Joint Source-Channel Optimization for UAV Video Coding and Transmission

This paper is concerned with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) video coding and transmission in scenarios such as emergency rescue and environmental monitoring. Unlike existing methods of modeling video source coding and channel transmission separately, we investigate the joint source-channel optimization issue for video coding and transmission. Particularly, we design eight-dimensional delay-power-rate-distortion models in terms of source coding and channel transmission and characterize the correlation between video coding and transmission, with which a joint source-channel optimization problem is formulated. Its objective is to minimize end-to-end distortion and UAV power consumption by optimizing fine-grained parameters related to UAV video coding and transmission. This problem is confirmed to be a challenging sequential-decision and non-convex optimization problem. We therefore decompose it into a family of repeated optimization problems by Lyapunov optimization and design an approximate convex optimization scheme with provable performance guarantees to tackle these problems. Based on the theoretical transformation, we propose a Lyapunov repeated iteration (LyaRI) algorithm. Extensive experiments are conducted to comprehensively evaluate the performance of LyaRI. Experimental results indicate that compared to its counterparts, LyaRI is robust to initial settings of encoding parameters, and the variance of its achieved encoding bitrate is reduced by 47.74%.

Heavy-Ball Momentum Accelerated Actor-Critic With Function Approximation

By using an parametric value function to replace the Monte-Carlo rollouts for value estimation, the actor-critic (AC) algorithms can reduce the variance of stochastic policy gradient so that to improve the convergence rate. While existing works mainly focus on analyzing convergence rate of AC algorithms under Markovian noise, the impacts of momentum on AC algorithms remain largely unexplored. In this work, we first propose a heavy-ball momentum based advantage actor-critic (\mbox{HB-A2C}) algorithm by integrating the heavy-ball momentum into the critic recursion that is parameterized by a linear function. When the sample trajectory follows a Markov decision process, we quantitatively certify the acceleration capability of the proposed HB-A2C algorithm. Our theoretical results demonstrate that the proposed HB-A2C finds an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point with $\oo{\epsilon^{-2}}$ iterations for reinforcement learning tasks with Markovian noise. Moreover, we also reveal the dependence of learning rates on the length of the sample trajectory. By carefully selecting the momentum factor of the critic recursion, the proposed HB-A2C can balance the errors introduced by the initialization and the stoschastic approximation.

Pilot-Aided Joint Time Synchronization and Channel Estimation for OTFS

In this letter, we propose a joint time synchronization and channel estimation (JTSCE) algorithm with embedded pilot for orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) systems. It completes both synchronization and channel estimation using the same pilot signal. Unlike existing synchronization and channel estimation algorithms based on embedded pilots, JTSCE employs a maximum length sequence (MLS) rather than an isolated signal as the pilot. Specifically, JTSCE first explores the autocorrelation properties of MLS to estimate timing offset (TO) and channel delay taps. After obtaining these types of delay taps, the closed-form estimation expressions of the Doppler and channel gain of each propagation path are derived. Extensive simulation results indicate that compared to its counterparts, JTSCE achieves better bit error rate (BER) performance, close to that with perfect time synchronization and channel state information.

Joint Radar Sensing, Location, and Communication Resources Optimization in 6G Network

The possibility of jointly optimizing location sensing and communication resources, facilitated by the existence of communication and sensing spectrum sharing, is what promotes the system performance to a higher level. However, the rapid mobility of user equipment (UE) can result in inaccurate location estimation, which can severely degrade system performance. Therefore, the precise UE location sensing and resource allocation issues are investigated in a spectrum sharing sixth generation network. An approach is proposed for joint subcarrier and power optimization based on UE location sensing, aiming to minimize system energy consumption. The joint allocation process is separated into two key phases of operation. In the radar location sensing phase, the multipath interference and Doppler effects are considered simultaneously, and the issues of UE's location and channel state estimation are transformed into a convex optimization problem, which is then solved through gradient descent. In the communication phase, a subcarrier allocation method based on subcarrier weights is proposed. To further minimize system energy consumption, a joint subcarrier and power allocation method is introduced, resolved via the Lagrange multiplier method for the non-convex resource allocation problem. Simulation analysis results indicate that the location sensing algorithm exhibits a prominent improvement in accuracy compared to benchmark algorithms. Simultaneously, the proposed resource allocation scheme also demonstrates a substantial enhancement in performance relative to baseline schemes.

Beyond the Edge: An Advanced Exploration of Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Edge Computing, its Applications, and Future Research Trajectories

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) broadens the scope of computation and storage beyond the central network, incorporating edge nodes close to end devices. This expansion facilitates the implementation of large-scale "connected things" within edge networks. The advent of applications necessitating real-time, high-quality service presents several challenges, such as low latency, high data rate, reliability, efficiency, and security, all of which demand resolution. The incorporation of reinforcement learning (RL) methodologies within MEC networks promotes a deeper understanding of mobile user behaviors and network dynamics, thereby optimizing resource use in computing and communication processes. This paper offers an exhaustive survey of RL applications in MEC networks, initially presenting an overview of RL from its fundamental principles to the latest advanced frameworks. Furthermore, it outlines various RL strategies employed in offloading, caching, and communication within MEC networks. Finally, it explores open issues linked with software and hardware platforms, representation, RL robustness, safe RL, large-scale scheduling, generalization, security, and privacy. The paper proposes specific RL techniques to mitigate these issues and provides insights into their practical applications.

