人行道表面数据的获取和评估在路面条件评估中起着至关重要的作用。在本文中，提出了一个称为RHA-NET的自动路面裂纹分割的有效端到端网络，以提高路面裂纹分割精度。 RHA-NET是通过将残留块（重阻）和混合注意块集成到编码器架构结构中来构建的。这些重组用于提高RHA-NET提取高级抽象特征的能力。混合注意块旨在融合低级功能和高级功能，以帮助模型专注于正确的频道和裂纹区域，从而提高RHA-NET的功能表现能力。构建并用于训练和评估所提出的模型的图像数据集，其中包含由自设计的移动机器人收集的789个路面裂纹图像。与其他最先进的网络相比，所提出的模型在全面的消融研究中验证了添加残留块和混合注意机制的功能。此外，通过引入深度可分离卷积生成的模型的轻加权版本可以更好地实现性能和更快的处理速度，而U-NET参数数量的1/30。开发的系统可以在嵌入式设备Jetson TX2（25 fps）上实时划分路面裂纹。实时实验拍摄的视频将在https://youtu.be/3xiogk0fig4上发布。

联邦元学习（FML）已成为应对当今边缘学习竞技场中的数据限制和异质性挑战的承诺范式。然而，其性能通常受到缓慢的收敛性和相应的低通信效率的限制。此外，由于可用的无线电频谱和物联网设备的能量容量通常不足，因此在在实际无线网络中部署FML时，控制资源分配和能量消耗是至关重要的。为了克服挑战，在本文中，我们严格地分析了每个设备对每轮全球损失减少的贡献，并使用非统一的设备选择方案开发FML算法（称为Nufm）以加速收敛。之后，我们制定了集成NuFM在多通道无线系统中的资源分配问题，共同提高收敛速率并最小化壁钟时间以及能量成本。通过逐步解构原始问题，我们设计了一个联合设备选择和资源分配策略，以解决理论保证问题。此外，我们表明Nufm的计算复杂性可以通过$ O（d ^ 2）$至$ o（d）$（使用模型维度$ d $）通过组合两个一阶近似技术来降低。广泛的仿真结果表明，与现有基线相比，所提出的方法的有效性和优越性。

A further understanding of cause and effect within observational data is critical across many domains, such as economics, health care, public policy, web mining, online advertising, and marketing campaigns. Although significant advances have been made to overcome the challenges in causal effect estimation with observational data, such as missing counterfactual outcomes and selection bias between treatment and control groups, the existing methods mainly focus on source-specific and stationary observational data. Such learning strategies assume that all observational data are already available during the training phase and from only one source. This practical concern of accessibility is ubiquitous in various academic and industrial applications. That's what it boiled down to: in the era of big data, we face new challenges in causal inference with observational data, i.e., the extensibility for incrementally available observational data, the adaptability for extra domain adaptation problem except for the imbalance between treatment and control groups, and the accessibility for an enormous amount of data. In this position paper, we formally define the problem of continual treatment effect estimation, describe its research challenges, and then present possible solutions to this problem. Moreover, we will discuss future research directions on this topic.

In this tutorial paper, we look into the evolution and prospect of network architecture and propose a novel conceptual architecture for the 6th generation (6G) networks. The proposed architecture has two key elements, i.e., holistic network virtualization and pervasive artificial intelligence (AI). The holistic network virtualization consists of network slicing and digital twin, from the aspects of service provision and service demand, respectively, to incorporate service-centric and user-centric networking. The pervasive network intelligence integrates AI into future networks from the perspectives of networking for AI and AI for networking, respectively. Building on holistic network virtualization and pervasive network intelligence, the proposed architecture can facilitate three types of interplay, i.e., the interplay between digital twin and network slicing paradigms, between model-driven and data-driven methods for network management, and between virtualization and AI, to maximize the flexibility, scalability, adaptivity, and intelligence for 6G networks. We also identify challenges and open issues related to the proposed architecture. By providing our vision, we aim to inspire further discussions and developments on the potential architecture of 6G.

