arXiv subjects

Kai Niu

Publications and source records attributed to Kai Niu.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

NeurJSCC Enabled Semantic Communications: Paradigms, Applications, and Potentials

Recent advances in deep learning have led to increased interest in solving high-efficiency end-to-end transmission problems using methods that employ the nonlinear property of neural networks. These techniques, we call neural joint source-channel coding (NeurJSCC), extract latent semantic features of the source signal across space and time, and design corresponding variable-length NeurJSCC approaches to transmit latent features over wireless communication channels. Rapid progress has led to numerous research papers, but a consolidation of the discovered knowledge has not yet emerged. In this article, we gather diverse ideas to categorize the expansive aspects on NeurJSCC as two paradigms, i.e., explicit and implicit NeurJSCC. We first focus on those two paradigms of NeurJSCC by identifying their common and different components in building end-to-end communication systems. We then focus on typical applications of NeurJSCC to various communication tasks. Our article highlights the improved quality, flexibility, and capability brought by NeurJSCC, and we also point out future directions.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2023

Toward Adaptive Semantic Communications: Efficient Data Transmission via Online Learned Nonlinear Transform Source-Channel Coding

The emerging field semantic communication is driving the research of end-to-end data transmission. By utilizing the powerful representation ability of deep learning models, learned data transmission schemes have exhibited superior performance than the established source and channel coding methods. While, so far, research efforts mainly concentrated on architecture and model improvements toward a static target domain. Despite their successes, such learned models are still suboptimal due to the limitations in model capacity and imperfect optimization and generalization, particularly when the testing data distribution or channel response is different from that adopted for model training, as is likely to be the case in real-world. To tackle this, we propose a novel online learned joint source and channel coding approach that leverages the deep learning model's overfitting property. Specifically, we update the off-the-shelf pre-trained models after deployment in a lightweight online fashion to adapt to the distribution shifts in source data and environment domain. We take the overfitting concept to the extreme, proposing a series of implementation-friendly methods to adapt the codec model or representations to an individual data or channel state instance, which can further lead to substantial gains in terms of the bandwidth ratio-distortion performance. The proposed methods enable the communication-efficient adaptation for all parameters in the network without sacrificing decoding speed. Our experiments, including user study, on continually changing target source data and wireless channel environments, demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, on which we outperform existing state-of-the-art engineered transmission scheme (VVC combined with 5G LDPC coded transmission).

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

A Golden Decade of Polar Codes: From Basic Principle to 5G Applications

After the pursuit of seventy years, the invention of polar codes indicates that we have found the first capacity-achieving coding with low complexity construction and decoding, which is the great breakthrough of the coding theory in the past two decades. In this survey, we retrospect the history of polar codes and summarize the advancement in the past ten years. First, the primary principle of channel polarization is investigated such that the basic construction, coding method, and classic successive cancellation (SC) decoding are reviewed. Second, in order to improve the performance of the finite code length, we introduce the guiding principle and conclude five design criteria for the construction, design, and implementation of the polar code in the practical communication system based on the exemplar schemes in the literature. Especially, we explain the design principle behind the concatenated coding and rate matching of polar codes in a 5G wireless system. Furthermore, the improved SC decoding algorithms, such as SC list (SCL) decoding and SC stack (SCS) decoding, etc., are investigated and compared. Finally, the research prospects of polar codes for the future 6G communication system are explored, including the optimization of short polar codes, coding construction in fading channels, polar coded modulation and HARQ, and the polar coded transmission, namely polar processing. Predictably, as a new coding methodology, polar codes will shine a light on communication theory and unveil a revolution in transmission technology.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Variational Speech Waveform Compression to Catalyze Semantic Communications

We propose a novel neural waveform compression method to catalyze emerging speech semantic communications. By introducing nonlinear transform and variational modeling, we effectively capture the dependencies within speech frames and estimate the probabilistic distribution of the speech feature more accurately, giving rise to better compression performance. In particular, the speech signals are analyzed and synthesized by a pair of nonlinear transforms, yielding latent features. An entropy model with hyperprior is built to capture the probabilistic distribution of latent features, followed with quantization and entropy coding. The proposed waveform codec can be optimized flexibly towards arbitrary rate, and the other appealing feature is that it can be easily optimized for any differentiable loss function, including perceptual loss used in semantic communications. To further improve the fidelity, we incorporate residual coding to mitigate the degradation arising from quantization distortion at the latent space. Results indicate that achieving the same performance, the proposed method saves up to 27% coding rate than widely used adaptive multi-rate wideband (AMR-WB) codec as well as emerging neural waveform coding methods.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2022

