arXiv subjects

Shuowen Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Shuowen Zhang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Integrated Massive Communication and Target Localization in 6G Cell-Free Networks

This paper presents an initial investigation into the combination of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and massive communication, both of which are largely regarded as key scenarios in sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. Specifically, we consider a cell-free network comprising a large number of users, multiple targets, and distributed base stations (BSs). In each time slot, a random subset of users becomes active, transmitting pilot signals that can be scattered by the targets before reaching the BSs. Unlike conventional massive random access schemes, where the primary objectives are device activity detection and channel estimation, our framework also enables target localization by leveraging the multipath propagation effects introduced by the targets. However, due to the intricate dependency between user channels and target locations, characterizing the posterior distribution required for minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimation presents significant computational challenges. To handle this problem, we propose a hybrid message passing-based framework that incorporates multiple approximations to mitigate computational complexity. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves high-accuracy device activity detection, channel estimation, and target localization simultaneously, validating the feasibility of embedding localization functionality into massive communication systems for future 6G networks.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

MIMO Radar Meets Polarization-Reconfigurable Antennas: A BCRB Perspective

In this paper, we investigate a novel multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar system aided by phase shifter based polarization-reconfigurable antennas (PRAs). Specifically, a base station (BS) equipped with multiple PRAs at both the transmitter and the receiver aims to sense the unknown and random angular location parameter of a point target via sending wireless signals and processing the received echo signals reflected by the target, where only prior distribution information about the location parameter is available for exploitation. Firstly, we characterize the sensing performance of this novel PRA-based MIMO radar system by deriving the Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound (BCRB) of the mean-squared error (MSE) in estimating the desired location parameter with prior distribution information. Then, to fully exploit the new design degrees-of-freedom (DoF) empowered by PRAs, we study the joint optimization of the transmit sample covariance matrix as well as the transmit and receive phase shift vectors to minimize the sensing BCRB subject to a transmit power constraint. This problem is non-convex and difficult to solve due to the coupling among optimization variables. To resolve this issue, we develop an alternating optimization (AO) based algorithm which iteratively obtains the closed-form optimal solution to each variable with the others being fixed at each time, thus being guaranteed to converge to at least a stationary point of the joint optimization problem. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Self-Rewarding Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning for Open-Ended Reasoning

Open-ended evaluation is essential for deploying large language models in real-world settings. In studying HealthBench, we observe that using the model itself as a grader and generating rubric-based reward signals substantially improves reasoning performance. Remarkably, the trained model also becomes a stronger grader. Motivated by this, we introduce Self-Rewarding Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning for Open-Ended Reasoning, a lightweight framework that enables faster and more resource-efficient training while surpassing baselines. Remarkably, on Qwen3-32B, training with just the 4000-sample HealthBench Easy subset is sufficient to obtain a model that exceeds GPT-5 on HealthBench Hard. Incorporating a small amount of teacher-graded data further enhances performance for less capable models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Assisted Multiuser Tracking and Signal Detection in ISAC

This paper investigates the multiuser tracking and signal detection problem in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems with the assistance of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). Due to the diverse and high user mobility, the tracking and signal detection performance can be significantly deteriorated without choreographed user state (position and velocity) updating principle. To tackle this challenge, we manage to establish a comprehensive probabilistic signal model to characterize the interdependencies among user states, transmit signals, and received signals during the tracking procedure. Based on the Bayesian problem formulation, we further propose a novel hybrid variational message passing algorithm for the online estimation of user states, which can iteratively update the posterior probabilities of user states during each tracking frame with computational efficiency. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve both of the tracking and signal detection performance over the representative Bayesian estimation counterparts.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Base Station Placement Optimization for Networked Sensing Exploiting Target Location Distribution

