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The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. In large-scale multiobjective optimization, too many decision variables hinder the convergence search of evolutionary algorithms. Reducing the search range of the decision space will significantly alleviate this puzzle. With this in mind, this paper proposes a fuzzy decision variables framework for largescale multiobjective optimization. The framework divides the entire evolutionary process into two main stages: fuzzy evolution and precise evolution. In fuzzy evolution, we blur the decision variables of the original solution to reduce the search range of the evolutionary algorithm in the decision space so that the evolutionary population can quickly converge. The degree of fuzzification gradually decreases with the evolutionary process. Once the population approximately converges, the framework will turn to precise evolution. In precise evolution, the actual decision variables of the solution are directly optimized to increase the diversity of the population so as to be closer to the true Pareto optimal front. Finally, this paper embeds some representative algorithms into the proposed framework and verifies the framework’s effectiveness through comparative experiments on various large-scale multiobjective problems with 500 to 5000 decision variables. Experimental results show that in large-scale multiobjective optimization, the framework proposed in this paper can significantly improve the performance and computational efficiency of multiobjective optimization algorithms.

We propose a flexible low complexity design (FLCD) of coded distributed computing (CDC) with empirical evaluation on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). CDC can expedite MapReduce like computation by trading increased map computations to reduce communication load and shuffle time. A main novelty of FLCD is to utilize the design freedom in defining map and reduce functions to develop asymptotic homogeneous systems to support varying intermediate values (IV) sizes under a general MapReduce framework. Compared to existing designs with constant IV sizes, FLCD offers greater flexibility in adapting to network parameters and significantly reduces the implementation complexity by requiring fewer input files and shuffle groups. The FLCD scheme is the first proposed low-complexity CDC design that can operate on a network with an arbitrary number of nodes and computation load. We perform empirical evaluations of the FLCD by executing the TeraSort algorithm on an Amazon EC2 cluster. This is the first time that theoretical predictions of the CDC shuffle time are validated by empirical evaluations. The evaluations demonstrate a 2.0 to 4.24x speedup compared to conventional uncoded MapReduce, a 12% to 52% reduction in total time, and a wider range of operating network parameters compared to existing CDC schemes., 13 pages, 4 figures

Graph Mining has gained importance due to its wide range of applications. As graph mining is a form of data mining where data is depicted in the form of graphs. The data when represented in the form of graphs helps to model the real scenario and relationship well. Discovery of interesting pattern from real relationship is of utmost beneficial. Frequent Subgraph Mining (FSM) is a significant area of graph mining. We accompany our approach in the field of FSM by adding a graph sampling function. This sampling function takes the single graph and a sampling percentage as input and produces a sampled graph which is similar in properties with original graph. This sampled graph is then taken as input while implementing the GraMi framework. Our sampling approach successfully mines the subgraphs with lower frequency threshold thus significantly improving the efficiency of the original GraMi framework.

Absorbing sets are combinatorial structures in the Tanner graphs of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes that have been shown to inhibit the high signal-to-noise ratio performance of iterative decoders over many communication channels. Absorbing sets of minimum size are the most likely to cause errors, and thus have been the focus of much research. In this paper, we determine the sizes of absorbing sets that can occur in general and left-regular LDPC code graphs, with emphasis on the range of \begin{document}$ b $\end{document} for a given \begin{document}$ a $\end{document} for which an \begin{document}$ (a,b) $\end{document} -absorbing set may exist. We identify certain cases of extremal absorbing sets that are elementary, a particularly harmful class of absorbing sets, and also introduce the notion of minimal absorbing sets which will help in designing absorbing set removal algorithms.

Deep learning methods have achieved significant progress in the presence of correctly annotated datasets in instance segmentation. However, object classes in large-scale datasets are sometimes ambiguous, which easily causes confusion. Besides, limited experience and knowledge of annotators can lead to mislabeled object semantic classes. To solve this issue, a novel method is proposed in this paper, which considers different roles of noisy class labels in different sub-tasks. Our method is based on two basic observations: firstly, the foreground-background annotation of a sample is correct even though its class label is noisy. Secondly, symmetric loss benefits the model robustness to noisy labels but harms the learning of hard samples, while cross entropy loss is the opposite. Based on the two basic observations, in the foreground-background sub-task, cross entropy loss is used to fully exploit correct gradient guidance. In the foreground-instance sub-task, symmetric loss is used to prevent incorrect gradient guidance provided by noisy class labels. Furthermore, we apply contrastive self-supervised loss to update features of all foreground, to compensate for insufficient guidance provided by partially correct labels especially in the highly noisy setting. Extensive experiments conducted with three popular datasets (i.e., Pascal VOC, Cityscapes and COCO) have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in a wide range of noisy class label scenarios.

Providing flexibility into a system on a chip design is sometimes required and generally always desirable. However the cost of providing this flexibility in terms of energy consumption and silicon area is not well understood. This cost can range over many orders of magnitude depending on the architecture and implementation strategy. To quantify this cost, efficiency metrics are introduced for energy (MOPS/mW) and area (MOPS/mm2) and are used to compare a variety of designs and architectures for signal processing applications. It is found that the critical architectural parameters are the amount of flexibility, the granularity of the architecture in providing this flexibility and the amount of parallelism. A range of architectural solutions which tradeoff these parameters are presented and applied to example applications.

