Leveraging Deep Learning and Digital Twins to Improve Energy Performance of Buildings

Digital transformation in buildings accumulates massive operational data, which calls for smart solutions to utilize these data to improve energy performance. This study has proposed a solution, namely Deep Energy Twin, for integrating deep learning and digital twins to better understand building energy use and identify the potential for improving energy efficiency. Ontology was adopted to create parametric digital twins to provide consistency of data format across different systems in a building. Based on created digital twins and collected data, deep learning methods were used for performing data analytics to identify patterns and provide insights for energy optimization. As a demonstration, a case study was conducted in a public historic building in Norrk\"oping, Sweden, to compare the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning architectures in building energy forecasting.

An Overview of Resource Allocation in Integrated Sensing and Communication

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is considered as a promising solution for improving spectrum efficiency and relieving wireless spectrum congestion. This paper systematically introduces the evolutionary path of ISAC technologies, then sorts out and summarizes the current research status of ISAC resource allocation. From the perspective of different integrated levels of ISAC, we introduce and elaborate the research progress of resource allocation in different stages, namely, resource separated, orthogonal, converged, and collaborative stages. In addition, we give in-depth consideration to propose a new resource allocation framework from a multi-granularity perspective. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed framework with a case of full-duplex ISAC system.

Cross or Wait? Predicting Pedestrian Interaction Outcomes at Unsignalized Crossings

Predicting pedestrian behavior when interacting with vehicles is one of the most critical challenges in the field of automated driving. Pedestrian crossing behavior is influenced by various interaction factors, including time to arrival, pedestrian waiting time, the presence of zebra crossing, and the properties and personality traits of both pedestrians and drivers. However, these factors have not been fully explored for use in predicting interaction outcomes. In this paper, we use machine learning to predict pedestrian crossing behavior including pedestrian crossing decision, crossing initiation time (CIT), and crossing duration (CD) when interacting with vehicles at unsignalized crossings. Distributed simulator data are utilized for predicting and analyzing the interaction factors. Compared with the logistic regression baseline model, our proposed neural network model improves the prediction accuracy and F1 score by 4.46% and 3.23%, respectively. Our model also reduces the root mean squared error (RMSE) for CIT and CD by 21.56% and 30.14% compared with the linear regression model. Additionally, we have analyzed the importance of interaction factors, and present the results of models using fewer factors. This provides information for model selection in different scenarios with limited input features.

Deep Learning Based Joint Beamforming Design in IRS-Assisted Secure Communications

In this article, physical layer security (PLS) in an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted multiple-input multiple-output multiple antenna eavesdropper (MIMOME) system is studied. In particular, we consider a practical scenario without instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropper and assume that the eavesdropping channel is a Rayleigh channel. To reduce the complexity of currently available IRS-assisted PLS schemes, we propose a low-complexity deep learning (DL) based approach to design transmitter beamforming and IRS jointly, where the precoding vector and phase shift matrix are designed to minimize the secrecy outage probability. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DL-based approach can achieve a similar performance of that with conventional alternating optimization (AO) algorithms for a significant reduction in the computational complexity.

Model-Agnostic Reachability Analysis on Deep Neural Networks

Verification plays an essential role in the formal analysis of safety-critical systems. Most current verification methods have specific requirements when working on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). They either target one particular network category, e.g., Feedforward Neural Networks (FNNs), or networks with specific activation functions, e.g., RdLU. In this paper, we develop a model-agnostic verification framework, called DeepAgn, and show that it can be applied to FNNs, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), or a mixture of both. Under the assumption of Lipschitz continuity, DeepAgn analyses the reachability of DNNs based on a novel optimisation scheme with a global convergence guarantee. It does not require access to the network's internal structures, such as layers and parameters. Through reachability analysis, DeepAgn can tackle several well-known robustness problems, including computing the maximum safe radius for a given input, and generating the ground-truth adversarial examples. We also empirically demonstrate DeepAgn's superior capability and efficiency in handling a broader class of deep neural networks, including both FNNs, and RNNs with very deep layers and millions of neurons, than other state-of-the-art verification approaches.

