Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have emerged as a promising technology to improve the efficiency of wireless communication systems. However, passive IRSs suffer from the ``multiplicative fading" effect, because the transmit signal will go through two fading hops. With the ability to amplify and reflect signals, active IRSs offer a potential way to tackle this issue, where the amplification energy only experiences the second hop. However, the fundamental limit and system design for active IRSs have not been fully understood, especially for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In this work, we consider the analysis and design for the large-scale active IRS-aided MIMO system assuming only statistical channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter and the IRS. The evaluation of the fundamental limit, i.e., ergodic rate, turns out to be a very difficult problem. To this end, we leverage random matrix theory (RMT) to derive the deterministic approximation (DA) for the ergodic rate, and then design an algorithm to jointly optimize the transmit covariance matrix at the transmitter and the reflection matrix at the active IRS. Numerical results demonstrate the accuracy of the derived DA and the effectiveness of the proposed optimization algorithm. The results in this work reveal interesting physical insights with respect to the advantage of active IRSs over their passive counterparts.
The title of this paper is motivated by the title of the paper by Forsythe written in 1952 and published in Bull. Amer. Math. Soc., 59 (1953), pp. 299-329. Forsythe argues that solving a system of $n$ linear algebraic equations in $n$ unknowns is mathematically a lowly subject. His beautiful text graduates with what was at that time ``the newest process on the roster, the method of conjugate gradients.'' We consider it important to revisit, after 70 years, to what extent Forsythe's views, and the views presented in the related contemporary works of Hestenes, Stiefel, Lanczos, Karush, and Hayes, remain relevant today. Including, besides the conjugate gradient method (CG), also the generalized minimal residual method (GMRES), we point out building blocks that we consider central for the current mathematical and computational understanding of Krylov subspace methods. We accomplish this through a set of computed examples. We keep technical details to a minimum and provide references to the literature. This allows us to demonstrate the mathematical beauty and intricacies of the methods, and to recall some persistent misunderstandings as well as important open problems. We hope that this work can initiate further theoretical investigations of Krylov subspace methods. This paper can not cover all Krylov subspace methods. The principles discussed for CG and GMRES are, however, important for all of them. Further, practical computations always incorporate preconditioning. We will not deal with preconditioning techniques, but we will deal with the basic question of how preconditioning is motivated, and we will recall some recent analytic results.
This paper investigates the energy efficiency of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system, in which one multi-antenna base station (BS) transmits unified ISAC signals to a multi-antenna communication user (CU) and at the same time use the echo signals to estimate an extended target. We focus on one particular ISAC transmission block and take into account the practical on-off non-transmission power at the BS. Under this setup, we minimize the energy consumption at the BS while ensuring a minimum average data rate requirement for communication and a maximum Cram\'er-Rao bound (CRB) requirement for target estimation, by jointly optimizing the transmit covariance matrix and the ``on'' duration for active transmission. We obtain the optimal solution to the rate-and-CRB-constrained energy minimization problem in a semi-closed form. Interestingly, the obtained optimal solution is shown to unify the spectrum-efficient and energy-efficient communications and sensing designs. In particular, for the special MIMO sensing case with rate constraint inactive, the optimal solution follows the isotropic transmission with shortest ``on'' duration, in which the BS radiates the required sensing energy by using sufficiently high power over the shortest duration. For the general ISAC case, the optimal transmit covariance solution is of full rank and follows the eigenmode transmission based on the communication channel, while the optimal ``on'' duration is determined based on both the rate and CRB constraints. Numerical results show that the proposed ISAC design achieves significantly reduced energy consumption as compared to the benchmark schemes based on isotropic transmission, always-on transmission, and sensing or communications only designs, especially when the rate and CRB constraints become stringent.
Given a set of inelastic material models, a microstructure, a macroscopic structural geometry, and a set of boundary conditions, one can in principle always solve the governing equations to determine the system's mechanical response. However, for large systems this procedure can quickly become computationally overwhelming, especially in three-dimensions when the microstructure is locally complex. In such settings multi-scale modeling offers a route to a more efficient model by holding out the promise of a framework with fewer degrees of freedom, which at the same time faithfully represents, up to a certain scale, the behavior of the system. In this paper, we present a methodology that produces such models for inelastic systems upon the basis of a variational scheme. The essence of the scheme is the construction of a variational statement for the free energy as well as the dissipation potential for a coarse scale model in terms of the free energy and dissipation functions of the fine scale model. From the coarse scale energy and dissipation we can then generate coarse scale material models that are computationally far more efficient than either directly solving the fine scale model or by resorting to FE-square type modeling. Moreover, the coarse scale model preserves the essential mathematical structure of the fine scale model. An essential feature for such schemes is the proper definition of the coarse scale inelastic variables. By way of concrete examples, we illustrate the needed steps to generate successful models via application to problems in classical plasticity, included are comparisons to direct numerical simulations of the microstructure to illustrate the accuracy of the proposed methodology.
