Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT) has shown impressive results among recently developed regularization methods called consistency regularization. VAT utilizes adversarial samples, generated by injecting perturbation in the input space, for training and thereby enhances the generalization ability of a classifier. However, such adversarial samples can be generated only within a very small area around the input data point, which limits the adversarial effectiveness of such samples. To address this problem we propose LVAT (Latent space VAT), which injects perturbation in the latent space instead of the input space. LVAT can generate adversarial samples flexibly, resulting in more adverse effect and thus more effective regularization. The latent space is built by a generative model, and in this paper we examine two different type of models: variational auto-encoder and normalizing flow, specifically Glow. We evaluated the performance of our method in both supervised and semi-supervised learning scenarios for an image classification task using SVHN and CIFAR-10 datasets. In our evaluation, we found that our method outperforms VAT and other state-of-the-art methods.

This paper introduces a high-resolution and compact CMOS switch-type phase shifter (STPS) for the 5th generation mobile network (5G) n260 band. In this work, totally four coarse phase shifting stages and a high-resolution tuning stage are included. The coarse stages based on the bridged-T topology is capable of providing 202.5° phase coverage with a 22.5° tuning step. To further improve the phase shifting resolution, a compact fine-tuning stage covering 23° is also integrated with the coarse stages. Sub-degree phase shifting resolution is realized for supporting the fine beam-steering and high-accuracy phase calibration in the 5G new radio. Simplified phase control algorithm and suppressed insertion loss can also be maintained by the proposed fine-tuning stage. In the measurement, the achieved RMS gain errors at 39 GHz are 0.1 dB and 0.4 dB for the coarse stages and fine stage, respectively. The achieved RMS phase errors at 39 GHz are 3.1° for the coarse stages and 0.1° for the fine stage. Within 37 GHz to 40 GHz, the measured return loss within all phase-tuning states is always better than -14 dB. The proposed phase shifter consumes a core area of only 0.12mm2 with 65-nm CMOS process, which is area-efficient.

The problem of enumerating connected induced subgraphs of a given graph is classical and studied well. It is known that connected induced subgraphs can be enumerated in constant time for each subgraph. In this paper, we focus on highly connected induced subgraphs. The most major concept of connectivity on graphs is vertex connectivity. For vertex connectivity, some enumeration problem settings and enumeration algorithms have been proposed, such as k-vertex connected spanning subgraphs. In this paper, we focus on another major concept of graph connectivity, edge-connectivity. This is motivated by the problem of finding evacuation routes in road networks. In evacuation routes, edge-connectivity is important, since highly edge-connected subgraphs ensure multiple routes between two vertices. In this paper, we consider the problem of enumerating 2-edge-connected induced subgraphs of a given graph. We present an algorithm that enumerates 2-edge-connected induced subgraphs of an input graph G with n vertices and m edges. Our algorithm enumerates all the 2-edge-connected induced subgraphs in O(n3m|SG|) time, where SG is the set of the 2-edge-connected induced subgraphs of G. Moreover, by slightly modifying the algorithm, we have a O(n3m)-delay enumeration algorithm for 2-edge-connected induced subgraphs.

Android operating system occupies a high share in the mobile terminal market. It promotes the rapid development of Android applications (apps). However, the emergence of Android malware greatly endangers the security of Android smartphone users. Existing research works have proposed a lot of methods for Android malware detection, but they did not make the utilization of apps' functional category information so that the strong similarity between benign apps in the same functional category is ignored. In this paper, we propose an Android malware detection scheme based on the functional classification. The benign apps in the same functional category are more similar to each other, so we can use less features to detect malware and improve the detection accuracy in the same functional category. The aim of our scheme is to provide an automatic application functional classification method with high accuracy. We design an Android application functional classification method inspired by the hyperlink induced topic search (HITS) algorithm. Using the results of automatic classification, we further design a malware detection method based on app similarity in the same functional category. We use benign apps from the Google Play Store and use malware apps from the Drebin malware set to evaluate our scheme. The experimental results show that our method can effectively improve the accuracy of malware detection.

A rep-cube is a polyomino that is a net of a cube, and it can be divided into some polyominoes such that each of them can be folded into a cube. This notion was invented in 2017, which is inspired by the notions of polyomino and rep-tile, which were introduced by Solomon W. Golomb. A rep-cube is called regular if it can be divided into the nets of the same area. A regular rep-cube is of order k if it is divided into k nets. Moreover, it is called uniform if it can be divided into the congruent nets. In this paper, we focus on these special rep-cubes and solve several open problems.

