In this letter, we propose a feature-based knowledge distillation scheme which transfers knowledge between intermediate blocks of teacher and student with flow-based architecture, specifically Normalizing flow in our implementation. In addition to the knowledge transfer scheme, we examine how configuration of the distillation positions impacts on the knowledge transfer performance. To evaluate the proposed ideas, we choose two knowledge distillation baseline models which are based on Normalizing flow on different domains: CS-Flow for anomaly detection and SRFlow-DA for super-resolution. A set of performance comparison to the baseline models with popular benchmark datasets shows promising results along with improved inference speed. The comparison includes performance analysis based on various configurations of the distillation positions in the proposed scheme.

Video-based action recognition encompasses the recognition of appearance and the classification of action types. This work proposes a discrete-temporal-sequence-based motion tendency clustering framework to implement motion clustering by extracting motion tendencies and self-supervised learning. A published traffic intersection dataset (inD) and a self-produced gesture video set are used for evaluation and to validate the motion tendency action recognition hypothesis.

We propose Quality Enhancement via a Side bitstream Network (QESN) technique for lossy image compression. The proposed QESN utilizes the network architecture of deep image compression to produce a bitstream for enhancing the quality of conventional compression. We also present a loss function that directly optimizes the Bjontegaard delta bit rate (BD-BR) by using a differentiable model of a rate-distortion curve. Experimental results show that QESN improves the rate by 16.7% in the BD-BR compared to Better Portable Graphics.

Involving higher-order thinking in learning activities can produce meaningful learning. It impacts the student's ability to solve problems in new situations. Concept mapping is a learning strategy that has been proven to promote higher-order thinking. Concept map recomposition (KB-mapping) in the Kit-Build system is a closed concept mapping where learners are given concepts and links to build a concept map, and it has advantage that the recomposed map can be automatically diagnosed. It has been proven that KB-mapping improves the students' learning achievement similar to the traditional concept mapping called scratch concept map composition (SC-mapping). However, the study on the effect of KB-mapping in fostering students' higher-order thinking has yet to be evaluated. This study designed and conducted an experiment to compare the impact of KB-mapping and SC-mapping on promoting students' ability in higher-order thinking. Fifty-four undergraduate students were assigned to either KB-Mapping or SC-Mapping for learning activities. The result of this study suggested that students who learn with KB-mapping had better abilities to solve questions of higher-order thinking than those who applied SC-mapping. The findings also suggested that the quality of students' concept maps affected their performance in solving higher-order thinking questions.

The design and adjustment of the divergence in audio applications using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is still open problem. In this study, to deal with this problem, we explore a representation of the divergence using neural networks (NNs). Instead of the divergence, our approach extends the multiplicative update algorithm (MUA), which estimates the NMF parameters, using NNs. The design of the extended MUA incorporates NNs, and the new algorithm is referred to as the deep MUA (DeMUA) for NMF. While the DeMUA represents the algorithm for the NMF, interestingly, the divergence is obtained from the incorporated NN. In addition, we propose theoretical guides to design the incorporated NN such that it can be interpreted as a divergence. By appropriately designing the NN, MUAs based on existing divergences with a single hyper-parameter can be represented by the DeMUA. To train the DeMUA, we applied it to audio denoising and supervised signal separation. Our experimental results show that the proposed architecture can learn the MUA and the divergences in sparse denoising and speech separation tasks and that the MUA based on generalized divergences with multiple parameters shows favorable performances on these tasks.

Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) are an important data structure for the design of digital circuits using VLSI CAD tools. The ordering of variables affects the total number of nodes and path length in the BDDs. Finding a good variable ordering is an optimization problem and previously many optimization approaches have been implemented for BDDs in a number of research works. In this paper, an optimization approach based on Spider Monkey Optimization (SMO) algorithm is proposed for the BDD variable ordering problem targeting number of nodes and longest path length. SMO is a well-known swarm intelligence-based optimization approach based on spider monkeys foraging behavior. The proposed work has been compared with other latest BDD reordering approaches using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The results obtained show significant improvement over the Particle Swarm Optimization method. The proposed SMO-based method is applied to different benchmark digital circuits having different levels of complexities. The node count and longest path length for the maximum number of tested circuits are found to be better in SMO than PSO.

