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Ping Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Ping Zhang.

At least 325 records · Page 18Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

Dual Identities Enabled Low-Latency Visual Networking for UAV Emergency Communication

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm networks will play a crucial role in the B5G/6G network thanks to its appealing features, such as wide coverage and on-demand deployment. Emergency communication (EC) is essential to promptly inform UAVs of potential danger to avoid accidents, whereas the conventional communication-only feedback-based methods, which separate the digital and physical identities (DPI), bring intolerable latency and disturb the unintended receivers. In this paper, we present a novel DPI-Mapping solution to match the identities (IDs) of UAVs from dual domains for visual networking, which is the first solution that enables UAVs to communicate promptly with what they see without the tedious exchange of beacons. The IDs are distinguished dynamically by defining feature similarity, and the asymmetric IDs from different domains are matched via the proposed bio-inspired matching algorithm. We also consider Kalman filtering to combine the IDs and predict the states for accurate mapping. Experiment results show that the DPI-Mapping reduces individual inaccuracy of features and significantly outperforms the conventional broadcast-based and feedback-based methods in EC latency. Furthermore, it also reduces the disturbing messages without sacrificing the hit rate.

cs.NI↗
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

Deep Dynamic Epidemiological Modelling for COVID-19 Forecasting in Multi-level Districts

Objective: COVID-19 has spread worldwide and made a huge influence across the world. Modeling the infectious spread situation of COVID-19 is essential to understand the current condition and to formulate intervention measurements. Epidemiological equations based on the SEIR model simulate disease development. The traditional parameter estimation method to solve SEIR equations could not precisely fit real-world data due to different situations, such as social distancing policies and intervention strategies. Additionally, learning-based models achieve outstanding fitting performance, but cannot visualize mechanisms. Methods: Thus, we propose a deep dynamic epidemiological (DDE) method that combines epidemiological equations and deep-learning advantages to obtain high accuracy and visualization. The DDE contains deep networks to fit the effect function to simulate the ever-changing situations based on the neural ODE method in solving variants' equations, ensuring the fitting performance of multi-level areas. Results: We introduce four SEIR variants to fit different situations in different countries and regions. We compare our DDE method with traditional parameter estimation methods (Nelder-Mead, BFGS, Powell, Truncated Newton Conjugate-Gradient, Neural ODE) in fitting the real-world data in the cases of countries (the USA, Columbia, South Africa) and regions (Wuhan in China, Piedmont in Italy). Our DDE method achieves the best Mean Square Error and Pearson coefficient in all five areas. Further, compared with the state-of-art learning-based approaches, the DDE outperforms all techniques, including LSTM, RNN, GRU, Random Forest, Extremely Random Trees, and Decision Tree. Conclusion: DDE presents outstanding predictive ability and visualized display of the changes in infection rates in different regions and countries.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Kalman Filter-based Sensing in Communication Systems with Clock Asynchronism

In this paper, we propose a novel Kalman Filter (KF)-based uplink (UL) joint communication and sensing (JCAS) scheme, which can significantly reduce the range and location estimation errors due to the clock asynchronism between the base station (BS) and user equipment (UE). Clock asynchronism causes time-varying time offset (TO) and carrier frequency offset (CFO), leading to major challenges in uplink sensing. Unlike existing technologies, our scheme does not require knowing the location of the UE in advance, and retains the linearity of the sensing parameter estimation problem. We first estimate the angle-of-arrivals (AoAs) of multipaths and use them to spatially filter the CSI. Then, we propose a KF-based CSI enhancer that exploits the estimation of Doppler with CFO as the prior information to significantly suppress the time-varying noise-like TO terms in spatially filtered CSIs. Subsequently, we can estimate the accurate ranges of UE and the scatterers based on the KF-enhanced CSI. Finally, we identify the UE's AoA and range estimation and locate UE, then locate the dumb scatterers using the bi-static system. Simulation results validate the proposed scheme. The localization root mean square error of the proposed method is about 20 dB lower than the benchmarking scheme.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2023

