Distributed Average Consensus via Noisy and Non-Coherent Over-the-Air Aggregation

Over-the-air aggregation has attracted widespread attention for its potential advantages in task-oriented applications, such as distributed sensing, learning, and consensus. In this paper, we develop a communication-efficient distributed average consensus protocol by utilizing over-the-air aggregation, which exploits the superposition property of wireless channels rather than combat it. Noisy channels and non-coherent transmission are taken into account, and only half-duplex transceivers are required. We prove that the system can achieve average consensus in mean square and even almost surely under the proposed protocol. Furthermore, we extend the analysis to the scenarios with time-varying topology. Numerical simulation shows the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.

Over-the-air Federated Policy Gradient

In recent years, over-the-air aggregation has been widely considered in large-scale distributed learning, optimization, and sensing. In this paper, we propose the over-the-air federated policy gradient algorithm, where all agents simultaneously broadcast an analog signal carrying local information to a common wireless channel, and a central controller uses the received aggregated waveform to update the policy parameters. We investigate the effect of noise and channel distortion on the convergence of the proposed algorithm, and establish the complexities of communication and sampling for finding an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point. Finally, we present some simulation results to show the effectiveness of the algorithm.

Prototypical Model with Novel Information-theoretic Loss Function for Generalized Zero Shot Learning

Generalized zero shot learning (GZSL) is still a technical challenge of deep learning as it has to recognize both source and target classes without data from target classes. To preserve the semantic relation between source and target classes when only trained with data from source classes, we address the quantification of the knowledge transfer and semantic relation from an information-theoretic viewpoint. To this end, we follow the prototypical model and format the variables of concern as a probability vector. Leveraging on the proposed probability vector representation, the information measurement such as mutual information and entropy, can be effectively evaluated with simple closed forms. We discuss the choice of common embedding space and distance function when using the prototypical model. Then We propose three information-theoretic loss functions for deterministic GZSL model: a mutual information loss to bridge seen data and target classes; an uncertainty-aware entropy constraint loss to prevent overfitting when using seen data to learn the embedding of target classes; a semantic preserving cross entropy loss to preserve the semantic relation when mapping the semantic representations to the common space. Simulation shows that, as a deterministic model, our proposed method obtains state of the art results on GZSL benchmark datasets. We achieve 21%-64% improvements over the baseline model -- deep calibration network (DCN) and for the first time demonstrate a deterministic model can perform as well as generative ones. Moreover, our proposed model is compatible with generative models. Simulation studies show that by incorporating with f-CLSWGAN, we obtain comparable results compared with advanced generative models.