An Intelligent SDWN Routing Algorithm Based on Network Situational Awareness and Deep Reinforcement Learning

Due to the highly dynamic changes in wireless network topologies, efficiently obtaining network status information and flexibly forwarding data to improve communication quality of service are important challenges. This article introduces an intelligent routing algorithm (DRL-PPONSA) based on proximal policy optimization deep reinforcement learning with network situational awareness under a software-defined wireless networking architecture. First, a specific data plane is designed for network topology construction and data forwarding. The control plane collects network traffic information, sends flow tables, and uses a GCN-GRU prediction mechanism to perceive future traffic change trends to achieve network situational awareness. Second, a DRL-based data forwarding mechanism is designed in the knowledge plane. The predicted network traffic matrix and topology information matrix are treated as the environment for DRL agents, while next-hop adjacent nodes are treated as executable actions. Accordingly, action selection strategies are designed for different network conditions to achieve more intelligent, flexible, and efficient routing control. The reward function is designed using network link information and various reward and penalty mechanisms. Additionally, importance sampling and gradient clipping techniques are employed during gradient updating to enhance convergence speed and stability. Experimental results show that DRL-PPONSA outperforms traditional routing methods in network throughput, delay, packet loss rate, and wireless node distance. Compared to value-function-based Dueling DQN routing, the convergence speed is significantly improved, and the convergence effect is more stable. Simultaneously, its consumption of hardware storage space is reduced, and efficient routing decisions can be made in real-time using the current network state information.

Evolve Path Tracer: Early Detection of Malicious Addresses in Cryptocurrency

With the ever-increasing boom of Cryptocurrency, detecting fraudulent behaviors and associated malicious addresses draws significant research effort. However, most existing studies still rely on the full history features or full-fledged address transaction networks, thus cannot meet the requirements of early malicious address detection, which is urgent but seldom discussed by existing studies. To detect fraud behaviors of malicious addresses in the early stage, we present Evolve Path Tracer, which consists of Evolve Path Encoder LSTM, Evolve Path Graph GCN, and Hierarchical Survival Predictor. Specifically, in addition to the general address features, we propose asset transfer paths and corresponding path graphs to characterize early transaction patterns. Further, since the transaction patterns are changing rapidly during the early stage, we propose Evolve Path Encoder LSTM and Evolve Path Graph GCN to encode asset transfer path and path graph under an evolving structure setting. Hierarchical Survival Predictor then predicts addresses' labels with nice scalability and faster prediction speed. We investigate the effectiveness and versatility of Evolve Path Tracer on three real-world illicit bitcoin datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that Evolve Path Tracer outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive scalability experiments demonstrate the model's adaptivity under a dynamic prediction setting.

A Novel Self-Supervised Learning-Based Anomaly Node Detection Method Based on an Autoencoder in Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the issue that existing wireless sensor network (WSN)-based anomaly detection methods only consider and analyze temporal features, in this paper, a self-supervised learning-based anomaly node detection method based on an autoencoder is designed. This method integrates temporal WSN data flow feature extraction, spatial position feature extraction and intermodal WSN correlation feature extraction into the design of the autoencoder to make full use of the spatial and temporal information of the WSN for anomaly detection. First, a fully connected network is used to extract the temporal features of nodes by considering a single mode from a local spatial perspective. Second, a graph neural network (GNN) is used to introduce the WSN topology from a global spatial perspective for anomaly detection and extract the spatial and temporal features of the data flows of nodes and their neighbors by considering a single mode. Then, the adaptive fusion method involving weighted summation is used to extract the relevant features between different models. In addition, this paper introduces a gated recurrent unit (GRU) to solve the long-term dependence problem of the time dimension. Eventually, the reconstructed output of the decoder and the hidden layer representation of the autoencoder are fed into a fully connected network to calculate the anomaly probability of the current system. Since the spatial feature extraction operation is advanced, the designed method can be applied to the task of large-scale network anomaly detection by adding a clustering operation. Experiments show that the designed method outperforms the baselines, and the F1 score reaches 90.6%, which is 5.2% higher than those of the existing anomaly detection methods based on unsupervised reconstruction and prediction. Code and model are available at https://github.com/GuetYe/anomaly_detection/GLSL