This paper studies a networked sensing system with multiple base stations (BSs), which collaboratively sense the unknown and random three-dimensional (3D) location of a target based on the target-reflected echo signals received at the BSs. Considering a practical scenario where the target location distribution is known a priori for exploitation, we aim to design the placement of the multiple BSs to optimize the networked sensing performance. Firstly, we characterize the posterior Cramér-Rao bound (PCRB) of the mean-squared error (MSE) in sensing the target's 3D location. Despite its complex form under networked sensing, we derive its closed-form expression in terms of the BS locations. Next, we formulate the BS placement optimization problem to minimize the sensing PCRB, which is non-convex and difficult to solve. By leveraging a series of equivalent transformations and the iterative inner approximation method, we devise an algorithm with polynomial-time complexity which is guaranteed to converge to a solution satisfying the Karush-Kuhn Tucker (KKT) conditions of the problem. Numerical results show that the proposed placement design significantly outperforms various benchmark designs.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Diagonal IRS Aided OFDM: Rate Maximization under Frequency-Dependent Reflection

This paper studies a broadband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system aided by a beyond diagonal intelligent reflecting surface (BD-IRS), where inter-connections exist among different elements such that the reflection matrix can exhibit a beyond diagonal structure. Under practical circuit structures, the reflection matrix of the BD-IRS is generally dependent on the circuit parameters (e.g., capacitance matrix for all tunable capacitors) as well as the operating frequency, which leads to couplings among the BD-IRS reflection matrices over different sub-carriers and consequently new challenges in the BD-IRS design. Motivated by this, we first model the relationship between the BD-IRS reflection matrices over different sub-carriers and the tunable capacitance matrix, and then formulate the joint optimization problem of the tunable capacitance matrix and power allocation over OFDM sub-carriers to maximize the achievable rate of the OFDM system. Despite the non-convexity of the problem, we propose an effective algorithm for finding a high-quality feasible solution via leveraging alternating optimization and successive convex approximation. Numerical results show the superiority of our proposed design over benchmark designs.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Diagonal Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Enabled Sensing: Cramer-Rao Bound Optimization

Recently, beyond diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surface (BD-RIS) has emerged as a more flexible solution to engineer the wireless propagation channels, thanks to its non-diagonal reflecting matrix. Although the gain of the BD-RIS over the conventional RIS in communication has been revealed in many works, its gain in 6G sensing is still unknown. This motivates us to study the BD-RIS assisted sensing in this letter. Specifically, we derive the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for estimating the angle-of-arrival (AOA) from the target to the BD-RIS under the constraint that the BD-RIS scattering matrix is unitary. To minimize the CRB, we develop an optimization scheme based on an adaptive Riemannian steepest ascent algorithm that can satisfy the non-convex unitary constraint. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed BD-RIS-assisted target localization method achieves superior sensing performance.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Optimizing Rate-CRB Performance for Beyond Diagonal Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Enabled ISAC

This letter considers a beyond diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surface (BD-RIS) aided integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where the BD-RIS can help a multi-antenna base station (BS) serve multiple user equipments (UEs) and localize a target simultaneously. We formulate an optimization problem that designs the BS beamforming matrix and the BD-RIS scattering matrix to maximize UEs' sum rate subject to a localization Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) constraint and an additional unitary matrix constraint for the scattering matrix. Because unitary matrices form a manifold, our problem belongs to constrained manifold optimization. This letter proposes a log-barrier based Riemannian steepest ascent method to solve this problem effectively. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of our algorithm and the performance gain of the BD-RIS aided ISAC systems over the conventional RIS aided ISAC systems.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Learning to Align, Aligning to Learn: A Unified Approach for Self-Optimized Alignment

