arXiv subjects

Xiaolan Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaolan Liu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Low-Latency Semantic State Estimator using Latent Predictive Learning for Dynamic Network Monitoring and Orchestration

Closed-loop network monitoring and orchestration increasingly require semantic interpretations of live telemetry beyond raw counter collection. However, dynamic cloud-edge environments change both the active node set and the monitoring query at runtime, while control loops demand bounded millisecond-scale responses. We introduce a latent predictive state estimator (LPSE) for dynamic network monitoring and orchestration, built on latent predictive learning over streaming telemetry. The framework converts variable-cardinality node telemetry into topology-adaptive temporal representations, fuses them with monitoring questions, and returns bounded answers from a semantic codebook instead of autoregressive text generation. This design enables fixed-cost, single-pass inference while preserving semantic interpretability. By operating on permutation-invariant, slot-routed node representations keyed by stable identity, the model maintains a fixed input space and generalizes to node addition, removal, and reordering without retraining. Experimental results on a multi-node Kubernetes cluster show semantic prediction accuracy of 82.42% at approximately 41$\times$ lower mean inference latency and 15$\times$ smaller memory footprint compared with a deployable 4B LLM endpoint.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Semantic Communications for Vehicle-Based Mission-Critical Services: Challenges and Solutions

As mission-critical (MC) services such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) based emergency communication and Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) enabled autonomous driving emerge, the traditional communication framework can not meet the growing demands for higher reliability and lower latency and the increasing transmission loads. Semantic Communication (SemCom), an emerging communication paradigm that shifts the focus from bit-level data to its context and intended task at the receiver (i.e., semantic level), is envisioned to be a key revolution in Sixth Generation (6G) networks. However, an explicit and systematic SemCom framework specifically tailored for Vehicle-based MC (VbMC) services has yet to be proposed, primarily due to the complexity and lack of analysis on their MC characteristics. In this article, we first present the key information-critical and infrastructure-critical vehicle-based services within the SemCom framework. We then analyze the unique characteristics of MC services and the corresponding challenges they present for SemCom. Building on this, we propose a novel SemCom framework designed to address the specific needs of MC services in vehicle systems, offering potential solutions to existing challenges. Finally, we present a case study on UAV-based rapid congestion relief, utilizing eXplainable AI (XAI) to validate the effectiveness of the proposed SemCom framework.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Galaxy: A Cognition-Centered Framework for Proactive, Privacy-Preserving, and Self-Evolving LLM Agents

Intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) such as Siri and Google Assistant are designed to enhance human capabilities and perform tasks on behalf of users. The emergence of LLM agents brings new opportunities for the development of IPAs. While responsive capabilities have been widely studied, proactive behaviors remain underexplored. Designing an IPA that is proactive, privacy-preserving, and capable of self-evolution remains a significant challenge. Designing such IPAs relies on the cognitive architecture of LLM agents. This work proposes Cognition Forest, a semantic structure designed to align cognitive modeling with system-level design. We unify cognitive architecture and system design into a self-reinforcing loop instead of treating them separately. Based on this principle, we present Galaxy, a framework that supports multidimensional interactions and personalized capability generation. Two cooperative agents are implemented based on Galaxy: KoRa, a cognition-enhanced generative agent that supports both responsive and proactive skills; and Kernel, a meta-cognition-based meta-agent that enables Galaxy's self-evolution and privacy preservation. Experimental results show that Galaxy outperforms multiple state-of-the-art benchmarks. Ablation studies and real-world interaction cases validate the effectiveness of Galaxy.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

A mini-batch training strategy for deep subspace clustering networks

Mini-batch training is a cornerstone of modern deep learning, offering computational efficiency and scalability for training complex architectures. However, existing deep subspace clustering (DSC) methods, which typically combine an autoencoder with a self-expressive layer, rely on full-batch processing. The bottleneck arises from the self-expressive module, which requires representations of the entire dataset to construct a self-representation coefficient matrix. In this work, we introduce a mini-batch training strategy for DSC by integrating a memory bank that preserves global feature representations. Our approach enables scalable training of deep architectures for subspace clustering with high-resolution images, overcoming previous limitations. Additionally, to efficiently fine-tune large-scale pre-trained encoders for subspace clustering, we propose a decoder-free framework that leverages contrastive learning instead of autoencoding for representation learning. This design not only eliminates the computational overhead of decoder training but also provides competitive performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only achieves performance comparable to full-batch methods, but outperforms other state-of-the-art subspace clustering methods on the COIL100 and ORL datasets by fine-tuning deep networks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

