Distributed H

This paper considers a distributed H∞ sampled-data filtering problem in sensor networks with stochastically switching topologies. It is assumed that the topology switching is triggered by a Markov chain. The output measurement at each sensor is first sampled and then transmitted to the corresponding filters via a communication network. Considering the effect of a transmission delay, a distributed filter structure for each sensor is given based on the sampled data from itself and its neighbor sensor nodes. As a consequence, the distributed H∞ sampled-data filtering in sensor networks under Markovian switching topologies is transformed into H∞ mean-square stability problem of a Markovian jump error system with an interval time-varying delay. By using Lyapunov Krasovskii functional and reciprocally convex approach, a new bounded real lemma (BRL) is derived, which guarantees the mean-square stability of the error system with a desired H∞ performance. Based on this BRL, the topology-dependent H∞ sampled-data filters are obtained. An illustrative example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method

Development of a SMA-fishing-line-McKibben bending actuator

High power-to-weight ratio soft artificial muscles are of overarching importance to enable inherently safer solutions to human-robot interactions. Traditional air driven soft McKibben artificial muscles are linear actuators. It is impossible for them to realize bending motions through a single McKibben muscle. Over two McKibben muscles should normally be used to achieve bending or rotational motions, leading to heavier and larger systems. In addition, air driven McKibben muscles are highly nonlinear in nature, making them difficult to be controlled precisely. A SMA(shape memory alloy)–fishing–line–McKibben (SFLM) bending actuator has been developed. This novel artificial actuator, made of a SMA-fishing-line muscle and a McKibben muscle, was able to produce the maximum output force of 3.0 N and the maximum bending angle (the rotation of the end face) of 61°. This may promote the application of individual McKibben muscles or SMA-fishing-line muscles alone. An output force control method for SFLM is proposed, and based on MATLAB/Simulink software the experiment platform is set up, the effectiveness of control system is verified through output force experiments. A three-fingered SFLM gripper driven by three SFLMs has been designed for a case study, which the maximum carrying capacity is 650.4 ± 0.2 g

Semantic Human Parsing via Scalable Semantic Transfer over Multiple Label Domains

This paper presents Scalable Semantic Transfer (SST), a novel training paradigm, to explore how to leverage the mutual benefits of the data from different label domains (i.e. various levels of label granularity) to train a powerful human parsing network. In practice, two common application scenarios are addressed, termed universal parsing and dedicated parsing, where the former aims to learn homogeneous human representations from multiple label domains and switch predictions by only using different segmentation heads, and the latter aims to learn a specific domain prediction while distilling the semantic knowledge from other domains. The proposed SST has the following appealing benefits: (1) it can capably serve as an effective training scheme to embed semantic associations of human body parts from multiple label domains into the human representation learning process; (2) it is an extensible semantic transfer framework without predetermining the overall relations of multiple label domains, which allows continuously adding human parsing datasets to promote the training. (3) the relevant modules are only used for auxiliary training and can be removed during inference, eliminating the extra reasoning cost. Experimental results demonstrate SST can effectively achieve promising universal human parsing performance as well as impressive improvements compared to its counterparts on three human parsing benchmarks (i.e., PASCAL-Person-Part, ATR, and CIHP). Code is available at https://github.com/yangjie-cv/SST.Comment: Accepted to CVPR2

OTIEA:Ontology-enhanced Triple Intrinsic-Correlation for Cross-lingual Entity Alignment

Cross-lingual and cross-domain knowledge alignment without sufficient external resources is a fundamental and crucial task for fusing irregular data. As the element-wise fusion process aiming to discover equivalent objects from different knowledge graphs (KGs), entity alignment (EA) has been attracting great interest from industry and academic research recent years. Most of existing EA methods usually explore the correlation between entities and relations through neighbor nodes, structural information and external resources. However, the complex intrinsic interactions among triple elements and role information are rarely modeled in these methods, which may lead to the inadequate illustration for triple. In addition, external resources are usually unavailable in some scenarios especially cross-lingual and cross-domain applications, which reflects the little scalability of these methods. To tackle the above insufficiency, a novel universal EA framework (OTIEA) based on ontology pair and role enhancement mechanism via triple-aware attention is proposed in this paper without introducing external resources. Specifically, an ontology-enhanced triple encoder is designed via mining intrinsic correlations and ontology pair information instead of independent elements. In addition, the EA-oriented representations can be obtained in triple-aware entity decoder by fusing role diversity. Finally, a bidirectional iterative alignment strategy is deployed to expand seed entity pairs. The experimental results on three real-world datasets show that our framework achieves a competitive performance compared with baselines

