arXiv subjects

Wei Yu

Publications and source records attributed to Wei Yu.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Information Relaxation and A Duality-Driven Algorithm for Stochastic Dynamic Programs

We use the technique of information relaxation to develop a duality-driven iterative approach to obtaining and improving confidence interval estimates for the true value of finite-horizon stochastic dynamic programming problems. We show that the sequence of dual value estimates yielded from the proposed approach in principle monotonically converges to the true value function in a finite number of dual iterations. Aiming to overcome the curse of dimensionality in various applications, we also introduce a regression-based Monte Carlo algorithm for implementation. The new approach can be used not only to assess the quality of heuristic policies, but also to improve them if we find that their duality gap is large. We obtain the convergence rate of our Monte Carlo method in terms of the amounts of both basis functions and the sampled states. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in an optimal order execution problem with market friction and in an inventory management problem in the presence of lost sale and lead time. Both examples are well known in the literature to be difficult to solve for optimality. The experiments show that our method can significantly improve the heuristics suggested in the literature and obtain new policies with a satisfactory performance guarantee.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

Joint User Identification, Channel Estimation, and Signal Detection for Grant-Free NOMA

For massive machine-type communications, centralized control may incur a prohibitively high overhead. Grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) provides possible solutions, yet poses new challenges for efficient receiver design. In this paper, we develop a joint user identification, channel estimation, and signal detection (JUICESD) algorithm. We divide the whole detection scheme into two modules: slot-wise multi-user detection (SMD) and combined signal and channel estimation (CSCE). SMD is designed to decouple the transmissions of different users by leveraging the approximate message passing (AMP) algorithms, and CSCE is designed to deal with the nonlinear coupling of activity state, channel coefficient and transmit signal of each user separately. To address the problem that the exact calculation of the messages exchanged within CSCE and between the two modules is complicated due to phase ambiguity issues, this paper proposes a rotationally invariant Gaussian mixture (RIGM) model, and develops an efficient JUICESD-RIGM algorithm. JUICESD-RIGM achieves a performance close to JUICESD with a much lower complexity. Capitalizing on the feature of RIGM, we further analyze the performance of JUICESD-RIGM with state evolution techniques. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve a significant performance improvement over the existing alternatives, and the derived state evolution method predicts the system performance accurately.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Optimizing Downlink Resource Allocation in Multiuser MIMO Networks via Fractional Programming and the Hungarian Algorithm

Optimizing the sum-log-utility for the downlink of multi-frequency band, multiuser, multiantenna networks requires joint solutions to the associated beamforming and user scheduling problems through the use of cloud radio access network (CRAN) architecture; optimizing such a network is, however, non-convex and NP-hard. In this paper, we present a novel iterative beamforming and scheduling strategy based on fractional programming and the Hungarian algorithm. The beamforming strategy allows us to iteratively maximize the chosen objective function in a fashion similar to block coordinate ascent. Furthermore, based on the crucial insight that, in the downlink, the interference pattern remains fixed for a given set of beamforming weights, we use the Hungarian algorithm as an efficient approach to optimally schedule users for the given set of beamforming weights. Specifically, this approach allows us to select the best subset of users (amongst the larger set of all available users). Our simulation results show that, in terms of average sum-log-utility, as well as sum-rate, the proposed scheme substantially outperforms both the state-of-the-art multicell weighted minimum mean-squared error (WMMSE) and greedy proportionally fair WMMSE schemes, as well as standard interior-point and sequential quadratic solvers. Importantly, our proposed scheme is also far more computationally efficient than the multicell WMMSE scheme.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive User Association in Dynamic mmWave Networks

Network densification and millimeter-wave technologies are key enablers to fulfill the capacity and data rate requirements of the fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks. In this context, designing low-complexity policies with local observations, yet able to adapt the user association with respect to the global network state and to the network dynamics is a challenge. In fact, the frameworks proposed in literature require continuous access to global network information and to recompute the association when the radio environment changes. With the complexity associated to such an approach, these solutions are not well suited to dense 5G networks. In this paper, we address this issue by designing a scalable and flexible algorithm for user association based on multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this approach, users act as independent agents that, based on their local observations only, learn to autonomously coordinate their actions in order to optimize the network sum-rate. Since there is no direct information exchange among the agents, we also limit the signaling overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is able to adapt to (fast) changes of radio environment, thus providing large sum-rate gain in comparison to state-of-the-art solutions.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Optimal Virtual Network Function Deployment for 5G Network Slicing in a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Network virtualization is a key enabler for 5G systems to support the expected use cases of vertical markets. In this context, we study the joint optimal deployment of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and allocation of computational resources in a hybrid cloud infrastructure by taking the requirements of the 5G services and the characteristics of the cloud architecture into consideration. The resulting mixed-integer problem is reformulated as an integer linear problem, which can be solved by using a standard solver. Our results underline the advantages of a hybrid infrastructure over a standard centralized radio access network consisting only of a central cloud, and show that the proposed mechanism to deploy VNF chains leads to high resource utilization efficiency and large gains in terms of the number of supported VNF chains. To deal with the computational complexity of optimizing a large number of clouds and VNF chains, we propose a simple low-complexity heuristic that attempts to find a feasible VNF deployment solution with a limited number of functional splits. Numerical results indicate that the performance of the proposed heuristic is close to the optimal one when the edge clouds are well dimensioned with respect to the computational requirements of the 5G services.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Semi-Submersible Wind Turbine Hull Shape Design for a Favorable System Response Behavior