A General Sensing-assisted Channel Estimation Framework in Distributed MIMO Network

In 6G communications, it is envisioned to equip the traditional access point (AP) with sensing capability to fully benefit the existing wireless communication infrastructures. Thus, sensing-assisted communication has attracted significant attention from both industry and academia. However, most existing works focused on sensing-assisted communication in line-of-sight (LoS) scenarios due to sensing limitations, where the sensing target (ST) and communication user equipment (UE) remain the same. In this paper, we propose a general sensing-assisted channel estimation framework in the distributed multiple-input and multiple-output (DMIMO) network and consider a scenario where the ST and UE are different entities. In addition, ST is a moving target (e.g. a robot) which causes channels between APs and UEs to vary due to changes in the reflection paths of the indoor environment. Therefore, we let multiple APs to jointly sense the position of the ST, which will be incorporated in a Ray tracing model to obtain a more accurate estimate of the channels from APs to UEs for both the LoS and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) scenarios. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed sensing-assisted communication framework achieves a much higher channel estimation accuracy and downlink throughput compared to the traditional least-square (LS) channel estimation. More importantly, the feasibility of the proposed framework has been validated to guarantee the stringent channel estimation accuracy requirement in the DMIMO network.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Maximizing Uncertainty for Federated learning via Bayesian Optimisation-based Model Poisoning

As we transition from Narrow Artificial Intelligence towards Artificial Super Intelligence, users are increasingly concerned about their privacy and the trustworthiness of machine learning (ML) technology. A common denominator for the metrics of trustworthiness is the quantification of uncertainty inherent in DL algorithms, and specifically in the model parameters, input data, and model predictions. One of the common approaches to address privacy-related issues in DL is to adopt distributed learning such as federated learning (FL), where private raw data is not shared among users. Despite the privacy-preserving mechanisms in FL, it still faces challenges in trustworthiness. Specifically, the malicious users, during training, can systematically create malicious model parameters to compromise the models predictive and generative capabilities, resulting in high uncertainty about their reliability. To demonstrate malicious behaviour, we propose a novel model poisoning attack method named Delphi which aims to maximise the uncertainty of the global model output. We achieve this by taking advantage of the relationship between the uncertainty and the model parameters of the first hidden layer of the local model. Delphi employs two types of optimisation , Bayesian Optimisation and Least Squares Trust Region, to search for the optimal poisoned model parameters, named as Delphi-BO and Delphi-LSTR. We quantify the uncertainty using the KL Divergence to minimise the distance of the predictive probability distribution towards an uncertain distribution of model output. Furthermore, we establish a mathematical proof for the attack effectiveness demonstrated in FL. Numerical results demonstrate that Delphi-BO induces a higher amount of uncertainty than Delphi-LSTR highlighting vulnerability of FL systems to model poisoning attacks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Enhancing Federated Learning Convergence with Dynamic Data Queue and Data Entropy-driven Participant Selection

Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized approach for collaborative model training on edge devices. This distributed method of model training offers advantages in privacy, security, regulatory compliance, and cost-efficiency. Our emphasis in this research lies in addressing statistical complexity in FL, especially when the data stored locally across devices is not identically and independently distributed (non-IID). We have observed an accuracy reduction of up to approximately 10\% to 30\%, particularly in skewed scenarios where each edge device trains with only 1 class of data. This reduction is attributed to weight divergence, quantified using the Euclidean distance between device-level class distributions and the population distribution, resulting in a bias term ($δ_k$). As a solution, we present a method to improve convergence in FL by creating a global subset of data on the server and dynamically distributing it across devices using a Dynamic Data queue-driven Federated Learning (DDFL). Next, we leverage Data Entropy metrics to observe the process during each training round and enable reasonable device selection for aggregation. Furthermore, we provide a convergence analysis of our proposed DDFL to justify their viability in practical FL scenarios, aiming for better device selection, a non-sub-optimal global model, and faster convergence. We observe that our approach results in a substantial accuracy boost of approximately 5\% for the MNIST dataset, around 18\% for CIFAR-10, and 20\% for CIFAR-100 with a 10\% global subset of data, outperforming the state-of-the-art (SOTA) aggregation algorithms.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

