The paper studies the multi-user precoding problem as a non-convex optimization problem for wireless multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) systems. In our work, we approximate the target Spectral Efficiency function with a novel computationally simpler function. Then, we reduce the precoding problem to an unconstrained optimization task using a special differential projection method and solve it by the Quasi-Newton L-BFGS iterative procedure to achieve gains in capacity. We are testing the proposed approach in several scenarios generated using Quadriga~-- open-source software for generating realistic radio channel impulse response. Our method shows monotonic improvement over heuristic methods with reasonable computation time. The proposed L-BFGS optimization scheme is novel in this area and shows a significant advantage over the standard approaches. The proposed method has a simple implementation and can be a good reference for other heuristic algorithms in this field.
Per-instance algorithm selection seeks to recommend, for a given problem instance and a given performance criterion, one or several suitable algorithms that are expected to perform well for the particular setting. The selection is classically done offline, using openly available information about the problem instance or features that are extracted from the instance during a dedicated feature extraction step. This ignores valuable information that the algorithms accumulate during the optimization process. In this work, we propose an alternative, online algorithm selection scheme which we coin per-run algorithm selection. In our approach, we start the optimization with a default algorithm, and, after a certain number of iterations, extract instance features from the observed trajectory of this initial optimizer to determine whether to switch to another optimizer. We test this approach using the CMA-ES as the default solver, and a portfolio of six different optimizers as potential algorithms to switch to. In contrast to other recent work on online per-run algorithm selection, we warm-start the second optimizer using information accumulated during the first optimization phase. We show that our approach outperforms static per-instance algorithm selection. We also compare two different feature extraction principles, based on exploratory landscape analysis and time series analysis of the internal state variables of the CMA-ES, respectively. We show that a combination of both feature sets provides the most accurate recommendations for our test cases, taken from the BBOB function suite from the COCO platform and the YABBOB suite from the Nevergrad platform.
This paper addresses the color image completion problem in accordance with low-rank quatenrion matrix optimization that is characterized by sparse regularization in a transformed domain. This research was inspired by an appreciation of the fact that different signal types, including audio formats and images, possess structures that are inherently sparse in respect of their respective bases. Since color images can be processed as a whole in the quaternion domain, we depicted the sparsity of the color image in the quaternion discrete cosine transform (QDCT) domain. In addition, the representation of a low-rank structure that is intrinsic to the color image is a vital issue in the quaternion matrix completion problem. To achieve a more superior low-rank approximation, the quatenrion-based truncated nuclear norm (QTNN) is employed in the proposed model. Moreover, this model is facilitated by a competent alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) based on the algorithm. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can yield vastly superior completion performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art low-rank matrix/quaternion matrix approximation methods tested on color image recovery.
Spectral efficiency improvement is a key focus in most wireless communication systems and achieved by various means such as using large antenna arrays and/or advanced modulation schemes and signal formats. This work proposes to further improve spectral efficiency through combining non-orthogonal spectrally efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM) systems with index modulation (IM), which can efficiently make use of the indices of activated subcarriers as communication information. Recent research has verified that IM may be used with SEFDM to alleviate inter-carrier interference (ICI) and improve error performance. This work proposes new SEFDM signal formats based on novel activation pattern designs, which limit the locations of activated subcarriers and enable a variable number of activated subcarriers in each SEFDM subblock. SEFDM-IM system designs are developed by jointly considering activation patterns, modulation schemes and signal waveform formats, with a set of solutions evaluated under different spectral efficiency scenarios. Detailed modelling of coded systems and simulation studies reveal that the proposed designs not only lead to better bit error rate (BER) but also lower peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and reduced computational complexity relative to other reported index-modulated systems.
Computing a dense subgraph is a fundamental problem in graph mining, with a diverse set of applications ranging from electronic commerce to community detection in social networks. In many of these applications, the underlying context is better modelled as a weighted hypergraph that keeps evolving with time. This motivates the problem of maintaining the densest subhypergraph of a weighted hypergraph in a {\em dynamic setting}, where the input keeps changing via a sequence of updates (hyperedge insertions/deletions). Previously, the only known algorithm for this problem was due to Hu et al. [HWC17]. This algorithm worked only on unweighted hypergraphs, and had an approximation ratio of $(1+\epsilon)r^2$ and an update time of $O(\text{poly} (r, \log n))$, where $r$ denotes the maximum rank of the input across all the updates. We obtain a new algorithm for this problem, which works even when the input hypergraph is weighted. Our algorithm has a significantly improved (near-optimal) approximation ratio of $(1+\epsilon)$ that is independent of $r$, and a similar update time of $O(\text{poly} (r, \log n))$. It is the first $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithm even for the special case of weighted simple graphs. To complement our theoretical analysis, we perform experiments with our dynamic algorithm on large-scale, real-world data-sets. Our algorithm significantly outperforms the state of the art [HWC17] both in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
Federated learning (FL) has been recognized as a viable distributed learning paradigm which trains a machine learning model collaboratively with massive mobile devices in the wireless edge while protecting user privacy. Although various communication schemes have been proposed to expedite the FL process, most of them have assumed ideal wireless channels which provide reliable and lossless communication links between the server and mobile clients. Unfortunately, in practical systems with limited radio resources such as constraint on the training latency and constraints on the transmission power and bandwidth, transmission of a large number of model parameters inevitably suffers from quantization errors (QE) and transmission outage (TO). In this paper, we consider such non-ideal wireless channels, and carry out the first analysis showing that the FL convergence can be severely jeopardized by TO and QE, but intriguingly can be alleviated if the clients have uniform outage probabilities. These insightful results motivate us to propose a robust FL scheme, named FedTOE, which performs joint allocation of wireless resources and quantization bits across the clients to minimize the QE while making the clients have the same TO probability. Extensive experimental results are presented to show the superior performance of FedTOE for deep learning-based classification tasks with transmission latency constraints.
