Deep Learning-aided Parametric Sparse Channel Estimation for Terahertz Massive MIMO Systems

Terahertz (THz) communications is considered as one of key solutions to support extremely high data demand in 6G. One main difficulty of the THz communication is the severe signal attenuation caused by the foliage loss, oxygen/atmospheric absorption, body and hand losses. To compensate for the severe path loss, multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna array-based beamforming has been widely used. Since the beams should be aligned with the signal propagation path to achieve the maximum beamforming gain, acquisition of accurate channel knowledge, i.e., channel estimation, is of great importance. An aim of this paper is to propose a new type of deep learning (DL)-based parametric channel estimation technique. In our work, DL figures out the mapping function between the received pilot signal and the sparse channel parameters characterizing the spherical domain channel. By exploiting the long short-term memory (LSTM), we can efficiently extract the temporally correlated features of sparse channel parameters and thus make an accurate estimation with relatively small pilot overhead. From the numerical experiments, we show that the proposed scheme is effective in estimating the near-field THz MIMO channel in THz downlink environments.

Role of Sensing and Computer Vision in 6G Wireless Communications

Recently, we are witnessing the remarkable progress and widespread adoption of sensing technologies in autonomous driving, robotics, and metaverse. Considering the rapid advancement of computer vision (CV) technology to analyze the sensing information, we anticipate a proliferation of wireless applications exploiting the sensing and CV technologies in 6G. In this article, we provide a holistic overview of the sensing and CV-aided wireless communications (SVWC) framework for 6G. By analyzing the high-resolution sensing information through the powerful CV techniques, SVWC can quickly and accurately understand the wireless environments and then perform the wireless tasks. To demonstrate the efficacy of SVWC, we design the whole process of SVWC including the sensing dataset collection, DL model training, and execution of realistic wireless tasks. From the numerical evaluations on 6G communication scenarios, we show that SVWC achieves considerable performance gains over the conventional 5G systems in terms of positioning accuracy, data rate, and access latency.

Deep Learning-Assisted Parallel Interference Cancellation for Grant-Free NOMA in Machine-Type Communication

In this paper, we present a novel approach for joint activity detection (AD), channel estimation (CE), and data detection (DD) in uplink grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems. Our approach employs an iterative and parallel interference removal strategy inspired by parallel interference cancellation (PIC), enhanced with deep learning to jointly tackle the AD, CE, and DD problems. Based on this approach, we develop three PIC frameworks, each of which is designed for either coherent or non-coherence schemes. The first framework performs joint AD and CE using received pilot signals in the coherent scheme. Building upon this framework, the second framework utilizes both the received pilot and data signals for CE, further enhancing the performances of AD, CE, and DD in the coherent scheme. The third framework is designed to accommodate the non-coherent scheme involving a small number of data bits, which simultaneously performs AD and DD. Through joint loss functions and interference cancellation modules, our approach supports end-to-end training, contributing to enhanced performances of AD, CE, and DD for both coherent and non-coherent schemes. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over traditional techniques, exhibiting enhanced performances of AD, CE, and DD while maintaining lower computational complexity.

Expand-and-Quantize: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Using High-Dimensional Space and Product Quantization

Unsupervised semantic segmentation (USS) aims to discover and recognize meaningful categories without any labels. For a successful USS, two key abilities are required: 1) information compression and 2) clustering capability. Previous methods have relied on feature dimension reduction for information compression, however, this approach may hinder the process of clustering. In this paper, we propose a novel USS framework called Expand-and-Quantize Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation (EQUSS), which combines the benefits of high-dimensional spaces for better clustering and product quantization for effective information compression. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that EQUSS achieves state-of-the-art results on three standard benchmarks. In addition, we analyze the entropy of USS features, which is the first step towards understanding USS from the perspective of information theory.

Depth-Relative Self Attention for Monocular Depth Estimation

Monocular depth estimation is very challenging because clues to the exact depth are incomplete in a single RGB image. To overcome the limitation, deep neural networks rely on various visual hints such as size, shade, and texture extracted from RGB information. However, we observe that if such hints are overly exploited, the network can be biased on RGB information without considering the comprehensive view. We propose a novel depth estimation model named RElative Depth Transformer (RED-T) that uses relative depth as guidance in self-attention. Specifically, the model assigns high attention weights to pixels of close depth and low attention weights to pixels of distant depth. As a result, the features of similar depth can become more likely to each other and thus less prone to misused visual hints. We show that the proposed model achieves competitive results in monocular depth estimation benchmarks and is less biased to RGB information. In addition, we propose a novel monocular depth estimation benchmark that limits the observable depth range during training in order to evaluate the robustness of the model for unseen depths.

