A simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system is proposed. More particularly, an STAR-RIS is deployed to assist in the information/power transfer from a multi-antenna access point (AP) to multiple single-antenna information users (IUs) and energy users (EUs), where two practical STAR-RIS operating protocols, namely energy splitting (ES) and time switching (TS), are employed. Under the imperfect channel state information (CSI) condition, a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP) framework, that simultaneously maximizes the minimum data rate and minimum harvested power, is employed to investigate the fundamental rate-energy trade-off between IUs and EUs. To obtain the optimal robust resource allocation strategy, the MOOP is first transformed into a single-objective optimization problem (SOOP) via the {\epsilon}-constraint method, which is then reformulated by approximating semi-infinite inequality constraints with the S-procedure. For ES, an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm is proposed to jointly design AP active beamforming and STAR-RIS passive beamforming, where a penalty method is leveraged in STAR-RIS beamforming design. Furthermore, the developed algorithm is extended to optimize the time allocation policy and beamforming vectors in a two-layer iterative manner for TS. Numerical results reveal that: 1) deploying STAR-RISs achieves a significant performance gain over conventional RISs, especially in terms of harvested power for EUs; 2) the ES protocol obtains a better user fairness performance when focusing only on IUs or EUs, while the TS protocol yields a better balance between IUs and EUs; 3) the imperfect CSI affects IUs more significantly than EUs, whereas TS can confer a more robust design to attenuate these effects.
Spectral graph convolutional network (SGCN) is a kind of graph neural networks (GNN) based on graph signal filters, and has shown compelling expressivity for modeling graph-structured data. Most SGCNs adopt polynomial filters and learn the coefficients from the training data. Many of them focus on which polynomial basis leads to optimal expressive power and models' architecture is little discussed. In this paper, we propose a general form in terms of spectral graph convolution, where the coefficients of polynomial basis are stored in a third-order tensor. Then, we show that the convolution block in existing SGCNs can be derived by performing a certain coefficient decomposition operation on the coefficient tensor. Based on the generalized view, we develop novel spectral graph convolutions CoDeSGC-CP and -Tucker by tensor decomposition CP and Tucker on the coefficient tensor. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed convolutions achieve favorable performance improvements.
Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) is a promising technology for next generation wireless networks. Despite substantial research in IRS-aided communications, the assumed antenna and channel models are typically simplified without considering site-specific characteristics, which in turn critically affect the IRS deployment and performance in a given environment. In this paper, we first investigate the link-level performance of active or passive IRS taking into account the IRS element radiation pattern (ERP) as well as the antenna radiation pattern of the access point (AP). Then the network-level coverage performance is evaluated/optimized in site-specific multi-building scenarios, by properly deploying multiple IRSs on candidate building facets to serve a given set of users or Points of Interests (PoIs). The problem is reduced to an integer linear programming (ILP) based on given link-level metrics, which is then solved efficiently under moderate network sizes. Numerical results confirm the impact of AP antenna/IRS element pattern on the link-level performance. In addition, it is found that active IRSs, though associated with higher hardware complexity and cost, significantly improve the site-specific network coverage performance in terms of average ergodic rate and fairness among the PoIs as well as the range of serving area, compared with passive IRSs that have a much larger number of elements.
The unprecedented development of non-terrestrial networks (NTN) utilizes the low-altitude airspace for commercial and social flying activities. The integration of NTN and terrestrial networks leads to the emergence of low-altitude economy (LAE). A series of LAE application scenarios are enabled by the sensing, communication, and transportation functionalities of the aircrafts. The prerequisite technologies supporting LAE are introduced in this paper, including the network coverage and aircrafts detection. The LAE functionalities assisted by aircrafts with respect to sensing and communication are then summarized, including the terrestrial and non-terrestrial targets sensing, ubiquitous coverage, relaying, and traffic offloading. Finally, several future directions are identified, including aircrafts collaboration, energy efficiency, and artificial intelligence enabled LAE.