Mechanical Properties of Nanostructured CoCrFeNiMn High-Entropy Alloy (HEA) Coating

An equiatomic CoCrFeMnNi high-entropy alloy (HEA) thin film coating has been successfully developed by high-vacuum Radio Frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering. The deposition of a smooth and homogenous thin film with uniformly distributed equiaxed nanograins (grain size ~ 10 nm) was achieved through this technique. The thin film coating exhibits a high hardness of 6.8 ± 0.6 GPa, which is superior compared to its bulk counterpart owing to its nanocrystalline structure. Furthermore, it also shows good ductility through nanoindentation, which demonstrates its potential to serve as an alternative to traditional transition metal nitride or carbide coatings for applications in micro-fabrication and advanced coating technologies

Automated Federated Learning in Mobile Edge Networks -- Fast Adaptation and Convergence

Federated Learning (FL) can be used in mobile edge networks to train machine learning models in a distributed manner. Recently, FL has been interpreted within a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) framework, which brings FL significant advantages in fast adaptation and convergence over heterogeneous datasets. However, existing research simply combines MAML and FL without explicitly addressing how much benefit MAML brings to FL and how to maximize such benefit over mobile edge networks. In this paper, we quantify the benefit from two aspects: optimizing FL hyperparameters (i.e., sampled data size and the number of communication rounds) and resource allocation (i.e., transmit power) in mobile edge networks. Specifically, we formulate the MAML-based FL design as an overall learning time minimization problem, under the constraints of model accuracy and energy consumption. Facilitated by the convergence analysis of MAML-based FL, we decompose the formulated problem and then solve it using analytical solutions and the coordinate descent method. With the obtained FL hyperparameters and resource allocation, we design a MAML-based FL algorithm, called Automated Federated Learning (AutoFL), that is able to conduct fast adaptation and convergence. Extensive experimental results verify that AutoFL outperforms other benchmark algorithms regarding the learning time and convergence performance

Analysis of vibration attenuation characteristics of large thickness carbon fiber composite laminates

The vibration attenuation and damping characteristics of carbon fiber reinforced composite laminates with different thicknesses were investigated by hammering experiments under free boundary constraints in different directions. The dynamic signal testing and analysis system is applied to collect and analyze the vibration signals of the composite specimens, and combine the self-spectrum analysis and logarithmic decay method to identify the fundamental frequencies of different specimens and calculate the damping ratios of different directions of the specimens. The results showed that the overall stiffness of the specimen increased with the increase of the specimen thickness, and when the thickness of the sample increases from 24mm to 32mm, the fundamental frequency increases by 35.1%, the vibration showed the same vibration attenuation and energy dissipation characteristics in the 0° and 90° directions of the specimen, compared with the specimen in the 45° direction, which was less likely to be excited and had poorer vibration attenuation ability, while the upper and lower surfaces of the same specimen showed slightly different attenuation characteristics to the vibration, the maximum difference of damping capacity between top and bottom surfaces of CFRP plates is about 70%

Robust Federated Contrastive Recommender System against Model Poisoning Attack

Federated Recommender Systems (FedRecs) have garnered increasing attention recently, thanks to their privacy-preserving benefits. However, the decentralized and open characteristics of current FedRecs present two dilemmas. First, the performance of FedRecs is compromised due to highly sparse on-device data for each client. Second, the system's robustness is undermined by the vulnerability to model poisoning attacks launched by malicious users. In this paper, we introduce a novel contrastive learning framework designed to fully leverage the client's sparse data through embedding augmentation, referred to as CL4FedRec. Unlike previous contrastive learning approaches in FedRecs that necessitate clients to share their private parameters, our CL4FedRec aligns with the basic FedRec learning protocol, ensuring compatibility with most existing FedRec implementations. We then evaluate the robustness of FedRecs equipped with CL4FedRec by subjecting it to several state-of-the-art model poisoning attacks. Surprisingly, our observations reveal that contrastive learning tends to exacerbate the vulnerability of FedRecs to these attacks. This is attributed to the enhanced embedding uniformity, making the polluted target item embedding easily proximate to popular items. Based on this insight, we propose an enhanced and robust version of CL4FedRec (rCL4FedRec) by introducing a regularizer to maintain the distance among item embeddings with different popularity levels. Extensive experiments conducted on four commonly used recommendation datasets demonstrate that CL4FedRec significantly enhances both the model's performance and the robustness of FedRecs