Providing ultra-reliable and low-latency transmission is a current issue in wireless communications (URLLC). While it is commonly known that channel coding with large codewords improves reliability, this usually necessitates using interleavers, which incur undesired latency. Using short codewords is a necessary adjustment that will eliminate the requirement for interleaving and reduce decoding latency. This paper suggests a coding and decoding system that, combined with the high spectral efficiency of spatial multiplexing, can provide URLLC over a fading wireless channel. Random linear codes (RLCs) are used over a block-fading massive multiple input-multiple-output (mMIMO) channel followed by zero-forcing (ZF) detection and guessing random additive noise decoding (GRAND). A variation of GRAND, called symbol-level GRAND, originally proposed for single-antenna systems, is generalized to spatial multiplexing. Symbol-level GRAND is much more computationally effective than bit-level GRAND as it takes advantage of the structure of the constellation of the modulation. The paper analyses the performance of symbol-level GRAND depending on the orthogonality defect (OD) of the underlying lattice. Symbol-level GRAND takes advantage of the a priori probability of each error pattern given a received symbol, and specifies the order in which error patterns are tested. The paper further proposes to make use of further side-information that comes from the mMIMO channel-state information (CSI) and its impacts on the reliability of each antenna. This induces an antenna sorting order that further reduces the decoding complexity by over 80 percent when comparing with bit-level GRAND.
We consider the problem of fair allocation of $m$ indivisible items to a group of $n$ agents with subsidy (money). Our work mainly focuses on the allocation of chores but most of our results extend to the allocation of goods as well. We consider the case when agents have (general) additive cost functions. Assuming that the maximum cost of an item to an agent can be compensated by one dollar, we show that a total of $n/4$ dollars of subsidy suffices to ensure a proportional allocation. Moreover, we show that $n/4$ is tight in the sense that there exists an instance with $n$ agents for which every proportional allocation requires a total subsidy of at least $n/4$. We also consider the weighted case and show that a total subsidy of $(n-1)/2$ suffices to ensure a weighted proportional allocation.
Resilience testing, which measures the ability to minimize service degradation caused by unexpected failures, is crucial for microservice systems. The current practice for resilience testing relies on manually defining rules for different microservice systems. Due to the diverse business logic of microservices, there are no one-size-fits-all microservice resilience testing rules. As the quantity and dynamic of microservices and failures largely increase, manual configuration exhibits its scalability and adaptivity issues. To overcome the two issues, we empirically compare the impacts of common failures in the resilient and unresilient deployments of a benchmark microservice system. Our study demonstrates that the resilient deployment can block the propagation of degradation from system performance metrics (e.g., memory usage) to business metrics (e.g., response latency). In this paper, we propose AVERT, the first AdaptiVE Resilience Testing framework for microservice systems. AVERT first injects failures into microservices and collects available monitoring metrics. Then AVERT ranks all the monitoring metrics according to their contributions to the overall service degradation caused by the injected failures. Lastly, AVERT produces a resilience index by how much the degradation in system performance metrics propagates to the degradation in business metrics. The higher the degradation propagation, the lower the resilience of the microservice system. We evaluate AVERT on two open-source benchmark microservice systems. The experimental results show that AVERT can accurately and efficiently test the resilience of microservice systems.
In this work, we study massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) precoders optimizing power consumption while achieving the users' rate requirements. We first characterize analytically the solutions for narrowband and wideband systems minimizing the power amplifiers (PAs) consumption in low system load, where the per-antenna power constraints are not binding. After, we focus on the asymptotic wideband regime. The power consumed by the whole base station (BS) and the high-load scenario are then also investigated. We obtain simple solutions, and the optimal strategy in the asymptotic case reduces to finding the optimal number of active antennas, relying on known precoders among the active antennas. Numerical results show that large savings in power consumption are achievable in the narrowband system by employing antenna selection, while all antennas need to be activated in the wideband system when considering only the PAs consumption, and this implies lower savings. When considering the overall BS power consumption and a large number of subcarriers, we show that significant savings are achievable in the low-load regime by using a subset of the BS antennas. While optimization based on transmit power pushes to activate all antennas, optimization based on consumed power activates a number of antennas proportional to the load.
Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals reflect brain activity across different brain states, characterized by distinct frequency distributions. Through multifractal analysis tools, we investigate the scaling behaviour of different classes of EEG signals and artifacts. We show that brain states associated to sleep and general anaesthesia are not in general characterized by scale invariance. The lack of scale invariance motivates the development of artifact removal algorithms capable of operating independently at each scale. We examine here the properties of the wavelet quantile normalization algorithm, a recently introduced adaptive method for real-time correction of transient artifacts in EEG signals. We establish general results regarding the regularization properties of the WQN algorithm, showing how it can eliminate singularities introduced by artefacts, and we compare it to traditional thresholding algorithms. Furthermore, we show that the algorithm performance is independent of the wavelet basis. We finally examine its continuity and boundedness properties and illustrate its distinctive non-local action on the wavelet coefficients through pathological examples.
