Bo Wei

Kasidis Arunruangsirilert, Bo Wei, Hang Song et al.

While the rollout of the fifth-generation mobile network (5G) is underway across the globe with the intention to deliver 4K/8K UHD videos, Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR) content to the mass amounts of users, the coverage and throughput are still one of the most significant issues, especially in the rural areas, where only 5G in the low-frequency band are being deployed. This called for a high-performance adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithm that can maximize the user quality of experience given 5G network characteristics and data rate of UHD contents. Recently, many of the newly proposed ABR techniques were machine-learning based. Among that, Pensieve is one of the state-of-the-art techniques, which utilized reinforcement-learning to generate an ABR algorithm based on observation of past decision performance. By incorporating the context of the 5G network and UHD content, Pensieve has been optimized into Pensieve 5G. New QoE metrics that more accurately represent the QoE of UHD video streaming on the different types of devices were proposed and used to evaluate Pensieve 5G against other ABR techniques including the original Pensieve. The results from the simulation based on the real 5G Standalone (SA) network throughput shows that Pensieve 5G outperforms both conventional algorithms and Pensieve with the average QoE improvement of 8.8% and 14.2%, respectively. Additionally, Pensieve 5G also performed well on the commercial 5G NR-NR Dual Connectivity (NR-DC) Network, despite the training being done solely using the data from the 5G Standalone (SA) network.

Alam Noor, Kai Li, Eduardo Tovar et al.

Recognizing unauthorized Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) within designated no-fly zones throughout the day and night is of paramount importance, where the unauthorized UAVs pose a substantial threat to both civil and military aviation safety. However, recognizing UAVs day and night with dual-vision cameras is nontrivial, since red-green-blue (RGB) images suffer from a low detection rate under an insufficient light condition, such as on cloudy or stormy days, while black-and-white infrared (IR) images struggle to capture UAVs that overlap with the background at night. In this paper, we propose a new optical flow-assisted graph-pooling residual network (OF-GPRN), which significantly enhances the UAV detection rate in day and night dual visions. The proposed OF-GPRN develops a new optical fusion to remove superfluous backgrounds, which improves RGB/IR imaging clarity. Furthermore, OF-GPRN extends optical fusion by incorporating a graph residual split attention network and a feature pyramid, which refines the perception of UAVs, leading to a higher success rate in UAV detection. A comprehensive performance evaluation is conducted using a benchmark UAV catch dataset. The results indicate that the proposed OF-GPRN elevates the UAV mean average precision (mAP) detection rate to 87.8%, marking a 17.9% advancement compared to the residual graph neural network (ResGCN)-based approach.

Rebeen Ali Hamad, Wai Lok Woo, Bo Wei et al.

Human activity recognition (HAR) is an essential research field that has been used in different applications including home and workplace automation, security and surveillance as well as healthcare. Starting from conventional machine learning methods to the recently developing deep learning techniques and the Internet of things, significant contributions have been shown in the HAR area in the last decade. Even though several review and survey studies have been published, there is a lack of sensor-based HAR overview studies focusing on summarising the usage of wearable sensors and smart home sensors data as well as applications of HAR and deep learning techniques. Hence, we overview sensor-based HAR, discuss several important applications that rely on HAR, and highlight the most common machine learning methods that have been used for HAR. Finally, several challenges of HAR are explored that should be addressed to further improve the robustness of HAR.

Shiqi Liu, Hang Song, Bo Wei et al.

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is considered as a key component of future 6G technologies, especially in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands. Recently, the performances of ISAC were experimentally evaluated and demonstrated in various scenarios by developing ISAC systems. These systems generally consist of coherent transmitting (Tx) and receiving (Rx) modules. However, actively transmitting radio waves for experiments is not easy due to regulatory restrictions of radio. Meanwhile, the Tx/Rx should be synchronized and Rx need the information of Tx. In this paper, a fully passive mmWave sensing system is developed with software-defined radio for blind ISAC. It only consists of a passive Rx module which does not depend on the Tx. Since the proposed system is not synchronized with Tx and has no knowledge of the transmitted signals, a differential structure with two oppositely-oriented receivers is introduced to realize the sensing function. This structure can mitigate the influences of unknown source signals and other distortions. With the proposed sensing system, the ambient mmWave communication signals are leveraged for sensing without interrupting the existing systems. It can be deployed for field applications such as signal detection and dynamic human activity recognition since it does not emit signals. The efficacy of the developed system is first verified with a metallic plate with known motion pattern. The measured Doppler spectrogram shows good agreement with the simulation results, demonstrating the correctness of the sensing results. Further, the system is evaluated in complex scenarios, including handwaving, single- and multi-person motion detection. The sensing results successfully reflect the corresponding motions, demonstrating that the proposed sensing system can be utilized for blind ISAC in various applications.

Zirui Wang, Xianhui Lin, Yi Dong et al.

