arXiv subjects

Ning Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Ning Gao.

51 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

RIS-Assisted Wireless Link Signatures for Specific Emitter Identification

The physical layer authentication (PLA) is a promising technology which can enhance the access security of a massive number of devices in the near future. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted PLA system, in which the legitimate transmitter can customize the channel fingerprints during PLA by controlling the ON-OFF state of the RIS. Without loss of generality, we use the received signal strength (RSS) based spoofing detection approach to analyze the feasibility of the proposed architecture. Specifically, based on the RSS, we derive the statistical properties of PLA and give some interesting insights, which showcase that the RIS-assisted PLA is theoretically feasible. Then, we derive the optimal detection threshold to maximize the performance in the context of the presented performance metrics. Next, the actual feasibility of the proposed system is verified via proof-of-concept experiments on a RIS-assisted PLA prototype platform. The experiment results show that there are 3.5% and 76% performance improvements when the transmission sources are at different locations and at the same location, respectively.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Category-Agnostic 6D Pose Estimation with Conditional Neural Processes

We present a novel meta-learning approach for 6D pose estimation on unknown objects. In contrast to ``instance-level" and ``category-level" pose estimation methods, our algorithm learns object representation in a category-agnostic way, which endows it with strong generalization capabilities across object categories. Specifically, we employ a neural process-based meta-learning approach to train an encoder to capture texture and geometry of an object in a latent representation, based on very few RGB-D images and ground-truth keypoints. The latent representation is then used by a simultaneously meta-trained decoder to predict the 6D pose of the object in new images. Furthermore, we propose a novel geometry-aware decoder for the keypoint prediction using a Graph Neural Network (GNN), which explicitly takes geometric constraints specific to each object into consideration. To evaluate our algorithm, extensive experiments are conducted on the \linemod dataset, and on our new fully-annotated synthetic datasets generated from Multiple Categories in Multiple Scenes (MCMS). Experimental results demonstrate that our model performs well on unseen objects with very different shapes and appearances. Remarkably, our model also shows robust performance on occluded scenes although trained fully on data without occlusion. To our knowledge, this is the first work exploring \textbf{cross-category level} 6D pose estimation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Meta-Learning Regrasping Strategies for Physical-Agnostic Objects

Grasping inhomogeneous objects in real-world applications remains a challenging task due to the unknown physical properties such as mass distribution and coefficient of friction. In this study, we propose a meta-learning algorithm called ConDex, which incorporates Conditional Neural Processes (CNP) with DexNet-2.0 to autonomously discern the underlying physical properties of objects using depth images. ConDex efficiently acquires physical embeddings from limited trials, enabling precise grasping point estimation. Furthermore, ConDex is capable of updating the predicted grasping quality iteratively from new trials in an online fashion. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first who generate two object datasets focusing on inhomogeneous physical properties with varying mass distributions and friction coefficients. Extensive evaluations in simulation demonstrate ConDex's superior performance over DexNet-2.0 and existing meta-learning-based grasping pipelines. Furthermore, ConDex shows robust generalization to previously unseen real-world objects despite training solely in the simulation. The synthetic and real-world datasets will be published as well.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

A Survey of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence for 6G Wireless Communications

The research on the sixth-generation (6G) wireless communications for the development of future mobile communication networks has been officially launched around the world. 6G networks face multifarious challenges, such as resource-constrained mobile devices, difficult wireless resource management, high complexity of heterogeneous network architectures, explosive computing and storage requirements, privacy and security threats. To address these challenges, deploying blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) in 6G networks may realize new breakthroughs in advancing network performances in terms of security, privacy, efficiency, cost, and more. In this paper, we provide a detailed survey of existing works on the application of blockchain and AI to 6G wireless communications. More specifically, we start with a brief overview of blockchain and AI. Then, we mainly review the recent advances in the fusion of blockchain and AI, and highlight the inevitable trend of deploying both blockchain and AI in wireless communications. Furthermore, we extensively explore integrating blockchain and AI for wireless communication systems, involving secure services and Internet of Things (IoT) smart applications. Particularly, some of the most talked-about key services based on blockchain and AI are introduced, such as spectrum management, computation allocation, content caching, and security and privacy. Moreover, we also focus on some important IoT smart applications supported by blockchain and AI, covering smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart grid, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We also analyze the open issues and research challenges for the joint deployment of blockchain and AI in 6G wireless communications. Lastly, based on lots of existing meaningful works, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of blockchain and AI in 6G networks.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

