Liuqing Yang

Yufei Ye, Shijian Gao, Xinhu Zheng et al.

Nowadays, the convergence of mobile edge computing (MEC) and vehicular networks has emerged as a vital enabler for the ever-increasing intelligent onboard applications. This paper proposes a multi-tier task offloading mechanism for MEC-enabled vehicular networks leveraging vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. The study focuses on applications with sequential subtasks and explores the collaboration of two tiers. In the Vehicle Tier, the requesting vehicle (RV)-service vehicle (SV) matching scheme and the inter-vehicle collaborative computation are studied, with joint optimization of task offloading decision, communication, and computing resource allocation to minimize energy consumption while satisfying delay requirements. In the Roadside Unit (RSU) Tier, collaboration among RSUs is investigated to further address multi-access issues of uplink subchannels and computing resources for serving unmatched RVs. To tackle this intricate problem, a layered optimization framework is first proposed to obtain task offloading decisions and optimal continuous resource allocation, after which a subchannel allocation scheme is designed to recover the discrete solution with low complexity. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the proposed method reduces average energy consumption by at least 15% compared with recent utility maximization and energy cost minimization benchmarks under varying task delay requirements and vehicle scales.

Lixia Wu, Haomin Wen, Haoyuan Hu et al.

Real-world last-mile delivery datasets are crucial for research in logistics, supply chain management, and spatio-temporal data mining. Despite a plethora of algorithms developed to date, no widely accepted, publicly available last-mile delivery dataset exists to support research in this field. In this paper, we introduce \texttt{LaDe}, the first publicly available last-mile delivery dataset with millions of packages from the industry. LaDe has three unique characteristics: (1) Large-scale. It involves 10,677k packages of 21k couriers over 6 months of real-world operation. (2) Comprehensive information. It offers original package information, such as its location and time requirements, as well as task-event information, which records when and where the courier is while events such as task-accept and task-finish events happen. (3) Diversity. The dataset includes data from various scenarios, including package pick-up and delivery, and from multiple cities, each with its unique spatio-temporal patterns due to their distinct characteristics such as populations. We verify LaDe on three tasks by running several classical baseline models per task. We believe that the large-scale, comprehensive, diverse feature of LaDe can offer unparalleled opportunities to researchers in the supply chain community, data mining community, and beyond. The dataset homepage is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Cainiao-AI/LaDe.

Rongqing Zhang, Xiang Cheng, Liuqing Yang

In this paper, we investigate flexible power transfer among electric vehicles (EVs) from a cooperative perspective in an EV system. First, the concept of cooperative EV-to-EV (V2V) charging is introduced, which enables active cooperation via charging/discharging operations between EVs as energy consumers and EVs as energy providers. Then, based on the cooperative V2V charging concept, a flexible energy management protocol with different V2V matching algorithms is proposed, which can help the EVs achieve more flexible and smarter charging/discharging behaviors. In the proposed energy management protocol, we define the utilities of the EVs based on the cost and profit through cooperative V2V charging and employ the bipartite graph to model the charging/discharging cooperation between EVs as energy consumers and EVs as energy providers. Based on the constructed bipartite graph, a max-weight V2V matching algorithm is proposed in order to optimize the network social welfare. Moreover, taking individual rationality into consideration, we further introduce the stable matching concepts and propose two stable V2V matching algorithms, which can yield the EV-consumer-optimal and EV-provider-optimal stable V2V matchings, respectively. Simulation results verify the efficiency of our proposed cooperative V2V charging based energy management protocol in improving the EV utilities and the network social welfare as well as reducing the energy consumption of the EVs.

Zonghui Yang, Shijian Gao, Xiang Cheng et al.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology is vital for vehicular networks, yet the time-varying communication channels and rapid movement of targets present significant challenges for real-time precoding design. Traditional optimization-based methods are computationally complex and depend on perfect prior information, which is often unavailable in double-dynamic scenarios. In this paper, we propose a synesthesia of machine (SoM)-enhanced precoding paradigm that leverages modalities such as positioning and channel information to adapt to these dynamics. Utilizing a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, our approach pushes ISAC performance boundaries. We also introduce a parameter-shared actor-critic architecture to accelerate training in complex state and action spaces. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our method over existing approaches.

