BehAVExplor: Behavior Diversity Guided Testing for Autonomous Driving Systems

Testing Autonomous Driving Systems (ADSs) is a critical task for ensuring the reliability and safety of autonomous vehicles. Existing methods mainly focus on searching for safety violations while the diversity of the generated test cases is ignored, which may generate many redundant test cases and failures. Such redundant failures can reduce testing performance and increase failure analysis costs. In this paper, we present a novel behavior-guided fuzzing technique (BehAVExplor) to explore the different behaviors of the ego vehicle (i.e., the vehicle controlled by the ADS under test) and detect diverse violations. Specifically, we design an efficient unsupervised model, called BehaviorMiner, to characterize the behavior of the ego vehicle. BehaviorMiner extracts the temporal features from the given scenarios and performs a clustering-based abstraction to group behaviors with similar features into abstract states. A new test case will be added to the seed corpus if it triggers new behaviors (e.g., cover new abstract states). Due to the potential conflict between the behavior diversity and the general violation feedback, we further propose an energy mechanism to guide the seed selection and the mutation. The energy of a seed quantifies how good it is. We evaluated BehAVExplor on Apollo, an industrial-level ADS, and LGSVL simulation environment. Empirical evaluation results show that BehAVExplor can effectively find more diverse violations than the state-of-the-art

Grain Boundary Effects on Microstructural Stability of Nanocrystalline Metallic Materials

Grain boundaries play an important role in dictating the mechanical and physical properties of nanocrystalline (NC) materials because of the increased volume fraction of intercrystalline components as the grain size decreases. In general, grain boundaries have a high energy level and there exists a thermodynamic driving force to reduce the overall area of grain boundaries through grain coarsening, making NC material systems intrinsically unstable. Recent investigations also indicate that mechanical deformation can promote grain growth in NC material even at the cryogenic temperatures. In this chapter, first, the current investigation on the grain boundary structures of NC metallic materials is briefly reviewed and then the state-of-the-art of experimental results on the microstructural stability during deformation processes is discussed. Finally, several key issues for improving the microstructure stability of NC metallic materials and possible future work are discussed

Clinical analysis of chemotherapy-related anemia in non-small cell lung cancer patients

The objective is to analyze the clinical features and factors of non-small cell lung cancer patients with chemotherapy-related anemia to prevent and treat anemia. 78 cases of hospitalized patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer treated with chemotherapy from January 2008 to October 2014 were recruited as subjects. The anemia information after chemotherapy was analyzed to understand the clinical features and the factors of anemia after chemotherapy. The incidence of anemia after chemotherapy was 82.05%, while the rate moderate and severe anemia was 34.61%. No significant difference was observed from the incidence of anemia after chemotherapy in patients in terms of gender. Among the stage IV patients, patients with bone metastasis has higher incidence of anemia after chemotherapy when compared with patients without bone metastasis (P < 0.05). Non-small cell lung cancer has a higher incidence of anemia after chemotherapy, patients should be given attention on the anemia therapy in addition to other clinical treatment. Patients with bone metastases are more prone to have anemia after chemotherapy thus, early intervention should be taken to reduce the incidence of anemia

One for All: Unified Workload Prediction for Dynamic Multi-tenant Edge Cloud Platforms

Workload prediction in multi-tenant edge cloud platforms (MT-ECP) is vital for efficient application deployment and resource provisioning. However, the heterogeneous application patterns, variable infrastructure performance, and frequent deployments in MT-ECP pose significant challenges for accurate and efficient workload prediction. Clustering-based methods for dynamic MT-ECP modeling often incur excessive costs due to the need to maintain numerous data clusters and models, which leads to excessive costs. Existing end-to-end time series prediction methods are challenging to provide consistent prediction performance in dynamic MT-ECP. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework with global pooling and static content awareness, DynEformer, to provide a unified workload prediction scheme for dynamic MT-ECP. Meticulously designed global pooling and information merging mechanisms can effectively identify and utilize global application patterns to drive local workload predictions. The integration of static content-aware mechanisms enhances model robustness in real-world scenarios. Through experiments on five real-world datasets, DynEformer achieved state-of-the-art in the dynamic scene of MT-ECP and provided a unified end-to-end prediction scheme for MT-ECP.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

Phosphorylation of TGB1 by protein kinase CK2 promotes barley stripe mosaic virus movement in monocots and dicots.

The barley stripe mosaic virus (BSMV) triple gene block 1 (TGB1) protein is required for virus cell-to-cell movement. However, little information is available about how these activities are regulated by post-translational modifications. In this study, we showed that the BSMV Xinjiang strain TGB1 (XJTGB1) is phosphorylated in vivo and in vitro by protein kinase CK2 from barley and Nicotiana benthamiana. Liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry analysis and in vitro phosphorylation assays demonstrated that Thr-401 is the major phosphorylation site of the XJTGB1 protein, and suggested that a Thr-395 kinase docking site supports Thr-401 phosphorylation. Substitution of Thr-395 with alanine (T395A) only moderately impaired virus cell-to-cell movement and systemic infection. In contrast, the Thr-401 alanine (T401A) virus mutant was unable to systemically infect N. benthamiana but had only minor effects in monocot hosts. Substitution of Thr-395 or Thr-401 with aspartic acid interfered with monocot and dicot cell-to-cell movement and the plants failed to develop systemic infections. However, virus derivatives with single glutamic acid substitutions at Thr-395 and Thr-401 developed nearly normal systemic infections in the monocot hosts but were unable to infect N. benthamiana systemically, and none of the double mutants was able to infect dicot and monocot hosts. The mutant XJTGB1T395A/T401A weakened in vitro interactions between XJTGB1 and XJTGB3 proteins but had little effect on XJTGB1 RNA-binding ability. Taken together, our results support a critical role of CK2 phosphorylation in the movement of BSMV in monocots and dicots, and provide new insights into the roles of phosphorylation in TGB protein functions