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Yiqin Deng

Publications and source records attributed to Yiqin Deng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Bringing Environmental Enhancement Back to Its Physical Essence via Specular Reflecting Surfaces

Intelligent control of wireless propagation environments is crucial for future network capacity and reliability. Unlike circuit-controlled reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), mechanically actuated specular reflecting surfaces (SRS) offer a simpler and potentially more cost-effective alternative. In this paper, based on the tractable ray-based cascaded channel model with power-projection correction, we investigate the fundamental operational behaviors of an ideal SRS in free space. Specifically, in the angle-aligned near field, edge reflections cause non-constructive combining, resulting in a damped oscillatory convergence of the gain to an aperture-independent constant. We further obtain the far-field behavior, unbounded-aperture asymptotics, an optimal aperture size and reflection angle, and a gain-based near/far-field boundary. For misalignment, we provide accurate approximations for small and large apertures via center-point and stationary-point analyses. We also define the SRS beam pattern, derive analytical 3-dB beamwidths, and quantify the effective region where a main lobe exists. Finally, we derive a closed-form achievable-rate for an SRS-aided communication system. Numerical results validate the proposed expressions, reveal distinct near-/far-field behaviors of specular reflection, and show that SRS can outperform RIS in the far field due to continuous aperture and angular-resolution control and stronger power projection.

cs.IT

Multi-Agent Embodied Autonomous Driving (MAEAD): From V2X Information Exchange to Shared World Models

Autonomous driving is shifting from isolated vehicle intelligence toward multi-agent embodied systems that share perception, infer intent, and coordinate action under uncertainty. This survey examines this transition through the lens of Shared World Models (SWMs): predictive cross-agent representations maintained across vehicles, infrastructure, and other traffic participants. We review approximately 400 publications covering vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, collaborative perception, inter-agent cognition, cooperative planning, end-to-end cooperative driving, and simulation and data engines for closed-loop validation. The organizing question is how exchanged observations become aligned state, intent-aware interaction, and coordinated downstream action. Across the surveyed literature, evaluation remains concentrated in simulation, curated benchmarks, and offline protocols. Foundation-model-based coordination also lacks verifiable real-time safety guarantees in open traffic. These gaps motivate key research priorities for multi-agent embodied autonomous driving (MAEAD): verifiable shared-state maintenance, robust intent and plan alignment, and safe coordinated action under communication and computing constraints in real-world deployment. We maintain an open-source project to continuously track the latest developments at https://github.com/dl-m9/Multi-Agent-Embodied-Autonomous-Driving.

cs.RO

CA3D: Computing Accessibility-Aware Cooperative 3D Deployment of Multiple UAVs

This letter investigates computing-accessibility-aware cooperative 3D deployment of multiple UAVs for task completion enhancement, termed CA3D. We first provide a theoretical analysis showing that computing accessibility is the key mechanism linking UAV deployment to delay-constrained task completion, and that UAV inter-spacing creates a fundamental tradeoff between computing-resource accessibility and task completion. We then develop a cooperative 3D deployment design that jointly balances accessible computing capacity, task completion probability, and redundant UAV overlap. Simulation results under heterogeneous computing node capacities show that CA3D consistently outperforms Random, Fixed, and Greedy deployment baselines under both hotspot and random ground user (GU) distributions. Under the hotspot GU distribution, CA3D achieves nearly full task completion, improving the task completion probability by about 3.3x over Random deployment when the number of UAVs is 8. Under a more challenging random GU distribution, CA3D still achieves about 35% higher task completion probability than the best baseline when the number of UAVs is 12. These results demonstrate that computing-accessibility-aware cooperative 3D deployment improves not only task completion but also robustness to GU distribution changes.

cs.NI

Collaborative Air-Ground Sensing, Communication, Computing, Storage, and Intelligence for Low-Altitude Economy