Zhide Zhong, Junfeng Li, Junjie He et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map visual observations and language instructions directly to robotic actions. While effective for simple tasks, standard VLA models often struggle with complex, multi-step tasks requiring logical planning, as well as precise manipulations demanding fine-grained spatial perception. Recent efforts have incorporated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to endow VLA models with a ``thinking before acting'' capability. However, current CoT-based VLA models face two critical limitations: 1) an inability to simultaneously capture low-level visual details and high-level logical planning due to their reliance on isolated, single-modal CoT; 2) high inference latency with compounding errors caused by step-by-step autoregressive decoding. To address these limitations, we propose DualCoT-VLA, a visual-linguistic CoT method for VLA models with a parallel reasoning mechanism. To achieve comprehensive multi-modal reasoning, our method integrates a visual CoT for low-level spatial understanding and a linguistic CoT for high-level task planning. Furthermore, to overcome the latency bottleneck, we introduce a parallel CoT mechanism that incorporates two sets of learnable query tokens, shifting autoregressive reasoning to single-step forward reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DualCoT-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on the LIBERO and RoboCasa GR1 benchmarks, as well as in real-world platforms.

Liuqing Yang, Yongdao Zhou, Haoda Fu et al.

Shapley value is originally a concept in econometrics to fairly distribute both gains and costs to players in a coalition game. In the recent decades, its application has been extended to other areas such as marketing, engineering and machine learning. For example, it produces reasonable solutions for problems in sensitivity analysis, local model explanation towards the interpretable machine learning, node importance in social network, attribution models, etc. However, its heavy computational burden has been long recognized but rarely investigated. Specifically, in a $d$-player coalition game, calculating a Shapley value requires the evaluation of $d!$ or $2^d$ marginal contribution values, depending on whether we are taking the permutation or combination formulation of the Shapley value. Hence it becomes infeasible to calculate the Shapley value when $d$ is reasonably large. A common remedy is to take a random sample of the permutations to surrogate for the complete list of permutations. We find an advanced sampling scheme can be designed to yield much more accurate estimation of the Shapley value than the simple random sampling (SRS). Our sampling scheme is based on combinatorial structures in the field of design of experiments (DOE), particularly the order-of-addition experimental designs for the study of how the orderings of components would affect the output. We show that the obtained estimates are unbiased, and can sometimes deterministically recover the original Shapley value. Both theoretical and simulations results show that our DOE-based sampling scheme outperforms SRS in terms of estimation accuracy. Surprisingly, it is also slightly faster than SRS. Lastly, real data analysis is conducted for the C. elegans nervous system and the 9/11 terrorist network.

Xiao-Yang Liu, Jingyang Rui, Jiechao Gao et al.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown huge potentials in building financial market simulators recently. However, due to the highly complex and dynamic nature of real-world markets, raw historical financial data often involve large noise and may not reflect the future of markets, degrading the fidelity of DRL-based market simulators. Moreover, the accuracy of DRL-based market simulators heavily relies on numerous and diverse DRL agents, which increases demand for a universe of market environments and imposes a challenge on simulation speed. In this paper, we present a FinRL-Meta framework that builds a universe of market environments for data-driven financial reinforcement learning. First, FinRL-Meta separates financial data processing from the design pipeline of DRL-based strategy and provides open-source data engineering tools for financial big data. Second, FinRL-Meta provides hundreds of market environments for various trading tasks. Third, FinRL-Meta enables multiprocessing simulation and training by exploiting thousands of GPU cores. Our codes are available online at https://github.com/AI4Finance-Foundation/FinRL-Meta.

Xiao-Yang Liu, Hongyang Yang, Qian Chen et al.

As deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been recognized as an effective approach in quantitative finance, getting hands-on experiences is attractive to beginners. However, to train a practical DRL trading agent that decides where to trade, at what price, and what quantity involves error-prone and arduous development and debugging. In this paper, we introduce a DRL library FinRL that facilitates beginners to expose themselves to quantitative finance and to develop their own stock trading strategies. Along with easily-reproducible tutorials, FinRL library allows users to streamline their own developments and to compare with existing schemes easily. Within FinRL, virtual environments are configured with stock market datasets, trading agents are trained with neural networks, and extensive backtesting is analyzed via trading performance. Moreover, it incorporates important trading constraints such as transaction cost, market liquidity and the investor's degree of risk-aversion. FinRL is featured with completeness, hands-on tutorial and reproducibility that favors beginners: (i) at multiple levels of time granularity, FinRL simulates trading environments across various stock markets, including NASDAQ-100, DJIA, S&P 500, HSI, SSE 50, and CSI 300; (ii) organized in a layered architecture with modular structure, FinRL provides fine-tuned state-of-the-art DRL algorithms (DQN, DDPG, PPO, SAC, A2C, TD3, etc.), commonly-used reward functions and standard evaluation baselines to alleviate the debugging workloads and promote the reproducibility, and (iii) being highly extendable, FinRL reserves a complete set of user-import interfaces. Furthermore, we incorporated three application demonstrations, namely single stock trading, multiple stock trading, and portfolio allocation. The FinRL library will be available on Github at link https://github.com/AI4Finance-LLC/FinRL-Library.

