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In image editing tasks, high-quality text editing capabilities can significantly reduce human and material resource costs. Current methods rely heavily on training data based on OCR text segment detection, where the text is tightly aligned with the mask area. This reliance creates a strong dependency on the mask area and lacks modules for adjusting text spacing and size in various scenarios. When the amount of text to be edited does not match the modification area or when the mask area is too large, significant issues may arise. Furthermore, no existing methods have explored controllable style transfer for text editing.To address these challenges, we propose TextMaster, a solution capable of accurately editing text with high realism and proper layout in any scenario and image area. Our approach employs adaptive standard letter spacing as guidance during training and uses adaptive mask boosting to prevent the leakage of text position and size information. We also utilize an attention mechanism to calculate the bounding box regression loss for each character, making text layout methods learnable across different scenarios. By injecting high-resolution standard font information and applying perceptual loss in the text editing area, we further enhance text rendering accuracy and fidelity. Additionally, we achieve style consistency between the modified and target text through a novel style injection method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms all existing approaches.

Anomaly detection is a critical task in industrial manufacturing, aiming to identify defective parts of products. Most industrial anomaly detection methods assume the availability of sufficient normal data for training. This assumption may not hold true due to the cost of labeling or data privacy policies. Additionally, mainstream methods require training bespoke models for different objects, which incurs heavy costs and lacks flexibility in practice. To address these issues, we seek help from Stable Diffusion (SD) model due to its capability of zero/few-shot inpainting, which can be leveraged to inpaint anomalous regions as normal. In this paper, a few-shot multi-class anomaly detection framework that adopts Stable Diffusion model is proposed, named AnomalySD. To adapt SD to anomaly detection task, we design different hierarchical text descriptions and the foreground mask mechanism for fine-tuning SD. In the inference stage, to accurately mask anomalous regions for inpainting, we propose multi-scale mask strategy and prototype-guided mask strategy to handle diverse anomalous regions. Hierarchical text prompts are also utilized to guide the process of inpainting in the inference stage. The anomaly score is estimated based on inpainting result of all masks. Extensive experiments on the MVTec-AD and VisA datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. We achieved anomaly classification and segmentation results of 93.6%/94.8% AUROC on the MVTec-AD dataset and 86.1%/96.5% AUROC on the VisA dataset under multi-class and one-shot settings., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to transform digital healthcare, as evidenced by recent advances in LLM-based virtual doctors. However, current approaches rely on patient's subjective descriptions of symptoms, causing increased misdiagnosis. Recognizing the value of daily data from smart devices, we introduce a novel LLM-based multi-turn consultation virtual doctor system, DrHouse, which incorporates three significant contributions: 1) It utilizes sensor data from smart devices in the diagnosis process, enhancing accuracy and reliability. 2) DrHouse leverages continuously updating medical databases such as Up-to-Date and PubMed to ensure our model remains at diagnostic standard's forefront. 3) DrHouse introduces a novel diagnostic algorithm that concurrently evaluates potential diseases and their likelihood, facilitating more nuanced and informed medical assessments. Through multi-turn interactions, DrHouse determines the next steps, such as accessing daily data from smart devices or requesting in-lab tests, and progressively refines its diagnoses. Evaluations on three public datasets and our self-collected datasets show that DrHouse can achieve up to an 18.8% increase in diagnosis accuracy over the state-of-the-art baselines. The results of a 32-participant user study show that 75% medical experts and 91.7% patients are willing to use DrHouse.

Recently,smart roadside infrastructure (SRI) has demonstrated the potential of achieving fully autonomous driving systems. To explore the potential of infrastructure-assisted autonomous driving, this paper presents the design and deployment of Soar, the first end-to-end SRI system specifically designed to support autonomous driving systems. Soar consists of both software and hardware components carefully designed to overcome various system and physical challenges. Soar can leverage the existing operational infrastructure like street lampposts for a lower barrier of adoption. Soar adopts a new communication architecture that comprises a bi-directional multi-hop I2I network and a downlink I2V broadcast service, which are designed based on off-the-shelf 802.11ac interfaces in an integrated manner. Soar also features a hierarchical DL task management framework to achieve desirable load balancing among nodes and enable them to collaborate efficiently to run multiple data-intensive autonomous driving applications. We deployed a total of 18 Soar nodes on existing lampposts on campus, which have been operational for over two years. Our real-world evaluation shows that Soar can support a diverse set of autonomous driving applications and achieve desirable real-time performance and high communication reliability. Our findings and experiences in this work offer key insights into the development and deployment of next-generation smart roadside infrastructure and autonomous driving systems.