SA6D: Self-Adaptive Few-Shot 6D Pose Estimator for Novel and Occluded Objects

To enable meaningful robotic manipulation of objects in the real-world, 6D pose estimation is one of the critical aspects. Most existing approaches have difficulties to extend predictions to scenarios where novel object instances are continuously introduced, especially with heavy occlusions. In this work, we propose a few-shot pose estimation (FSPE) approach called SA6D, which uses a self-adaptive segmentation module to identify the novel target object and construct a point cloud model of the target object using only a small number of cluttered reference images. Unlike existing methods, SA6D does not require object-centric reference images or any additional object information, making it a more generalizable and scalable solution across categories. We evaluate SA6D on real-world tabletop object datasets and demonstrate that SA6D outperforms existing FSPE methods, particularly in cluttered scenes with occlusions, while requiring fewer reference images.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Enhancing Interpretable Object Abstraction via Clustering-based Slot Initialization

Object-centric representations using slots have shown the advances towards efficient, flexible and interpretable abstraction from low-level perceptual features in a compositional scene. Current approaches randomize the initial state of slots followed by an iterative refinement. As we show in this paper, the random slot initialization significantly affects the accuracy of the final slot prediction. Moreover, current approaches require a predetermined number of slots from prior knowledge of the data, which limits the applicability in the real world. In our work, we initialize the slot representations with clustering algorithms conditioned on the perceptual input features. This requires an additional layer in the architecture to initialize the slots given the identified clusters. We design permutation invariant and permutation equivariant versions of this layer to enable the exchangeable slot representations after clustering. Additionally, we employ mean-shift clustering to automatically identify the number of slots for a given scene. We evaluate our method on object discovery and novel view synthesis tasks with various datasets. The results show that our method outperforms prior works consistently, especially for complex scenes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

EsaNet: Environment Semantics Enabled Physical Layer Authentication

Wireless networks are vulnerable to physical layer spoofing attacks due to the wireless broadcast nature, thus, integrating communications and security (ICAS) is urgently needed for 6G endogenous security. In this letter, we propose an environment semantics enabled physical layer authentication network based on deep learning, namely EsaNet, to authenticate the spoofing from the underlying wireless protocol. Specifically, the frequency independent wireless channel fingerprint (FiFP) is extracted from the channel state information (CSI) of a massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system based on environment semantics knowledge. Then, we transform the received signal into a two-dimensional red green blue (RGB) image and apply the you only look once (YOLO), a single-stage object detection network, to quickly capture the FiFP. Next, a lightweight classification network is designed to distinguish the legitimate from the illegitimate users. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed EsaNet can effectively detect physical layer spoofing attacks and is robust in time-varying wireless environments.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

When Physical Layer Key Generation Meets RIS: Opportunities, Challenges, and Road Ahead

Physical layer key generation (PLKG) is a promising technology to obtain symmetric keys between a pair of wireless communication users in a plug-and-play manner. The shared entropy source almost entirely comes from the intrinsic randomness of the radio channel, which is highly dependent on the wireless environments. However, in some static/block fading wireless environments, the intrinsic randomness of the wireless channel is hard to be guaranteed. Very recently, thanks to reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) with their excellent ability on electromagnetic wave control, the wireless channel environment can be customized. In this article, we overview the RISaided PLKG in static indoor environments, including its channel model and hardware architectures. Then, we propose potential application scenarios and analyze the design challenges of RIS aided PLKG, including channel reciprocity, RIS reconfiguration speed and RIS deployment via proof-of-concept experiments on a RIS-aided PLKG prototype system. In particular, our experimental results show that the key generation rate is 15-fold higher than that without RIS in a static indoor environment. Next, we design a RIS jamming attack via a prototype experiment and discuss its possible attack-defense countermeasures. Finally, several conclusions and future directions are identified.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Measuring incompatibility and clustering quantum observables with a quantum switch

