In semantic communications, only task-relevant information is transmitted, yielding significant performance gains over conventional communications. To satisfy user requirements for different tasks, we investigate the semantic-aware resource allocation in a multi-cell network for serving multiple tasks in this paper. First, semantic entropy is defined and quantified to measure the semantic information for different tasks. Then, we develop a novel quality-of-experience (QoE) model to formulate the semantic-aware resource allocation problem in terms of semantic compression, channel assignment, and transmit power allocation. To solve the formulated problem, we first decouple it into two subproblems. The first one is to optimize semantic compression with given channel assignment and power allocation results, which is solved by a developed deep Q-network (DQN) based method. The second one is to optimize the channel assignment and transmit power, which is modeled as a many-to-one matching game and solved by a proposed low-complexity matching algorithm. Simulation results validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed semantic-aware resource allocation method, as well as its compatibility with conventional and semantic communications.
Digital Twins play a crucial role in bridging the physical and virtual worlds. Given the dynamic and evolving characteristics of the physical world, a huge volume of data transmission and exchange is necessary to attain synchronized updates in the virtual world. In this paper, we propose a semantic communication framework based on You Only Look Once (YOLO) to construct a virtual apple orchard with the aim of mitigating the costs associated with data transmission. Specifically, we first employ the YOLOv7-X object detector to extract semantic information from captured images of edge devices, thereby reducing the volume of transmitted data and saving transmission costs. Afterwards, we quantify the importance of each semantic information by the confidence generated through the object detector. Based on this, we propose two resource allocation schemes, i.e., the confidence-based scheme and the artificial intelligence-generated scheme, aimed at enhancing the transmission quality of important semantic information. The proposed diffusion model generates an optimal allocation scheme that outperforms both the average allocation scheme and the confidence-based allocation scheme. Moreover, to obtain semantic information more effectively, we enhance the detection capability of the YOLOv7-X object detector by introducing new Efficient Layer Aggregation Network-HorNet (ELAN-H) and SimAM attention modules, while reducing the model parameters and computational complexity, making it easier to run on edge devices with limited performance. The numerical results indicate that our proposed semantic communication framework and resource allocation schemes significantly reduce transmission costs while enhancing the transmission quality of important information in communication services.
Developing optimal controllers for aggressive high-speed quadcopter flight poses significant challenges in robotics. Recent trends in the field involve utilizing neural network controllers trained through supervised or reinforcement learning. However, the sim-to-real transfer introduces a reality gap, requiring the use of robust inner loop controllers during real flights, which limits the network's control authority and flight performance. In this paper, we investigate for the first time, an end-to-end neural network controller, addressing the reality gap issue without being restricted by an inner-loop controller. The networks, referred to as G\&CNets, are trained to learn an energy-optimal policy mapping the quadcopter's state to rpm commands using an optimal trajectory dataset. In hover-to-hover flights, we identified the unmodeled moments as a significant contributor to the reality gap. To mitigate this, we propose an adaptive control strategy that works by learning from optimal trajectories of a system affected by constant external pitch, roll and yaw moments. In real test flights, this model mismatch is estimated onboard and fed to the network to obtain the optimal rpm command. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by performing energy-optimal hover-to-hover flights with and without moment feedback. Finally, we compare the adaptive controller to a state-of-the-art differential-flatness-based controller in a consecutive waypoint flight and demonstrate the advantages of our method in terms of energy optimality and robustness.
The robot operating system is the de-facto standard for designing and implementing robotics applications. Several previous works deal with the integration of heterogeneous accelerators into ROS-based applications. One of these approaches is ReconROS, which enables nodes to be completely mapped to hardware. The follow-up work fpgaDDS extends ReconROS by an intra-FPGA data distribution service to process topic-based communication between nodes entirely in hardware. However, the application of this approach is strictly limited to communication between nodes implemented in hardware only. This paper introduces gateways to close the gap between topic communication in hardware and software. Gateways aim to reduce data transfers between hardware and software by synchronizing a hardware-and software-mapped topic. As a result, data must be transferred only once compared to a separate data transmission for each subscribing hardware node in the baseline. Our measurements show significant speedups in multi-subscriber scenarios with large message sizes. From the conclusions of these measurements, we present a methodology for the communication mapping of ROS 2 computation graphs. In the evaluation, an autonomous driving real-world example benefits from the gateway and achieves a speedup of 1.4.