This paper presents a hybrid robot motion planner that generates long-horizon motion plans for robot navigation in environments with obstacles. We propose a hybrid planner, RRT* with segmented trajectory optimization (RRT*-sOpt), which combines the merits of sampling-based planning, optimization-based planning, and trajectory splitting to quickly plan for a collision-free and dynamically-feasible motion plan. When generating a plan, the RRT* layer quickly samples a semi-optimal path and sets it as an initial reference path. Then, the sOpt layer splits the reference path and performs optimization on each segment. It then splits the new trajectory again and repeats the process until the whole trajectory converges. We also propose to reduce the number of segments before convergence with the aim of further reducing computation time. Simulation results show that RRT*-sOpt benefits from the hybrid structure with trajectory splitting and performs robustly in various robot platforms and scenarios.
The problem of active mapping aims to plan an informative sequence of sensing views given a limited budget such as distance traveled. This paper consider active occupancy grid mapping using a range sensor, such as LiDAR or depth camera. State-of-the-art methods optimize information-theoretic measures relating the occupancy grid probabilities with the range sensor measurements. The non-smooth nature of ray-tracing within a grid representation makes the objective function non-differentiable, forcing existing methods to search over a discrete space of candidate trajectories. This work proposes a differentiable approximation of the Shannon mutual information between a grid map and ray-based observations that enables gradient ascent optimization in the continuous space of SE(3) sensor poses. Our gradient-based formulation leads to more informative sensing trajectories, while avoiding occlusions and collisions. The proposed method is demonstrated in simulated and real-world experiments in 2-D and 3-D environments.
Vector Perturbation Precoding (VPP) can speed up downlink data transmissions in Large and Massive Multi-User MIMO systems but is known to be NP-hard. While there are several algorithms in the literature for VPP under total power constraint, they are not applicable for VPP under per-antenna power constraint. This paper proposes a novel, parallel tree search algorithm for VPP under per-antenna power constraint, called \emph{\textbf{TreeStep}}, to find good quality solutions to the VPP problem with practical computational complexity. We show that our method can provide huge performance gain over simple linear precoding like Regularised Zero Forcing. We evaluate TreeStep for several large MIMO~($16\times16$ and $24\times24$) and massive MIMO~($16\times32$ and $24\times 48$) and demonstrate that TreeStep outperforms the popular polynomial-time VPP algorithm, the Fixed Complexity Sphere Encoder, by achieving the extremely low BER of $10^{-6}$ at a much lower SNR.
With the increasing penetration of distributed energy resources, distributed optimization algorithms have attracted significant attention for power systems applications due to their potential for superior scalability, privacy, and robustness to a single point-of-failure. The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is a popular distributed optimization algorithm; however, its convergence performance is highly dependent on the selection of penalty parameters, which are usually chosen heuristically. In this work, we use reinforcement learning (RL) to develop an adaptive penalty parameter selection policy for the AC optimal power flow (ACOPF) problem solved via ADMM with the goal of minimizing the number of iterations until convergence. We train our RL policy using deep Q-learning, and show that this policy can result in significantly accelerated convergence (up to a 59% reduction in the number of iterations compared to existing, curvature-informed penalty parameter selection methods). Furthermore, we show that our RL policy demonstrates promise for generalizability, performing well under unseen loading schemes as well as under unseen losses of lines and generators (up to a 50% reduction in iterations). This work thus provides a proof-of-concept for using RL for parameter selection in ADMM for power systems applications.
We present a pipelined multiplier with reduced activities and minimized interconnect based on online digit-serial arithmetic. The working precision has been truncated such that $p<n$ bits are used to compute $n$ bits product, resulting in significant savings in area and power. The digit slices follow variable precision according to input, increasing upto $p$ and then decreases according to the error profile. Pipelining has been done to achieve high throughput and low latency which is desirable for compute intensive inner products. Synthesis results of the proposed designs have been presented and compared with the non-pipelined online multiplier, pipelined online multiplier with full working precision and conventional serial-parallel and array multipliers. For $8, 16, 24$ and $32$ bit precision, the proposed low power pipelined design show upto $38\%$ and $44\%$ reduction in power and area respectively compared to the pipelined online multiplier without working precision truncation.