The existence of incompatible observables is a cornerstone of quantum mechanics and a valuable resource in quantum technologies. Here we introduce a measure of incompatibility, called the mutual eigenspace disturbance (MED), which quantifies the amount of disturbance induced by the measurement of a sharp observable on the eigenspaces of another. The MED provides a metric on the space of von Neumann measurements, and can be efficiently estimated by letting the measurement processes act in an indefinite order, using a setup known as the quantum switch, which also allows one to quantify the noncommutativity of arbitrary quantum processes. Thanks to these features, the MED can be used in quantum machine learning tasks. We demonstrate this application by providing an unsupervised algorithm that clusters unknown von Neumann measurements. Our algorithm is robust to noise can be used to identify groups of observers that share approximately the same measurement context.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

An NLoS-based Enhanced Sensing Method for MmWave Communication System

The millimeter-wave (mmWave)-based Wi-Fi sensing technology has recently attracted extensive attention since it provides a possibility to realize higher sensing accuracy. However, current works mainly concentrate on sensing scenarios where the line-of-sight (LoS) path exists, which significantly limits their applications. To address the problem, we propose an enhanced mmWave sensing algorithm in the 3D non-line-of-sight environment (mm3NLoS), aiming to sense the direction and distance of the target when the LoS path is weak or blocked. Specifically, we first adopt the directional beam to estimate the azimuth/elevation angle of arrival (AoA) and angle of departure (AoD) of the reflection path. Then, the distance of the related path is measured by the fine timing measurement protocol. Finally, we transform the AoA and AoD of the multiple non-line-of-sight (NLoS) paths into the direction vector and then obtain the information of targets based on the geometric relationship. The simulation results demonstrate that mm3NLoS can achieve a centimeter-level error with a 2m spacing. Compared to the prior work, it can significantly reduce the performance degradation under the NLoS condition.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

What Matters For Meta-Learning Vision Regression Tasks?

Meta-learning is widely used in few-shot classification and function regression due to its ability to quickly adapt to unseen tasks. However, it has not yet been well explored on regression tasks with high dimensional inputs such as images. This paper makes two main contributions that help understand this barely explored area. \emph{First}, we design two new types of cross-category level vision regression tasks, namely object discovery and pose estimation of unprecedented complexity in the meta-learning domain for computer vision. To this end, we (i) exhaustively evaluate common meta-learning techniques on these tasks, and (ii) quantitatively analyze the effect of various deep learning techniques commonly used in recent meta-learning algorithms in order to strengthen the generalization capability: data augmentation, domain randomization, task augmentation and meta-regularization. Finally, we (iii) provide some insights and practical recommendations for training meta-learning algorithms on vision regression tasks. \emph{Second}, we propose the addition of functional contrastive learning (FCL) over the task representations in Conditional Neural Processes (CNPs) and train in an end-to-end fashion. The experimental results show that the results of prior work are misleading as a consequence of a poor choice of the loss function as well as too small meta-training sets. Specifically, we find that CNPs outperform MAML on most tasks without fine-tuning. Furthermore, we observe that naive task augmentation without a tailored design results in underfitting.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

3-D Deployment of UAV Swarm for Massive MIMO Communications

We consider the uplink transmission between a multi-antenna ground station and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm. The UAVs are assumed as intelligent agents, which can explore their optimal three dimensional (3-D) deployment to maximize the channel capacity of the multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system. Specifically, considering the limitations of each UAV in accessing the global information of the network, we focus on a decentralized control strategy by noting that each UAV in the swarm can only utilize the local information to achieve the optimal 3-D deployment. In this case, the optimization problem can be divided into several optimization sub-problems with respect to the rank function. Due to the non-convex nature of the rank function and the fact that the optimization sub-problems are coupled, the original problem is NP-hard and, thus, cannot be solved with standard convex optimization solvers. Interestingly, we can relax the constraint condition of each sub-problem and solve the optimization problem by a formulated UAVs channel capacity maximization game. We analyze such game according to the designed reward function and the potential function. Then, we discuss the existence of the pure Nash equilibrium in the game. To achieve the best Nash equilibrium of the MIMO system, we develop a decentralized learning algorithm, namely decentralized UAVs channel capacity learning. The details of the algorithm are provided, and then, the convergence, the effectiveness and the computational complexity are analyzed, respectively. Moreover, we give some insightful remarks based on the proofs and the theoretical analysis. Also, extensive simulations illustrate that the developed learning algorithm can achieve a high MIMO channel capacity by optimizing the 3-D UAV swarm deployment with the local information.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Energy Model for UAV Communications: Experimental Validation and Model Generalization

