Combating Unknown Bias with Effective Bias-Conflicting Scoring and Gradient Alignment

Models notoriously suffer from dataset biases which are detrimental to robustness and generalization. The identify-emphasize paradigm shows a promising effect in dealing with unknown biases. However, we find that it is still plagued by two challenges: A, the quality of the identified bias-conflicting samples is far from satisfactory; B, the emphasizing strategies just yield suboptimal performance. In this work, for challenge A, we propose an effective bias-conflicting scoring method to boost the identification accuracy with two practical strategies -- peer-picking and epoch-ensemble. For challenge B, we point out that the gradient contribution statistics can be a reliable indicator to inspect whether the optimization is dominated by bias-aligned samples. Then, we propose gradient alignment, which employs gradient statistics to balance the contributions of the mined bias-aligned and bias-conflicting samples dynamically throughout the learning process, forcing models to leverage intrinsic features to make fair decisions. Experiments are conducted on multiple datasets in various settings, demonstrating that the proposed solution can alleviate the impact of unknown biases and achieve state-of-the-art performance

Analysis and Introduction of Effective Permeability with Additional Air-Gaps on Wireless Power Transfer Coils for Electric Vehicle based on SAE J2954 Recommended Practice

The wireless power transfer (WPT) method for electric vehicles (EVs) is becoming more popular, and to ensure the interoperability of WPT systems, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) established the J2954 recommended practice (RP). It includes powering frequency, electrical parameters, specifications, testing procedures, and other contents for EV WPT. Specifically, it describes the ranges of self-inductances of the transmitting coil, the receiving coil, and coupling coefficient (k), as well as the impedance matching values of the WPT system. Following the electrical parameters listed in SAE J2954 RP is crucial to ensure the EV wireless charging system is interoperable. This paper introduces a method for adjusting the effective permeability of the ferrite blocks in the standard model, to tune the self-inductance of the coils as well as the coupling coefficient. To guarantee the given values of the self-inductance of the coil and coupling coefficient matched those in the standard, we slightly modified the air-gap between the ferrite tiles in a specific region. Based on this method, it was possible to successfully tune the self-inductance of the transmitting coil and receiving coil as well as the coupling coefficient. The proposed method was verified by simulation and experimental measurements

Adaptive Sensing with Reliable Guarantee under White Gaussian Noise Channels of Sensor Networks

Quality of sensing is a fundamental research topic in sensor networks. In this paper, we propose an adaptive sensing technique to guarantee the end-to-end reliability while maximizing the lifetime of sensor networks under additive white Gaussian noise channels. First, we conduct theoretical analysis to obtain optimal node number N∗, node placement d∗, and node transmission structure P∗ under minimum total energy consumption and minimum unit data transmission energy consumption. Then, because sensor nodes closer to the sink consume more energy, nodes far from the sink have more residual energy. Based on this observation, we propose an adaptive sensing technique to achieve balanced network energy consumption. It adopts lower reliability requirement and shorter transmission distance for nodes near the sink and adopts higher reliability requirement and farther transmission distance for nodes far from the sink. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that our design can improve the network lifetime by several times (1–5 times) and network utility by 20% and the desired reliability level is also guaranteed

Single-peak-regulation and wide-angle dual-band metamaterial absorber based on hollow-cross and solid-cross resonators

A dual-band microwave metamaterial absorber with single-peak regulation and wide-angle absorption has been proposed and illustrated. The designed metamaterial absorber is consisted of hollow-cross resonators, solid-cross resonators, dielectric substrate and metallic background plane. Strong absorption peak coefficients of 99.92% and 99.55% are achieved at 8.42 and 11.31 GHz, respectively, which is basically consistent with the experimental results. Surface current density and changing material properties are employed to illustrate the absorptive mechanism. More importantly, the proposed dual-band metamaterial absorber has the adjustable property of single absorption peak and could operate well at wide incidence angles for both transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) waves. Research results could provide and enrich instructive guidances for realizing a single-peak-regulation and wide-angle dual-band metamaterial absorber

PA-WuRES: A green pre-awake routing protocol for wake-up radio enable sensor networks

More and more sensor nodes which are deployed in smart cities for data collection and analysis form the ubiquitous urban Internet of Things. Energy saving and rapid data collection play a key role in environmental monitoring, military search, medical care, and general city management in smart cities. Therefore, it is a very meaningful and challenging work to design an energy efficient and fast routing protocol to collect data. Although the widely used duty cycle mechanism can effectively save energy, it brings greater delay to routing. Using wake-up radio enable nodes can effectively reduce the delay, but it will bring a large network deployment cost. So how to reduce the deployment cost and quickly route data is a challenge issue for sensor-based system. In this paper, Pre-Awake for Wake-up Radio Enable Sensor based system (PA-WuRES) routing protocol is proposed to reduce delay and deployment cost. The main contribution of our work are as follows: (a) A novel PA-WuRES protocol is proposed which requires much less WuR(WuR,Wake-up Radio) enable nodes, so its deployment cost is lower. (b) Using WuR enable nodes will increase a certain amount of energy consumption. Therefore, this paper proposes a differentiated service data routing mechanism to minimize energy consumption. (c) Full theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed PA-WuRES protocol reduces the deployed WuR enable nodes by 80%, but sensitive-data routing delay is reduced by 48.4%

An Impedance Converter-Based Probe Characterization Method for Magnetic Materials Loss Measurement

As an essential component in power applications, magnetic cores and their design play an important role in achieving high efficiency and high power density. Accurate measurement of the core loss is important for inductor and power converter optimization. Loss measurement depends on exactly determining the phase angle between the voltage and the current. However, measurement errors can be introduced due to the discrepancies in propagation delays in the voltage and current sensors. In addition, the propagation delay is frequency dependent, but has a large influence in the MHz range and above. Previously, several methods have been proposed to compensate for this discrepancy but they are time consuming and can result in large measurement errors. In this paper, a characterization method for core loss based on a vector network analyzer and an impedance converter is proposed to accurately measure the phase discrepancies between voltage and current sensors. The proposed method is experimentally verified up to 15 MHz with a three-coil test setup