DRL-Based Optimization for AoI and Energy Consumption in C-V2X Enabled IoV

To address communication latency issues, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has defined Cellular-Vehicle to Everything (C-V2X) technology, which includes Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication for direct vehicle-to-vehicle communication. However, this method requires vehicles to autonomously select communication resources based on the Semi-Persistent Scheduling (SPS) protocol, which may lead to collisions due to different vehicles sharing the same communication resources, thereby affecting communication effectiveness. Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) is considered a potential solution for handling large-scale vehicle communication, as it can enhance the Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) by employing Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC), thereby reducing the negative impact of communication collisions. When evaluating vehicle communication performance, traditional metrics such as reliability and transmission delay present certain contradictions. Introducing the new metric Age of Information (AoI) provides a more comprehensive evaluation of communication system. Additionally, to ensure service quality, user terminals need to possess high computational capabilities, which may lead to increased energy consumption, necessitating a trade-off between communication energy consumption and effectiveness. Given the complexity and dynamics of communication systems, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) serves as an intelligent learning method capable of learning optimal strategies in dynamic environments. Therefore, this paper analyzes the effects of multi-priority queues and NOMA on AoI in the C-V2X vehicular communication system and proposes an energy consumption and AoI optimization method based on DRL. Finally, through comparative simulations with baseline methods, the proposed approach demonstrates its advances in terms of energy consumption and AoI.

V2X-Assisted Distributed Computing and Control Framework for Connected and Automated Vehicles under Ramp Merging Scenario

This paper investigates distributed computing and cooperative control of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) in ramp merging scenario under transportation cyber-physical system. Firstly, a centralized cooperative trajectory planning problem is formulated subject to the safely constraints and traffic performance in ramp merging scenario, where the trajectories of all vehicles are jointly optimized. To get rid of the reliance on a central controller and reduce computation time, a distributed solution to this problem implemented among CAVs through Vehicles-to-Everything (V2X) communication is proposed. Unlike existing method, our method can distribute the computational task among CAVs and carry out parallel solving through V2X communication. Then, a multi-vehicles model predictive control (MPC) problem aimed at maximizing system stability and minimizing control input is formulated based on the solution of the first problem subject to strict safety constants and input limits. Due to these complex constraints, this problem becomes high-dimensional, centralized, and non-convex. To solve it in a short time, a decomposition and convex reformulation method, namely distributed cooperative iterative model predictive control (DCIMPC), is proposed. This method leverages the communication capability of CAVs to decompose the problem, making full use of the computational resources on vehicles to achieve fast solutions and distributed control. The two above problems with their corresponding solving methods form the systemic framework of the V2X assisted distributed computing and control. Simulations have been conducted to evaluate the framework's convergence, safety, and solving speed. Additionally, extra experiments are conducted to validate the performance of DCIMPC. The results show that our method can greatly improve computation speed without sacrificing system performance.

Overcoming False Illusions in Real-World Face Restoration with Multi-Modal Guided Diffusion Model

We introduce a novel Multi-modal Guided Real-World Face Restoration (MGFR) technique designed to improve the quality of facial image restoration from low-quality inputs. Leveraging a blend of attribute text prompts, high-quality reference images, and identity information, MGFR can mitigate the generation of false facial attributes and identities often associated with generative face restoration methods. By incorporating a dual-control adapter and a two-stage training strategy, our method effectively utilizes multi-modal prior information for targeted restoration tasks. We also present the Reface-HQ dataset, comprising over 23,000 high-resolution facial images across 5,000 identities, to address the need for reference face training images. Our approach achieves superior visual quality in restoring facial details under severe degradation and allows for controlled restoration processes, enhancing the accuracy of identity preservation and attribute correction. Including negative quality samples and attribute prompts in the training further refines the model's ability to generate detailed and perceptually accurate images.