Yufei Ye, Shijian Gao, Xinhu Zheng et al.

In the context of 6G ubiquitous connectivity, the space-air-ground-sea integrated network (SAGSIN) emerges as a new paradigm to provide critical services for resource-limited ocean environments. To realize this paradigm efficiently, we propose an innovative dynamic task and resource scheduling approach for green SAGSIN that delivers computing support for vessels while minimizing overall task execution delay. To address the challenge of multi-layer task scheduling, a layer-wise task offloading algorithm is developed specifically for SAGSIN. It adapts to real-time, multi-dimensional system dynamics and integrates an anticipatory handover strategy that adaptively controls the amount of data offloaded to the satellite, thereby preventing post-handover congestion while improving satellite resource utilization. Furthermore, the bandwidth allocation of uncrewed aerial vehicles and base station, UAV trajectories, and computing resource allocation are jointly optimized to enhance connectivity among low-altitude devices and facilitate demand-driven resource allocation for green network development. Simulation results verify that the proposed method better adapts to dynamic system resources and achieves at least a 23% reduction in average task delay compared with benchmarks.

Wenlihan Lu, Shijian Gao, Miaowen Wen et al.

With the emergence of the low-altitude economy, radio maps have become essential for ensuring reliable wireless connectivity to aerial platforms. Autonomous aerial agents are commonly deployed for data collection using waypoint-based navigation; however, their limited battery capacity significantly constrains coverage and efficiency. To address this, we propose an uncertainty-aware radio map (URAM) reconstruction framework that explicitly leverages graph-based reasoning tailored for waypoint navigation. Our approach integrates two key deep learning components: (1) a Bayesian neural network that estimates spatial uncertainty in real time, and (2) an attention-based reinforcement learning policy that performs global reasoning over a probabilistic roadmap, using uncertainty estimates to plan informative and energy-efficient trajectories. This graph-based reasoning enables intelligent, non-myopic trajectory planning, guiding agents toward the most informative regions while satisfying safety constraints. Experimental results show that URAM improves reconstruction accuracy by up to 34% over existing baselines.

Zonghui Yang, Shijian Gao, Xiang Cheng et al.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) within sub-THz frequencies is crucial for future air-ground networks, but unique propagation characteristics and hardware limitations present challenges in optimizing ISAC performance while increasing operational latency. This paper introduces a multi-modal sensing fusion framework inspired by synesthesia of machine (SoM) to enhance sub-THz ISAC transmission. By exploiting inherent degrees of freedom in sub-THz hardware and channels, the framework optimizes the radio-frequency environment. Squint-aware beam management is developed to improve air-ground network adaptability, enabling three-dimensional dynamic ISAC links. Leveraging multi-modal information, the framework enhances ISAC performance and reduces latency. Visual data rapidly localizes users and targets, while a customized multi-modal learning algorithm optimizes the hybrid precoder. A new metric provides comprehensive performance evaluation, and extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves ISAC efficiency.

Dongrui Wu, Jiaxin Xu, Weili Fang et al.

Physiological computing uses human physiological data as system inputs in real time. It includes, or significantly overlaps with, brain-computer interfaces, affective computing, adaptive automation, health informatics, and physiological signal based biometrics. Physiological computing increases the communication bandwidth from the user to the computer, but is also subject to various types of adversarial attacks, in which the attacker deliberately manipulates the training and/or test examples to hijack the machine learning algorithm output, leading to possible user confusion, frustration, injury, or even death. However, the vulnerability of physiological computing systems has not been paid enough attention to, and there does not exist a comprehensive review on adversarial attacks to them. This paper fills this gap, by providing a systematic review on the main research areas of physiological computing, different types of adversarial attacks and their applications to physiological computing, and the corresponding defense strategies. We hope this review will attract more research interests on the vulnerability of physiological computing systems, and more importantly, defense strategies to make them more secure.

Xinyi Li, Yinchuan Li, Hongyang Yang et al.

Stock price prediction is important for value investments in the stock market. In particular, short-term prediction that exploits financial news articles is promising in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network DP-LSTM for stock price prediction, which incorporates the news articles as hidden information and integrates difference news sources through the differential privacy mechanism. First, based on the autoregressive moving average model (ARMA), a sentiment-ARMA is formulated by taking into consideration the information of financial news articles in the model. Then, an LSTM-based deep neural network is designed, which consists of three components: LSTM, VADER model and differential privacy (DP) mechanism. The proposed DP-LSTM scheme can reduce prediction errors and increase the robustness. Extensive experiments on S&P 500 stocks show that (i) the proposed DP-LSTM achieves 0.32% improvement in mean MPA of prediction result, and (ii) for the prediction of the market index S&P 500, we achieve up to 65.79% improvement in MSE.