Ming Liu

Xiaoyu Liu, Yuxiang Wei, Ming Liu et al.

Human visual imagination usually begins with analogies or rough sketches. For example, given an image with a girl playing guitar before a building, one may analogously imagine how it seems like if Iron Man playing guitar before Pyramid in Egypt. Nonetheless, visual condition may not be precisely aligned with the imaginary result indicated by text prompt, and existing layout-controllable text-to-image (T2I) generation models is prone to producing degraded generated results with obvious artifacts. To address this issue, we present a novel T2I generation method dubbed SmartControl, which is designed to modify the rough visual conditions for adapting to text prompt. The key idea of our SmartControl is to relax the visual condition on the areas that are conflicted with text prompts. In specific, a Control Scale Predictor (CSP) is designed to identify the conflict regions and predict the local control scales, while a dataset with text prompts and rough visual conditions is constructed for training CSP. It is worth noting that, even with a limited number (e.g., 1,000~2,000) of training samples, our SmartControl can generalize well to unseen objects. Extensive experiments on four typical visual condition types clearly show the efficacy of our SmartControl against state-of-the-arts. Source code, pre-trained models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/liuxiaoyu1104/SmartControl.

Ming Liu, Zhi Xue, Xiangjian He et al.

Following the current big data trend, the scale of real-time system call traces generated by Linux applications in a contemporary data center may increase excessively. Due to the deficiency of scalability, it is challenging for traditional host-based intrusion detection systems deployed on every single host to collect, maintain, and manipulate those large-scale accumulated system call traces. It is inflexible to build data mining models on one physical host that has static computing capability and limited storage capacity. To address this issue, we propose SCADS, a corresponding solution using Apache Spark in the Google cloud environment. A set of Spark algorithms are developed to achieve the computational scalability. The experiment results demonstrate that the efficiency of intrusion detection can be enhanced, which indicates that the proposed method can apply to the design of next-generation host-based intrusion detection systems with system calls.

Ming Liu, Dongpeng Liu, Guangyu Sun et al.

Detecting inaccurate smart meters and targeting them for replacement can save significant resources. For this purpose, a novel deep-learning method was developed based on long short-term memory (LSTM) and a modified convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict electricity usage trajectories based on historical data. From the significant difference between the predicted trajectory and the observed one, the meters that cannot measure electricity accurately are located. In a case study, a proof of principle was demonstrated in detecting inaccurate meters with high accuracy for practical usage to prevent unnecessary replacement and increase the service life span of smart meters.