Structured IB: Improving Information Bottleneck with Structured Feature Learning

The Information Bottleneck (IB) principle has emerged as a promising approach for enhancing the generalization, robustness, and interpretability of deep neural networks, demonstrating efficacy across image segmentation, document clustering, and semantic communication. Among IB implementations, the IB Lagrangian method, employing Lagrangian multipliers, is widely adopted. While numerous methods for the optimizations of IB Lagrangian based on variational bounds and neural estimators are feasible, their performance is highly dependent on the quality of their design, which is inherently prone to errors. To address this limitation, we introduce Structured IB, a framework for investigating potential structured features. By incorporating auxiliary encoders to extract missing informative features, we generate more informative representations. Our experiments demonstrate superior prediction accuracy and task-relevant information preservation compared to the original IB Lagrangian method, even with reduced network size.

Hierarchical Learning and Computing over Space-Ground Integrated Networks

Space-ground integrated networks hold great promise for providing global connectivity, particularly in remote areas where large amounts of valuable data are generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, but lacking terrestrial communication infrastructure. The massive data is conventionally transferred to the cloud server for centralized artificial intelligence (AI) models training, raising huge communication overhead and privacy concerns. To address this, we propose a hierarchical learning and computing framework, which leverages the lowlatency characteristic of low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites and the global coverage of geostationary-earth-orbit (GEO) satellites, to provide global aggregation services for locally trained models on ground IoT devices. Due to the time-varying nature of satellite network topology and the energy constraints of LEO satellites, efficiently aggregating the received local models from ground devices on LEO satellites is highly challenging. By leveraging the predictability of inter-satellite connectivity, modeling the space network as a directed graph, we formulate a network energy minimization problem for model aggregation, which turns out to be a Directed Steiner Tree (DST) problem. We propose a topologyaware energy-efficient routing (TAEER) algorithm to solve the DST problem by finding a minimum spanning arborescence on a substitute directed graph. Extensive simulations under realworld space-ground integrated network settings demonstrate that the proposed TAEER algorithm significantly reduces energy consumption and outperforms benchmarks.

A Survey on Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computation

The forthcoming generation of wireless technology, 6G, promises a revolutionary leap beyond traditional data-centric services. It aims to usher in an era of ubiquitous intelligent services, where everything is interconnected and intelligent. This vision requires the seamless integration of three fundamental modules: Sensing for information acquisition, communication for information sharing, and computation for information processing and decision-making. These modules are intricately linked, especially in complex tasks such as edge learning and inference. However, the performance of these modules is interdependent, creating a resource competition for time, energy, and bandwidth. Existing techniques like integrated communication and computation (ICC), integrated sensing and computation (ISC), and integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) have made partial strides in addressing this challenge, but they fall short of meeting the extreme performance requirements. To overcome these limitations, it is essential to develop new techniques that comprehensively integrate sensing, communication, and computation. This integrated approach, known as Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computation (ISCC), offers a systematic perspective for enhancing task performance. This paper begins with a comprehensive survey of historic and related techniques such as ICC, ISC, and ISAC, highlighting their strengths and limitations. It then explores the state-of-the-art signal designs for ISCC, along with network resource management strategies specifically tailored for ISCC. Furthermore, this paper discusses the exciting research opportunities that lie ahead for implementing ISCC in future advanced networks. By embracing ISCC, we can unlock the full potential of intelligent connectivity, paving the way for groundbreaking applications and services.

Collaborative Edge AI Inference over Cloud-RAN

In this paper, a cloud radio access network (Cloud-RAN) based collaborative edge AI inference architecture is proposed. Specifically, geographically distributed devices capture real-time noise-corrupted sensory data samples and extract the noisy local feature vectors, which are then aggregated at each remote radio head (RRH) to suppress sensing noise. To realize efficient uplink feature aggregation, we allow each RRH receives local feature vectors from all devices over the same resource blocks simultaneously by leveraging an over-the-air computation (AirComp) technique. Thereafter, these aggregated feature vectors are quantized and transmitted to a central processor (CP) for further aggregation and downstream inference tasks. Our aim in this work is to maximize the inference accuracy via a surrogate accuracy metric called discriminant gain, which measures the discernibility of different classes in the feature space. The key challenges lie on simultaneously suppressing the coupled sensing noise, AirComp distortion caused by hostile wireless channels, and the quantization error resulting from the limited capacity of fronthaul links. To address these challenges, this work proposes a joint transmit precoding, receive beamforming, and quantization error control scheme to enhance the inference accuracy. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed optimization algorithm compared to various baselines.

Satellite Federated Edge Learning: Architecture Design and Convergence Analysis

The proliferation of low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite networks leads to the generation of vast volumes of remote sensing data which is traditionally transferred to the ground server for centralized processing, raising privacy and bandwidth concerns. Federated edge learning (FEEL), as a distributed machine learning approach, has the potential to address these challenges by sharing only model parameters instead of raw data. Although promising, the dynamics of LEO networks, characterized by the high mobility of satellites and short ground-to-satellite link (GSL) duration, pose unique challenges for FEEL. Notably, frequent model transmission between the satellites and ground incurs prolonged waiting time and large transmission latency. This paper introduces a novel FEEL algorithm, named FEDMEGA, tailored to LEO mega-constellation networks. By integrating inter-satellite links (ISL) for intra-orbit model aggregation, the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the usage of low data rate and intermittent GSL. Our proposed method includes a ring all-reduce based intra-orbit aggregation mechanism, coupled with a network flow-based transmission scheme for global model aggregation, which enhances transmission efficiency. Theoretical convergence analysis is provided to characterize the algorithm performance. Extensive simulations show that our FEDMEGA algorithm outperforms existing satellite FEEL algorithms, exhibiting an approximate 30% improvement in convergence rate.