Face restoration under complex degradations still remains an ill-posed inverse problem due to severe information loss. Although diffusion models benefit from strong generative priors, most methods still condition only on low-quality inputs, making it difficult to recover identity-critical details under heavy degradations. In this work, we propose HDRFace, a High-Dimensional Representation conditioned Face restoration framework that injects semantically rich priors into the conditional flow without modifying the generative backbone. Our pipeline first obtains a structurally reliable intermediate restoration with an off-the-shelf restorer, then uses a pretrained high-dimensional feature encoder to extract fine-grained facial representations from both the low-quality input and the intermediate result, and injects them as additional conditions for generation. We further introduce SDFM, a Structure-Detail aware adaptive Fusion Mechanism that emphasizes global constraints during structure modeling and strengthens representation guidance during detail synthesis, balancing structural consistency and detail fidelity. To validate the generalization ability of our method, we implement the proposed framework on two generative models, SD V2.1-base and Qwen-Image, and consistently observe stable and coherent performance gains across different architectures.

Rui Sun, Yumin Zhang, Tejal Shah et al.

With impressive achievements made, artificial intelligence is on the path forward to artificial general intelligence. Sora, developed by OpenAI, which is capable of minute-level world-simulative abilities can be considered as a milestone on this developmental path. However, despite its notable successes, Sora still encounters various obstacles that need to be resolved. In this survey, we embark from the perspective of disassembling Sora in text-to-video generation, and conducting a comprehensive review of literature, trying to answer the question, \textit{From Sora What We Can See}. Specifically, after basic preliminaries regarding the general algorithms are introduced, the literature is categorized from three mutually perpendicular dimensions: evolutionary generators, excellent pursuit, and realistic panorama. Subsequently, the widely used datasets and metrics are organized in detail. Last but more importantly, we identify several challenges and open problems in this domain and propose potential future directions for research and development.

Yumin Zhang, Xingyu Miao, Haoran Duan et al.

Text-to-3D content creation is a rapidly evolving research area. Given the scarcity of 3D data, current approaches often adapt pre-trained 2D diffusion models for 3D synthesis. Among these approaches, Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) has been widely adopted. However, the issue of over-smoothing poses a significant limitation on the high-fidelity generation of 3D models. To address this challenge, LucidDreamer replaces the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) in SDS with the Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) to construct Interval Score Matching (ISM). However, ISM inevitably inherits inconsistencies from DDIM, causing reconstruction errors during the DDIM inversion process. This results in poor performance in the detailed generation of 3D objects and loss of content. To alleviate these problems, we propose a novel method named Exact Score Matching (ESM). Specifically, ESM leverages auxiliary variables to mathematically guarantee exact recovery in the DDIM reverse process. Furthermore, to effectively capture the dynamic changes of the original and auxiliary variables, the LoRA of a pre-trained diffusion model implements these exact paths. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ESM in text-to-3D generation, particularly highlighting its superiority in detailed generation.

Yumin Zhang, Yan Gao, Haoran Duan et al.

Transformer-based foundation models (FMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable performance in medical image segmentation. However, scaling these models is challenging due to the limited size of medical image datasets within isolated hospitals, where data centralization is restricted due to privacy concerns. These constraints, combined with the data-intensive nature of FMs, hinder their broader application. Integrating federated learning (FL) with foundation models (FLFM) fine-tuning offers a potential solution to these challenges by enabling collaborative model training without data sharing, thus allowing FMs to take advantage of a diverse pool of sensitive medical image data across hospitals/clients. However, non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data among clients, paired with computational and communication constraints in federated environments, presents an additional challenge that limits further performance improvements and remains inadequately addressed in existing studies. In this work, we propose a novel FLFM fine-tuning framework, \underline{\textbf{Fed}}erated tuning with \underline{\textbf{S}}imilarity-guided \underline{\textbf{C}}ollaborative \underline{\textbf{A}}ggregation (FedSCA), encompassing all phases of the FL process. This includes (1) specially designed parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for local client training to enhance computational efficiency; (2) partial low-level adapter transmission for communication efficiency; and (3) similarity-guided collaborative aggregation (SGCA) on the server side to address non-IID issues. Extensive experiments on three FL benchmarks for medical image segmentation demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed FedSCA, establishing new SOTA performance.

Rui Sun, Yumin Zhang, Varun Ojha et al.

We propose Exemplar-Condensed federated class-incremental learning (ECoral) to distil the training characteristics of real images from streaming data into informative rehearsal exemplars. The proposed method eliminates the limitations of exemplar selection in replay-based approaches for mitigating catastrophic forgetting in federated continual learning (FCL). The limitations particularly related to the heterogeneity of information density of each summarized data. Our approach maintains the consistency of training gradients and the relationship to past tasks for the summarized exemplars to represent the streaming data compared to the original images effectively. Additionally, our approach reduces the information-level heterogeneity of the summarized data by inter-client sharing of the disentanglement generative model. Extensive experiments show that our ECoral outperforms several state-of-the-art methods and can be seamlessly integrated with many existing approaches to enhance performance.

