AntM$^{2}$C: A Large Scale Dataset For Multi-Scenario Multi-Modal CTR Prediction

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial issue in recommendation systems. There has been an emergence of various public CTR datasets. However, existing datasets primarily suffer from the following limitations. Firstly, users generally click different types of items from multiple scenarios, and modeling from multiple scenarios can provide a more comprehensive understanding of users. Existing datasets only include data for the same type of items from a single scenario. Secondly, multi-modal features are essential in multi-scenario prediction as they address the issue of inconsistent ID encoding between different scenarios. The existing datasets are based on ID features and lack multi-modal features. Third, a large-scale dataset can provide a more reliable evaluation of models, fully reflecting the performance differences between models. The scale of existing datasets is around 100 million, which is relatively small compared to the real-world CTR prediction. To address these limitations, we propose AntM$^{2}$C, a Multi-Scenario Multi-Modal CTR dataset based on industrial data from Alipay. Specifically, AntM$^{2}$C provides the following advantages: 1) It covers CTR data of 5 different types of items, providing insights into the preferences of users for different items, including advertisements, vouchers, mini-programs, contents, and videos. 2) Apart from ID-based features, AntM$^{2}$C also provides 2 multi-modal features, raw text and image features, which can effectively establish connections between items with different IDs. 3) AntM$^{2}$C provides 1 billion CTR data with 200 features, including 200 million users and 6 million items. It is currently the largest-scale CTR dataset available. Based on AntM$^{2}$C, we construct several typical CTR tasks and provide comparisons with baseline methods. The dataset homepage is available at https://www.atecup.cn/home.

Block-Level Interference Exploitation Precoding for MU-MISO: An ADMM Approach

We study constructive interference based block-level precoding (CI-BLP) in the downlink of multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems. Specifically, our aim is to extend the analysis on CI-BLP to the case where the considered number of symbol slots is smaller than that of the users. To this end, we mathematically prove the feasibility of using the pseudo-inverse to obtain the optimal CI-BLP precoding matrix in a closed form. Similar to the case when the number of users is small, we show that a quadratic programming (QP) optimization on simplex can be constructed. We also design a low-complexity algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework, which can efficiently solve large-scale QP problems. We further analyze the convergence and complexity of the proposed algorithm. Numerical results validate our analysis and the optimality of the proposed algorithm, and further show that the proposed algorithm offers a flexible performance-complexity tradeoff by limiting the maximum number of iterations, which motivates the use of CI-BLP in practical wireless systems.

AutoReP: Automatic ReLU Replacement for Fast Private Network Inference

The growth of the Machine-Learning-As-A-Service (MLaaS) market has highlighted clients' data privacy and security issues. Private inference (PI) techniques using cryptographic primitives offer a solution but often have high computation and communication costs, particularly with non-linear operators like ReLU. Many attempts to reduce ReLU operations exist, but they may need heuristic threshold selection or cause substantial accuracy loss. This work introduces AutoReP, a gradient-based approach to lessen non-linear operators and alleviate these issues. It automates the selection of ReLU and polynomial functions to speed up PI applications and introduces distribution-aware polynomial approximation (DaPa) to maintain model expressivity while accurately approximating ReLUs. Our experimental results demonstrate significant accuracy improvements of 6.12% (94.31%, 12.9K ReLU budget, CIFAR-10), 8.39% (74.92%, 12.9K ReLU budget, CIFAR-100), and 9.45% (63.69%, 55K ReLU budget, Tiny-ImageNet) over current state-of-the-art methods, e.g., SNL. Morever, AutoReP is applied to EfficientNet-B2 on ImageNet dataset, and achieved 75.55% accuracy with 176.1 times ReLU budget reduction.

Symbol-Level Precoding for MU-MIMO System with RIRC Receiver

Consider a multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) downlink system in which the base station (BS) sends multiple data streams to multi-antenna users via symbol-level precoding (SLP), where the optimization of receive combining matrix becomes crucial, unlike in the single-antenna user scenario. We begin by introducing a joint optimization problem on the symbol-level transmit precoder and receive combiner. The problem is solved using the alternating optimization (AO) method, and the optimal solution structures for transmit precoding and receive combining matrices are derived by using Lagrangian and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions, based on which, the original problem is transformed into an equivalent quadratic programming problem, enabling more efficient solutions. To address the challenge that the above joint design is difficult to implement, we propose a more practical scheme where the receive combining optimization is replaced by the interference rejection combiner (IRC), which is however difficult to directly use because of the rank-one transmit precoding matrix. Therefore, we introduce a new regularized IRC (RIRC) receiver to circumvent the above issue. Numerical results demonstrate that the practical SLP-RIRC method enjoys only a slight communication performance loss compared to the joint transmit precoding and receive combining design, both offering substantial performance gains over the conventional BD-based approaches.

A Novel Spatial-Temporal Variational Quantum Circuit to Enable Deep Learning on NISQ Devices

Quantum computing presents a promising approach for machine learning with its capability for extremely parallel computation in high-dimension through superposition and entanglement. Despite its potential, existing quantum learning algorithms, such as Variational Quantum Circuits(VQCs), face challenges in handling more complex datasets, particularly those that are not linearly separable. What's more, it encounters the deployability issue, making the learning models suffer a drastic accuracy drop after deploying them to the actual quantum devices. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a novel spatial-temporal design, namely ST-VQC, to integrate non-linearity in quantum learning and improve the robustness of the learning model to noise. Specifically, ST-VQC can extract spatial features via a novel block-based encoding quantum sub-circuit coupled with a layer-wise computation quantum sub-circuit to enable temporal-wise deep learning. Additionally, a SWAP-Free physical circuit design is devised to improve robustness. These designs bring a number of hyperparameters. After a systematic analysis of the design space for each design component, an automated optimization framework is proposed to generate the ST-VQC quantum circuit. The proposed ST-VQC has been evaluated on two IBM quantum processors, ibm_cairo with 27 qubits and ibmq_lima with 7 qubits to assess its effectiveness. The results of the evaluation on the standard dataset for binary classification show that ST-VQC can achieve over 30% accuracy improvement compared with existing VQCs on actual quantum computers. Moreover, on a non-linear synthetic dataset, the ST-VQC outperforms a linear classifier by 27.9%, while the linear classifier using classical computing outperforms the existing VQC by 15.58%.

