Jun Luo

Bo Yang, Xinyu Zhang, Jian Zhang et al.

Single-frame infrared small target detection is considered to be a challenging task, due to the extreme imbalance between target and background, bounding box regression is extremely sensitive to infrared small target, and target information is easy to lose in the high-level semantic layer. In this article, we propose an enhancing feature learning network (EFLNet) to address these problems. First, we notice that there is an extremely imbalance between the target and the background in the infrared image, which makes the model pay more attention to the background features rather than target features. To address this problem, we propose a new adaptive threshold focal loss (ATFL) function that decouples the target and the background, and utilizes the adaptive mechanism to adjust the loss weight to force the model to allocate more attention to target features. Second, we introduce the normalized Gaussian Wasserstein distance (NWD) to alleviate the difficulty of convergence caused by the extreme sensitivity of the bounding box regression to infrared small target. Finally, we incorporate a dynamic head mechanism into the network to enable adaptive learning of the relative importance of each semantic layer. Experimental results demonstrate our method can achieve better performance in the detection performance of infrared small target compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep-learning-based methods. The source codes and bounding box annotated datasets are available at https://github.com/YangBo0411/infrared-small-target.

Elmira Amirloo, Amir Rasouli, Peter Lakner et al.

Multi-agent trajectory prediction is a fundamental problem in autonomous driving. The key challenges in prediction are accurately anticipating the behavior of surrounding agents and understanding the scene context. To address these problems, we propose LatentFormer, a transformer-based model for predicting future vehicle trajectories. The proposed method leverages a novel technique for modeling interactions among dynamic objects in the scene. Contrary to many existing approaches which model cross-agent interactions during the observation time, our method additionally exploits the future states of the agents. This is accomplished using a hierarchical attention mechanism where the evolving states of the agents autoregressively control the contributions of past trajectories and scene encodings in the final prediction. Furthermore, we propose a multi-resolution map encoding scheme that relies on a vision transformer module to effectively capture both local and global scene context to guide the generation of more admissible future trajectories. We evaluate the proposed method on the nuScenes benchmark dataset and show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and improves upon trajectory metrics by up to 40%. We further investigate the contributions of various components of the proposed technique via extensive ablation studies.

Weiwei Zhuang, Wangze Xie, Qi Zhang et al.

Adversarial attacks pose a severe threat to the reliability of deep learning models in remote sensing (RS) image classification. Most existing methods rely on direct pixel-wise perturbations, failing to exploit the inherent atmospheric characteristics of RS imagery or survive real-world image degradations. In this paper, we propose FogFool, a physically plausible adversarial framework that generates fog-based perturbations by iteratively optimizing atmospheric patterns based on Perlin noise. By modeling fog formations with natural, irregular structures, FogFool generates adversarial examples that are not only visually consistent with authentic RS scenes but also deceptive. By leveraging the spatial coherence and mid-to-low-frequency nature of atmospheric phenomena, FogFool embeds adversarial information into structural features shared across diverse architectures. Extensive experiments on two benchmark RS datasets demonstrate that FogFool achieves superior performance: not only does it exceed in white-box settings, but also exhibits exceptional black-box transferability (reaching 83.74% TASR) and robustness against common preprocessing-based defenses such as JPEG compression and filtering. Detailed analyses, including confusion matrices and Class Activation Map (CAM) visualizations, reveal that our atmospheric-driven perturbations induce a universal shift in model attention. These results indicate that FogFool represents a practical, stealthy, and highly persistent threat to RS classification systems, providing a robust benchmark for evaluating model reliability in complex environments.

Zheng Lin, Wei Wei, Zhe Chen et al.

