670 research outputs found
A Hierarchical Game with Strategy Evolution for Mobile Sponsored Content and Service Markets
In sponsored content and service markets, the content and service providers
are able to subsidize their target mobile users through directly paying the
mobile network operator, to lower the price of the data/service access charged
by the network operator to the mobile users. The sponsoring mechanism leads to
a surge in mobile data and service demand, which in return compensates for the
sponsoring cost and benefits the content/service providers. In this paper, we
study the interactions among the three parties in the market, namely, the
mobile users, the content/service providers and the network operator, as a
two-level game with multiple Stackelberg (i.e., leader) players. Our study is
featured by the consideration of global network effects owning to consumers'
grouping. Since the mobile users may have bounded rationality, we model the
service-selection process among them as an evolutionary-population follower
sub-game. Meanwhile, we model the pricing-then-sponsoring process between the
content/service providers and the network operator as a non-cooperative
equilibrium searching problem. By investigating the structure of the proposed
game, we reveal a few important properties regarding the equilibrium existence,
and propose a distributed, projection-based algorithm for iterative equilibrium
searching. Simulation results validate the convergence of the proposed
algorithm, and demonstrate how sponsoring helps improve both the providers'
profits and the users' experience
Cloud/fog computing resource management and pricing for blockchain networks
The mining process in blockchain requires solving a proof-of-work puzzle,
which is resource expensive to implement in mobile devices due to the high
computing power and energy needed. In this paper, we, for the first time,
consider edge computing as an enabler for mobile blockchain. In particular, we
study edge computing resource management and pricing to support mobile
blockchain applications in which the mining process of miners can be offloaded
to an edge computing service provider. We formulate a two-stage Stackelberg
game to jointly maximize the profit of the edge computing service provider and
the individual utilities of the miners. In the first stage, the service
provider sets the price of edge computing nodes. In the second stage, the
miners decide on the service demand to purchase based on the observed prices.
We apply the backward induction to analyze the sub-game perfect equilibrium in
each stage for both uniform and discriminatory pricing schemes. For the uniform
pricing where the same price is applied to all miners, the existence and
uniqueness of Stackelberg equilibrium are validated by identifying the best
response strategies of the miners. For the discriminatory pricing where the
different prices are applied to different miners, the Stackelberg equilibrium
is proved to exist and be unique by capitalizing on the Variational Inequality
theory. Further, the real experimental results are employed to justify our
proposed model.Comment: 16 pages, double-column version, accepted by IEEE Internet of Things
Journa
Mutual Guidance and Residual Integration for Image Enhancement
Previous studies show the necessity of global and local adjustment for image
enhancement. However, existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and
transformer-based models face great challenges in balancing the computational
efficiency and effectiveness of global-local information usage. Especially,
existing methods typically adopt the global-to-local fusion mode, ignoring the
importance of bidirectional interactions. To address those issues, we propose a
novel mutual guidance network (MGN) to perform effective bidirectional
global-local information exchange while keeping a compact architecture. In our
design, we adopt a two-branch framework where one branch focuses more on
modeling global relations while the other is committed to processing local
information. Then, we develop an efficient attention-based mutual guidance
approach throughout our framework for bidirectional global-local interactions.
As a result, both the global and local branches can enjoy the merits of mutual
information aggregation. Besides, to further refine the results produced by our
MGN, we propose a novel residual integration scheme following the
divide-and-conquer philosophy. The extensive experiments demonstrate the
effectiveness of our proposed method, which achieves state-of-the-art
performance on several public image enhancement benchmarks.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figure
From NeRFLiX to NeRFLiX++: A General NeRF-Agnostic Restorer Paradigm
Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown great success in novel view
synthesis. However, recovering high-quality details from real-world scenes is
still challenging for the existing NeRF-based approaches, due to the potential
imperfect calibration information and scene representation inaccuracy. Even
with high-quality training frames, the synthetic novel views produced by NeRF
models still suffer from notable rendering artifacts, such as noise and blur.
To address this, we propose NeRFLiX, a general NeRF-agnostic restorer paradigm
that learns a degradation-driven inter-viewpoint mixer. Specially, we design a
NeRF-style degradation modeling approach and construct large-scale training
data, enabling the possibility of effectively removing NeRF-native rendering
artifacts for deep neural networks. Moreover, beyond the degradation removal,
we propose an inter-viewpoint aggregation framework that fuses highly related
high-quality training images, pushing the performance of cutting-edge NeRF
models to entirely new levels and producing highly photo-realistic synthetic
views. Based on this paradigm, we further present NeRFLiX++ with a stronger
two-stage NeRF degradation simulator and a faster inter-viewpoint mixer,
achieving superior performance with significantly improved computational
efficiency. Notably, NeRFLiX++ is capable of restoring photo-realistic
ultra-high-resolution outputs from noisy low-resolution NeRF-rendered views.
Extensive experiments demonstrate the excellent restoration ability of
NeRFLiX++ on various novel view synthesis benchmarks.Comment: 17 pages, 16 figures. Project Page:
https://redrock303.github.io/nerflix_plus/. arXiv admin note: text overlap
with arXiv:2303.0691
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