Symmetry Breaking in Neural Network Optimization: Insights from Input Dimension Expansion

Understanding the mechanisms behind neural network optimization is crucial for improving network design and performance. While various optimization techniques have been developed, a comprehensive understanding of the underlying principles that govern these techniques remains elusive. Specifically, the role of symmetry breaking, a fundamental concept in physics, has not been fully explored in neural network optimization. This gap in knowledge limits our ability to design networks that are both efficient and effective. Here, we propose the symmetry breaking hypothesis to elucidate the significance of symmetry breaking in enhancing neural network optimization. We demonstrate that a simple input expansion can significantly improve network performance across various tasks, and we show that this improvement can be attributed to the underlying symmetry breaking mechanism. We further develop a metric to quantify the degree of symmetry breaking in neural networks, providing a practical approach to evaluate and guide network design. Our findings confirm that symmetry breaking is a fundamental principle that underpins various optimization techniques, including dropout, batch normalization, and equivariance. By quantifying the degree of symmetry breaking, our work offers a practical technique for performance enhancement and a metric to guide network design without the need for complete datasets and extensive training processes.

DRL-Based Federated Self-Supervised Learning for Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in ISAC-Enabled Vehicle Edge Computing

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) leverage Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) to enhance data exchange between vehicles and infrastructure in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). This integration inevitably increases computing demands, risking real-time system stability. Vehicle Edge Computing (VEC) addresses this by offloading tasks to Road Side Unit (RSU), ensuring timely services. Our previous work FLSimCo algorithm, which uses local resources for Federated Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), though vehicles often can't complete all iterations task. Our improved algorithm offloads partial task to RSU and optimizes energy consumption by adjusting transmission power, CPU frequency, and task assignment ratios, balancing local and RSU-based training. Meanwhile, setting an offloading threshold further prevents inefficiencies. Simulation results show that the enhanced algorithm reduces energy consumption, improves offloading efficiency and the accuracy of Federated SSL.

DRL-Based Resource Allocation for Motion Blur Resistant Federated Self-Supervised Learning in IoV

In the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), Federated Learning (FL) provides a privacy-preserving solution by aggregating local models without sharing data. Traditional supervised learning requires image data with labels, but data labeling involves significant manual effort. Federated Self-Supervised Learning (FSSL) utilizes Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) for local training in FL, eliminating the need for labels while protecting privacy. Compared to other SSL methods, Momentum Contrast (MoCo) reduces the demand for computing resources and storage space by creating a dictionary. However, using MoCo in FSSL requires uploading the local dictionary from vehicles to Base Station (BS), which poses a risk of privacy leakage. Simplified Contrast (SimCo) addresses the privacy leakage issue in MoCo-based FSSL by using dual temperature instead of a dictionary to control sample distribution. Additionally, considering the negative impact of motion blur on model aggregation, and based on SimCo, we propose a motion blur-resistant FSSL method, referred to as BFSSL. Furthermore, we address energy consumption and delay in the BFSSL process by proposing a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based resource allocation scheme, called DRL-BFSSL. In this scheme, BS allocates the Central Processing Unit (CPU) frequency and transmission power of vehicles to minimize energy consumption and latency, while aggregating received models based on the motion blur level. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of our proposed aggregation and resource allocation methods.

RadioDiff: An Effective Generative Diffusion Model for Sampling-Free Dynamic Radio Map Construction

Radio map (RM) is a promising technology that can obtain pathloss based on only location, which is significant for 6G network applications to reduce the communication costs for pathloss estimation. However, the construction of RM in traditional is either computationally intensive or depends on costly sampling-based pathloss measurements. Although the neural network (NN)-based method can efficiently construct the RM without sampling, its performance is still suboptimal. This is primarily due to the misalignment between the generative characteristics of the RM construction problem and the discrimination modeling exploited by existing NN-based methods. Thus, to enhance RM construction performance, in this paper, the sampling-free RM construction is modeled as a conditional generative problem, where a denoised diffusion-based method, named RadioDiff, is proposed to achieve high-quality RM construction. In addition, to enhance the diffusion model's capability of extracting features from dynamic environments, an attention U-Net with an adaptive fast Fourier transform module is employed as the backbone network to improve the dynamic environmental features extracting capability. Meanwhile, the decoupled diffusion model is utilized to further enhance the construction performance of RMs. Moreover, a comprehensive theoretical analysis of why the RM construction is a generative problem is provided for the first time, from both perspectives of data features and NN training methods. Experimental results show that the proposed RadioDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance in all three metrics of accuracy, structural similarity, and peak signal-to-noise ratio. The code is available at https://github.com/UNIC-Lab/RadioDiff.

