In this letter, we give a characterization for a generic construction of bent functions. This characterization enables us to obtain another efficient construction of bent functions and to give a positive answer on a problem of bent functions.

We propose a pre-T event-triggered controller (ETC) for the stabilization of a chain of integrators. Our per-T event-triggered controller is a modified event-triggered controller by adding a pre-defined positive constant T to the event-triggering condition. With this pre-T, the immediate advantages are (i) the often complicated additional analysis regarding the Zeno behavior is no longer needed, (ii) the positive lower bound of interexecution times can be specified, (iii) the number of control input updates can be further reduced. We carry out the rigorous system analysis and simulations to illustrate the advantages of our proposed method over the traditional event-triggered control method.

This paper reports a spatial extrapolation of the sound field with a physics-informed neural network. We investigate the spatial extrapolation of the room impulse responses with physics-informed SIREN architecture. Furthermore, we proposed a noise-robust extrapolation method by introducing a tolerance term to the loss function.

Radar emitter identification (REI) is a crucial function of electronic radar warfare support systems. The challenge emphasizes identifying and locating unique transmitters, avoiding potential threats, and preparing countermeasures. Due to the remarkable effectiveness of deep learning (DL) in uncovering latent features within data and performing classifications, deep neural networks (DNNs) have seen widespread application in radar emitter identification (REI). In many real-world scenarios, obtaining a large number of annotated radar transmitter samples for training identification models is essential yet challenging. Given the issues of insufficient labeled datasets and abundant unlabeled training datasets, we propose a novel REI method based on a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework with virtual adversarial training (VAT). Specifically, two objective functions are designed to extract the semantic features of radar signals: computing cross-entropy loss for labeled samples and virtual adversarial training loss for all samples. Additionally, a pseudo-labeling approach is employed for unlabeled samples. The proposed VAT-based SS-REI method is evaluated on a radar dataset. Simulation results indicate that the proposed VAT-based SS-REI method outperforms the latest SS-REI method in recognition performance.

The dispersion problem is a variant of facility location problems, that has been extensively studied. Given a polygon with n edges on a plane we want to find k points in the polygon so that the minimum pairwise Euclidean distance of the k points is maximized. We call the problem the k-dispersion problem in a polygon. Intuitively, for an island, we want to locate k drone bases far away from each other in flying distance to avoid congestion in the sky. In this paper, we give a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for this problem when k is a constant and ε < 1 (where ε is a positive real number). Our proposed algorithm runs in O(((1/ε)2 + n/ε)k) time with 1/(1 + ε) approximation, the first PTAS developed for this problem. Additionally, we consider three variations of the dispersion problem and design a PTAS for each of them.

A rectangle-of-influence drawing of a plane graph G is a straight-line planar drawing of G such that there is no vertex in the proper inside of the axis-parallel rectangle defined by the two ends of any edge. In this paper, we show that any given 5-connected plane graph G with five or more vertices on the outer face has a rectangle-of-influence drawing in an integer grid such that W + H ≤ n - 2, where n is the number of vertices in G, W is the width and H is the height of the grid.

This paper reports on the details of the International Competition on Graph Counting Algorithms (ICGCA) held in 2023. The graph counting problem is to count the subgraphs satisfying specified constraints on a given graph. The problem belongs to #P-complete, a computationally tough class. Since many essential systems in modern society, e.g., infrastructure networks, are often represented as graphs, graph counting algorithms are a key technology to efficiently scan all the subgraphs representing the feasible states of the system. In the ICGCA, contestants were asked to count the paths on a graph under a length constraint. The benchmark set included 150 challenging instances, emphasizing graphs resembling infrastructure networks. Eleven solvers were submitted and ranked by the number of benchmarks correctly solved within a time limit. The winning solver, TLDC, was designed based on three fundamental approaches: backtracking search, dynamic programming, and model counting or #SAT (a counting version of Boolean satisfiability). Detailed analyses show that each approach has its own strengths, and one approach is unlikely to dominate the others. The codes and papers of the participating solvers are available: https://afsa.jp/icgca/.

Sparse-view CT reconstruction has gained significant attention due to the growing concerns about radiation safety. Although recent deep learning-based image domain reconstruction methods have achieved encouraging performance over iterative methods, effectively capturing intricate details and organ structures while suppressing noise remains challenging. This study presents a novel dual-stream encoder-decoder-based reconstruction network that combines global path reconstruction from the entire image with local path reconstruction from image patches. These two branches interact through an attention module, which enhances visual quality and preserves image details by learning correlations between image features and patch features. Visual and numerical results show that the proposed method has superior reconstruction capabilities to state-of-the-art 180-, 90-, and 45-view CT reconstruction methods.

