arXiv subjects

Wenyi Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Wenyi Zhang.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Joint Design of Sampler and Compressor for Timely Status Updates: Age-Distortion Tradeoff

We consider a joint sampling and compression system for timely status updates. Samples are taken, quantized and encoded into binary sequences, which are sent to the destination. We formulate an optimization problem to jointly design sampler, quantizer and encoder, minimizing the age of information (AoI) on the basis of satisfying a mean-squared error (MSE) distortion constraint of the samples. We prove that the zero-wait sampling, the uniform quantization, and the real-valued AoI-optimal coding policies together provide an asymptotically optimal solution to this problem, i.e., as the average distortion approaches zero, the combination achieves the minimum AoI asymptotically. Furthermore, we prove that the AoI of this solution is asymptotically linear with respect to the log MSE distortion with a slope of $-\frac{3}{4}$. We also show that the real-valued Shannon coding policy suffices to achieve the optimal performance asymptotically. Numerical simulations corroborate the analysis.

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arXiv2023

A Multi-timescale and Chance-Constrained Energy Dispatching Strategy of Integrated Heat-Power Community with Shared Hybrid Energy Storage

The community in the future may develop into an integrated heat-power system, which includes a high proportion of renewable energy, power generator units, heat generator units, and shared hybrid energy storage. In the integrated heat-power system with coupling heat-power generators and demands, the key challenges lie in the interaction between heat and power, the inherent uncertainty of renewable energy and consumers' demands, and the multi-timescale scheduling of heat and power. In this paper, we propose a game theoretic model of the integrated heat-power system. For the welfare-maximizing community operator, its energy dispatch strategy is under chance constraints, where the day-ahead scheduling determines the scheduled energy dispatching strategies, and the real-time dispatch considers the adjustment of generators. For utility-maximizing consumers, their demands are sensitive to the preference parameters. Taking into account the uncertainty in both renewable energy and consumer demand, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg game equilibrium and develop a fixed point algorithm to find the market equilibrium between the community operator and community consumers. Numerical simulations on integrated heat-power system validate the effectiveness of the proposed multi-timescale integrated heat and power model.

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arXiv2023

Information Bottleneck Revisited: Posterior Probability Perspective with Optimal Transport

Information bottleneck (IB) is a paradigm to extract information in one target random variable from another relevant random variable, which has aroused great interest due to its potential to explain deep neural networks in terms of information compression and prediction. Despite its great importance, finding the optimal bottleneck variable involves a difficult nonconvex optimization problem due to the nonconvexity of mutual information constraint. The Blahut-Arimoto algorithm and its variants provide an approach by considering its Lagrangian with fixed Lagrange multiplier. However, only the strictly concave IB curve can be fully obtained by the BA algorithm, which strongly limits its application in machine learning and related fields, as strict concavity cannot be guaranteed in those problems. To overcome the above difficulty, we derive an entropy regularized optimal transport (OT) model for IB problem from a posterior probability perspective. Correspondingly, we use the alternating optimization procedure and generalize the Sinkhorn algorithm to solve the above OT model. The effectiveness and efficiency of our approach are demonstrated via numerical experiments.

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arXiv2023

Unimodal Training-Multimodal Prediction: Cross-modal Federated Learning with Hierarchical Aggregation

Multimodal learning has seen great success mining data features from multiple modalities with remarkable model performance improvement. Meanwhile, federated learning (FL) addresses the data sharing problem, enabling privacy-preserved collaborative training to provide sufficient precious data. Great potential, therefore, arises with the confluence of them, known as multimodal federated learning. However, limitation lies in the predominant approaches as they often assume that each local dataset records samples from all modalities. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by proposing an Unimodal Training - Multimodal Prediction (UTMP) framework under the context of multimodal federated learning. We design HA-Fedformer, a novel transformer-based model that empowers unimodal training with only a unimodal dataset at the client and multimodal testing by aggregating multiple clients' knowledge for better accuracy. The key advantages are twofold. Firstly, to alleviate the impact of data non-IID, we develop an uncertainty-aware aggregation method for the local encoders with layer-wise Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling. Secondly, to overcome the challenge of unaligned language sequence, we implement a cross-modal decoder aggregation to capture the hidden signal correlation between decoders trained by data from different modalities. Our experiments on popular sentiment analysis benchmarks, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, demonstrate that HA-Fedformer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal models under the UTMP federated learning frameworks, with 15%-20% improvement on most attributes.