Low-altitude economy (LAE) is transforming low-altitude airspace into a new cyber-physical infrastructure. Although air-ground communications have been widely studied, LAE is fundamentally different in the sense that it is mission-centric with diverse requirements, such as stringent safety and compliance constraints not be effectively addressed with a communication-centric design alone, which makes air-ground collaboration indispensable: Only through effectively coordinating air-ground infrastructure and resources can LAE missions be fulfilled. Consequently, LAE calls for task-driven, closed-loop, multi-resource orchestration of Sensing, Communication, Computing, Storage, and Intelligence (SCCSI), where key decisions must be co-designed under mobility and uncertainty. In this paper, we first present a novel framework that connects (i) LAE scenarios and a requirement--resource coupling matrix, (ii) an air--ground collaborative architecture, and (iii) methodological toolboxes for SCCSI co-optimization and online decision-making. We then systematically review enabling technologies for collaborative SCCSI resources and capabilities, emphasizing their coupling and end-to-end tradeoffs. Finally, we summarize testbeds, datasets, and evaluation metrics, and provide representative use cases to illustrate how the proposed framework translates application requirements into practical task-driven optimization designs, together with open challenges and a roadmap toward scalable and trustworthy LAE deployment.

cs.NI

TriDeliver: Cooperative Air-Ground Instant Delivery with UAVs, Couriers, and Crowdsourced Ground Vehicles

Instant delivery, shipping items before critical deadlines, is essential in daily life. While multiple delivery agents, such as couriers, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and crowdsourced agents, have been widely employed, each of them faces inherent limitations (e.g., low efficiency/labor shortages, flight control, and dynamic capabilities, respectively), preventing them from meeting the surging demands alone. This paper proposes TriDeliver, the first hierarchical cooperative framework, integrating human couriers, UAVs, and crowdsourced ground vehicles (GVs) for efficient instant delivery. To obtain the initial scheduling knowledge for GVs and UAVs as well as improve the cooperative delivery performance, we design a Transfer Learning (TL)-based algorithm to extract delivery knowledge from couriers' behavioral history and transfer their knowledge to UAVs and GVs with fine-tunings, which is then used to dispatch parcels for efficient delivery. Evaluated on one-month real-world trajectory and delivery datasets, it has been demonstrated that 1) by integrating couriers, UAVs, and crowdsourced GVs, TriDeliver reduces the delivery cost by $65.8\%$ versus state-of-the-art cooperative delivery by UAVs and couriers; 2) TriDeliver achieves further improvements in terms of delivery time ($-17.7\%$), delivery cost ($-9.8\%$), and impacts on original tasks of crowdsourced GVs ($-43.6\%$), even with the representation of the transferred knowledge by simple neural networks, respectively.

cs.RO

Birdcast: Interest-aware BEV Multicasting for Infrastructure-assisted Collaborative Perception

Vehicle-to-infrastructure collaborative perception (V2I-CP) leverages a high-vantage node to transmit supplementary information, i.e., bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature maps, to vehicles, effectively overcoming line-of-sight limitations. However, the downlink V2I transmission introduces a significant communication bottleneck. Moreover, vehicles in V2I-CP require \textit{heterogeneous yet overlapping} information tailored to their unique occlusions and locations, rendering standard unicast/broadcast protocols inefficient. To address this limitation, we propose \textit{Birdcast}, a novel multicasting framework for V2I-CP. By accounting for individual maps of interest, we formulate a joint feature selection and multicast grouping problem to maximize network-wide utility under communication constraints. Since this formulation is a mixed-integer nonlinear program and is NP-hard, we develop an accelerated greedy algorithm with a theoretical $(1 - 1/\sqrt{e})$ approximation guarantee. While motivated by CP, Birdcast provides a general framework applicable to a wide range of multicasting systems where users possess heterogeneous interests and varying channel conditions. Extensive simulations on the V2X-Sim dataset demonstrate that Birdcast significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both system utility and perception quality, achieving up to 27\% improvement in total utility and a 3.2\% increase in mean average precision (mAP).

cs.NI

Aggregation Alignment for Federated Learning with Mixture-of-Experts under Data Heterogeneity