Wireless Deep Speech Semantic Transmission

In this paper, we propose a new class of high-efficiency semantic coded transmission methods for end-to-end speech transmission over wireless channels. We name the whole system as deep speech semantic transmission (DSST). Specifically, we introduce a nonlinear transform to map the speech source to semantic latent space and feed semantic features into source-channel encoder to generate the channel-input sequence. Guided by the variational modeling idea, we build an entropy model on the latent space to estimate the importance diversity among semantic feature embeddings. Accordingly, these semantic features of different importance can be allocated with different coding rates reasonably, which maximizes the system coding gain. Furthermore, we introduce a channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) adaptation mechanism such that a single model can be applied over various channel states. The end-to-end optimization of our model leads to a flexible rate-distortion (RD) trade-off, supporting versatile wireless speech semantic transmission. Experimental results verify that our DSST system clearly outperforms current engineered speech transmission systems on both objective and subjective metrics. Compared with existing neural speech semantic transmission methods, our model saves up to 75% of channel bandwidth costs when achieving the same quality. An intuitive comparison of audio demos can be found at https://ximoo123.github.io/DSST.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2022

Nonlinear Transform Source-Channel Coding for Semantic Communications

In this paper, we propose a class of high-efficiency deep joint source-channel coding methods that can closely adapt to the source distribution under the nonlinear transform, it can be collected under the name nonlinear transform source-channel coding (NTSCC). In the considered model, the transmitter first learns a nonlinear analysis transform to map the source data into latent space, then transmits the latent representation to the receiver via deep joint source-channel coding. Our model incorporates the nonlinear transform as a strong prior to effectively extract the source semantic features and provide side information for source-channel coding. Unlike existing conventional deep joint source-channel coding methods, the proposed NTSCC essentially learns both the source latent representation and an entropy model as the prior on the latent representation. Accordingly, novel adaptive rate transmission and hyperprior-aided codec refinement mechanisms are developed to upgrade deep joint source-channel coding. The whole system design is formulated as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the end-to-end transmission rate-distortion performance under established perceptual quality metrics. Across test image sources with various resolutions, we find that the proposed NTSCC transmission method generally outperforms both the analog transmission using the standard deep joint source-channel coding and the classical separation-based digital transmission. Notably, the proposed NTSCC method can potentially support future semantic communications due to its content-aware ability and perceptual optimization goal.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Wireless Deep Video Semantic Transmission

In this paper, we design a new class of high-efficiency deep joint source-channel coding methods to achieve end-to-end video transmission over wireless channels. The proposed methods exploit nonlinear transform and conditional coding architecture to adaptively extract semantic features across video frames, and transmit semantic feature domain representations over wireless channels via deep joint source-channel coding. Our framework is collected under the name deep video semantic transmission (DVST). In particular, benefiting from the strong temporal prior provided by the feature domain context, the learned nonlinear transform function becomes temporally adaptive, resulting in a richer and more accurate entropy model guiding the transmission of current frame. Accordingly, a novel rate adaptive transmission mechanism is developed to customize deep joint source-channel coding for video sources. It learns to allocate the limited channel bandwidth within and among video frames to maximize the overall transmission performance. The whole DVST design is formulated as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the end-to-end transmission rate-distortion performance under perceptual quality metrics or machine vision task performance metrics. Across standard video source test sequences and various communication scenarios, experiments show that our DVST can generally surpass traditional wireless video coded transmission schemes. The proposed DVST framework can well support future semantic communications due to its video content-aware and machine vision task integration abilities.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

WITT: A Wireless Image Transmission Transformer for Semantic Communications

In this paper, we aim to redesign the vision Transformer (ViT) as a new backbone to realize semantic image transmission, termed wireless image transmission transformer (WITT). Previous works build upon convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are inefficient in capturing global dependencies, resulting in degraded end-to-end transmission performance especially for high-resolution images. To tackle this, the proposed WITT employs Swin Transformers as a more capable backbone to extract long-range information. Different from ViTs in image classification tasks, WITT is highly optimized for image transmission while considering the effect of the wireless channel. Specifically, we propose a spatial modulation module to scale the latent representations according to channel state information, which enhances the ability of a single model to deal with various channel conditions. As a result, extensive experiments verify that our WITT attains better performance for different image resolutions, distortion metrics, and channel conditions. The code is available at https://github.com/KeYang8/WITT.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Versatile Semantic Coded Transmission over MIMO Fading Channels