Bo Wei, Hang Song, Jiro Katto

With the dramatically increasing video streaming in the total network traffic, it is critical to develop effective algorithms to promote the content delivery service of high quality. Adaptive bitrate (ABR) control is the most essential technique which determines the proper bitrate to be chosen based on network conditions, thus realize high-quality video streaming. In this paper, a novel ABR strategy is proposed based on Ising machine by using the quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) method and Digital Annealer (DA) for the first time. The proposed method is evaluated by simulation with the real-world measured throughput, and compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Experiment results show that the proposed QUBO-based method can outperform the existing methods, which demonstrating the superior of the proposed QUBO-based method.

Bo Wei, Mulin Chen, Qi Wang et al.

Crowd counting is a task worth exploring in modern society because of its wide applications such as public safety and video monitoring. Many CNN-based approaches have been proposed to improve the accuracy of estimation, but there are some inherent issues affect the performance, such as overfitting and details lost caused by pooling layers. To tackle these problems, in this paper, we propose an effective network called MDSNet, which introduces a novel supervision framework called Multi-channel Deep Supervision (MDS). The MDS conducts channel-wise supervision on the decoder of the estimation model to help generate the density maps. To obtain the accurate supervision information of different channels, the MDSNet employs an auxiliary network called SupervisionNet (SN) to generate abundant supervision maps based on existing groundtruth. Besides the traditional density map supervision, we also use the SN to convert the dot annotations into continuous supervision information and conduct dot supervision in the MDSNet. Extensive experiments on several mainstream benchmarks show that the proposed MDSNet achieves competitive results and the MDS significantly improves the performance without changing the network structure.

Weitao Xu, Zhenjiang Li, Wanli Xue et al.

Secure Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is becoming increasingly important with the ever-growing number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in our daily life. To achieve secure D2D communication, the key agreement between different IoT devices without any prior knowledge is becoming desirable. Although various approaches have been proposed in the literature, they suffer from a number of limitations, such as low key generation rate and short pairing distance. In this paper, we present InaudibleKey, an inaudible acoustic signal-based key generation protocol for mobile devices. Based on acoustic channel reciprocity, InaudibleKey exploits the acoustic channel frequency response of two legitimate devices as a common secret to generating keys. InaudibleKey employs several novel technologies to significantly improve its performance. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed system in different real environments. Compared to state-of-the-art works, InaudibleKey improves key generation rate by 3-145 times, extends pairing distance by 3.2-44 times, and reduces information reconciliation counts by 2.5-16 times. Security analysis demonstrates that InaudibleKey is resilient to a number of malicious attacks. We also implement InaudibleKey on modern smartphones and resource-limited IoT devices. Results show that it is energy-efficient and can run on both powerful and resource-limited IoT devices without incurring excessive resource consumption.

Weitao Xu, Xiang Zhang, Lina Yao et al.

Automatic identification of animal species by their vocalization is an important and challenging task. Although many kinds of audio monitoring system have been proposed in the literature, they suffer from several disadvantages such as non-trivial feature selection, accuracy degradation because of environmental noise or intensive local computation. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based acoustic classification framework for Wireless Acoustic Sensor Network (WASN). The proposed framework is based on cloud architecture which relaxes the computational burden on the wireless sensor node. To improve the recognition accuracy, we design a multi-view Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to extract the short-, middle-, and long-term dependencies in parallel. The evaluation on two real datasets shows that the proposed architecture can achieve high accuracy and outperforms traditional classification systems significantly when the environmental noise dominate the audio signal (low SNR). Moreover, we implement and deploy the proposed system on a testbed and analyse the system performance in real-world environments. Both simulation and real-world evaluation demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed acoustic classification system in distinguishing species of animals.

Chidimma Opara, Bo Wei, Yingke Chen

Recently, the development and implementation of phishing attacks require little technical skills and costs. This uprising has led to an ever-growing number of phishing attacks on the World Wide Web. Consequently, proactive techniques to fight phishing attacks have become extremely necessary. In this paper, we propose HTMLPhish, a deep learning based data-driven end-to-end automatic phishing web page classification approach. Specifically, HTMLPhish receives the content of the HTML document of a web page and employs Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to learn the semantic dependencies in the textual contents of the HTML. The CNNs learn appropriate feature representations from the HTML document embeddings without extensive manual feature engineering. Furthermore, our proposed approach of the concatenation of the word and character embeddings allows our model to manage new features and ensure easy extrapolation to test data. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a dataset of more than 50,000 HTML documents that provides a distribution of phishing to benign web pages obtainable in the real-world that yields over 93 percent Accuracy and True Positive Rate. Also, HTMLPhish is a completely language-independent and client-side strategy which can, therefore, conduct web page phishing detection regardless of the textual language.