In mobile crowdsensing, location-based task recommendation requires each data requester to submit a task-related geometric range to crowdsensing service providers such that they can match suitable workers within this range. Generally, a trusted server (i.e., database owner) should be deployed to protect location privacy during the process, which is not desirable in practice. In this paper, we propose the location privacy-preserving task recommendation (PPTR) schemes with geometric range query in mobile crowdsensing without the trusted database owner. Specifically, we first propose a PPTR scheme with linear search complexity, named PPTR-L, based on a two-server model. By leveraging techniques of polynomial fitting and randomizable matrix multiplication, PPTR-L enables the service provider to find the workers located in the data requester's arbitrary geometric query range without disclosing the sensitive location privacy. To further improve query efficiency, we design a novel data structure for task recommendation and propose PPTR-F to achieve faster-than-linear search complexity. Through security analysis, it is shown that our schemes can protect the confidentiality of workers locations and data requesters' queries. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate that our schemes can achieve high computational efficiency in terms of geometric range query.

This article considers the problem of cyclic flow shop (CFS) scheduling problems in robotic cells deploying several single and dual gripper robots. In this problem, different part types are successively processed on multiple machines with different pickup criteria including free pickup, pickup within time windows, and no-waiting times. The parts are transported between the machines by the robots. We propose a novel integer programming approach that determines the optimal sequence of parts simultaneously for the sequencing of the robots’ movements and the cyclic schedule, which also results in maximizing the throughput rate. The proposed mathematical model is validated on a number of randomly generated test instances. These problem instances are constructed by varying the number of machines, part types, robots, and gripper options. This allows a detailed analysis of the model including how it scales with increasing numbers of machines, part types, robots, and grippers. An experimental evaluation shows that our proposed model is very effective for a range of small medium-sized problems. In particular, we find that differing number of robots and gripper options directly affects the cycle time and in turn, the throughput rate. Overall, our integer programming model finds good feasible solutions for up to 20 machines and 10 part types, which is comparable to real-world industrial problems.

Spectrum map is an essential tool for a range of emerging applications of 5G and 6G networks. Despite the great efforts that have been put on the construction of spectrum maps, access to accurate and valid spectrum data in dynamically changing environments emphasizes the need for more advanced solutions. To this end, the idea of spectrum map prediction is introduced. In this paper, we address the problem of spectrum map prediction from incomplete and corrupted historical spectrum observations. We propose three techniques to solve the problem. First, we combine the spectrum map with prediction functionalities so as to offer a huge potential in dynamically changing environments. Second, by fully exploiting the inherent spatial-temporal-spectral structures of the spectrum data and the sparsity of anomalies and missing data, we model the spectrum map as a 3rd-order spectrum tensor and formulate the spectrum map prediction problem as a low-rank tensor completion problem. Third, we design a robust online spectrum map prediction (ROSMP) algorithm based on the alternating direction minimization method. Finally, extensive numerical evaluations using a real spectrum measurement dataset confirm the efficacy and efficiency of ROSMP and show the superiority of ROSMP over the baselines.

The generalized exponential rational function (GERF) method is used in this work to obtain analytic wave solutions to the Kudryashov-Sinelshchikov (KS) equation. The KS equation depicts the occurrence of pressure waves in mixtures of liquid-gas bubbles while accounting for thermal expansion and viscosity. By applying the GERF method to the KS equation, we obtain analytic solutions in terms of trigonometric, hyperbolic, and exponential functions, among others. These solutions include solitary wave solutions, dark-bright soliton solutions, singular soliton solutions, singular bell-shaped solutions, traveling wave solutions, rational form solutions, and periodic wave solutions. We discuss the two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphics of some obtained solutions under the accurate range space by selecting appropriate values for the involved arbitrary parameters to make this research more praiseworthy. The obtained analytic wave solutions specify the GERF method’s dependability, capability, trustworthiness, and efficiency.

This article investigates the distributed time-varying optimization problem for second-order multiagent systems (MASs) under limited interaction ranges. The goal is to seek the minimum of the sum of local time-varying cost functions (CFs), where each CF is only available to the corresponding agent. Limited communication range refers to the scenario where the agents have limited sensing and communication capabilities, that is, a pair of agents can communicate with each other only if their distance is within a certain range. To handle such a problem, a new continuous connectivity-preserving mechanism is presented to preserve the connectivity of the considered network. Then, two distributed optimization algorithms are presented to solve the optimization problem with time-varying CFs and time-invariant CFs, respectively. Theoretical analysis and two numerical examples are provided to verify the effectiveness of the methods.

Human-robot co-transportation allows for a human and a robot to perform an object transportation task cooperatively on a shared environment. This range of applications raises a great number of theoretical and practical challenges arising mainly from the unknown human-robot interaction model as well as from the difficulty of accurately model the robot dynamics. In this article, an adaptive impedance controller for human-robot co-transportation is put forward in task space. Vision and force sensing are employed to obtain the human hand position, and to measure the interaction force between the human and the robot. Using the latest developments in nonlinear control theory, we propose a robot end-effector controller to track the motion of the human partner under actuators' input constraints, unknown initial conditions, and unknown robot dynamics. The proposed adaptive impedance control algorithm offers a safe interaction between the human and the robot and achieves a smooth control behavior along the different phases of the co-transportation task. Simulations and experiments are conducted to illustrate the performance of the proposed techniques in a co-transportation task.