Semantic communications have shown great potential to boost the end-to-end transmission performance. To further improve the system efficiency, in this paper, we propose a class of novel semantic coded transmission (SCT) schemes over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) fading channels. In particular, we propose a high-efficiency SCT system supporting concurrent transmission of multiple streams, which can maximize the multiplexing gain of end-to-end semantic communication system. By jointly considering the entropy distribution on the source semantic features and the wireless MIMO channel states, we design a spatial multiplexing mechanism to realize adaptive coding rate allocation and stream mapping. As a result, source content and channel environment will be seamlessly coupled, which maximizes the coding gain of SCT system. Moreover, our SCT system is versatile: a single model can support various transmission rates. The whole model is optimized under the constraint of transmission rate-distortion (RD) tradeoff. Experimental results verify that our scheme substantially increases the throughput of semantic communication system. It also outperforms traditional MIMO communication systems under realistic fading channels.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

A Survey on the Network Models applied in the Industrial Network Optimization

Network architecture design is very important for the optimization of industrial networks. The type of network architecture can be divided into small-scale network and large-scale network according to its scale. Graph theory is an efficient mathematical tool for network topology modeling. For small-scale networks, its structure often has regular topology. For large-scale networks, the existing research mainly focuses on the random characteristics of network nodes and edges. Recently, popular models include random networks, small-world networks and scale-free networks. Starting from the scale of network, this survey summarizes and analyzes the network modeling methods based on graph theory and the practical application in industrial scenarios. Furthermore, this survey proposes a novel network performance metric - system entropy. From the perspective of mathematical properties, the analysis of its non-negativity, monotonicity and concave-convexity is given. The advantage of system entropy is that it can cover the existing regular network, random network, small-world network and scale-free network, and has strong generality. The simulation results show that this metric can realize the comparison of various industrial networks under different models.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2022

Actor and Action Modular Network for Text-based Video Segmentation

Text-based video segmentation aims to segment an actor in video sequences by specifying the actor and its performing action with a textual query. Previous methods fail to explicitly align the video content with the textual query in a fine-grained manner according to the actor and its action, due to the problem of \emph{semantic asymmetry}. The \emph{semantic asymmetry} implies that two modalities contain different amounts of semantic information during the multi-modal fusion process. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel actor and action modular network that individually localizes the actor and its action in two separate modules. Specifically, we first learn the actor-/action-related content from the video and textual query, and then match them in a symmetrical manner to localize the target tube. The target tube contains the desired actor and action which is then fed into a fully convolutional network to predict segmentation masks of the actor. Our method also establishes the association of objects cross multiple frames with the proposed temporal proposal aggregation mechanism. This enables our method to segment the video effectively and keep the temporal consistency of predictions. The whole model is allowed for joint learning of the actor-action matching and segmentation, as well as achieves the state-of-the-art performance for both single-frame segmentation and full video segmentation on A2D Sentences and J-HMDB Sentences datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Communication Beyond Transmitting Bits: Semantics-Guided Source and Channel Coding

Classical communication paradigms focus on accurately transmitting bits over a noisy channel, and Shannon theory provides a fundamental theoretical limit on the rate of reliable communications. In this approach, bits are treated equally, and the communication system is oblivious to what meaning these bits convey or how they would be used. Future communications towards intelligence and conciseness will predictably play a dominant role, and the proliferation of connected intelligent agents requires a radical rethinking of coded transmission paradigm to support the new communication morphology on the horizon. The recent concept of "semantic communications" offers a promising research direction. Injecting semantic guidance into the coded transmission design to achieve semantics-aware communications shows great potential for further breakthrough in effectiveness and reliability. This article sheds light on semantics-guided source and channel coding as a transmission paradigm of semantic communications, which exploits both data semantics diversity and wireless channel diversity together to boost the whole system performance. We present the general system architecture and key techniques, and indicate some open issues on this topic.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Communication Beyond Transmitting Bits: Semantics-Guided Source and Channel Coding

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Perceptual Learned Source-Channel Coding for High-Fidelity Image Semantic Transmission