Individuals with visual impairments, encompassing both partial and total difficulties in visual perception, are referred to as visually impaired (VI) people. An estimated 2.2 billion individuals worldwide are affected by visual impairments. Recent advancements in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have showcased their extraordinary capabilities across various domains. It is desirable to help VI individuals with MLLMs' great capabilities of visual understanding and reasoning. However, it is challenging for VI people to use MLLMs due to the difficulties in capturing the desirable images to fulfill their daily requests. For example, the target object is not fully or partially placed in the image. This paper explores how to leverage MLLMs for VI individuals to provide visual-question answers. VIAssist can identify undesired images and provide detailed actions. Finally, VIAssist can provide reliable answers to users' queries based on the images. Our results show that VIAssist provides +0.21 and +0.31 higher BERTScore and ROUGE scores than the baseline, respectively., Comment: Accepted to IEEE International Workshop on Foundation Models for Cyber-Physical Systems & Internet of Things (FMSys 2024)

Deep Learning (DL) models have been widely deployed on IoT devices with the help of advancements in DL algorithms and chips. However, the limited resources of edge devices make these on-device DL models hard to be generalizable to diverse environments and tasks. Although the recently emerged foundation models (FMs) show impressive generalization power, how to effectively leverage the rich knowledge of FMs on resource-limited edge devices is still not explored. In this paper, we propose EdgeFM, a novel edge-cloud cooperative system with open-set recognition capability. EdgeFM selectively uploads unlabeled data to query the FM on the cloud and customizes the specific knowledge and architectures for edge models. Meanwhile, EdgeFM conducts dynamic model switching at run-time taking into account both data uncertainty and dynamic network variations, which ensures the accuracy always close to the original FM. We implement EdgeFM using two FMs on two edge platforms. We evaluate EdgeFM on three public datasets and two self-collected datasets. Results show that EdgeFM can reduce the end-to-end latency up to 3.2x and achieve 34.3% accuracy increase compared with the baseline., Comment: Accepted to the 21th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2023)

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and related dementia are a growing global health challenge due to the aging population. In this paper, we present ADMarker, the first end-to-end system that integrates multi-modal sensors and new federated learning algorithms for detecting multidimensional AD digital biomarkers in natural living environments. ADMarker features a novel three-stage multi-modal federated learning architecture that can accurately detect digital biomarkers in a privacy-preserving manner. Our approach collectively addresses several major real-world challenges, such as limited data labels, data heterogeneity, and limited computing resources. We built a compact multi-modality hardware system and deployed it in a four-week clinical trial involving 91 elderly participants. The results indicate that ADMarker can accurately detect a comprehensive set of digital biomarkers with up to 93.8% accuracy and identify early AD with an average of 88.9% accuracy. ADMarker offers a new platform that can allow AD clinicians to characterize and track the complex correlation between multidimensional interpretable digital biomarkers, demographic factors of patients, and AD diagnosis in a longitudinal manner.

The brightest Gamma-ray burst, GRB 221009A, has spurred numerous theoretical investigations, with particular attention paid to the origins of ultra-high energy TeV photons during the prompt phase. However, analyzing the mechanism of radiation of photons in the $\sim$MeV range has been difficult because the high flux causes pile-up and saturation effects in most GRB detectors. In this letter, we present systematic modeling of the time-resolved spectra of the GRB using unsaturated data obtained from Fermi/GBM (precursor) and SATech-01/GECAM-C (main emission and flare). Our approach incorporates the synchrotron radiation model, which assumes an expanding emission region with relativistic speed and a global magnetic field that decays with radius, and successfully fits such a model to the observational data. Our results indicate that the spectra of the burst are fully in accordance with a synchrotron origin from relativistic electrons accelerated at a large emission radius. The lack of thermal emission in the prompt emission spectra supports a Poynting-flux-dominated jet composition., Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJL

