Joint Beamforming and Reflection Design for RIS-assisted ISAC Systems

In this paper, we investigate the potential of employing reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. In particular, we consider an RIS-assisted ISAC system in which a multi-antenna base station (BS) simultaneously performs multi-user multi-input singleoutput (MU-MISO) communication and target detection. We aim to jointly design the transmit beamforming and receive filter of the BS, and the reflection coefficients of the RIS to maximize the sum-rate of the communication users, while satisfying a worst-case radar output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the transmit power constraint, and the unit modulus property of the reflecting coefficients. An efficient iterative algorithm based on fractional programming (FP), majorization-minimization (MM), and alternative direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is developed to solve the complicated non-convex problem. Simulation results verify the advantage of the proposed RIS-assisted ISAC scheme and the effectiveness of the developed algorithm.

Deep Reinforcement Learning based Joint Active and Passive Beamforming Design for RIS-Assisted MISO Systems

Owing to the unique advantages of low cost and controllability, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising candidate to address the blockage issue in millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems, consequently has captured widespread attention in recent years. However, the joint active beamforming and passive beamforming design is an arduous task due to the high computational complexity and the dynamic changes of wireless environment. In this paper, we consider a RIS-assisted multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) mmWave system and aim to develop a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based algorithm to jointly design active hybrid beamformer at the base station (BS) side and passive beamformer at the RIS side. By employing an advanced soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm, we propose a maximum entropy based DRL algorithm, which can explore more stochastic policies than deterministic policy, to design active analog precoder and passive beamformer simultaneously. Then, the digital precoder is determined by minimum mean square error (MMSE) method. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SAC algorithm can achieve better performance compared with conventional optimization algorithm and DRL algorithm.

DRL-based Joint Beamforming and BS-RIS-UE Association Design for RIS-Assisted mmWave Networks

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is considered as an extraordinarily promising technology to solve the blockage problem of millimeter wave (mmWave) communications owing to its capable of establishing a reconfigurable wireless propagation. In this paper, we focus on a RIS-assisted mmWave communication network consisting of multiple base stations (BSs) serving a set of user equipments (UEs). Considering the BS-RIS-UE association problem which determines that the RIS should assist which BS and UEs, we joint optimize BS-RIS-UE association and passive beamforming at RIS to maximize the sum-rate of the system. To solve this intractable non-convex problem, we propose a soft actor-critic (SAC) deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based joint beamforming and BS-RIS-UE association design algorithm, which can learn the best policy by interacting with the environment using less prior information and avoid falling into the local optimal solution by incorporating with the maximization of policy information entropy. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SAC-DRL algorithm can achieve significant performance gains compared with benchmark schemes.

Fully-integrated multipurpose microwave frequency identification system on a single chip

We demonstrate a fully-integrated multipurpose microwave frequency identification system on silicon-on-insulator platform. Thanks to its multipurpose features, the chip is able to identify different types of microwave signals, including single-frequency, multiple-frequency, chirped and frequency-hopping microwave signals, as well as discriminate instantaneous frequency variation among the frequency-modulated signals. This demonstration exhibits fully integrated solution and fully functional microwave frequency identification, which can meet the requirements in reduction of size, weight and power for future advanced microwave photonic processor.

Explainable COVID-19 Infections Identification and Delineation Using Calibrated Pseudo Labels

The upheaval brought by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to bring fresh challenges over the past two years. During this COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a need for rapid identification of infected patients and specific delineation of infection areas in computed tomography (CT) images. Although deep supervised learning methods have been established quickly, the scarcity of both image-level and pixellevel labels as well as the lack of explainable transparency still hinder the applicability of AI. Can we identify infected patients and delineate the infections with extreme minimal supervision? Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has demonstrated promising performance under limited labelled data and sufficient unlabelled data. Inspired by SSL, we propose a model-agnostic calibrated pseudo-labelling strategy and apply it under a consistency regularization framework to generate explainable identification and delineation results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model with the combination of limited labelled data and sufficient unlabelled data or weakly-labelled data. Extensive experiments have shown that our model can efficiently utilize limited labelled data and provide explainable classification and segmentation results for decision-making in clinical routine.

