Ning Ge

Yueshan Lin, Wei Feng, Yunfei Chen et al.

This paper investigates latency-constrained resource synergization for mission-oriented non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) in post-disaster emergency scenarios. When terrestrial infrastructures are damaged, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with edge information hubs (EIHs) are deployed to provide temporary coverage and synergize communication and computing resources for rapid situation awareness. We formulate a joint resource configuration and location optimization problem to minimize overall resource costs while guaranteeing stringent latency requirements. Through analytical derivations, we obtain closed-form optimal solutions that reveal the fundamental tradeoff between communication and computing resources, and develop a successive convex approximation method for EIH location optimization. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves approximately 20% cost reduction compared with benchmark approaches, validating its optimality and effectiveness for mission-critical emergency response applications in the sixth-generation (6G) era.

Xinran Fang, Wei Feng, Yanmin Wang et al.

In hazardous environments, sensors and actuators can be deployed to see and operate on behalf of humans, enabling safe and efficient task execution. Functioning as a neural center, the edge information hub (EIH), which integrates communication and computing capabilities, coordinates these sensors and actuators into sensing-communication-computing-control (SC3) closed loops to enable autonomous operations. From a system-level optimization perspective, this paper addresses the problem of joint sensor-actuator pairing and resource allocation across multiple SC3 closed loops. To tackle the resulting mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, we develop a learning-optimization-integrated actor-critic (LOAC) framework. In this framework, a deep neural network-based actor generates pairing candidates, while an optimization-based critic subsequently allocates communication and computing resources. The actor is then iteratively refined through feedback from the critic. Simulation results demonstrate that the LOAC framework achieves near-optimal solutions with low computational complexity, offering significant performance gains in reducing control cost.

Peng Wei, Kun Guo, Ye Li et al.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is considered a novel paradigm for computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks in fifth generation (5G) networks and beyond. However, its uncertainty, referred to as dynamic and randomness, from the mobile device, wireless channel, and edge network sides, results in high-dimensional, nonconvex, nonlinear, and NP-hard optimization problems. Thanks to the evolved reinforcement learning (RL), upon iteratively interacting with the dynamic and random environment, its trained agent can intelligently obtain the optimal policy in MEC. Furthermore, its evolved versions, such as deep RL (DRL), can achieve higher convergence speed efficiency and learning accuracy based on the parametric approximation for the large-scale state-action space. This paper provides a comprehensive research review on RL-enabled MEC and offers insight for development in this area. More importantly, associated with free mobility, dynamic channels, and distributed services, the MEC challenges that can be solved by different kinds of RL algorithms are identified, followed by how they can be solved by RL solutions in diverse mobile applications. Finally, the open challenges are discussed to provide helpful guidance for future research in RL training and learning MEC.

Zhiming Wang, Yantian Luo, Danlan Huang et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) becomes more and more popular in tackling real-world problems without ground truth of the target domain. Though tedious annotation work is not required, UDA unavoidably faces two problems: 1) how to narrow the domain discrepancy to boost the transferring performance; 2) how to improve pseudo annotation producing mechanism for self-supervised learning (SSL). In this paper, we focus on UDA for semantic segmentation task. Firstly, we introduce adversarial learning into style gap bridging mechanism to keep the style information from two domains in the similar space. Secondly, to keep the balance of pseudo labels on each category, we propose a category-adaptive threshold mechanism to choose category-wise pseudo labels for SSL. The experiments are conducted using GTA5 as the source domain, Cityscapes as the target domain. The results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-arts with a noticeable gain on cross-domain adaptation tasks.

Ning Ge, Guanghao Li, Li Zhang et al.

