Joint Beamforming for Multi-target Detection and Multi-user Communication in ISAC Systems

Detecting weak targets is one of the main challenges for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. Sensing and communication suffer from a performance trade-off in ISAC systems. As the communication demand increases, sensing ability, especially weak target detection performance, will inevitably reduce. Traditional approaches fail to address this issue. In this paper, we develop a joint beamforming scheme and formulate it as a max-min problem to maximize the detection probability of the weakest target under the constraint of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of multi-user communication. An alternating optimization (AO) algorithm is developed for solving the complicated non-convex problem to obtain the joint beamformer. The proposed scheme can direct the transmit energy toward the multiple targets properly to ensure robust multi-target detection performance. Numerical results show that the proposed beamforming scheme can effectively increase the detection probability of the weakest target compared to baseline approaches while ensuring communication performance.

Joint Beamforming for Backscatter Integrated Sensing and Communication

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a key technology of next generation wireless communication. Backscatter communication (BackCom) plays an important role for internet of things (IoT). Then the integration of ISAC with BackCom technology enables low-power data transmission while enhancing the system sensing ability, which is expected to provide a potentially revolutionary solution for IoT applications. In this paper, we propose a novel backscatter-ISAC (B-ISAC) system and focus on the joint beamforming design for the system. We formulate the communication and sensing model of the B-ISAC system and derive the metrics of communication and sensing performance respectively, i.e., communication rate and detection probability. We propose a joint beamforming scheme aiming to optimize the communication rate under sensing constraint and power budget. A successive convex approximation (SCA) based algorithm and an iterative algorithm are developed for solving the complicated non-convex optimization problem. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and associated algorithms. The proposed B-ISAC system has broad application prospect in IoT scenarios.

Misaligned Over-The-Air Computation of Multi-Sensor Data with Wiener-Denoiser Network

In data driven deep learning, distributed sensing and joint computing bring heavy load for computing and communication. To face the challenge, over-the-air computation (OAC) has been proposed for multi-sensor data aggregation, which enables the server to receive a desired function of massive sensing data during communication. However, the strict synchronization and accurate channel estimation constraints in OAC are hard to be satisfied in practice, leading to time and channel-gain misalignment. The paper formulates the misalignment problem as a non-blind image deblurring problem. At the receiver side, we first use the Wiener filter to deblur, followed by a U-Net network designed for further denoising. Our method is capable to exploit the inherent correlations in the signal data via learning, thus outperforms traditional methods in term of accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/auto-Dog/MOAC_deep

B-ISAC: Backscatter Integrated Sensing and Communication for 6G IoE Applications

The integration of backscatter communication (BackCom) technology with integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology not only enhances the system sensing performance, but also enables low-power information transmission. This is expected to provide a new paradigm for communication and sensing in internet of everything (IoE) applications. Existing works only consider sensing rate and detection performance, while none consider the estimation performance. The design of the system in different task modes also needs to be further studied. In this paper, we propose a novel system called backscatter-ISAC (B-ISAC) and design a joint beamforming framework for different stages (task modes). We derive communication performance metrics of the system in terms of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and communication rate, and derive sensing performance metrics of the system in terms of probability of detection, estimation error of linear least squares (LS) estimation, and the estimation error of linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) estimation. The proposed joint beamforming framework consists of three stages: tag detection, tag estimation, and communication enhancement. We develop corresponding joint beamforming schemes aimed at enhancing the performance objectives of their respective stages by solving complex non-convex optimization problems. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed joint beamforming schemes. The proposed B-ISAC system has broad application prospect in sixth generation (6G) IoE scenarios.

A Survey on Efficient Inference for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted extensive attention due to their remarkable performance across various tasks. However, the substantial computational and memory requirements of LLM inference pose challenges for deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. Efforts within the field have been directed towards developing techniques aimed at enhancing the efficiency of LLM inference. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the existing literature on efficient LLM inference. We start by analyzing the primary causes of the inefficient LLM inference, i.e., the large model size, the quadratic-complexity attention operation, and the auto-regressive decoding approach. Then, we introduce a comprehensive taxonomy that organizes the current literature into data-level, model-level, and system-level optimization. Moreover, the paper includes comparative experiments on representative methods within critical sub-fields to provide quantitative insights. Last but not least, we provide some knowledge summary and discuss future research directions.

