ISAC Prototype System for Multi-Domain Cooperative Communication Networks

Future wireless networks are poised to transform into integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) networks, unlocking groundbreaking services such as digital twinning. To harness the full potential of ISAC networks, it is essential to experimentally validate their sensing capabilities and the role of sensing in boosting communication. However, current prototype systems fall short in supporting multiple sensing functions or validating sensing-assisted communication. In response, we have developed an advanced ISAC prototype system that incorporates monostatic, bistatic, and network sensing modes. This system supports multimodal data collection and synchronization, ensuring comprehensive experimental validation. On the communication front, it excels in sensing-aided beam tracking and real-time high-definition video transmission. For sensing applications, it provides precise angle and range measurements, real-time angle-range imaging, and radio-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Our prototype aligns with the 5G New Radio standard, offering scalability for up to 16 user equipments (UEs) in uplink transmission and 10 UEs in downlink transmission. Real-world tests showcase the system's superior accuracy, with root mean square errors of 2.3 degrees for angle estimation and 0.3 meters (m) for range estimation. Additionally, the estimation errors for multimodal-aided real-time radio SLAM localization and mapping are 0.25 m and 0.8 m, respectively.

Joint User Scheduling and Precoding for RIS-Aided MU-MISO Systems: A MADRL Approach

With the increasing demand for spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have attracted massive attention due to its low-cost and capability of controlling wireless environment. However, there is still a lack of treatments to deal with the growth of the number of users and RIS elements, which may incur performance degradation or computational complexity explosion. In this paper, we investigate the joint optimization of user scheduling and precoding for distributed RIS-aided communication systems. Firstly, we propose an optimization-based numerical method to obtain suboptimal solutions with the aid of the approximation of ergodic sum rate. Secondly, to reduce the computational complexity caused by the high dimensionality, we propose a data-driven scalable and generalizable multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) framework with the aim to maximize the ergodic sum rate approximation through the cooperation of all agents. Further, we propose a novel dynamic working process exploiting the trained MADRL algorithm, which enables distributed RISs to configure their own passive precoding independently. Simulation results show that our algorithm substantially reduces the computational complexity by a time reduction of three orders of magnitude at the cost of 3% performance degradation, compared with the optimization-based method, and achieves 6% performance improvement over the state-of-the-art MADRL algorithms.

Faster-GCG: Efficient Discrete Optimization Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned Large Language Models

Aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks. However, LLMs remain susceptible to jailbreak adversarial attacks, where adversaries manipulate prompts to elicit malicious responses that aligned LLMs should have avoided. Identifying these vulnerabilities is crucial for understanding the inherent weaknesses of LLMs and preventing their potential misuse. One pioneering work in jailbreaking is the GCG attack, a discrete token optimization algorithm that seeks to find a suffix capable of jailbreaking aligned LLMs. Despite the success of GCG, we find it suboptimal, requiring significantly large computational costs, and the achieved jailbreaking performance is limited. In this work, we propose Faster-GCG, an efficient adversarial jailbreak method by delving deep into the design of GCG. Experiments demonstrate that Faster-GCG can surpass the original GCG with only 1/10 of the computational cost, achieving significantly higher attack success rates on various open-source aligned LLMs. In addition, We demonstrate that Faster-GCG exhibits improved attack transferability when testing on closed-sourced LLMs such as ChatGPT.

HumanEval-V: Evaluating Visual Understanding and Reasoning Abilities of Large Multimodal Models Through Coding Tasks

Coding tasks have been valuable for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs), as they demand the comprehension of high-level instructions, complex reasoning, and the implementation of functional programs -- core capabilities for advancing Artificial General Intelligence. Despite the progress in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), which extend LLMs with visual perception and understanding capabilities, there remains a notable lack of coding benchmarks that rigorously assess these models, particularly in tasks that emphasize visual reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce HumanEval-V, a novel and lightweight benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LMMs' visual understanding and reasoning capabilities through code generation. HumanEval-V includes 108 carefully crafted, entry-level Python coding tasks derived from platforms like CodeForces and Stack Overflow. Each task is adapted by modifying the context and algorithmic patterns of the original problems, with visual elements redrawn to ensure distinction from the source, preventing potential data leakage. LMMs are required to complete the code solution based on the provided visual context and a predefined Python function signature outlining the task requirements. Every task is equipped with meticulously handcrafted test cases to ensure a thorough and reliable evaluation of model-generated solutions. We evaluate 19 state-of-the-art LMMs using HumanEval-V, uncovering significant challenges. Proprietary models like GPT-4o achieve only 13% pass@1 and 36.4% pass@10, while open-weight models with 70B parameters score below 4% pass@1. Ablation studies further reveal the limitations of current LMMs in vision reasoning and coding capabilities. These results underscore key areas for future research to enhance LMMs' capabilities. We have open-sourced our code and benchmark at https://github.com/HumanEval-V/HumanEval-V-Benchmark.

A Comprehensive Framework for Analyzing the Convergence of Adam: Bridging the Gap with SGD

Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam) is a cornerstone optimization algorithm in deep learning, widely recognized for its flexibility with adaptive learning rates and efficiency in handling large-scale data. However, despite its practical success, the theoretical understanding of Adam's convergence has been constrained by stringent assumptions, such as almost surely bounded stochastic gradients or uniformly bounded gradients, which are more restrictive than those typically required for analyzing stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In this paper, we introduce a novel and comprehensive framework for analyzing the convergence properties of Adam. This framework offers a versatile approach to establishing Adam's convergence. Specifically, we prove that Adam achieves asymptotic (last iterate sense) convergence in both the almost sure sense and the \(L_1\) sense under the relaxed assumptions typically used for SGD, namely \(L\)-smoothness and the ABC inequality. Meanwhile, under the same assumptions, we show that Adam attains non-asymptotic sample complexity bounds similar to those of SGD.