Complex CNN CSI Enhancer for Integrated Sensing and Communications

In this paper, we propose a novel complex convolutional neural network (CNN) CSI enhancer for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), which exploits the correlation between the sensing parameters (such as angle-of-arrival and range) and the channel state information (CSI) to significantly improve the CSI estimation accuracy and further enhance the sensing accuracy. Within the CNN CSI enhancer, we use the complex-valued computation layers to form the CNN, which maintains the phase information of CSI. We also transform the CSI into the sparse angle-delay domain, leading to heatmap images with prominent peaks that can be efficiently processed by CNN. Based on the enhanced CSI outputs, we further propose a novel biased fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based sensing scheme for improving the range sensing accuracy, by artificially introducing phase biasing terms. Extensive simulation results show that the ISAC complex CNN CSI enhancer can converge within 30 training epochs. The normalized mean square error (NMSE) of its CSI estimates is about 17 dB lower than that of the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) estimator, and the bit error rate (BER) of demodulation using the enhanced CSI estimation approaches that with perfect CSI. Finally, the range estimation MSE of the proposed biased FFT-based sensing method approaches that of the subspace-based sensing method, at a much lower complexity.

cs.IT↗
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

Zero-shot Multi-level Feature Transmission Policy Powered by Semantic Knowledge Base

Remote zero-shot object recognition, i.e., offloading zero-shot object recognition task from one mobile device to remote mobile edge computing (MEC) server or another mobile device, has become a common and important task to solve for 6G. In order to tackle this problem, this paper first establishes a zero-shot multi-level feature extractor, which projects the image into visual, semantic, as well as intermediate feature space in a lightweight way. Then, this paper proposes a novel multi-level feature transmission framework powered by semantic knowledge base (SKB), and characterizes the semantic loss and required transmission latency at each level. Under this setup, this paper formulates the multi-level feature transmission optimization problem to minimize the semantic loss under the end-to-end latency constraint. The optimization problem, however, is a multi-choice knapsack problem, and thus very difficult to be optimized. To resolve this issue, this paper proposes an efficient algorithm based on convex concave procedure to find a high-quality solution. Numerical results show that the proposed design outperforms the benchmarks, and illustrate the tradeoff between the transmission latency and zero-shot classification accuracy, as well as the effects of the SKBs at both the transmitter and receiver on classification accuracy.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2023

Realistic Safety-critical Scenarios Search for Autonomous Driving System via Behavior Tree

The simulation-based testing of Autonomous Driving Systems (ADSs) has gained significant attention. However, current approaches often fall short of accurately assessing ADSs for two reasons: over-reliance on expert knowledge and the utilization of simplistic evaluation metrics. That leads to discrepancies between simulated scenarios and naturalistic driving environments. To address this, we propose the Matrix-Fuzzer, a behavior tree-based testing framework, to automatically generate realistic safety-critical test scenarios. Our approach involves the $log2BT$ method, which abstracts logged road-users' trajectories to behavior sequences. Furthermore, we vary the properties of behaviors from real-world driving distributions and then use an adaptive algorithm to explore the input space. Meanwhile, we design a general evaluation engine that guides the algorithm toward critical areas, thus reducing the generation of invalid scenarios. Our approach is demonstrated in our Matrix Simulator. The experimental results show that: (1) Our $log2BT$ achieves satisfactory trajectory reconstructions. (2) Our approach is able to find the most types of safety-critical scenarios, but only generating around 30% of the total scenarios compared with the baseline algorithm. Specifically, it improves the ratio of the critical violations to total scenarios and the ratio of the types to total scenarios by at least 10x and 5x, respectively, while reducing the ratio of the invalid scenarios to total scenarios by at least 58% in two case studies.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

On the global stability of large Fourier mode for 3-D Navier-Stokes equations

In this paper, we first prove the global existence of strong solutions to 3-D incompressible Navier-Stokes equations with solenoidal initial data, which writes in the cylindrical coordinates is of the form: $A(r,z)\cos Nθ+B(r,z)\sin Nθ,$ provided that $N$ is large enough. In particular, we prove that the corresponding solution has almost the same frequency $N$ for any positive time. The main idea of the proof is first to write the solution in trigonometrical series in $θ$ variable and estimate the coefficients separately in some scale-invariant spaces, then we handle a sort of weighted sum of these norms of the coefficients in order to close the a priori estimate of the solution. Furthermore, we shall extend the above well-posedness result for initial data which is a linear combination of axisymmetric data without swirl and infinitely many large mode trigonometric series in the angular variable.

math.AP↗
arXiv2023

Location Tracking for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces Aided Vehicle Platoons: Diverse Sparsities Inspired Approaches