FlashDecoding++: Faster Large Language Model Inference on GPUs

As the Large Language Model (LLM) becomes increasingly important in various domains. However, the following challenges still remain unsolved in accelerating LLM inference: (1) Synchronized partial softmax update. The softmax operation requires a synchronized update operation among each partial softmax result, leading to ~20% overheads for the attention computation in LLMs. (2) Under-utilized computation of flat GEMM. The shape of matrices performing GEMM in LLM inference is flat, leading to under-utilized computation and >50% performance loss after padding zeros in previous designs. (3) Performance loss due to static dataflow. Kernel performance in LLM depends on varied input data features, hardware configurations, etc. A single and static dataflow may lead to a 50.25% performance loss for GEMMs of different shapes in LLM inference. We present FlashDecoding++, a fast LLM inference engine supporting mainstream LLMs and hardware back-ends. To tackle the above challenges, FlashDecoding++ creatively proposes: (1) Asynchronized softmax with unified max value. FlashDecoding++ introduces a unified max value technique for different partial softmax computations to avoid synchronization. (2) Flat GEMM optimization with double buffering. FlashDecoding++ points out that flat GEMMs with different shapes face varied bottlenecks. Then, techniques like double buffering are introduced. (3) Heuristic dataflow with hardware resource adaptation. FlashDecoding++ heuristically optimizes dataflow using different hardware resource considering input dynamics. Due to the versatility of optimizations in FlashDecoding++, FlashDecoding++ can achieve up to 4.86x and 2.18x speedup on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs compared to Hugging Face implementations. FlashDecoding++ also achieves an average speedup of 1.37x compared to state-of-the-art LLM inference engines on mainstream LLMs.

Wi-Fi 8: Embracing the Millimeter-Wave Era

With the increasing demands in communication, Wi-Fi technology is advancing towards its next generation. Building on the foundation of Wi-Fi 7, millimeter-wave technology is anticipated to converge with Wi-Fi 8 in the near future. In this paper, we look into the millimeter-wave technology and other potential feasible features, providing a comprehensive perspective on the future of Wi-Fi 8. Our simulation results demonstrate that significant performance gains can be achieved, even in the presence of hardware impairments.

IEEE 802.11be Wi-Fi 7: Feature Summary and Performance Evaluation

While the pace of commercial scale application of Wi-Fi 6 accelerates, the IEEE 802.11 Working Group is about to complete the development of a new amendment standard IEEE 802.11be -- Extremely High Throughput (EHT), also known as Wi-Fi 7, which can be used to meet the demand for the throughput of 4K/8K videos up to tens of Gbps and low-latency video applications such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Wi-Fi 7 not only scales Wi-Fi 6 with doubled bandwidth, but also supports real-time applications, which brings revolutionary changes to Wi-Fi. In this article, we start by introducing the main objectives and timeline of Wi-Fi 7 and then list the latest key techniques which promote the performance improvement of Wi-Fi 7. Finally, we validate the most critical objectives of Wi-Fi 7 -- the potential up to 30 Gbps throughput and lower latency. System-level simulation results suggest that by combining the new techniques, Wi-Fi 7 achieves 30 Gbps throughput and lower latency than Wi-Fi 6.

Contrastive Learning for Low-light Raw Denoising

Image/video denoising in low-light scenes is an extremely challenging problem due to limited photon count and high noise. In this paper, we propose a novel approach with contrastive learning to address this issue. Inspired by the success of contrastive learning used in some high-level computer vision tasks, we bring in this idea to the low-level denoising task. In order to achieve this goal, we introduce a new denoising contrastive regularization (DCR) to exploit the information of noisy images and clean images. In the feature space, DCR makes the denoised image closer to the clean image and far away from the noisy image. In addition, we build a new feature embedding network called Wnet, which is more effective to extract high-frequency information. We conduct the experiments on a real low-light dataset that captures still images taken on a moonless clear night in 0.6 millilux and videos under starlight (no moon present, <0.001 lux). The results show that our method can achieve a higher PSNR and better visual quality compared with existing methods

Bokeh Rendering Based on Adaptive Depth Calibration Network

Bokeh rendering is a popular and effective technique used in photography to create an aesthetically pleasing effect. It is widely used to blur the background and highlight the subject in the foreground, thereby drawing the viewer's attention to the main focus of the image. In traditional digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLRs), this effect is achieved through the use of a large aperture lens. This allows the camera to capture images with shallow depth-of-field, in which only a small area of the image is in sharp focus, while the rest of the image is blurred. However, the hardware embedded in mobile phones is typically much smaller and more limited than that found in DSLRs. Consequently, mobile phones are not able to capture natural shallow depth-of-field photos, which can be a significant limitation for mobile photography. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel method for bokeh rendering using the Vision Transformer, a recent and powerful deep learning architecture. Our approach employs an adaptive depth calibration network that acts as a confidence level to compensate for errors in monocular depth estimation. This network is used to supervise the rendering process in conjunction with depth information, allowing for the generation of high-quality bokeh images at high resolutions. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving about 24.7% improvements on LPIPS and obtaining higher PSNR scores.