Data protection across organizations is limiting the application of centralized learning (CL) techniques. Federated learning (FL) enables multiple participants to build a learning model without sharing data. Nevertheless, there are very few research works on FL in intelligent manufacturing. This paper presents the results of an empirical study on failure prediction in the production line based on FL. This paper (1) designs Federated Support Vector Machine (FedSVM) and Federated Random Forest (FedRF) algorithms for the horizontal FL and vertical FL scenarios, respectively; (2) proposes an experiment process for evaluating the effectiveness between the FL and CL algorithms; (3) finds that the performance of FL and CL are not significantly different on the global testing data, on the random partial testing data, and on the estimated unknown Bosch data, respectively. The fact that the testing data is heterogeneous enhances our findings. Our study reveals that FL can replace CL for failure prediction.

Yi Liu, Li Zhang, Ning Ge et al.

As an emerging technique, Federated Learning (FL) can jointly train a global model with the data remaining locally, which effectively solves the problem of data privacy protection through the encryption mechanism. The clients train their local model, and the server aggregates models until convergence. In this process, the server uses an incentive mechanism to encourage clients to contribute high-quality and large-volume data to improve the global model. Although some works have applied FL to the Internet of Things (IoT), medicine, manufacturing, etc., the application of FL is still in its infancy, and many related issues need to be solved. Improving the quality of FL models is one of the current research hotspots and challenging tasks. This paper systematically reviews and objectively analyzes the approaches to improving the quality of FL models. We are also interested in the research and application trends of FL and the effect comparison between FL and non-FL because the practitioners usually worry that achieving privacy protection needs compromising learning quality. We use a systematic review method to analyze 147 latest articles related to FL. This review provides useful information and insights to both academia and practitioners from the industry. We investigate research questions about academic research and industrial application trends of FL, essential factors affecting the quality of FL models, and compare FL and non-FL algorithms in terms of learning quality. Based on our review's conclusion, we give some suggestions for improving the FL model quality. Finally, we propose an FL application framework for practitioners.

Hongxin Wei, Wei Feng, Yunfei Chen et al.

Due to the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), a massive number of devices are connected to the Internet. For these distributed devices in IoT networks, how to ensure their security and privacy becomes a significant challenge. The blockchain technology provides a promising solution to protect the data integrity, provenance, privacy, and consistency for IoT networks. In blockchains, communication is a prerequisite for participants, which are distributed in the system, to reach consensus. However, in IoT networks, most of the devices communicate through wireless links, which are not always reliable. Hence, the communication reliability of IoT devices influences the system security. In this article, we rethink the roles of communication and computing in blockchains by accounting for communication reliability. We analyze the tradeoff between communication reliability and computing power in blockchain security, and present a lower bound to the computing power that is needed to conduct an attack with a given communication reliability. Simulation results show that adversarial nodes can succeed in tampering a block with less computing power by hindering the propagation of blocks from other nodes.

Ning Ge, Marc Pantel, Xavier Crégut

Automated fault localization is an important issue in model validation and verification. It helps the end users in analyzing the origin of failure. In this work, we show the early experiments with probabilistic analysis approaches in fault localization. Inspired by the Kullback-Leibler Divergence from Bayesian probabilistic theory, we propose a suspiciousness factor to compute the fault contribution for the transitions in the reachability graph of model checking, using which to rank the potential faulty transitions. To automatically locate design faults in the simulation model of detailed design, we propose to use the statistical model Hidden Markov Model (HMM), which provides statistically identical information to component's real behavior. The core of this method is a fault localization algorithm that gives out the set of suspicious ranked faulty components and a backward algorithm that computes the matching degree between the HMM and the simulation model to evaluate the confidence degree of the localization conclusion.

Ning Ge, Arnaud Dieumegard, Eric Jenn et al.

This work addresses the correct translation of an Event-B model to C code via an intermediate formal language, HLL. The proof of correctness follows two main steps. First, the final refinement of the Event-B model, including invariants, is translated to HLL. At that point, additional properties (e.g., deadlock-freeness, liveness properties, etc.) are added to the HLL model. The proof of the invariants and additional properties at the HLL level guarantees the correctness of the translation. Second, the C code is automatically generated from the HLL model for most of the system functions and manually for the remaining ones; in this case, the HLL model provides formal contracts to the software developer. An equivalence proof between the C code and the HLL model guarantees the correctness of the code.