Semantic communication represents a promising roadmap toward achieving end-to-end communication with reduced communication overhead and an enhanced user experience. The integration of semantic concepts with wireless communications presents novel challenges. This paper proposes a flexible simulation software that automatically transmits semantic segmentation map images over a communication channel. An additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel using binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) modulation is considered as the channel setup. The well-known polar codes are chosen as the channel coding scheme. The popular COCO-Stuff dataset is used as an example to generate semantic map images corresponding to different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). To evaluate the proposed software, we have generated four small datasets, each containing a thousand semantic map samples, accompanied by comprehensive information corresponding to each image, including the polar code specifications, detailed image attributes, bit error rate (BER), and frame error rate (FER). The capacity to generate an unlimited number of semantic maps utilizing desired channel coding parameters and preferred SNR, in conjunction with the flexibility of using alternative datasets, renders our simulation software highly adaptable and transferable to a broad range of use cases.
Semantic communication, which focuses on conveying the meaning of information rather than exact bit reconstruction, has gained considerable attention in recent years. Meanwhile, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology that can achieve high spectral and energy efficiency by dynamically reflecting incident signals through programmable passive components. In this paper, we put forth a semantic communication scheme aided by RIS. Using text transmission as an example, experimental results demonstrate that the RIS-assisted semantic communication system outperforms the point-to-point semantic communication system in terms of bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) scores in Rayleigh fading channels, especially at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. In addition, the RIS-assisted semantic communication system exhibits superior robustness against channel estimation errors compared to its point-to-point counterpart. RIS can improve performance as it provides extra line-of-sight (LoS) paths and enhances signal propagation conditions compared to point-to-point systems.
Text correction, especially the semantic correction of more widely used scenes, is strongly required to improve, for the fluency and writing efficiency of the text. An adversarial multi-task learning method is proposed to enhance the modeling and detection ability of character polysemy in Chinese sentence context. Wherein, two models, the masked language model and scoring language model, are introduced as a pair of not only coupled but also adversarial learning tasks. Moreover, the Monte Carlo tree search strategy and a policy network are introduced to accomplish the efficient Chinese text correction task with semantic detection. The experiments are executed on three datasets and five comparable methods, and the experimental results show that our method can obtain good performance in Chinese text correction task for better semantic rationality.
Visual content in the form of images and videos has taken over general-purpose social networks in a variety of ways, streamlining and enriching online communications. We are interested to understand if and to what extent the use of images is popular and helpful in social coding platforms. We mined nine years of data from two popular software developers' platforms: the Mozilla issue tracking system, i.e., Bugzilla, and the most well-known platform for developers' Q/A, i.e., Stack Overflow. We further triangulated and extended our mining results by performing a survey with 168 software developers. We observed that, between 2013 and 2022, the number of posts containing image data on Bugzilla and Stack Overflow doubled. Furthermore, we found that sharing images makes other developers engage more and faster with the content. In the majority of cases in which an image is included in a developer's post, the information in that image is complementary to the text provided. Finally, our results showed that when an image is shared, understanding the content without the information in the image is unlikely for 86.9\% of the cases. Based on these observations, we discuss the importance of considering visual content when analyzing developers and designing automation tools.
This paper presents a novel framework for structured argumentation, named extend argumentative decision graph ($xADG$). It is an extension of argumentative decision graphs built upon Dung's abstract argumentation graphs. The $xADG$ framework allows for arguments to use boolean logic operators and multiple premises (supports) within their internal structure, resulting in more concise argumentation graphs that may be easier for users to understand. The study presents a methodology for construction of $xADGs$ and evaluates their size and predictive capacity for classification tasks of varying magnitudes. Resulting $xADGs$ achieved strong (balanced) accuracy, which was accomplished through an input decision tree, while also reducing the average number of supports needed to reach a conclusion. The results further indicated that it is possible to construct plausibly understandable $xADGs$ that outperform other techniques for building $ADGs$ in terms of predictive capacity and overall size. In summary, the study suggests that $xADG$ represents a promising framework to developing more concise argumentative models that can be used for classification tasks and knowledge discovery, acquisition, and refinement.
Upon the advent of the emerging metaverse and its related applications in Augmented Reality (AR), the current bit-oriented network struggles to support real-time changes for the vast amount of associated information, hindering its development. Thus, a critical revolution in the Sixth Generation (6G) networks is envisioned through the joint exploitation of information context and its importance to the task, leading to a communication paradigm shift towards semantic and effectiveness levels. However, current research has not yet proposed any explicit and systematic communication framework for AR applications that incorporate these two levels. To fill this research gap, this paper presents a task-oriented and semantics-aware communication framework for augmented reality (TSAR) to enhance communication efficiency and effectiveness in 6G. Specifically, we first analyse the traditional wireless AR point cloud communication framework and then summarize our proposed semantic information along with the end-to-end wireless communication. We then detail the design blocks of the TSAR framework, covering both semantic and effectiveness levels. Finally, numerous experiments have been conducted to demonstrate that, compared to the traditional point cloud communication framework, our proposed TSAR significantly reduces wireless AR application transmission latency by 95.6%, while improving communication effectiveness in geometry and color aspects by up to 82.4% and 20.4%, respectively.