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arXiv2022

A Communication Optimal Transport Approach to the Computation of Rate Distortion Functions

In this paper, we propose a new framework named Communication Optimal Transport (CommOT) for computing the rate distortion (RD) function. This work is motivated by observing the fact that the transition law and the relative entropy in communication theory can be viewed as the transport plan and the regularized objective function in the optimal transport (OT) model. However, unlike in classical OT problems, the RD function only possesses one-side marginal distribution. Hence, to maintain the OT structure, we introduce slackness variables to fulfill the other-side marginal distribution and then propose a general framework (CommOT) for the RD function. The CommOT model is solved via the alternating optimization technique and the well-known Sinkhorn algorithm. In particular, the expected distortion threshold can be converted into finding the unique root of a one-dimensional monotonic function with only a few steps. Numerical experiments show that our proposed framework (CommOT) for solving the RD function with given distortion threshold is efficient and accurate.

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arXiv2022

ORBGRAND Is Almost Capacity-Achieving

Decoding via sequentially guessing the error pattern in a received noisy sequence has received attention recently, and ORBGRAND has been proposed as one such decoding algorithm that is capable of utilizing the soft information embedded in the received noisy sequence. An information theoretic study is conducted for ORBGRAND, and it is shown that the achievable rate of ORBGRAND using independent and identically distributed random codebooks almost coincides with the channel capacity, for an additive white Gaussian noise channel under antipodal input. For finite-length codes, improved guessing schemes motivated by the information theoretic study are proposed that attain lower error rates than ORBGRAND, especially in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime.

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arXiv2022

Linear shrinkage receiver for slow fading channels under imperfect channel state information

This paper studies receiver design in single-input multiple-output (SIMO) slow fading channels with imperfect channel state information (CSI) at the receiver only. Using generalized mutual information (GMI) as achievable rate, we study the outage behavior when the receiver employs certain generalized form of the nearest neighbor decoding rule. Our study reveals that linearly shrinking the linear minimum meansquared error (LMMSE) estimate of the CSI reduces the outage probability when the number of receive antennas is finite. Only in the asymptotic regime where the number of receive antennas grows without bound, the LMMSE estimate of the CSI minimizes the outage probability. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed linear shrinkage receiver achieves evident outage probability reduction.

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arXiv2022

An Optimal Transport Approach to the Computation of the LM Rate

Mismatch capacity characterizes the highest information rate for a channel under a prescribed decoding metric, and is thus a highly relevant fundamental performance metric when dealing with many practically important communication scenarios. Compared with the frequently used generalized mutual information (GMI), the LM rate has been known as a tighter lower bound of the mismatch capacity. The computation of the LM rate, however, has been a difficult task, due to the fact that the LM rate involves a maximization over a function of the channel input, which becomes challenging as the input alphabet size grows, and direct numerical methods (e.g., interior point methods) suffer from intensive memory and computational resource requirements. Noting that the computation of the LM rate can also be formulated as an entropy-based optimization problem with constraints, in this work, we transform the task into an optimal transport (OT) problem with an extra constraint. This allows us to efficiently and accurately accomplish our task by using the well-known Sinkhorn algorithm. Indeed, only a few iterations are required for convergence, due to the fact that the formulated problem does not contain additional regularization terms. Moreover, we convert the extra constraint into a root-finding procedure for a one-dimensional monotonic function. Numerical experiments demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of our OT approach to the computation of the LM rate.

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arXiv2022

An Indirect Rate-Distortion Characterization for Semantic Sources: General Model and the Case of Gaussian Observation

A new source model, which consists of an intrinsic state part and an extrinsic observation part, is proposed and its information-theoretic characterization, namely its rate-distortion function, is defined and analyzed. Such a source model is motivated by the recent surge of interest in the semantic aspect of information: the intrinsic state corresponds to the semantic feature of the source, which in general is not observable but can only be inferred from the extrinsic observation. There are two distortion measures, one between the intrinsic state and its reproduction, and the other between the extrinsic observation and its reproduction. Under a given code rate, the tradeoff between these two distortion measures is characterized by the rate-distortion function, which is solved via the indirect rate-distortion theory and is termed as the semantic rate-distortion function of the source. As an application of the general model and its analysis, the case of Gaussian extrinsic observation is studied, assuming a linear relationship between the intrinsic state and the extrinsic observation, under a quadratic distortion structure. The semantic rate-distortion function is shown to be the solution of a convex programming programming problem with respect to an error covariance matrix, and a reverse water-filling type of solution is provided when the model further satisfies a diagonalizability condition.