Faster-Than-Nyquist Symbol-Level Precoding for Wideband Integrated Sensing and Communications

In this paper, we present an innovative symbol-level precoding (SLP) approach for a wideband multi-user multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO) downlink Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) system employing faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling. Our proposed technique minimizes the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) for the sensed parameter estimation while ensuring the communication per-user quality-of-service through the utilization of constructive interference (CI) methodologies. While the formulated problem is non-convex in general, we tackle this issue using proficient minorization and successive convex approximation (SCA) strategies. Numerical results substantiate that our FTN-ISAC-SLP framework significantly enhances communication throughput while preserving satisfactory sensing performance.

Style Transfer Enabled Sim2Real Framework for Efficient Learning of Robotic Ultrasound Image Analysis Using Simulated Data

Robotic ultrasound (US) systems have shown great potential to make US examinations easier and more accurate. Recently, various machine learning techniques have been proposed to realize automatic US image interpretation for robotic US acquisition tasks. However, obtaining large amounts of real US imaging data for training is usually expensive or even unfeasible in some clinical applications. An alternative is to build a simulator to generate synthetic US data for training, but the differences between simulated and real US images may result in poor model performance. This work presents a Sim2Real framework to efficiently learn robotic US image analysis tasks based only on simulated data for real-world deployment. A style transfer module is proposed based on unsupervised contrastive learning and used as a preprocessing step to convert the real US images into the simulation style. Thereafter, a task-relevant model is designed to combine CNNs with vision transformers to generate the task-dependent prediction with improved generalization ability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in an image regression task to predict the probe position based on US images in robotic transesophageal echocardiography (TEE). Our results show that using only simulated US data and a small amount of unlabelled real data for training, our method can achieve comparable performance to semi-supervised and fully supervised learning methods. Moreover, the effectiveness of our previously proposed CT-based US image simulation method is also indirectly confirmed.

BitGNN: Unleashing the Performance Potential of Binary Graph Neural Networks on GPUs

Recent studies have shown that Binary Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are promising for saving computations of GNNs through binarized tensors. Prior work, however, mainly focused on algorithm designs or training techniques, leaving it open to how to materialize the performance potential on accelerator hardware fully. This work redesigns the binary GNN inference backend from the efficiency perspective. It fills the gap by proposing a series of abstractions and techniques to map binary GNNs and their computations best to fit the nature of bit manipulations on GPUs. Results on real-world graphs with GCNs, GraphSAGE, and GraphSAINT show that the proposed techniques outperform state-of-the-art binary GNN implementations by 8-22X with the same accuracy maintained. BitGNN code is publicly available.

Machine Learning Automated Approach for Enormous Synchrotron X-Ray Diffraction Data Interpretation

Manual analysis of XRD data is usually laborious and time consuming. The deep neural network (DNN) based models trained by synthetic XRD patterns are proved to be an automatic, accurate, and high throughput method to analysis common XRD data collected from solid sample in ambient environment. However, it remains unknown that whether synthetic XRD based models are capable to solve u-XRD mapping data for in-situ experiments involving liquid phase exhibiting lower quality with significant artifacts. In this study, we collected u-XRD mapping data from an LaCl3-calcite hydrothermal fluid system and trained two categories of models to solve the experimental XRD patterns. The models trained by synthetic XRD patterns show low accuracy (as low as 64%) when solving experimental u-XRD mapping data. The accuracy of the DNN models was significantly improved (90% or above) when training them with the dataset containing both synthetic and small number of labeled experimental u-XRD patterns. This study highlighted the importance of labeled experimental patterns on the training of DNN models to solve u-XRD mapping data from in-situ experiments involving liquid phase.

Deep Learning-Based Channel Extrapolation for Pattern Reconfigurable Massive MIMO

Antennas that can dynamically change the operation state exhibit excellent adaptivity and flexibility over traditional antennas, and MIMO arrays that consist of Multifunctional and reconfigurable antennas (MRAs) are foreseen as one promising solution towards future Holographic MIMO. Specifically, in pattern reconfigurable MIMO (PR-MIMO) communication systems, accurate acquisition of channel state information (CSI) of all the radiation modes is a challenging task, because using conventional pilot-based channel estimation techniques in PR-MIMO systems incurs overwhelming pilot overheads. In this letter, we leverage deep learning methods to design a PR neural network, which can use the estimated CSI for one radiation mode to infer CSIs for the other radiation modes. In order to reduce the pilot overheads, we propose a new channel estimation method specially for PR-MIMO systems which divides the transmit antennas of PR-MIMO into groups, where antennas in different groups employ different radiation modes. Comparing with conventional full connected deep neural networks (FNN), the PR neural network which uses complex weight coefficients can work directly in the complex domain. Experiment results show that the proposed channel extrapolation method offers significant performance gains in terms of prediction accuracy over benchmark schemes.