MetaPortrait: Identity-Preserving Talking Head Generation with Fast Personalized Adaptation

In this work, we propose an ID-preserving talking head generation framework, which advances previous methods in two aspects. First, as opposed to interpolating from sparse flow, we claim that dense landmarks are crucial to achieving accurate geometry-aware flow fields. Second, inspired by face-swapping methods, we adaptively fuse the source identity during synthesis, so that the network better preserves the key characteristics of the image portrait. Although the proposed model surpasses prior generation fidelity on established benchmarks, to further make the talking head generation qualified for real usage, personalized fine-tuning is usually needed. However, this process is rather computationally demanding that is unaffordable to standard users. To solve this, we propose a fast adaptation model using a meta-learning approach. The learned model can be adapted to a high-quality personalized model as fast as 30 seconds. Last but not the least, a spatial-temporal enhancement module is proposed to improve the fine details while ensuring temporal coherency. Extensive experiments prove the significant superiority of our approach over the state of the arts in both one-shot and personalized settings.

Spatial-temporal traffic modeling with a fusion graph reconstructed by tensor decomposition

Accurate spatial-temporal traffic flow forecasting is essential for helping traffic managers to take control measures and drivers to choose the optimal travel routes. Recently, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been widely used in traffic flow prediction owing to their powerful ability to capture spatial-temporal dependencies. The design of the spatial-temporal graph adjacency matrix is a key to the success of GCNs, and it is still an open question. This paper proposes reconstructing the binary adjacency matrix via tensor decomposition, and a traffic flow forecasting method is proposed. First, we reformulate the spatial-temporal fusion graph adjacency matrix into a three-way adjacency tensor. Then, we reconstructed the adjacency tensor via Tucker decomposition, wherein more informative and global spatial-temporal dependencies are encoded. Finally, a Spatial-temporal Synchronous Graph Convolutional module for localized spatial-temporal correlations learning and a Dilated Convolution module for global correlations learning are assembled to aggregate and learn the comprehensive spatial-temporal dependencies of the road network. Experimental results on four open-access datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the prediction performance and computational cost.

Towards Precise Flood Prediction via Hierachical Terrain Attention and Multi-Scale Rainfall Guidance

With the deterioration of climate, the phenomenon of rain-induced flooding has become frequent. To mitigate its impact, recent works adopt convolutional neural networks or other variants to predict the floods. However, these methods directly force the model to reconstruct the raw pixels of water depth maps through constraining pixel-level differences, ignoring the high-level information contained in terrain features and rainfall patterns. To address this, we present a novel GAN-based framework for precise flood prediction, which incorporates hierarchical terrain spatial attention to help the model focus on spatially-salient areas of terrain features and constructs multi-scale rainfall embedding to extensively integrate rainfall pattern information into generation. To better adapt the model in various rainfall conditions, we leverage a rainfall regression loss for both the generator and the discriminator as additional supervision. Extensive evaluations on real catchment datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method, which greatly surpasses the previous arts under different rainfall conditions.

HDNet: Hierarchical Dynamic Network for Gait Recognition using Millimeter-Wave Radar

Gait recognition is widely used in diversified practical applications. Currently, the most prevalent approach is to recognize human gait from RGB images, owing to the progress of computer vision technologies. Nevertheless, the perception capability of RGB cameras deteriorates in rough circumstances, and visual surveillance may cause privacy invasion. Due to the robustness and non-invasive feature of millimeter wave (mmWave) radar, radar-based gait recognition has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In this research, we propose a Hierarchical Dynamic Network (HDNet) for gait recognition using mmWave radar. In order to explore more dynamic information, we propose point flow as a novel point clouds descriptor. We also devise a dynamic frame sampling module to promote the efficiency of computation without deteriorating performance noticeably. To prove the superiority of our methods, we perform extensive experiments on two public mmWave radar-based gait recognition datasets, and the results demonstrate that our model is superior to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Toward Intention Discovery for Early Malice Detection in Bitcoin