The booming of Internet-of-Things (IoT) is expected to provide more intelligent and reliable communication services for higher network coverage, massive connectivity, and low-cost solutions for 6G services. However, frequent charging and battery replacement of these massive IoT devices brings a series of challenges. Zero energy devices, which rely on energy-harvesting technologies and can operate without battery replacement or charging, play a pivotal role in facilitating the massive use of IoT devices. In order to enable reliable communications of such low-power devices, Manchester-coded on-off keying (OOK) modulation and non-coherent detections are attractive techniques due to their energy efficiency, robustness in noisy environments, and simplicity in receiver design. Moreover, to extend their communication range, employing channel coding along with enhanced detection schemes is crucial. In this paper, a novel soft-decision decoder is designed for OOK-based low-power receivers to enhance their detection performance. In addition, exact closed-form expressions and two simplified approximations are derived for the log-likelihood ratio (LLR), an essential metric for soft decoding. Numerical results demonstrate the significant coverage gain achieved through soft decoding for convolutional code.
Programming recurrent spiking neural networks (RSNNs) to robustly perform multi-timescale computation remains a difficult challenge. To address this, we show how the distributed approach offered by vector symbolic architectures (VSAs), which uses high-dimensional random vectors as the smallest units of representation, can be leveraged to embed robust multi-timescale dynamics into attractor-based RSNNs. We embed finite state machines into the RSNN dynamics by superimposing a symmetric autoassociative weight matrix and asymmetric transition terms. The transition terms are formed by the VSA binding of an input and heteroassociative outer-products between states. Our approach is validated through simulations with highly non-ideal weights; an experimental closed-loop memristive hardware setup; and on Loihi 2, where it scales seamlessly to large state machines. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of VSA representations for embedding robust computation with recurrent dynamics into neuromorphic hardware, without requiring parameter fine-tuning or significant platform-specific optimisation. This advances VSAs as a high-level representation-invariant abstract language for cognitive algorithms in neuromorphic hardware.
Future wireless networks, in particular, 5G and beyond, are anticipated to deploy dense Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites to provide global coverage and broadband connectivity. However, the limited frequency band and the coexistence of multiple constellations bring new challenges for interference management. In this paper, we propose a robust multilayer interference management scheme for spectrum sharing in heterogeneous satellite networks with statistical channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter (CSIT) and receivers (CSIR). In the proposed scheme, Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA), as a general and powerful framework for interference management and multiple access strategies, is implemented distributedly at GEO and LEO satellites, coined Distributed-RSMA (D-RSMA). By doing so, D-RSMA aims to mitigate the interference and boost the user fairness of the overall multilayer satellite system. Specifically, we study the problem of jointly optimizing the GEO/LEO precoders and message splits to maximize the minimum rate among User Terminals (UTs) subject to a transmit power constraint at all satellites. A robust algorithm is proposed to solve the original non-convex optimization problem. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness towards network load and CSI uncertainty of our proposed D-RSMA scheme. Benefiting from the interference management capability, D-RSMA provides significant max-min fairness performance gains compared to several benchmark schemes.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) is widely used to learn a powerful representation of graph-structured data. Recent work demonstrates that transferring knowledge from self-supervised tasks to downstream tasks could further improve graph representation. However, there is an inherent gap between self-supervised tasks and downstream tasks in terms of optimization objective and training data. Conventional pre-training methods may be not effective enough on knowledge transfer since they do not make any adaptation for downstream tasks. To solve such problems, we propose a new transfer learning paradigm on GNNs which could effectively leverage self-supervised tasks as auxiliary tasks to help the target task. Our methods would adaptively select and combine different auxiliary tasks with the target task in the fine-tuning stage. We design an adaptive auxiliary loss weighting model to learn the weights of auxiliary tasks by quantifying the consistency between auxiliary tasks and the target task. In addition, we learn the weighting model through meta-learning. Our methods can be applied to various transfer learning approaches, it performs well not only in multi-task learning but also in pre-training and fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that the proposed methods can effectively combine auxiliary tasks with the target task and significantly improve the performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
Approaches based on deep neural networks have achieved striking performance when testing data and training data share similar distribution, but can significantly fail otherwise. Therefore, eliminating the impact of distribution shifts between training and testing data is crucial for building performance-promising deep models. Conventional methods assume either the known heterogeneity of training data (e.g. domain labels) or the approximately equal capacities of different domains. In this paper, we consider a more challenging case where neither of the above assumptions holds. We propose to address this problem by removing the dependencies between features via learning weights for training samples, which helps deep models get rid of spurious correlations and, in turn, concentrate more on the true connection between discriminative features and labels. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on multiple distribution generalization benchmarks compared with state-of-the-art counterparts. Through extensive experiments on distribution generalization benchmarks including PACS, VLCS, MNIST-M, and NICO, we show the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art counterparts.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.