Floating offshore wind turbines are a novel technology, which has reached, with the first wind farm in operation, an advanced state of development. The question of how floating wind systems can be optimized to operate smoothly in harsh wind and wave conditions is the subject of the present work. An integrated optimization was conducted, where the hull shape of a semi-submersible, as well as the wind turbine controller were varied with the goal of finding a cost-efficient design, which does not respond to wind and wave excitations, resulting in small structural fatigue and extreme loads. The optimum design was found to have a remarkably low tower-base fatigue load response and small rotor fore-aft amplitudes. Further investigations showed that the reason for the good dynamic behavior is a particularly favorable response to first-order wave loads: The floating wind turbine rotates in pitch-direction about a point close to the rotor hub and the rotor fore-aft motion is almost unaffected by the wave excitation. As a result, the power production and the blade loads are not influenced by the waves. A comparable effect was so far known for Tension Leg Platforms but not for semi-submersible wind turbines. The methodology builds on a low-order simulation model, coupled to a parametric panel code model, a detailed viscous drag model and an individually tuned blade pitch controller. The results are confirmed by the higher-fidelity model FAST. A new indicator to express the optimal behavior through a single design criterion has been developed.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2020

Adaptive Semantic-Visual Tree for Hierarchical Embeddings

Merchandise categories inherently form a semantic hierarchy with different levels of concept abstraction, especially for fine-grained categories. This hierarchy encodes rich correlations among various categories across different levels, which can effectively regularize the semantic space and thus make predictions less ambiguous. However, previous studies of fine-grained image retrieval primarily focus on semantic similarities or visual similarities. In a real application, merely using visual similarity may not satisfy the need of consumers to search merchandise with real-life images, e.g., given a red coat as a query image, we might get a red suit in recall results only based on visual similarity since they are visually similar. But the users actually want a coat rather than suit even the coat is with different color or texture attributes. We introduce this new problem based on photoshopping in real practice. That's why semantic information are integrated to regularize the margins to make "semantic" prior to "visual". To solve this new problem, we propose a hierarchical adaptive semantic-visual tree (ASVT) to depict the architecture of merchandise categories, which evaluates semantic similarities between different semantic levels and visual similarities within the same semantic class simultaneously. The semantic information satisfies the demand of consumers for similar merchandise with the query while the visual information optimizes the correlations within the semantic class. At each level, we set different margins based on the semantic hierarchy and incorporate them as prior information to learn a fine-grained feature embedding. To evaluate our framework, we propose a new dataset named JDProduct, with hierarchical labels collected from actual image queries and official merchandise images on an online shopping application. Extensive experimental results on the public CARS196 and CUB-

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Energy-Efficient Processing and Robust Wireless Cooperative Transmission for Edge Inference

Edge machine learning can deliver low-latency and private artificial intelligent (AI) services for mobile devices by leveraging computation and storage resources at the network edge. This paper presents an energy-efficient edge processing framework to execute deep learning inference tasks at the edge computing nodes whose wireless connections to mobile devices are prone to channel uncertainties. Aimed at minimizing the sum of computation and transmission power consumption with probabilistic quality-of-service (QoS) constraints, we formulate a joint inference tasking and downlink beamforming problem that is characterized by a group sparse objective function. We provide a statistical learning based robust optimization approach to approximate the highly intractable probabilistic-QoS constraints by nonconvex quadratic constraints, which are further reformulated as matrix inequalities with a rank-one constraint via matrix lifting. We design a reweighted power minimization approach by iteratively reweighted $\ell_1$ minimization with difference-of-convex-functions (DC) regularization and updating weights, where the reweighted approach is adopted for enhancing group sparsity whereas the DC regularization is designed for inducing rank-one solutions. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Tunable Anisotropic Thermal Transport in Super-Aligned Carbon Nanotube Films

