An improved MOEA/D algorithm for multi-objective multicast routing with network coding

Network coding enables higher network throughput, more balanced traffic, and securer data transmission. However, complicated mathematical operations incur when packets are combined at intermediate nodes, which, if not operated properly, lead to very high network resource consumption and unacceptable delay. Therefore, it is of vital importance to minimize various network resources and end-to-end delays while exploiting promising benefits of network coding. Multicast has been used in increasingly more applications, such as video conferencing and remote education. In this paper the multicast routing problem with network coding is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP), where the total coding cost, the total link cost and the end-to-end delay are minimized simultaneously. We adapt the multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) for this MOP by hybridizing it with a population-based incremental learning technique which makes use of the global and historical information collected to provide additional guidance to the evolutionary search. Three new schemes are devised to facilitate the performance improvement, including a probability-based initialization scheme, a problem-specific population updating rule, and a hybridized reproduction operator. Experimental results clearly demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms a number of state-of-the-art MOEAs regarding the solution quality and computational time

SegCLIP: Patch Aggregation with Learnable Centers for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Recently, the contrastive language-image pre-training, e.g., CLIP, has demonstrated promising results on various downstream tasks. The pre-trained model can capture enriched visual concepts for images by learning from a large scale of text-image data. However, transferring the learned visual knowledge to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation is still under-explored. In this paper, we propose a CLIP-based model named SegCLIP for the topic of open-vocabulary segmentation in an annotation-free manner. The SegCLIP achieves segmentation based on ViT and the main idea is to gather patches with learnable centers to semantic regions through training on text-image pairs. The gathering operation can dynamically capture the semantic groups, which can be used to generate the final segmentation results. We further propose a reconstruction loss on masked patches and a superpixel-based KL loss with pseudo-labels to enhance the visual representation. Experimental results show that our model achieves comparable or superior segmentation accuracy on the PASCAL VOC 2012 (+1.4% mIoU), PASCAL Context (+2.4% mIoU), and COCO (+5.6% mIoU) compared with baselines. We release the code at https://github.com/ArrowLuo/SegCLIP

New phase-changing soft open point and impacts on optimising unbalanced power distribution networks

Three-phase unbalanced conditions in distribution networks are conventionally caused by load imbalance, asymmetrical fault conditions of transformers and impedances of three phases. The uneven integration of single-phase distributed generation (DG) worsens the imbalance situation. These unbalanced conditions result in financial losses, inefficient utilisation of assets and security risks to the network infrastructure. In this study, a phase-changing soft open point (PC-SOP) is proposed as a new way of connecting soft open points (SOPs) to balance the power flows among three phases by controlling active power and reactive power. Then an operational strategy based on PC-SOPs is presented for three-phase four-wire unbalanced systems. By optimising the regulation of SOPs, optimal energy storage systems dispatch and DG curtailment, the proposed strategy can reduce power losses and three-phase imbalance. Second-order cone programming (SOCP) relaxation is utilised to convert the original non-convex and non-linear model into an SOCP model which can be solved efficiently by commercial solvers. Case studies are conducted on a modified IEEE 34-node three-phase four-wire system and the IEEE 123-node test feeder to verify the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of the proposed PC-SOP concept and its operational strategy