Cross-Channel Attention-Based Target Speaker Voice Activity Detection: Experimental Results for M2MeT Challenge

In this paper, we present the speaker diarization system for the Multi-channel Multi-party Meeting Transcription Challenge (M2MeT) from team DKU_DukeECE. As the highly overlapped speech exists in the dataset, we employ an x-vector-based target-speaker voice activity detection (TS-VAD) to find the overlap between speakers. For the single-channel scenario, we separately train a model for each of the 8 channels and fuse the results. We also employ the cross-channel self-attention to further improve the performance, where the non-linear spatial correlations between different channels are learned and fused. Experimental results on the evaluation set show that the single-channel TS-VAD reduces the DER by over 75% from 12.68\% to 3.14%. The multi-channel TS-VAD further reduces the DER by 28% and achieves a DER of 2.26%. Our final submitted system achieves a DER of 2.98% on the AliMeeting test set, which ranks 1st in the M2MET challenge.

The HCCL-DKU system for fake audio generation task of the 2022 ICASSP ADD Challenge

The voice conversion task is to modify the speaker identity of continuous speech while preserving the linguistic content. Generally, the naturalness and similarity are two main metrics for evaluating the conversion quality, which has been improved significantly in recent years. This paper presents the HCCL-DKU entry for the fake audio generation task of the 2022 ICASSP ADD challenge. We propose a novel ppg-based voice conversion model that adopts a fully end-to-end structure. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other conversion models, including Tacotron-based and Fastspeech-based models, on conversion quality and spoofing performance against anti-spoofing systems. In addition, we investigate several post-processing methods for better spoofing power. Finally, we achieve second place with a deception success rate of 0.916 in the ADD challenge.

Invertible Voice Conversion

In this paper, we propose an invertible deep learning framework called INVVC for voice conversion. It is designed against the possible threats that inherently come along with voice conversion systems. Specifically, we develop an invertible framework that makes the source identity traceable. The framework is built on a series of invertible $1\times1$ convolutions and flows consisting of affine coupling layers. We apply the proposed framework to one-to-one voice conversion and many-to-one conversion using parallel training data. Experimental results show that this approach yields impressive performance on voice conversion and, moreover, the converted results can be reversed back to the source inputs utilizing the same parameters as in forwarding.

pvCNN: Privacy-Preserving and Verifiable Convolutional Neural Network Testing

This paper proposes a new approach for privacy-preserving and verifiable convolutional neural network (CNN) testing, enabling a CNN model developer to convince a user of the truthful CNN performance over non-public data from multiple testers, while respecting model privacy. To balance the security and efficiency issues, three new efforts are done by appropriately integrating homomorphic encryption (HE) and zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARK) primitives with the CNN testing. First, a CNN model to be tested is strategically partitioned into a private part kept locally by the model developer, and a public part outsourced to an outside server. Then, the private part runs over HE-protected test data sent by a tester and transmits its outputs to the public part for accomplishing subsequent computations of the CNN testing. Second, the correctness of the above CNN testing is enforced by generating zk-SNARK based proofs, with an emphasis on optimizing proving overhead for two-dimensional (2-D) convolution operations, since the operations dominate the performance bottleneck during generating proofs. We specifically present a new quadratic matrix programs (QMPs)-based arithmetic circuit with a single multiplication gate for expressing 2-D convolution operations between multiple filters and inputs in a batch manner. Third, we aggregate multiple proofs with respect to a same CNN model but different testers' test data (i.e., different statements) into one proof, and ensure that the validity of the aggregated proof implies the validity of the original multiple proofs. Lastly, our experimental results demonstrate that our QMPs-based zk-SNARK performs nearly 13.9$\times$faster than the existing QAPs-based zk-SNARK in proving time, and 17.6$\times$faster in Setup time, for high-dimension matrix multiplication.

CaFT: Clustering and Filter on Tokens of Transformer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) is a challenging task to localize the object by only category labels. However, there is contradiction between classification and localization because accurate classification network tends to pay attention to discriminative region of objects rather than the entirety. We propose this discrimination is caused by handcraft threshold choosing in CAM-based methods. Therefore, we propose Clustering and Filter of Tokens (CaFT) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone to solve this problem in another way. CaFT first sends the patch tokens of the image split to ViT and cluster the output tokens to generate initial mask of the object. Secondly, CaFT considers the initial mask as pseudo labels to train a shallow convolution head (Attention Filter, AtF) following backbone to directly extract the mask from tokens. Then, CaFT splits the image into parts, outputs masks respectively and merges them into one refined mask. Finally, a new AtF is trained on the refined masks and used to predict the box of object. Experiments verify that CaFT outperforms previous work and achieves 97.55\% and 69.86\% localization accuracy with ground-truth class on CUB-200 and ImageNet-1K respectively. CaFT provides a fresh way to think about the WSOL task.