Attention Based Machine Learning Methods for Data Reduction with Guaranteed Error Bounds

Scientific applications in fields such as high energy physics, computational fluid dynamics, and climate science generate vast amounts of data at high velocities. This exponential growth in data production is surpassing the advancements in computing power, network capabilities, and storage capacities. To address this challenge, data compression or reduction techniques are crucial. These scientific datasets have underlying data structures that consist of structured and block structured multidimensional meshes where each grid point corresponds to a tensor. It is important that data reduction techniques leverage strong spatial and temporal correlations that are ubiquitous in these applications. Additionally, applications such as CFD, process tensors comprising hundred plus species and their attributes at each grid point. Reduction techniques should be able to leverage interrelationships between the elements in each tensor. In this paper, we propose an attention-based hierarchical compression method utilizing a block-wise compression setup. We introduce an attention-based hyper-block autoencoder to capture inter-block correlations, followed by a block-wise encoder to capture block-specific information. A PCA-based post-processing step is employed to guarantee error bounds for each data block. Our method effectively captures both spatiotemporal and inter-variable correlations within and between data blocks. Compared to the state-of-the-art SZ3, our method achieves up to 8 times higher compression ratio on the multi-variable S3D dataset. When evaluated on single-variable setups using the E3SM and XGC datasets, our method still achieves up to 3 times and 2 times higher compression ratio, respectively.

NeuroVE: Brain-inspired Linear-Angular Velocity Estimation with Spiking Neural Networks

Vision-based ego-velocity estimation is a fundamental problem in robot state estimation. However, the constraints of frame-based cameras, including motion blur and insufficient frame rates in dynamic settings, readily lead to the failure of conventional velocity estimation techniques. Mammals exhibit a remarkable ability to accurately estimate their ego-velocity during aggressive movement. Hence, integrating this capability into robots shows great promise for addressing these challenges. In this paper, we propose a brain-inspired framework for linear-angular velocity estimation, dubbed NeuroVE. The NeuroVE framework employs an event camera to capture the motion information and implements spiking neural networks (SNNs) to simulate the brain's spatial cells' function for velocity estimation. We formulate the velocity estimation as a time-series forecasting problem. To this end, we design an Astrocyte Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (ALIF) neuron model to encode continuous values. Additionally, we have developed an Astrocyte Spiking Long Short-term Memory (ASLSTM) structure, which significantly improves the time-series forecasting capabilities, enabling an accurate estimate of ego-velocity. Results from both simulation and real-world experiments indicate that NeuroVE has achieved an approximate 60% increase in accuracy compared to other SNN-based approaches.

Rotatable Block-Controlled RIS: Bridging the Performance Gap to Element-Controlled Systems

The passive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) requires numerous elements to achieve adequate array gain, which linearly increases power consumption (PC) with the number of reflection phases. To address this, this letter introduces a rotatable block-controlled RIS (BC-RIS) that preserves spectral efficiency (SE) while reducing power costs. Unlike the element-controlled RIS (EC-RIS), which necessitates independent phase control for each element, the BC-RIS uses a single phase control circuit for each block, substantially lowering power requirements. In the maximum ratio transmission, by customizing specular reflection channels through the rotation of blocks and coherently superimposing signals with optimized reflection phase of blocks, the BC-RIS achieves the same averaged SE as the EC-RIS. To counteract the added power demands from rotation, influenced by block size, we have developed a segmentation scheme to minimize overall PC. Furthermore, constraints for rotation power-related parameters have been established to enhance the energy efficiency of the BC-RIS compared to the EC-RIS. Numerical results confirm that this approach significantly improves energy efficiency while maintaining performance.

Mid-Band Extra Large-Scale MIMO System: Channel Modeling and Performance Analysis

In pursuit of enhanced quality of service and higher transmission rates, communication within the mid-band spectrum, such as bands in the 6-15 GHz range, combined with extra large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO), is considered a potential enabler for future communication systems. However, the characteristics introduced by mid-band XL-MIMO systems pose challenges for channel modeling and performance analysis. In this paper, we first analyze the potential characteristics of mid-band MIMO channels. Then, an analytical channel model incorporating novel channel characteristics is proposed, based on a review of classical analytical channel models. This model is convenient for theoretical analysis and compatible with other analytical channel models. Subsequently, based on the proposed channel model, we analyze key metrics of wireless communication, including the ergodic spectral efficiency (SE) and outage probability (OP) of MIMO maximal-ratio combining systems. Specifically, we derive closed-form approximations and performance bounds for two typical scenarios, aiming to illustrate the influence of mid-band XL-MIMO systems. Finally, comparisons between systems under different practical configurations are carried out through simulations. The theoretical analysis and simulations demonstrate that mid-band XL-MIMO systems excel in SE and OP due to the increased array elements, moderate large-scale fading, and enlarged transmission bandwidth.

ADBM: Adversarial diffusion bridge model for reliable adversarial purification

Recently Diffusion-based Purification (DiffPure) has been recognized as an effective defense method against adversarial examples. However, we find DiffPure which directly employs the original pre-trained diffusion models for adversarial purification, to be suboptimal. This is due to an inherent trade-off between noise purification performance and data recovery quality. Additionally, the reliability of existing evaluations for DiffPure is questionable, as they rely on weak adaptive attacks. In this work, we propose a novel Adversarial Diffusion Bridge Model, termed ADBM. ADBM directly constructs a reverse bridge from the diffused adversarial data back to its original clean examples, enhancing the purification capabilities of the original diffusion models. Through theoretical analysis and experimental validation across various scenarios, ADBM has proven to be a superior and robust defense mechanism, offering significant promise for practical applications.