Vehicle logo detection (VLD) is a special and significant topic in object detection for vehicle identification system applications. Nevertheless, the range of the research and analysis for VLD are seriously narrow in the real complex scenes, although it's a critical role in the object detection of small sizes. In this paper, we make further analysis work toward vehicle logo recognition and detection in real-world situations. To begin with, we propose a new multi-class VLD dataset, called VLD-45 (Vehicle Logo Dataset), which contains 45000 images and 50359 objects from 45 categories respectively. Our new dataset provides several research challenges involve in small sizes object, shape deformation, low contrast and so on. Meanwhile, we use 6 existing classifiers and 6 detectors to evaluate our dataset and show the baseline performance. According to the result, our dataset has very significant research value for the task of small-scale object detection. The dataset source: https://github.com/YangShuoys/VLD-45-B-DATASET-Detection

Complex systems can be defined by “sloppy” dimensions, meaning that their behavior is unmodified by large changes to specific parameter combinations, and “stiff” dimensions whose change results in considerable behavioral modification. In the neocortex, sloppiness in synaptic architectures would be crucial to allow for the maintenance of asynchronous irregular spiking dynamics with low firing rates despite a diversity of inputs, states, and both short- and long-term plasticity. Using simulations on neural networks with first-order spiking statistics matched to firing in murine visual cortex while varying connectivity parameters, we determined the stiff and sloppy parameters of synaptic architectures across three classes of input (brief, continuous, and cyclical). Algorithmically-generated connectivity parameter values drawn from a large portion of the parameter space reveal that specific combinations of excitatory and inhibitory connectivity are stiff and that all other architectural details are sloppy. Stiff dimensions are consistent across input classes with self-sustaining synaptic architectures following brief input occupying a smaller subspace as compared to the other input classes. Experimentally estimated connectivity probabilities from mouse visual cortex are consistent with the connectivity correlations found and fall in the same region of the parameter space as architectures identified algorithmically. This suggests that simple statistical descriptions of spiking dynamics are a sufficient and parsimonious description of neocortical activity when examining structure-function relationships at the mesoscopic scale. Additionally, coarse graining cell types does not prevent the generation of accurate, informative, and interpretable models underlying simple spiking activity. This unbiased investigation provides further evidence of the importance of the interrelationship of excitatory and inhibitory connectivity to establish and maintain stable spiking dynamical regimes in the neocortex.Author SummaryConnections between neurons are continuously changing to allow learning and adaptation to new stimuli. However, the ability of neural networks to vary these connections while avoiding excessively high- or low-activity states is still not well understood. We tackled this question by studying how changes in the parameters of connectivity within and between different neuronal populations impacted network activity in computational models. We identified specific combinations of parameters, deemed “stiff”, that must be maintained to observe activity consistent with recordings from murine visual cortex, while the rest of the parameters can be varied freely with minimal effects on activity. Our results agree with experimentally measured connectivity statistics demonstrating the importance of balancing opposing forces to maintain activity in a natural regime.

Learning node representations in a network has a wide range of applications. Most of the existing work focuses on improving the performance of the learned node representations by designing advanced network embedding models. In contrast to these work, this article aims to provide some understanding of the rationale behind the existing network embedding models, e.g., why a given embedding algorithm outputs the specific node representations and how the resulting node representations relate to the structure of the input network. In particular, we propose to discern the edge influence for two widely-studied classes of network embedding models, i.e., skip-gram based models and graph neural networks. We provide algorithms to effectively and efficiently quantify the edge influence on node representations, and further identify high-influential edges by exploiting the linkage between edge influence and network structure. Experimental evaluations are conducted on real datasets showing that: 1) in terms of quantifying edge influence, the proposed method is significantly faster (up to 2,000x) than straightforward methods with little quality loss, and 2) in terms of identifying high-influential edges, the identified edges by the proposed method have a significant impact in the context of downstream prediction task and adversarial attacking.

Predicting the defect-proneness of a module can reduce the time, effort, manpower, and consequently the cost to develop a software project. Since the causes of software defects are difficult to identify, a wide range of machine learning models are still being developed to build a high performing prediction systems. For this reason, an hybrid approach called – diverse ensemble learning technique (DELT), that adopts two diversity generation schemes such as bootstrap aggregation and multi-inducer concepts, is proposed for with-in-project defect prediction (WPDP) problem in order to mitigate the low classification rates of the prediction model. To predict the final class-label for any unlabeled test module, the proposed DELT employs the principle of majority voting. An extensive set of experiments are conducted on 43 publicly available PROMISE and NASA datasets. The experimental results are promising since it improves the generalization performance in classifying the defect proneness of the software module.

Lisätään OA-artikkeli, kun julkaistu We address the problem of autonomous tracking and state estimation for marine vessels, autonomous vehicles, and other dynamic signals under a (structured) sparsity assumption. The aim is to improve the tracking and estimation accuracy with respect to the classical Bayesian filters and smoothers. We formulate the estimation problem as a dynamic generalized group Lasso problem and develop a class of smoothing-and-splitting methods to solve it. The Levenberg-Marquardt iterated extended Kalman smoother-based multiblock alternating direction method of multipliers (LM-IEKS-mADMMs) algorithms are based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMMs) framework. This leads to minimization subproblems with an inherent structure to which three new augmented recursive smoothers are applied. Our methods can deal with large-scale problems without preprocessing for dimensionality reduction. Moreover, the methods allow one to solve nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems. We then prove that under mild conditions, the proposed methods converge to a stationary point of the optimization problem. By simulated and real-data experiments, including multisensor range measurement problems, marine vessel tracking, autonomous vehicle tracking, and audio signal restoration, we show the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Modern companies are moving rapidly toward more customer-oriented approaches for new product design and development. In real-world applications, customer requirements are more diverse and rather heterogeneous in practice, which requires the targeted market to be multisegmented. In this article, employing the quality function deployment (QFD) and assuming that parameter uncertainty exists, we propose a new fuzzy QFD model for use in multisegment markets, to search for optimal engineering characteristics by maximizing the overall customer satisfaction score. Under that framework, and when the credibility measure is employed, we adopt a fuzzy chance-constrained programming setting to convert the fuzzy model into its crisp counterpart. Afterwards, an analytical method based on fuzzy operational law is proposed to further transform the chance-constrained programming into an equivalent explicit model that can be solved directly by a standard commercial software. For a targeted group of customers, a new yoghurt design is presented to illustrate the effectiveness and superiority of our treatment. We report that our methodology not only permits the selection of the preferred solution based on an acceptable level of risk, which is very important in practice, but also guarantees higher customer satisfaction scores. This fact extends the fuzzy QFD methodology to a wider range of applications.