Alignment methodologies have emerged as a critical pathway for enhancing language model alignment capabilities. While SFT (supervised fine-tuning) accelerates convergence through direct token-level loss intervention, its efficacy is constrained by offline policy trajectory. In contrast, RL(reinforcement learning) facilitates exploratory policy optimization, but suffers from low sample efficiency and stringent dependency on high-quality base models. To address these dual challenges, we propose GRAO (Group Relative Alignment Optimization), a unified framework that synergizes the respective strengths of SFT and RL through three key innovations: 1) A multi-sample generation strategy enabling comparative quality assessment via reward feedback; 2) A novel Group Direct Alignment Loss formulation leveraging intra-group relative advantage weighting; 3) Reference-aware parameter updates guided by pairwise preference dynamics. Our theoretical analysis establishes GRAO's convergence guarantees and sample efficiency advantages over conventional approaches. Comprehensive evaluations across complex human alignment tasks demonstrate GRAO's superior performance, achieving 57.70\%,17.65\% 7.95\% and 5.18\% relative improvements over SFT, DPO, PPO and GRPO baselines respectively. This work provides both a theoretically grounded alignment framework and empirical evidence for efficient capability evolution in language models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Diagonal Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Integrated Sensing and Communication

Beyond diagonal intelligent reflecting surface (BD-IRS) is a new promising IRS architecture for which the reflection matrix is not limited to the diagonal structure as for conventional IRS. In this paper, we study a BD-IRS aided uplink integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system where sensing is performed in a device-based manner. Specifically, we aim to estimate the unknown and random location of an active target based on its uplink probing signals sent to a multi-antenna base station (BS) as well as the known prior distribution information of the target's location. Multiple communication users also simultaneously send uplink signals, resulting in a challenging mutual interference issue between sensing and communication. We first characterize the sensing performance metric by deriving the posterior Cramér-Rao bound (PCRB) of the mean-squared error (MSE) when prior information is available. Then, we formulate a BD-IRS reflection matrix optimization problem to maximize the minimum expected achievable rate among the multiple users subject to a constraint on the PCRB as well as the lossless and reciprocal constraints on the BD-IRS reflection matrix. The formulated problem is non-convex and challenging to solve. To tackle this problem, we propose a penalty dual decomposition (PDD) based algorithm which can find a high-quality suboptimal solution with polynomial-time complexity. In addition, we propose and optimize a time-division multiple access (TDMA) based scheme which removes the sensing-communication mutual interference. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed designs and provide useful design insights such as the optimal choice of multiple access scheme.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Over-the-Air Diagnosis of Defective Elements in Intelligent Reflecting Surface

Due to circuit failures, defective elements that cannot adaptively adjust the phase shifts of their impinging signals in a desired manner may exist on an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). Traditional way to locate these defective IRS elements requires a thorough diagnosis of all the circuits belonging to a huge number of IRS elements, which is practically challenging. In this paper, we will devise novel approaches under which a transmitter sends known pilot signals and a receiver localizes all the defective IRS elements just based on its over-the-air measurements reflected from the IRS. Specifically, given any set of IRS elements, we propose an efficient method to process the received signals to determine whether this cluster contains defective elements or not with a very high accuracy probability. Based on this method, we show that the over-the-air diagnosis problem belongs to the 20 questions problem, where we can adaptively change the query set at the IRS so as to localize all the defective elements as quickly as possible. Along this line, we first propose a sorted posterior matching (sortPM) based method according to the noisy 20 questions technique, which enables accurate diagnosis even if the answers about the existence of defective elements in some sets of interest are wrong at certain question and answer (Q&A) rounds due to the noisy received signals. Next, to reduce the complexity, we propose a bisection based method according to the noiseless 20 questions technique, which totally trusts the answer at each Q&A round and keeps removing half of the remaining region based on such answers. Via numerical results, we show that our proposed methods can exploit the over-the-air measurements to localize all the defective IRS elements quickly and accurately.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Low-Overhead Channel Estimation Framework for Beyond Diagonal Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Assisted Multi-User MIMO Communication

