N$^{3}$-Mapping: Normal Guided Neural Non-Projective Signed Distance Fields for Large-scale 3D Mapping

Accurate and dense mapping in large-scale environments is essential for various robot applications. Recently, implicit neural signed distance fields (SDFs) have shown promising advances in this task. However, most existing approaches employ projective distances from range data as SDF supervision, introducing approximation errors and thus degrading the mapping quality. To address this problem, we introduce N3-Mapping, an implicit neural mapping system featuring normal-guided neural non-projective signed distance fields. Specifically, we directly sample points along the surface normal, instead of the ray, to obtain more accurate non-projective distance values from range data. Then these distance values are used as supervision to train the implicit map. For large-scale mapping, we apply a voxel-oriented sliding window mechanism to alleviate the forgetting issue with a bounded memory footprint. Besides, considering the uneven distribution of measured point clouds, a hierarchical sampling strategy is designed to improve training efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates SDF approximation errors and achieves state-of-the-art mapping quality compared to existing approaches.

Optimization-driven Machine Learning for Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces Assisted Wireless Networks

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been recently employed to reshape the wireless channels by controlling individual scattering elements' phase shifts, namely, passive beamforming. Due to the large size of scattering elements, the passive beamforming is typically challenged by the high computational complexity and inexact channel information. In this article, we focus on machine learning (ML) approaches for performance maximization in IRS-assisted wireless networks. In general, ML approaches provide enhanced flexibility and robustness against uncertain information and imprecise modeling. Practical challenges still remain mainly due to the demand for a large dataset in offline training and slow convergence in online learning. These observations motivate us to design a novel optimization-driven ML framework for IRS-assisted wireless networks, which takes both advantages of the efficiency in model-based optimization and the robustness in model-free ML approaches. By splitting the decision variables into two parts, one part is obtained by the outer-loop ML approach, while the other part is optimized efficiently by solving an approximate problem. Numerical results verify that the optimization-driven ML approach can improve both the convergence and the reward performance compared to conventional model-free learning approaches.

Optimization-driven Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robust Beamforming in IRS-assisted Wireless Communications

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology to assist downlink information transmissions from a multi-antenna access point (AP) to a receiver. In this paper, we minimize the AP's transmit power by a joint optimization of the AP's active beamforming and the IRS's passive beamforming. Due to uncertain channel conditions, we formulate a robust power minimization problem subject to the receiver's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) requirement and the IRS's power budget constraint. We propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach that can adapt the beamforming strategies from past experiences. To improve the learning performance, we derive a convex approximation as a lower bound on the robust problem, which is integrated into the DRL framework and thus promoting a novel optimization-driven deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) approach. In particular, when the DDPG algorithm generates a part of the action (e.g., passive beamforming), we can use the model-based convex approximation to optimize the other part (e.g., active beamforming) of the action more efficiently. Our simulation results demonstrate that the optimization-driven DDPG algorithm can improve both the learning rate and reward performance significantly compared to the conventional model-free DDPG algorithm.