Indoor self-localization is a highly demanded system function for smartphones. The current solutions based on inertial, radio frequency, and geomagnetic sensing may have degraded performance when their limiting factors take effect. In this paper, we present a new indoor simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system that utilizes the smartphone's built-in audio hardware and inertial measurement unit (IMU). Our system uses a smartphone's loudspeaker to emit near-inaudible chirps and then the microphone to record the acoustic echoes from the indoor environment. Our profiling measurements show that the echoes carry location information with sub-meter granularity. To enable SLAM, we apply contrastive learning to construct an echoic location feature (ELF) extractor, such that the loop closures on the smartphone's trajectory can be accurately detected from the associated ELF trace. The detection results effectively regulate the IMU-based trajectory reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that our ELF-based SLAM achieves median localization errors of $0.1\,\text{m}$, $0.53\,\text{m}$, and $0.4\,\text{m}$ on the reconstructed trajectories in a living room, an office, and a shopping mall, and outperforms the Wi-Fi and geomagnetic SLAM systems.

Adversarial example attack endangers the mobile edge systems such as vehicles and drones that adopt deep neural networks for visual sensing. This paper presents {\em Sardino}, an active and dynamic defense approach that renews the inference ensemble at run time to develop security against the adaptive adversary who tries to exfiltrate the ensemble and construct the corresponding effective adversarial examples. By applying consistency check and data fusion on the ensemble's predictions, Sardino can detect and thwart adversarial inputs. Compared with the training-based ensemble renewal, we use HyperNet to achieve {\em one million times} acceleration and per-frame ensemble renewal that presents the highest level of difficulty to the prerequisite exfiltration attacks. We design a run-time planner that maximizes the ensemble size in favor of security while maintaining the processing frame rate. Beyond adversarial examples, Sardino can also address the issue of out-of-distribution inputs effectively. This paper presents extensive evaluation of Sardino's performance in counteracting adversarial examples and applies it to build a real-time car-borne traffic sign recognition system. Live on-road tests show the built system's effectiveness in maintaining frame rate and detecting out-of-distribution inputs due to the false positives of a preceding YOLO-based traffic sign detector.

Achieving efficient execution of machine learning models has attracted significant attention recently. To generate tensor programs efficiently, a key component of DNN compilers is the cost model that can predict the performance of each configuration on specific devices. However, due to the rapid emergence of hardware platforms, it is increasingly labor-intensive to train domain-specific predictors for every new platform. Besides, current design of cost models cannot provide transferable features between different hardware accelerators efficiently and effectively. In this paper, we propose Moses, a simple and efficient design based on the lottery ticket hypothesis, which fully takes advantage of the features transferable to the target device via domain adaptation. Compared with state-of-the-art approaches, Moses achieves up to 1.53X efficiency gain in the search stage and 1.41X inference speedup on challenging DNN benchmarks.

Run-time domain shifts from training-phase domains are common in sensing systems designed with deep learning. The shifts can be caused by sensor characteristic variations and/or discrepancies between the design-phase model and the actual model of the sensed physical process. To address these issues, existing transfer learning techniques require substantial target-domain data and thus incur high post-deployment overhead. This paper proposes to exploit the first principle governing the domain shift to reduce the demand on target-domain data. Specifically, our proposed approach called PhyAug uses the first principle fitted with few labeled or unlabeled source/target-domain data pairs to transform the existing source-domain training data into augmented data for updating the deep neural networks. In two case studies of keyword spotting and DeepSpeech2-based automatic speech recognition, with 5-second unlabeled data collected from the target microphones, PhyAug recovers the recognition accuracy losses due to microphone characteristic variations by 37% to 72%. In a case study of seismic source localization with TDoA fngerprints, by exploiting the frst principle of signal propagation in uneven media, PhyAug only requires 3% to 8% of labeled TDoA measurements required by the vanilla fingerprinting approach in achieving the same localization accuracy.