In this paper, we develop a hybrid multiple access (MA) protocol for an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided uplink transmission network by incorporating the IRS-aided time-division MA (I-TDMA) protocol and the IRS-aided non-orthogonal MA (I-NOMA) protocol as special cases. Two typical communication scenarios, namely the transmit power limited case and the transmit energy limited case are considered, where the device's rearranged order, time and power allocation, as well as dynamic IRS beamforming patterns over time are jointly optimized to minimize the sum transmission delay. To shed light on the superiority of the proposed IRS-aided hybrid MA (I-HMA) protocol over conventional protocols, the conditions under which I-HMA outperforms I-TDMA and I-NOMA are revealed by characterizing their corresponding optimal solution. Then, a computationally efficient algorithm is proposed to obtain the high-quality solution to the corresponding optimization problems. Simulation results validate our theoretical findings, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed design, and draw some useful insights. Specifically, it is found that the proposed protocol can significantly reduce the sum transmission delay by combining the additional gain of dynamic IRS beamforming with the high spectral efficiency of NOMA, which thus reveals that integrating IRS into the proposed HMA protocol is an effective solution for delay-aware optimization. Furthermore, it reveals that the proposed design reduces the time consumption not only from the system-centric view, but also from the device-centric view.
In everyday life, we often find that we can maintain an object's equilibrium on a tray by adjusting its orientation. Building upon this observation and extending the method we previously proposed to suppress sloshing in a moving vessel, this paper presents a feedforward control approach for transporting objects with a robot that are not firmly grasped but simply placed on a tray. The proposed approach combines smoothing actions and end-effector re-orientation to prevent object sliding. It can be integrated into existing robotic systems as a plug-in element between the reference trajectory generator and the robot control. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, particularly when dealing with unknown reference signals, we embed them in a direct teleoperation scheme. In this scheme, the user commands the robot carrying the tray by simply moving their hand in free space, with the hand's 3D position detected by a motion capture system. Furthermore, in the case of point-to-point motions, the same feedforward control, when fed with step inputs representing the desired goal position, dynamically generates the minimum-time reference trajectory that complies with velocity and acceleration constraints, thus avoiding sloshing and slipping. More information and accompanying videos can be found at //sites.google.com/view/robotwaiter/
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technology to realize smart radio environment for future wireless communication systems. Existing works in this line of research have mainly considered the conventional passive IRS that reflects wireless signals without power amplification, while in this article, we give an overview of a new type of IRS, called active IRS, which enables simultaneous signal reflection and amplification, thus significantly extending the signal coverage of passive IRS. We first present the fundamentals of active IRS, including its hardware architecture, signal and channel models, as well as practical constraints, in comparison with those of passive IRS. Then, we discuss new considerations and open issues in designing active-IRS-aided wireless communications, such as the reflection optimization, channel estimation, and deployment for active IRS, as well as its integrated design with passive IRS. Finally, numerical results are provided to show the potential performance gains of active IRS as compared to passive IRS and traditional active relay.
This paper is concerned with a finite-horizon inverse control problem, which has the goal of inferring, from observations, the possibly non-convex and non-stationary cost driving the actions of an agent. In this context, we present a result that enables cost estimation by solving an optimization problem that is convex even when the agent cost is not and when the underlying dynamics is nonlinear, non-stationary and stochastic. To obtain this result, we also study a finite-horizon forward control problem that has randomized policies as decision variables. For this problem, we give an explicit expression for the optimal solution. Moreover, we turn our findings into algorithmic procedures and we show the effectiveness of our approach via both in-silico and experimental validations with real hardware. All the experiments confirm the effectiveness of our approach.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
Interest in the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence has been growing for decades and has accelerated recently. As Artificial Intelligence models have become more complex, and often more opaque, with the incorporation of complex machine learning techniques, explainability has become more critical. Recently, researchers have been investigating and tackling explainability with a user-centric focus, looking for explanations to consider trustworthiness, comprehensibility, explicit provenance, and context-awareness. In this chapter, we leverage our survey of explanation literature in Artificial Intelligence and closely related fields and use these past efforts to generate a set of explanation types that we feel reflect the expanded needs of explanation for today's artificial intelligence applications. We define each type and provide an example question that would motivate the need for this style of explanation. We believe this set of explanation types will help future system designers in their generation and prioritization of requirements and further help generate explanations that are better aligned to users' and situational needs.
Substantial progress has been made recently on developing provably accurate and efficient algorithms for low-rank matrix factorization via nonconvex optimization. While conventional wisdom often takes a dim view of nonconvex optimization algorithms due to their susceptibility to spurious local minima, simple iterative methods such as gradient descent have been remarkably successful in practice. The theoretical footings, however, had been largely lacking until recently. In this tutorial-style overview, we highlight the important role of statistical models in enabling efficient nonconvex optimization with performance guarantees. We review two contrasting approaches: (1) two-stage algorithms, which consist of a tailored initialization step followed by successive refinement; and (2) global landscape analysis and initialization-free algorithms. Several canonical matrix factorization problems are discussed, including but not limited to matrix sensing, phase retrieval, matrix completion, blind deconvolution, robust principal component analysis, phase synchronization, and joint alignment. Special care is taken to illustrate the key technical insights underlying their analyses. This article serves as a testament that the integrated consideration of optimization and statistics leads to fruitful research findings.