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly adopt Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures to scale model capacity while reducing computation. Fine-tuning these MoE-based LLMs often requires access to distributed and privacy-sensitive data, making centralized fine-tuning impractical. Federated learning (FL) therefore provides a paradigm to collaboratively fine-tune MoE-based LLMs, enabling each client to integrate diverse knowledge without compromising data privacy. However, the integration of MoE-based LLM fine-tuning into FL encounters two critical aggregation challenges due to inherent data heterogeneity across clients: (i) divergent local data distributions drive clients to develop distinct gating preference for localized expert selection, causing direct parameter aggregation to produce a ``one-size-fits-none'' global gating network, and (ii) same-indexed experts develop disparate semantic roles across clients, leading to expert semantic blurring and the degradation of expert specialization. To address these challenges, we propose FedAlign-MoE, a federated aggregation alignment framework that jointly enforces routing consistency and expert semantic alignment. Specifically, FedAlign-MoE aggregates gating behaviors by aligning routing distributions through consistency weighting and optimizes local gating networks through distribution regularization, maintaining cross-client stability without overriding discriminative local preferences. Meanwhile, FedAlign-MoE explicitly quantifies semantic consistency among same-indexed experts across clients and selectively aggregates updates from semantically aligned clients, ensuring stable and specialized functional roles for global experts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedAlign-MoE outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks, achieving faster convergence and superior accuracy in non-IID federated environments.

cs.LG

MLFCIL: A Multi-Level Forgetting Mitigation Framework for Federated Class-Incremental Learning in LEO Satellites

Low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellations are increasingly performing on-board computing. However, the continuous emergence of new classes under strict memory and communication constraints poses major challenges for collaborative training. Federated class-incremental learning (FCIL) enables distributed incremental learning without sharing raw data, but faces three LEO-specific challenges: non-independent and identically distributed data heterogeneity caused by orbital dynamics, amplified catastrophic forgetting during aggregation, and the need to balance stability and plasticity under limited resources. To tackle these challenges, we propose MLFCIL, a multi-level forgetting mitigation framework that decomposes catastrophic forgetting into three sources and addresses them at different levels: class-reweighted loss to reduce local bias, knowledge distillation with feature replay and prototype-guided drift compensation to preserve cross-task knowledge, and class-aware aggregation to mitigate forgetting during federation. In addition, we design a dual-granularity coordination strategy that combines round-level adaptive loss balancing with step-level gradient projection to further enhance the stability-plasticity trade-off. Experiments on the NWPU-RESISC45 dataset show that MLFCIL significantly outperforms baselines in both accuracy and forgetting mitigation, while introducing minimal resource overhead.

cs.NI

Shatter Throughput Ceilings: Leveraging Reflection Surfaces to Enhance Transmissions for Vehicular Fast Data Exchange

Rapid emergence of smart mobility necessitates high-volume bursty data transmission over a single link between a target vehicle and its designated edge computing-enabled Base Station (BS) or Roadside Unit (RSU), which must be completed within a short time period when the vehicle traverses the coverage area. However, in bandwidth-limited scenarios, conventional communication systems face a fundamental throughput ceiling at each single vehicle. This limitation persists even when all time-frequency resources are allocated to a single vehicle, as the underlying channel lacks sufficient spatial diversity to support higher data rates. To break this throughput ceiling, in this paper, we propose a novel reflection-enhanced transmission framework by strategically employing dedicated specular reflecting surfaces along roadways to proactively augment the transmission environments. This setup concentrates dispersed signals from multiple directions toward a target vehicle, analogous to the light-focusing effect of a concave magnifying lens, thereby enhancing the spatial diversity and achievable rank of an individual channel. This allows a BS to allocate more transmission layers to one single user, consequently significantly raising the throughput ceiling for individual vehicles. Moreover, we also introduce dynamic virtualization methods for reflecting panel patch groups, compatible with existing communication systems, to flexibly manage interference with other coexisting users. Furthermore, collaborative rotation among multiple reflecting panels is introduced to enhance signal concentration. Finally, the schematic effectiveness is rigorously validated through 3GPP-compliant system-level simulations, demonstrating significant throughput boosts.