Cramer-Rao Bound Minimization for Movable Antenna-Assisted Multiuser Integrated Sensing and Communications

This paper investigates a movable antenna (MA)-assisted multiuser integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where the base station (BS) and communication users are all equipped with MA for improving both the sensing and communication performance. We employ the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) as the performance metric of sensing, thus a joint beamforming design and MAs' position optimizing problem is formulated to minimize the CRB. However the resulting optimization problem is NP-hard and the variables are highly coupled. To tackle this problem, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) framework by adopting semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and successive convex approximation (SCA) technique. Numerical results reveal that the proposed MA-assisted ISAC system achieves lower estimation CRB compared to the fixed-position antenna (FPA) counterpart.

Resource Allocation for Twin Maintenance and Computing Task Processing in Digital Twin Vehicular Edge Computing Network

As a promising technology, vehicular edge computing (VEC) can provide computing and caching services by deploying VEC servers near vehicles. However, VEC networks still face challenges such as high vehicle mobility. Digital twin (DT), an emerging technology, can predict, estimate, and analyze real-time states by digitally modeling objects in the physical world. By integrating DT with VEC, a virtual vehicle DT can be created in the VEC server to monitor the real-time operating status of vehicles. However, maintaining the vehicle DT model requires ongoing attention from the VEC server, which also needs to offer computing services for the vehicles. Therefore, effective allocation and scheduling of VEC server resources are crucial. This study focuses on a general VEC network with a single VEC service and multiple vehicles, examining the two types of delays caused by twin maintenance and computational processing within the network. By transforming the problem using satisfaction functions, we propose an optimization problem aimed at maximizing each vehicle's resource utility to determine the optimal resource allocation strategy. Given the non-convex nature of the issue, we employ multi-agent Markov decision processes to reformulate the problem. Subsequently, we propose the twin maintenance and computing task processing resource collaborative scheduling (MADRL-CSTC) algorithm, which leverages multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. Through experimental comparisons with alternative algorithms, it demonstrates that our proposed approach is effective in terms of resource allocation.

Enhancing Robustness and Security in ISAC Network Design: Leveraging Transmissive Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface with RSMA

In this paper, we propose a novel transmissive reconfigurable intelligent surface transceiver-enhanced robust and secure integrated sensing and communication network. A time-division sensing communication mechanism is designed for the scenario, which enables communication and sensing to share wireless resources. To address the interference management problem and hinder eavesdropping, we implement rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA), where the common stream is designed as a useful signal and an artificial noise, while taking into account the imperfect channel state information and modeling the channel for the illegal users in a fine-grained manner as well as giving an upper bound on the error. We introduce the secrecy outage probability and construct an optimization problem with secrecy sum-rate as the objective functions to optimize the common stream beamforming matrix, the private stream beamforming matrix and the timeslot duration variable. Due to the coupling of the optimization variables and the infinity of the error set, the proposed problem is a nonconvex optimization problem that cannot be solved directly. In order to address the above challenges, the block coordinate descent-based second-order cone programming algorithm is used to decouple the optimization variables and solving the problem. Specifically, the problem is decoupled into two subproblems concerning the common stream beamforming matrix, the private stream beamforming matrix, and the timeslot duration variable, which are solved by alternating optimization until convergence is reached. To solve the problem, S-procedure, Bernstein's inequality and successive convex approximation are employed to deal with the objective function and non-convex constraints. Numerical simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed scheme in improving the secrecy energy efficiency and the Cram\'{e}r-Rao boundary.