Wireless communication involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is expected to play an important role in future wireless networks. However, different from conventional terrestrial communication systems, UAVs typically have rather limited onboard energy on one hand, and require additional flying energy consumption on the other hand, which renders energy-efficient UAV communication with smart energy expenditure of paramount importance. In this paper, via extensive flight experiments, we aim to firstly validate the recently derived theoretical energy model for rotary-wing UAVs, and then develop a general model for those complicated flight scenarios where rigorous theoretical model derivation is quite challenging, if not impossible. Specifically, we first investigate how UAV power consumption varies with its flying speed for the simplest straight-and-level flight. With about 12,000 valid power-speed data points collected, we first apply the model-based curve fitting to obtain the modelling parameters based on the theoretical closed-form energy model in the existing literature. In addition, in order to exclude the potential bias caused by the theoretical energy model, the obtained measurement data is also trained using a model-free deep neural network. It is found that the obtained curve from both methods can match quite well with the theoretical energy model. Next, we further extend the study to arbitrary 2-dimensional (2-D) flight, where, to our best knowledge, no rigorous theoretical derivation is available for the closed-form energy model as a function of its flying speed, direction, and acceleration. To fill the gap, we first propose a heuristic energy model for these more complicated cases, and then provide experimental validation based on the measurement results for circular level flight.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2017

DTranx: A SEDA-based Distributed and Transactional Key Value Store with Persistent Memory Log

Current distributed key value stores achieve scalability by trading off consistency. As persistent memory technologies evolve tremendously, it is not necessary to sacrifice consistency for performance. This paper proposes DTranx, a distributed key value store based on a persistent memory aware log. DTranx integrates a state transition based garbage collection mechanism in the log design to effectively and efficiently reclaim old logs. In addition, DTranx adopts the SEDA architecture to exploit higher concurrency in multi-core environments and employs the optimal core binding strategy to minimize context switch overhead. Moreover, we customize a hybrid commit protocol that combines optimistic concurrency control and two-phase commit to reduce critical section of distributed locking and introduce a locking mechanism to avoid deadlocks and livelocks. In our evaluations, DTranx reaches 514.11k transactions per second with 36 servers and 95\% read workloads. The persistent memory aware log is 30 times faster than the SSD based system. And, our state transition based garbage collection mechanism is efficient and effective. It does not affect normal transactions and log space usage is steadily low.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2016

Phase transition of strongly interacting matter with a chemical potential dependent Polyakov loop potential

We construct a hadron-quark two-phase model based on the Walecka-quantum hadrodynamics and the improved Polyakov-Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model with an explicit chemical potential dependence of Polyakov-loop potential ($μ$PNJL model). With respect to the original PNJL model, the confined-deconfined phase transition is largely affected at low temperature and large chemical potential. Using the two-phase model, we investigate the equilibrium transition between hadronic and quark matter at finite chemical potentials and temperatures. The numerical results show that the transition boundaries from nuclear to quark matter move towards smaller chemical potential (lower density) when the $μ$-dependent Polyakov loop potential is taken. In particular, for charge asymmetric matter, we compute the local asymmetry of $u, d$ quarks in the hadron-quark coexisting phase, and analyse the isospin-relevant observables possibly measurable in heavy-ion collision (HIC) experiments. In general new HIC data on the location and properties of the mixed phase would bring relevant information on the expected chemical potential dependence of the Polyakov Loop contribution.

nucl-th↗