In this paper, we investigate the employment of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) into vehicle platoons, functioning in tandem with a base station (BS) in support of the high-precision location tracking. In particular, the use of a RIS imposes additional structured sparsity that, when paired with the initial sparse line-of-sight (LoS) channels of the BS, facilitates beneficial group sparsity. The resultant group sparsity significantly enriches the energies of the original direct-only channel, enabling a greater concentration of the LoS channel energies emanated from the same vehicle location index. Furthermore, the burst sparsity is exposed by representing the non-line-of-sight (NLoS) channels as their sparse copies. This thus constitutes the philosophy of the diverse sparsities of interest. Then, a diverse dynamic layered structured sparsity (DiLuS) framework is customized for capturing different priors for this pair of sparsities, based upon which the location tracking problem is formulated as a maximum a posterior (MAP) estimate of the location. Nevertheless, the tracking issue is highly intractable due to the ill-conditioned sensing matrix, intricately coupled latent variables associated with the BS and RIS, and the spatialtemporal correlations among the vehicle platoon. To circumvent these hurdles, we propose an efficient algorithm, namely DiLuS enabled spatial-temporal platoon localization (DiLuS-STPL), which incorporates both variational Bayesian inference (VBI) and message passing techniques for recursively achieving parameter updates in a turbo-like way. Finally, we demonstrate through extensive simulation results that the localization relying exclusively upon a BS and a RIS may achieve the comparable precision performance obtained by the two individual BSs, along with the robustness and superiority of our proposed algorithm as compared to various benchmark schemes.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2023

Simultaneously Transmitting And Reflecting (STAR) RIS for 6G: Fundamentals, Recent Advances, and Future Directions

Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RISs) have been attracting significant attention in both academia and industry for their advantages of achieving 360° coverage and enhanced degrees of freedom. This article first identifies the fundamentals of STAR-RIS, by discussing the hardware models, channel models, and signal models. Then, three representative categorizing approaches for STAR-RIS are introduced from phase-shift, directional, and energy consumption perspectives. Furthermore, the beamforming design of STAR-RIS is investigated for both independent and coupled phase-shift cases. A general optimization framework is proposed as the recent advances, which has high compatibility and provable optimality regardless of the application scenarios. As a further advance, several promising applications are discussed to demonstrate the potential benefits of applying STAR-RIS in the sixth-generation wireless network. Lastly, a few future directions and research opportunities are highlighted for motivating future work.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2023

Downlink and Uplink Cooperative Joint Communication and Sensing

Downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) joint communication and sensing (JCAS) technologies have been individually studied for realizing sensing using DL and UL communication signals, respectively. Since the spatial environment and JCAS channels in the consecutive DL and UL JCAS time slots are generally unchanged, DL and UL JCAS may be jointly designed to achieve better sensing performance. In this paper, we propose a novel DL and UL cooperative (DUC) JCAS scheme, including a unified multiple signal classification (MUSIC)-based JCAS sensing scheme for both DL and UL JCAS and a DUC JCAS fusion method. The unified MUSIC JCAS sensing scheme can accurately estimate AoA, range, and Doppler based on a unified MUSIC-based sensing module. The DUC JCAS fusion method can distinguish between the sensing results of the communication user and other dumb targets. Moreover, by exploiting the channel reciprocity, it can also improve the sensing and channel state information (CSI) estimation accuracy. Extensive simulation results validate the proposed DUC JCAS scheme. It is shown that the minimum location and velocity estimation mean square errors of the proposed DUC JCAS scheme are about 20 dB lower than those of the state-of-the-art separated DL and UL JCAS schemes.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2023

Scalable Multi-task Semantic Communication System with Feature Importance Ranking

Semantic communications are expected to be an innovative solution to the emerging intelligent applications in the era of connected intelligence. In this paper, a novel scalable multitask semantic communication system with feature importance ranking (SMSC-FIR) is explored. Firstly, the multi-task correlations are investigated by a joint semantic encoder to extract relevant features. Then, a new scalable coding method is proposed based on feature importance ranking, which dynamically adjusts the coding rate and guarantees that important features for semantic tasks are transmitted with higher priority. Simulation results show that SMSC-FIR achieves performance gain w.r.t. individual intelligent tasks, especially in the low SNR regime.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2023

Contrastive Attention for Automatic Chest X-ray Report Generation

Recently, chest X-ray report generation, which aims to automatically generate descriptions of given chest X-ray images, has received growing research interests. The key challenge of chest X-ray report generation is to accurately capture and describe the abnormal regions. In most cases, the normal regions dominate the entire chest X-ray image, and the corresponding descriptions of these normal regions dominate the final report. Due to such data bias, learning-based models may fail to attend to abnormal regions. In this work, to effectively capture and describe abnormal regions, we propose the Contrastive Attention (CA) model. Instead of solely focusing on the current input image, the CA model compares the current input image with normal images to distill the contrastive information. The acquired contrastive information can better represent the visual features of abnormal regions. According to the experiments on the public IU-X-ray and MIMIC-CXR datasets, incorporating our CA into several existing models can boost their performance across most metrics. In addition, according to the analysis, the CA model can help existing models better attend to the abnormal regions and provide more accurate descriptions which are crucial for an interpretable diagnosis. Specifically, we achieve the state-of-the-art results on the two public datasets.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

