Exploring Scale Shift in Crowd Localization under the Context of Domain Generalization

Crowd localization plays a crucial role in visual scene understanding towards predicting each pedestrian location in a crowd, thus being applicable to various downstream tasks. However, existing approaches suffer from significant performance degradation due to discrepancies in head scale distributions (scale shift) between training and testing data, a challenge known as domain generalization (DG). This paper aims to comprehend the nature of scale shift within the context of domain generalization for crowd localization models. To this end, we address four critical questions: (i) How does scale shift influence crowd localization in a DG scenario? (ii) How can we quantify this influence? (iii) What causes this influence? (iv) How to mitigate the influence? Initially, we conduct a systematic examination of how crowd localization performance varies with different levels of scale shift. Then, we establish a benchmark, ScaleBench, and reproduce 20 advanced DG algorithms to quantify the influence. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the limitations of existing algorithms and underscore the importance and complexity of scale shift, a topic that remains insufficiently explored. To deepen our understanding, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis on scale shift. Building on these insights, we further propose an effective algorithm called Causal Feature Decomposition and Anisotropic Processing (Catto) to mitigate the influence of scale shift in DG settings. Later, we also provide extensive analytical experiments, revealing four significant insights for future research. Our results emphasize the importance of this novel and applicable research direction, which we term Scale Shift Domain Generalization.

Language Model Based Text-to-Audio Generation: Anti-Causally Aligned Collaborative Residual Transformers

While language models (LMs) paired with residual vector quantization (RVQ) tokenizers have shown promise in text-to-audio (T2A) generation, they still lag behind diffusion-based models by a non-trivial margin. We identify a critical dilemma underpinning this gap: incorporating more RVQ layers improves audio reconstruction fidelity but exceeds the generation capacity of conventional LMs. To address this, we first analyze RVQ dynamics and uncover two key limitations: 1) orthogonality of features across RVQ layers hinders effective LMs training, and 2) descending semantic richness in tokens from deeper RVQ layers exacerbates exposure bias during autoregressive decoding. Based on these insights, we propose Siren, a novel LM-based framework that employs multiple isolated transformers with causal conditioning and anti-causal alignment via reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Siren outperforms both existing LM-based and diffusion-based T2A systems, achieving state-of-the-art results. By bridging the representational strengths of LMs with the fidelity demands of audio synthesis, our approach repositions LMs as competitive contenders against diffusion models in T2A tasks. Moreover, by aligning audio representations with linguistic structures, Siren facilitates a promising pathway toward unified multi-modal generation frameworks.

Towards Robust Learning to Optimize with Theoretical Guarantees

Learning to optimize (L2O) is an emerging technique to solve mathematical optimization problems with learning-based methods. Although with great success in many real-world scenarios such as wireless communications, computer networks, and electronic design, existing L2O works lack theoretical demonstration of their performance and robustness in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. We address this gap by providing comprehensive proofs. First, we prove a sufficient condition for a robust L2O model with homogeneous convergence rates over all In-Distribution (InD) instances. We assume an L2O model achieves robustness for an InD scenario. Based on our proposed methodology of aligning OOD problems to InD problems, we also demonstrate that the L2O model's convergence rate in OOD scenarios will deteriorate by an equation of the L2O model's input features. Moreover, we propose an L2O model with a concise gradient-only feature construction and a novel gradient-based history modeling method. Numerical simulation demonstrates that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline in both InD and OOD scenarios and achieves up to 10 $\times$ convergence speedup. The code of our method can be found from https://github.com/NetX-lab/GoMathL2O-Official.

Adaptive Federated LoRA in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks with Independent Sampling

Federated LoRA has emerged as a promising technique for efficiently fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on distributed devices by reducing the number of trainable parameters. However, existing approaches often inadequately overlook the theoretical and practical implications of system and data heterogeneity, thereby failing to optimize the overall training efficiency, particularly in terms of wall-clock time. In this paper, we propose an adaptive federated LoRA strategy with independent client sampling to minimize the convergence wall-clock time of federated fine-tuning under both computation and communication heterogeneity. We first derive a new convergence bound for federated LoRA with arbitrary and independent client sampling, notably without requiring the stringent bounded gradient assumption. Then, we introduce an adaptive bandwidth allocation scheme that accounts for heterogeneous client resources and system bandwidth constraints. Based on the derived theory, we formulate and solve a non-convex optimization problem to jointly determine the LoRA sketching ratios and sampling probabilities, aiming to minimize wall-clock convergence time. An efficient and low-complexity algorithm is developed to approximate the solution. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces wall-clock training time compared to state-of-the-art methods across various models and datasets.

Synchronized Video-to-Audio Generation via Mel Quantization-Continuum Decomposition

Video-to-audio generation is essential for synthesizing realistic audio tracks that synchronize effectively with silent videos. Following the perspective of extracting essential signals from videos that can precisely control the mature text-to-audio generative diffusion models, this paper presents how to balance the representation of mel-spectrograms in terms of completeness and complexity through a new approach called Mel Quantization-Continuum Decomposition (Mel-QCD). We decompose the mel-spectrogram into three distinct types of signals, employing quantization or continuity to them, we can effectively predict them from video by a devised video-to-all (V2X) predictor. Then, the predicted signals are recomposed and fed into a ControlNet, along with a textual inversion design, to control the audio generation process. Our proposed Mel-QCD method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across eight metrics, evaluating dimensions such as quality, synchronization, and semantic consistency. Our codes and demos will be released at \href{Website}{https://wjc2830.github.io/MelQCD/}.