In this research article, the perturbed nonlinear Schrodinger equation (P-NLSE) is examined by utilizing two analytical methods, namely the extended modified auxiliary equation mapping and the generalized Riccati equation mapping methods. Consequently, we establish several sorts of new families of complex soliton wave solutions such as hyperbolic functions, trigonometric functions, dark and bright solitons, periodic solitons, singular solitons, and kink-type solitons wave solutions of the P-NLSE. Using the mentioned methods, the results are displayed in 3D and 2D contours for specific values of the open parameters. The obtained findings demonstrate that the implemented techniques are capable of identifying the exact solutions of the other complex nonlinear evolution equations (C-NLEEs) that arise in a range of applied disciplines.

In this article, we propose a novel method to simultaneously solve the data problem of dirty quality and poor quantity for person reidentification (ReID). Dirty quality refers to the wrong labels in image annotations. Poor quantity means that some identities have very few images (FewIDs). Training with these mislabeled data or FewIDs with triplet loss will lead to low generalization performance. To solve the label error problem, we propose a weighted label correction based on cross-entropy (wLCCE) strategy. Specifically, according to the influence range of the wrong labels, we first classify the mislabeled images into point label error and set label error. Then, we propose a weighted triplet loss (WTL) to correct the two label errors, respectively. To alleviate the poor quantity issue, we propose a feature simulation based on autoencoder (FSAE) method to generate some virtual samples for FewID. For the authenticity of the simulated features, we transfer the difference pattern of identities with multiple images (MultIDs) to FewIDs by training an autoencoder (AE)-based simulator. In this way, the FewIDs obtain richer expressions to distinguish from other identities. By dealing with a dirty and poor data problem, we can learn more robust ReID models using the triplet loss. We conduct extensive experiments on two public person ReID datasets: 1) Market-1501 and 2) DukeMTMC-reID, to verify the effectiveness of our approach.

In this paper, a new data augmentation algorithm, named Mask2Defect is proposed. Via prior knowledge based data infusing, this method is able to generate defects with varied features. Large volume of defects with different shapes, severities, scales, rotation angles, spatial locations, and part numbers can be generated in a controllable manner. These generated defects will work as teacher samples to fine-tune the inspection model, and automatically adapt it to a wider range of defects. To be specific, we first encode the prior knowledge into the teacher mask via the Industrial Prior Knowledge Encoder, and render the defect details according to the mask with the Mask-to-Defect Construction Network. Then, the Fake-to-Real Domain Transformation GAN is used to transform the rendered samples from the fake domain into the real defect domain. Experiments reveal that the synthesized image quality of our method outperforms the state-of-the-art generative methods, and the performance of the inspection model in defect classification and localization has also been improved by fine-tuned with the generated samples.

Bitprobe complexity of the static membership problem has been widely investigated since Burhman et al. (2000) studied the worst-case bounds for a whole range of membership problems. Though tremendous progress has been made in recent years, as is evident from the remarkable papers due to Alon and Feige (2009) [1] , Viola (2012) [8] , and Lewenstein et al. (2014), among others, Nicholson et al. (2013) [5] in their survey of the state of the art of the area noted that even the first non-trivial scenario of two probe adaptive schemes storing two elements of the universe is not completely settled, in that the lower bound for this problem is still open. We propose a proof (Kesh and Sharma, 2019) [3] for the lower bound for the same problem, but for a restricted class of schemes. We believe that this proof makes progress over the ideas proposed by Radhakrishnan et al. (2001, 2010) towards the proof. It is our belief that the single restriction imposed on the general class of schemes towards our proof faithfully captures the dependencies among the elements that share the same bit in the datastructure, and we hope that the general lower bound proof can be developed using similar ideas.

Recent works on structural sparse representation (SSR), which exploit image nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) prior by grouping similar patches for processing, have demonstrated promising performance in various image restoration applications. However, conventional SSR-based image restoration methods directly fit the dictionaries or transforms to the internal (corrupted) image data. The trained internal models inevitably suffer from overfitting to data corruption, thus generating the degraded restoration results. In this article, we propose a novel hybrid structural sparsification error (HSSE) model for image restoration, which jointly exploits image NSS prior using both the internal and external image data that provide complementary information. Furthermore, we propose a general image restoration scheme based on the HSSE model, and an alternating minimization algorithm for a range of image restoration applications, including image inpainting, image compressive sensing and image deblocking. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the proposed HSSE-based scheme outperforms many popular or state-of-the-art image restoration methods in terms of both objective metrics and visual perception.

In recent years, the proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm has received considerable attention because of its excellent performance in many challenging tasks. However, there is still a large space for theoretical explanation of the mechanism of PPO's horizontal clipping operation, which is a key means to improve the performance of PPO. In addition, while PPO is inspired by the learning theory of trust region policy optimization (TRPO), the theoretical connection between PPO's clipping operation and TRPO's trust region constraint has not been well studied. In this article, we first analyze the effect of PPO's clipping operation on the objective function of conservative policy iteration, and strictly give the theoretical relationship between PPO and TRPO. Then, a novel first-order policy gradient algorithm called authentic boundary PPO (ABPPO) is proposed, which is based on the authentic boundary setting rule. To ensure the difference between the new and old policies is better kept within the clipping range, by borrowing the idea of ABPPO, we proposed two novel improved PPO algorithms called rollback mechanism-based ABPPO (RMABPPO) and penalized point policy difference-based ABPPO (P3DABPPO), which are based on the ideas of rollback clipping and penalized point policy difference, respectively. Experiments on the continuous robotic control tasks implemented in MuJoCo show that our proposed improved PPO algorithms can effectively improve the learning stability and accelerate the learning speed compared with the original PPO.

