In this letter, we consider an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided wireless relaying system, where a decode-and-forward relay (R) is employed to forward data from a source (S) to a destination (D), aided by M passive reflecting elements. We consider two practical IRS deployment strategies, namely, single-IRS deployment where all reflecting elements are mounted on one single IRS that is deployed near S, R, or D, and multi-IRS deployment where the reflecting elements are allocated over three separate IRSs which are deployed near S, R, and D, respectively. Under the line-of-sight (LoS) channel model, we characterize the capacity scaling orders with respect to an increasing M for the IRS-aided relay system with different IRS deployment strategies. For single-IRS deployment, we show that deploying the IRS near R achieves the highest capacity as compared to that near S or D. While for multi-IRS deployment, we propose a practical cooperative IRS passive beamforming design which is analytically shown to achieve a larger capacity scaling order than the single-IRS deployment (i.e., near R or S/D) when M is sufficiently large. Numerical examples are provided, which validate our theoretical results.
Trimming consists of cutting away parts of a geometric domain, without reconstructing a global parametrization (meshing). It is a widely used operation in computer aided design, which generates meshes that are unfitted with the described physical object. This paper develops an adaptive mesh refinement strategy on trimmed geometries in the context of hierarchical B-spline based isogeometric analysis. A residual a posteriori estimator of the energy norm of the numerical approximation error is derived, in the context of Poisson equation. The reliability of the estimator is proven, and the effectivity index is shown to be independent from the number of hierarchical levels and from the way the trimmed boundaries cut the underlying mesh. In particular, it is thus independent from the size of the active part of the trimmed mesh elements. Numerical experiments are performed to validate the presented theory.
Mining maximal subgraphs with cohesive structures from a bipartite graph has been widely studied. One important cohesive structure on bipartite graphs is k-biplex, where each vertex on one side disconnects at most k vertices on the other side. In this paper, we study the maximal k-biplex enumeration problem which enumerates all maximal k-biplexes. Existing methods suffer from efficiency and/or scalability issues and have the time of waiting for the next output exponential w.r.t. the size of the input bipartite graph (i.e., an exponential delay). In this paper, we adopt a reverse search framework called bTraversal, which corresponds to a depth-first search (DFS) procedure on an implicit solution graph on top of all maximal k-biplexes. We then develop a series of techniques for improving and implementing this framework including (1) carefully selecting an initial solution to start DFS, (2) pruning the vast majority of links from the solution graph of bTraversal, and (3) implementing abstract procedures of the framework. The resulting algorithm is called iTraversal, which has its underlying solution graph significantly sparser than (around 0.1% of) that of bTraversal. Besides, iTraversal provides a guarantee of polynomial delay. Our experimental results on real and synthetic graphs, where the largest one contains more than one billion edges, show that our algorithm is up to four orders of magnitude faster than existing algorithms.
Content-delivery applications can achieve scalability and reduce wide-area network traffic using geographically distributed caches. However, each deployed cache has an associated cost, and under time-varying request rates (e.g., a daily cycle) there may be long periods when the request rate from the local region is not high enough to justify this cost. Cloud computing offers a solution to problems of this kind, by supporting dynamic allocation and release of resources. In this paper, we analyze the potential benefits from dynamically instantiating caches using resources from cloud service providers. We develop novel analytic caching models that accommodate time-varying request rates, transient behavior as a cache fills following instantiation, and selective cache insertion policies. Within the context of a simple cost model, we then develop bounds and compare policies with optimized parameter selections to obtain insights into key cost/performance tradeoffs. We find that dynamic cache instantiation can provide substantial cost reductions, that potential reductions strongly dependent on the object popularity skew, and that selective cache insertion can be even more beneficial in this context than with conventional edge caches. Finally, our contributions also include accurate and easy-to-compute approximations that are shown applicable to LRU caches under time-varying workloads.
We introduce a novel approach to dynamic obstacle avoidance based on Deep Reinforcement Learning by defining a traffic type independent environment with variable complexity. Filling a gap in the current literature, we thoroughly investigate the effect of missing velocity information on an agent's performance in obstacle avoidance tasks. This is a crucial issue in practice since several sensors yield only positional information of objects or vehicles. We evaluate frequently-applied approaches in scenarios of partial observability, namely the incorporation of recurrency in the deep neural networks and simple frame-stacking. For our analysis, we rely on state-of-the-art model-free deep RL algorithms. The lack of velocity information is found to significantly impact the performance of an agent. Both approaches - recurrency and frame-stacking - cannot consistently replace missing velocity information in the observation space. However, in simplified scenarios, they can significantly boost performance and stabilize the overall training procedure.