Super-aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) films have intriguing anisotropic thermal transport properties due to the anisotropic nature of individual nanotubes and the important role of nanotube alignment. However, the relationship between the alignment and the anisotropic thermal conductivities was not well understood due to the challenges in both the preparation of high-quality super-aligned CNT film samples and the thermal characterization of such highly anisotropic and porous thin films. Here, super-aligned CNT films with different alignment configurations are designed and their anisotropic thermal conductivities are measured using time-domain thermoreflectance (TDTR) with an elliptical-beam approach. The results suggest that the alignment configuration could tune the cross-plane thermal conductivity k_z from 6.4 to 1.5 W/mK and the in-plane anisotropic ratio from 1.2 to 13.5. This work confirms the important role of CNT alignment in tuning the thermal transport properties of super-aligned CNT films and provides an efficient way to design thermally anisotropic films for thermal management.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2019

Joint Annotator-and-Spectrum Allocation in Wireless Networks for Crowd Labelling

The massive sensing data generated by Internet-of-Things will provide fuel for ubiquitous artificial intelligence (AI), automating the operations of our society ranging from transportation to healthcare. The realistic adoption of this technique however entails labelling of the enormous data prior to the training of AI models via supervised learning. To tackle this challenge, we explore a new perspective of wireless crowd labelling that is capable of downloading data to many imperfect mobile annotators for repetition labelling by exploiting multicasting in wireless networks. In this cross-disciplinary area, the integration of the rate-distortion theory and the principle of repetition labelling for accuracy improvement gives rise to a new tradeoff between radio-and-annotator resources under a constraint on labelling accuracy. Building on the tradeoff and aiming at maximizing the labelling throughput, this work focuses on the joint optimization of encoding rate, annotator clustering, and sub-channel allocation, which results in an NP-hard integer programming problem. To devise an efficient solution approach, we establish an optimal sequential annotator-clustering scheme based on the order of decreasing signal-to-noise ratios. Thereby, the optimal solution can be found by an efficient tree search. Next, the solution is simplified by applying truncated channel inversion. Alternatively, the optimization problem can be recognized as a knapsack problem, which can be efficiently solved in pseudo-polynomial time by means of dynamic programming. In addition, exact polices are derived for the annotators constrained and spectrum constrained cases. Last, simulation results demonstrate the significant throughput gains based on the optimal solution compared with decoupled allocation of the two types of resources.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Power Control for Massive MIMO Systems with Nonorthogonal Pilots

This letter shows that optimizing the transmit powers along with optimally designed nonorthogonal pilots can significantly reduce pilot contamination and improve the overall throughput of the uplink multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system as compared to the conventional schemes that use orthogonal pilots. Given the optimized nonorthogonal pilots, power control as a function of the large-scale path-loss can be thought of as a stochastic optimization problem due to the presence of fast fading. This paper advocates a deterministic approach to solve this problem, then further proposes a stochastic optimization method that utilizes successive convex approximation as a benchmark to quantify the performance of the proposed approach. Simulation results reveal significant advantage of using optimized nonorthogonal pilots together with power control to combat pilot contamination.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Tuning Non-Gilbert-type damping in FeGa films on MgO(001) via oblique deposition

The ability to tailor the damping factor is essential for spintronic and spin-torque applications. Here, we report an approach to manipulate the damping factor of FeGa/MgO(001) films by oblique deposition. Owing to the defects at the surface or interface in thin films, two-magnon scattering (TMS) acts as a non-Gilbert damping mechanism in magnetization relaxation. In this work, the contribution of TMS was characterized by in-plane angular dependent ferromagnetic resonance (FMR). It is demonstrated that the intrinsic Gilbert damping is isotropic and invariant, while the extrinsic mechanism related to TMS is anisotropic and can be tuned by oblique deposition. Furthermore, the two and fourfold TMS related to the uniaxial magnetic anisotropy (UMA) and magnetocrystalline anisotropy were discussed. Our results open an avenue to manipulate magnetization relaxation in spintronic devices.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2019

CrevNet: Conditionally Reversible Video Prediction

Applying resolution-preserving blocks is a common practice to maximize information preservation in video prediction, yet their high memory consumption greatly limits their application scenarios. We propose CrevNet, a Conditionally Reversible Network that uses reversible architectures to build a bijective two-way autoencoder and its complementary recurrent predictor. Our model enjoys the theoretically guaranteed property of no information loss during the feature extraction, much lower memory consumption and computational efficiency.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Joint Design of Measurement Matrix and Sparse Support Recovery Method via Deep Auto-encoder