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is a key research technology to realize the third generation of artificial intelligence, which is widely used in human-computer interaction, emotion diagnosis, interpersonal communication and other fields. However, the aliasing of language and semantic information in speech tends to distort the alignment of emotion features, which affects the performance of cross-corpus SER system. This paper proposes a cross-corpus SER model based on causal emotion information representation (CEIR). The model uses the reconstruction loss of the deep autoencoder network and the source domain label information to realize the preliminary separation of causal features. Then, the causal correlation matrix is constructed, and the local maximum mean difference (LMMD) feature alignment technology is combined to make the causal features of different dimensions jointly distributed independent. Finally, the supervised fine-tuning of labeled data is used to achieve effective extraction of causal emotion information. The experimental results show that the average unweighted average recall (UAR) of the proposed algorithm is increased by 3.4% to 7.01% compared with the latest partial algorithms in the field.

Currently, a significant portion of acoustic scene categorization (ASC) research is centered around utilizing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. This preference is primarily due to CNN’s ability to effectively extract time-frequency information from audio recordings of scenes by employing spectrum data as input. The expression of many dimensions can be achieved by utilizing 2D spectrum characteristics. Nevertheless, the diverse interpretations of the same object’s existence in different positions on the spectrum map can be attributed to the discrepancies between spectrum properties and picture qualities. The lack of distinction between different aspects of input information in ASC-based CNN networks may result in a decline in system performance. Considering this, a feature pyramid segmentation (FPS) approach based on CNN is proposed. The proposed approach involves utilizing spectrum features as the input for the model. These features are split based on a preset scale, and each segment-level feature is then fed into the CNN network for learning. The SoftMax classifier will receive the output of all feature scales, and these high-level features will be fused and fed to it to categorize different scenarios. The experiment provides evidence to support the efficacy of the FPS strategy and its potential to enhance the performance of the ASC system.

With the rapid advancement of graphics processing units (GPUs), Virtual Reality (VR) experiences have significantly improved, enhancing immersion and realism. However, these advancements also raise security concerns in VR. In this paper, I introduce a new attack leveraging known WebVR vulnerabilities to track the activities of VR users. The proposed attack leverages the user’s hand motion information exposed to web attackers, demonstrating the capability to identify consumed content, such as 3D images and videos, and pilfer private drawings created in a 3D drawing app. To achieve this, I employed a machine learning approach to process controller sensor data and devised techniques to extract sensitive activities during the use of target apps. The experimental results demonstrate that the viewed content in the targeted content viewer can be identified with 90% accuracy. Furthermore, I successfully obtained drawing outlines that precisely match the user’s original drawings without performance degradation, validating the effectiveness of the attack.

Melanin, which is responsible for the appearance of spots and freckles, is an important indicator in evaluating skin condition. To assess the efficacy of cosmetics, skin condition scoring is performed by analyzing the distribution and amount of melanin from microscopic images of the stratum corneum cells. However, the current practice of diagnosing skin condition using stratum corneum cells images relies heavily on visual evaluation by experts. The goal of this study is to develop a quantitative evaluation system for skin condition based on melanin within unstained stratum corneum cells images. The proposed system utilizes principal component regression to perform five-level scoring, which is then compared with visual evaluation scores to assess the system’s usefulness. Additionally, we evaluated the impact of indicators related to melanin obtained from images on the scores, and verified which indicators are effective for evaluation. In conclusion, we confirmed that scoring is possible with an accuracy of more than 60% on a combination of several indicators, which is comparable to the accuracy of visual assessment.

The design of automobile lamps requires accurate estimation of heat distribution to prevent overheating and deformation of the product. Traditional heat resistant analysis using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is time-consuming and requires expertise in thermofluid mechanics, making real-time temperature analysis less accessible to lamp designers. We propose a machine learning-based temperature prediction system for automobile lamp design. We trained our machine learning models using CFD results of various lamp designs, providing lamp designers real-time Heat-Resistant Analysis. Comprehensive tests on real lamp products demonstrate that our prediction model accurately estimates heat distribution comparable to CFD analysis within a minute. Our system visualizes the estimated heat distribution of car lamp design supporting quick decision-making by lamp designer. It is expected to shorten the product design process, improving the market competitiveness.

In many real-world problems, a complex task is typically composed of a set of subtasks that follow a certain execution order. Traditional multi-agent reinforcement learning methods perform poorly in such multi-task cases, as they consider the whole problem as one task. For such multi-agent multi-task problems, heterogeneous relationships i.e., subtask-subtask, agent-agent, and subtask-agent, are important characters which should be explored to facilitate the learning performance. This paper proposes a dynamic heterogeneous graph based agent allocation-action learning framework. Specifically, a dynamic heterogeneous graph model is firstly designed to characterize the variation of heterogeneous relationships with the time going on. Then a multi-subgraph partition method is invented to extract features of heterogeneous graphs. Leveraging the extracted features, a hierarchical framework is designed to learn the dynamic allocation of agents among subtasks, as well as cooperative behaviors. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms recent representative methods on two challenging tasks, i.e., SAVETHECITY and Google Research Football full game.