Multi-dimensional range queries, especially over the cloud platform, have received considerable attention in recent years. However, as the cloud server is not fully trustable, designing multi-dimensional range queries over encrypted data becomes a research trend, and many solutions have been proposed in the literature. Nevertheless, most existing solutions suffer from the leakage of single-dimensional privacy. Although a few existing works have addressed the problem of single-dimensional privacy, they are impractical in some real scenarios due to the issues of inefficiency, inaccuracy, and two-cloud-server requirement. Aiming at solving these issues, in this paper, we propose a practical and privacy-preserving multi-dimensional range query (PRQ) scheme. Specifically, in our PRQ scheme, we first index the multi-dimensional database with an R-tree and reduce R-tree based range queries to the problem of point intersection and range intersection. Then, by employing the lightweight matrix encryption technique, we design two novel algorithms for PRQ, i.e., multi-dimensional point intersection predicate encryption (PIPE) and multi-dimensional range intersection predicate encryption (RIPE), which can preserve the privacy of the proposed point intersection algorithm and range intersection algorithm, and further preserve the single-dimensional privacy in the PRQ scheme. Security analysis and extensive simulations show that our PRQ scheme is privacy-preserving and efficient.

Defects on rail surfaces, which have become critical problems, need to be detected and removed as quickly as possible to ensure the fast, safe, and stable operation of trains. At present, although many solutions have been proposed to address these problems, the comprehensiveness, rapidity, and accuracy of defect detection remain unsatisfactory. This study aims to resolve these existing problems and accordingly proposes a multi-model rail surface defect detection system based on convolutional neural networks (MRSDI-CNN) from the standpoint of studying the squat on the rail surface. The convolutional neural networks utilized include the improved Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) and You Only Look Once version 3(YOLOv3)--two types of one-stage networks. We expounded and analyzed the performance of the convolutional neural networks as well as their applicability to rail surface defect detection. We used a diverse range of rail defect sizes to improve the detection performance of the two deep learning networks, following which they could identify three types of squats in parallel with improved accuracy and without reduction of the detection speed. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method over those of previous studies.

Many complex nonlinear optimization or control issues can be transformed into the solving of time-varying nonlinear equations (TVNEs), playing a fundamental role in the control and management of complex systems. As a result, a robust and high-precision online solution method is significant for TVNE. However, there are three main challenges for handling TVNE via the existing methods: First, short-time invariance assumption frequently leveraged in the existing methods leads to lagging errors that are difficult to eliminate. Second, it is difficult in dealing with unknown noise disturbance during the solution process, which causes low solution accuracy or solution failure. Third, existing continuous-time methods are hard to be implemented on digital equipments. In this article, an anti-noise discrete-time neural dynamics (DTND) is designed and studied to overcome the above issues systematically. The theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed model effectively eliminates the lagging errors and achieves the accurate solution of the TVNE in a noisy environment. Moreover, to verify the superior numerical computational property of the DTND model, the intention recognition of lower limbs is explored from the artificial systems, computational experiments, and parallel execution (ACP) framework. Specifically, a nonlinear artificial dynamic system (NADS) concerning the human surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals and joint information is established, which performs in parallel with the actual human lower limb physical experiments. Simulation results illustrate that, within the acceptable range of the digital computer, the controller designed by the DTND model can well guide the NADS to accurately recognize the motion intention of the human lower limb.

This paper considers the distributed structured optimization problem of collaboratively minimizing the global objective function composed of the sum of local cost functions. Each local objective function involves a Lipschitz-differentiable convex function, a nonsmooth convex function, and a linear composite nonsmooth convex function. For such problems, we derive the synchronous distributed primal-dual splitting (S-DPDS) algorithm with uncoordinated stepsizes. Meanwhile, we develop the asynchronous version of the algorithm in light of the randomized block-coordinate method (A-DPDS). Further, the convergence results show the relaxed range and concise form of the acceptable parameters, which indicates that the algorithms are conducive to the selection of parameters in practical applications. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of S-DPDS and A-DPDS algorithms by numerical experiments.

We develop efficient algorithms for determining the number of global cubic fields of given discriminant. They are based on earlier work of Hasse for cubic number fields. Our new ingredients allow to enlarge the range of computations considerably. For explicit calculations we used Magma.

Mathematical optimization problems including a time dimension abound. For example, logistics, process optimization and production planning tasks must often be optimized for a range of time periods. Usually, these problems incorporating time structure are very large and cannot be solved to global optimality by modern solvers within a reasonable period of time. Therefore, the so-called rolling-horizon approach is often adopted. This approach aims to solve the problem periodically, including additional information from proximately following periods. In this paper, we first investigate several drawbacks of this approach and develop an algorithm that compensates for these drawbacks both theoretically and practically. As a result, the rolling-horizon decomposition methodology is adjusted to enable large scale optimization problems to be solved efficiently. In addition, we introduce conditions that guarantee the quality of the solutions. We further demonstrate the applicability of the method to a variety of challenging optimization problems. We substantiate the findings with computational studies on the lot-sizing problem in production planning, as well as for large-scale real-world instances of the tail-assignment problem in aircraft management. It proves possible to solve large-scale realistic tail-assignment instances efficiently, leading to solutions that are at most a few percent away from a globally optimal solution.

