Blind Beamforming for Coverage Enhancement with Intelligent Reflecting Surface

Conventional policy for configuring an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) typically requires channel state information (CSI), thus incurring substantial overhead costs and facing incompatibility with the current network protocols. This paper proposes a blind beamforming strategy in the absence of CSI, aiming to boost the minimum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) among all the receiver positions, namely the coverage enhancement. Although some existing works already consider the IRS-assisted coverage enhancement without CSI, they assume certain position-channel models through which the channels can be recovered from the geographic locations. In contrast, our approach solely relies on the received signal power data, not assuming any position-channel model. We examine the achievability and converse of the proposed blind beamforming method. If the IRS has $N$ reflective elements and there are $U$ receiver positions, then our method guarantees the minimum SNR of $\Omega(N^2/U)$ -- which is fairly close to the upper bound $O(N+N^2\sqrt{\ln (NU)}/\sqrt[4]{U})$. Aside from the simulation results, we justify the practical use of blind beamforming in a field test at 2.6 GHz. According to the real-world experiment, the proposed blind beamforming method boosts the minimum SNR across seven random positions in a conference room by 18.22 dB, while the position-based method yields a boost of 12.08 dB.

SEMINAR: Search Enhanced Multi-modal Interest Network and Approximate Retrieval for Lifelong Sequential Recommendation

The modeling of users' behaviors is crucial in modern recommendation systems. A lot of research focuses on modeling users' lifelong sequences, which can be extremely long and sometimes exceed thousands of items. These models use the target item to search for the most relevant items from the historical sequence. However, training lifelong sequences in click through rate (CTR) prediction or personalized search ranking (PSR) is extremely difficult due to the insufficient learning problem of ID embedding, especially when the IDs in the lifelong sequence features do not exist in the samples of training dataset. Additionally, existing target attention mechanisms struggle to learn the multi-modal representations of items in the sequence well. The distribution of multi-modal embedding (text, image and attributes) output of user's interacted items are not properly aligned and there exist divergence across modalities. We also observe that users' search query sequences and item browsing sequences can fully depict users' intents and benefit from each other. To address these challenges, we propose a unified lifelong multi-modal sequence model called SEMINAR-Search Enhanced Multi-Modal Interest Network and Approximate Retrieval. Specifically, a network called Pretraining Search Unit (PSU) learns the lifelong sequences of multi-modal query-item pairs in a pretraining-finetuning manner with multiple objectives: multi-modal alignment, next query-item pair prediction, query-item relevance prediction, etc. After pretraining, the downstream model restores the pretrained embedding as initialization and finetunes the network. To accelerate the online retrieval speed of multi-modal embedding, we propose a multi-modal codebook-based product quantization strategy to approximate the exact attention calculati

Fast Fractional Programming for Multi-Cell Integrated Sensing and Communications

This paper concerns the coordinate multi-cell beamforming design for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC). In particular, we assume that each base station (BS) has massive antennas. The optimization objective is to maximize a weighted sum of the data rates (for communications) and the Fisher information (for sensing). We first show that the conventional beamforming method for the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, i.e., the weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) algorithm, has a natural extension to the ISAC problem scenario from a fractional programming (FP) perspective. However, the extended WMMSE algorithm requires computing the $N\times N$ matrix inverse extensively, where $N$ is proportional to the antenna array size, so the algorithm becomes quite costly when antennas are massively deployed. To address this issue, we develop a nonhomogeneous bound and use it in conjunction with the FP technique to solve the ISAC beamforming problem without the need to invert any large matrices. It is further shown that the resulting new FP algorithm has an intimate connection with gradient projection, based on which we can accelerate the convergence via Nesterov's gradient extrapolation.

Denoising Time Cycle Modeling for Recommendation

Recently, modeling temporal patterns of user-item interactions have attracted much attention in recommender systems. We argue that existing methods ignore the variety of temporal patterns of user behaviors. We define the subset of user behaviors that are irrelevant to the target item as noises, which limits the performance of target-related time cycle modeling and affect the recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose Denoising Time Cycle Modeling (DiCycle), a novel approach to denoise user behaviors and select the subset of user behaviors that are highly related to the target item. DiCycle is able to explicitly model diverse time cycle patterns for recommendation. Extensive experiments are conducted on both public benchmarks and a real-world dataset, demonstrating the superior performance of DiCycle over the state-of-the-art recommendation methods.

Intelligent Surfaces Empowered Wireless Network: Recent Advances and The Road to 6G

Intelligent surfaces (ISs) have emerged as a key technology to empower a wide range of appealing applications for wireless networks, due to their low cost, high energy efficiency, flexibility of deployment and capability of constructing favorable wireless channels/radio environments. Moreover, the recent advent of several new IS architectures further expanded their electromagnetic functionalities from passive reflection to active amplification, simultaneous reflection and refraction, as well as holographic beamforming. However, the research on ISs is still in rapid progress and there have been recent technological advances in ISs and their emerging applications that are worthy of a timely review. Thus, we provide in this paper a comprehensive survey on the recent development and advances of ISs aided wireless networks. Specifically, we start with an overview on the anticipated use cases of ISs in future wireless networks such as 6G, followed by a summary of the recent standardization activities related to ISs. Then, the main design issues of the commonly adopted reflection-based IS and their state-of-theart solutions are presented in detail, including reflection optimization, deployment, signal modulation, wireless sensing, and integrated sensing and communications. Finally, recent progress and new challenges in advanced IS architectures are discussed to inspire futrue research.

