Journal of King Saud University-Computer and Information Sciences最新文献

Exploring effective and efficient strategies for identifying influential nodes from social networks as seeds to promote the propagation of influence remains a crucial challenge in the field of influence maximization (IM), which has attracted significant research efforts. Deep learning-based approaches have been adopted as an alternative promising solution to the IM problem. However, a robust model that captures the associations between network information and node influence needs to be investigated, while concurrently considering the effects of the overlapped influence on training labels. To address these challenges, a GCNT model, which integrates Graph Convolutional Networks with Graph Transformers, is introduced in this paper to capture the intricate relationships among the topology of the network, node attributes, and node influence effectively. Furthermore, an innovative method called $Greedy$-$LIE$ is proposed to generate labels to alleviate the issue of overlapped influence spread. Moreover, a Mask mechanism specially tailored for the IM problem is presented along with an input embedding balancing strategy. The effectiveness of the GCNT model is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments conducted on six real-world networks, and the model shows its competitive performance in terms of both influence maximization and computational efficiency over state-of-the-art methods.

Emerging Zoned Namespace (ZNS) is a new-style Solid State Drive (SSD) that manages data in a zoned manner, which can achieve higher performance by strictly obeying the sequential write mode in each zone and alleviating the redundant overhead of garbage collections. Unfortunately, flash memory usually has a serious problem with limited program/erase cycles. Meanwhile, inappropriate data placement strategy of storage systems can lead to imbalanced wear among zones, severely reducing the lifespan of ZNS SSDs. In this paper, we propose a Wear-Leveling-Aware Data Placement (WADP) to solve this problem with negligible performance cost. First, WADP employs a wear-aware empty zone allocation algorithm to quantify the resets of zones and choose the less-worn zone for each allocation. Second, to prevent long-term zone occupation of infrequently written data (namely cold data), we propose a wear-leveling cold zone monitoring mechanism to identify cold zones dynamically. Finally, WADP adopts a real-time I/O pressure-aware data migration mechanism to adaptively migrate cold data for achieving wear-leveling among zones. We implement the proposed WADP in ZenFS and evaluate it with widely used workloads. Compared with state-of-the-art solutions, i.e., LIZA and FAR, the experimental results show that WADP can significantly reduce the standard deviation of zone resets while maintaining decent performance.

This special issue is a collection of emerging trends and challenges in applying learning-driven approaches to data fabric architectures within the cloud-to-thing continuum. As data generation and processing increasingly occur at the edge, there is a growing need for intelligent, adaptive data management solutions that seamlessly operate across distributed environments. In this special issue, we received research contributions from various groups around the world. We chose the eight most appropriate and novel contributions to include in this special issue. These eight contributions were further categorized into three themes: Data Handling approaches, resource optimization and management, and security and attacks. Additionally, this editorial suggests future research directions that will potentially lead to groundbreaking insights, which could pave the way for a new era of learning techniques in Data Fabric and the Cloud-to-Thing Continuum.

The efficient and timely execution of tasks is a fundamental challenge in the realm of future Internet of Things (IoT) networks. To address this challenge, fog devices are often deployed close to end devices to facilitate task processing on behalf of IoT nodes. One strategy for improving task computational delay is to employ parallel task offloading, in which tasks are subdivided into subtasks and sent to different fog devices for execution in parallel. However, allocating computational resources to fog nodes and mapping these resources to IoT subtasks is a key challenge in this area. This work models the parallel task offloading problem as a graph-matching problem and utilizes a many-to-many matching technique to achieve a stable mapping of IoT subtasks to fog node resources. Unfortunately, the proposed solution is subject to the problem of externalities due to the dynamic preference profiling of fog nodes. To address this issue, we employ an iterative algorithm to resolve any blocking pairs that may arise. Our results demonstrate that the proposed technique reduces the task latency by 29% as compared to other matching-based techniques available in the literature.

Image captioning, the task of generating descriptive sentences for images, has seen significant advancements by incorporating semantic information. However, previous studies employed semantic attribute detectors to extract predetermined attributes consistently applied at every time step, resulting in the use of irrelevant attributes to the linguistic context during words’ generation. Furthermore, the integration between semantic attributes and visual representations in previous works is considered superficial and ineffective, leading to the neglection of the rich visual-semantic connections affecting the captioning model’s performance. To address the limitations of previous models, we introduced a novel framework that adapts attribute usage based on contextual relevance and effectively utilizes the similarities between visual features and semantic attributes. Our framework includes an Attribute Detection Component (ADC) that predicts relevant attributes using visual features and attribute embeddings. The Attribute Prediction and Visual Weighting module (APVW) then dynamically adjusts these attributes and generates weights to refine the visual context vector, enhancing semantic alignment. Our approach demonstrated an average improvement of 3.30% in BLEU@1 and 5.24% in CIDEr on MS-COCO, and 6.55% in BLEU@1 and 25.72% in CIDEr on Flickr30K, during CIDEr optimization phase.

