arXiv subjects

Wen Zhan

Publications and source records attributed to Wen Zhan.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Telling stories, making Hanzi: AI-assisted co-creation with elderly migrants in urban China

This paper explores how older migrants in urban China can record stories that everyday language and design often miss. We ran two co-creation workshops with 10 elders. Activities combined oral storytelling, facilitator-mediated AI assistance, and hand-making. Large language models proposed candidate glyphs through a facilitator. Participants crafted new Hanzi to hold their stories. The resulting characters served as memory anchors for later sharing and retelling. Our interpretive analysis shows heterogeneity and adaptive capacity among participants. Participants experienced AI as a creative initiator that lowered barriers to expression and making, especially for those with lower digital literacy. The work challenges homogenizing assumptions about older adults and the presumption of uniform capacities and needs. We contribute a workshop framework that positions AI as a backstage facilitator. We also offer insights on engaging older migrants as sources of community memory and situated cultural knowledge within inclusive urban systems.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Timely and Energy-Efficient Information Delivery in Heterogeneous Correlated Random Access Networks

This paper characterizes and jointly optimizes Age of Information (AoI) and energy efficiency in heterogeneous correlated random access networks, where each sensor adopts a distinct transmission probability and its observations are correlated with those of other sensors. An analytical model is proposed to analyze AoI and energy efficiency for each sensor. Closed-form expressions for long-term average AoI and energy efficiency are derived, explicitly accounting for spatial correlation and state-dependent power consumption. By constraining sensors to adopt the same transmission probability, three unified transmission strategies are derived: the age-optimal strategy (q_A^), the energy-efficiency optimal strategy (q_E^), and the Pareto-optimal strategy (q^), which jointly optimizes AoI and energy efficiency. A bounded exhaustive search with O(1/(n q_epsilon)) complexity guarantees efficient computation of q^. Theoretically, the correlation gain is proven to significantly enhance both metrics under spatial correlation. To exploit sensor heterogeneity, a gradient-based iterative algorithm, Multi-Start Projected Adaptive Moment Estimation (MS-PAdam), is proposed to jointly optimize all sensors' transmission probabilities, efficiently converging to the optimal AoI-energy-efficiency tradeoff. Crucially, MS-PAdam adaptively suppresses transmissions where marginal gains are outweighed by correlated neighbors' contributions, substantially alleviating competition. Numerical results show MS-PAdam outperforms unified strategies, achieving harmonious operation that mitigates AoI/energy degradation in contention-intensive scenarios.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

Meta-Reinforcement Learning With Mixture of Experts for Generalizable Multi Access in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

This paper focuses on spectrum sharing in heterogeneous wireless networks, where nodes with different Media Access Control (MAC) protocols to transmit data packets to a common access point over a shared wireless channel. While previous studies have proposed Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based multiple access protocols tailored to specific scenarios, these approaches are limited by their inability to generalize across diverse environments, often requiring time-consuming retraining. To address this issue, we introduce Generalizable Multiple Access (GMA), a novel Meta-Reinforcement Learning (meta-RL)-based MAC protocol designed for rapid adaptation across heterogeneous network environments. GMA leverages a context-based meta-RL approach with Mixture of Experts (MoE) to improve representation learning, enhancing latent information extraction. By learning a meta-policy during training, GMA enables fast adaptation to different and previously unknown environments, without prior knowledge of the specific MAC protocols in use. Simulation results demonstrate that, although the GMA protocol experiences a slight performance drop compared to baseline methods in training environments, it achieves faster convergence and higher performance in new, unseen environments.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2021

Optimizing Age of Information in Random-Access Poisson Networks

Timeliness is an emerging requirement for many Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In IoT networks, where a large-number of nodes are distributed, severe interference may incur during the transmission phase which causes age of information (AoI) degradation. It is therefore important to study the performance limit of AoI as well as how to achieve such limit. In this paper, we aim to optimize the AoI in random access Poisson networks. By taking into account the spatio-temporal interactions amongst the transmitters, an expression of the peak AoI is derived, based on explicit expressions of the optimal peak AoI and the corresponding optimal system parameters including the packet arrival rate and the channel access probability are further derived. It is shown that with a given packet arrival rate (resp. a given channel access probability), the optimal channel access probability (resp. the optimal packet arrival rate), is equal to one under a small node deployment density, and decrease monotonically as the spatial deployment density increases due to the severe interference caused by spatio-temproal coupling between transmitters. When joint tuning of the packet arrival rate and channel access probability is performed, the optimal channel access probability is always set to be one. Moreover, with the sole tuning of the channel access probability, it is found that the optimal peak AoI performance can be improved with a smaller packet arrival rate only when the node deployment density is high, which is contrast to the case of the sole tuning of the packet arrival rate, where a higher channel access probability always leads to better optimal peak AoI regardless of the node deployment density. In all the cases of optimal tuning of system parameters, the optimal peak AoI linearly grows with the node deployment density as opposed to an exponential growth with fixed system parameters.

cs.IT↗