Large-Scale AI in Telecom: Charting the Roadmap for Innovation, Scalability, and Enhanced Digital Experiences

This white paper discusses the role of large-scale AI in the telecommunications industry, with a specific focus on the potential of generative AI to revolutionize network functions and user experiences, especially in the context of 6G systems. It highlights the development and deployment of Large Telecom Models (LTMs), which are tailored AI models designed to address the complex challenges faced by modern telecom networks. The paper covers a wide range of topics, from the architecture and deployment strategies of LTMs to their applications in network management, resource allocation, and optimization. It also explores the regulatory, ethical, and standardization considerations for LTMs, offering insights into their future integration into telecom infrastructure. The goal is to provide a comprehensive roadmap for the adoption of LTMs to enhance scalability, performance, and user-centric innovation in telecom networks.

Strategic priorities for transformative progress in advancing biology with proteomics and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming scientific research, including proteomics. Advances in mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics data quality, diversity, and scale, combined with groundbreaking AI techniques, are unlocking new challenges and opportunities in biological discovery. Here, we highlight key areas where AI is driving innovation, from data analysis to new biological insights. These include developing an AI-friendly ecosystem for proteomics data generation, sharing, and analysis; improving peptide and protein identification and quantification; characterizing protein-protein interactions and protein complexes; advancing spatial and perturbation proteomics; integrating multi-omics data; and ultimately enabling AI-empowered virtual cells.

WirelessGPT: A Generative Pre-trained Multi-task Learning Framework for Wireless Communication

This paper introduces WirelessGPT, a pioneering foundation model specifically designed for multi-task learning in wireless communication and sensing. Specifically, WirelessGPT leverages large-scale wireless channel datasets for unsupervised pretraining and extracting universal channel representations, which captures complex spatiotemporal dependencies. In fact,this task-agnostic design adapts WirelessGPT seamlessly to a wide range of downstream tasks, using a unified representation with minimal fine-tuning. By unifying communication and sensing functionalities, WirelessGPT addresses the limitations of task-specific models, offering a scalable and efficient solution for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). With an initial parameter size of around 80 million, WirelessGPT demonstrates significant improvements over conventional methods and smaller AI models, reducing reliance on large-scale labeled data. As the first foundation model capable of supporting diverse tasks across different domains, WirelessGPT establishes a new benchmark, paving the way for future advancements in multi-task wireless systems.

SAFL: Structure-Aware Personalized Federated Learning via Client-Specific Clustering and SCSI-Guided Model Pruning

Federated Learning (FL) enables clients to collaboratively train machine learning models without sharing local data, preserving privacy in diverse environments. While traditional FL approaches preserve privacy, they often struggle with high computational and communication overhead. To address these issues, model pruning is introduced as a strategy to streamline computations. However, existing pruning methods, when applied solely based on local data, often produce sub-models that inadequately reflect clients' specific tasks due to data insufficiency. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces SAFL (Structure-Aware Federated Learning), a novel framework that enhances personalized federated learning through client-specific clustering and Similar Client Structure Information (SCSI)-guided model pruning. SAFL employs a two-stage process: initially, it groups clients based on data similarities and uses aggregated pruning criteria to guide the pruning process, facilitating the identification of optimal sub-models. Subsequently, clients train these pruned models and engage in server-based aggregation, ensuring tailored and efficient models for each client. This method significantly reduces computational overhead while improving inference accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAFL markedly diminishes model size and improves performance, making it highly effective in federated environments characterized by heterogeneous data.

Environmental large language model Evaluation (ELLE) dataset: A Benchmark for Evaluating Generative AI applications in Eco-environment Domain

Generative AI holds significant potential for ecological and environmental applications such as monitoring, data analysis, education, and policy support. However, its effectiveness is limited by the lack of a unified evaluation framework. To address this, we present the Environmental Large Language model Evaluation (ELLE) question answer (QA) dataset, the first benchmark designed to assess large language models and their applications in ecological and environmental sciences. The ELLE dataset includes 1,130 question answer pairs across 16 environmental topics, categorized by domain, difficulty, and type. This comprehensive dataset standardizes performance assessments in these fields, enabling consistent and objective comparisons of generative AI performance. By providing a dedicated evaluation tool, ELLE dataset promotes the development and application of generative AI technologies for sustainable environmental outcomes. The dataset and code are available at https://elle.ceeai.net/ and https://github.com/CEEAI/elle.