When analyzing real-world data it is common to work with event ensembles, which comprise sets of observations that collectively constrain the parameters of an underlying model of interest. Such models often have a hierarchical structure, where "local" parameters impact individual events and "global" parameters influence the entire dataset. We introduce practical approaches for optimal dataset-wide probabilistic inference in cases where the likelihood is intractable, but simulations can be realized via forward modeling. We construct neural estimators for the likelihood(-ratio) or posterior and show that explicitly accounting for the model's hierarchical structure can lead to tighter parameter constraints. We ground our discussion using case studies from the physical sciences, focusing on examples from particle physics (particle collider data) and astrophysics (strong gravitational lensing observations).
Learning on big data brings success for artificial intelligence (AI), but the annotation and training costs are expensive. In future, learning on small data is one of the ultimate purposes of AI, which requires machines to recognize objectives and scenarios relying on small data as humans. A series of machine learning models is going on this way such as active learning, few-shot learning, deep clustering. However, there are few theoretical guarantees for their generalization performance. Moreover, most of their settings are passive, that is, the label distribution is explicitly controlled by one specified sampling scenario. This survey follows the agnostic active sampling under a PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) framework to analyze the generalization error and label complexity of learning on small data using a supervised and unsupervised fashion. With these theoretical analyses, we categorize the small data learning models from two geometric perspectives: the Euclidean and non-Euclidean (hyperbolic) mean representation, where their optimization solutions are also presented and discussed. Later, some potential learning scenarios that may benefit from small data learning are then summarized, and their potential learning scenarios are also analyzed. Finally, some challenging applications such as computer vision, natural language processing that may benefit from learning on small data are also surveyed.
Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is a learning paradigm in machine learning and its aim is to leverage useful information contained in multiple related tasks to help improve the generalization performance of all the tasks. In this paper, we give a survey for MTL from the perspective of algorithmic modeling, applications and theoretical analyses. For algorithmic modeling, we give a definition of MTL and then classify different MTL algorithms into five categories, including feature learning approach, low-rank approach, task clustering approach, task relation learning approach and decomposition approach as well as discussing the characteristics of each approach. In order to improve the performance of learning tasks further, MTL can be combined with other learning paradigms including semi-supervised learning, active learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, multi-view learning and graphical models. When the number of tasks is large or the data dimensionality is high, we review online, parallel and distributed MTL models as well as dimensionality reduction and feature hashing to reveal their computational and storage advantages. Many real-world applications use MTL to boost their performance and we review representative works in this paper. Finally, we present theoretical analyses and discuss several future directions for MTL.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Deep learning (DL) based semantic segmentation methods have been providing state-of-the-art performance in the last few years. More specifically, these techniques have been successfully applied to medical image classification, segmentation, and detection tasks. One deep learning technique, U-Net, has become one of the most popular for these applications. In this paper, we propose a Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) based on U-Net as well as a Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network (RRCNN) based on U-Net models, which are named RU-Net and R2U-Net respectively. The proposed models utilize the power of U-Net, Residual Network, as well as RCNN. There are several advantages of these proposed architectures for segmentation tasks. First, a residual unit helps when training deep architecture. Second, feature accumulation with recurrent residual convolutional layers ensures better feature representation for segmentation tasks. Third, it allows us to design better U-Net architecture with same number of network parameters with better performance for medical image segmentation. The proposed models are tested on three benchmark datasets such as blood vessel segmentation in retina images, skin cancer segmentation, and lung lesion segmentation. The experimental results show superior performance on segmentation tasks compared to equivalent models including U-Net and residual U-Net (ResU-Net).
Recent advance in fluorescence microscopy enables acquisition of 3D image volumes with better quality and deeper penetration into tissue. Segmentation is a required step to characterize and analyze biological structures in the images. 3D segmentation using deep learning has achieved promising results in microscopy images. One issue is that deep learning techniques require a large set of groundtruth data which is impractical to annotate manually for microscopy volumes. This paper describes a 3D nuclei segmentation method using 3D convolutional neural networks. A set of synthetic volumes and the corresponding groundtruth volumes are generated automatically using a generative adversarial network. Segmentation results demonstrate that our proposed method is capable of segmenting nuclei successfully in 3D for various data sets.
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.