FheFL: Fully Homomorphic Encryption Friendly Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning with Byzantine Users

The federated learning (FL) technique was developed to mitigate data privacy issues in the traditional machine learning paradigm. While FL ensures that a user's data always remain with the user, the gradients are shared with the centralized server to build the global model. This results in privacy leakage, where the server can infer private information from the shared gradients. To mitigate this flaw, the next-generation FL architectures proposed encryption and anonymization techniques to protect the model updates from the server. However, this approach creates other challenges, such as malicious users sharing false gradients. Since the gradients are encrypted, the server is unable to identify rogue users. To mitigate both attacks, this paper proposes a novel FL algorithm based on a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme. We develop a distributed multi-key additive homomorphic encryption scheme that supports model aggregation in FL. We also develop a novel aggregation scheme within the encrypted domain, utilizing users' non-poisoning rates, to effectively address data poisoning attacks while ensuring privacy is preserved by the proposed encryption scheme. Rigorous security, privacy, convergence, and experimental analyses have been provided to show that FheFL is novel, secure, and private, and achieves comparable accuracy at reasonable computational cost.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Fully Independent Communication in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) comprises a broad area of research within the field of multi-agent systems. Several recent works have focused specifically on the study of communication approaches in MARL. While multiple communication methods have been proposed, these might still be too complex and not easily transferable to more practical contexts. One of the reasons for that is due to the use of the famous parameter sharing trick. In this paper, we investigate how independent learners in MARL that do not share parameters can communicate. We demonstrate that this setting might incur into some problems, to which we propose a new learning scheme as a solution. Our results show that, despite the challenges, independent agents can still learn communication strategies following our method. Additionally, we use this method to investigate how communication in MARL is affected by different network capacities, both for sharing and not sharing parameters. We observe that communication may not always be needed and that the chosen agent network sizes need to be considered when used together with communication in order to achieve efficient learning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Laser frequency stabilization and photoacoustic detection based on the tapered fiber coupled crystalline resonator

We demonstrate laser frequency stabilization using a high-Q MgF2 crystalline whispering gallery mode resonator coupled with a tapered fiber. We discovered that the tapered fiber, acting as a microcantilever, exhibits mechanical resonance characteristics that is capable of transmitting acoustic perturbations to the frequency locking loop. Both experimental and theoretical investigations into the influence of external acoustic waves on the coupling system were conducted. After acoustic isolation, the locked laser exhibits a minimum frequency noise of 0.4Hz2/Hz at 7kHz and an integral linewidth of 68Hz (0.1s integration time). Benefiting from the ultralow frequency noise of the stabilized laser, it achieves a minimum noise equivalent acoustic signal level of 4.76*10-4 Pa/Hz1/2. Our results not only facilitate the realization of ultralow noise lasers but also serves as a novel and sensitive photoacoustic detector.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2023