This article investigates the task assignment problem in which multiple dispersed robots need to visit a set of target locations while trying to minimize the robots' total travel distance. Each robot initially has the position information of all the targets and of those robots that are within its limited communication range, and each target demands a robot with some specified capability to visit it. We propose a decentralized auction algorithm which first employs an information consensus procedure to merge the local information carried by each communication-connected (CC) robot subnetwork. Then, we apply a marginal-cost-based strategy to construct conflict-free target assignments for the CC robots. When the communication network of the robots is not connected, we demonstrate that the robots' total travel distance might in fact increase when their communication range grows, and more importantly, such a somewhat counterintuitive fact holds for a range of algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm guarantees that the total travel distance of the robots is at most twice of the optimal when the communication network is initially connected. Finally, Monte Carlo simulation results demonstrate the satisfying performance of the proposed algorithm.

In the switching process of driving authority for man-machine cooperative driving, it should be ensured that the driver can take over the vehicle safely, stably and efficiently. This paper proposes a driving authority allocation strategy based on real-time allocation domain (RAD), which mainly includes the establishment of RAD and the dynamic optimization. The RAD is a comprehensive dynamic allocation internal, whose range is determined by the corresponding allocation values of driver's cognitive state, driver's muscle state and environment state. The dynamic optimization is to search for the optimal driving authority in RAD at any time, and its optimization objectives and constraints all contain time-varying parameters. This work proposes an improved simulated annealing algorithm to solve this problem. Simulation results show that the proposed driving authority allocation strategy can effectively allocate the driving authority according to the current condition and driver's state, and ensure the safety, stability and efficiency of the take-over process.

All current work on calculating approximate sets of a rough set inevitably requires the participation of all elements in the universe. However, it is cumbersome and causes a huge waste of resources when the universe is quite big and the computed set is small enough. By introducing the notion of invariant subspace in rough set theory, we skillfully reduce the range of elements involved in the computations of approximations of a rough set from the whole universe U to a suitable invariant subspace V of U, and then give the modular method within the reduced range. Moreover, we present the modular Boolean matrix method, such that the calculation of upper and lower approximations of rough sets can be converted into operations on modular matrices. Finally, the results in covering approximation space are generalized to fuzzy β-covering approximation space to calculate the upper and lower approximations of the crisp sets. In particular, an algorithm for calculating the value of β is proposed to make the involved information has the highest distinction degree. This β is more reliable and meaningful than the empirical one, and an example about COVID-19 is put forward to simply illustrate its application.

As one of the most effective technologies for network reconstruction, compressive sensing can recover signals from a small amount of observed data through sparse search or greedy algorithms in the assumption that the unknown signal is sufficiently sparse on a specific basis. However, there often occurs loss of precision even failure in the process of reconstruction without enough prior information. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to solve the problem of low reconstruction accuracy by mining implicit structural information in the network. Specifically, we propose a novel and efficient algorithm (MCM_TRA) for reconstructing the structure of the K -forked tree network. Based on evolutionary game dynamics, the modified clustering method (MCM) classifies all nodes into two sets, then a two-stage reconstruction algorithm (TRA) is illustrated to recover the node signals in different sets. The experimental results demonstrate that the MCM_TRA enhances the reconstruction accuracy prominently than previous algorithms. Moreover, extensive sensitivity analysis shows that the reconstruction effect can be promoted for a broad range of parameters, which further indicates the superiority of the proposed method.

First, we present construction methods for interior operators on a meet semilattice. Second, under the assumption that the underlying meet semilattices constitute the range of an interior operator, we prove an ordinal sum theorem for countably many (finite or countably infinite) triangular norms on bounded meet semilattices, which unifies and generalizes two recent results: one by Dvořak and Holcapek and the other by some of the present authors. We also characterize triangular norms that are representable as the ordinal sum of countably many triangular norms on given bounded meet semilattices.

International audience; Existing studies in black-box optimization for machine learning suffer from low generalizability, caused by a typically selective choice of problem instances used for training and testing different optimization algorithms. Among other issues, this practice promotes overfitting and poor-performing user guidelines. To address this shortcoming, we propose in this work a benchmark suite, OptimSuite, which covers a broad range of black-box optimization problems, ranging from academic benchmarks to real-world applications, from discrete over numerical to mixed-integer problems, from small to very large-scale problems, from noisy over dynamic to static problems, etc. We demonstrate the advantages of such a broad collection by deriving from it Automated Black Box Optimizer (ABBO), a general-purpose algorithm selection wizard. Using three different types of algorithm selection techniques, ABBO achieves competitive performance on all benchmark suites. It significantly outperforms previous state of the art on some of them, including YABBOB and LSGO. ABBO relies on many high-quality base components. Its excellent performance is obtained without any task-specific parametrization. The OptimSuite benchmark collection, the ABBO wizard and its base solvers have all been merged into the open-source Nevergrad platform, where they are available for reproducible research.

This paper investigates the consensus problem for a class of multi-agent systems with P-one-sided Lipschitz nonlinearity. This nonlinearity offers a significant extension to application range of existing consensus control protocol design methods, which removes the assumption of the quadratic inner-boundedness. To solve this problem, a strongly connected graph topology is applied within the consensus protocol design framework. Moreover, the leader-following scenario is addressed under the graph topology. Under the above objectives, sufficient conditions are employed to yield consensus. Two examples are performed to illustrate the properties.