We study how to learn optimal interventions sequentially given causal information represented as a causal graph along with associated conditional distributions. Causal modeling is useful in real world problems like online advertisement where complex causal mechanisms underlie the relationship between interventions and outcomes. We propose two algorithms, causal upper confidence bound (C-UCB) and causal Thompson Sampling (C-TS), that enjoy improved cumulative regret bounds compared with algorithms that do not use causal information. We thus resolve an open problem posed by \cite{lattimore2016causal}. Further, we extend C-UCB and C-TS to the linear bandit setting and propose causal linear UCB (CL-UCB) and causal linear TS (CL-TS) algorithms. These algorithms enjoy a cumulative regret bound that only scales with the feature dimension. Our experiments show the benefit of using causal information. For example, we observe that even with a few hundreds of iterations, the regret of causal algorithms is less than that of standard algorithms by a factor of three. We also show that under certain causal structures, our algorithms scale better than the standard bandit algorithms as the number of interventions increases.

Deep learning based visual sensing has achieved attractive accuracy but is shown vulnerable to adversarial example attacks. Specifically, once the attackers obtain the deep model, they can construct adversarial examples to mislead the model to yield wrong classification results. Deployable adversarial examples such as small stickers pasted on the road signs and lanes have been shown effective in misleading advanced driver-assistance systems. Many existing countermeasures against adversarial examples build their security on the attackers' ignorance of the defense mechanisms. Thus, they fall short of following Kerckhoffs's principle and can be subverted once the attackers know the details of the defense. This paper applies the strategy of moving target defense (MTD) to generate multiple new deep models after system deployment, that will collaboratively detect and thwart adversarial examples. Our MTD design is based on the adversarial examples' minor transferability to models differing from the one (e.g., the factory-designed model) used for attack construction. The post-deployment quasi-secret deep models significantly increase the bar for the attackers to construct effective adversarial examples. We also apply the technique of serial data fusion with early stopping to reduce the inference time by a factor of up to 5 while maintaining the sensing and defense performance. Extensive evaluation based on three datasets including a road sign image database and a GPU-equipped Jetson embedded computing board shows the effectiveness of our approach.

This paper presents TouchAuth, a new touch-to-access device authentication approach using induced body electric potentials (iBEPs) caused by the indoor ambient electric field that is mainly emitted from the building's electrical cabling. The design of TouchAuth is based on the electrostatics of iBEP generation and a resulting property, i.e., the iBEPs at two close locations on the same human body are similar, whereas those from different human bodies are distinct. Extensive experiments verify the above property and show that TouchAuth achieves high-profile receiver operating characteristics in implementing the touch-to-access policy. Our experiments also show that a range of possible interfering sources including appliances' electromagnetic emanations and noise injections into the power network do not affect the performance of TouchAuth. A key advantage of TouchAuth is that the iBEP sensing requires a simple analog-to-digital converter only, which is widely available on microcontrollers. Compared with existing approaches including intra-body communication and physiological sensing, TouchAuth is a low-cost, lightweight, and convenient approach for authorized users to access the smart objects found in indoor environments., Comment: 16 pages, accepted to the 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom 2019), October 21-25, 2019, Los Cabos, Mexico

User intended actions are widely seen in many areas. Forecasting these actions and taking proactive measures to optimize business outcome is a crucial step towards sustaining the steady business growth. In this work, we focus on pre- dicting attrition, which is one of typical user intended actions. Conventional attrition predictive modeling strategies suffer a few inherent drawbacks. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel end-to-end learning scheme to keep track of the evolution of attrition patterns for the predictive modeling. It integrates user activity logs, dynamic and static user profiles based on multi-path learning. It exploits historical user records by establishing a decaying multi-snapshot technique. And finally it employs the precedent user intentions via guiding them to the subsequent learning procedure. As a result, it addresses all disadvantages of conventional methods. We evaluate our methodology on two public data repositories and one private user usage dataset provided by Adobe Creative Cloud. The extensive experiments demonstrate that it can offer the appealing performance in comparison with several existing approaches as rated by different popular metrics. Furthermore, we introduce an advanced interpretation and visualization strategy to effectively characterize the periodicity of user activity logs. It can help to pinpoint important factors that are critical to user attrition and retention and thus suggests actionable improvement targets for business practice. Our work will provide useful insights into the prediction and elucidation of other user intended actions as well., Comment: 10 pages, International Conference on Data Mining 2018