Beyond diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surface (BD-RIS) refers to a family of RIS architectures characterized by scattering matrices not limited to being diagonal and enables higher wave manipulation flexibility and large performance gains over conventional (diagonal) RIS. To achieve those promising gains, accurate channel state information (CSI) needs to be acquired in BD-RIS assisted communication systems. However, the number of coefficients in the cascaded channels to be estimated in BD-RIS assisted systems is significantly larger than that in conventional RIS assisted systems, because the channels associated with the off-diagonal elements of the scattering matrix have to be estimated as well. Surprisingly, for the first time in the literature, this paper rigorously shows that the uplink channel estimation overhead in BD-RIS assisted systems is actually of the same order as that in the conventional RIS assisted systems. This amazing result stems from a key observation: for each user antenna, its cascaded channel matrix associated with one reference BD-RIS element is a scaled version of that associated with any other BD-RIS element due to the common RIS-base station (BS) channel. In other words, the number of independent unknown variables is far less than it would seem at first glance. Building upon this property, this paper manages to characterize the minimum overhead to perfectly estimate all the channels in the ideal case without noise at the BS, and propose a twophase estimation framework for the practical case with noise at the BS. Numerical results demonstrate outstanding channel estimation overhead reduction over existing schemes in BD-RIS assisted systems.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Scalable Transceiver Design for Multi-User Communication in FDD Massive MIMO Systems via Deep Learning

This paper addresses the joint transceiver design, including pilot transmission, channel feature extraction and feedback, as well as precoding, for low-overhead downlink massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication in frequency-division duplex (FDD) systems. Although deep learning (DL) has shown great potential in tackling this problem, existing methods often suffer from poor scalability in practical systems, as the solution obtained in the training phase merely works for a fixed feedback capacity and a fixed number of users in the deployment phase. To address this limitation, we propose a novel DL-based framework comprised of choreographed neural networks, which can utilize one training phase to generate all the transceiver solutions used in the deployment phase with varying sizes of feedback codebooks and numbers of users. The proposed framework includes a residual vector-quantized variational autoencoder (RVQ-VAE) for efficient channel feedback and an edge graph attention network (EGAT) for robust multiuser precoding. It can adapt to different feedback capacities by flexibly adjusting the RVQ codebook sizes using the hierarchical codebook structure, and scale with the number of users through a feedback module sharing scheme and the inherent scalability of EGAT. Moreover, a progressive training strategy is proposed to further enhance data transmission performance and generalization capability. Numerical results on a real-world dataset demonstrate the superior scalability and performance of our approach over existing methods.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Handover-Aware Trajectory Optimization for Cellular-Connected UAV

In this letter, we study a cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which aims to complete a mission of flying between two pre-determined locations while maintaining satisfactory communication quality with the ground base stations (GBSs). Due to the potentially long distance of the UAV's flight, frequent handovers may be incurred among different GBSs, which leads to various practical issues such as large delay and synchronization overhead. To address this problem, we investigate the trajectory optimization of the UAV to minimize the number of GBS handovers during the flight, subject to a communication quality constraint and a maximum mission completion time constraint. Although this problem is non-convex and difficult to solve, we derive useful structures of the optimal solution, based on which we propose an efficient algorithm based on graph theory and Lagrangian relaxation for finding a high-quality suboptimal solution in polynomial time. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed trajectory design.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

User Equipment Assisted Localization for 6G Integrated Sensing and Communication

This paper investigates user equipment (UE) assisted device-free networked sensing in the sixth-generation (6G) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where one base station (BS) and multiple UEs, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), serve as anchors to cooperatively localize multiple passive targets based on the range information. Three challenges arise from the above scheme. First, the UEs are not perfectly synchronized with the BSs. Second, the UE (anchor) positions are usually estimated by the Global Positioning System (GPS) and subject to unknown errors. Third, data association is challenging, since it is hard for each anchor to associate each rang estimation to the right target under device-free sensing. We first tackle the above three challenges under a passive UE based sensing mode, where UEs only passively hear the signals over the BS-target-UE paths. A two-phase UE assisted localization protocol is proposed. In Phase I, we design an efficient method to accurately estimate the ranges from the BS to the targets and those from the BS to the targets to the UEs in the presence of synchronization errors between the BS and the UEs. In Phase II, an efficient algorithm is proposed to localize the targets via jointly removing the UEs with quite inaccurate position information from the anchor set and matching the estimated ranges at the BS and the remaining UEs with the targets. Next, we also consider an active UE based sensing mode, where the UEs can actively emit signals to obtain additional range information from them to the targets. We show that this additional range information can be utilized to significantly reduce the complexity of Phase II in the aforementioned two-phase localization protocol. Numerical results show that our proposed UE assisted networked sensing scheme can achieve very high localization accuracy.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Intelligent Reflecting Surface Based Localization of Mixed Near-Field and Far-Field Targets