For distributed estimation arising in the nonlinear least squares (NLLSs) problems over adaptive networks, where every node has the abilities of data processing and learning, only the incomplete local data are exploited by the traditional noncooperative method, thereby resulting in the degradation on estimation performance. In this article, a cooperative diffusion strategy is proposed by using a Gauss-Newton (GN) method in order to fully utilize the diversity of temporal-spatial data on local updates. The proposed algorithm includes two steps, i.e., aggregate then update (ATU), where the aggregating step collects in real time the global information instead of local information due to the diffusion strategy, and the updating step implements the local GN iteration. The resulting ATU diffusion algorithm is a distributed and cooperative system without any increase on communication cost, as compared with the noncooperative version. Based on the detailed convergence analysis for ATU, which is fundamental to the promotion of this algorithm, the sufficient conditions for convergence are derived and the evidences of faster convergence than the noncooperative version are provided. The simulation results confirm the obtained theoretical derivations by applying the ATU algorithm to an NLLS-based target localization problem and show the cooperation gains in many aspects, such as the convergence rate, steady-state accuracy, and robustness to noisy range, step size, node, and link failures.

This contribution presents an electronic travel aid for blind and visually-impaired people based on a millimeter wave radar and a traditional white-cane. It not only represents an advanced system able to warn the user of potential obstacles, but also discerns between human and nonhuman targets. Since real scenarios would likely have moving targets, a new range alignment technique has been proposed with the aim of detecting the tiny chest displacement due to the physiological activity as the key sign of the human presence. The proposed system is able to properly recognize humans in complex environments with multiple moving targets, thus providing to the user a complete set of information, namely presence, position and nature of the available targets. The operating principle and the effectiveness of the system are shown both by simulated case studies and by employing a 122 GHz radar board for carrying out suitable measurements.

Forward privacy in existing searchable symmetric encryption approaches generally supports only keyword searches, rather than range searches. In addition, existing approaches that support range search over encrypted datasets have limitations associated with efficiency, accuracy, and security. Seeking to address these limitations, we formally propose the definition of the forward privacy for secure range searches. Also, we demonstrate how three widely-used cryptographic tools— order-preserving encryption (OPE), pseudorandom function, and one-time pad–can be leveraged to design an efficient, accurate, and forward secure (EAFS) searchable encryption scheme supporting range search in encrypted numerical databases. In the proposed EAFS scheme, a trapdoor only matches the last data record that satisfies the search range, and the other results are found iteratively using the previous result. The chain-like search and the embedded ciphertexts of OPE simultaneously guarantee its efficiency, forward privacy, and accuracy. We also use the simulation-based method to demonstrate that our scheme is secure. Then, we implement EAFS in Microsoft Azure and evaluate its performance. The evaluation findings demonstrate that our proposed scheme supports secure range search practically and efficiently.

Metaheuristics are found to be efficient in different applications where the use of exact algorithms becomes short-handed. In the last decade, many of these algorithms have been introduced and used in a wide range of applications. Nevertheless, most of those approaches share similar components leading to a concern related to their novelty or contribution. Thus, in this paper, a pool template is proposed and used to categorize algorithm components permitting to analyze them in a structured way. We exemplify its use by means of continuous optimization metaheuristics, and provide some measures and methodology to identify their similarities and novelties. Finally, a discussion at a component level is provided in order to point out possible design differences and commonalities.

Numerous image retargeting algorithms have been proposed to achieve adaptive image resizing during the past years. To compare different image retargeting algorithms, reliable objective image retargeting quality assessment (IRQA) metrics are highly desired. Given that image retargeting usually introduces geometric distortions, this paper presents an objective IRQA metric by measuring both local and global geometric distortions (LGGD). Since human visual system perception is highly dependent on edges and the geometric distortions caused by image retargeting usually cause edge deformation, a sketch token-based local edge descriptor (ST-LED) is introduced to represent geometric-aware features in LGGD. First, ST-LED is first applied on both source and retargeted images for edge pattern representation. Second, pixel-level backward registration is conducted to enable estimating local geometric distortion (LGD) and a spatial pyramid-improved Bag-of-Token (BoT) model is built to enable estimating global geometric distortion (GGD). Since the proposed LGGD metric only focuses on geometric distortion while image retargeting quality is related with more aspects, we further fuse LGGD and an existing (EXT) IRQA metric to build a final version called LGGD+ for IRQA. Experiments on two benchmark databases demonstrate the superiority of LGGD+ and the excellent compatibility of our proposed LGGD for further improving a wide range of existing IRQA metrics (including both geometric distortion and non-geometric distortion metrics). In addition, the effectiveness of our LGGD metric is also demonstrated in another relevant task, i.e., quality evaluation of depth-image-based rendering (DIBR)-synthesized images, which also calls for accurate estimation of geometric distortion.

Readability is a measure that associates a written text to a reader’s skill or grade level. Readability assessment is very important in the field of second or foreign language (L2) learning. The complexity of reading in some languages, such as Arabic, presents a great challenge to overcome and increases the need for such a measure before giving texts to a learner. In order to develop powerful tools that automate this choice, we must first choose the optimal feature set to be used in the development of such a tool. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically measure the readability of Arabic as a foreign language through a series of experiments. We begin by using a wide range of features plausibly relevant to readability, as found in the literature, and reduce them in subsequent experiments by eliminating features that appear to have little significance in readability prediction. Our objective is to keep the smallest set of features that gives good readability prediction accuracy based on three different corpora for learners of Arabic as a foreign language, annotated with five difficulty levels. Our best L2 readability accuracy result is 86.15%.