Staged Reinforcement Learning for Complex Tasks through Decomposed Environments

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an area of growing interest in the field of artificial intelligence due to its many notable applications in diverse fields. Particularly within the context of intelligent vehicle control, RL has made impressive progress. However, currently it is still in simulated controlled environments where RL can achieve its full super-human potential. Although how to apply simulation experience in real scenarios has been studied, how to approximate simulated problems to the real dynamic problems is still a challenge. In this paper, we discuss two methods that approximate RL problems to real problems. In the context of traffic junction simulations, we demonstrate that, if we can decompose a complex task into multiple sub-tasks, solving these tasks first can be advantageous to help minimising possible occurrences of catastrophic events in the complex task. From a multi-agent perspective, we introduce a training structuring mechanism that exploits the use of experience learned under the popular paradigm called Centralised Training Decentralised Execution (CTDE). This experience can then be leveraged in fully decentralised settings that are conceptually closer to real settings, where agents often do not have access to a central oracle and must be treated as isolated independent units. The results show that the proposed approaches improve agents performance in complex tasks related to traffic junctions, minimising potential safety-critical problems that might happen in these scenarios. Although still in simulation, the investigated situations are conceptually closer to real scenarios and thus, with these results, we intend to motivate further research in the subject.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Opportunistic Transmission of Distributed Learning Models in Mobile UAVs

In this paper, we propose an opportunistic scheme for the transmission of model updates from Federated Learning (FL) clients to the server, where clients are wireless mobile users. This proposal aims to opportunistically take advantage of the proximity of users to the base station or the general condition of the wireless transmission channel, rather than traditional synchronous transmission. In this scheme, during the training, intermediate model parameters are uploaded to the server, opportunistically and based on the wireless channel condition. Then, the proactively-transmitted model updates are used for the global aggregation if the final local model updates are delayed. We apply this novel model transmission scheme to one of our previous work, which is a hybrid split and federated learning (HSFL) framework for UAVs. Simulation results confirm the superiority of using proactive transmission over the conventional asynchronous aggregation scheme for the staled model by obtaining higher accuracy and more stable training performance. Test accuracy increases by up to 13.47% with just one round of extra transmission.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Recursive Euclidean Distance Based Robust Aggregation Technique For Federated Learning

Federated learning has gained popularity as a solution to data availability and privacy challenges in machine learning. However, the aggregation process of local model updates to obtain a global model in federated learning is susceptible to malicious attacks, such as backdoor poisoning, label-flipping, and membership inference. Malicious users aim to sabotage the collaborative learning process by training the local model with malicious data. In this paper, we propose a novel robust aggregation approach based on recursive Euclidean distance calculation. Our approach measures the distance of the local models from the previous global model and assigns weights accordingly. Local models far away from the global model are assigned smaller weights to minimize the data poisoning effect during aggregation. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms by at least $5\%$ in accuracy while reducing time complexity by less than $55\%$. Our contribution is significant as it addresses the critical issue of malicious attacks in federated learning while improving the accuracy of the global model.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

IRS Assisted NOMA Aided Mobile Edge Computing with Queue Stability: Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

By employing powerful edge servers for data processing, mobile edge computing (MEC) has been recognized as a promising technology to support emerging computation-intensive applications. Besides, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-aided MEC system can further enhance the spectral-efficiency with massive tasks offloading. However, with more dynamic devices brought online and the uncontrollable stochastic channel environment, it is even desirable to deploy appealing technique, i.e., intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS), in the MEC system to flexibly tune the communication environment and improve the system energy efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the joint offloading, communication and computation resource allocation for IRS-assisted NOMA MEC system. We firstly formulate a mixed integer energy efficiency maximization problem with system queue stability constraint. We then propose the Lyapunov-function-based Mixed Integer Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (LMIDDPG) algorithm which is based on the centralized reinforcement learning (RL) framework. To be specific, we design the mixed integer action space mapping which contains both continuous mapping and integer mapping. Moreover, the award function is defined as the upper-bound of the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty function. To enable end devices (EDs) to choose actions independently at the execution stage, we further propose the Heterogeneous Multi-agent LMIDDPG (HMA-LMIDDPG) algorithm based on distributed RL framework with homogeneous EDs and heterogeneous base station (BS) as heterogeneous multi-agent. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithms can achieve superior energy efficiency performance to the benchmark algorithms while maintaining the queue stability. Specially, the distributed structure HMA-LMIDDPG can acquire more energy efficiency gain than centralized structure LMIDDPG.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