This paper considers an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted bi-static localization architecture for the sixth-generation (6G) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) network. The system consists of a transmit user, a receive base station (BS), an IRS, and multiple targets in either the far-field or near-field region of the IRS. In particular, we focus on the challenging scenario where the line-of-sight (LOS) paths between targets and the BS are blocked, such that the emitted orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals from the user reach the BS merely via the user-target-IRS-BS path. Based on the signals received by the BS, our goal is to localize the targets by estimating their relative positions to the IRS, instead of to the BS. We show that subspace-based methods, such as the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm, can be applied onto the BS's received signals to estimate the relative states from the targets to the IRS. To this end, we create a virtual signal via combining user-target-IRS-BS channels over various time slots. By applying MUSIC on such a virtual signal, we are able to detect the far-field targets and the near-field targets, and estimate the angle-of-arrivals (AOAs) and/or ranges from the targets to the IRS. Furthermore, we theoretically verify that the proposed method can perfectly estimate the relative states from the targets to the IRS in the ideal case with infinite coherence blocks. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of our proposed IRS-assisted localization scheme. Our paper demonstrates the potential of employing passive anchors, i.e., IRSs, to improve the sensing coverage of the active anchors, i.e., BSs.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Reducing Channel Estimation and Feedback Overhead in IRS-Aided Downlink System: A Quantize-then-Estimate Approach

Channel state information (CSI) acquisition is essential for the base station (BS) to fully reap the beamforming gain in intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided downlink communication systems. Recently, [1] revealed a strong correlation in different users' cascaded channels stemming from their common BS-IRS channel component, and leveraged such a correlation to significantly reduce the pilot transmission overhead in IRS-aided uplink communication. In this paper, we aim to exploit the above channel property to reduce the overhead for both pilot and feedback transmission in IRS-aided downlink communication. Note that in the downlink, the distributed users merely receive the pilot signals containing their own CSI and cannot leverage the correlation in different users' channels, which is in sharp contrast to the uplink counterpart considered in [1]. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes a novel ``quantize-then-estimate'' protocol in frequency division duplex (FDD) IRS-aided downlink communication. Specifically, the users quantize and feed back their received pilot signals, instead of the estimated channels, to the BS. After de-quantizing the pilot signals received by all the users, the BS estimates all the cascaded channels by leveraging their correlation, similar to the uplink scenario. Under this protocol, we manage to propose efficient user-side quantization and BS-side channel estimation methods. Moreover, we analytically quantify the pilot and feedback transmission overhead to reveal the significant performance gain of our proposed scheme over the conventional ``estimate-then-quantize'' scheme.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Optimal Transmit Signal Design for Multi-Target MIMO Sensing Exploiting Prior Information

In this paper, we study the transmit signal optimization in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar system for sensing the angle information of multiple targets via their reflected echo signals. We consider a challenging and practical scenario where the angles to be sensed are unknown and random, while their probability information is known a priori for exploitation. First, we establish an analytical framework to quantify the multi-target sensing performance exploiting prior distribution information, by deriving the posterior Cramér-Rao bound (PCRB) as a lower bound of the mean-squared error (MSE) matrix in sensing multiple unknown and random angles. Then, we formulate and study the transmit sample covariance matrix optimization problem to minimize the PCRB for the sum MSE in estimating all angles. Moreover, we propose a sum-of-ratios iterative algorithm which can obtain the optimal solution to the PCRB-minimization problem with low complexity. Numerical results validate our results and the superiority of our proposed design over benchmark schemes.

cs.IT↗