Developing well-designed presentation slides is challenging for many people, especially novices. The ability to build high quality slideshows is becoming more important in society. In this study, a neural network was used to identify novice vs. well-designed presentation slides based on visual and structural features. For such a purpose, a dataset containing 1,080 slide pairs was newly constructed. One of each pair was created by a novice, and the other was the improved one by the same person according to the experts' advice. Ten checkpoints frequently pointed out by professional consultants were extracted and set as prediction targets. The intrinsic problem was that the label distribution was imbalanced, because only a part of the samples had corresponding design problems. Therefore, re-sampling methods for addressing class imbalance were applied to improve the accuracy of the proposed model. Furthermore, we combined the target task with an assistant task for transfer and multi-task learning, which helped the proposed model achieve better performance. After the optimal settings were used for each checkpoint, the average accuracy of the proposed model rose up to 81.79%. With the advice provided by our assessment system, the novices significantly improved their slide design.

The effect of provision of “Neither-Good-Nor-Bad” (NGNB) information on the perceived trustworthiness of agents has been investigated in previous studies. The experimental results have revealed several conditions under which the provision of NGNB information works effectively to make users perceive greater trust of agents. However, the experiments in question were carried out in a situation in which a user is able to choose, with the agent's advice, one of a limited number of options. In practical problems, we are often at a loss as to which to choose because there are too many possible options and it is not easy to narrow them down. Furthermore, in the above-mentioned previous studies, it was easy to predict the size of profits that a user would obtain because its pattern was also limited. This prompted us, in this paper, to investigate the effect of provision of NGNB information on the users' trust of agents under conditions where it appears to the users that numerous options are available. Our experimental results reveal that an agent that reliably provides NGNB information tends to gain greater user trust in a situation where it appears to the users that there are numerous options and their consequences, and it is not easy to predict the size of profits. However, in contradiction to the previous study, the results in this paper also reveal that stable provision of NGNB information in the context of numerous options is less effective in a situation where it is harder to obtain larger profits.

Online feeds are streamed continuously in batches with varied polarities at varying times. The system handling the online feeds must be trained to classify all the varying polarities occurring dynamically. The polarity classification system designed for the online feeds must address two significant challenges: i) stability-plasticity, ii) category-proliferation. The challenges faced in the polarity classification of online feeds can be addressed using the technique of incremental learning, which serves to learn new classes dynamically and also retains the previously learned knowledge. This paper proposes a new incremental learning methodology, ILOF (Incremental Learning of Online Feeds) to classify the feeds by adopting Deep Learning Techniques such as RNN (Recurrent Neural Networks) and LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) and also ELM (Extreme Learning Machine) for addressing the above stated problems. The proposed method creates a separate model for each batch using ELM and incrementally learns from the trained batches. The training of each batch avoids the retraining of old feeds, thus saving training time and memory space. The trained feeds can be discarded when new batch of feeds arrives. Experiments are carried out using the standard datasets comprising of long feeds (IMDB, Sentiment140) and short feeds (Twitter, WhatsApp, and Twitter airline sentiment) and the proposed method showed positive results in terms of better performance and accuracy.

Double modular redundancy (DMR) is to execute an operation twice and detect a soft error by comparing the duplicated operation results. The soft error is corrected by re-executing necessary operations. The re-execution requires error-free input data and registers are needed to store such necessary error-free data. In this paper, a method to minimize the required number of registers is proposed where an appropriate subgraph partitioning of operation nodes are searched. In addition, using the proposed register minimization method, a minimization of the area of functional units and registers required to implement the DMR design is proposed.

In this paper, we construct the first efficient leakage-resilient CCA2 (LR-CCA2)-secure attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes. We also construct the first efficient LR-CCA2-secure identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme with optimal leakage rate. To obtain our results, we develop a new quasi-adaptive non-interactive zero-knowledge (QA-NIZK) argument for the ciphertext consistency of the LR-CPA-secure schemes. Our ABE schemes are obtained by boosting the LR-CPA-security of some existing schemes to the LR-CCA2-security by using our QA-NIZK arguments. The schemes are almost as efficient as the underlying LR-CPA-secure schemes.