The widespread integration of software into all parts of our lives has led to the need for software of higher reliability. Ensuring reliable software usually necessitates some form of formal methods in the early stages of the development process which requires strenuous effort. Hence, researchers in the field of software reliability introduced Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) as a relatively inexpensive approach to software reliability prediction. Conventional parameter estimation methods of SRGMs were ineffective and left more to be desired. Consequently, researchers sought out swarm intelligence to combat its flaws, resulting in significant improvements. While similar surveys exist within the domain, the surveys are broader in scope and do not cover many swarm intelligence algorithms. Moreover, the broader scope has resulted in the occasional omission of information regarding the design for reliability predictions. A more comprehensive survey containing 38 studies and 18 different swarm intelligence algorithms in the domain is presented. Each design proposed by the studies was systematically analyzed where relevant information including the measures used, datasets used, SRGMs used, and the effectiveness of each proposed design, were extracted and organized into tables and taxonomies to be able to identify the current trends within the domain. Some notable findings include the distance-based approach providing a high prediction accuracy and an increasing trend in hybridized variants of swarm intelligence algorithms designs to predict software reliability. Future researchers are encouraged to include Mean Square Error (MSE) or Root MSE as the measures offer the largest sample size for comparison.

In a service ecosystem, the trust of users in services serves as the foundation for maintaining normal interactions among users, service providers, and platforms. However, malicious attacks can tamper with the trust value of these services, making it difficult for users to identify reliable services and undermining the benefits of reliable service providers and platforms. When existing trust management models address the impact of malicious attacks on service reliability, they rarely consider leveraging different attack targets to improve the accuracy of compromised service trust. Therefore, we propose a trust enhancement model based on distributed learning and blockchain in the service ecosystem, which adaptively enhances the trust values of compromised services according to the targets of anomalous attacks. Firstly, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the targets of malicious attacks using distributed learning. Secondly, we introduced a trust enhancement contract that utilizes different methods to enhance the trust of the service based on various attack targets. Finally, our approach outperforms the baseline method significantly. For different attack targets, we observe a reduction in RMSE by 12.38% and 12.12%, respectively, and an enhancement in coverage by 24.94% and 14.56%, respectively. The experimental results show the reliability and efficacy of our proposed model.

Recovering structures from images with 180${}^{\circ }$ or 360${}^{\circ }$ FoV is pivotal in computer vision and computational photography, particularly for VR/AR/MR and autonomous robotics applications. Due to varying distortions and the complexity of indoor scenes, recovering flexible structures from a single image is challenging. We introduce OmniSRNet, a comprehensive deep learning framework that merges distortion-aware learning with bidirectional LSTM. Utilizing a curated dataset with optimized panorama and expanded fisheye images, our framework features a distortion-aware module (DAM) for extracting features and a horizontal and vertical step module (HVSM) of LSTM for contextual predictions. OmniSRNet excels in applications such as VR-based house viewing and MR-based video surveillance, achieving leading results on cuboid and non-cuboid datasets. The code and dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/mmlph/OmniSRNet/.

The recent rapid expansion of cloud computing has led to the prominence of Cloud Data Center (CDC) emerging. However, user requests’ waiting time might be greatly increased for a single physical machine (PM) in the CDC. We provide a cloud resource allocation scheme with virtual machine (VM) inter-group asynchronous failure. This method improves requests’ throughput and reduces wait time of requests. In particular, two PMs with different service rates for mapping multiple VMs are deployed in order to equally distribute cloud users’ requests, and we assume that the two PMs will fail and repair at different probabilities. A finite cache is also introduced to reduce the requests’ blocking rate. We model the VMs and user requests and create a 3-dimensional Markov chain (3DMC) to gauge the requests’ performance metrics. Numerical experiments are performed to obtain multiple performance metrics graphs for the requests. By comparing our scheme with the traditional cloud resource allocation scheme that involves synchronization failure in VM, we find that our scheme has an improvement in throughput, and each scheme has advantages and disadvantages in blocking rate of requests.

Multi-view graph clustering has garnered tremendous interest for its capability to effectively segregate data by harnessing information from multiple graphs representing distinct views. Despite the advances, conventional methods commonly construct similarity graphs straightway from raw features, leading to suboptimal outcomes due to noise or outliers. To address this, latent representation-based graph clustering has emerged. However, it often hypothesizes that multiple views share a fixed-dimensional coefficient matrix, potentially resulting in useful information loss and limited representation capabilities. Additionally, many methods exploit Euclidean distance as a similarity metric, which may inaccurately measure linear relationships between samples. To tackle these challenges, we develop a novel diverse representation-guided graph learning for multi-view metric clustering (DRGMMC). Concretely, raw sample matrix from each view is first projected into diverse latent spaces to capture comprehensive knowledge. Subsequently, a popular metric is leveraged to adaptively learn similarity graphs with linearity-aware based on attained coefficient matrices. Furthermore, a self-weighted fusion strategy and Laplacian rank constraint are introduced to output clustering results directly. Consequently, our model merges diverse representation learning, metric learning, consensus graph learning, and data clustering into a joint model, reinforcing each other for holistic optimization. Substantial experimental findings substantiate that DRGMMC outperforms most advanced graph clustering techniques.