Rate-Quality or Energy-Quality Pareto Fronts for Adaptive Video Streaming?

Adaptive video streaming is a key enabler for optimising the delivery of offline encoded video content. The research focus to date has been on optimisation, based solely on rate-quality curves. This paper adds an additional dimension, the energy expenditure, and explores construction of bitrate ladders based on decoding energy-quality curves rather than the conventional rate-quality curves. Pareto fronts are extracted from the rate-quality and energy-quality spaces to select optimal points. Bitrate ladders are constructed from these points using conventional rate-based rules together with a novel quality-based approach. Evaluation on a subset of YouTube-UGC videos encoded with x.265 shows that the energy-quality ladders reduce energy requirements by 28-31% on average at the cost of slightly higher bitrates. The results indicate that optimising based on energy-quality curves rather than rate-quality curves and using quality levels to create the rungs could potentially improve energy efficiency for a comparable quality of experience.

Understanding the Reasoning Ability of Language Models From the Perspective of Reasoning Paths Aggregation

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are able to perform complex reasoning without explicit fine-tuning. To understand how pre-training with a next-token prediction objective contributes to the emergence of such reasoning capability, we propose that we can view an LM as deriving new conclusions by aggregating indirect reasoning paths seen at pre-training time. We found this perspective effective in two important cases of reasoning: logic reasoning with knowledge graphs (KGs) and math reasoning with math word problems (MWPs). More specifically, we formalize the reasoning paths as random walk paths on the knowledge/reasoning graphs. Analyses of learned LM distributions suggest that a weighted sum of relevant random walk path probabilities is a reasonable way to explain how LMs reason. Experiments and analysis on multiple KG and MWP datasets reveal the effect of training on random walk paths and suggest that augmenting unlabeled random walk reasoning paths can improve real-world multi-step reasoning performance.

GE-AdvGAN: Improving the transferability of adversarial samples by gradient editing-based adversarial generative model

Adversarial generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), are widely applied for generating various types of data, i.e., images, text, and audio. Accordingly, its promising performance has led to the GAN-based adversarial attack methods in the white-box and black-box attack scenarios. The importance of transferable black-box attacks lies in their ability to be effective across different models and settings, more closely aligning with real-world applications. However, it remains challenging to retain the performance in terms of transferable adversarial examples for such methods. Meanwhile, we observe that some enhanced gradient-based transferable adversarial attack algorithms require prolonged time for adversarial sample generation. Thus, in this work, we propose a novel algorithm named GE-AdvGAN to enhance the transferability of adversarial samples whilst improving the algorithm's efficiency. The main approach is via optimising the training process of the generator parameters. With the functional and characteristic similarity analysis, we introduce a novel gradient editing (GE) mechanism and verify its feasibility in generating transferable samples on various models. Moreover, by exploring the frequency domain information to determine the gradient editing direction, GE-AdvGAN can generate highly transferable adversarial samples while minimizing the execution time in comparison to the state-of-the-art transferable adversarial attack algorithms. The performance of GE-AdvGAN is comprehensively evaluated by large-scale experiments on different datasets, which results demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm. The code for our algorithm is available at: https://github.com/LMBTough/GE-advGAN

Joint Transmitter Design for Robust Secure Radar-Communication Coexistence Systems

This paper investigates the spectrum sharing between a multiple-input single-output (MISO) secure communication system and a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar system in the presence of one suspicious eavesdropper. We jointly design the radar waveform and communication beamforming vector at the two systems, such that the interference between the base station (BS) and radar is reduced, and the detrimental radar interference to the communication system is enhanced to jam the eavesdropper, thereby increasing secure information transmission performance. In particular, by considering the imperfect channel state information (CSI) for the user and eavesdropper, we maximize the worst-case secrecy rate at the user, while ensuring the detection performance of radar system. To tackle this challenging problem, we propose a two-layer robust cooperative algorithm based on the S-lemma and semidefinite relaxation techniques. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves significant secrecy rate gains over the non-robust scheme. Furthermore, we illustrate the trade-off between secrecy rate and detection probability.

Joint Beamforming and Offloading Design for Integrated Sensing, Communication and Computation System

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is powerful to alleviate the heavy computing tasks in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. In this paper, we investigate joint beamforming and offloading design in a three-tier integrated sensing, communication and computation (ISCC) framework comprising one cloud server, multiple mobile edge servers, and multiple terminals. While executing sensing tasks, the user terminals can optionally offload sensing data to either MEC server or cloud servers. To minimize the execution latency, we jointly optimize the transmit beamforming matrices and offloading decision variables under the constraint of sensing performance. An alternating optimization algorithm based on multidimensional fractional programming is proposed to tackle the non-convex problem. Simulation results demonstrates the superiority of the proposed mechanism in terms of convergence and task execution latency reduction, compared with the state-of-the-art two-tier ISCC framework.

