arXiv subjects

Kaiming Shen

Publications and source records attributed to Kaiming Shen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Bounded Deep Unfolding for Joint Beamforming and Scheduling in Multi-Cell MIMO Networks

This paper investigates the joint resource block group (RBG) scheduling and beamforming optimization problem for weighted sum-rate (WSR) maximization in multi-cell multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) downlink networks. While the Fast Fractional Programming (FastFP) framework provides a reliable model-driven solution, it suffers from conservative continuous beamforming updates and prohibitive computational overhead during the discrete RBG matching phase. To address these bottlenecks, we propose a joint deep unfolding framework comprising two core modules: P-Net and K-Net. Specifically, P-Net learns an adaptive relaxation factor along the FastFP direction, strictly bounded within an ascent-preserving interval to accelerate convergence while retaining stationary-point guarantees. Meanwhile, K-Net learns a long-horizon priority policy to guide a low-complexity greedy assignment, maintaining high assignment quality while bypassing the computationally expensive Hungarian matching. Both networks leverage analytical algorithmic priors and utilize recurrent parameter sharing, enabling flexible inference beyond the training horizon. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed joint framework achieves higher WSR and faster execution times than conventional model-driven baselines, while generalizing robustly across unseen network scales and channel conditions without retraining.

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arXiv2026

Eliminating Blind Spots from Wireless Network by Metasurface: A Blind Approach

Deploying metasurfaces (MTSs) to eliminate wireless blind spots requires jointly determining the physical placement of MTSs and the meta-atom phase shifts. Existing methods typically rely on explicit channel estimation, which incurs prohibitive overhead and is often intractable in real-world networks. To sidestep this bottleneck, we propose RFZero, a channel-state-information (CSI)-free deployment paradigm. Instead of estimating channels, RFZero extracts macro-environmental features from visual photos to guide MTS placement, and leverages reference signal received power (RSRP) feedback for dynamic phase-shift optimization. Most importantly, RFZero operates independently of base stations, thereby enabling seamless plug-and-play implementation. Real-world field tests confirm that RFZero completely eliminates all blind spots in a $100\text{ m}^2$ indoor area using just a pair of $1.5\text{ m}\times 0.9\text{ m}$ MTSs.

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arXiv2026

Ellipsoidal Manifold Optimization for Distributed Antenna Beamforming

This paper addresses the weighted sum-rate (WSR) maximization problem in a downlink distributed antenna system subject to per-cluster power constraints. This optimization scenario presents significant challenges due to the high dimensionality of beamforming variables in dense antenna deployments and the structural complexity of multiple independent power constraints. To overcome these difficulties, we generalize the low-dimensional subspace property--previously established for sum-power constraints--to the per-cluster power constraint case. We prove that all stationary-point beamformers reside in a reduced subspace spanned by the channel vectors of the corresponding antenna cluster. Leveraging this property, we reformulate the original high-dimensional constrained problem into an unconstrained optimization task over a product of ellipsoidal manifolds, thereby achieving significant dimensionality reduction. We systematically derive the necessary Riemannian geometric structures for this specific manifold, including the tangent space, Riemannian metric, orthogonal projection, retraction, and vector transport. Subsequently, we develop a tailored Riemannian conjugate gradient algorithm to solve the reformulated problem. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves the same local optima as standard benchmarks, such as the weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) method and conventional manifold optimization, but with substantially higher computational efficiency and scalability, particularly as the number of antenna clusters increases.

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arXiv2026

DeepFP: Deep-Unfolded Fractional Programming for MIMO Beamforming

This work proposes a mixed learning-based and optimization-based approach to the weighted-sum-rates beamforming problem in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless network. The conventional methods, i.e., the fractional programming (FP) method and the weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) algorithm, can be computationally demanding for two reasons: (i) they require inverting a sequence of matrices whose sizes are proportional to the number of antennas; (ii) they require tuning a set of Lagrange multipliers to account for the power constraints. The recently proposed method called the reduced WMMSE addresses the above two issues for a single cell. In contrast, for the multicell case, another recent method called the FastFP eliminates the large matrix inversion and the Lagrange multipliers by using an improved FP technique, but the update stepsize in the FastFP can be difficult to decide. As such, we propose integrating the deep unfolding network into the FastFP for the stepsize optimization. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method is much more efficient than the learning method based on the WMMSE algorithm.

