Conformal Distributed Remote Inference in Sensor Networks Under Reliability and Communication Constraints

This paper presents communication-constrained distributed conformal risk control (CD-CRC) framework, a novel decision-making framework for sensor networks under communication constraints. Targeting multi-label classification problems, such as segmentation, CD-CRC dynamically adjusts local and global thresholds used to identify significant labels with the goal of ensuring a target false negative rate (FNR), while adhering to communication capacity limits. CD-CRC builds on online exponentiated gradient descent to estimate the relative quality of the observations of different sensors, and on online conformal risk control (CRC) as a mechanism to control local and global thresholds. CD-CRC is proved to offer deterministic worst-case performance guarantees in terms of FNR and communication overhead, while the regret performance in terms of false positive rate (FPR) is characterized as a function of the key hyperparameters. Simulation results highlight the effectiveness of CD-CRC, particularly in communication resource-constrained environments, making it a valuable tool for enhancing the performance and reliability of distributed sensor networks.

Attribute-Aware Implicit Modality Alignment for Text Attribute Person Search

Text attribute person search aims to find specific pedestrians through given textual attributes, which is very meaningful in the scene of searching for designated pedestrians through witness descriptions. The key challenge is the significant modality gap between textual attributes and images. Previous methods focused on achieving explicit representation and alignment through unimodal pre-trained models. Nevertheless, the absence of inter-modality correspondence in these models may lead to distortions in the local information of intra-modality. Moreover, these methods only considered the alignment of inter-modality and ignored the differences between different attribute categories. To mitigate the above problems, we propose an Attribute-Aware Implicit Modality Alignment (AIMA) framework to learn the correspondence of local representations between textual attributes and images and combine global representation matching to narrow the modality gap. Firstly, we introduce the CLIP model as the backbone and design prompt templates to transform attribute combinations into structured sentences. This facilitates the model's ability to better understand and match image details. Next, we design a Masked Attribute Prediction (MAP) module that predicts the masked attributes after the interaction of image and masked textual attribute features through multi-modal interaction, thereby achieving implicit local relationship alignment. Finally, we propose an Attribute-IoU Guided Intra-Modal Contrastive (A-IoU IMC) loss, aligning the distribution of different textual attributes in the embedding space with their IoU distribution, achieving better semantic arrangement. Extensive experiments on the Market-1501 Attribute, PETA, and PA100K datasets show that the performance of our proposed method significantly surpasses the current state-of-the-art methods.

Data Augmentation for Text-based Person Retrieval Using Large Language Models

Text-based Person Retrieval (TPR) aims to retrieve person images that match the description given a text query. The performance improvement of the TPR model relies on high-quality data for supervised training. However, it is difficult to construct a large-scale, high-quality TPR dataset due to expensive annotation and privacy protection. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have approached or even surpassed human performance on many NLP tasks, creating the possibility to expand high-quality TPR datasets. This paper proposes an LLM-based Data Augmentation (LLM-DA) method for TPR. LLM-DA uses LLMs to rewrite the text in the current TPR dataset, achieving high-quality expansion of the dataset concisely and efficiently. These rewritten texts are able to increase the diversity of vocabulary and sentence structure while retaining the original key concepts and semantic information. In order to alleviate the hallucinations of LLMs, LLM-DA introduces a Text Faithfulness Filter (TFF) to filter out unfaithful rewritten text. To balance the contributions of original text and augmented text, a Balanced Sampling Strategy (BSS) is proposed to control the proportion of original text and augmented text used for training. LLM-DA is a plug-and-play method that can be easily integrated into various TPR models. Comprehensive experiments on three TPR benchmarks show that LLM-DA can improve the retrieval performance of current TPR models.

Uncertainty, Calibration, and Membership Inference Attacks: An Information-Theoretic Perspective

In a membership inference attack (MIA), an attacker exploits the overconfidence exhibited by typical machine learning models to determine whether a specific data point was used to train a target model. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the state-of-the-art likelihood ratio attack (LiRA) within an information-theoretical framework that allows the investigation of the impact of the aleatoric uncertainty in the true data generation process, of the epistemic uncertainty caused by a limited training data set, and of the calibration level of the target model. We compare three different settings, in which the attacker receives decreasingly informative feedback from the target model: confidence vector (CV) disclosure, in which the output probability vector is released; true label confidence (TLC) disclosure, in which only the probability assigned to the true label is made available by the model; and decision set (DS) disclosure, in which an adaptive prediction set is produced as in conformal prediction. We derive bounds on the advantage of an MIA adversary with the aim of offering insights into the impact of uncertainty and calibration on the effectiveness of MIAs. Simulation results demonstrate that the derived analytical bounds predict well the effectiveness of MIAs.

A Survey on Indoor Visible Light Positioning Systems: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challenges

The growing demand for location-based services in areas like virtual reality, robot control, and navigation has intensified the focus on indoor localization. Visible light positioning (VLP), leveraging visible light communications (VLC), becomes a promising indoor positioning technology due to its high accuracy and low cost. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of VLP systems. In particular, since VLC lays the foundation for VLP, we first present a detailed overview of the principles of VLC. The performance of each positioning algorithm is also compared in terms of various metrics such as accuracy, coverage, and orientation limitation. Beyond the physical layer studies, the network design for a VLP system is also investigated, including multi-access technologies resource allocation, and light-emitting diode (LED) placements. Next, the applications of the VLP systems are overviewed. Finally, this paper outlines open issues, challenges, and future research directions for the research field. In a nutshell, this paper constitutes the first holistic survey on VLP from state-of-the-art studies to practical uses.