The Transposition Distance Problem (TDP) is a classical problem in genome rearrangements which seeks to determine the minimum number of transpositions needed to transform a linear chromosome into another represented by the permutations $\pi$ and $\sigma$, respectively. This paper focuses on the equivalent problem of Sorting By Transpositions (SBT), where $\sigma$ is the identity permutation $\iota$. Specifically, we investigate palisades, a family of permutations that are "hard" to sort, as they require numerous transpositions above the celebrated lower bound devised by Bafna and Pevzner. By determining the transposition distance of palisades, we were able to provide the exact transposition diameter for $3$-permutations (TD3), a special subset of the Symmetric Group $S_n$, essential for the study of approximate solutions for SBT using the simplification technique. The exact value for TD3 has remained unknown since Elias and Hartman showed an upper bound for it. Another consequence of determining the transposition distance of palisades is that, using as lower bound the one by Bafna and Pevzner, it is impossible to guarantee approximation ratios lower than $1.375$ when approximating SBT. This finding has significant implications for the study of SBT, as this problem has been subject of intense research efforts for the past 25 years.
This paper focuses on advancing outdoor wireless systems to better support ubiquitous extended reality (XR) applications, and close the gap with current indoor wireless transmission capabilities. We propose a hybrid knowledge-data driven method for channel semantic acquisition and multi-user beamforming in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Specifically, we firstly propose a data-driven multiple layer perceptron (MLP)-Mixer-based auto-encoder for channel semantic acquisition, where the pilot signals, CSI quantizer for channel semantic embedding, and CSI reconstruction for channel semantic extraction are jointly optimized in an end-to-end manner. Moreover, based on the acquired channel semantic, we further propose a knowledge-driven deep-unfolding multi-user beamformer, which is capable of achieving good spectral efficiency with robustness to imperfect CSI in outdoor XR scenarios. By unfolding conventional successive over-relaxation (SOR)-based linear beamforming scheme with deep learning, the proposed beamforming scheme is capable of adaptively learning the optimal parameters to accelerate convergence and improve the robustness to imperfect CSI. The proposed deep unfolding beamforming scheme can be used for access points (APs) with fully-digital array and APs with hybrid analog-digital array structure. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme in improving the accuracy of channel acquisition, as well as reducing complexity in both CSI acquisition and beamformer design. The proposed beamforming method achieves approximately 96% of the converged spectrum efficiency performance after only three iterations in downlink transmission, demonstrating its efficacy and potential to improve outdoor XR applications.
Transition amplitudes and transition probabilities are relevant to many areas of physics simulation, including the calculation of response properties and correlation functions. These quantities can also be related to solving linear systems of equations. Here we present three related algorithms for calculating transition probabilities. First, we extend a previously published short-depth algorithm, allowing for the two input states to be non-orthogonal. Building on this first procedure, we then derive a higher-depth algorithm based on Trotterization and Richardson extrapolation that requires fewer circuit evaluations. Third, we introduce a tunable algorithm that allows for trading off circuit depth and measurement complexity, yielding an algorithm that can be tailored to specific hardware characteristics. Finally, we implement proof-of-principle numerics for models in physics and chemistry and for a subroutine in variational quantum linear solving (VQLS). The primary benefits of our approaches are that (a) arbitrary non-orthogonal states may now be used with small increases in quantum resources, (b) we (like another recently proposed method) entirely avoid subroutines such as the Hadamard test that may require three-qubit gates to be decomposed, and (c) in some cases fewer quantum circuit evaluations are required as compared to the previous state-of-the-art in NISQ algorithms for transition probabilities.
Classic algorithms and machine learning systems like neural networks are both abundant in everyday life. While classic computer science algorithms are suitable for precise execution of exactly defined tasks such as finding the shortest path in a large graph, neural networks allow learning from data to predict the most likely answer in more complex tasks such as image classification, which cannot be reduced to an exact algorithm. To get the best of both worlds, this thesis explores combining both concepts leading to more robust, better performing, more interpretable, more computationally efficient, and more data efficient architectures. The thesis formalizes the idea of algorithmic supervision, which allows a neural network to learn from or in conjunction with an algorithm. When integrating an algorithm into a neural architecture, it is important that the algorithm is differentiable such that the architecture can be trained end-to-end and gradients can be propagated back through the algorithm in a meaningful way. To make algorithms differentiable, this thesis proposes a general method for continuously relaxing algorithms by perturbing variables and approximating the expectation value in closed form, i.e., without sampling. In addition, this thesis proposes differentiable algorithms, such as differentiable sorting networks, differentiable renderers, and differentiable logic gate networks. Finally, this thesis presents alternative training strategies for learning with algorithms.
Human doctors with well-structured medical knowledge can diagnose a disease merely via a few conversations with patients about symptoms. In contrast, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems often require a large number of dialogue instances to learn as they fail to capture the correlations between different diseases and neglect the diagnostic experience shared among them. To address this issue, we propose a more natural and practical paradigm, i.e., low-resource medical dialogue generation, which can transfer the diagnostic experience from source diseases to target ones with a handful of data for adaptation. It is capitalized on a commonsense knowledge graph to characterize the prior disease-symptom relations. Besides, we develop a Graph-Evolving Meta-Learning (GEML) framework that learns to evolve the commonsense graph for reasoning disease-symptom correlations in a new disease, which effectively alleviates the needs of a large number of dialogues. More importantly, by dynamically evolving disease-symptom graphs, GEML also well addresses the real-world challenges that the disease-symptom correlations of each disease may vary or evolve along with more diagnostic cases. Extensive experiment results on the CMDD dataset and our newly-collected Chunyu dataset testify the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art approaches. Besides, our GEML can generate an enriched dialogue-sensitive knowledge graph in an online manner, which could benefit other tasks grounded on knowledge graph.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.