Semantic-Preserving Augmentation for Robust Image-Text Retrieval

Image text retrieval is a task to search for the proper textual descriptions of the visual world and vice versa. One challenge of this task is the vulnerability to input image and text corruptions. Such corruptions are often unobserved during the training, and degrade the retrieval model decision quality substantially. In this paper, we propose a novel image text retrieval technique, referred to as robust visual semantic embedding (RVSE), which consists of novel image-based and text-based augmentation techniques called semantic preserving augmentation for image (SPAugI) and text (SPAugT). Since SPAugI and SPAugT change the original data in a way that its semantic information is preserved, we enforce the feature extractors to generate semantic aware embedding vectors regardless of the corruption, improving the model robustness significantly. From extensive experiments using benchmark datasets, we show that RVSE outperforms conventional retrieval schemes in terms of image-text retrieval performance.

Beamforming Design with Partial Channel Estimation and Feedback for FDD RIS-Assisted Systems

Beamforming design with partial channel estimation and feedback for frequency-division duplexing (FDD) reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted systems is considered in this paper. We leverage the observation that path angle information (PAI) varies more slowly than path gain information (PGI). Then, several dominant paths are selected among all the cascaded paths according to the known PAI for maximizing the spectral efficiency of downlink data transmission. To acquire the dominating path gain information (DPGI, also regarded as the path gains of selected dominant paths) at the base station (BS), we propose a DPGI estimation and feedback scheme by jointly beamforming design at BS and RIS. Both the required number of downlink pilot signals and the length of uplink feedback vector are reduced to the number of dominant paths, and thus we achieve a great reduction of the pilot overhead and feedback overhead. Furthermore, we optimize the active BS beamformer and passive RIS beamformer by exploiting the feedback DPGI to further improve the spectral efficiency. From numerical results, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithms over the conventional schemes.

Vision Transformer-based Feature Extraction for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) is a technique to train a deep learning model to identify unseen classes using the image attribute. In this paper, we put forth a new GZSL approach exploiting Vision Transformer (ViT) to maximize the attribute-related information contained in the image feature. In ViT, the entire image region is processed without the degradation of the image resolution and the local image information is preserved in patch features. To fully enjoy these benefits of ViT, we exploit patch features as well as the CLS feature in extracting the attribute-related image feature. In particular, we propose a novel attention-based module, called attribute attention module (AAM), to aggregate the attribute-related information in patch features. In AAM, the correlation between each patch feature and the synthetic image attribute is used as the importance weight for each patch. From extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed technique outperforms the state-of-the-art GZSL approaches by a large margin.

Towards Intelligent Millimeter and Terahertz Communication for 6G: Computer Vision-aided Beamforming

Beamforming technique realized by the multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna arrays has been widely used to compensate for the severe path loss in the millimeter wave (mmWave) bands. In 5G NR system, the beam sweeping and beam refinement are employed to find out the best beam codeword aligned to the mobile. Due to the complicated handshaking and finite resolution of the codebook, today's 5G-based beam management strategy is ineffective in various scenarios in terms of the data rate, energy consumption, and also processing latency. An aim of this article is to introduce a new type of beam management framework based on the computer vision (CV) technique. In this framework referred to as computer vision-aided beam management (CVBM), a camera attached to the BS captures the image and then the deep learning-based object detector identifies the 3D location of the mobile. Since the base station can directly set the beam direction without codebook quantization and feedback delay, CVBM achieves the significant beamforming gain and latency reduction. Using the specially designed dataset called Vision Objects for Beam Management (VOBEM), we demonstrate that CVBM achieves more than 40% improvement in the beamforming gain and 40% reduction in the beam training overhead over the 5G NR beam management.

Towards Deep Learning-aided Wireless Channel Estimation and Channel State Information Feedback for 6G

Deep learning (DL), a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, has shown great promise in various disciplines such as image classification and segmentation, speech recognition, language translation, among others. This remarkable success of DL has stimulated increasing interest in applying this paradigm to wireless channel estimation in recent years. Since DL principles are inductive in nature and distinct from the conventional rule-based algorithms, when one tries to use DL technique to the channel estimation, one might easily get stuck and confused by so many knobs to control and small details to be aware of. The primary purpose of this paper is to discuss key issues and possible solutions in DL-based wireless channel estimation and channel state information (CSI) feedback including the DL model selection, training data acquisition, and neural network design for 6G. Specifically, we present several case studies together with the numerical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the DL-based wireless channel estimation framework.