DRAC: Diabetic Retinopathy Analysis Challenge with Ultra-Wide Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography Images

Computer-assisted automatic analysis of diabetic retinopathy (DR) is of great importance in reducing the risks of vision loss and even blindness. Ultra-wide optical coherence tomography angiography (UW-OCTA) is a non-invasive and safe imaging modality in DR diagnosis system, but there is a lack of publicly available benchmarks for model development and evaluation. To promote further research and scientific benchmarking for diabetic retinopathy analysis using UW-OCTA images, we organized a challenge named "DRAC - Diabetic Retinopathy Analysis Challenge" in conjunction with the 25th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2022). The challenge consists of three tasks: segmentation of DR lesions, image quality assessment and DR grading. The scientific community responded positively to the challenge, with 11, 12, and 13 teams from geographically diverse institutes submitting different solutions in these three tasks, respectively. This paper presents a summary and analysis of the top-performing solutions and results for each task of the challenge. The obtained results from top algorithms indicate the importance of data augmentation, model architecture and ensemble of networks in improving the performance of deep learning models. These findings have the potential to enable new developments in diabetic retinopathy analysis. The challenge remains open for post-challenge registrations and submissions for benchmarking future methodology developments.

eess.IV↗
arXiv2023

Code-Division OFDM Joint Communication and Sensing System for 6G Machine-type Communication

The joint communication and sensing (JCS) system can provide higher spectrum efficiency and load-saving for 6G machine-type communication (MTC) applications by merging necessary communication and sensing abilities with unified spectrum and transceivers. In order to suppress the mutual interference between the communication and radar sensing signals to improve the communication reliability and radar sensing accuracy, we propose a novel code-division orthogonal frequency division multiplex (CD-OFDM) JCS MTC system, where MTC users can simultaneously and continuously conduct communication and sensing with each other. {\color{black} We propose a novel CD-OFDM JCS signal and corresponding successive-interference-cancellation (SIC) based signal processing technique that obtains code-division multiplex (CDM) gain, which is compatible with the prevalent orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) communication system.} To model the unified JCS signal transmission and reception process, we propose a novel unified JCS channel model. Finally, the simulation and numerical results are shown to verify the feasibility of the CD-OFDM JCS MTC system {\color{black} and the error propagation performance}. We show that the CD-OFDM JCS MTC system can achieve not only more reliable communication but also comparably robust radar sensing compared with the precedent OFDM JCS system, especially in low signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) regime.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2023

Ab initio calculated dynamic structure factor and optical properties of beryllium along the Hugoniot

Beryllium is an ablator material in the inertial-confinement fusion and hypervelocity impact studies. The thermoelastic properties, structure factors, and optical properties of beryllium are important in these studies. In this paper, the static structure factors, ion-ion dynamic structure factors, adiabatic velocity, and optical properties of beryllium along the Hugoniot were calculated by ab initio simulations. The static structure factors show that beryllium atoms were randomly distributed. The dynamic structure factors via the scattering function have extracted the dispersion relation for the collective excitations. By collecting the peak position of dynamic structure factors, the dispersion relation and adiabatic sound velocity were derived by definitions. By the calculated equation of state, the thermoelastic properties and adiabatic sound velocity have been derived. The two calculated methods about adiabatic sound velocity were verified to be equivalent.

physics.plasm-ph↗
arXiv2023

Thermoelastic properties and thermal evolution of the Martian core from ab initio calculated ferromagnetic Fe-S liquid

The accurate thermoelastic properties and thermal conductivity are crucial in understanding the thermal evolution of the Martian core. A fitting method based on the ab initio calculated pressure-volume-temperature data is proposed in the formulation of the equation of state with high accuracy, by which the pressure and temperature dependent thermoelastic properties can be directly calculated by definitions. The ab initio results show that the liquid Fe0.75S0.25 under Martian core condition is thoroughly in the ferromagnetic state, without existing spin crossover. The liquid Fe0.75S0.25 in magnetic calculation owns a low thermal conductivity (21~23 W/m/K) when compared with non-magnetic calculation at the same state. Based on the Insight estimated and ab initio calculated properties of the Martian core, the iron snow model is verified when the current temperature at the core-mantle boundary is below the core melting temperature, and the simply secular cooling model is verified on the contrary.

astro-ph.EP↗