ReFocus: Reinforcing Mid-Frequency and Key-Frequency Modeling for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Recent advancements have progressively incorporated frequency-based techniques into deep learning models, leading to notable improvements in accuracy and efficiency for time series analysis tasks. However, the Mid-Frequency Spectrum Gap in the real-world time series, where the energy is concentrated at the low-frequency region while the middle-frequency band is negligible, hinders the ability of existing deep learning models to extract the crucial frequency information. Additionally, the shared Key-Frequency in multivariate time series, where different time series share indistinguishable frequency patterns, is rarely exploited by existing literature. This work introduces a novel module, Adaptive Mid-Frequency Energy Optimizer, based on convolution and residual learning, to emphasize the significance of mid-frequency bands. We also propose an Energy-based Key-Frequency Picking Block to capture shared Key-Frequency, which achieves superior inter-series modeling performance with fewer parameters. A novel Key-Frequency Enhanced Training strategy is employed to further enhance Key-Frequency modeling, where spectral information from other channels is randomly introduced into each channel. Our approach advanced multivariate time series forecasting on the challenging Traffic, ECL, and Solar benchmarks, reducing MSE by 4%, 6%, and 5% compared to the previous SOTA iTransformer. Code is available at this GitHub Repository: https://github.com/Levi-Ackman/ReFocus.

Doubly-Bounded Queue for Constrained Online Learning: Keeping Pace with Dynamics of Both Loss and Constraint

We consider online convex optimization with time-varying constraints and conduct performance analysis using two stringent metrics: dynamic regret with respect to the online solution benchmark, and hard constraint violation that does not allow any compensated violation over time. We propose an efficient algorithm called Constrained Online Learning with Doubly-bounded Queue (COLDQ), which introduces a novel virtual queue that is both lower and upper bounded, allowing tight control of the constraint violation without the need for the Slater condition. We prove via a new Lyapunov drift analysis that COLDQ achieves $O(T^\frac{1+V_x}{2})$ dynamic regret and $O(T^{V_g})$ hard constraint violation, where $V_x$ and $V_g$ capture the dynamics of the loss and constraint functions. For the first time, the two bounds smoothly approach to the best-known $O(T^\frac{1}{2})$ regret and $O(1)$ violation, as the dynamics of the losses and constraints diminish. For strongly convex loss functions, COLDQ matches the best-known $O(\log{T})$ static regret while maintaining the $O(T^{V_g})$ hard constraint violation. We further introduce an expert-tracking variation of COLDQ, which achieves the same performance bounds without any prior knowledge of the system dynamics. Simulation results demonstrate that COLDQ outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

Joint Beamforming Design and Stream Allocation for Non-Coherent Joint Transmission in Cell-Free MIMO Networks

We consider joint beamforming and stream allocation to maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR) for non-coherent joint transmission (NCJT) in user-centric cell-free MIMO networks, where distributed access points (APs) are organized in clusters to transmit different signals to serve each user equipment (UE). We for the first time consider the common limits of maximum number of receive streams at UEs in practical networks, and formulate a joint beamforming and transmit stream allocation problem for WSR maximization under per-AP transmit power constraints. Since the integer number of transmit streams determines the dimension of the beamformer, the joint optimization problem is mixed-integer and nonconvex with coupled decision variables that is inherently NP-hard. In this paper, we first propose a distributed low-interaction reduced weighted minimum mean square error (RWMMSE) beamforming algorithm for WSR maximization with fixed streams. Our proposed RWMMSE algorithm requires significantly less interaction across the network and has the current lowest computational complexity that scales linearly with the number of transmit antennas, without any compromise on WSR. We draw insights on the joint beamforming and stream allocation problem to decouple the decision variables and relax the mixed-integer constraints. We then propose a joint beamforming and linear stream allocation algorithm, termed as RWMMSE-LSA, which yields closed-form updates with linear stream allocation complexity and is guaranteed to converge to the stationary points of the original joint optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate substantial performance gain of our proposed algorithms over the current best alternatives in both WSR performance and convergence time.

Adaptive Federated Learning in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks with Independent Sampling

Federated Learning (FL) algorithms commonly sample a random subset of clients to address the straggler issue and improve communication efficiency. While recent works have proposed various client sampling methods, they have limitations in joint system and data heterogeneity design, which may not align with practical heterogeneous wireless networks. In this work, we advocate a new independent client sampling strategy to minimize the wall-clock training time of FL, while considering data heterogeneity and system heterogeneity in both communication and computation. We first derive a new convergence bound for non-convex loss functions with independent client sampling and then propose an adaptive bandwidth allocation scheme. Furthermore, we propose an efficient independent client sampling algorithm based on the upper bounds on the convergence rounds and the expected per-round training time, to minimize the wall-clock time of FL, while considering both the data and system heterogeneity. Experimental results under practical wireless network settings with real-world prototype demonstrate that the proposed independent sampling scheme substantially outperforms the current best sampling schemes under various training models and datasets.

Energy-Efficient Data Offloading for Earth Observation Satellite Networks

In Earth Observation Satellite Networks (EOSNs) with a large number of battery-carrying satellites, proper power allocation and task scheduling are crucial to improving the data offloading efficiency. As such, we jointly optimize power allocation and task scheduling to achieve energy-efficient data offloading in EOSNs, aiming to balance the objectives of reducing the total energy consumption and increasing the sum weights of tasks. First, we derive the optimal power allocation solution to the joint optimization problem when the task scheduling policy is given. Second, leveraging the conflict graph model, we transform the original joint optimization problem into a maximum weight independent set problem when the power allocation strategy is given. Finally, we utilize the genetic framework to combine the above special solutions as a two-layer solution for the joint optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed solution can properly balance the sum weights of tasks and the total energy consumption, achieving superior system performance over the current best alternatives.