Visible light communication (VLC) and visible light ranging are applicable techniques for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). They use every unique light-emitting diode (LED) on roads for data transmission and range estimation. The simultaneous VLC and ranging can be applied to improve the performance of both. It is necessary to achieve rapid data rate and high-accuracy ranging when transmitting VLC data and estimating the range simultaneously. We use the signal modulation method of pulse-width modulation (PWM) to increase the data rate. However, when using PWM for VLC data transmission, images of the LED transmitters are captured at different luminance levels and are easily saturated, and LED saturation leads to inaccurate range estimation. In this paper, we establish a novel simultaneous visible light communication and ranging system for ITS using PWM. Here, we analyze the LED saturation problems and apply bicubic interpolation to solve the LED saturation problem and thus, improve the communication and ranging performance. Simultaneous communication and ranging are enabled using a stereo camera. Communication is realized using maximal-ratio combining (MRC) while ranging is achieved using phase-only correlation (POC) and sinc function approximation. Furthermore, we measured the performance of our proposed system using a field trial experiment. The results show that error-free performance can be achieved up to a communication distance of 55 m and the range estimation errors are below 0.5m within 60m.

A super-resolution algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of measuring the thin thickness of oil slick using compressed sensing theory. First, a mathematical model of a single pulse underwater ultrasonic echo is established. Then, the estimation model of the transmit time of flight (TOF) of ultrasonic echo within oil slick is given based on the sparsity of echo signals. At last, the super-resolution TOF value can be obtained by solving the sparse convex optimization problem. Simulations and experiments are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed method.

The estimation problem of structured clutter covariance matrix (CCM) in space-time adaptive processing (STAP) for airborne radar systems is studied in this letter. By employing the prior knowledge and the persymmetric covariance structure, a new estimation algorithm is proposed based on the whitening ability of the covariance matrix. The proposed algorithm is robust to prior knowledge of different accuracy, and can whiten the observed interference data to obtain the optimal solution. In addition, the extended factored approach (EFA) is used in the optimization for dimensionality reduction, which reduces the computational burden. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve STAP performance even under the condition of some errors in prior knowledge.

Let f be a Boolean function in n variables. The Möbius transform and its converse of f can describe the transformation behaviors between the truth table of f and the coefficients of the monomials in the algebraic normal form representation of f. In this letter, we develop the Möbius transform and its converse into a more generalized form, which also includes the known result given by Reed in 1954. We hope that our new result can be used in the design of decoding schemes for linear codes and the cryptanalysis for symmetric cryptography. We also apply our new result to verify the basic idea of the cube attack in a very simple way, in which the cube attack is a powerful technique on the cryptanalysis for symmetric cryptography.

In this paper, a novel reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided full-duplex (FD) cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (CNOMA) network is investigated over Nakagami-m fading channels, where two RISs are employed to help the communication of paired users. To evaluate the potential benefits of our proposed scheme, we first derive the closed-form expressions of the outage probability. Then, we derive users' diversity orders according to the asymptotic approximation at high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). Simulation results validate our analysis and reveal that users' diversity orders are affected by their channel fading parameters, the self-interference of FD, and the number of RIS elements.

Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR), which was introduced by 3GPP is considered the powerful technique to improve user performance. However, implementation of FFR is a challenge due to strong dependence between base stations (BSs) in terms of resource allocations. This paper studies a modified and flexible FFR scheme that allows all BSs works independently. The analytical and simulation results prove that the modified FFR scheme outperforms the conventional FFR.

Glaucoma is a common high-incidence eye disease. The detection of the optic cup and optic disc in fundus images is one of the important steps in the clinical diagnosis of glaucoma. However, the fundus images are generally intensity inhomogeneity, and complex organizational structure, and are disturbed by blood vessels and lesions. In order to extract the optic disc and optic cup regions more accurately, we propose a segmentation method of the optic disc and optic cup in fundus image based on distance regularized two-layer level with sparse shape prior constraint. The experimental results show that our method can segment the optic disc and optic cup region more accurately and obtain satisfactory results.

In order to improve the anomaly detection efficiency of network traffic, firstly, the model is established for network flows based on complex networks. Aiming at the uncertainty and fuzziness between network traffic characteristics and network states, the deviation extent is measured from the normal network state using deviation interval uniformly, and the intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs) are established for the various characteristics on the network model that the membership degree, non-membership degree and hesitation margin of the IFSs are used to quantify the ownership of values to be tested and the corresponding network state. Then, the knowledge measure (KM) is introduced into the intuitionistic fuzzy weighted geometry (IFWGω) to weight the results of IFSs corresponding to the same network state with different characteristics together to detect network anomaly comprehensively. Finally, experiments are carried out on different network traffic datasets to analyze the evaluation indicators of network characteristics by our method, and compare with other existing anomaly detection methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the changes of various network characteristics are inconsistent under abnormal attack, and the accuracy of anomaly detection results obtained by our method is higher, verifying our method has a better detection performance.