In this paper, we provide a statistical testing framework to check whether a random sample splitting in a multi-dimensional space is carried out in a valid way, which could be directly applied to A/B testing and multivariate testing to ensure the online traffic split is truly random with respect to the covariates. We believe this is an important step of quality control that is missing in many real world online experiments. Here, we propose a randomized chi-square test method, compared with propensity score and distance components (DISCO) test methods, to test the hypothesis that the post-split categorical data sets have the same multi-dimensional distribution. The methods can be easily generalized to continuous data. We also propose a resampling procedure to adjust for multiplicity which in practice often has higher power than some existing method such as Holm's procedure. We try the three methods on both simulated and real data sets from Adobe Experience Cloud and show that each method has its own advantage while all of them establish promising power. To our knowledge, we are among the first ones to formulate the validity of A/B testing into a post-experiments statistical testing problem. Our methodology is non-parametric and requires minimum assumption on the data, so it can also have a wide range of application in other areas such as clinical trials, medicine, and recommendation system where random data splitting is needed., Comment: 9 pages; double-column

Customers are usually exposed to online digital advertisement channels, such as email marketing, display advertising, paid search engine marketing, along their way to purchase or subscribe products( aka. conversion). The marketers track all the customer journey data and try to measure the effectiveness of each advertising channel. The inference about the influence of each channel plays an important role in budget allocation and inventory pricing decisions. Several simplistic rule-based strategies and data-driven algorithmic strategies have been widely used in marketing field, but they do not address the issues, such as channel interaction, time dependency, user characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel attribution algorithm based on deep learning to assess the impact of each advertising channel. We present Deep Neural Net With Attention multi-touch attribution model (DNAMTA) model in a supervised learning fashion of predicting if a series of events leads to conversion, and it leads us to have a deep understanding of the dynamic interaction effects between media channels. DNAMTA also incorporates user-context information, such as user demographics and behavior, as control variables to reduce the estimation biases of media effects. We used computational experiment of large real world marketing dataset to demonstrate that our proposed model is superior to existing methods in both conversion prediction and media channel influence evaluation., Comment: 6 pages ; It got published in AdKDD 2018 workshop as part of KDD 2018

Predicting keywords performance, such as number of impressions, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR), revenue per click (RPC), and cost per click (CPC), is critical for sponsored search in the online advertising industry. An interesting phenomenon is that, despite the size of the overall data, the data are very sparse at the individual unit level. To overcome the sparsity and leverage hierarchical information across the data structure, we propose a Dynamic Hierarchical Empirical Bayesian (DHEB) model that dynamically determines the hierarchy through a data-driven process and provides shrinkage-based estimations. Our method is also equipped with an efficient empirical approach to derive inferences through the hierarchy. We evaluate the proposed method in both simulated and real-world datasets and compare to several competitive models. The results favor the proposed method among all comparisons in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. In the end, we design a two-phase system to serve prediction in real time., Comment: AdKDD 2018

Design of clock synchronization for networked nodes faces a fundamental trade-off between synchronization accuracy and universality for heterogeneous platforms, because a high synchronization accuracy generally requires platform-dependent hardware-level network packet timestamping. This paper presents TouchSync, a new indoor clock synchronization approach for wearables that achieves millisecond accuracy while preserving universality in that it uses standard system calls only, such as reading system clock, sampling sensors, and sending/receiving network messages. The design of TouchSync is driven by a key finding from our extensive measurements that the skin electric potentials (SEPs) induced by powerline radiation are salient, periodic, and synchronous on a same wearer and even across different wearers. TouchSync integrates the SEP signal into the universal principle of Network Time Protocol and solves an integer ambiguity problem by fusing the ambiguous results in multiple synchronization rounds to conclude an accurate clock offset between two synchronizing wearables. With our shared code, TouchSync can be readily integrated into any wearable applications. Extensive evaluation based on our Arduino and TinyOS implementations shows that TouchSync's synchronization errors are below 3 and 7 milliseconds on the same wearer and between two wearers 10 kilometers apart, respectively., Comment: The 15th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2017)