The growing interest in intelligent services and privacy protection for mobile devices has given rise to the widespread application of federated learning in Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). Diverse user behaviors call for personalized services with heterogeneous Machine Learning (ML) models on different devices. Federated Multi-task Learning (FMTL) is proposed to train related but personalized ML models for different devices, whereas previous works suffer from excessive communication overhead during training and neglect the model heterogeneity among devices in MEC. Introducing knowledge distillation into FMTL can simultaneously enable efficient communication and model heterogeneity among clients, whereas existing methods rely on a public dataset, which is impractical in reality. To tackle this dilemma, Federated MultI-task Distillation for Multi-access Edge CompuTing (FedICT) is proposed. FedICT direct local-global knowledge aloof during bi-directional distillation processes between clients and the server, aiming to enable multi-task clients while alleviating client drift derived from divergent optimization directions of client-side local models. Specifically, FedICT includes Federated Prior Knowledge Distillation (FPKD) and Local Knowledge Adjustment (LKA). FPKD is proposed to reinforce the clients' fitting of local data by introducing prior knowledge of local data distributions. Moreover, LKA is proposed to correct the distillation loss of the server, making the transferred local knowledge better match the generalized representation. Experiments on three datasets show that FedICT significantly outperforms all compared benchmarks in various data heterogeneous and model architecture settings, achieving improved accuracy with less than 1.2% training communication overhead compared with FedAvg and no more than 75% training communication round compared with FedGKT.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most important branches of AI. Due to its capacity for self-adaption and decision-making in dynamic environments, reinforcement learning has been widely applied in multiple areas, such as healthcare, data markets, autonomous driving, and robotics. However, some of these applications and systems have been shown to be vulnerable to security or privacy attacks, resulting in unreliable or unstable services. A large number of studies have focused on these security and privacy problems in reinforcement learning. However, few surveys have provided a systematic review and comparison of existing problems and state-of-the-art solutions to keep up with the pace of emerging threats. Accordingly, we herein present such a comprehensive review to explain and summarize the challenges associated with security and privacy in reinforcement learning from a new perspective, namely that of the Markov Decision Process (MDP). In this survey, we first introduce the key concepts related to this area. Next, we cover the security and privacy issues linked to the state, action, environment, and reward function of the MDP process, respectively. We further highlight the special characteristics of security and privacy methodologies related to reinforcement learning. Finally, we discuss the possible future research directions within this area.

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) are emerging in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis because of their strong capability of generating high-fidelity samples. However, their iterative refinement process in high-dimensional data space results in slow inference speed, which restricts their application in real-time systems. Previous works have explored speeding up by minimizing the number of inference steps but at the cost of sample quality. In this work, to improve the inference speed for DDPM-based TTS model while achieving high sample quality, we propose ResGrad, a lightweight diffusion model which learns to refine the output spectrogram of an existing TTS model (e.g., FastSpeech 2) by predicting the residual between the model output and the corresponding ground-truth speech. ResGrad has several advantages: 1) Compare with other acceleration methods for DDPM which need to synthesize speech from scratch, ResGrad reduces the complexity of task by changing the generation target from ground-truth mel-spectrogram to the residual, resulting into a more lightweight model and thus a smaller real-time factor. 2) ResGrad is employed in the inference process of the existing TTS model in a plug-and-play way, without re-training this model. We verify ResGrad on the single-speaker dataset LJSpeech and two more challenging datasets with multiple speakers (LibriTTS) and high sampling rate (VCTK). Experimental results show that in comparison with other speed-up methods of DDPMs: 1) ResGrad achieves better sample quality with the same inference speed measured by real-time factor; 2) with similar speech quality, ResGrad synthesizes speech faster than baseline methods by more than 10 times. Audio samples are available at https://resgrad1.github.io/.

Face manipulation detection has been receiving a lot of attention for the reliability and security of the face images. Recent studies focus on using auxiliary information or prior knowledge to capture robust manipulation traces, which are shown to be promising. As one of the important face features, the face depth map, which has shown to be effective in other areas such as the face recognition or face detection, is unfortunately paid little attention to in literature for detecting the manipulated face images. In this paper, we explore the possibility of incorporating the face depth map as auxiliary information to tackle the problem of face manipulation detection in real world applications. To this end, we first propose a Face Depth Map Transformer (FDMT) to estimate the face depth map patch by patch from a RGB face image, which is able to capture the local depth anomaly created due to manipulation. The estimated face depth map is then considered as auxiliary information to be integrated with the backbone features using a Multi-head Depth Attention (MDA) mechanism that is newly designed. Various experiments demonstrate the advantage of our proposed method for face manipulation detection.

The development of deep learning models in medical image analysis is majorly limited by the lack of large-sized and well-annotated datasets. Unsupervised learning does not require labels and is more suitable for solving medical image analysis problems. However, most of the current unsupervised learning methods need to be applied to large datasets. To make unsupervised learning applicable to small datasets, we proposed Swin MAE, which is a masked autoencoder with Swin Transformer as its backbone. Even on a dataset of only a few thousand medical images and without using any pre-trained models, Swin MAE is still able to learn useful semantic features purely from images. It can equal or even slightly outperform the supervised model obtained by Swin Transformer trained on ImageNet in terms of the transfer learning results of downstream tasks. The code will be publicly available soon.

In this paper, we study the \underline{R}obust \underline{o}ptimization for \underline{se}quence \underline{Net}worked \underline{s}ubmodular maximization (RoseNets) problem. We interweave the robust optimization with the sequence networked submodular maximization. The elements are connected by a directed acyclic graph and the objective function is not submodular on the elements but on the edges in the graph. Under such networked submodular scenario, the impact of removing an element from a sequence depends both on its position in the sequence and in the network. This makes the existing robust algorithms inapplicable. In this paper, we take the first step to study the RoseNets problem. We design a robust greedy algorithm, which is robust against the removal of an arbitrary subset of the selected elements. The approximation ratio of the algorithm depends both on the number of the removed elements and the network topology. We further conduct experiments on real applications of recommendation and link prediction. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.