OFDM-Based Digital Semantic Communication with Importance Awareness

Semantic communication (SemCom) has received considerable attention for its ability to reduce data transmission size while maintaining task performance. However, existing works mainly focus on analog SemCom with simple channel models, which may limit its practical application. To reduce this gap, we propose an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based SemCom system that is compatible with existing digital communication infrastructures. In the considered system, the extracted semantics is quantized by scalar quantizers, transformed into OFDM signal, and then transmitted over the frequency-selective channel. Moreover, we propose a semantic importance measurement method to build the relationship between target task and semantic features. Based on semantic importance, we formulate a sub-carrier and bit allocation problem to maximize communication performance. However, the optimization objective function cannot be accurately characterized using a mathematical expression due to the neural network-based semantic codec. Given the complex nature of the problem, we first propose a low-complexity sub-carrier allocation method that assigns sub-carriers with better channel conditions to more critical semantics. Then, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-based bit allocation algorithm with dynamic action space. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves 9.7% and 28.7% performance gains compared to analog SemCom and conventional bit-based communication systems, respectively.

Boundary-Aware Proposal Generation Method for Temporal Action Localization

The goal of Temporal Action Localization (TAL) is to find the categories and temporal boundaries of actions in an untrimmed video. Most TAL methods rely heavily on action recognition models that are sensitive to action labels rather than temporal boundaries. More importantly, few works consider the background frames that are similar to action frames in pixels but dissimilar in semantics, which also leads to inaccurate temporal boundaries. To address the challenge above, we propose a Boundary-Aware Proposal Generation (BAPG) method with contrastive learning. Specifically, we define the above background frames as hard negative samples. Contrastive learning with hard negative mining is introduced to improve the discrimination of BAPG. BAPG is independent of the existing TAL network architecture, so it can be applied plug-and-play to mainstream TAL models. Extensive experimental results on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet-1.3 demonstrate that BAPG can significantly improve the performance of TAL.

Disentangled Information Bottleneck guided Privacy-Protective JSCC for Image Transmission

Joint source and channel coding (JSCC) has attracted increasing attention due to its robustness and high efficiency. However, JSCC is vulnerable to privacy leakage due to the high relevance between the source image and channel input. In this paper, we propose a disentangled information bottleneck guided privacy-protective JSCC (DIB-PPJSCC) for image transmission, which aims at protecting private information as well as achieving superior communication performance at the legitimate receiver. In particular, we propose a DIB objective to disentangle private and public information. The goal is to compress the private information in the public subcodewords, preserve the private information in the private subcodewords and improve the reconstruction quality simultaneously. In order to optimize JSCC neural networks using the DIB objective, we derive a differentiable estimation of the DIB objective based on the variational approximation and the density-ratio trick. Additionally, we design a password-based privacy-protective (PP) algorithm which can be jointly optimized with JSCC neural networks to encrypt the private subcodewords. Specifically, we employ a private information encryptor to encrypt the private subcodewords before transmission, and a corresponding decryptor to recover the private information at the legitimate receiver. A loss function for jointly training the encryptor, decryptor and JSCC decoder is derived based on the maximum entropy principle, which aims at maximizing the eavesdropping uncertainty as well as improving the reconstruction quality. Experimental results show that DIB-PPJSCC can reduce the eavesdropping accuracy on private information up to $15\%$ and reduce $10\%$ inference time compared to existing privacy-protective JSCC and traditional separate methods.

Privacy-Aware Joint Source-Channel Coding for image transmission based on Disentangled Information Bottleneck

Current privacy-aware joint source-channel coding (JSCC) works aim at avoiding private information transmission by adversarially training the JSCC encoder and decoder under specific signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of eavesdroppers. However, these approaches incur additional computational and storage requirements as multiple neural networks must be trained for various eavesdroppers' SNRs to determine the transmitted information. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel privacy-aware JSCC for image transmission based on disentangled information bottleneck (DIB-PAJSCC). In particular, we derive a novel disentangled information bottleneck objective to disentangle private and public information. Given the separate information, the transmitter can transmit only public information to the receiver while minimizing reconstruction distortion. Since DIB-PAJSCC transmits only public information regardless of the eavesdroppers' SNRs, it can eliminate additional training adapted to eavesdroppers' SNRs. Experimental results show that DIB-PAJSCC can reduce the eavesdropping accuracy on private information by up to 20\% compared to existing methods.

Federated Inference with Reliable Uncertainty Quantification over Wireless Channels via Conformal Prediction

Consider a setting in which devices and a server share a pre-trained model. The server wishes to make an inference on a new input given the model. Devices have access to data, previously not used for training, and can communicate to the server over a common wireless channel. If the devices have no access to the new input, can communication from devices to the server enhance the quality of the inference decision at the server? Recent work has introduced federated conformal prediction (CP), which leverages devices-to-server communication to improve the reliability of the server's decision. With federated CP, devices communicate to the server information about the loss accrued by the shared pre-trained model on the local data, and the server leverages this information to calibrate a decision interval, or set, so that it is guaranteed to contain the correct answer with a pre-defined target reliability level. Previous work assumed noise-free communication, whereby devices can communicate a single real number to the server. In this paper, we study for the first time federated CP in a wireless setting. We introduce a novel protocol, termed wireless federated conformal prediction (WFCP), which builds on type-based multiple access (TBMA) and on a novel quantile correction strategy. WFCP is proved to provide formal reliability guarantees in terms of coverage of the predicted set produced by the server. Using numerical results, we demonstrate the significant advantages of WFCP against digital implementations of existing federated CP schemes, especially in regimes with limited communication resources and/or large number of devices.