RACER: An LLM-powered Methodology for Scalable Analysis of Semi-structured Mental Health Interviews

Semi-structured interviews (SSIs) are a commonly employed data-collection method in healthcare research, offering in-depth qualitative insights into subject experiences. Despite their value, the manual analysis of SSIs is notoriously time-consuming and labor-intensive, in part due to the difficulty of extracting and categorizing emotional responses, and challenges in scaling human evaluation for large populations. In this study, we develop RACER, a Large Language Model (LLM) based expert-guided automated pipeline that efficiently converts raw interview transcripts into insightful domain-relevant themes and sub-themes. We used RACER to analyze SSIs conducted with 93 healthcare professionals and trainees to assess the broad personal and professional mental health impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. RACER achieves moderately high agreement with two human evaluators (72%), which approaches the human inter-rater agreement (77%). Interestingly, LLMs and humans struggle with similar content involving nuanced emotional, ambivalent/dialectical, and psychological statements. Our study highlights the opportunities and challenges in using LLMs to improve research efficiency and opens new avenues for scalable analysis of SSIs in healthcare research.

ML-Based Feedback-Free Adaptive MCS Selection for Massive Multi-User MIMO

As wireless communication systems strive to improve spectral efficiency, there has been a growing interest in employing machine learning (ML)-based approaches for adaptive modulation and coding scheme (MCS) selection. In this paper, we introduce a new adaptive MCS selection framework for massive MIMO systems that operates without any feedback from users by solely relying on instantaneous uplink channel estimates. Our proposed method can effectively operate in multi-user scenarios where user feedback imposes excessive delay and bandwidth overhead. To learn the mapping between the user channel matrices and the optimal MCS level of each user, we develop a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM)-based model and compare the performance with the state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our algorithm by evaluating it experimentally using real-world datasets collected from the RENEW massive MIMO platform.

Solving Linear Inverse Problems using Higher-Order Annealed Langevin Diffusion

We propose a solution for linear inverse problems based on higher-order Langevin diffusion. More precisely, we propose pre-conditioned second-order and third-order Langevin dynamics that provably sample from the posterior distribution of our unknown variables of interest while being computationally more efficient than their first-order counterpart and the non-conditioned versions of both dynamics. Moreover, we prove that both pre-conditioned dynamics are well-defined and have the same unique invariant distributions as the non-conditioned cases. We also incorporate an annealing procedure that has the double benefit of further accelerating the convergence of the algorithm and allowing us to accommodate the case where the unknown variables are discrete. Numerical experiments in two different tasks (MIMO symbol detection and channel estimation) showcase the generality of our method and illustrate the high performance achieved relative to competing approaches (including learning-based ones) while having comparable or lower computational complexity.

Full-Duplex Wireless for 6G: Progress Brings New Opportunities and Challenges

The use of in-band full-duplex (FD) enables nodes to simultaneously transmit and receive on the same frequency band, which challenges the traditional assumption in wireless network design. The full-duplex capability enhances spectral efficiency and decreases latency, which are two key drivers pushing the performance expectations of next-generation mobile networks. In less than ten years, in-band FD has advanced from being demonstrated in research labs to being implemented in standards, presenting new opportunities to utilize its foundational concepts. Some of the most significant opportunities include using FD to enable wireless networks to sense the physical environment, integrate sensing and communication applications, develop integrated access and backhaul solutions, and work with smart signal propagation environments powered by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. However, these new opportunities also come with new challenges for large-scale commercial deployment of FD technology, such as managing self-interference, combating cross-link interference in multi-cell networks, and coexistence of dynamic time division duplex, subband FD and FD networks.

ERSAM: Neural Architecture Search For Energy-Efficient and Real-Time Social Ambiance Measurement

Social ambiance describes the context in which social interactions happen, and can be measured using speech audio by counting the number of concurrent speakers. This measurement has enabled various mental health tracking and human-centric IoT applications. While on-device Socal Ambiance Measure (SAM) is highly desirable to ensure user privacy and thus facilitate wide adoption of the aforementioned applications, the required computational complexity of state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) powered SAM solutions stands at odds with the often constrained resources on mobile devices. Furthermore, only limited labeled data is available or practical when it comes to SAM under clinical settings due to various privacy constraints and the required human effort, further challenging the achievable accuracy of on-device SAM solutions. To this end, we propose a dedicated neural architecture search framework for Energy-efficient and Real-time SAM (ERSAM). Specifically, our ERSAM framework can automatically search for DNNs that push forward the achievable accuracy vs. hardware efficiency frontier of mobile SAM solutions. For example, ERSAM-delivered DNNs only consume 40 mW x 12 h energy and 0.05 seconds processing latency for a 5 seconds audio segment on a Pixel 3 phone, while only achieving an error rate of 14.3% on a social ambiance dataset generated by LibriSpeech. We can expect that our ERSAM framework can pave the way for ubiquitous on-device SAM solutions which are in growing demand.

Accelerated massive MIMO detector based on annealed underdamped Langevin dynamics

We propose a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detector based on an annealed version of the \emph{underdamped} Langevin (stochastic) dynamic. Our detector achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of symbol error rate (SER) while keeping the computational complexity in check. Indeed, our method can be easily tuned to strike the right balance between computational complexity and performance as required by the application at hand. This balance is achieved by tuning hyperparameters that control the length of the simulated Langevin dynamic. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our detector yields lower SER than competing approaches (including learning-based ones) with a lower running time compared to a previously proposed \emph{overdamped} Langevin-based MIMO detector.

Dyadic Interaction Assessment from Free-living Audio for Depression Severity Assessment

Psychomotor retardation in depression has been associated with speech timing changes from dyadic clinical interviews. In this work, we investigate speech timing features from free-living dyadic interactions. Apart from the possibility of continuous monitoring to complement clinical visits, a study in free-living conditions would also allow inferring sociability features such as dyadic interaction frequency implicated in depression. We adapted a speaker count estimator as a dyadic interaction detector with a specificity of 89.5% and a sensitivity of 86.1% in the DIHARD dataset. Using the detector, we obtained speech timing features from the detected dyadic interactions in multi-day audio recordings of 32 participants comprised of 13 healthy individuals, 11 individuals with depression, and 8 individuals with psychotic disorders. The dyadic interaction frequency increased with depression severity in participants with no or mild depression, indicating a potential diagnostic marker of depression onset. However, the dyadic interaction frequency decreased with increasing depression severity for participants with moderate or severe depression. In terms of speech timing features, the response time had a significant positive correlation with depression severity. Our work shows the potential of dyadic interaction analysis from audio recordings of free-living to obtain markers of depression severity.