Tackling uncertainty is becoming increasingly relevant for decision-support across fields due to its critical impact on real-world problems. Uncertainty is often modelled using scenarios, which are combinations of possible outcomes of the uncertain parameters in a problem. Alongside expected value methods, decisions under uncertainty may also be tackled using methods that do not rely on probability distributions and model different decision-maker risk profiles. Scenarios are at the core of these approaches. Therefore, we propose a scenario generation methodology that seizes the structure and concepts of genetic algorithms. This methodology aims to obtain a diverse set of scenarios, evolving a scenario population with a diversity goal. Diversity is here expressed as the difference in the impact that scenarios have on the value of potential solutions to the problem. Moreover, this method does not require a priori knowledge of probability distributions or statistical moments of uncertain parameters, as it is based on their range. We adapt the available code for Biased-Random Key Genetic Algorithms to apply the methodology to a packing problem under demand uncertainty as a proof of concept, also extending its use to a multi-objective setting. We make available these code adaptations to allow the straightforward application of this scenario generation method to other problems. With this, the decision-maker obtains scenarios with a distinct impact on potential solutions, enabling the use of different criteria based on their profile and preferences.

Many methods have been proposed to estimate how much effort is required to build and maintain software. Much of that research tries to recommend a single method - an approach that makes the dubious assumption that one method can handle the diversity of software project data. To address that drawback, we apply a configuration technique called “ROME” (Rapid Optimizing Methods for Estimation), which uses sequential model-based optimization (SMO) to find what configuration settings of effort estimation techniques work best for a particular data set. We test this method using data from 1161 classic waterfall projects and 120 contemporary projects (from GitHub). In terms of magnitude of relative error and standardized accuracy, we find that ROME achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods for both classic and contemporary projects. In addition, we conclude that we should not recommend one method for estimation. Rather, it is better to search through a wide range of different methods to find what works best for the local data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest effort estimation experiment yet attempted and the only one to test its methods on classic and contemporary projects.

This paper addresses the interactions among the control loops of voltage-sourced converters (VSCs) embedded in high-voltage direct current(HVDC) systems and the impact of these interactions on the performance of individual control loops. Furthermore, this paper proposes a method to design the individual control loops, rather than the interconnected control system, such that the overall system stability is ensured in the presence of interactions. This paper addresses three aspects of the impact of control loop interactions on the overall control system of the VSC including stability, transient response, and steady-state response. To illustrate the impact of interactions on the VSC small-signal stability, stability regions of the interconnected control loops are obtained and compared against those of the various individual control loops. Then, a novel formulation of the VSC stability criterion is presented, and the small-gain theorem is utilized to determine a range of stabilizing gains for the interconnected control system. Moreover, new indices using the infinity norm are introduced to evaluate the impact of interactions on the transient response of the VSC. Finally, the DC gain of a certain set of transfer functions is used to assess the impact of control loops interactions on the set-point tracking capability of the VSC

This paper examines the delay range for robust consensus of unstable first-order agents by using proportional (P) and proportional-derivative (PD) control protocols subject to time-varying delays. The maximal delay range is defined by the delay consensus margin (DCM), which is a robustness measure within which consensus can be achieved robustly despite the presence of uncertain and time-varying delays. We apply an Hinf-type small-gain analysis to multi-agent systems, which results in explicit lower bounds on the DCM for both undirected and directed graphs. The results provide sufficient conditions for robust consensus for all time-varying delays that may vary within the range. It is seen that the agent dynamics and the graph connectivity may fundamentally limit the range of tolerable delays. It is also found that the DCM can be increased beyond that achieved by P protocol by incorporating the delay variation rate in the design of the PD control protocol.

The developments in microsensor fabrication over the past few decades have contributed to the availability of a wide range of sensors with varying degrees of performance and cost. Many of the recent waves of technological developments such as the Internet-of-Things or wearables rely on such sensors. With the increasing availability of on-board and remote computing power, the trend is to go beyond the simple quantification of events and (re)create context from sensor data using statistical signal processing, or as commonly known, machine learning. Within the scope of this tutorial, we highlight the applications of machine learning in sensing and introduce the fundamental stages for creating data-driven models based on simple machine learning algorithms. We focus on algorithms that are simple to implement, provide accurate results, and yet remain understandable to the human developer. The ability to follow how a data-driven model functions is essential in many engineering applications where a trade-off between accuracy and reliability is often acceptable. We provide case studies that utilize the presented material to solve different real-life applications. These examples demonstrate the importance of choosing appropriate features, selecting algorithms, and finally, a study on figuring out the environmental conditions from sensor data.

The interest on graph matching has not stopped growing since the late seventies. The basic idea of graph matching consists of generating graph representations of different data or structures and compare those representations by searching correspondences between them. There are manifold techniques that have been developed to find those correspondences and the choice of one or another depends on the characteristics of the application of interest. These applications range from pattern recognition (e.g. biometric identification) to signal processing or artificial intelligence. One of the aspects that make graph matching so attractive is its ability to facilitate data analysis, and medical imaging is one of the fields that can benefit from this in a greater extent. The potential of graph matching to find similarities and differences between data acquired at different points in time shows its potential to improve diagnosis, follow-up of human diseases or any other of the clinical scenarios that require comparison between different datasets. In spite of the large amount of papers that were published in this field to the date there is no survey paper of graph matching for clinical applications. This survey aims to fill this gap.

In this paper, a new computationally efficient approach to solve fractional differential equations with Atangana–Baleanu operator is introduced. Controlled Picard’s method is employed for solving a class of fractional differential equations with order 0 α 1 . The proposed approach can cover wide range of integer and fractional orders differential equations due to the extra auxiliary parameter which enhances the convergence and is suitable for nonlinear differential equations. Two models of fractional Riccati equation are solved to validate and illustrate the accuracy of the new approach. Figures has been used to construct the results obtained from the presented approach. It is shown that the proposed method is efficient, credible, and easy to implement for various related problems in science and engineering.