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technique to enhance wireless communication performance cost effectively. The existing literature has mainly considered IRS being deployed near user terminals to improve their performance. However, this approach may incur a high cost if IRSs need to be densely deployed in the network to cater to random user locations. To avoid such high deployment cost, in this paper we consider a new IRS aided wireless network architecture, where IRSs are deployed in the vicinity of each base station (BS) to assist in its communications with distributed users regardless of their locations. Besides significantly enhancing IRSs' signal coverage, this scheme helps reduce the IRS associated channel estimation overhead as compared to conventional user-side IRSs, by exploiting the nearly static BS-IRS channels over short distance. For this scheme, we propose a new two stage transmission protocol to achieve IRS channel estimation and reflection optimization for uplink data transmission efficiently. In addition, we propose effective methods for solving the user IRS association problem based on long term channel knowledge and the selected user IRS BS cascaded channel estimation problem. Finally, all IRSs' passive reflections are jointly optimized with the BS's multi-antenna receive combining to maximize the minimum achievable rate among all users for data transmission. Numerical results show that the proposed co site IRS empowered BS scheme can achieve significant performance gains over the conventional BS without co site IRS and existing schemes for IRS channel estimation and reflection optimization, thus enabling an appealing low cost and high performance BS design for future wireless networks.
Analog, low-voltage electronics show great promise in producing silicon neurons (SiNs) with unprecedented levels of energy efficiency. Yet, their inherently high susceptibility to process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations, and noise has long been recognised as a major bottleneck in developing effective neuromorphic solutions. Inspired by spike transmission studies in biophysical, neocortical neurons, we demonstrate that the inherent noise and variability can coexist with reliable spike transmission in analog SiNs, similarly to biological neurons. We illustrate this property on a recent neuromorphic model of a bursting neuron by showcasing three different relevant types of reliable event transmission: single spike transmission, burst transmission, and the on-off control of a half-centre oscillator (HCO) network.
We consider large-scale Markov decision processes with an unknown cost function and address the problem of learning a policy from a finite set of expert demonstrations. We assume that the learner is not allowed to interact with the expert and has no access to reinforcement signal of any kind. Existing inverse reinforcement learning methods come with strong theoretical guarantees, but are computationally expensive, while state-of-the-art policy optimization algorithms achieve significant empirical success, but are hampered by limited theoretical understanding. To bridge the gap between theory and practice, we introduce a novel bilinear saddle-point framework using Lagrangian duality. The proposed primal-dual viewpoint allows us to develop a model-free provably efficient algorithm through the lens of stochastic convex optimization. The method enjoys the advantages of simplicity of implementation, low memory requirements, and computational and sample complexities independent of the number of states. We further present an equivalent no-regret online-learning interpretation.
We present techniques for scaling Swin Transformer up to 3 billion parameters and making it capable of training with images of up to 1,536$\times$1,536 resolution. By scaling up capacity and resolution, Swin Transformer sets new records on four representative vision benchmarks: 84.0% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-V2 image classification, 63.1/54.4 box/mask mAP on COCO object detection, 59.9 mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation, and 86.8% top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400 video action classification. Our techniques are generally applicable for scaling up vision models, which has not been widely explored as that of NLP language models, partly due to the following difficulties in training and applications: 1) vision models often face instability issues at scale and 2) many downstream vision tasks require high resolution images or windows and it is not clear how to effectively transfer models pre-trained at low resolutions to higher resolution ones. The GPU memory consumption is also a problem when the image resolution is high. To address these issues, we present several techniques, which are illustrated by using Swin Transformer as a case study: 1) a post normalization technique and a scaled cosine attention approach to improve the stability of large vision models; 2) a log-spaced continuous position bias technique to effectively transfer models pre-trained at low-resolution images and windows to their higher-resolution counterparts. In addition, we share our crucial implementation details that lead to significant savings of GPU memory consumption and thus make it feasible to train large vision models with regular GPUs. Using these techniques and self-supervised pre-training, we successfully train a strong 3B Swin Transformer model and effectively transfer it to various vision tasks involving high-resolution images or windows, achieving the state-of-the-art accuracy on a variety of benchmarks.
Implicit probabilistic models are models defined naturally in terms of a sampling procedure and often induces a likelihood function that cannot be expressed explicitly. We develop a simple method for estimating parameters in implicit models that does not require knowledge of the form of the likelihood function or any derived quantities, but can be shown to be equivalent to maximizing likelihood under some conditions. Our result holds in the non-asymptotic parametric setting, where both the capacity of the model and the number of data examples are finite. We also demonstrate encouraging experimental results.
It is always well believed that modeling relationships between objects would be helpful for representing and eventually describing an image. Nevertheless, there has not been evidence in support of the idea on image description generation. In this paper, we introduce a new design to explore the connections between objects for image captioning under the umbrella of attention-based encoder-decoder framework. Specifically, we present Graph Convolutional Networks plus Long Short-Term Memory (dubbed as GCN-LSTM) architecture that novelly integrates both semantic and spatial object relationships into image encoder. Technically, we build graphs over the detected objects in an image based on their spatial and semantic connections. The representations of each region proposed on objects are then refined by leveraging graph structure through GCN. With the learnt region-level features, our GCN-LSTM capitalizes on LSTM-based captioning framework with attention mechanism for sentence generation. Extensive experiments are conducted on COCO image captioning dataset, and superior results are reported when comparing to state-of-the-art approaches. More remarkably, GCN-LSTM increases CIDEr-D performance from 120.1% to 128.7% on COCO testing set.