MFABA: A More Faithful and Accelerated Boundary-based Attribution Method for Deep Neural Networks

To better understand the output of deep neural networks (DNN), attribution based methods have been an important approach for model interpretability, which assign a score for each input dimension to indicate its importance towards the model outcome. Notably, the attribution methods use the axioms of sensitivity and implementation invariance to ensure the validity and reliability of attribution results. Yet, the existing attribution methods present challenges for effective interpretation and efficient computation. In this work, we introduce MFABA, an attribution algorithm that adheres to axioms, as a novel method for interpreting DNN. Additionally, we provide the theoretical proof and in-depth analysis for MFABA algorithm, and conduct a large scale experiment. The results demonstrate its superiority by achieving over 101.5142 times faster speed than the state-of-the-art attribution algorithms. The effectiveness of MFABA is thoroughly evaluated through the statistical analysis in comparison to other methods, and the full implementation package is open-source at: https://github.com/LMBTough/MFABA

Comparative Study of Hardware and Software Power Measurements in Video Compression

The environmental impact of video streaming services has been discussed as part of the strategies towards sustainable information and communication technologies. A first step towards that is the energy profiling and assessment of energy consumption of existing video technologies. This paper presents a comprehensive study of power measurement techniques in video compression, comparing the use of hardware and software power meters. An experimental methodology to ensure reliability of measurements is introduced. Key findings demonstrate the high correlation of hardware and software based energy measurements for two video codecs across different spatial and temporal resolutions at a lower computational overhead.

The Good, The Bad, and Why: Unveiling Emotions in Generative AI

Emotion significantly impacts our daily behaviors and interactions. While recent generative AI models, such as large language models, have shown impressive performance in various tasks, it remains unclear whether they truly comprehend emotions. This paper aims to address this gap by incorporating psychological theories to gain a holistic understanding of emotions in generative AI models. Specifically, we propose three approaches: 1) EmotionPrompt to enhance AI model performance, 2) EmotionAttack to impair AI model performance, and 3) EmotionDecode to explain the effects of emotional stimuli, both benign and malignant. Through extensive experiments involving language and multi-modal models on semantic understanding, logical reasoning, and generation tasks, we demonstrate that both textual and visual EmotionPrompt can boost the performance of AI models while EmotionAttack can hinder it. Additionally, EmotionDecode reveals that AI models can comprehend emotional stimuli akin to the mechanism of dopamine in the human brain. Our work heralds a novel avenue for exploring psychology to enhance our understanding of generative AI models. This paper is an extended version of our previous work EmotionPrompt (arXiv:2307.11760).

OA-ECBVC: A Cooperative Collision-free Encirclement and Capture Approach in Cluttered Environments

This article investigates the practical scenarios of chasing an adversarial evader in an unbounded environment with cluttered obstacles. We propose a Voronoi-based decentralized algorithm for multiple pursuers to encircle and capture the evader by reacting to collisions. An efficient approach is presented for constructing an obstacle-aware evader-centered bounded Voronoi cell (OA-ECBVC), which strictly ensures collision avoidance in various obstacle scenarios when pursuing the evader. The evader can be efficiently enclosed in a convex hull given random initial configurations. Furthermore, to cooperatively capture the evader, each pursuer continually compresses the boundary of its OA-ECBVC to quickly reduce the movement space of the evader while maintaining encirclement. Our OA-ECBVC algorithm is validated in various simulated environments with different dynamic systems of robots. Real-time performance of resisting uncertainties shows the superior reliability of our method for deployment on multiple robot platforms.

Seeing through the Mask: Multi-task Generative Mask Decoupling Face Recognition

The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic make people wear masks more frequently than ever. Current general face recognition system suffers from serious performance degradation,when encountering occluded scenes. The potential reason is that face features are corrupted by occlusions on key facial regions. To tackle this problem, previous works either extract identity-related embeddings on feature level by additional mask prediction, or restore the occluded facial part by generative models. However, the former lacks visual results for model interpretation, while the latter suffers from artifacts which may affect downstream recognition. Therefore, this paper proposes a Multi-task gEnerative mask dEcoupling face Recognition (MEER) network to jointly handle these two tasks, which can learn occlusionirrelevant and identity-related representation while achieving unmasked face synthesis. We first present a novel mask decoupling module to disentangle mask and identity information, which makes the network obtain purer identity features from visible facial components. Then, an unmasked face is restored by a joint-training strategy, which will be further used to refine the recognition network with an id-preserving loss. Experiments on masked face recognition under realistic and synthetic occlusions benchmarks demonstrate that the MEER can outperform the state-ofthe-art methods.