Reliable Online Resource Allocation for Multi-User Semantic Communications: A Constraint Bayesian Optimization Approach

Semantic communication has been increasingly integrated into edge computing systems for reconstruction tasks, owing to its advantages in source compression, robustness to channel noise, and task execution efficiency. However, the black-box nature of neural-network (NN)-based semantic codecs, together with the noisy transmission of semantic features, makes it difficult to allocate transmission resources and guarantee reconstruction quality for multiple users. In this paper, we propose a reliable online resource allocation framework for a semantic-driven multi-user edge computing system, where multiple users encode source information into semantic features and offload reconstruction to an edge server. We formulate a multi-user resource optimization problem whose objective jointly accounts for system-wide reconstruction performance and transmission latency, under constraints that guarantee each user's minimum reconstruction quality. To solve this problem, we develop a Bayesian optimization (BO)-based online algorithm that enables flexible control of the user-side semantic compression ratio (CR) and allocation of transmission rates. The edge server jointly determines each user's CR and transmission rate by exploiting Gaussian-process (GP) models that capture the relationship between reconstruction performance, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and CR, and by employing an acquisition function to select CRs that satisfy the performance quality constraints while maximizing the objective. Simulation results on high-resolution video-frame reconstruction datasets demonstrate that the proposed method selects near-optimal CRs via the GP surrogate and acquisition function, achieving a 98.03% constraint-satisfaction rate and reducing transmission latency by more than 45% compared with fixed-CR schemes.

Scalable Multi-task Edge Sensing via Task-oriented Joint Information Gathering and Broadcast

The recent advance of edge computing technology enables significant sensing performance improvement of Internet of Things (IoT) networks. In particular, an edge server (ES) is responsible for gathering sensing data from distributed sensing devices, and immediately executing different sensing tasks to accommodate the heterogeneous service demands of mobile users. However, as the number of users surges and the sensing tasks become increasingly compute-intensive, the huge amount of computation workloads and data transmissions may overwhelm the edge system of limited resources. Accordingly, we propose in this paper a scalable edge sensing framework for multi-task execution, in the sense that the computation workload and communication overhead of the ES do not increase with the number of downstream users or tasks. By exploiting the task-relevant correlations, the proposed scheme implements a unified encoder at the ES, which produces a common low-dimensional message from the sensing data and broadcasts it to all users to execute their individual tasks. To achieve high sensing accuracy, we extend the well-known information bottleneck theory to a multi-task scenario to jointly optimize the information gathering and broadcast processes. We also develop an efficient two-step training procedure to optimize the parameters of the neural network-based codecs deployed in the edge sensing system. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the considered representative benchmark methods in multi-task inference accuracy. Besides, the proposed scheme is scalable to the network size, which maintains almost constant computation delay with less than 1% degradation of inference performance when the user number increases by four times.

DASECount: Domain-Agnostic Sample-Efficient Wireless Indoor Crowd Counting via Few-shot Learning

Accurate indoor crowd counting (ICC) is a key enabler to many smart home/office applications. In this paper, we propose a Domain-Agnostic and Sample-Efficient wireless indoor crowd Counting (DASECount) framework that suffices to attain robust cross-domain detection accuracy given very limited data samples in new domains. DASECount leverages the wisdom of few-shot learning (FSL) paradigm consisting of two major stages: source domain meta training and target domain meta testing. Specifically, in the meta-training stage, we design and train two separate convolutional neural network (CNN) modules on the source domain dataset to fully capture the implicit amplitude and phase features of CSI measurements related to human activities. A subsequent knowledge distillation procedure is designed to iteratively update the CNN parameters for better generalization performance. In the meta-testing stage, we use the partial CNN modules to extract low-dimension features out of the high-dimension input target domain CSI data. With the obtained low-dimension CSI features, we can even use very few shots of target domain data samples (e.g., 5-shot samples) to train a lightweight logistic regression (LR) classifier, and attain very high cross-domain ICC accuracy. Experiment results show that the proposed DASECount method achieves over 92.68\%, and on average 96.37\% detection accuracy in a 0-8 people counting task under various domain setups, which significantly outperforms the other representative benchmark methods considered.