As AI models expand in size, it has become increasingly challenging to deploy federated learning (FL) on resource-constrained edge devices. To tackle this issue, split federated learning (SFL) has emerged as an FL framework with reduced workload on edge devices via model splitting; it has received extensive attention from the research community in recent years. Nevertheless, most prior works on SFL focus only on a two-tier architecture without harnessing multi-tier cloudedge computing resources. In this paper, we intend to analyze and optimize the learning performance of SFL under multi-tier systems. Specifically, we propose the hierarchical SFL (HSFL) framework and derive its convergence bound. Based on the theoretical results, we formulate a joint optimization problem for model splitting (MS) and model aggregation (MA). To solve this rather hard problem, we then decompose it into MS and MA subproblems that can be solved via an iterative descending algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the tailored algorithm can effectively optimize MS and MA for SFL within virtually any multi-tier system.

Xianliang Li, Jun Luo, Zhiwei Zheng et al.

Momentum-based optimizers are widely adopted for training neural networks. However, the optimal selection of momentum coefficients remains elusive. This uncertainty impedes a clear understanding of the role of momentum in stochastic gradient methods. In this paper, we present a frequency domain analysis framework that interprets the momentum method as a time-variant filter for gradients, where adjustments to momentum coefficients modify the filter characteristics. Our experiments support this perspective and provide a deeper understanding of the mechanism involved. Moreover, our analysis reveals the following significant findings: high-frequency gradient components are undesired in the late stages of training; preserving the original gradient in the early stages, and gradually amplifying low-frequency gradient components during training both enhance performance. Based on these insights, we propose Frequency Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum (FSGDM), a heuristic optimizer that dynamically adjusts the momentum filtering characteristic with an empirically effective dynamic magnitude response. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of FSGDM over conventional momentum optimizers.

Jingzhi Hu, Xin Li, Zhou Su et al.

In wireless networks with integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), edge intelligence (EI) is expected to be developed at edge devices (ED) for sensing user activities based on channel state information (CSI). However, due to the CSI being highly specific to users' characteristics, the CSI-activity relationship is notoriously domain dependent, essentially demanding EI to learn sufficient datasets from various domains in order to gain cross-domain sensing capability. This poses a crucial challenge owing to the EDs' limited resources, for which storing datasets across all domains will be a significant burden. In this paper, we propose the EdgeCL framework, enabling the EI to continually learn-then-discard each incoming dataset, while remaining resilient to catastrophic forgetting. We design a transformer-based discriminator for handling sequences of noisy and nonequispaced CSI samples. Besides, we propose a distilled core-set based knowledge retention method with robustness-enhanced optimization to train the discriminator, preserving its performance for previous domains while preventing future forgetting. Experimental evaluations show that EdgeCL achieves 89% of performance compared to cumulative training while consuming only 3% of its memory, mitigating forgetting by 79%.

Liqiang Cheng, Jun Luo, Weiwei Fan et al.

This paper addresses a multi-echelon inventory management problem with a complex network topology where deriving optimal ordering decisions is difficult. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has recently shown potential in solving such problems, while designing the neural networks in DRL remains a challenge. In order to address this, a DRL model is developed whose Q-network is based on radial basis functions. The approach can be more easily constructed compared to classic DRL models based on neural networks, thus alleviating the computational burden of hyperparameter tuning. Through a series of simulation experiments, the superior performance of this approach is demonstrated compared to the simple base-stock policy, producing a better policy in the multi-echelon system and competitive performance in the serial system where the base-stock policy is optimal. In addition, the approach outperforms current DRL approaches.

Amir Rasouli, Tiffany Yau, Mohsen Rohani et al.

Pedestrian behavior prediction is one of the major challenges for intelligent driving systems in urban environments. Pedestrians often exhibit a wide range of behaviors and adequate interpretations of those depend on various sources of information such as pedestrian appearance, states of other road users, the environment layout, etc. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-modal prediction algorithm that incorporates different sources of information captured from the environment to predict future crossing actions of pedestrians. The proposed model benefits from a hybrid learning architecture consisting of feedforward and recurrent networks for analyzing visual features of the environment and dynamics of the scene. Using the existing 2D pedestrian behavior benchmarks and a newly annotated 3D driving dataset, we show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in pedestrian crossing prediction.