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arXiv2026

Fractional Programming for Kullback-Leibler Divergence in Hypothesis Testing

Maximizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) is a fundamental problem in waveform design for active sensing and hypothesis testing, as it directly relates to the error exponent of detection probability. However, the associated optimization problem is highly nonconvex due to the intricate coupling of log-determinant and matrix trace terms. Existing solutions often suffer from high computational complexity, typically requiring matrix inversion at every iteration. In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient optimization framework based on fractional programming (FP). Our key idea is to reformulate the KLD maximization problem into a sequence of tractable quadratic subproblems using matrix FP. To further reduce complexity, we introduce a nonhomogeneous relaxation technique that replaces the costly linear system solver with a simple closed-form update, thereby reducing the per-iteration complexity to quadratic order. To compensate for the convergence speed trade-off caused by relaxation, we employ an acceleration method called STEM by interpreting the iterative scheme as a fixed-point mapping. The resulting algorithm achieves significantly faster convergence rates with low per-iteration cost. Numerical results demonstrate that our approach reduces the total runtime by orders of magnitude compared to a state-of-the-art benchmark. Finally, we apply the proposed framework to a multiple random access scenario and a joint integrated sensing and communication scenario, validating the efficacy of our framework in such applications.

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arXiv2025

Enhancing Communications and Sensing Simultaneously by Zero-Order Optimization of MTS

Metasurface (MTS) comprises an array of meta-atoms, each reflecting and inducing a phase shift into the incident wireless signal. We seek the optimal combination of phase shifts across all the meta-atoms to maximize the channel strength from transmitter to receiver. Unlike many existing works that heavily rely on channel state information (CSI), this paper proposes a statistical approach to the phase shift optimization in the absence of CSI, namely blind configuration or zero-order optimization. The main idea is to extract the key features of the wireless environment from the received signal strength (RSS) data via conditional sample mean, with provable performance. Furthermore, as a windfall profit, we show that the proposed blind configuration method has a nontrivial connection to phase retrieval which can be utilized for active sensing. In a nutshell, by configuring a pair of MTSs blindly without channel estimation, we not only enhance the channel strength to facilitate wireless communication, but also enable receiver to localize transmitter. All we need is the RSS data that can be readily measured at receiver. Our algorithm is verified in prototype systems in the 2.6 GHz spectral band. As shown in field tests, the proposed algorithm outperforms the benchmarks (e.g., MUSIC) in the active sensing task, and in the meanwhile raises the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) significantly by about 10 dB.

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arXiv2025

Shuffling for Semantic Secrecy

Deep learning draws heavily on the latest progress in semantic communications. The present paper aims to examine the security aspect of this cutting-edge technique from a novel shuffling perspective. Our goal is to improve upon the conventional secure coding scheme to strike a desirable tradeoff between transmission rate and leakage rate. To be more specific, for a wiretap channel, we seek to maximize the transmission rate while minimizing the semantic error probability under the given leakage rate constraint. Toward this end, we devise a novel semantic security communication system wherein the random shuffling pattern plays the role of the shared secret key. Intuitively, the permutation of feature sequences via shuffling would distort the semantic essence of the target data to a sufficient extent so that eavesdroppers cannot access it anymore. The proposed random shuffling method also exhibits its flexibility in working for the existing semantic communication system as a plugin. Simulations demonstrate the significant advantage of the proposed method over the benchmark in boosting secure transmission, especially when channels are prone to strong noise and unpredictable fading.

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arXiv2025

Fractional Programming for Stochastic Precoding over Generalized Fading Channels

This paper seeks an efficient algorithm for stochastic precoding to maximize the long-term average weighted sum rates throughout a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network. Unlike many existing works that assume a particular probability distribution model for fading channels (which is typically Gaussian), our approach merely relies on the first and second moments of fading channels. For the stochastic precoding problem, a naive idea is to directly apply the fractional programming (FP) method to the data rate inside the expectation; it does not work well because the auxiliary variables introduced by FP are then difficult to decide. To address the above issue, we propose using a lower bound to approximate the expectation of data rate. This lower bound stems from a nontrivial use of the matrix FP, and outperforms the existing lower bounds in that it accounts for generalized fading channels whose first and second moments are known. The resulting approximate problem can be efficiently solved in closed form in an iterative fashion. Furthermore, for large-scale MIMO, we improve the efficiency of the proposed algorithm by eliminating the large matrix inverse. Simulations show that the proposed stochastic precoding method outperforms the benchmark methods in both Gaussian and non-Gaussian fading channel cases.