A new adaptive binarization method is proposed for the vehicle state images obtained from the intelligent operation and maintenance system of rail transit. The method can check the corresponding vehicle status information in the intelligent operation and maintenance system of rail transit more quickly and effectively, track and monitor the vehicle operation status in real time, and improve the emergency response ability of the system. The advantages of the proposed method mainly include two points. For decolorization, we use the method of contrast preserving decolorization[1] obtain the appropriate ratio of R, G, and B for the grayscale of the RGB image which can retain the color information of the vehicle state images background to the maximum, and maintain the contrast between the foreground and the background. In terms of threshold selection, the mean value and standard deviation of gray value corresponding to multi-color background of vehicle state images are obtained by using major cluster estimation[2], and the adaptive threshold is determined by the 2 sigma principle for binarization, which can extract text, identifier and other target information effectively. The experimental results show that, regarding the vehicle state images with rich background color information, this method is better than the traditional binarization methods, such as the global threshold Otsu algorithm[3] and the local threshold Sauvola algorithm[4],[5] based on threshold, Mean-Shift algorithm[6], K-Means algorithm[7] and Fuzzy C Means[8] algorithm based on statistical learning. As an image preprocessing scheme for intelligent rail transit data verification, the method can improve the accuracy of text and identifier recognition effectively by verifying the optical character recognition through a data set containing images of different vehicle statuses.

The development of educational informatization makes data privacy particularly important in education. With society's development, the education system is complicated, and the result of education evaluation becomes more and more critical to students. The evaluation process of education must be justice and transparent. In recent years, the Onscreen Marking (OSM) system based on traditional cloud platforms has been widely used in various large-scale public examinations. However, due to the excessive concentration of power in the existing scheme, the mainstream marking process is not transparent, and there are hidden dangers of black-box operation, which will damage the fairness of the examination. In addition, issues related to data security and privacy are still considered to be severe challenges. This paper deals with the above problems by providing secure and private transactions in a distributed OSM assuming the semi-trusted examination center. We have implemented a proof-of-concept for a consortium blockchain-based OSM in a privacy-preserving and auditable manner, enabling markers to mark on the distributed ledger anonymously. We have proposed a distributed OSM system in high-level, which provides theoretical support for the fair evaluation process of education informatization. It has particular theoretical and application value for education combined with blockchain.

With the increase of IoT devices, P2P-based IoT platforms have been attracting attention because of their capabilities of building and maintaining their networks autonomously in a decentralized way. In particular, Skip Graph, which has a low network rebuilding cost and allows range search, is suitable for the platform. However, when data observed at geographically close points have similar values (i.e. when data have strong spatial autocorrelation), existing types of Skip Graph degrade their search performances. In this paper, we propose a query transfer method that enables efficient search even for spatially autocorrelated data by adaptively using two-types of Skip Graph depending on the key-distance to the target key. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the query transfer distance compared to the existing method even for spatially autocorrelated data.

The Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol is one of the consensus algorithms for blockchain, in which the integrity of a new block is validated according to voting by nodes called validators. However, due to validator-oriented voting, voting results are likely to be false when the number of validators with wrong votes increases. In the PoS protocol, validators are motivated to vote correctly by reward and penalty mechanisms. With such mechanisms, validators who contribute to correct consensuses are rewarded, while those who vote incorrectly are penalized. In this paper, we consider an incentivization mechanism based on the voting profile of a validator, which is estimated from the voting history of the validator. In this mechanism, the stake collected due to the penalties are redistributed to validators who vote correctly, improving the incentive of validators to contribute to the system. We evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism by computer simulations, investigating the impacts of system parameters on the estimation accuracy of the validator profile and the amount of validator's stake. Numerical results show that the proposed mechanism can estimate the voting profile of a validator accurately even when the voting profile dynamically changes. It is also shown that the proposed mechanism gives more reward to validators who vote correctly with high voting profile.

Convolutional approximate message-passing (CAMP) is an efficient algorithm to solve linear inverse problems. CAMP aims to realize advantages of both approximate message-passing (AMP) and orthogonal/vector AMP. CAMP uses the same low-complexity matched-filter as AMP. To realize the asymptotic Gaussianity of estimation errors for all right-orthogonally invariant matrices, as guaranteed in orthogonal/vector AMP, the Onsager correction in AMP is replaced with a convolution of all preceding messages. CAMP was proved to be asymptotically Bayes-optimal if a state-evolution (SE) recursion converges to a fixed-point (FP) and if the FP is unique. However, no proofs for the convergence were provided. This paper presents a theoretical analysis for the convergence of the SE recursion. Gaussian signaling is assumed to linearize the SE recursion. A condition for the convergence is derived via a necessary and sufficient condition for which the linearized SE recursion has a unique stationary solution. The SE recursion is numerically verified to converge toward the Bayes-optimal solution if and only if the condition is satisfied. CAMP is compared to conjugate gradient (CG) for Gaussian signaling in terms of the convergence properties. CAMP is inferior to CG for matrices with a large condition number while they are comparable to each other for a small condition number. These results imply that CAMP has room for improvement in terms of the convergence properties.