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arXiv2022

Generalized Nearest Neighbor Decoding

It is well known that for Gaussian channels, a nearest neighbor decoding rule, which seeks the minimum Euclidean distance between a codeword and the received channel output vector, is the maximum likelihood solution and hence capacity-achieving. Nearest neighbor decoding remains a convenient and yet mismatched solution for general channels, and the key message of this paper is that the performance of the nearest neighbor decoding can be improved by generalizing its decoding metric to incorporate channel state dependent output processing and codeword scaling. Using generalized mutual information, which is a lower bound to the mismatched capacity under independent and identically distributed codebook ensemble, as the performance measure, this paper establishes the optimal generalized nearest neighbor decoding rule, under Gaussian channel input. Several {restricted forms of the} generalized nearest neighbor decoding rule are also derived and compared with existing solutions. The results are illustrated through several case studies for fading channels with imperfect receiver channel state information and for channels with quantization effects.

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arXiv2022

Improved Receivers for Optical Wireless OFDM: An Information Theoretic Perspective

We consider performance enhancement of asymmetrically-clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM) and related optical OFDM schemes, which are variations of OFDM in intensity-modulated optical wireless communications. Unlike most existing studies on specific designs of improved receivers, this paper investigates information theoretic limits of all possible receivers. For independent and identically distributed complex Gaussian inputs, we obtain an exact characterization of information rate of ACO-OFDM with improved receivers for all SNRs. It is proved that the high-SNR gain of improved receivers asymptotically achieve 1/4 bits per channel use, which is equivalent to 3 dB in electrical SNR or 1.5 dB in optical SNR; as the SNR decreases, the maximum achievable SNR gain of improved receivers decreases monotonically to a non-zero low-SNR limit, corresponding to an information rate gain of 36.3%. For practically used constellations, we derive an upper bound on the gain of improved receivers. Numerical results demonstrate that the upper bound can be approached to within 1 dB in optical SNR by combining existing improved receivers and coded modulation. We also show that our information theoretic analyses can be extended to Flip-OFDM and PAM-DMT. Our results imply that, for the considered schemes, improved receivers may reduce the gap to channel capacity significantly at low-to-moderate SNR.

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arXiv2022

Decentralized Federated Learning: Balancing Communication and Computing Costs

Decentralized stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a driving engine for decentralized federated learning (DFL). The performance of decentralized SGD is jointly influenced by inter-node communications and local updates. In this paper, we propose a general DFL framework, which implements both multiple local updates and multiple inter-node communications periodically, to strike a balance between communication efficiency and model consensus. It can provide a general decentralized SGD analytical framework. We establish strong convergence guarantees for the proposed DFL algorithm without the assumption of convex objectives. The convergence rate of DFL can be optimized to achieve the balance of communication and computing costs under constrained resources. For improving communication efficiency of DFL, compressed communication is further introduced to the proposed DFL as a new scheme, named DFL with compressed communication (C-DFL). The proposed C-DFL exhibits linear convergence for strongly convex objectives. Experiment results based on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets illustrate the superiority of DFL over traditional decentralized SGD methods and show that C-DFL further enhances communication efficiency.

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arXiv2021

On the Capacity of MISO Optical Intensity Channels With Per-Antenna Intensity Constraints

This paper investigates the capacity of general multiple-input single-output (MISO) optical intensity channels (OICs) under per-antenna peak- and average-intensity constraints. We first consider the MISO equal-cost constrained OIC (EC-OIC), where, apart from the peak-intensity constraint, average intensities of inputs are equal to arbitrarily preassigned constants. The second model of our interest is the MISO bounded-cost constrained OIC (BC-OIC), where, as compared with the EC-OIC, average intensities of inputs are no larger than arbitrarily preassigned constants. By leveraging tools from quantile functions, stop-loss transform and convex ordering of nonnegative random variables, we prove two decomposition theorems for bounded and nonnegative random variables, based on which we equivalently transform both the EC-OIC and the BC-OIC into respective single-input single-output channels under a peak-intensity and several stop-loss mean constraints. Capacity lower and upper bounds for both channels are established, based on which the asymptotic capacity at high and low signal-to-noise-ratio are determined.

