Disentangled Cascaded Graph Convolution Networks for Multi-Behavior Recommendation

Multi-behavioral recommender systems have emerged as a solution to address data sparsity and cold-start issues by incorporating auxiliary behaviors alongside target behaviors. However, existing models struggle to accurately capture varying user preferences across different behaviors and fail to account for diverse item preferences within behaviors. Various user preference factors (such as price or quality) entangled in the behavior may lead to sub-optimization problems. Furthermore, these models overlook the personalized nature of user behavioral preferences by employing uniform transformation networks for all users and items. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Disentangled Cascaded Graph Convolutional Network (Disen-CGCN), a novel multi-behavior recommendation model. Disen-CGCN employs disentangled representation techniques to effectively separate factors within user and item representations, ensuring their independence. In addition, it incorporates a multi-behavioral meta-network, enabling personalized feature transformation across user and item behaviors. Furthermore, an attention mechanism captures user preferences for different item factors within each behavior. By leveraging attention weights, we aggregate user and item embeddings separately for each behavior, computing preference scores that predict overall user preferences for items. Our evaluation on benchmark datasets demonstrates the superiority of Disen-CGCN over state-of-the-art models, showcasing an average performance improvement of 7.07% and 9.00% on respective datasets. These results highlight Disen-CGCN's ability to effectively leverage multi-behavioral data, leading to more accurate recommendations.

Cluster-based Graph Collaborative Filtering

Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) have significantly succeeded in learning user and item representations for recommendation systems. The core of their efficacy is the ability to explicitly exploit the collaborative signals from both the first- and high-order neighboring nodes. However, most existing GCN-based methods overlook the multiple interests of users while performing high-order graph convolution. Thus, the noisy information from unreliable neighbor nodes (e.g., users with dissimilar interests) negatively impacts the representation learning of the target node. Additionally, conducting graph convolution operations without differentiating high-order neighbors suffers the over-smoothing issue when stacking more layers, resulting in performance degradation. In this paper, we aim to capture more valuable information from high-order neighboring nodes while avoiding noise for better representation learning of the target node. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel GCN-based recommendation model, termed Cluster-based Graph Collaborative Filtering (ClusterGCF). This model performs high-order graph convolution on cluster-specific graphs, which are constructed by capturing the multiple interests of users and identifying the common interests among them. Specifically, we design an unsupervised and optimizable soft node clustering approach to classify user and item nodes into multiple clusters. Based on the soft node clustering results and the topology of the user-item interaction graph, we assign the nodes with probabilities for different clusters to construct the cluster-specific graphs. To evaluate the effectiveness of ClusterGCF, we conducted extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can significantly improve recommendation performance.

Fundamental Limits of Communication-Assisted Sensing in ISAC Systems

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system stands out as a pivotal usage scenario of 6G. To explore the coordination gains offered by the ISAC technique, this paper introduces a novel communication-assisted sensing (CAS) system. The CAS system can endow users with beyond-line-of-sight sensing capability, wherein the base station with favorable visibility senses device-free targets, simultaneously transmitting the acquired sensory information to users. Within the CAS framework, we characterize the fundamental limits to reveal the achievable distortion between the state of the targets of interest and their reconstruction at the users' end. Finally, within the confines of this theoretical framework, we employ a typical application as an illustrative example to demonstrate the minimization of distortion through dual-functional waveform design, showcasing the potential of CAS in enhancing sensing capabilities.

Waveform Design for Joint Communication and SAR Imaging Under Random Signaling

Conventional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging systems typically employ deterministic signal designs, which lack the capability to convey communication information and are thus not suitable for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) scenarios. In this letter, we propose a joint communication and SAR imaging (JCASAR) system based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signal with cyclic prefix (CP), which is capable of reconstructing the target profile while serving a communication user. In contrast to traditional matched filters, we propose a least squares (LS) estimator for range profiling. Then the SAR image is obtained followed by range cell migration correction (RCMC) and azimuth processing. By minimizing the mean squared error (MSE) of the proposed LS estimator, we investigate the optimal waveform design for SAR imaging, and JCASAR under random signaling, where power allocation strategies are conceived for Gaussian-distributed ISAC signals, in an effort to strike a flexible performance tradeoff between the communication and SAR imaging tasks. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed ISAC waveform design for JCASAR systems.

Task-Based Quantizer Design for Sensing With Random Signals

In integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, random signaling is used to convey useful information as well as sense the environment. Such randomness poses challenges in various components in sensing signal processing. In this paper, we investigate quantizer design for sensing in ISAC systems. Unlike quantizers for channel estimation in massive multiple-input-multiple-out (MIMO) communication systems, sensing in ISAC systems needs to deal with random nonorthogonal transmitted signals rather than a fixed orthogonal pilot. Considering sensing performance and hardware implementation, we focus on task-based hardware-limited quantization with spatial analog combining. We propose two strategies of quantizer optimization, i.e., data-dependent (DD) and data-independent (DI). The former achieves optimized sensing performance with high implementation overhead. To reduce hardware complexity, the latter optimizes the quantizer with respect to the random signal from a stochastic perspective. We derive the optimal quantizers for both strategies and formulate an algorithm based on sample average approximation (SAA) to solve the optimization in the DI strategy. Numerical results show that the optimized quantizers outperform digital-only quantizers in terms of sensing performance. Additionally, the DI strategy, despite its lower computational complexity compared to the DD strategy, achieves near-optimal sensing performance.