Personalized news recommendation is becoming increasingly important for online news platforms to help users alleviate information overload and improve news reading experience. A key problem in news recommendation is learning accurate user representations to capture their interest. However, most existing news recommendation methods usually learn user representation only from their interacted historical news, while ignoring the clustering features among users. Here we proposed a hierarchical user preference hash network to enhance the representation of users' interest. In the hash part, a series of buckets are generated based on users' historical interactions. Users with similar preferences are assigned into the same buckets automatically. We also learn representations of users from their browsed news in history part. And then, a Route Attention is adopted to combine these two parts (history vector and hash vector) and get the more informative user preference vector. As for news representation, a modified transformer with category embedding is exploited to build news semantic representation. By comparing the hierarchical hash network with multiple news recommendation methods and conducting various experiments on the Microsoft News Dataset (MIND) validate the effectiveness of our approach on news recommendation.

In this paper, we introduce our latest progress in the colloidal quantum dot enhanced color conversion layer for micro LEDs. Different methods of how to deploy colloidal quantum dots can be discussed and reviewed. The necessity of the using color conversion layer can be seen and color conversion efficiency of such layer can be calculated from the measured spectrum. A sub-pixel size of 5 micron of colloidal quantum dot pattern can be demonstrated in array format.

In-band full-duplex (IBFD) has been an attractive technology, which can theoretically double the spectral efficiency. However, when performing IBFD in the dynamic-duplex cellular (DDC) system, inter-user interference (IUI) deteriorates transmission performance in downlink (DL) communication and limits IBFD-applicable area and IBFD application ratio. In this paper, to expand the IBFD-applicable area and improve the IBFD application ratio, we propose an IUI reduction scheme using successive interference cancellation (SIC) for the DDC system. SIC can utilize the power difference and reduce the signal with the higher power. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated by the computer simulation. The IUI reducing effect on the IBFD-inapplicable area is confirmed when the received power of the IUI is stronger than that of the desired signal at the user equipment for DL (DL-UE). The IBFD-inapplicable area within 95m from the DL-UE, where the IBFD does not work without the proposed scheme, can reduce by 43.6% from 52.8% to 9.2% by applying the proposed scheme. Moreover, the IBFD application ratio can improve by 24.6% from 69.5% to 94.1%.

A mobile crowdsensing system (MCS) utilizes a crowd of users to collect large-scale data using their mobile devices efficiently. The collected data are usually linked with sensitive information, raising the concerns of user privacy leakage. To date, many approaches have been proposed to protect the users' privacy, with the majority relying on a centralized structure, which poses though attack and intrusion vulnerability. Some studies build a distributed platform exploiting a blockchain-type solution, which still requires a fully trusted third party (TTP) to manage a reliable reward distribution in the MCS. Spurred by the deficiencies of current methods, we propose a distributed user privacy protection structure that combines blockchain and a trusted execution environment (TEE). The proposed architecture successfully manages the users' privacy protection and an accurate reward distribution without requiring a TTP. This is because the encryption algorithms ensure data confidentiality and uncouple the correlation between the users' identity and the sensitive information in the collected data. Accordingly, the smart contract signature is used to manage the user deposit and verify the data. Extensive comparative experiments verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed combined blockchain and TEE scheme.

In this letter, we derive a novel and accurate closed-form bit error rate (BER) approximation of the optical wireless communications (OWC) systems for the sub-carrier intensity modulation (SIM) employing binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) with multiple transmit and single receive apertures over strong atmospheric turbulence channels, which makes it possible to effectively investigate and predict the BER performance for various system configurations. Furthermore, we also derive a concise asymptotic BER formula to quantitatively evaluate the asymptotically achievable error performance (i.e., asymptotic diversity and combining gains) in the high signal-to-noise (SNR) regimes. Some numerical results are provided to corroborate the accuracy and effectiveness of our theoretical expressions.