4.5SYJul 18
Cooperative MARL-Based Energy-Efficient Power Control for Two-Hop Relaying NetworksXinyu Qu, Yuanzhe Geng, Erwu Liu et al.
In this paper, we study a cooperative game in the cooperative communication network, where each relay makes decisions autonomously and aims to achieve the same optimization objective of maximizing energy efficiency. We consider the non-ideal situation where instantaneous channel state information (CSI) is difficult to obtain and only partially observable outdated CSI is available. To solve this game problem, we define a delayed reward-based state-action value function and propose a multi-agent deep Q network learning framework. Then, we prove analytically that utilities obtained by game-theoretic approaches with the instantaneous CSI serve as upper bounds for those of the proposed method. Simulation results reveal that our approach considerably outperforms its potential alternatives and is only about 5.2% away from the optimal solution.
4.3AIJul 18
A Research Prototype for Closed-Loop Generative Design of Customized Foot Orthoses via Semantic-Physics AlignmentRui Wang, Byungwon Min, Suxing Liu
Translating unstructured clinical prescriptions into patient-specific foot orthoses (FOs) is hindered by a semantic-physical misalignment: high-level clinical intent is not mapped deterministically onto the 3D geometric parameters of the orthosis, and existing design workflows remain dependent on manual expertise with no instantaneous biomechanical validation. We present TANS-FO, a research prototype-a modular pipeline with closed-loop feedback for computational design automation of customized FOs, not a clinically validated therapeutic device. A Text-Aligned Neural Surrogate (TANS) uses cross-attention to project clinical-text embeddings onto a continuous lattice-density field, while a Graph Neural Network (GNN) surrogate predicts plantar stress in real time as a substitute for Finite Element Analysis (FEA). The framework is anchored on the open-access PicoFoot-5K anthropometric database (5,230 subjects; 30+ anatomical parameters). Under standardized quasi-static loading, the GNN surrogate agrees with an Abaqus reference solver (R^2 = 0.94), and the full pipeline synthesizes manufacturing-ready lattice insoles within minutes. On the Male 18-40 cohort, the proposed system attains a surrogate-predicted peak-pressure reduction of 34.7% over parametric CAD, with a fit error of 0.42 mm. Separately, an exploratory feasibility observation (n = 12; 2-week follow-up; no control group) using VAS pain reporting indicates short-term comfort improvement (VAS 6.4 -> 2.1), but this data is explicitly classified as preliminary observational evidence only-not evidence of clinical efficacy.
9.1CVJul 18
Cross-Branch Conflict as a Shield: Safeguarding Facial Identities in Unified Multimodal Image EditingWeiwei Tan, Junxian Li, Rui Wang et al.
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have recently demonstrated powerful instruction-based image editing capabilities, but they also raise serious concerns about unauthorized manipulation of personal portraits. Existing adversarial protection methods are mainly designed for either visual understanding or image generation models and often become ineffective when transferred to UMMs, which process an image through multiple complementary visual pathways. In this work, we first conduct a feature-level analysis of unified image editing. We observe that the ViT-based understanding branch and the VAE-based generation branch exhibit non-trivial structural agreement for the same input image. Although perturbing an individual branch can reduce this agreement and induce intermediate hidden-state deviations, such effects are asymmetric and gradually attenuated during multimodal fusion and generation. These observations reveal that single-branch feature distortion is insufficient for consistently disrupting unified image editing. Motivated by this finding, we propose CCS, a unified adversarial protection framework that jointly drives the ViT and VAE representations away from their clean counterparts while explicitly disrupting their cross-branch compatibility through linear CKA. By simultaneously removing stable information from both visual pathways and creating incompatible visual contexts, CCS prevents the UMM from recovering reliable identity information during editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CCS consistently outperforms existing protection methods in suppressing identity-preserving edits.