cs.IT

CP-uniGuard: A Unified, Probability-Agnostic, and Adaptive Framework for Malicious Agent Detection and Defense in Multi-Agent Embodied Perception Systems

Collaborative Perception (CP) has been shown to be a promising technique for multi-agent autonomous driving and multi-agent robotic systems, where multiple agents share their perception information to enhance the overall perception performance and expand the perception range. However, in CP, an ego agent needs to receive messages from its collaborators, which makes it vulnerable to attacks from malicious agents. To address this critical issue, we propose a unified, probability-agnostic, and adaptive framework, namely, CP-uniGuard, which is a tailored defense mechanism for CP deployed by each agent to accurately detect and eliminate malicious agents in its collaboration network. Our key idea is to enable CP to reach a consensus rather than a conflict against an ego agent's perception results. Based on this idea, we first develop a probability-agnostic sample consensus (PASAC) method to effectively sample a subset of the collaborators and verify the consensus without prior probabilities of malicious agents. Furthermore, we define collaborative consistency loss (CCLoss) for object detection task and bird's eye view (BEV) segmentation task to capture the discrepancy between an ego agent and its collaborators, which is used as a verification criterion for consensus. In addition, we propose online adaptive threshold via dual sliding windows to dynamically adjust the threshold for consensus verification and ensure the reliability of the systems in dynamic environments. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Code is available at https://github.com/CP-Security/CP-uniGuard.

cs.CV

UAV-enabled Computing Power Networks: Task Completion Probability Analysis

This paper presents an innovative framework that synergistically enhances computing performance through ubiquitous computing power distribution and dynamic computing node accessibility control via adaptive unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) positioning, establishing UAV-enabled Computing Power Networks (UAV-CPNs). In UAV-CPNs, UAVs function as dynamic aerial relays, outsourcing tasks generated in the request zone to an expanded service zone, consisting of a diverse range of computing devices, from vehicles with onboard computational capabilities and edge servers to dedicated computing nodes. This approach has the potential to alleviate communication bottlenecks in traditional computing power networks and overcome the "island effect" observed in multi-access edge computing. However, how to quantify the network performance under the complex spatio-temporal dynamics of both communication and computing power is a significant challenge, which introduces intricacies beyond those found in conventional networks. To address this, in this paper, we introduce task completion probability as the primary performance metric for evaluating the ability of UAV-CPNs to complete ground users' tasks within specified end-to-end latency requirements. Utilizing theories from stochastic processes and stochastic geometry, we derive analytical expressions that facilitate the assessment of this metric. Our numerical results emphasize that striking a delicate balance between communication and computational capabilities is essential for enhancing the performance of UAV-CPNs. Moreover, our findings show significant performance gains from the widespread distribution of computing nodes.

cs.NI

UAV-enabled Computing Power Networks: Design and Performance Analysis under Energy Constraints

This paper presents an innovative framework that boosts computing power by utilizing ubiquitous computing power distribution and enabling higher computing node accessibility via adaptive UAV positioning, establishing a UAV-enabled Computing Power Network (UAV-CPN). In a UAV-CPN, a UAV functions as a dynamic relay, outsourcing computing tasks from the request zone to an expanded service zone with diverse computing nodes, including vehicle onboard units, edge servers, and dedicated powerful nodes. This approach has the potential to alleviate communication bottlenecks and overcome the "island effect" observed in multi-access edge computing. A significant challenge is to quantify computing power performance under complex dynamics of communication and computing. To address this challenge, we introduce task completion probability to capture the capability of UAV-CPNs for task computing. We further enhance UAV-CPN performance under a hybrid energy architecture by jointly optimizing UAV altitude and transmit power, where fuel cells and batteries collectively power both UAV propulsion and communication systems. Extensive evaluations show significant performance gains, highlighting the importance of balancing communication and computing capabilities, especially under dual-energy constraints. These findings underscore the potential of UAV-CPNs to significantly boost computing power.

