TREET: TRansfer Entropy Estimation via Transformer

Transfer entropy (TE) is a measurement in information theory that reveals the directional flow of information between processes, providing valuable insights for a wide range of real-world applications. This work proposes Transfer Entropy Estimation via Transformers (TREET), a novel transformer-based approach for estimating the TE for stationary processes. The proposed approach employs Donsker-Vardhan (DV) representation to TE and leverages the attention mechanism for the task of neural estimation. We propose a detailed theoretical and empirical study of the TREET, comparing it to existing methods. To increase its applicability, we design an estimated TE optimization scheme that is motivated by the functional representation lemma. Afterwards, we take advantage of the joint optimization scheme to optimize the capacity of communication channels with memory, which is a canonical optimization problem in information theory, and show the memory capabilities of our estimator. Finally, we apply TREET to real-world feature analysis. Our work, applied with state-of-the-art deep learning methods, opens a new door for communication problems which are yet to be solved.

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Network Routing in Integrated Access Backhaul Networks

We investigate the problem of wireless routing in integrated access backhaul (IAB) networks consisting of fiber-connected and wireless base stations and multiple users. The physical constraints of these networks prevent the use of a central controller, and base stations have limited access to real-time network conditions. We aim to maximize packet arrival ratio while minimizing their latency, for this purpose, we formulate the problem as a multi-agent partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP). To solve this problem, we develop a Relational Advantage Actor Critic (Relational A2C) algorithm that uses Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) and information about similar destinations to derive a joint routing policy on a distributed basis. We present three training paradigms for this algorithm and demonstrate its ability to achieve near-centralized performance. Our results show that Relational A2C outperforms other reinforcement learning algorithms, leading to increased network efficiency and reduced selfish agent behavior. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to optimize routing strategy for IAB networks.

Data-Driven Optimization of Directed Information over Discrete Alphabets

Directed information (DI) is a fundamental measure for the study and analysis of sequential stochastic models. In particular, when optimized over input distributions it characterizes the capacity of general communication channels. However, analytic computation of DI is typically intractable and existing optimization techniques over discrete input alphabets require knowledge of the channel model, which renders them inapplicable when only samples are available. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel estimation-optimization framework for DI over discrete input spaces. We formulate DI optimization as a Markov decision process and leverage reinforcement learning techniques to optimize a deep generative model of the input process probability mass function (PMF). Combining this optimizer with the recently developed DI neural estimator, we obtain an end-to-end estimation-optimization algorithm which is applied to estimating the (feedforward and feedback) capacity of various discrete channels with memory. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to use the optimized PMF model to (i) obtain theoretical bounds on the feedback capacity of unifilar finite-state channels; and (ii) perform probabilistic shaping of constellations in the peak power-constrained additive white Gaussian noise channel.

A Study On Data Augmentation In Voice Anti-Spoofing

In this paper, we perform an in-depth study of how data augmentation techniques improve synthetic or spoofed audio detection. Specifically, we propose methods to deal with channel variability, different audio compressions, different band-widths, and unseen spoofing attacks, which have all been shown to significantly degrade the performance of audio-based systems and Anti-Spoofing systems. Our results are based on the ASVspoof 2021 challenge, in the Logical Access (LA) and Deep Fake (DF) categories. Our study is Data-Centric, meaning that the models are fixed and we significantly improve the results by making changes in the data. We introduce two forms of data augmentation - compression augmentation for the DF part, compression & channel augmentation for the LA part. In addition, a new type of online data augmentation, SpecAverage, is introduced in which the audio features are masked with their average value in order to improve generalization. Furthermore, we introduce a Log spectrogram feature design that improved the results. Our best single system and fusion scheme both achieve state-of-the-art performance in the DF category, with an EER of 15.46% and 14.46% respectively. Our best system for the LA task reduced the best baseline EER by 50% and the min t-DCF by 16%. Our techniques to deal with spoofed data from a wide variety of distributions can be replicated and can help anti-spoofing and speech-based systems enhance their results.

A Study on MIMO Channel Estimation by 2D and 3D Convolutional Neural Networks

In this paper, we study the usage of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) estimators for the task of Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) Channel Estimation (CE). Specifically, the CNN estimators interpolate the channel values of reference signals for estimating the channel of the full OFDM resource element (RE) matrix. We have designed a 2D CNN architecture based on U-net, and a 3D CNN architecture for handling spatial correlation. We investigate the performance of various CNN architectures fora diverse data set generated according to the 5G NR standard and in particular, we investigate the influence of spatial correlation, Doppler, and reference signal resource allocation. The CE CNN estimators are then integrated with MIMO detection algorithms for testing their influence on the system level Bit Error Rate(BER) performance.

Amended Cross Entropy Cost: Framework For Explicit Diversity Encouragement

Cross Entropy (CE) has an important role in machine learning and, in particular, in neural networks. It is commonly used in neural networks as the cost between the known distribution of the label and the Softmax/Sigmoid output. In this paper we present a new cost function called the Amended Cross Entropy (ACE). Its novelty lies in its affording the capability to train multiple classifiers while explicitly controlling the diversity between them. We derived the new cost by mathematical analysis and "reverse engineering" of the way we wish the gradients to behave, and produced a tailor-made, elegant and intuitive cost function to achieve the desired result. This process is similar to the way that CE cost is picked as a cost function for the Softmax/Sigmoid classifiers for obtaining linear derivatives. By choosing the optimal diversity factor we produce an ensemble which yields better results than the vanilla one. We demonstrate two potential usages of this outcome, and present empirical results. Our method works for classification problems analogously to Negative Correlation Learning (NCL) for regression problems.

Highway State Gating for Recurrent Highway Networks: improving information flow through time

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) play a major role in the field of sequential learning, and have outperformed traditional algorithms on many benchmarks. Training deep RNNs still remains a challenge, and most of the state-of-the-art models are structured with a transition depth of 2-4 layers. Recurrent Highway Networks (RHNs) were introduced in order to tackle this issue. These have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a few benchmarks using a depth of 10 layers. However, the performance of this architecture suffers from a bottleneck, and ceases to improve when an attempt is made to add more layers. In this work, we analyze the causes for this, and postulate that the main source is the way that the information flows through time. We introduce a novel and simple variation for the RHN cell, called Highway State Gating (HSG), which allows adding more layers, while continuing to improve performance. By using a gating mechanism for the state, we allow the net to "choose" whether to pass information directly through time, or to gate it. This mechanism also allows the gradient to back-propagate directly through time and, therefore, results in a slightly faster convergence. We use the Penn Treebank (PTB) dataset as a platform for empirical proof of concept. Empirical results show that the improvement due to Highway State Gating is for all depths, and as the depth increases, the improvement also increases.

Gradual Learning of Recurrent Neural Networks

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) achieve state-of-the-art results in many sequence-to-sequence modeling tasks. However, RNNs are difficult to train and tend to suffer from overfitting. Motivated by the Data Processing Inequality (DPI), we formulate the multi-layered network as a Markov chain, introducing a training method that comprises training the network gradually and using layer-wise gradient clipping. We found that applying our methods, combined with previously introduced regularization and optimization methods, resulted in improvements in state-of-the-art architectures operating in language modeling tasks.