Ning Cai

Ning Cai, M. Junaid Khan

This paper introduces a conception that any weighted directed network topology is almost decouplable, which can help to transform the topology into a similar form being composed of uncoupled vertices, and thus reduce the complexity of analysis for networked dynamical systems. As an example of its application, the consensus problem of linear multi-agent systems with time-varying network topologies is addressed. As a result, a necessary and sufficient condition for uniform consensus is proposed.

Ning Cai

This letter deals with the controllability issue of complex networks. An index is chosen to quantitatively measure the extent of controllability of given network. The effect of this index is analyzed based on empirical studies on various classes of network topologies, such as random network, small-world network, and scale-free network.

Ning Cai, Chen Diao, M. Junaid Khan

This paper introduces a novel approach of clustering, which is based on group consensus of dynamic linear high-order multi-agent systems. The graph topology is associated with a selected multi-agent system, with each agent corresponding to one vertex. In order to reveal the cluster structure, the agents belonging to a similar cluster are expected to aggregate together. As theoretical foundation, a necessary and sufficient condition is given to check the group consensus. Two numerical instances are shown to illustrate the process of approach.

Holger Boche, Ning Cai, Yiqi Chen et al.

We compare the strong secrecy capacities of Arbitrarily Varying Wiretap Channels (AVWCs) and General Arbitrary Varying Wiretap Channels (GAVWCs) with their capacities under semantic secrecy constraint and other equivalent cryptographic secrecy constraints. It turns out that the average error and strong secrecy capacity of an AVWC is always equal to its maximal error and semantic secrecy capacity. However, this equivalence does not hold for all general communication systems, and we prove this by a counterexample. We also show that, for the GAVWC, semantic security and the other cryptographic security measures considered achieve the same capacity values. Finally, we bound the gap between the strong secrecy capacity and the semantic secrecy capacity for the GAVWC. The gap vanishes if the choice of the jammer is sub-double-exponential with respect to the block length n, which gives a sufficient condition for the strong and semantic secrecy capacities to be equal for GAVWCs.

Mingyang Li, Song Wang, Ning Cai

Rule mining in knowledge graphs enables interpretable link prediction. However, deep learning-based rule mining methods face significant memory and time challenges for large-scale knowledge graphs, whereas traditional approaches, limited by rigid confidence metrics, incur high computational costs despite sampling techniques. To address these challenges, we propose MPRM, a novel rule mining method that models rule-based inference as a Markov chain and uses an efficient confidence metric derived from aggregated path probabilities, significantly lowering computational demands. Experiments on multiple datasets show that MPRM efficiently mines knowledge graphs with over a million facts, sampling less than 1% of facts on a single CPU in 22 seconds, while preserving interpretability and boosting inference accuracy by up to 11% over baselines.

Zheng Li, Ying Huang, Defang Chen et al.

Knowledge distillation is an effective method to transfer the knowledge from the cumbersome teacher model to the lightweight student model. Online knowledge distillation uses the ensembled prediction results of multiple student models as soft targets to train each student model. However, the homogenization problem will lead to difficulty in further improving model performance. In this work, we propose a new distillation method to enhance the diversity among multiple student models. We introduce Feature Fusion Module (FFM), which improves the performance of the attention mechanism in the network by integrating rich semantic information contained in the last block of multiple student models. Furthermore, we use the Classifier Diversification(CD) loss function to strengthen the differences between the student models and deliver a better ensemble result. Extensive experiments proved that our method significantly enhances the diversity among student models and brings better distillation performance. We evaluate our method on three image classification datasets: CIFAR-10/100 and CINIC-10. The results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on these datasets.

Hai-Ying Ma, Xiao Jia, Ning Cai et al.

Adaptive guaranteed-performance consensus control problems for multi-agent systems are investigated, where the adjustable convergence speed is discussed. This paper firstly proposes a novel adaptive guaranteed-performance consensus protocol, where the communication weights can be adaptively regulated. By the state space decomposition method and the stability theory, sufficient conditions for guaranteed-performance consensus are obtained, as well as the guaranteed-performance cost. Moreover, since the convergence speed is usually adjusted by changing the algebraic connectivity in existing works, which increases the communication burden and the load of the controller, and the system topology is always given in practical applications, the lower bound of the convergence coefficient for multi-agent systems with the adaptive guaranteed-performance consensus protocol is deduced, which is linearly adjustable approximately by changing the adaptive control gain. Finally, simulation examples are introduced to demonstrate theoretical results.

Ning Cai, Chun-Lin Deng, Qiu-Xuan Wu

The non-consensus problems of high order linear time-invariant dynamical homogeneous multi-agent systems are concerned. Based on the conditions of consensus achievement, the mechanisms that lead to non-consensus motions are analyzed. Besides, a comprehensive classification for diverse types of non-consensus phases in accordance to the different conditions is conducted, which is jointly depending on the self-dynamics of agents, the interactive protocol and the graph topology. A series of numerical examples are demonstrated to illustrate the theoretical analysis.

Ning Cai, Ming He, Qiu-Xuan Wu et al.

This paper discusses the controllability problem of complex networks. It is shown that almost any weighted complex network with noise on the strength of communication links is controllable in the sense of Kalman controllability. The concept of almost controllability is elaborated by both theoretical discussions and experimental verifications.