Plan4MC: Skill Reinforcement Learning and Planning for Open-World Minecraft Tasks

We study building a multi-task agent in Minecraft. Without human demonstrations, solving long-horizon tasks in this open-ended environment with reinforcement learning (RL) is extremely sample inefficient. To tackle the challenge, we decompose solving Minecraft tasks into learning basic skills and planning over the skills. We propose three types of fine-grained basic skills in Minecraft, and use RL with intrinsic rewards to accomplish basic skills with high success rates. For skill planning, we use Large Language Models to find the relationships between skills and build a skill graph in advance. When the agent is solving a task, our skill search algorithm walks on the skill graph and generates the proper skill plans for the agent. In experiments, our method accomplishes 24 diverse Minecraft tasks, where many tasks require sequentially executing for more than 10 skills. Our method outperforms baselines in most tasks by a large margin. The project's website and code can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/plan4mc.

Cyclic Delay-Doppler Shift: A Simple Transmit Diversity Technique for Delay-Doppler Waveforms in Doubly Selective Channels

Delay-Doppler waveform design has been considered as a promising solution to achieve reliable communication under high-mobility channels for the space-air-ground-integrated networks (SAGIN). In this paper, we introduce the cyclic delay-Doppler shift (CDDS) technique for delay-Doppler waveforms to extract transmit diversity in doubly selective channels. Two simple CDDS schemes, named time-domain CDDS (TD-CDDS) and modulation-domain CDDS (MD-CDDS), are proposed in the setting of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). We demonstrate the applications of CDDS on two representative delay-Doppler waveforms, namely orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) and affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM), by deriving their corresponding CDDS matrices. Furthermore, we prove theoretically and experimentally that CDDS can provide OTFS and AFDM with full transmit diversity gain on most occasions.

Denoising and Prompt-Tuning for Multi-Behavior Recommendation

In practical recommendation scenarios, users often interact with items under multi-typed behaviors (e.g., click, add-to-cart, and purchase). Traditional collaborative filtering techniques typically assume that users only have a single type of behavior with items, making it insufficient to utilize complex collaborative signals to learn informative representations and infer actual user preferences. Consequently, some pioneer studies explore modeling multi-behavior heterogeneity to learn better representations and boost the performance of recommendations for a target behavior. However, a large number of auxiliary behaviors (i.e., click and add-to-cart) could introduce irrelevant information to recommenders, which could mislead the target behavior (i.e., purchase) recommendation, rendering two critical challenges: (i) denoising auxiliary behaviors and (ii) bridging the semantic gap between auxiliary and target behaviors. Motivated by the above observation, we propose a novel framework-Denoising and Prompt-Tuning (DPT) with a three-stage learning paradigm to solve the aforementioned challenges. In particular, DPT is equipped with a pattern-enhanced graph encoder in the first stage to learn complex patterns as prior knowledge in a data-driven manner to guide learning informative representation and pinpointing reliable noise for subsequent stages. Accordingly, we adopt different lightweight tuning approaches with effectiveness and efficiency in the following stages to further attenuate the influence of noise and alleviate the semantic gap among multi-typed behaviors. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of DPT over a wide range of state-of-the-art methods. The implementation code is available online at https://github.com/zc-97/DPT.

XFL: A High Performace, Lightweighted Federated Learning Framework

This paper introduces XFL, an industrial-grade federated learning project. XFL supports training AI models collaboratively on multiple devices, while utilizes homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, secure multi-party computation and other security technologies ensuring no leakage of data. XFL provides an abundant algorithms library, integrating a large number of pre-built, secure and outstanding federated learning algorithms, covering both the horizontally and vertically federated learning scenarios. Numerical experiments have shown the prominent performace of these algorithms. XFL builds a concise configuration interfaces with presettings for all federation algorithms, and supports the rapid deployment via docker containers.Therefore, we believe XFL is the most user-friendly and easy-to-develop federated learning framework. XFL is open-sourced, and both the code and documents are available at https://github.com/paritybit-ai/XFL.