One-Bit Byzantine-Tolerant Distributed Learning via Over-the-Air Computation

Distributed learning has become a promising computational parallelism paradigm that enables a wide scope of intelligent applications from the Internet of Things (IoT) to autonomous driving and the healthcare industry. This paper studies distributed learning in wireless data center networks, which contain a central edge server and multiple edge workers to collaboratively train a shared global model and benefit from parallel computing. However, the distributed nature causes the vulnerability of the learning process to faults and adversarial attacks from Byzantine edge workers, as well as the severe communication and computation overhead induced by the periodical information exchange process. To achieve fast and reliable model aggregation in the presence of Byzantine attacks, we develop a signed stochastic gradient descent (SignSGD)-based Hierarchical Vote framework via over-the-air computation (AirComp), where one voting process is performed locally at the wireless edge by taking advantage of Bernoulli coding while the other is operated over-the-air at the central edge server by utilizing the waveform superposition property of the multiple-access channels. We comprehensively analyze the proposed framework on the impacts including Byzantine attacks and the wireless environment (channel fading and receiver noise), followed by characterizing the convergence behavior under non-convex settings. Simulation results validate our theoretical achievements and demonstrate the robustness of our proposed framework in the presence of Byzantine attacks and receiver noise.

Over-the-Air Federated Learning and Optimization

Federated learning (FL), as an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm, allows a mass of edge devices to collaboratively train a global model while preserving privacy. In this tutorial, we focus on FL via over-the-air computation (AirComp), which is proposed to reduce the communication overhead for FL over wireless networks at the cost of compromising in the learning performance due to model aggregation error arising from channel fading and noise. We first provide a comprehensive study on the convergence of AirComp-based FedAvg (AirFedAvg) algorithms under both strongly convex and non-convex settings with constant and diminishing learning rates in the presence of data heterogeneity. Through convergence and asymptotic analysis, we characterize the impact of aggregation error on the convergence bound and provide insights for system design with convergence guarantees. Then we derive convergence rates for AirFedAvg algorithms for strongly convex and non-convex objectives. For different types of local updates that can be transmitted by edge devices (i.e., local model, gradient, and model difference), we reveal that transmitting local model in AirFedAvg may cause divergence in the training procedure. In addition, we consider more practical signal processing schemes to improve the communication efficiency and further extend the convergence analysis to different forms of model aggregation error caused by these signal processing schemes. Extensive simulation results under different settings of objective functions, transmitted local information, and communication schemes verify the theoretical conclusions.

Towards Scalable Wireless Federated Learning: Challenges and Solutions

The explosive growth of smart devices (e.g., mobile phones, vehicles, drones) with sensing, communication, and computation capabilities gives rise to an unprecedented amount of data. The generated massive data together with the rapid advancement of machine learning (ML) techniques spark a variety of intelligent applications. To distill intelligence for supporting these applications, federated learning (FL) emerges as an effective distributed ML framework, given its potential to enable privacy-preserving model training at the network edge. In this article, we discuss the challenges and solutions of achieving scalable wireless FL from the perspectives of both network design and resource orchestration. For network design, we discuss how task-oriented model aggregation affects the performance of wireless FL, followed by proposing effective wireless techniques to enhance the communication scalability via reducing the model aggregation distortion and improving the device participation. For resource orchestration, we identify the limitations of the existing optimization-based algorithms and propose three task-oriented learning algorithms to enhance the algorithmic scalability via achieving computation-efficient resource allocation for wireless FL. We highlight several potential research issues that deserve further study.

Federated Linear Bandit Learning via Over-the-Air Computation

In this paper, we investigate federated contextual linear bandit learning within a wireless system that comprises a server and multiple devices. Each device interacts with the environment, selects an action based on the received reward, and sends model updates to the server. The primary objective is to minimize cumulative regret across all devices within a finite time horizon. To reduce the communication overhead, devices communicate with the server via over-the-air computation (AirComp) over noisy fading channels, where the channel noise may distort the signals. In this context, we propose a customized federated linear bandits scheme, where each device transmits an analog signal, and the server receives a superposition of these signals distorted by channel noise. A rigorous mathematical analysis is conducted to determine the regret bound of the proposed scheme. Both theoretical analysis and numerical experiments demonstrate the competitive performance of our proposed scheme in terms of regret bounds in various settings.

Federated Reinforcement Learning for Electric Vehicles Charging Control on Distribution Networks

With the growing popularity of electric vehicles (EVs), maintaining power grid stability has become a significant challenge. To address this issue, EV charging control strategies have been developed to manage the switch between vehicle-to-grid (V2G) and grid-to-vehicle (G2V) modes for EVs. In this context, multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) has proven its effectiveness in EV charging control. However, existing MADRL-based approaches fail to consider the natural power flow of EV charging/discharging in the distribution network and ignore driver privacy. To deal with these problems, this paper proposes a novel approach that combines multi-EV charging/discharging with a radial distribution network (RDN) operating under optimal power flow (OPF) to distribute power flow in real time. A mathematical model is developed to describe the RDN load. The EV charging control problem is formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to find an optimal charging control strategy that balances V2G profits, RDN load, and driver anxiety. To effectively learn the optimal EV charging control strategy, a federated deep reinforcement learning algorithm named FedSAC is further proposed. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed algorithm in terms of the diversity of the charging control strategy, the power fluctuations on RDN, the convergence efficiency, and the generalization ability.