At Crypto 2019, Gohr first adopted the neural distinguisher for differential cryptanalysis, and since then, this work received increasing attention. However, most of the existing work focuses on improving and applying the neural distinguisher, the studies delving into the intrinsic principles of neural distinguishers are finite. At Eurocrypt 2021, Benamira et al. conducted a study on Gohr’s neural distinguisher. But for the neural distinguishers proposed later, such as the r-round neural distinguishers trained with k ciphertext pairs or ciphertext differences, denoted as NDcpk_r (Gohr’s neural distinguisher is the special NDcpk_r with K = 1) and NDcdk_r , such research is lacking. In this work, we devote ourselves to study the intrinsic principles and relationship between NDcdk_r and NDcpk_r. Firstly, we explore the working principle of NDcd1_r through a series of experiments and find that it strongly relies on the probability distribution of ciphertext differences. Its operational mechanism bears a strong resemblance to that of NDcp1_r given by Benamira et al.. Therefore, we further compare them from the perspective of differential cryptanalysis and sample features, demonstrating the superior performance of NDcp1_r can be attributed to the relationships between certain ciphertext bits, especially the significant bits. We then extend our investigation to NDcpk_r, and show that its ability to recognize samples heavily relies on the average differential probability of k ciphertext pairs and some relationships in the ciphertext itself, but the reliance between k ciphertext pairs is very weak. Finally, in light of the findings of our research, we introduce a strategy to enhance the accuracy of the neural distinguisher by using a fixed difference to generate the negative samples instead of the random one. Through the implementation of this approach, we manage to improve the accuracy of the neural distinguishers by approximately 2% to 8% for 7-round Speck32/64 and 9-round Simon32/64.

Image denoising is an indispensable process of manifold high level tasks in image processing and computer vision. However, the traditional low-rank minimization-based methods suffer from a biased problem since only the noisy observation is used to estimate the underlying clean matrix. To overcome this issue, a new low-rank minimization-based method, called nuclear norm minus Frobenius norm rank residual minimization (NFRRM), is proposed for image denoising. The propose method transforms the ill-posed image denoising problem to rank residual minimization problems through excavating the nonlocal self-similarity prior. The proposed NFRRM model can perform an accurate estimation to the underlying clean matrix through treating each rank residual component flexibly. More importantly, the global optimum of the proposed NFRRM model can be obtained in closed-form. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed NFRRM method outperforms many state-of-the-art image denoising methods.

This study investigates a two/three-dimensional (2D/3D) symbol-mapping technique that evaluates data transmission quality based on a four-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) symbol transition. Multi-dimensional symbol transition mapping facilitates the visualization of the degree of interference (ISI). The simulation and experimental results demonstrated that the 2D symbol mapping can evaluate the PAM-4 data transmission quality degraded by ISI and visualize the equalization effect. Furthermore, potential applications of 2D mapping and its extension to 3D mapping were explored.

In high-speed data communication systems, it is important to evaluate the quality of the transmitted signal at the receiver. At a high-speed data rate, the transmission line characteristics act as a high-frequency attenuator and contribute to the intersymbol interference (ISI) at the receiver. To evaluate ISI conditions, eye diagrams are widely used to analyze signal quality and visualize the ISI effect as an eye-opening rate. Various types of on-chip eye-opening monitors (EOM) have been proposed to adjust waveform-shaping circuits. However, the eye diagram evaluation of multi-valued signaling becomes more difficult than that of binary transmission because of the complicated signal transition patterns. Moreover, in severe ISI situations where the eye is completely closed, eye diagram evaluation does not work well. This paper presents a novel evaluation method using Two-dimensional(2D) symbol mapping and a linear mixture model (LMM) for multi-valued data transmission. In our proposed method, ISI evaluation can be realized by 2D symbol mapping, and an efficient quantitative analysis can be realized using the LMM. An experimental demonstration of four leveled pulse amplitude modulation(PAM-4) data transmission using a Cat5e cable 100 m is presented. The experimental results show that the proposed method can extract features of the ISI effect even though the eye is completely closed in the server condition.

Signal processing using delta-sigma modulated bit streams is reviewed, along with related topics in stochastic computing (SC). The basic signal processing circuits, adders and multipliers, are covered. In particular, the possibility of preserving the noise-shaping properties inherent in delta-sigma modulation during these operations is discussed. Finally, the root mean square error for addition and multiplication is evaluated, and the performance improvement of signal processing in the delta-sigma domain compared with SC is verified.

The development of energy-efficient neural network hardware using magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) devices has been widely investigated. One of the issues in the use of MTJ devices is large write energy. Since MTJ devices show stochastic behaviors, a large write current with enough time length is required to guarantee the certainty of the information held in MTJ devices. This paper demonstrates that quantized neural networks (QNNs) exhibit high tolerance to bit errors in weights and an output feature map. Since probabilistic switching errors in MTJ devices do not have always a serious effect on the performance of QNNs, large write energy is not required for reliable switching operations of MTJ devices. Based on the evaluation results, we achieve about 80% write-energy reduction on buffer memory compared to the conventional method. In addition, it is demonstrated that binary representation exhibits higher bit-error tolerance than the other data representations in the range of large error rates.