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arXiv2021

Diagnosis of Intelligent Reflecting Surface in Millimeter-wave Communication Systems

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology for enhancing wireless communication systems. It adaptively configures massive passive reflecting elements to control wireless channel in a desirable way. Due to hardware characteristics and deploying environments, an IRS may be subject to reflecting element blockages and failures, and hence developing diagnostic techniques is of great significance to system monitoring and maintenance. In this paper, we develop diagnostic techniques for IRS systems to locate faulty reflecting elements and retrieve failure parameters. Three cases of channel state information (CSI) availability are considered. In the first case where full CSI is available, a compressed sensing based diagnostic technique is proposed, which significantly reduces the required number of measurements. In the second case where only partial CSI is available, we jointly exploit the sparsity of the millimeter-wave channel and the failure, and adopt compressed sparse and low-rank matrix recovery algorithm to decouple channel and failure. In the third case where no CSI is available, a novel atomic norm is introduced as the sparsity-inducing norm of the cascaded channel, and the diagnosis problem is formulated as a joint sparse recovery problem. Finally, the proposed diagnostic techniques are validated through numerical simulations.

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arXiv2021

Generalized Nearest Neighbor Decoding for MIMO Channels with Imperfect Channel State Information

Information transmission over a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) fading channel with imperfect channel state information (CSI) is investigated, under a new receiver architecture which combines the recently proposed generalized nearest neighbor decoding rule (GNNDR) and a successive procedure in the spirit of successive interference cancellation (SIC). Recognizing that the channel input-output relationship is a nonlinear mapping under imperfect CSI, the GNNDR is capable of extracting the information embedded in the joint observation of channel output and imperfect CSI more efficiently than the conventional linear scheme, as revealed by our achievable rate analysis via generalized mutual information (GMI). Numerical results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves performance close to the channel capacity with perfect CSI, and significantly outperforms the conventional pilot-assisted scheme, which first estimates the CSI and then uses the estimated CSI as the true one for coherent decoding.

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arXiv2021

A Rate-Distortion Framework for Characterizing Semantic Information

A rate-distortion problem motivated by the consideration of semantic information is formulated and solved. The starting point is to model an information source as a pair consisting of an intrinsic state which is not observable, corresponding to the semantic aspect of the source, and an extrinsic observation which is subject to lossy source coding. The proposed rate-distortion problem seeks a description of the information source, via encoding the extrinsic observation, under two distortion constraints, one for the intrinsic state and the other for the extrinsic observation. The corresponding state-observation rate-distortion function is obtained, and a few case studies of Gaussian intrinsic state estimation and binary intrinsic state classification are studied.

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arXiv2021

Blind Diagnosis for Millimeter-wave Large-scale Antenna Systems

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems rely on large-scale antenna arrays to combat large path-loss at mmWave band. Due to hardware characteristics and deployment environments, mmWave large-scale antenna systems are vulnerable to antenna element blockages and failures, which necessitate diagnostic techniques to locate faulty antenna elements for calibration purposes. Current diagnostic techniques require full or partial knowledge of channel state information (CSI), which can be challenging to acquire in the presence of antenna failures. In this letter, we propose a blind diagnostic technique to identify faulty antenna elements in mmWave large-scale antenna systems, which does not require any CSI knowledge. By jointly exploiting the sparsity of mmWave channel and failure pattern, we first formulate the diagnosis problem as a joint sparse recovery problem. Then, the atomic norm is introduced to induce the sparsity of mmWave channel over continuous Fourier dictionary. An efficient algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is proposed to solve the formulated problem. Finally, the performance of the proposed technique is evaluated through numerical simulations.

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arXiv2020

Deep-Learned Broadband Encoding Stochastic Filters for Computational Spectroscopic Instruments

Computational spectroscopic instruments with Broadband Encoding Stochastic (BEST) filters allow the reconstruction of the spectrum at high precision with only a few filters. However, conventional design manners of BEST filters are often heuristic and may fail to fully explore the encoding potential of BEST filters. The Parameter Constrained Spectral Encoder and Decoder (PCSED) - a neural network-based framework is presented for the design of BEST filters in spectroscopic instruments. By incorporating the target spectral response definition and the optical design procedures comprehensively, PCSED links the mathematical optimum and practical limits confined by available fabrication techniques. Benefiting from this, the BEST-filter-based spectral camera present a higher reconstruction accuracy with up to 30 times' enhancement and a better tolerance on fabrication errors. The generalizability of PCSED is validated in designing metasurface- and interference-thin-film-based BEST filters.

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