cs.NI

HFedMoE: Resource-aware Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Mixture-of-Experts

While federated learning (FL) enables fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) without compromising data privacy, the substantial size of an LLM renders on-device training impractical for resource-constrained clients, such as mobile devices. Thus, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have emerged as a computation-efficient solution, which activates only a sparse subset of experts during model training to reduce computing burden without sacrificing performance. Though integrating MoE into FL fine-tuning holds significant potential, it still encounters three key challenges: i) selecting appropriate experts for clients remains challenging due to the lack of a reliable metric to measure each expert's impact on local fine-tuning performance, ii) the heterogeneous computing resources across clients severely hinder MoE-based LLM fine-tuning, as dynamic expert activations across diverse input samples can overwhelm resource-constrained devices, and iii) client-specific expert subsets and routing preference undermine global aggregation, where misaligned expert updates and inconsistent gating networks in troduce destructive interference. To address these challenges, we propose HFedMoE, a heterogeneous MoE-based FL fine-tuning framework that customizes a subset of experts to each client for computation-efficient LLM fine-tuning. Specifically, HFedMoE identifies the expert importance based on its contributions to fine-tuning performance, and then adaptively selects a subset of experts from an information bottleneck perspective to align with each client' s computing budget. A sparsity-aware model aggregation strategy is also designed to aggregate the actively fine-tuned experts and gating parameters with importance weighted contributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HFedMoE outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in training accuracy and convergence speed.

cs.LG

Minimizing Maximum Latency of Task Offloading for Multi-UAV-assisted Maritime Search and Rescue

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play a crucial role in Maritime Search and Rescue (MSAR), contributing to the improvement of rescue efficiency and reduction of casualties. Typically, UAVs equipped with cameras collect data from disaster areas and transmit it to the shore-based rescue command centers. By deploying Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) servers, UAVs can pre-process video footage to reduce data transmission volume, thus reducing transmission delays. However, the limited computational capacity and energy of UAVs pose significant challenges to the efficiency of UAV-assisted MSAR systems. To address these problems, in this paper, we investigate a multi-UAV assisted MSAR system consisting of multiple Surveillance UAVs (S-UAVs) and a Relay UAV (R-UAV). Then, we formulate a joint optimization problem to minimize the maximum total latency among all S-UAVs via jointly making the computing offloading decisions, R-UAV deployment, and the association between a S-UAV and rescue targets while ensuring that all targets are monitored by S-UAVs. Since the formulated optimization problem is typically hard to solve due to its non-convexity, we propose an effective iterative algorithm by breaking it into three sub-problems. Numerical simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm with various performance parameters.

eess.SY

Joint Computation Offloading and Resource Management for Cooperative Satellite-Aerial-Marine Internet of Things Networks

Devices within the marine Internet of Things (MIoT) can connect to low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to facilitate low-latency data transmission and execution, as well as enhanced-capacity data storage. However, without proper traffic handling strategy, it is still difficult to effectively meet the low-latency requirements. In this paper, we consider a cooperative satellite-aerial-MIoT network (CSAMN) for maritime edge computing and maritime data storage to prioritize delay-sensitive (DS) tasks by employing mobile edge computing, while handling delay-tolerant (DT) tasks via the store-carry-forward method. Considering the delay constraints of DS tasks, we formulate a constrained joint optimization problem of maximizing satellite-collected data volume while minimizing system energy consumption by controlling four interdependent variables, including the transmit power of UAVs for DS tasks, the start time of DT tasks, computing resource allocation, and offloading ratio. To solve this non-convex and non-linear problem, we propose a joint computation offloading and resource management (JCORM) algorithm using the Dinkelbach method and linear programming. Our results show that the volume of data collected by the proposed JCORM algorithm can be increased by up to 41.5% compared to baselines. Moreover, JCORM algorithm achieves a dramatic reduction in computational time, from a maximum of 318.21 seconds down to just 0.16 seconds per experiment, making it highly suitable for real-time maritime applications.