Spin: An Efficient Secure Computation Framework with GPU Acceleration

Accuracy and efficiency remain challenges for multi-party computation (MPC) frameworks. Spin is a GPU-accelerated MPC framework that supports multiple computation parties and a dishonest majority adversarial setup. We propose optimized protocols for non-linear functions that are critical for machine learning, as well as several novel optimizations specific to attention that is the fundamental unit of Transformer models, allowing Spin to perform non-trivial CNNs training and Transformer inference without sacrificing security. At the backend level, Spin leverages GPU, CPU, and RDMA-enabled smart network cards for acceleration. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that Spin can be up to $2\times$ faster than the state-of-the-art for deep neural network training. For inference on a Transformer model with 18.9 million parameters, our attention-specific optimizations enable Spin to achieve better efficiency, less communication, and better accuracy.

Cut-and-Paste: Subject-Driven Video Editing with Attention Control

This paper presents a novel framework termed Cut-and-Paste for real-word semantic video editing under the guidance of text prompt and additional reference image. While the text-driven video editing has demonstrated remarkable ability to generate highly diverse videos following given text prompts, the fine-grained semantic edits are hard to control by plain textual prompt only in terms of object details and edited region, and cumbersome long text descriptions are usually needed for the task. We therefore investigate subject-driven video editing for more precise control of both edited regions and background preservation, and fine-grained semantic generation. We achieve this goal by introducing an reference image as supplementary input to the text-driven video editing, which avoids racking your brain to come up with a cumbersome text prompt describing the detailed appearance of the object. To limit the editing area, we refer to a method of cross attention control in image editing and successfully extend it to video editing by fusing the attention map of adjacent frames, which strikes a balance between maintaining video background and spatio-temporal consistency. Compared with current methods, the whole process of our method is like ``cut" the source object to be edited and then ``paste" the target object provided by reference image. We demonstrate that our method performs favorably over prior arts for video editing under the guidance of text prompt and extra reference image, as measured by both quantitative and subjective evaluations.

IDVT: Interest-aware Denoising and View-guided Tuning for Social Recommendation

In the information age, recommendation systems are vital for efficiently filtering information and identifying user preferences. Online social platforms have enriched these systems by providing valuable auxiliary information. Socially connected users are assumed to share similar preferences, enhancing recommendation accuracy and addressing cold start issues. However, empirical findings challenge the assumption, revealing that certain social connections can actually harm system performance. Our statistical analysis indicates a significant amount of noise in the social network, where many socially connected users do not share common interests. To address this issue, we propose an innovative \underline{I}nterest-aware \underline{D}enoising and \underline{V}iew-guided \underline{T}uning (IDVT) method for the social recommendation. The first ID part effectively denoises social connections. Specifically, the denoising process considers both social network structure and user interaction interests in a global view. Moreover, in this global view, we also integrate denoised social information (social domain) into the propagation of the user-item interactions (collaborative domain) and aggregate user representations from two domains using a gating mechanism. To tackle potential user interest loss and enhance model robustness within the global view, our second VT part introduces two additional views (local view and dropout-enhanced view) for fine-tuning user representations in the global view through contrastive learning. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets with varying noise ratios demonstrate the superiority of IDVT over state-of-the-art social recommendation methods.

DRGame: Diversified Recommendation for Multi-category Video Games with Balanced Implicit Preferences

The growing popularity of subscription services in video game consumption has emphasized the importance of offering diversified recommendations. Providing users with a diverse range of games is essential for ensuring continued engagement and fostering long-term subscriptions. However, existing recommendation models face challenges in effectively handling highly imbalanced implicit feedback in gaming interactions. Additionally, they struggle to take into account the distinctive characteristics of multiple categories and the latent user interests associated with these categories. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel framework, named DRGame, to obtain diversified recommendation. It is centered on multi-category video games, consisting of two {components}: Balance-driven Implicit Preferences Learning for data pre-processing and Clustering-based Diversified Recommendation {Module} for final prediction. The first module aims to achieve a balanced representation of implicit feedback in game time, thereby discovering a comprehensive view of player interests across different categories. The second module adopts category-aware representation learning to cluster and select players and games based on balanced implicit preferences, and then employs asymmetric neighbor aggregation to achieve diversified recommendations. Experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over existing approaches in terms of game diversity recommendations.

Accelerating Wireless Federated Learning via Nesterov's Momentum and Distributed Principle Component Analysis

A wireless federated learning system is investigated by allowing a server and workers to exchange uncoded information via orthogonal wireless channels. Since the workers frequently upload local gradients to the server via bandwidth-limited channels, the uplink transmission from the workers to the server becomes a communication bottleneck. Therefore, a one-shot distributed principle component analysis (PCA) is leveraged to reduce the dimension of uploaded gradients such that the communication bottleneck is relieved. A PCA-based wireless federated learning (PCA-WFL) algorithm and its accelerated version (i.e., PCA-AWFL) are proposed based on the low-dimensional gradients and the Nesterov's momentum. For the non-convex loss functions, a finite-time analysis is performed to quantify the impacts of system hyper-parameters on the convergence of the PCA-WFL and PCA-AWFL algorithms. The PCA-AWFL algorithm is theoretically certified to converge faster than the PCA-WFL algorithm. Besides, the convergence rates of PCA-WFL and PCA-AWFL algorithms quantitatively reveal the linear speedup with respect to the number of workers over the vanilla gradient descent algorithm. Numerical results are used to demonstrate the improved convergence rates of the proposed PCA-WFL and PCA-AWFL algorithms over the benchmarks.