Distributed Intelligence in Wireless Networks

The cloud-based solutions are becoming inefficient due to considerably large time delays, high power consumption, security and privacy concerns caused by billions of connected wireless devices and typically zillions bytes of data they produce at the network edge. A blend of edge computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques could optimally shift the resourceful computation servers closer to the network edge, which provides the support for advanced AI applications (e.g., video/audio surveillance and personal recommendation system) by enabling intelligent decision making on computing at the point of data generation as and when it is needed, and distributed Machine Learning (ML) with its potential to avoid the transmission of large dataset and possible compromise of privacy that may exist in cloud-based centralized learning. Therefore, AI is envisioned to become native and ubiquitous in future communication and networking systems. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive overview of recent advances in distributed intelligence in wireless networks under the umbrella of native-AI wireless networks, with a focus on the basic concepts of native-AI wireless networks, on the AI-enabled edge computing, on the design of distributed learning architectures for heterogeneous networks, on the communication-efficient technologies to support distributed learning, and on the AI-empowered end-to-end communications. We highlight the advantages of hybrid distributed learning architectures compared to the state-of-art distributed learning techniques. We summarize the challenges of existing research contributions in distributed intelligence in wireless networks and identify the potential future opportunities.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2020

Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Resource Allocation in IoT networks with Edge Computing

To support popular Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as virtual reality, mobile games and wearable devices, edge computing provides a front-end distributed computing archetype of centralized cloud computing with low latency. However, it's challenging for end users to offload computation due to their massive requirements on spectrum and computation resources and frequent requests on Radio Access Technology (RAT). In this paper, we investigate computation offloading mechanism with resource allocation in IoT edge computing networks by formulating it as a stochastic game. Here, each end user is a learning agent observing its local environment to learn optimal decisions on either local computing or edge computing with the goal of minimizing long term system cost by choosing its transmit power level, RAT and sub-channel without knowing any information of the other end users. Therefore, a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework is developed to solve the stochastic game with a proposed independent learners based multi-agent Q-learning (IL-based MA-Q) algorithm. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed IL-based MA-Q algorithm is feasible to solve the formulated problem and is more energy efficient without extra cost on channel estimation at the centralized gateway compared to the other two benchmark algorithms.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Resource Allocation for Edge Computing in IoT Networks via Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we consider resource allocation for edge computing in internet of things (IoT) networks. Specifically, each end device is considered as an agent, which makes its decisions on whether offloading the computation tasks to the edge devices or not. To minimise the long-term weighted sum cost which includes the power consumption and the task execution latency, we consider the channel conditions between the end devices and the gateway, the computation task queue as well as the remaining computation resource of the end devices as the network states. The problem of making a series of decisions at the end devices is modelled as a Markov decision process and solved by the reinforcement learning approach. Therefore, we propose a near optimal task offloading algorithm based on Q-learning. Simulations validate the feasibility of our proposed algorithm, which achieves a better trade-off between the power consumption and the task execution latency compared to these of edge computing and local computing modes.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Resource Allocation in Wireless Powered IoT Networks

In this paper, efficient resource allocation for the uplink transmission of wireless powered IoT networks is investigated. We adopt LoRa technology as an example in the IoT network, but this work is still suitable for other communication technologies. Allocating limited resources, like spectrum and energy resources, among a massive number of users faces critical challenges. We consider grouping wireless powered IoT users into available channels first and then investigate power allocation for users grouped in the same channel to improve the network throughput. Specifically, the user grouping problem is formulated as a many to one matching game. It is achieved by considering IoT users and channels as selfish players which belong to two disjoint sets. Both selfish players focus on maximizing their own utilities. Then we propose an efficient channel allocation algorithm (ECAA) with low complexity for user grouping. Additionally, a Markov Decision Process (MDP) is used to model unpredictable energy arrival and channel conditions uncertainty at each user, and a power allocation algorithm is proposed to maximize the accumulative network throughput over a finite-horizon of time slots. By doing so, we can distribute the channel access and dynamic power allocation local to IoT users. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed ECAA algorithm achieves near-optimal performance and is superior to random channel assignment, but has much lower computational complexity. Moreover, simulations show that the distributed power allocation policy for each user is obtained with better performance than a centralized offline scheme.

cs.IT↗