Bitcoin has been subject to illicit activities more often than probably any other financial assets, due to the pseudo-anonymous nature of its transacting entities. An ideal detection model is expected to achieve all the three properties of (I) early detection, (II) good interpretability, and (III) versatility for various illicit activities. However, existing solutions cannot meet all these requirements, as most of them heavily rely on deep learning without satisfying interpretability and are only available for retrospective analysis of a specific illicit type. First, we present asset transfer paths, which aim to describe addresses' early characteristics. Next, with a decision tree based strategy for feature selection and segmentation, we split the entire observation period into different segments and encode each as a segment vector. After clustering all these segment vectors, we get the global status vectors, essentially the basic unit to describe the whole intention. Finally, a hierarchical self-attention predictor predicts the label for the given address in real time. A survival module tells the predictor when to stop and proposes the status sequence, namely intention. % With the type-dependent selection strategy and global status vectors, our model can be applied to detect various illicit activities with strong interpretability. The well-designed predictor and particular loss functions strengthen the model's prediction speed and interpretability one step further. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that our proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Besides, additional case studies justify our model can not only explain existing illicit patterns but can also find new suspicious characters.

DRL-M4MR: An Intelligent Multicast Routing Approach Based on DQN Deep Reinforcement Learning in SDN

Traditional multicast routing methods have some problems in constructing a multicast tree, such as limited access to network state information, poor adaptability to dynamic and complex changes in the network, and inflexible data forwarding. To address these defects, the optimal multicast routing problem in software-defined networking (SDN) is tailored as a multi-objective optimization problem, and an intelligent multicast routing algorithm DRL-M4MR based on the deep Q network (DQN) deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method is designed to construct a multicast tree in SDN. First, the multicast tree state matrix, link bandwidth matrix, link delay matrix, and link packet loss rate matrix are designed as the state space of the DRL agent by combining the global view and control of the SDN. Second, the action space of the agent is all the links in the network, and the action selection strategy is designed to add the links to the current multicast tree under four cases. Third, single-step and final reward function forms are designed to guide the intelligence to make decisions to construct the optimal multicast tree. The experimental results show that, compared with existing algorithms, the multicast tree construct by DRL-M4MR can obtain better bandwidth, delay, and packet loss rate performance after training, and it can make more intelligent multicast routing decisions in a dynamic network environment.

GestureLens: Visual Analysis of Gestures in Presentation Videos

Appropriate gestures can enhance message delivery and audience engagement in both daily communication and public presentations. In this paper, we contribute a visual analytic approach that assists professional public speaking coaches in improving their practice of gesture training through analyzing presentation videos. Manually checking and exploring gesture usage in the presentation videos is often tedious and time-consuming. There lacks an efficient method to help users conduct gesture exploration, which is challenging due to the intrinsically temporal evolution of gestures and their complex correlation to speech content. In this paper, we propose GestureLens, a visual analytics system to facilitate gesture-based and content-based exploration of gesture usage in presentation videos. Specifically, the exploration view enables users to obtain a quick overview of the spatial and temporal distributions of gestures. The dynamic hand movements are firstly aggregated through a heatmap in the gesture space for uncovering spatial patterns, and then decomposed into two mutually perpendicular timelines for revealing temporal patterns. The relation view allows users to explicitly explore the correlation between speech content and gestures by enabling linked analysis and intuitive glyph designs. The video view and dynamic view show the context and overall dynamic movement of the selected gestures, respectively. Two usage scenarios and expert interviews with professional presentation coaches demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of GestureLens in facilitating gesture exploration and analysis of presentation videos.