As one novel approach to realize end-to-end wireless image semantic transmission, deep learning-based joint source-channel coding (deep JSCC) method is emerging in both deep learning and communication communities. However, current deep JSCC image transmission systems are typically optimized for traditional distortion metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) or multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM). But for low transmission rates, due to the imperfect wireless channel, these distortion metrics lose significance as they favor pixel-wise preservation. To account for human visual perception in semantic communications, it is of great importance to develop new deep JSCC systems optimized beyond traditional PSNR and MS-SSIM metrics. In this paper, we introduce adversarial losses to optimize deep JSCC, which tends to preserve global semantic information and local texture. Our new deep JSCC architecture combines encoder, wireless channel, decoder/generator, and discriminator, which are jointly learned under both perceptual and adversarial losses. Our method yields human visually much more pleasing results than state-of-the-art engineered image coded transmission systems and traditional deep JSCC systems. A user study confirms that achieving the perceptually similar end-to-end image transmission quality, the proposed method can save about 50\% wireless channel bandwidth cost.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Attract me to Buy: Advertisement Copywriting Generation with Multimodal Multi-structured Information

Recently, online shopping has gradually become a common way of shopping for people all over the world. Wonderful merchandise advertisements often attract more people to buy. These advertisements properly integrate multimodal multi-structured information of commodities, such as visual spatial information and fine-grained structure information. However, traditional multimodal text generation focuses on the conventional description of what existed and happened, which does not match the requirement of advertisement copywriting in the real world. Because advertisement copywriting has a vivid language style and higher requirements of faithfulness. Unfortunately, there is a lack of reusable evaluation frameworks and a scarcity of datasets. Therefore, we present a dataset, E-MMAD (e-commercial multimodal multi-structured advertisement copywriting), which requires, and supports much more detailed information in text generation. Noticeably, it is one of the largest video captioning datasets in this field. Accordingly, we propose a baseline method and faithfulness evaluation metric on the strength of structured information reasoning to solve the demand in reality on this dataset. It surpasses the previous methods by a large margin on all metrics. The dataset and method are coming soon on \url{https://e-mmad.github.io/e-mmad.net/index.html}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Generalized Polarization Transform: A Novel Coded Transmission Paradigm

For the upcoming 6G wireless networks, a new wave of applications and services will demand ultra-high data rates and reliability. To this end, future wireless systems are expected to pave the way for entirely new fundamental air interface technologies to attain a breakthrough in spectrum efficiency (SE). This article discusses a new paradigm, named generalized polarization transform (GPT), to achieve an integrated design of coding, modulation, multi-antenna, multiple access, etc., in a real sense. The GPT enabled air interface develops far-reaching insights that the joint optimization of critical air interface ingredients can achieve remarkable gains on SE compared with the state-of-the-art module-stacking design.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Performance and Construction of Polar Codes: The Perspective of Bit Error Probability

Most existing works of polar codes focus on the analysis of block error probability. However, in many scenarios, bit error probability is also important for evaluating the performance of channel codes. In this paper, we establish a new framework to analyze the bit error probability of polar codes. Specifically, by revisiting the error event of bit-channel, we first introduce the conditional bit error probability as a metric to evaluate the reliability of bit-channel for both systematic and non-systematic polar codes. Guided by the concept of polar subcode, we then derive an upper bound on the conditional bit error probability of each bit-channel, and accordingly, an upper bound on the bit error probability of polar codes. Based on these, two types of construction metrics aiming at minimizing the bit error probability of polar codes are proposed, which are of linear computational complexity and explicit forms. Simulation results show that the polar codes constructed by the proposed methods can outperform those constructed by the conventional methods.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Towards Semantic Communications: A Paradigm Shift

The last seventy years have witnessed the transition of communication from Shannon's theoretical concept to current high-efficient practical systems. Classical communication systems address the capability-deficiency issue mainly by module-stacking and technique-densification with ever-increasing complexity. In such a traditional viewpoint, classical source coding only uses explicit probabilistic models to compress data, regardless of the meaning of transmitted source messages. Also, channel coded transmission does not identify the source content. In this sense, state-of-the-art communication systems work merely at the technical level as summarized by Weaver. Unlike the traditional system design philosophy, this article proposes a new route to boost the system capabilities towards intelligence-endogenous and primitive-concise communications. The communication paradigm upgrades to the semantic level, which is radically different since all the key techniques imply the use of meanings of transmitted data, thus deeply changing the design of the communication system. This paradigm shifting unveils a promising direction due to its ability to offer an identical quality of service with much lower data transmission requirement. Different from other similar works, this article constitutes a brief tutorial on the framework of semantic communications, its gain analyzed from the information theory perspective, a method to calculate the semantic compression bound, and an exemplary use case of semantic communications.

cs.IT↗