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arXiv2025

FollowSpot: Enhancing Wireless Communications via Movable Ceiling-Mounted Metasurfaces

This paper studies the optimal placement of ceiling-mounted metasurfaces (MTSs) to help focus the wireless signal beam onto the target receiver, as inspired by the theatre spotlight. We assume that a total of $M$ MTSs are deployed, and that there are $L$ possible positions for each MTS. The resulting signal-to-noise (SNR) maximization problem is difficult to tackle directly because of the coupling between the placement decisions of the different MTSs. Mathematically, we are faced with a nonlinear discrete optimization problem with $L^M$ possible solutions. A remarkable result shown in this paper is that the above challenging problem can be efficiently solved within $O(ML^2\log(ML))$ time. There are two key steps in developing the proposed algorithm. First, we successfully decouple the placement variables of different MTSs by introducing a continuous auxiliary variable $\mu$; the discrete primal variables are now easy to optimize when $\mu$ is held fixed, but the optimization problem of $\mu$ is nonconvex. Second, we show that the optimization of continuous $\mu$ can be recast into a discrete optimization problem with only $LM$ possible solutions, so the optimal $\mu$ can now be readily obtained. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can not only guarantee a global optimum but also reach the optimal solution efficiently.

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arXiv2025

Blind Passive Beamforming for MIMO System

Passive beamforming for the intelligent surface (IS)-aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication is a difficult nonconvex problem. It becomes even more challenging under the practical discrete constraints on phase shifts. Unlike most of the existing approaches that rely on the channel state information (CSI), this work advocates a blind beamforming strategy without any CSI. Simply put, we propose a statistical method that learns the main feature of the wireless environment from the random samples of received signal power. Field tests in the 5G commercial network demonstrate the superiority of the proposed blind passive beamforming method.

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arXiv2025

Finite Horizon Optimization for Large-Scale MIMO

Large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is an emerging wireless technology that deploys thousands of transmit antennas at the base-station to boost spectral efficiency. The classic weighted minimum mean-square-error (WMMSE) algorithm for beamforming is no suited for the large-scale MIMO because each iteration of the algorithm then requires inverting a matrix whose size equals the number of transmit antennas. While the existing methods such as the reduced WMMSE algorithm seek to decrease the size of matrix to invert, this work proposes to eliminate this large matrix inversion completely by applying gradient descent method in conjunction with fractional programming. Furthermore, we optimize the step sizes for gradient descent from a finite horizon optimization perspective, aiming to maximize the performance after a limited number of iterations of gradient descent. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm is much more efficient than the WMMSE algorithm in optimizing the large-scale MIMO precoders.

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arXiv2025

Quadratic Transform for Fractional Programming in Signal Processing and Machine Learning

Fractional programming (FP) is a branch of mathematical optimization that deals with the optimization of ratios. It is an invaluable tool for signal processing and machine learning, because many key metrics in these fields are fractionally structured, e.g., the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) in wireless communications, the Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound (CRB) in radar sensing, the normalized cut in graph clustering, and the margin in support vector machine (SVM). This article provides a comprehensive review of both the theory and applications of a recently developed FP technique known as the quadratic transform, which can be applied to a wide variety of FP problems, including both the minimization and the maximization of the sum of functions of ratios as well as matrix-ratio problems.

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arXiv2025

Uplink Coordinated Pilot Design for 1-bit Massive MIMO in Correlated Channel

In this paper, we propose a coordinated pilot design method to minimize the channel estimation mean squared error (MSE) in 1-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). Under the assumption that the well-known Bussgang linear minimum mean square error (BLMMSE) estimator is used for channel estimation, we first observe that the resulting MSE leads to an intractable optimization problem, as it involves the arcsin function and a complex multiple matrix ratio form. To resolve this, we derive the approximate MSE by assuming the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, by which we develop an efficient coordinated pilot design based on a fractional programming technique. The proposed pilot design is distinguishable from the existing work in that it is applicable in general system environments, including correlated channel and multi-cell environments. We demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the channel estimation accuracy performance compared to the conventional approaches.