eess.SY

Sense4FL: Vehicular Crowdsensing Enhanced Federated Learning for Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

To accommodate constantly changing road conditions, real-time vision model training is essential for autonomous driving (AD). Federated learning (FL) serves as a promising paradigm to enable autonomous vehicles to train models collaboratively with their onboard computing resources. However, existing vehicle selection schemes for FL all assume predetermined and location-independent vehicles' datasets, neglecting the fact that vehicles collect training data along their routes, thereby resulting in suboptimal vehicle selection. In this paper, we focus on the fundamental perception problem and propose Sense4FL, a vehicular crowdsensing-enhanced FL framework featuring \textit{trajectory-dependent} vehicular \textit{training data collection} to \rev{improve the object detection quality} in AD for a region. To this end, we first derive the convergence bound of FL by considering the impact of both vehicles' uncertain trajectories and uploading probabilities, from which we discover that minimizing the training loss is equivalent to minimizing a weighted sum of local and global earth mover's distance (EMD) between vehicles' collected data distribution and global data distribution. Based on this observation, we formulate the trajectory-dependent vehicle selection and data collection problem for FL in AD. Given that the problem is NP-hard, we develop an efficient algorithm to find the solution with an approximation guarantee. Extensive simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in improving object detection performance compared with existing benchmarks.

cs.RO

Dynamic Uncertainty-aware Multimodal Fusion for Outdoor Health Monitoring

Outdoor health monitoring is essential to detect early abnormal health status for safeguarding human health and safety. Conventional outdoor monitoring relies on static multimodal deep learning frameworks, which requires extensive data training from scratch and fails to capture subtle health status changes. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) emerge as a promising alternative, utilizing only small datasets to fine-tune pre-trained information-rich models for enabling powerful health status monitoring. Unfortunately, MLLM-based outdoor health monitoring also faces significant challenges: I) sensor data contains input noise stemming from sensor data acquisition and fluctuation noise caused by sudden changes in physiological signals due to dynamic outdoor environments, thus degrading the training performance; ii) current transformer based MLLMs struggle to achieve robust multimodal fusion, as they lack a design for fusing the noisy modality; iii) modalities with varying noise levels hinder accurate recovery of missing data from fluctuating distributions. To combat these challenges, we propose an uncertainty-aware multimodal fusion framework, named DUAL-Health, for outdoor health monitoring in dynamic and noisy environments. First, to assess the impact of noise, we accurately quantify modality uncertainty caused by input and fluctuation noise with current and temporal features. Second, to empower efficient muitimodal fusion with low-quality modalities,we customize the fusion weight for each modality based on quantified and calibrated uncertainty. Third, to enhance data recovery from fluctuating noisy modalities, we align modality distributions within a common semantic space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DUAL-Health outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in detection accuracy and robustness.

cs.NI

CP-Guard: Malicious Agent Detection and Defense in Collaborative Bird's Eye View Perception

Collaborative Perception (CP) has shown a promising technique for autonomous driving, where multiple connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) share their perception information to enhance the overall perception performance and expand the perception range. However, in CP, ego CAV needs to receive messages from its collaborators, which makes it easy to be attacked by malicious agents. For example, a malicious agent can send harmful information to the ego CAV to mislead it. To address this critical issue, we propose a novel method, CP-Guard, a tailored defense mechanism for CP that can be deployed by each agent to accurately detect and eliminate malicious agents in its collaboration network. Our key idea is to enable CP to reach a consensus rather than a conflict against the ego CAV's perception results. Based on this idea, we first develop a probability-agnostic sample consensus (PASAC) method to effectively sample a subset of the collaborators and verify the consensus without prior probabilities of malicious agents. Furthermore, we define a collaborative consistency loss (CCLoss) to capture the discrepancy between the ego CAV and its collaborators, which is used as a verification criterion for consensus. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments in collaborative bird's eye view (BEV) tasks and our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our CP-Guard. Code is available at https://github.com/CP-Security/CP-Guard

cs.AI