This paper presents new methods for analyzing and evaluating generalized plans that can solve broad classes of related planning problems. Although synthesis and learning of generalized plans has been a longstanding goal in AI, it remains challenging due to fundamental gaps in methods for analyzing the scope and utility of a given generalized plan. This paper addresses these gaps by developing a new conceptual framework along with proof techniques and algorithmic processes for assessing termination and goal-reachability related properties of generalized plans. We build upon classic results from graph theory to decompose generalized plans into smaller components that are then used to derive hierarchical termination arguments. These methods can be used to determine the utility of a given generalized plan, as well as to guide the synthesis and learning processes for generalized plans. We present theoretical as well as empirical results illustrating the scope of this new approach. Our analysis shows that this approach significantly extends the class of generalized plans that can be assessed automatically, thereby reducing barriers in the synthesis and learning of reliable generalized plans.
Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, the edge computing systems integrate computing, storage and network resources at the edge of the network to provide computing infrastructure, enabling developers to quickly develop and deploy edge applications. Nowadays the edge computing systems have received widespread attention in both industry and academia. To explore new research opportunities and assist users in selecting suitable edge computing systems for specific applications, this survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the existing edge computing systems and introduces representative projects. A comparison of open source tools is presented according to their applicability. Finally, we highlight energy efficiency and deep learning optimization of edge computing systems. Open issues for analyzing and designing an edge computing system are also studied in this survey.
Sliding-window object detectors that generate bounding-box object predictions over a dense, regular grid have advanced rapidly and proven popular. In contrast, modern instance segmentation approaches are dominated by methods that first detect object bounding boxes, and then crop and segment these regions, as popularized by Mask R-CNN. In this work, we investigate the paradigm of dense sliding-window instance segmentation, which is surprisingly under-explored. Our core observation is that this task is fundamentally different than other dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation or bounding-box object detection, as the output at every spatial location is itself a geometric structure with its own spatial dimensions. To formalize this, we treat dense instance segmentation as a prediction task over 4D tensors and present a general framework called TensorMask that explicitly captures this geometry and enables novel operators on 4D tensors. We demonstrate that the tensor view leads to large gains over baselines that ignore this structure, and leads to results comparable to Mask R-CNN. These promising results suggest that TensorMask can serve as a foundation for novel advances in dense mask prediction and a more complete understanding of the task. Code will be made available.
Time Series Classification (TSC) is an important and challenging problem in data mining. With the increase of time series data availability, hundreds of TSC algorithms have been proposed. Among these methods, only a few have considered Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to perform this task. This is surprising as deep learning has seen very successful applications in the last years. DNNs have indeed revolutionized the field of computer vision especially with the advent of novel deeper architectures such as Residual and Convolutional Neural Networks. Apart from images, sequential data such as text and audio can also be processed with DNNs to reach state-of-the-art performance for document classification and speech recognition. In this article, we study the current state-of-the-art performance of deep learning algorithms for TSC by presenting an empirical study of the most recent DNN architectures for TSC. We give an overview of the most successful deep learning applications in various time series domains under a unified taxonomy of DNNs for TSC. We also provide an open source deep learning framework to the TSC community where we implemented each of the compared approaches and evaluated them on a univariate TSC benchmark (the UCR/UEA archive) and 12 multivariate time series datasets. By training 8,730 deep learning models on 97 time series datasets, we propose the most exhaustive study of DNNs for TSC to date.
Object detection is an important and challenging problem in computer vision. Although the past decade has witnessed major advances in object detection in natural scenes, such successes have been slow to aerial imagery, not only because of the huge variation in the scale, orientation and shape of the object instances on the earth's surface, but also due to the scarcity of well-annotated datasets of objects in aerial scenes. To advance object detection research in Earth Vision, also known as Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, we introduce a large-scale Dataset for Object deTection in Aerial images (DOTA). To this end, we collect $2806$ aerial images from different sensors and platforms. Each image is of the size about 4000-by-4000 pixels and contains objects exhibiting a wide variety of scales, orientations, and shapes. These DOTA images are then annotated by experts in aerial image interpretation using $15$ common object categories. The fully annotated DOTA images contains $188,282$ instances, each of which is labeled by an arbitrary (8 d.o.f.) quadrilateral To build a baseline for object detection in Earth Vision, we evaluate state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on DOTA. Experiments demonstrate that DOTA well represents real Earth Vision applications and are quite challenging.