Deep Cooperation in ISAC System: Resource, Node and Infrastructure Perspectives

With the mobile communication system evolving into 6th-generation (6G), the Internet of Everything (IoE) is becoming reality, which connects human, big data and intelligent machines to support the intelligent decision making, reconfiguring the traditional industries and human life. The applications of IoE require not only pure communication capability, but also high-accuracy and large-scale sensing capability. With the emerging integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technique, exploiting the mobile communication system with multi-domain resources, multiple network elements, and large-scale infrastructures to realize cooperative sensing is a crucial approach to satisfy the requirements of high-accuracy and large-scale sensing in IoE. In this article, the deep cooperation in ISAC system including three perspectives is investigated. In the microscopic perspective, namely, within a single node, the cooperation at the resource-level is performed to improve sensing accuracy by fusing the sensing information carried in the time-frequency-space-code multi-domain resources. In the mesoscopic perspective, the sensing accuracy could be improved through the cooperation of multiple nodes including Base Station (BS), User Equipment (UE), and Reconfigurable Intelligence Surface (RIS), etc. In the macroscopic perspective, the massive number of infrastructures from the same operator or different operators could perform cooperative sensing to extend the sensing coverage and improve the sensing continuity. This article may provide a deep and comprehensive view on the cooperative sensing in ISAC system to enhance the performance of sensing, supporting the applications of IoE.

AI-enabled STAR-RIS aided MISO ISAC Secure Communications

A simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) aided integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) dual-secure communication system is studied in this paper. The sensed target and legitimate users (LUs) are situated on the opposite sides of the STAR-RIS, and the energy splitting and time switching protocols are applied in the STAR-RIS, respectively. The long-term average security rate for LUs is maximized by the joint design of the base station (BS) transmit beamforming and receive filter, along with the STAR-RIS transmitting and reflecting coefficients, under guarantying the echo signal-to-noise ratio thresholds and rate constraints for the LUs. Since the channel information changes over time, conventional convex optimization techniques cannot provide the optimal performance for the system, and result in excessively high computational complexity in the exploration of the long-term gains for the system. Taking continuity control decisions into account, the deep deterministic policy gradient and soft actor-critic algorithms based on off-policy are applied to address the complex non-convex problem. Simulation results comprehensively evaluate the performance of the proposed two reinforcement learning algorithms and demonstrate that STAR-RIS is remarkably better than the two benchmarks in the ISAC system.

Sensing Mutual Information with Random Signals in Gaussian Channels: Bridging Sensing and Communication Metrics

Sensing performance is typically evaluated by classical radar metrics, such as Cramer-Rao bound and signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio. The recent development of the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework motivated the efforts to unify the performance metric for sensing and communication, where mutual information (MI) was proposed as a sensing performance metric with deterministic signals. However, the need of communication in ISAC systems necessitates the transmission of random signals for sensing applications, whereas an explicit evaluation for the sensing mutual information (SMI) with random signals is not yet available in the literature. This paper aims to fill the research gap and investigate the unification of sensing and communication performance metrics. For that purpose, we first derive the explicit expression for the SMI with random signals utilizing random matrix theory. On top of that, we further build up the connections between SMI and traditional sensing metrics, such as ergodic minimum mean square error (EMMSE), ergodic linear minimum mean square error (ELMMSE), and ergodic Bayesian Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound (EBCRB). Such connections open up the opportunity to unify sensing and communication performance metrics, which facilitates the analysis and design for ISAC systems. Finally, SMI is utilized to optimize the precoder for both sensing-only and ISAC applications. Simulation results validate the accuracy of the theoretical results and the effectiveness of the proposed precoding designs.

Secure ISAC MIMO Systems: Exploiting Interference With Bayesian Cramér-Rao Bound Optimization

In this paper, we present a signaling design for secure integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems comprising a dual-functional multi-input multi-output (MIMO) base station (BS) that simultaneously communicates with multiple users while detecting targets present in their vicinity, which are regarded as potential eavesdroppers. In particular, assuming that the distribution of each parameter to be estimated is known \textit{a priori}, we focus on optimizing the targets' sensing performance. To this end, we derive and minimize the Bayesian Cram\'er-Rao bound (BCRB), while ensuring certain communication quality of service (QoS) by exploiting constructive interference (CI). The latter scheme enforces that the received signals at the eavesdropping targets fall into the destructive region of the signal constellation, to deteriorate their decoding probability, thus enhancing the ISAC's system physical-layer security (PLS) capability. To tackle the nonconvexity of the formulated problem, a tailored successive convex approximation method is proposed for its efficient solution. Our extensive numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed secure ISAC design showing that the proposed algorithm outperforms block-level precoding techniques.

Few-shot Adaptation of Multi-modal Foundation Models: A Survey

Multi-modal (vision-language) models, such as CLIP, are replacing traditional supervised pre-training models (e.g., ImageNet-based pre-training) as the new generation of visual foundation models. These models with robust and aligned semantic representations learned from billions of internet image-text pairs and can be applied to various downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. However, in some fine-grained domains like medical imaging and remote sensing, the performance of multi-modal foundation models often leaves much to be desired. Consequently, many researchers have begun to explore few-shot adaptation methods for these models, gradually deriving three main technical approaches: 1) prompt-based methods, 2) adapter-based methods, and 3) external knowledge-based methods. Nevertheless, this rapidly developing field has produced numerous results without a comprehensive survey to systematically organize the research progress. Therefore, in this survey, we introduce and analyze the research advancements in few-shot adaptation methods for multi-modal models, summarizing commonly used datasets and experimental setups, and comparing the results of different methods. In addition, due to the lack of reliable theoretical support for existing methods, we derive the few-shot adaptation generalization error bound for multi-modal models. The theorem reveals that the generalization error of multi-modal foundation models is constrained by three factors: domain gap, model capacity, and sample size. Based on this, we propose three possible solutions from the following aspects: 1) adaptive domain generalization, 2) adaptive model selection, and 3) adaptive knowledge utilization.