Sparse support recovery arises in many applications in communications and signal processing. Existing methods tackle sparse support recovery problems for a given measurement matrix, and cannot flexibly exploit the properties of sparsity patterns for improving performance. In this letter, we propose a data-driven approach to jointly design the measurement matrix and support recovery method for complex sparse signals, using auto-encoder in deep learning. The proposed architecture includes two components, an auto-encoder and a hard thresholding module. The proposed auto-encoder successfully handles complex signals using standard auto-encoder for real numbers. The proposed approach can effectively exploit properties of sparsity patterns, and is especially useful when these underlying properties do not have analytic models. In addition, the proposed approach can achieve sparse support recovery with low computational complexity. Experiments are conducted on an application ex-ample, device activity detection in grant-free massive access for massive machine type communications (mMTC). Numerical results show that the proposed approach achieves significantly better performance with much less computation time than classic methods, in the presence of extra structures in sparsity patterns.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Generalized Compression Strategy for the Downlink Cloud Radio Access Network

This paper studies the downlink of a cloud radio access network (C-RAN) in which a centralized processor (CP) communicates with mobile users through base stations (BSs) that are connected to the CP via finite-capacity fronthaul links. Information theoretically, the downlink of a C-RAN is modeled as a two-hop broadcast-relay network. Among the various transmission and relaying strategies for such model, this paper focuses on the compression strategy, in which the CP centrally encodes the signals to be broadcasted jointly by the BSs, then compresses and sends these signals to the BSs through the fronthaul links. This paper characterizes an achievable rate region for a generalized compression strategy with Marton's multicoding for broadcasting and multivariate compression for fronthaul transmission. We then compare this rate region with the distributed decode-forward (DDF) scheme, which achieves the capacity of the general relay networks to within a constant gap, and show that the difference lies in that DDF performs Marton's multicoding and multivariate compression jointly as opposed to successively as in the compression strategy. A main result of this paper is that under the assumption that the fronthaul links are subject to a \emph{sum} capacity constraint this difference is immaterial, so the successive encoding based compression strategy can already achieve the capacity region of the C-RAN to within a constant gap, where the gap is independent of the channel parameters and the power constraints at the BSs. For the special case of the Gaussian network, we further establish that under individual fronthaul constraints, the compression strategy achieves to within a constant gap to the \emph{sum} capacity of the C-RAN.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Multi-Cell Sparse Activity Detection for Massive Random Access: Massive MIMO versus Cooperative MIMO

This paper considers sparse device activity detection for cellular machine-type communications with non-orthogonal signatures using the approximate message passing algorithm. This paper compares two network architectures, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and cooperative MIMO, in terms of their effectiveness in overcoming inter-cell interference. In the massive MIMO architecture, each base station (BS) detects only the users from its own cell while treating inter-cell interference as noise. In the cooperative MIMO architecture, each BS detects the users from neighboring cells as well; the detection results are then forwarded in the form of log-likelihood ratio (LLR) to a central unit where final decisions are made. This paper analytically characterizes the probabilities of false alarm and missed detection for both architectures. Numerical results validate the analytic characterization and show that as the number of antennas increases, a massive MIMO system effectively drives the detection error to zero, while as the cooperation size increases, the cooperative MIMO architecture mainly improves the cell-edge user performance. Moreover, this paper studies the effect of LLR quantization to account for the finite-capacity fronthaul. Numerical simulations of a practical scenario suggest that in that specific case cooperating three BSs in a cooperative MIMO system achieves about the same cell-edge detection reliability as a non-cooperative massive MIMO system with four times the number of antennas per BS.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Recovering the parameters underlying the Lorenz-96 chaotic dynamics

Climate projections suffer from uncertain equilibrium climate sensitivity. The reason behind this uncertainty is the resolution of global climate models, which is too coarse to resolve key processes such as clouds and convection. These processes are approximated using heuristics in a process called parameterization. The selection of these parameters can be subjective, leading to significant uncertainties in the way clouds are represented in global climate models. Here, we explore three deep network algorithms to infer these parameters in an objective and data-driven way. We compare the performance of a fully-connected network, a one-dimensional and, a two-dimensional convolutional networks to recover the underlying parameters of the Lorenz-96 model, a non-linear dynamical system that has similar behavior to the climate system.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Exact Sparse Signal Recovery via Orthogonal Matching Pursuit with Prior Information

The orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm is a commonly used algorithm for recovering $K$-sparse signals $\x\in \mathbb{R}^{n}$ from linear model $\y=\A\x$, where $\A\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ is a sensing matrix. A fundamental question in the performance analysis of OMP is the characterization of the probability that it can exactly recover $\x$ for random matrix $\A$. Although in many practical applications, in addition to the sparsity, $\x$ usually also has some additional property (for example, the nonzero entries of $\x$ independently and identically follow the Gaussian distribution), none of existing analysis uses these properties to answer the above question. In this paper, we first show that the prior distribution information of $\x$ can be used to provide an upper bound on $\|\x\|_1^2/\|\x\|_2^2$, and then explore the bound to develop a better lower bound on the probability of exact recovery with OMP in $K$ iterations. Simulation tests are presented to illustrate the superiority of the new bound.

cs.IT↗