Generalization-Enhanced Few-Shot Object Detection in Remote Sensing

Remote sensing object detection is particularly challenging due to the high resolution, multi-scale features, and diverse ground object characteristics inherent in satellite and UAV imagery. These challenges necessitate more advanced approaches for effective object detection in such environments. While deep learning methods have achieved remarkable success in remote sensing object detection, they typically rely on large amounts of labeled data. Acquiring sufficient labeled data, particularly for novel or rare objects, is both challenging and time-consuming in remote sensing scenarios, limiting the generalization capabilities of existing models. To address these challenges, few-shot learning (FSL) has emerged as a promising approach, aiming to enable models to learn new classes from limited labeled examples. Building on this concept, few-shot object detection (FSOD) specifically targets object detection challenges in data-limited conditions. However, the generalization capability of FSOD models, particularly in remote sensing, is often constrained by the complex and diverse characteristics of the objects present in such environments. In this paper, we propose the Generalization-Enhanced Few-Shot Object Detection (GE-FSOD) model to improve the generalization capability in remote sensing FSOD tasks. Our model introduces three key innovations: the Cross-Level Fusion Pyramid Attention Network (CFPAN) for enhanced multi-scale feature representation, the Multi-Stage Refinement Region Proposal Network (MRRPN) for more accurate region proposals, and the Generalized Classification Loss (GCL) for improved classification performance in few-shot scenarios. Extensive experiments on the DIOR and NWPU VHR-10 datasets show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for few-shot object detection in remote sensing.

Your Next State-of-the-Art Could Come from Another Domain: A Cross-Domain Analysis of Hierarchical Text Classification

Text classification with hierarchical labels is a prevalent and challenging task in natural language processing. Examples include assigning ICD codes to patient records, tagging patents into IPC classes, assigning EUROVOC descriptors to European legal texts, and more. Despite its widespread applications, a comprehensive understanding of state-of-the-art methods across different domains has been lacking. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive cross-domain overview with empirical analysis of state-of-the-art methods. We propose a unified framework that positions each method within a common structure to facilitate research. Our empirical analysis yields key insights and guidelines, confirming the necessity of learning across different research areas to design effective methods. Notably, under our unified evaluation pipeline, we achieved new state-of-the-art results by applying techniques beyond their original domains.

Goal-oriented Semantic Communications for Metaverse Construction via Generative AI and Optimal Transport

The emergence of the metaverse has boosted productivity and creativity, driving real-time updates and personalized content, which will substantially increase data traffic. However, current bit-oriented communication networks struggle to manage this high volume of dynamic information, restricting metaverse applications interactivity. To address this research gap, we propose a goal-oriented semantic communication (GSC) framework for metaverse. Building on an existing metaverse wireless construction task, our proposed GSC framework includes an hourglass network-based (HgNet) encoder to extract semantic information of objects in the metaverse; and a semantic decoder that uses this extracted information to reconstruct the metaverse content after wireless transmission, enabling efficient communication and real-time object behaviour updates to the scenery for metaverse construction task. To overcome the wireless channel noise at the receiver, we design an optimal transport (OT)-enabled semantic denoiser, which enhances the accuracy of metaverse scenery through wireless communication. Experimental results show that compared to the conventional metaverse construction, our proposed GSC framework significantly reduces wireless metaverse construction latency by 92.6\%, while improving metaverse object status accuracy and viewing experience by 45.6\% and 44.7\%, respectively.

Efficient Ternary Weight Embedding Model: Bridging Scalability and Performance

Embedding models have become essential tools in both natural language processing and computer vision, enabling efficient semantic search, recommendation, clustering, and more. However, the high memory and computational demands of full-precision embeddings pose challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments, such as real-time recommendation systems. In this work, we propose a novel finetuning framework to ternary-weight embedding models, which reduces memory and computational overhead while maintaining high performance. To apply ternarization to pre-trained embedding models, we introduce self-taught knowledge distillation to finalize the ternary-weights of the linear layers. With extensive experiments on public text and vision datasets, we demonstrated that without sacrificing effectiveness, the ternarized model consumes low memory usage and has low latency in the inference stage with great efficiency. In practical implementations, embedding models are typically integrated with Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search. Our experiments combining ternary embedding with ANN search yielded impressive improvement in both accuracy and computational efficiency. The repository is available at here.

Goal-Oriented Semantic Communication for Wireless Image Transmission via Stable Diffusion

Efficient image transmission is essential for seamless communication and collaboration within the visually-driven digital landscape. To achieve low latency and high-quality image reconstruction over a bandwidth-constrained noisy wireless channel, we propose a stable diffusion (SD)-based goal-oriented semantic communication (GSC) framework. In this framework, we design a semantic autoencoder that effectively extracts semantic information from images to reduce the transmission data size while ensuring high-quality reconstruction. Recognizing the impact of wireless channel noise on semantic information transmission, we propose an SD-based denoiser for GSC (SD-GSC) conditional on instantaneous channel gain to remove the channel noise from the received noisy semantic information under known channel. For scenarios with unknown channel, we further propose a parallel SD denoiser for GSC (PSD-GSC) to jointly learn the distribution of channel gains and denoise the received semantic information. Experimental results show that SD-GSC outperforms state-of-the-art ADJSCC and Latent-Diff DNSC, with the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) improvement by 7 dB and 5 dB, and the Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) reduction by 16 and 20, respectively. Additionally, PSD-GSC archives PSNR improvement of 2 dB and FID reduction of 6 compared to MMSE equalizer-enhanced SD-GSC.