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arXiv2025

Intelligent Surface Assisted Radar Stealth Against Unauthorized ISAC

The integration of radar sensors and communication networks as envisioned for the 6G wireless networks poses significant security risks, e.g., the user position information can be released to an unauthorized dual-functional base station (DFBS). To address this issue, we propose an intelligent surface (IS)-assisted radar stealth technology that prevents adversarial sensing. Specifically, we modify the wireless channels by tuning the phase shifts of IS in order to protect the target user from unauthorized sensing without jeopardizing the wireless communication link. In principle, we wish to maximize the distortion between the estimated angle-of-arrival (AoA) by the DFBS and the ground truth given the minimum signal-to-noise-radio (SNR) constraint for communication. Toward this end, we propose characterizing the problem as a game played by the DFBS and the IS, in which the DFBS aims to maximize a particular utility while the IS aims to minimize the utility. Although the problem is nonconvex, this paper shows that it can be optimally solved in closed form from a geometric perspective. According to the simulations, the proposed closed-form algorithm outperforms the baseline methods significantly in combating unauthorized sensing while limiting the impacts on wireless communications.

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arXiv2025

A Semantic Approach to Successive Interference Cancellation for Multiple Access Networks

Differing from the conventional communication system paradigm that models information source as a sequence of (i.i.d. or stationary) random variables, the semantic approach aims at extracting and sending the high-level features of the content deeply contained in the source, thereby breaking the performance limits from the statistical information theory. As a pioneering work in this area, the deep learning-enabled semantic communication (DeepSC) constitutes a novel algorithmic framework based on the transformer--which is a deep learning tool widely used to process text numerically. The main goal of this work is to extend the DeepSC approach from the point-to-point link to the multi-user multiple access channel (MAC). The inter-user interference has long been identified as the bottleneck of the MAC. In the classic information theory, the successive interference cancellation (SIC) scheme is a common way to mitigate interference and achieve the channel capacity. Our main contribution is to incorporate the SIC scheme into the DeepSC. As opposed to the traditional SIC that removes interference in the digital symbol domain, the proposed semantic SIC works in the domain of the semantic word embedding vectors. Furthermore, to enhance the training efficiency, we propose a pretraining scheme and a partial retraining scheme that quickly adjust the neural network parameters when new users are added to the MAC. We also modify the existing loss function to facilitate training. Finally, we present numerical experiments to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed semantic approach as compared to the existing benchmark methods.

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arXiv2024

Power Allocation for Finite-Blocklength IR-HARQ

This letter concerns the power allocation across the multiple transmission rounds under the Incremental Redundancy Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (IR-HARQ) policy, in pursuit of an energy-efficient way of fulfilling the outage probability target in the finite-blocklength regime. We start by showing that the optimization objective and the constraints of the above power allocation problem all depend upon the outage probability. The main challenge then lies in the fact that the outage probability cannot be written analytically in terms of the power variables. To sidestep this difficulty, we propose a novel upper bound on the outage probability in the finite-blocklength regime, which is much tighter than the existing ones from the literature. Most importantly, by using this upper bound to approximate the outage probability, we can recast the original intractable power allocation problem into a geometric programming (GP) form--which can be efficiently solved by the standard method.

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arXiv2024

An Efficient Convex-Hull Relaxation Based Algorithm for Multi-User Discrete Passive Beamforming

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an emerging technology to enhance spatial multiplexing in wireless networks. This letter considers the discrete passive beamforming design for IRS in order to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among multiple users in an IRS-assisted downlink network. The main design difficulty lies in the discrete phase-shift constraint. Differing from most existing works, this letter advocates a convex-hull relaxation of the discrete constraints which leads to a continuous reformulated problem equivalent to the original discrete problem. This letter further proposes an efficient alternating projection/proximal gradient descent and ascent algorithm for solving the reformulated problem. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly.

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arXiv2024

Blind Beamforming for Coverage Enhancement with Intelligent Reflecting Surface

Conventional policy for configuring an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) typically requires channel state information (CSI), thus incurring substantial overhead costs and facing incompatibility with the current network protocols. This paper proposes a blind beamforming strategy in the absence of CSI, aiming to boost the minimum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) among all the receiver positions, namely the coverage enhancement. Although some existing works already consider the IRS-assisted coverage enhancement without CSI, they assume certain position-channel models through which the channels can be recovered from the geographic locations. In contrast, our approach solely relies on the received signal power data, not assuming any position-channel model. We examine the achievability and converse of the proposed blind beamforming method. If the IRS has $N$ reflective elements and there are $U$ receiver positions, then our method guarantees the minimum SNR of $\Omega(N^2/U)$ -- which is fairly close to the upper bound $O(N+N^2\sqrt{\ln (NU)}/\sqrt[4]{U})$. Aside from the simulation results, we justify the practical use of blind beamforming in a field test at 2.6 GHz. According to the real-world experiment, the proposed blind beamforming method boosts the minimum SNR across seven random positions in a conference room by 18.22 dB, while the position-based method yields a boost of 12.08 dB.

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