Solar power is the most widely used renewable energy source, which reduces pollution consequences from using conventional fossil fuels. However, supplying stable power from solar power generation remains challenging because it is difficult to forecast power generation. Accurate prediction of solar power generation would allow effective control of the amount of electricity stored in batteries, leading in a stable supply of electricity. Although the number of power plants is increasing, building a solar power prediction model for a newly constructed power plant usually requires collecting a new training dataset for the new power plant, which takes time to collect a sufficient amount of data. This paper aims to develop a highly accurate solar power prediction model for multiple power plants available for both new and existing power plants. The proposed method trains the model on existing multiple power plants to generate a general prediction model, and then uses it for a new power plant while waiting for the data to be collected. In addition, the proposed method tunes the general prediction model on the newly collected dataset and improves the accuracy for the new power plant. We evaluated the proposed method on 55 power plants in Japan with the dataset collected for two and a half years. As a result, the pre-trained models of our proposed method significantly reduces the average RMSE of the baseline method by 73.19%. This indicates that the model can generalize over multiple power plants, and training using datasets from other power plants is effective in reducing the RMSE. Fine-tuning the pre-trained model further reduces the RMSE by 8.12%.

This paper introduces a deep reinforcement learning approach to solve the virtual network function scheduling problem in dynamic scenarios. We formulate an integer linear programming model for the problem in static scenarios. In dynamic scenarios, we define the state, action, and reward to form the learning approach. The learning agents are applied with the asynchronous advantage actor-critic algorithm. We assign a master agent and several worker agents to each network function virtualization node in the problem. The worker agents work in parallel to help the master agent make decision. We compare the introduced approach with existing approaches by applying them in simulated environments. The existing approaches include three greedy approaches, a simulated annealing approach, and an integer linear programming approach. The numerical results show that the introduced deep reinforcement learning approach improves the performance by 6-27% in our examined cases.

In this paper, we investigate the sum rate (SR) maximization problem for downlink cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (C-NOMA) system under in-phase and quadrature-phase (IQ) imbalance at the base station (BS) and destination. The BS communicates with users by a half-duplex amplified-and-forward (HD-AF) relay under imperfect IQ imbalance. The sum rate maximization problem is formulated as a non-convex optimization with the quality of service (QoS) constraint for each user. We first use the variable substitution method to transform the non-convex SR maximization problem into an equivalent problem. Then, a joint power and rate allocation algorithm is proposed based on successive convex approximation (SCA) to maximize the SR of the systems. Simulation results verify that the algorithm can improve the SR of the C-NOMA compared with the cooperative orthogonal multiple access (C-OMA) scheme.

In this paper, we investigate the Access Point (AP) selection problem in Cell-Free Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. Firstly, we add a connecting coefficient to the uplink data transmission model. Then, the problem of AP selection is formulated as a discrete combinatorial optimization problem which can be dealt with by the particle swarm algorithm. However, when the number of optimization variables is large, the search efficiency of the traditional particle swarm algorithm will be significantly reduced. Then, we propose an ‘user-centric’ cooperative coevolution scheme which includes the proposed probability-based particle evolution strategy and random-sampling-based particle evaluation mechanism to deal with the search efficiency problem. Simulation results show that proposed algorithm has better performance than other existing algorithms.

In this paper, user set selection in the allocation sequences of round-robin (RR) scheduling for distributed antenna transmission with block diagonalization (BD) pre-coding is proposed. In prior research, the initial phase selection of user equipment allocation sequences in RR scheduling has been investigated. The performance of the proposed RR scheduling is inferior to that of proportional fair (PF) scheduling under severe intra-cell interference. In this paper, the multi-input multi-output technology with BD pre-coding is applied. Furthermore, the user equipment (UE) sets in the allocation sequences are eliminated with reinforcement learning. After the modification of a RR allocation sequence, no estimated throughput calculation for UE set selection is required. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that the maximum selection, one of the criteria for initial phase selection, outperforms the weighted PF scheduling in a restricted realm in terms of the computational complexity, fairness, and throughput.