Discerning and Enhancing the Weighted Sum-Rate Maximization Algorithms in Communications

Weighted sum-rate (WSR) maximization plays a critical role in communication system design. This paper examines three optimization methods for WSR maximization, which ensure convergence to stationary points: two block coordinate ascent (BCA) algorithms, namely, weighted sum-minimum mean-square error (WMMSE) and WSR maximization via fractional programming (WSR-FP), along with a minorization-maximization (MM) algorithm, WSR maximization via MM (WSR-MM). Our contributions are threefold. Firstly, we delineate the exact relationships among WMMSE, WSR-FP, and WSR-MM, which, despite their extensive use in the literature, lack a comprehensive comparative study. By probing the theoretical underpinnings linking the BCA and MM algorithmic frameworks, we reveal the direct correlations between the equivalent transformation techniques, essential to the development of WMMSE and WSR-FP, and the surrogate functions pivotal to WSR-MM. Secondly, we propose a novel algorithm, WSR-MM+, harnessing the flexibility of selecting surrogate functions in MM framework. By circumventing the repeated matrix inversions in the search for optimal Lagrange multipliers in existing algorithms, WSR-MM+ significantly reduces the computational load per iteration and accelerates convergence. Thirdly, we reconceptualize WSR-MM+ within the BCA framework, introducing a new equivalent transform, which gives rise to an enhanced version of WSR-FP, named as WSR-FP+. We further demonstrate that WSR-MM+ can be construed as the basic gradient projection method. This perspective yields a deeper understanding into its computational intricacies. Numerical simulations corroborate the connections between WMMSE, WSR-FP, and WSR-MM and confirm the efficacy of the proposed WSR-MM+ and WSR-FP+ algorithms.

An Unified Search and Recommendation Foundation Model for Cold-Start Scenario

In modern commercial search engines and recommendation systems, data from multiple domains is available to jointly train the multi-domain model. Traditional methods train multi-domain models in the multi-task setting, with shared parameters to learn the similarity of multiple tasks, and task-specific parameters to learn the divergence of features, labels, and sample distributions of individual tasks. With the development of large language models, LLM can extract global domain-invariant text features that serve both search and recommendation tasks. We propose a novel framework called S\&R Multi-Domain Foundation, which uses LLM to extract domain invariant features, and Aspect Gating Fusion to merge the ID feature, domain invariant text features and task-specific heterogeneous sparse features to obtain the representations of query and item. Additionally, samples from multiple search and recommendation scenarios are trained jointly with Domain Adaptive Multi-Task module to obtain the multi-domain foundation model. We apply the S\&R Multi-Domain foundation model to cold start scenarios in the pretrain-finetune manner, which achieves better performance than other SOTA transfer learning methods. The S\&R Multi-Domain Foundation model has been successfully deployed in Alipay Mobile Application's online services, such as content query recommendation and service card recommendation, etc.

Blind Beamforming for Intelligent Reflecting Surface in Fading Channels without CSI

This paper discusses how to optimize the phase shifts of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to combat channel fading without any channel state information (CSI), namely blind beamforming. Differing from most previous works based on a two-stage paradigm of first estimating channels and then optimizing phase shifts, our approach is completely data-driven, only requiring a dataset of the received signal power at the user terminal. Thus, our method does not incur extra overhead costs for channel estimation, and does not entail collaboration from service provider, either. The main idea is to choose phase shifts at random and use the corresponding conditional sample mean of the received signal power to extract the main features of the wireless environment. This blind beamforming approach guarantees an $N^2$ boost of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), where $N$ is the number of reflective elements (REs) of IRS, regardless of whether the direct channel is line-of-sight (LoS) or not. Moreover, blind beamforming is extended to a double-IRS system with provable performance. Finally, prototype tests show that the proposed blind beamforming method can be readily incorporated into the existing communication systems in the real world; simulation tests further show that it works for a variety of fading channel models.

Crossword: A Semantic Approach to Data Compression via Masking

The traditional methods for data compression are typically based on the symbol-level statistics, with the information source modeled as a long sequence of i.i.d. random variables or a stochastic process, thus establishing the fundamental limit as entropy for lossless compression and as mutual information for lossy compression. However, the source (including text, music, and speech) in the real world is often statistically ill-defined because of its close connection to human perception, and thus the model-driven approach can be quite suboptimal. This study places careful emphasis on English text and exploits its semantic aspect to enhance the compression efficiency further. The main idea stems from the puzzle crossword, observing that the hidden words can still be precisely reconstructed so long as some key letters are provided. The proposed masking-based strategy resembles the above game. In a nutshell, the encoder evaluates the semantic importance of each word according to the semantic loss and then masks the minor ones, while the decoder aims to recover the masked words from the semantic context by means of the Transformer. Our experiments show that the proposed semantic approach can achieve much higher compression efficiency than the traditional methods such as Huffman code and UTF-8 code, while preserving the meaning in the target text to a great extent.

Coordinating Multiple Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces without Channel Information

Conventional beamforming methods for intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) or reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) typically entail the full channel state information (CSI). However, the computational cost of channel acquisition soars exponentially with the number of IRSs. To bypass this difficulty, we propose a novel strategy called blind beamforming that coordinates multiple IRSs by means of statistics without knowing CSI. Blind beamforming only requires measuring the received signal power at the user terminal for a sequence of randomly generated phase shifts across all IRSs. The main idea is to extract the key statistical quantity for beamforming by exploring only a small portion of the whole solution space of phase shifts. We show that blind beamforming guarantees a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) boost of Theta(N^{2L}) under certain conditions, where L is the number of IRSs and N is the number of reflecting elements per IRS. The above result significantly improves upon the state of the art in the area of multi-IRS assisted communication. Moreover, blind beamforming is justified via field tests and simulations.