate migration action and routing action. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is scalable and substantially reduces service delay, migration cost and travel time as compared with the existing baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the promise of recent deep neural networks to provide more accurate and efficient iris recognition compared to traditional techniques, there are vital properties of the classic IrisCode which are almost unable to be achieved with current deep iris networks: the compactness of model and the small number of computing operations (FLOPs). This paper casts the iris network design process as a constrained optimization problem which takes model size and computation into account as learning criteria. On one hand, this allows us to fully automate the network design process to search for the optimal iris network architecture with the highest recognition accuracy confined to the computation and model compactness constraints. On the other hand, it allows us to investigate the optimality of the classic IrisCode and recent deep iris networks. It also enables us to learn an optimal iris network and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with less computation and memory requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulations of multi-label Markov random fields (MRFs) models with global connectivity priors were investigated previously in computer vision. In these works, only Linear Programming (LP) relaxations or simplified versions of the problem were solved. This paper investigates the ILP of MRF with exact connectivity priors via a branch-and-cut method, which provably finds globally optimal solutions. It enforces connectivity priors iteratively by a cutting plane method, and provides feasible solutions with a guarantee on sub-optimality even if we terminate it earlier. The proposed ILP can be applied as a post-processing method on top of any existing multi-label segmentation approach. As it provides globally optimal solution, it can be used off-line to serve as quality check for any fast on-line algorithm. Furthermore, the scribble based model presented in this paper could be potentially used to generate ground-truth proposals for any deep learning based segmentation. We demonstrate the power and usefulness of our model by extensive experiments on the BSDS500 and PASCAL VOC dataset. The experiments show that our proposed model achieves great performance, yielding provably global optimum in most instances and that provably good optimization solutions also provide good segmentation accuracy, even with the limited computing time of few seconds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed the wide application of hashing for large-scale image retrieval, because of its high computation efficiency and low storage cost. Particularly, benefiting from current advances in deep learning, supervised deep hashing methods have greatly boosted the retrieval performance, under the strong supervision of large amounts of manually annotated semantic labels. However, their performance is highly dependent upon the supervised labels, which significantly limits the scalability. In contrast, unsupervised deep hashing without label dependence enjoys the advantages of well scalability. Nevertheless, due to the relaxed hash optimization, and more importantly, the lack of semantic guidance, existing methods suffer from limited retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose a SCAlable Deep Hashing (SCADH) to learn enhanced hash codes for social image retrieval. We formulate a unified scalable deep hash learning framework which explores the weak but free supervision of discriminative user tags that are commonly accompanied with social images. It jointly learns image representations and hash functions with deep neural networks, and simultaneously enhances the discriminative capability of image hash codes with the refined semantics from the accompanied social tags. Further, instead of simple relaxed hash optimization, we propose a discrete hash optimization method based on Augmented Lagrangian Multiplier to directly solve the hash codes and avoid the binary quantization information loss. Experiments on two standard social image datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach compared with state-of-the-art shallow and deep hashing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robust visual tracking is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision applications. However, the limited training data and the computational complexity have severely affected tracking performance. In this paper, we propose an auto-encoder pair model for visual tracking which is composed of source domain network and target domain network to help a more accurate localization. We adopt the dense circular samples of the object state to increase the number of training samples and prevent model overfitting. Meanwhile, a difference regularization term is also introduced into our framework to penalize the large appearance variations of the object in two domains. The alternating optimization is used to solve the optimization problems. Furthermore, our method alleviates the model update problem and improves the tracking speed by using long-term and short-term updating scheme. In addition, the target domain filter is updated by introducing the updated source domain filter to avoid the object drift. Comprehensive experiments on some challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our approach concurrently improves both tracking accuracy and speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demand-side management (DSM) increases the complexity of forecasting environment, which makes traditional forecasting methods difficult to meet the firm's need for predictive accuracy. Since deep learning can comprehensively consider various factors to improve prediction results, this paper improves the deep belief network from three aspects of input data, model and performance, and uses it to solve the short-term load forecasting problem in DSM. In the data optimization stage, the Hankel matrix is constructed to increase the input weight of DSM data, and the gray relational analysis is used to select strongly correlated data from the data set. In the model optimization stage, the Gauss-Bernoulli restricted Boltzmann machine is used as the first restricted Boltzmann machine of the deep network to convert the continuity feature of input data into binomial distribution feature. In the performance optimization stage, a pre-training method combining error constraint and unsupervised learning is proposed to provide good initial parameters, and the global fine-tuning of network parameters is realized based on the genetic algorithm. Based on the actual data of Tianjin Power Grid in China, the experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed the promising future of hashing in the industrial applications for fast similarity retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised hashing method for large-scale cross-media search, termed self-supervised deep multimodal hashing (SSDMH), which learns unified hash codes as well as deep hash functions for different modalities in a self-supervised manner. With the proposed regularized binary latent model, unified binary codes can be solved directly without relaxation strategy while retaining the neighborhood structures by the graph regularization term. Moreover, we propose a new discrete optimization solution, termed as binary gradient descent, which aims at improving the optimization efficiency toward real-time operation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark data sets demonstrate the superiority of SSDMH over state-of-the-art cross-media hashing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For vehicle-to-network communications, handover (HO) management enables vehicles to maintain the connection with the network while transiting through coverage areas of different base stations (BSs). However, the high mobility of vehicles means shorter connection periods with each BS that leads to frequent HOs, hence raises the necessity for optimal HO decision making for high quality infotainment services. Machine learning is capable of capturing underlying pattern via data driven methods to find optimal solutions to complex problems, and much learning-based HO optimization research has been conducted focusing on specific network setups. However, attention still needs to be paid to the actual deployment aspect and standardized datasets or simulation environments for evaluation. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning-based HO algorithm using the input parameters that are configurable in the existing measurement report of cellular networks. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using the well-known network simulator ns-3 with its official LTE module. A realistic network setup in the city center of Glasgow (U.K.) is configured with vehicle trajectories generated by the routes mobility model using Google Maps Directions API. Evaluation results reveal that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the A3 RSRP baseline with an average of 25.72% packet loss reduction per HO, suggesting significant improvement in quality of service of phone call and video streaming, etc. The proposed algorithm also has a small implementation cost compared to some state-of-the-art and should be deployed by a software update to a local BS controller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video Summarization (VS) has become one of the most effective solutions for quickly understanding a large volume of video data. Dictionary selection with self representation and sparse regularization has demonstrated its promise for VS by formulating the VS problem as a sparse selection task on video frames. However, existing dictionary selection models are generally designed only for data reconstruction, which results in the neglect of the inherent structured information among video frames. In addition, the sparsity commonly constrained by $L_{2,1}$ norm is not strong enough, which causes the redundancy of keyframes, i.e., similar keyframes are selected. Therefore, to address these two issues, in this paper we propose a general framework called graph convolutional dictionary selection with $L_{2,p}$ ($0< p\leq 1$) norm (GCDS $_{2,p}$) for both keyframe selection and skimming based summarization. Firstly, we incorporate graph embedding into dictionary selection to generate the graph embedding dictionary, which can take the structured information depicted in videos into account. Secondly, we propose to use $L_{2,p}$ ($0< p\leq 1$) norm constrained row sparsity, in which $p$ can be flexibly set for two forms of video summarization. For keyframe selection, $0< p< 1$ can be utilized to select diverse and representative keyframes; and for skimming, $p=1$ can be utilized to select key shots. In addition, an efficient iterative algorithm is devised to optimize the proposed model, and the convergence is theoretically proved. Experimental results including both keyframe selection and skimming based summarization on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]